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Palmer tosses the printout through the air before turning to look through the viewport at the interior of the reactor chamber. “A power-down command was issued to the reactor around two hours ago. At the same time the solar panels were extended, almost like whoever issued the power-down command wanted it to go unnoticed.”
“Is that where the computer problems came from?”
Jackie shakes her head. “I thought so at first, but now… no. I don’t think so.”
Palmer is about to ask a question when a deep shudder runs through the length of the station. The groan of metal and crack of materials that should not be cracking while in space echoes through the room and the three astronauts look at each other with wide eyes. Several alarms go off a second later, each of them a different tone and frequency. The worse, by far, is accompanied by a bright orange light that flashes from the corner of each room in the station.
“We’re losing O2! Get your suits on now!” Commander Palmer doesn’t hesitate to bellow o
ut the order even as the station shakes again as it lurches to one side. Ted reaches out for a handhold on the wall and looks at it with a horrified expression.
“Did someone turn on the thrusters?”
Palmer kicks against the exterior of the reactor, pushing himself toward the nearest wall. He grabs hold, feeling the vibration of the station’s thrusters and shakes his head. “Negative. What’s going on here, some kind of computer glitch?” Before either Jackie or Ted can answer he waves them off. “It doesn’t matter; first we get in our suits then we’ll see what’s going on!”
The three astronauts sail through the rooms of the station, quickly reaching the area where their suits are stored. They crack open the back of the suits, step inside and the back seals automatically as they flex their muscles. A small green light illuminates at the bottom of their helmets’ heads-up displays to indicate that the seal is complete.
Ted, the first to get into his suit, is about to press a button on his left wrist display to connect the suit to the station’s computer system when Palmer grabs his right hand and pulls it away. “No!” Palmer says, looking at Ted and Jackie both. “If this is a computer glitch it could affect the suits, too. Don’t connect them to the station. We’ll do this all manually.”
The trio spend the next twenty minutes sweating—in spite of their suits’ on-board cooling systems—as they attempt to find out why the station’s thrusters started firing. The reason why is not forthcoming but the end result is soon discovered, though it generates more questions than answers.
“Who would want to de-orbit us?!” Jackie pounds her fist against the bulkhead as she stares at the rough set of calculations drawn out on a notepad by Commander Palmer. Ted is furiously scribbling on a separate pad and, once he finishes, he compares his calculations to Palmer’s.
“Confirmed. We’re de-orbiting and should reach the point of no return in about… an hour. Maybe less. Hard to tell with how the systems are acting.”
“And all the fuel’s expended?”
“Every drop. They burned hard and fast.”
“It has to be sabotage.” Palmer taps his pen against the notepad and shakes his head. “Or a terrorist attack.”
“If we could pick up any sort of transmissions then maybe we could figure out what’s going on.”
Palmer frowns, feeling a chill run down his spine. “Our emergency radio equipment. Does it run completely separate from the station’s systems? Or is it tied in to everything here?”
“Tied in. Wh—oh. Oh God.” Jackie slowly shakes her head. “No…”
“Oh yes.” Palmer nods slowly and Ted’s eyes widen as he realizes what they’re talking about.
“Do you think… maybe the computer problems are affecting the backup radio systems, too?”
“They’re tied directly into the main computer. Which is currently having some sort of psychotic break.”
Commander Palmer snorts at Jackie’s morbid sense of humor before his face grows serious again. “Unless someone here has a magic switch to flip and turn off the thrusters we’re going to have to abandon the station if we want to live.”
“Where are we going to go? We’re too low to use the lifeboat to perform an emergency splashdown, aren’t we?”
“We would have had to leave six minutes ago to do that.” Commander Palmer grits his teeth. “We should have, though. I didn’t realize that all the fuel was gone. Even if we were to pull something out of our asses that would start pushing us back out we’ve got too much momentum in the wrong direction.”
Silence descends over the three as they each contemplate the repercussions of what Palmer has said. Space travel is a dangerous endeavor and each of them has understood that death waits around the corner. Facing it head-on isn’t what they were expecting when they woke up that morning, though.
“Commander?” Ted is staring out the window, watching across the vastness of space as he speaks.
“What’s up?”
“How far away is the ISS?”
“I don’t know, a few hundred kilometers?”
