With the Klaxon continuing to hoot throughout the station, she turned back to the laptop’s monitor, her breath quickening as she watched Al and Farid battling. Al fought furiously, arms pummeling wildly, but Farid was bigger, more solidly built, obviously more experienced.
A scientist like Kimberly herself, Al was small in stature and had a feral appearance: the other astronauts called him Rat, although Kimberly kept their relationship strictly professional and always referred to him as Al.
But that didn’t do anything to help Al now.
Farid was holding Al in a choke hold with his left arm. Kimberly could see the dark hair on his wrist in the high-resolution clarity of the laptop’s monitor. His arms bulged in his cosmonaut’s blue uniform. It looked as though the man had spent the three years since his last ISS mission lifting weights and working out. This certainly wasn’t the quiet Kazakhstani that the psychological profilers had analyzed. Had he undergone some sort of physical training for this radically different behavior?
As they gyrated in zero gravity, Farid twisted Al to the left and brought his right hand up and placed it against the back of Al’s head.
Al’s face turned beet red as he struggled for breath. Gasping, he used both hands to try to pry Farid’s massive left arm off his throat. He thrashed and kicked with both his legs, jerking violently back and forth, desperately trying to work free. The two started rotating in midair, bouncing off the consoles. Just as they floated out of sight of the video, Farid viciously twisted Al’s neck … and he went limp.
Kimberly pounded at the comm link to NASA, wanting to make sure that the ground was aware of what was happening. How much had they seen? They should have seen Colonel Zel’dovich’s dead body floating from the Soyuz and Vasilev being murdered, but they hadn’t responded in any way. She was sure they were shocked, probably too stunned to respond. She knew they wouldn’t be able to do anything from the ground to help her at this moment, but they had access to the most creative minds in the world: somebody should be able to come up with a workable countermeasure.
But Kimberly realized that at this moment it was up to her, the two Russians, and one other American. They couldn’t rely on NASA to do anything in the station that they couldn’t do for themselves.
The comm link to NASA Headquarters was out, she realized. Not responding. Then she remembered that the link had been working just moments before, when Scott’s voice had been broadcasting over the monitor in his official duty as today’s CAPCOM while the Soyuz had docked.
She knew that the feed was being sent out over NASA TV, and in addition to being picked up by the Russian space program, every major network and news channel back on Earth would have someone watching the feed, even if it was only a lowly summer intern. Their only job was to watch for anything that might occur aboard the ISS that might be worthy of shooting to the newsroom—or even breaking into their regularly scheduled broadcast, if it was important enough.
None of the big guys wanted to be scooped with breaking news by their competitors. Being first meant being able to charge more for commercial airtime, and that meant more bucks. Which was the real name of the game, not news just for the altruistic sake of news.
Kimberly quickly ran through the alternate links emanating from the ISS. One after another they showed that nothing was being transmitted or received. Running her fingers over the touchscreen, she called up the backup satellite-to-satellite relay. That too was dead.
This wasn’t just a technical malfunction; it was a deliberate severing of the entire station-to-ground communication links.
She felt her pulse racing faster, her heart beating so hard it seemed to be trying to burst out of her ribs. Farid. He must have cut the links. He was a computer scientist; he knew exactly how to do it. With his past six-month tour on the ISS he had more than enough experience to control the entire station.
Looking around the crowded compartment, Kimberly kicked out and shot through the air, reaching for one of the white cloth bags secured to the JPM wall that held a potpourri of tools. Her feet glided upward as she grabbed the bag and unfastened its Velcro strap. Fumbling inside, she pulled out two foot-long wrenches and an oversized screwdriver.
Guns were prohibited aboard the ISS. The purpose was to prevent any violence that might occur from people crowded together in an inescapable environment for months—even years—at a time. Bullets would only punch holes in the station’s thin aluminum siding, letting the air escape and killing everyone inside.
For the same reason the Russians had decreed that knives were not allowed on the ISS either, although Kimberly knew there was an ultrasharp utility knife stowed away in Shep’s toolkit—the grab bag of various odd tools Bill Shepherd had brought up with him when he had served on the ISS. Nobody but Shepherd, a free-spirited ex-Navy SEAL, could have gotten away with such a flouting of the rules. Several crew members had used the knife when they needed it. Nobody complained about it and HQ didn’t know it existed. Kimberly was pretty certain Shep’s bag—and the knife—were still in the JPM where Shepherd had stored it, but she couldn’t find it.
From what she’d just seen, Kimberly wasn’t thinking about using an approved, standardized weapon to defend herself, or following any international rules that had been negotiated and talked to death by chair-bound bureaucrats. These madmen would be coming after her. She was totally focused on survival.
Kimberly knew she didn’t have time for discussions or new age, touchy-feely, get-in-touch-with-your-emotions, hand-holding séances. These bastards were coming for her, and she had to be able to defend herself. They’d already murdered three men; what were they going to do next?
She thought she knew. Farid and his companion were out to kill everyone on the station.
Sooner or later they would come for her.
Sooner, she realized. Not later.
She began to tremble. They want to kill me!
But then she remembered her father, all those years ago. And the fear inside her subsided. It did not disappear altogether, but now it was overlaid by an icy, pitiless resolve.
Those murdering sons of bitches, she thought. I’ll kill them. Both of them.
But how?
FLASHBACK: KIMBERLY, AGE 10
Her eyes nearly blinded with tears, ten-year-old Kimberly fled out of the schoolyard, stumbled across Porter Road, and ran all the way home.
My dress, she kept thinking. My new dress. They ruined it.
Her mother was in the front yard, working on her bed of chrysanthemums. Once she saw Kimberly she dropped her trowel and ran to her only child, her normally placid Japanese features wide-eyed with sudden alarm.
“What happened?” her mother shouted. “Your dress is filthy!”
Kimberly rushed to her arms, still crying. She tried to explain between gasping sobs. “They said I was too dark to wear a white dress! They threw mud at me! Five of them!”
Mama brushed the tears away, wrapped a protective arm around her daughter, and led her into the house. Kimberly’s father was at the door, his lean, ascetic face worried, alarmed.
It took several minutes for them to get Kimberly soothed down. Mama led her upstairs, helped her take off the ruined dress, and cleaned her up.
“There were five of them,” Kimberly told her, calmer now. “Marla Kingston was the leader. I hate her!”