Death Orbit (38 page)

Watching it now from the flight deck of the Zon, Hunter felt a chill go through him. This had been a common occurrence in the last few hours. He was a psychic animal, a slave to ESP. His whole life, not just in the cockpit of his fighter, but on the ground and in his relationships with people, all of it was based, at least in some part, on his intuitive powers. It was the way he always had the edge on everybody else.

Certainly there were a lot of compulsive instincts that went along with this clairvoyance. But never, ever, had he had the compulsive override to come here to this part of space and find this thing, the Hubble space telescope.

The retreat from the Nazi Space Station had been a bizarre affair. Hunter and the others just left. They backed their way out and the Space Nazis let them go. Returning to the Zon, Hunter was sure that Viktor would send at least some of his minions out to chase them, or at least try for some kind of retaliation—but none came. The Zon backed away and Hunter began plotting its new course almost immediately. Meanwhile, once the connection was broken, the space station became powered up again—lights could be seen popping on in its windows. It also began spinning faster, a maneuver which allowed it to climb slightly in its orbit and quickly drift away from the Zon. It was out of sight within five minutes.

Everyone aboard the Zon—JT, Ben, Elvis, Cook, Geraci, and the two girls—was wondering just what the hell was going on. From their perspective, just when it seemed they’d accomplished their mission and at last had Viktor dead to rights, Hunter had suddenly called the whole thing off. He’d led their retreat without so much as a word of explanation, simply because he wasn’t exactly sure himself why he’d suddenly felt the urge to go.

Yet after a six-hour dash through space, he had found what his psyche had told him to look for. The Hubble, ingloriously tumbling through the sky, had been his goal all along.

But now that they’d found it, what next?

“I assume you want to get it straight and working,” Geraci asked Hunter quietly, as they brought the Zon up to pace and slightly below the rolling space instrument. Finding the Hubble had been no problem. The on-board space radar helped, but Hunter’s inner self had laid out a more accurate, quicker approach.

“How much of an effort do you think it will take?” he asked Geraci.

The CE officer just shrugged.

“I know it was tumbling when NASA first came up to fix it,” he said. “So stopping it shouldn’t be that big a deal. Just an EVA, probably two or three people, we put a bearhug on it and slow it down. Like the Soyuz.

“But getting it to work? Well, that means getting the main juice turned on and doing some kind of diagnostic check. But getting it powered up is a long way from making it operational. I mean, I know there’s no manual eyepiece over there. Everything that baby collected was transmitted back to Earth. How can we possibly capture those images?”

It did seem like an enormous problem. The Hubble used to see all these great things via remote control from the ground. Any pictures it took were sent via radio and TV waves back to a NASA receiving station. It was the equipment there that had the ability to develop the Hubble’s images. How the hell would they be able to do all that up here?

“It will be easy,” Ben surprised them all by saying.

Everyone on the flight deck turned in his direction, even the girls.

“Easy?” JT snarled at him. “When’s the last time you did anything that was easy?”

Ben just shrugged. He couldn’t remember.

“What I mean is, it won’t be the hassle that you think,” he began to explain. “The Hubble is not just a telescope and camera, it’s also a sending station. A small TV station, if you will. That’s how the images got back to earth.”

“Yeah, well, if you’d been listening, you’d know we’ve already talked about that,” JT told him snidely.

“Okay, I know,” Ben replied. “But you see, when they built this thing, they must have had some kind of attachment which would allow them to check the TV relay
before
they launched. A way to connect into the transmitter to see if the lens was working even before it came up into space.”

“Are you saying that there’s a TV input plug on that thing?” Geraci asked, legitimately curious. “Like something we could just run a coaxial and a monitor into and get results?”

“I’ll bet a hundred in gold there is,” Ben replied. “We just have to find it, run a wire to one of our TV monitors, and
voilà!”

JT was already digging into his pockets.

“Hundred in gold? You’re on, pineapple boy,” he said.

But Hunter wasn’t paying attention to the beginnings of the wager. He was studying the tumbling Hubble through the powerful biscopes instead.

Just as Ben predicted, there
was
a diagnostic panel right on the bottom of the thing—or was it the top?—which appeared to contain a simple hook-up of the type Ben had described. Of course, the satellite was tumbling at such a rate, Hunter could only catch quick glimpses of it as it went by.

To make certain it was a TV input jack, they would have to see it up close.

To this end, he undid his seatbelt and began floating toward the hatch.

“Okay,” he asked, somewhat wearily. “Who wants to stretch their legs this time?”

It took Hunter, Geraci, and JT more than an hour to stop the huge Hubble telescope from tumbling.

This was not like the Soyuz, which had responded to Geraci’s acrobatic antics almost on demand. The Hubble fought them all the way, not only refusing to become stable at first, but also increasing its speed as they wrestled with it, high above the bright blue earth.

Finally, after much huffing and puffing, and nearly one complete orbit of the earth, the Hubble just suddenly stopped spinning. It was very strange; almost as if the space telescope itself had decided this was the time and place to behave.

JT was ready with the small TV monitor Ben had dug out of the navigation control panel. It boasted a modest 12-inch screen and a lot of floating wires that didn’t seem to go anywhere or connect to anything. But a quick check of its battery pack and a test of its screen proved the crappy little thing did work.

Geraci located the Hubble’s TV input plug right where Ben had said it would be. After a minor struggle trying to get coaxial cable to screw in, the small TV was finally hooked into the enormous trash barrel of a satellite.

The most amazing thing of all, at least to Hunter’s mind, was that the Hubble still had some power left in it. It took several punches of the diagnostic panel, but incredibly, a reserve battery or something kicked in, and Hunter was soon staring at an image of the M404 Galaxy, which the Hubble’s lens had just started picking up randomly.

JT floated over to him, took a peek at the TV screen, and then tapped Hunter twice on the helmet.

“What now, pardner?” he called over the radio.

It was a good question, one to which Hunter really had no reply.

“You and the G-man go back inside,” he told JT unexpectedly. “I think I’ve got to do this alone.”

JT just stared back at him, helmet-to-helmet. They’d been friends for a very long time.

“I’m sure whatever is bothering you will get better, Hawk,” he said, with uncharacteristic volume control. “And whenever you’re ready, we’ll go back and snatch that A-hole Viktor again. Don’t worry. He still can’t go anywhere. And it’ll be more fun the second time around. I guarantee it.”

With that, JT gave Geraci the high sign and they both floated back to the Zon, waiting about 100 feet away.

Now Hunter was alone in outer space.

He could not count the number of times he’d dreamed of this moment when he was a kid. He would spend endless hours in his bed, looking out his window to the stars above and knowing somehow, in some way, he’d walk among them someday. Now here he was, just another heavenly body, doing exactly what his childhood dreams had said he’d do.

What he hadn’t counted on back then—what he couldn’t have conceived of—was that a weight the size of the universe would be resting on his heart when he finally did take that walk among the stars. Here, in what should have been his most supremely content moment, he was actually the saddest and most miserable he’d ever been in his life.

Dominique was dead—he knew that now. Somehow she had passed on. And she had loved him to the end, had stayed true even while he’d been waffling, dallying with an infatuation named Chloe. This was the hand that gripped the vise that was now tightening around his heart. How would he ever forget that? How would he ever reconcile the fact that Dominique died still in love with him, while he wasn’t so sure about being in love with her?

Suddenly, he missed his father and mother very much. He’d been alone, without close family, since his teens. JT and Ben were his best friends; the UAAF inner circle constituted his extended family. But he’d been alone—
really
alone—for many years. Until Dominique.

Now she was gone, too.

Hunter stared out at the blanket of stars swirling above his head. A billion galaxies, each one filled with an average of a billion stars. That was a lot of hydrogen burning up there. He turned and sadly looked back at the earth. Blue was the main color with some green and brown and white of clouds here and there. They were just passing over Central America; the rim of West Africa was almost in view. The Atlantic looked particularly clear and blue, but there was a gathering of clouds up around the northeast part of the eastern seaboard. The angle wasn’t quite right and Hunter couldn’t see very much, but the clouds seemed to be turning in a very angry fashion.

For some reason, this brought him back to the matter at hand.

Some of Dominique’s last words to him said that he should point the Hubble toward a part of the sky that his instincts led him to. Oddly enough, now that the satellite wasn’t tumbling, shifting it this way and that wasn’t so much of a big deal.

But where to point it exactly? And what would he see when he did?

He closed his eyes and let his psyche take over. Millions of thought fragments went through his head. He found himself seeing bits and pieces of the images leading up to the Zon launch, and then back to the battle of Lolita Island, and then back further to when he first met Chloe, to when he saw the Zon first go up with Viktor inside, to the battle of Khe Sanh, the war in the Pacific against the Cult, the invasion of the Fourth Reich, all the way back through his many battles with the Twisted Cross, the Family, the Mid-Aks, the Russians.

And then he went even further back, to the pre-Big War days when he was trained to pilot the NASA shuttle, to his flying with the Thunderbirds, to his earning his pilot’s wings after graduating from MIT, the youngest person ever to do so.

Suddenly he was back at his home in Boston. He was a kid again and he was lying in his bed, looking up at the stars, picking out his favorite formations, and deciding that he liked the Big Dipper the best.

That’s when he felt another tap on his shoulder. He spun around, fully expecting to see Dominique, hovering in space with him—but she was not there. Instead, he looked straight ahead, and sure enough, taking up almost his entire field of vision, were the stars that made up the Big Dipper.

That’s how he knew which way he should point the Hubble.

It took Hunter more than an hour to do it.

Jostling the big ash can was beginning to sap his strength, and as his colleagues watched anxiously from the Zon, they knew his air supply would be running low soon, too.

He stayed with it, finally lining up what he was seeing on his TV screen with the center of the field which made up the lower part of the Big Dipper.

That’s when he saw it.

It was so big and moving so fast, Hunter was certain at first that there was something wrong with the mickey-mouse viewing system they’d set up. It looked like a tremendously huge star literally falling out of the heavens. He figured out a way to make the Hubble’s lens zoom in closer and tighter, and that’s when he saw this thing in all its frightening girth and color.

It looked like a gigantic snowball—or more accurately, an iceball. He could see the sparkling effect of the sun’s rays glistening off its sides, just like the refracted light of a melting icicle. Yet the thing was almost entirely engulfed in flames. It was carrying a tail that looked like it extended for thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—of miles.

It was a comet, a huge, burning chunk of space dust and ice that was being sucked in by the sun’s gravity at such a speed even the long-range viewfinder of the Hubble couldn’t keep up with it. With shaking hands and a supercomputer-like brain that was nevertheless getting a little weary of all these revelations, Hunter used the perceived distance of the stars in the background as a measuring device and did a quick calculation on the comet’s size. He was astounded to find that it was nearly 300 miles across, or roughly one-fifth the size of earth’s moon. He did an even quicker estimation on the comet’s speed and found it was traveling at more than 200 miles
a second.
This meant it could cover 12,000 miles in a minute, 720,000 miles an hour, or more than 17 million miles in just one day.

Hunter began a slow, but jittery calculation on the comet’s path. It took all his brainpower to figure the angles, the rotations, the increasing effect of gravity as opposed to the decreasing size of the comet as it neared the sun’s warmth. He reached one conclusion after five minutes of crude calculus; he added this to a second conclusion reached a few minutes later. More triangulations, more bustling around with sines and cosines and tangents. He was thinking so hard now that he didn’t even hear the warning buzzer for his oxygen supply system go off.

Even as the front of his mask began fogging up again due to inadequate air circulation, he kept on calculating, reaching sums, adding them to quotients and multiplying them by subquotients. It took nearly 25 minutes, floating in space, doing in all this in his head, and way past what would be considered a safe point for remaining out on an EVA with such a quickly diminishing oxygen supply.

But finally, Hunter reached an indisputable conclusion. There was no need to double-check it. The voices of the dead wouldn’t have been whispering to him if this was going to be some kind of fantastic near-miss.