Reluctantly, Kimberly turned away from the laptop and peered through the confocal microscope at the crystal she was monitoring. It was visibly growing, slowly but unmistakably, like a diamond glittering in the microscope’s glareless light. Floating in front of the experimental chamber, she was careful to position herself away from the portable microwave projector that was beaming its 98 GHz radiation into the crystal specimen.
The novel experiment was something she’d never expected to come from the Air Force Academy, but with Scott Robinson pushing heaven and earth to overcome the Academy’s trade-school reputation, his alma mater was evolving into a world-class research organization.
Now where did that come from? Kimberly hadn’t thought of Scott in what? Minutes?
Focus on the experiment, she commanded herself. Stop thinking about Scott: you’re divorced, it’s over.
But her ex-husband was CAPCOM today, serving as their astronaut lead at the mission control center, MCC at Houston, commanding the space station’s communications link with the ground. It’s been eighteen months since the divorce, Kimberly told herself, a near eternity in today’s stop-and-shop world of one-relationship-after-another. And besides, his ego was so large it probably filled every corner of the MCC.
Still, she saw Scott’s handsome, smiling face in her mind.
She shook her head to get clear of Scott’s memory and peered through the eyepiece while her right hand delicately adjusted the Helium-Neon Zeeman laser to measure the crystal’s growth. So far, so good. As the scientists had predicted, the 98 GHz waves from the microwave projector actually accelerated the crystal’s growth over what had been measured back on Earth in a one-gee environment. Score one for zero-gee, Kimberly thought. No, better. It was a hat trick: a home run for the science community, the Air Force Academy, and the ISS.
And for Scott Robinson, as well. Scott was the one who put his old alma mater in touch with NASA’s chief scientist and got the experiment onto the ISS.
Enough about Scott! she told herself. She looked over at her laptop and saw that the airlock hatch in the MRM-2 was swinging open. The newbies were arriving.
JAPANESE MODULE (JPM)
Floating between the crystal growth experiment and her laptop, Kimberly watched the inner airlock hatch swing open and the jumpsuited body of the Soyuz spacecraft’s commander, Colonel Yuri Zel’dovich, drift slowly into the ISS, headfirst. Smiling broadly, Cosmonaut Ivan Vasilev, the one-man welcoming committee, reached out for his approaching comrade.
Zel’dovich’s shoulder bumped gently against the hatch’s metal framework, making his feet slowly rotate upward in the zero-gee space. Small, vibrating globules of bright red blood pulsed in the air, more of them oozing out from a slashing wound in the colonel’s neck.
His eyes wide with shock, Vasilev grabbed at Zel’dovich’s lifeless body and started yelling hoarsely in Russian while Kimberly watched the scene on her laptop’s screen, frozen with sudden terror. Vasilev grabbed a handhold on the side of the module and pulled forward, toward the hatch.
Kimberly saw a knifelike object—it was actually thicker than a knife and looked as if it had a retractable blade—suddenly fly from the Soyuz and embed itself in Vasilev’s eye with a sickening thud.
The cosmonaut screamed and jerked away, pawing at his face, frantically trying to pull the blade from his eye, his body twisting in the air, spherules of blood spewing from his face.
A blue jumpsuited body shot out of the Soyuz from the airlock, hurtling toward Vasilev. Kimberly recognized the man from the publicity photos and media releases she’d seen: Farid!
She’d never met the Kazakhstani, and from everything she’d heard, three years ago he’d been a valuable member of the ISS crew. She’d been looking forward to getting a computer scientist up to the station, to help reduce her own brutal research schedule.
But now, muttering something in a guttural language, Farid reached for Vasilev with outstretched hands and caught the Russian as he was trying to pull the blade from his eye. Farid put a hand to the back of Vasilev’s head and pushed as hard as he could against his chin, snapping his head back. Then he twisted Vasilev’s neck until Kimberly actually heard an audible pop as the spine snapped.
Vasilev went limp. Farid shoved him away. The dead cosmonaut spun slowly in midair and bumped into the metal structure of the compartment as he floated inertly in zero-gee.
In the Japanese module, Kimberly tightly grasped the handhold she’d been clinging to, too shocked to react to the murders she had just seen. As she started to unconsciously rotate around, her free hand suddenly felt an incredible searing pain, as though the hottest oven in the world had just opened in front of her and she’d stuck her hand smack into its middle. She jerked her hand back. The 98 GHz microwave beam, she realized. Even though her skin wasn’t even reddened, it hurt like hell. No wonder some Academy geeks were working on developing such microwaves to protect embassies overseas.
Wringing her hand in pain, Kimberly saw a second person emerging from the Soyuz airlock, wearing a blue jumpsuit identical to Farid’s. She recognized Adama Bakhet, the Qatari tourist. Bakhet floated out slowly, hesitantly, taking his time, obviously quite new to zero-gee.
Kimberly remembered watching a video about the young billionaire tourist from Qatar. He’d paid $60 million for the opportunity to stay aboard the ISS for nine days. But she didn’t focus on him. He was a newbie, and as a tourist he might not even adapt to the station’s zero-gee environment before it was time for him to leave.
To Kimberly, the real threat was Farid.
Farid moved out of the monitor’s view, disappeared from the screen. Where’s he heading? What was he going to do?
Kimberly jerked forward and slapped a hand on the emergency alert button on the caution and warning panel. Klaxons started blaring all through the station. The signal should not only get everyone’s attention, but the crew should rush to their emergency stations. Farid and the fake tourist would hear it, too, and know that they’d lost the element of surprise.
Gingerly, her hand still throbbing from its exposure to the microwave beam, she jabbed at the monitor control, her feet rotating in midair as she moved. In addition to warning the two Russians and the American in the Joint Airlock, she needed to quickly alert Al Sweeting to what she’d just seen. Al was one of her American colleagues who was manning the station’s control center, next door to the Russian SM module, during the docking. Unless he’d been watching the docking he wouldn’t know what had just happened.
Farid was probably heading for Al. Kimberly’s fingers flew over the controls and the monitor blinked and switched to Central Post. She turned up the volume—
And she saw Al and Farid grappling in the zero-gee compartment, rotating around in the air, bouncing off the metal shelving, monitors, computers, and white-sided insulation as they clawed at each other.
I’ve got to do something! Kimberly knew. But what? NASA couldn’t even help, as this view was internal to the ISS, and not being broadcast.
The SM was at the far end of the ISS, and the Russians or the remaining American should be able to get to it faster than she could. Still, Kimberly couldn’t just stay in the JPM and watch. She flicked her eyes from the monitor to the array of white cloth bags Velcroed to the compartment’s wall; they held tools and equipment that she might be able to grab and use.