"Ready for another first, guys?"
McNeilly sounded altogether too chirpy, but it was probably just pilot bravado. The alternative explanation, pilot exhaustion, didn't bear thinking about—nor could Kyle do anything about it. "I say we get out and walk."
The first to which Windy referred was a manned aerobrake maneuver. The heat tiles that insulated Endeavor during its fiery reentry had been designed for near-Earth missions. Symmetry was a cruel mistress: just as the orbiter had had to add speed to reach the moon, it now had more speed to shed than any previous returning shuttle. That faster-than-spec reentry turned directly into unacceptable thermal stress on the tiles. Instead of reengineering yet another critical system, the mission had turned to a technique previously tried only with robotic interplanetary probes.
"Hold on to your helmets, folks." The orbiter shuddered as it bludgeoned its way through the Earth's upper atmosphere. The angle of attack was by intent shallower than any previous reentry. "Getting toasty up here." The "up here" was because Windy, for her own protection, was alone on the flight deck. Those who had been to the lunar surface remained sealed in Resolute's claustrophobic ascent stage, inside Endeavor's cargo bay. Darkroom-style red bulbs provided their only, and decidedly dim, lighting.
"Nearing fourteen hundred degrees C." Carlisle meant the tiles, not the flight deck. He was studying telemetry from the cockpit. His remoted instruments reproduced everything he would have seen in his now-empty command seat beside the pilot. "I'd say that qualifies as warm."
"And back out we go."
Kyle clutched the arms of his acceleration seat as the cabin vibrated like mad. Aerobraking was such an antiseptic term. In reality, the Endeavor had hit the atmosphere at almost seven miles a second. The Earth's skin of air was softer than, say, a brick wall . . . but at these speeds, not by much. The trick was to strike a glancing blow. Each dip into the atmosphere removed a bit of velocity, followed by a return to space to shed the friction-induced heat. If they entered at the wrong angle, the Endeavor would bounce like a stone skipping off a lake, or heat up past the thermal tiles' capacity to protect them.
"Whee!" Gonzalez was either having a great time or had forgotten their thin margin of safety. Maybe both. "Once more, Windy."
"Anything for you, Speedy."
A few tooth-rattling repetitions slowed them enough for a sedate, five-mile-per-second low Earth orbit, circularized at an altitude of two hundred miles. Landing from LEO should be a piece of cake—if all the aerobraking shocks hadn't dislodged too many tiles.
"Great job, Endeavor."
"Copy that, Houston. Quite a ride, actually."
"Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but you'll have to wait a bit longer. Storm in the Marshalls." That put off until the weather cleared another item for the record books: the first shuttle landing at a remote Pacific atoll.
Quarantine Central.
Endeavor smacked the isolated runway, bounced, and settled into a fast roll. The landing strip had been lengthened for them, but the curve of the atoll limited what could be done. They shook with relief when the orbiter coasted to rest with only a few hundred feet to spare.
"You make it look easy, Windy. Whenever you're ready."
"Thanks, Houston." Over the in-ship radio Kyle heard flung metal buckles striking whatever—and a meaty thud. "Head rush."
It was a wonder, thought Kyle, the shuttle pilot could stand at all. Except for a few minutes acceleration and deceleration, she had been weightless for almost a month. By rights, someone should have helped her from her seat. That was a risk no sane person would take.
"Tricky, Speedy . . . Doc." The pilot was breathless merely from struggling back to her feet. "It's been . . . fun. See you . . . in a few weeks."
They watched by close-circuit TV as their shipmate stumbled to the middeck. Braced against a bulkhead, Windy waved at the videocam. "Stay out of trouble, guys." She struggled briefly with the hatch's release. As the door slid aside, TV showed the three (still sealed in the Resolute's ascent stage) an approaching, teleoperated motorized staircase. Windy would be taken, entirely by remote-controlled vehicle, to the farthest part of the atoll. They, once she was safely away, would go to their own, separate quarantine.
They had one final task to perform first.
Kyle and Craig Carlisle struggled with the suddenly heavy cooler-sized chest, in which nested smaller vacuum-sealed vessels. Each inner container held lunar-dust samples, harvested by abandoned robots. Gonzalez, meanwhile, opened the hatch into the Endeavor's payload bay. Two weeks in one-sixth G, Kyle decided, were little better than free-fall the entire time as McNeilly had experienced. All three were panting before they'd wrestled the chest from the ascent vehicle, through the orbiter, and down mobile stairs to the concrete runway. It was the middle of the night, as per plan, and the electric lighting on the stairs was decidedly dim.
Out of breath, Kyle awaited another remote-controlled vehicle. Out to sea, warships were discernible only by their running lights. They were here to enforce the quarantine.
A driverless truck rolled up. "Excuse the informal welcome," announced an unseen speaker. Grunting, the astronauts hoisted the chest onto the flatbed and slammed shut the tailgate. The truck looped around them and drove to a pier jutting into the lagoon. Darkness and distance kept Kyle from seeing exactly how the chest was transferred to the awaiting submarine. No one knew how best to isolate the nanotech samples, or how rapidly the contagion might reproduce in terrestrial conditions. For lack of an alternative, the safety protocols in the onboard labs, converted torpedo rooms, were based on biohazard containment.
The submarine sailed off into the midnight darkness, headed, Kyle knew, for the deepest point in the island's lagoon. Nuclear powered, the sub extracted oxygen by electrolysis and desalinated its drinking water. The Navy boasted that its subs could remain submerged as long as the food lasted.
In the worst-case scenario, this sub would never surface.
The driverless truck returned. "Hop in, folks," crackled the speaker. "Time for your all-expenses-paid tropical vacation, courtesy of Uncle Sam." They climbed in for the ride to a nearby cluster of huts. It went unspoken that their stay could be permanent if the coming dawn revealed an outbreak of alien nanotech.
No one slept until an entirely ordinary sunrise became a gloriously ordinary day.