The Boys' Club

Chapter 8

      The space shuttle Iridium rolled down the runway and lifted off into the cloud speckled sky over the Pacific Ocean. This time Carmen sat behind Adam Baily who was the mission commander and Mike Sinclair in the co-pilot's seat. The only other crew member on board was one of the engineers Barry Fitzgerald who was next to her monitoring a systems board. The other three flight crew were still on leave, so it was a skeleton crew of four on this urgent mission. Carmen thought back a mere six days earlier to Driscoll's briefing on their first day back on the island.

"The Chinese space agency contacted Dr Hammond asking if we can go into space as soon as possible," he explained. "One of their important communication satellites as developed a major fault, it may have been struck by a meteor, and they want us to retrieve it and bring it back to Earth so they can examine and repair it. Apparently they are willing to pay a huge fee if we can get it back to them in less than ten days. Dr Hammond suspects it is more than just a communications satellite, but a job is a job. We need to launch in six days."

"Six days?" exclaimed Liam Peters, the chief maintenance engineer, "I don't know if that's possible. The Copernicus is still having its major overhaul. It should be ready for the moonflight on the 27th, but there's no way we can have it ready to go in six days."
"Well it will have to be the Iridium then," Driscoll said.

"I have a reduced staff, thanks to the holidays. Most of them are arriving back in a week. If we work around the clock with the crew I have we might just be able to have it ready in six days. That means plenty of overtime."
"Take all the overtime you need. Just have it ready for lift off on the 8th."

So here they were on an unscheduled satellite retrieval mission. Dr Hammond had apparently insisted that Carmen be included in the crew, otherwise she suspected if Driscoll and Baily had their way she would have been left behind to play in the simulator.

Less than an hour after take-off they were in a low Earth orbit about three hundred kilometres above the surface. Carmen looked out the side window of the flight deck. They were passing over the Pacific Ocean and she could see a huge spiral arm network of clouds boiling up into the sky. It was a tropical cyclone slowly making its way towards the east coast of Australia.

"Stop sight seeing, Taylor," Adam snapped at her, "Mike and Barry are going below to the cargo hold to set up the retrieval device. We are on the same orbit as the satellite we have to capture. We should catch up to it in just over an hour, so I'll let you come and sit in the co-pilot's seat and help me monitor the systems."
Wow, that's big of you, Carmen thought, but out loud she said, "Sure, okay." She unstrapped and moved forward to the seat Mike had just vacated. A minute later it was just Carmen and Adam in the flight deck. The other two would don their spacesuits and make preparations in the cargo hold below to secure the errant satellite once they had locked onto it with the magnetic tractor beam and pulled it into the hold.

"Keep an eye on your monitor," Adam instructed, "and watch the radar for bogies," he added with a smirk.

"Bogies?" Carmen questioned him.

"Unidentified spacecraft. Didn't Dr Driscoll or Dr Hammond tell you about them?"

No they hadn't, but Carmen had learned about them from a  conversation she had had with Josh Williams a few weeks earlier.
"All the flight crew have experienced them," he had told Carmen one evening in the dining room after the others had left, "Occasionally on the longer flights to Mars we'll get a radar contact of a spaceship sized object following us at the same velocity but always just out of visual range. Then after a few hours it does a rapid course change and disappears. It only ever happened on the Mars flights until last year when it happened again, but this time on a moon flight."