Zero Limit Page 9

  He scanned the room again, taking a pause before starting to conclude his speech. Much to his dismay, he noticed that, during the course of his talk, several seats had lost their occupants. This was the ongoing battle scientists faced when trying to raise awareness about the threats posed by near-Earth objects, the so-called giggle factor. For most people, the idea of an asteroid striking Earth with life-altering results ranged from impossible to downright laughable. During the twentieth century, interest in asteroid impacts spiked when scientists discovered the Chicxulub Crater in the Yucatán Peninsula, the crater thought to be caused by the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. After that fervor died off, the public’s interest was briefly rekindled when, in 1994, a comet known as Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter. Named for Carolyn and Eugene M. Shoemaker and David Levy, the comet was discovered in March of 1993 and impacted with the planet more than a year later, leaving scars that were, for a time, easier to identify via telescope than the Great Red Spot. However, yet again, once the fervor from that story had abated, the public’s interest turned elsewhere. And, for the last hundred-plus years, elsewhere it had remained, explaining the indifference with which Alex’s presentation was being met.

  “The simple fact is, an asteroid could wipe out a major city tomorrow and we would have no warning,” Alex went on, even if only for himself. “This is a scenario we have to start considering. Is the possibility low? Yes. But it is still a possibility. And to dismiss it is to invite disaster.”

  He opted to change gears.

  “I know that there are many people, both in this room and out there in the world, who don’t take this seriously,” he said. “People who think that the idea of an asteroid striking Earth is fantasy. Something that might spring out of the mind of a Hollywood screenwriter. And that people like me are like Chicken Little, running from door to door warning that the sky is falling. And maybe they’re right to a point. But the fact is, an asteroid doesn’t even have to hit the ground to cause catastrophe. Back in 2002, an asteroid exploded in midair over the Mediterranean between Libya and Crete. Now, at the time, tensions between Pakistan and India were running particularly high. Both countries were on full nuclear alert. Luckily, the asteroid exploded over the ocean and no harm was done. But what if it had exploded over Mumbai or Islamabad? Who’s to say that either country wouldn’t have misinterpreted the explosion as a first strike and retaliated accordingly?”

  This provoked a reaction, although not the one Alex had intended. The room was filled with the sound of more chairs emptying and more footfalls making their way to the door. He shuffled his papers and looked at his holopad, hoping to find an image or story that could win them over again.

  “Excuse me,” came a voice from the podium that had been placed in the center aisle. Alex was a little thrown by this. Initially, he had planned on waiting until the presentation was over to take questions. However, given the way the afternoon had been going, he was no longer confident he had the luxury of time. And if this guy was interested enough to ask anything, he certainly wasn’t about to admonish him for it.

  “Yes sir,” said Alex. “And you are . . . ?”

  “Senator Mark Rayburn,” the man at the podium said. “Alabama.”

  “The home of Ann Hodges,” said Alex brightly, hoping to use the connection to establish a little common ground. “That’s a coinciden—”

  “Yes,” Rayburn said. “I’m a man who believes in cutting to the chase. So why don’t you tell these good people, or at least those of us who are left, what it is that you’re asking.”

  “Here’s the truth, Senator,” said Alex. “This is the only natural disaster that we have a chance at stopping. You can’t stop tornadoes or flash floods. You can only seek to minimize the damage that they cause. But with asteroids, we have the means, resources, and technology to prevent them from ever causing us any harm in the first place. We just haven’t taken advantage of our options. So what am I asking? I’m asking for your help in funding a system that will allow us to track these things. Specifically, we’re hoping to track near-Earth asteroids, which are harder to spot. See, they’re naturally dark, and the brightest ones only reflect about twenty percent of the light that hits them, so we need . . .”

  Rayburn held up his hand. “And if we track them,” he asked, “do we have the means to stop them?”

  “Well,” Alex said, “that is also something we’re working on. We have a number of very promising ideas at the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. In fact, someone there was going to—”

  Rayburn clearly didn’t want to hear it. He bulldozed over Alex’s response to get to his next question.

  “I seem to recall a whole big fuss sometime ago about another asteroid that was going to pass us by. Apotheosis or something?”

  “Apophis,” said Alex. He knew where this was going.

  “Uh-huh,” Senator Rayburn said. “And what happened there?”

  “It missed us,” Alex said, “by about nineteen thousand miles.”

  “Nineteen thousand miles,” Rayburn said.

  “That’s not that far when you think of it in interstellar terms,” Alex said. “That’s almost ten percent of the distance to the Moon!”

  “I see,” said Rayburn, as though he hadn’t heard Alex’s reply. “And since then, how many near misses like that have we had?”

  “Well,” Alex said, feeling the air slowly running out of his presentation like a punctured air mattress, “none, but—”

  Rayburn didn’t answer. He just nodded and offered a sarcastic salute on his way to the door. In his wake, the remaining attendees began to gather their things and shuffle out of the conference room. Alex found that his voice was rising, both in volume and pitch.

  “That’s all the more reason it could happen now,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before something enters our atmosphere. Something too big for us to stop. The dinosaurs didn’t stand a chance, but we do! We’re living on borrowed time!”

  When he finished, his words echoed, confirming that he was now addressing an empty room. He blinked like a man just coming to his senses and realized how hysterical he’d probably just sounded. Then he looked down at the small stuffed bear that he had perched on the podium, a good-luck charm from his goddaughter.

  “How do you think it went?” he asked his sole remaining audience member.

  As he gathered up his papers, he jostled the podium, and the bear tipped over, falling to the floor.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That about sums it up.”

  As he was gathering up his papers dejectedly, Alex suddenly heard slow but steady applause echoing through the ballroom. He looked up from the podium at the tall figure approaching him.

  “Wonderful presentation, Doctor,” a woman said. “You really had ’em hooked.”

  Although the face had yet to come fully into focus from the glare of the spotlight, Alex didn’t need to see it. He’d know Sara Kent’s voice if he heard it underwater. He looked at her, shaking his head as he continued cleaning up his presentation.

  “Would have helped to have you up here instead of out there,” he said.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I got hung up back at work. By the time I got here, you were already—”

  “It will really help what’s left of my ego if you don’t finish that sentence,” Alex said, but his tone had softened. He knew Sara had been busy ever since she’d been named director of NASA’s PDCO. The organization’s responsibility was the early detection of PHOs—potentially hazardous objects—that might pass by Earth at a distance deemed too close for comfort. Should something fitting that description be spotted, it was up to them to coordinate with FEMA and other government agencies to determine the severity of the threat and come up with solutions.

  Sara walked up to the podium. In the ten years since he’d seen her last, she hadn’t changed much. She still wore her strawberry-blonde hair in a loose ponytail, and her eyes still had that hint of mischief, like she was perennially about to t
ell you a joke at a bar.

  Once Sara had crossed the distance between them, Alex suddenly found himself going in for a hug. She blocked the attempt with an outstretched hand.

  They shook hands and exchanged awkward greetings. Alex had a feeling he’d be replaying the moment again and again in his hotel room.

  Sara walked over to the screen behind them and looked up at the slide that still flickered there.

  “‘Vermin of the Solar System’?” she said, reading the title off the slide.

  “Too much?” Alex asked.

  “If you’re making a low-rent science-fiction movie? No,” said Sara. “But if you’re looking to rally potential deep pockets to your cause? Maybe just a touch.”

  “It’s a real term,” he said. “Astronomers used to think that asteroids were just bits of junk cluttering up the view of more important things.”

  “I remember,” Sara said. “I’ve got the same Caltech degree you do, if you recall.”

  “Yeah,” said Alex. “But would you have done as well without my help?”

  “Excuse you,” Sara said with a light shove. In the space of that gesture, Alex felt a real moment of time travel. Walking with her along Colorado Boulevard in Old Town, their futures out in front of them like the lights of a far-off city. What had happened to those two? he wondered. But just as quickly as the thought rose, Alex tamped it back down.

  They stepped out of the hotel only to find that it had begun to rain. Alex scanned his phone to see when his ride was due to arrive and noticed that the seven minutes he had been promised had now leaped to fifteen. He grimaced. Nothing like being kicked when you’re already down. He looked over at Sara.

  “What?” she asked.

  “No, nothing,” Alex fumbled. “I just was wondering . . . you know . . . curious . . . did you ever . . . you know . . . find someone?”

  Way to go, Alex, the voice in his head chided. For some reason, he always heard that voice as the Miracle Max character in The Princess Bride. A million things you could have talked to her about in this moment and you pick at the oldest wound in the book.

  “Never did,” Sara said, somewhat awkwardly. “I chose to put my career first. You?”

  “Yeah,” said Alex. “Didn’t take, though.”

  “With all your charming traits?” said Sara. “I’m shocked.”

  Her words left an icy trail in their wake. Before the void could be filled with conversation, Sara flagged a cab. When it sloshed up to the curb, Alex lurched forward rather gracelessly to hold the door for her. In doing so, he accidentally almost knocked Sara to the curb. She steadied herself with a rather bemused look, then slipped into the backseat.

  “You still coming to the PDCO tomorrow?” she asked. “I’ll give you the grand tour.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  “See you then,” Sara said, and began to close the door. Before she could, Alex reached out and held it open.

  “How come you never got married?” he asked, trying to sound casual. “Were you afraid you’d never find someone who treated you the way I did?”

  “Not at all,” Sara said. “I was afraid that I would.”

  With that, she slammed the door and the car pulled out into the rain, leaving Alex confused and embarrassed for the second time in one night.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The explosion on the Tamarisk was almost instantaneous, sending a torrent of fire erupting suddenly from the rear of the ship and working its way slowly and deliberately forward. In the microgravity environment, the blue-and-yellow flames moved almost like liquid. To a dispassionate observer, the effect might have been strangely beautiful. To the crew of the Tamarisk, however, it was terrifying. They spoke in breathless shouts, trying to process and relay information amid total chaos.

  “Jesus Christ!” yelled Diaz. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “Dammit,” said Tony. “The fuel’s ignited!”

  “How the hell did that happen?” Caitlin asked.

  “There’s no time to worry about how,” Tony said, already moving aft. “Someone’s got to shut the valves down or we’re going to lose the whole ship.”

  “I’ll go with you,” said Caitlin.

  “Stay here,” Tony said. “There’s nothing you can do. It’s a one-person job, and I know the makeup of the engines. Sit tight. If something goes wrong, you’re gonna know about it.”

  He kissed Vee quickly.

  “Keep her flying,” he told her, and was gone before she could formulate an answer.

  Keeping the ship flying was proving to be a tall order as the fire in the engines played havoc with the RCS. Vee and Caitlin worked to try to get the Tamarisk under control, but the experience was like breaking a stallion without a bridle.

  Belowdecks, Tony worked his way through the guts of the Tamarisk and cursed the name of Lyman Ross. There was a reason no one used hypergolic fuels anymore, he thought. Designed to spontaneously combust when they came into contact with each other, they were once seen as ideal because no ignition system was required. The two propellants simply flowed through their respective valves and, once they made contact, ignited. The downside was that the chemicals involved tended to be toxic and potentially dangerous. And, in the case of the hypergolics used to fuel the Tamarisk, they were the most toxic and dangerous of all. Devil’s Venom, as the Soviets had called it in the early days of their space program, was an incredibly powerful fuel comprised of unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and nitric acid. However, as powerful as it was, Devil’s Venom was also extremely corrosive, to the point that the nitric acid couldn’t remain in the oxidizer tank for longer than a few days without eating through the metal.

  Tony suspected that was what he was confronting here. He knew the valves on the Tamarisk were old and worn, and the ship itself had probably not been assembled in the cleanest shop to begin with. It wouldn’t take much for the acid to eat through the pipe. If even a little dripped onto the tube containing the dimethylhydrazine, then a fire would be the inevitable result.

  Reaching the engine, Tony saw immediately that the worst had happened. The valve for the nitric acid had been completely corroded. Still, he could try to contain the leak and maybe at the very least buy them time. He accessed the ship’s computer and ran a series of commands to shut down the valves and prevent more fuel from mixing. Just as the computer seemed to be responding, Tony was suddenly greeted with a blast of dimethylhydrazine from the corroded pipe. In an instant, he was doused with the caustic liquid.

  Pain blossomed all over his body as the chemicals seared through his suit and skin. His eyes burned and he squeezed them shut, trying to keep out the fumes. Deprived of the chance to torment his eyes further, the agents instead entered his mouth, scorching his nose and throat. Almost instantly, he felt as though his lungs were being filled with fluid, a sure sign of pulmonary edema. Tony coughed violently, as if that would somehow expel the deadly materials, and retched up a torrent of blood onto the decks. Even in the throes of agony, he found himself pausing a moment and blinking in shock, experiencing an almost detached amazement at the viscera he had just ejected from his body. He knew that what he was seeing was a sign of something terrible, and that the time he had left in which to be effective could now be measured in minutes, if not seconds.

  He tried to work his way forward, but his head swam as though he’d just been sucker punched, tilting him off balance and sending him spinning wildly back down the tunnel. Desperate, he tried to force himself to move, inching his way to the hatch for the escape lander. Hand over hand, gripping the sides of the ship for balance, Tony pushed through the tunnel.

  I’m coming, Vee. I’m coming . . .

  Around him, the fire grew worse, the smoke and flames aggravating his failing lungs. His hands shaking, he reached for the comm.

  In the cockpit, Caitlin and Vee were battling to keep the Tamarisk level when they heard Tony on the comm. His voice was strained, as though each word was a struggle.

  “Get to the Alley Oo
p,” he said. “Now.”

  “Tony?” Vee asked. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, honey,” Tony said. “I’m all right. Just go. Now! I’ll meet you there.”

  Before anyone in the cockpit could protest further, something burst somewhere on the ship and it jerked wildly starboard.

  “We’ve got to go!” said Diaz.

  They scrambled their way down the hatch and into the Alley Oop, bouncing off the walls as they floated nearly uncontrollably in zero gravity. Once inside the lander, they strapped in and locked their helmets into place. Vee and Diaz started the launch cycle while Shaw manned the radar to search for their position in space. Another burst and they were rocked again.

  “Tony!” Caitlin yelled into her helmet mic. “We’ve got to move.”

  The only response she received to her query was silence wrapped in static. Something was very wrong.

  “I’m going for him,” she said, and began unbuckling her straps.

  Caitlin pinballed her way back up the tunnel. When she reached the top, a terrifying sight greeted her. The Tamarisk was now engulfed in flame, making it next to impossible to move anywhere.

  “Tony!” she cried into her mic again, hoping he was still alive and able to hear her.

  Suddenly, Tony burst out from the wall of fire that led aft and slowly worked his way toward her. His face was covered in burns, his suit slowly being eaten away. He looked up at her, shaking as he tried to speak.