PLAGUE
FOUR
The Sunjammer had easily been placed into low earth orbit and was on slow approach towards the international space station.
Their departure had been tricky as expected, but the ground-based systems performed flawlessly, and despite the fact solar sails work poorly in low orbit, the combination of lasers and optics, as configured and run by the brilliant Toshiko Sato, placed the ship in perfect geocentric orbit. Wil was now steering using the auxiliary vanes to change the attitude of the main sails, and she was using the sun to decelerate towards their ultimate goal, the space station.
NASA had been working with the U.S. Department of Defense to move a few of DOD's geosynchronous orbit satellites into position so as to assist in the re-entry of the Sunjammer. Jack had been briefed that the satellites' onboard masers were communication devices. He knew better. There was little doubt in his mind the masers were weaponry, and while the audacity of the revelation and its implications still astounded him, he filed away the potentially handy information for future use. In the meantime it was likely that the masers would be their ticket home.
Stupid twenty-first century humans, he thought. When they should be working on protecting their planet from external threats, leave it to them to be focused on killing each other.
Through the headset in his spacesuit's helmet Jack could hear Wil talking to herself, sometimes even softly singing. She'd come up to speed on his solar sail spacecraft with amazing alacrity. He wasn't quite sure how she did it, but he suspected that after 60 minutes of intense concentration she knew more about his ship than he. She seemed to both absorb and understand instantaneously. It was the understanding that made her invaluable; it allowed her to devise solutions and solve problems at an astounding pace.
If she had a weakness, he mused, and it wasn't really her fault, it was her age.
Notwithstanding her incredible intelligence, and despite her academic awards, research grants, multiple doctorate degrees and numerous positions at prestigious universities, she still had all the failings and frailties of youth. She was sometimes painfully naïve; she often didn't know when to shut up; and she tended to deny her own mortality – she was liable to take risks with herself that horrified Jack.
A 'father figure' or even a big brother he was not, and yet he found himself at times trying to protect her beyond what he'd come to recognize as his norm. The rest of the team accepted this, although he'd not revealed to them how it had come to be. It was second nature for him to keep secrets and the way he felt about Wil was a perfect example of something that needed to be kept in the shadows; she was one of his weaknesses.
His thoughts were interrupted by the proximity alarm.
There were no 'windows' in the spacecraft. Instead there was video and other instrumentation feeding onto a HUD forward of their seats. As they approached the space station Wil went quiet and Jack began adjusting their views. There was debris. It didn't look good.
"It appears there were multiple implosions of indeterminate origin," Jack spoke to himself as much as Wil. "Scans show at present no life signs; we are not detecting human remains among the debris field. There's no E.M. coming from the site. It's gone dark.
"Docking is going to be a bitch. The shuttle's payload bay is open and the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System is extended. Using our impulse engines we can try hanging off the SRMS and then EVA in; I think it may be our best bet.
"Professor Beinert, do you concur?"
Wil smiled despite the fact she knew he couldn't see her face. "Yes, Captain. Your orders sir?"
He could hear the smile in her voice, and the unwavering confidence; he smiled back. "Then make it so."