Dan gripped both of his gloved hands securely on the lip of the command module’s hatch. He swung his feet out toward the far end of the tunnel, the momentum ripping one hand from the hatch. Clinging desperately with the remaining hand, he painfully mustered the strength to pull himself inside.
The module was spinning like a fun-house barrel. Lorraine floated limply in the narrow aisle alongside the utilities section. Her eyes were closed and a thread of blood curled away from the corner of her lips. But she was breathing and a pulse was visible in her neck.
A flash of motion reflected in Dan’s helmet visor. Someone clad in an EMU was banging at the keyboard of the main computer. The sonofabitch is deliberately wrecking the station. My station! Deliberately! I’ll kill him!
Dan barreled down the aisle like a heat-seeking missile and struck the EMU solidly in the shoulder, tearing it out of the anchoring loops and sending it crashing against the viewport. Quickly bracing himself with his hands against the console behind him as the space-suited figure righted itself, Dan jackknifed and, with all the fury burning within him, kicked both legs into the soft area of the suit’s midsection. He could feel muscles and ribs giving way beneath the impact of his kick.
I’ll kill you, you sonofabitch, Dan snarled inwardly. But the figure folded into a fetal position and went limp, drifting slowly upward above the instrument panel.
His hands shaking with barely controlled rage, Dan unfastened its helmet and yanked it off the EMU. Lance Muncie’s head lolled around in the collar of the suit, his youthful face almost cherubic in unconsciousness.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Dan said out loud. The anger drained out of him. Muncie. He must have gone berserk.
Dan shoved Lance out of the command center and anchored himself at the control panel. The instrument panel was ablaze with warning lights. Even with the alarm channel shut off, the whooping and ringing seeped into his helmet. His fingers tapped out a set of commands. The data readout showed that the tumble had begun with a short burst from the port zenith translation thruster at 1015 hours. The control moment gyroscopes had automatically tried to contain the torque generated by the burst, but they were quickly saturated and shut off automatically. A second firing command was issued seven minutes later. That’s what caused the surge that knocked me back through the tunnel, Dan realized. The computer indicated that the thruster was still firing. The station wasn’t only spinning. It was twisting and twanging like a paper kite caught in a high wind.
Can’t abandon the station, he realized. The whole damned crew is too high to even hear the warning signals.
Muncie hadn’t done that, he knew. One of the wiseass scientists had put something in the station’s air. That was the only explanation.
“You’re going to have to bring her back under control, mister,” he muttered to himself. “You used to be a flier. Let’s see if you still have the good stuff.”
Strangely, he felt no fear. No more anger. He was as calm inside as he had ever been in the cockpit of an airplane or spacecraft. There was no room for emotions when he had his hands on the controls of a dangerously careening craft. There was hardly any room for Dan Tighe to think about himself. He was one with the vehicle he was trying to control; he and this beautiful piece of machinery beneath his hands merged into a single being, nerves melding with electrical circuits, mind and machine, flesh and metal becoming one living entity.
Dan looked out the viewport and located the nadir trailing edge of the diamond against the dizzying sky. The solar panel and radiator were flapping like slow-motion bird’s wings. The blue-and-white curve of the Earth slid past, then disappeared from his view. He could see a few stars in the darkness out there, whipping by so fast it almost made him dizzy.
Got to work fast. The solar panels were useless without proper orientation. Once the station lost power there would be no hope of regaining control. The station would spin and spin until it tore itself apart.