Asteroid Diversion: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller (The Asteroid Series Book 2) by Bobby Akart

Author:Bobby Akart [Akart, Bobby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 30

Three Years Prior

The International Space Station

Two Hundred Fifty-Four miles above Earth

“Houston, did you see that?” Mere seconds after Heather Fox uttered those words, warning alarms erupted inside the ISS. Confused at first, Heather looked around to seek out one of her fellow astronauts for guidance. The largely Russian crew seemed to stick to themselves as the spirit of cooperation that once was evident aboard the ISS was replaced with the diplomatic chill of the second cold war.

Heather had been frustrated by this and, at first, somewhat despondent. She’d dreamed of traveling into space as a girl, spending her nights gazing through her telescope and her days reading about the history of space exploration.

There was never any doubt about the career path she would choose, and she pursued it with vigor. She understood that her role would be limited on this first trip. It was part of NASA’s protocols. Her first trip into space would be intentionally short, full of research projects and mundane tasks associated with the operation of the ISS. While she dreamt of a space walk and envied the other astronauts who had done one just the day before, Heather was willing to pay her dues and wait her turn.

Then things changed in an instant. She’d been studying the solar system through the newly modified Celestron telescope designed to overcome the challenges of observing space from the constantly moving ISS. Up until a few years ago, the Celestron was only used to observe Earth because of the orbital velocity of the ISS. Moving at eighteen thousand miles per hour, the view was designed to focus on the Earth, as the ISS slowly rotates to keep the same side facing the planet.

The design made it very difficult to view the solar system. Given the limited view from one of the windows of the ISS, an astronaut could only observe a region of the sky for about ten minutes. That changed when the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was mounted outside the ISS, and with the subsequent Celestron upgrades. Heather was able to focus on a part of the stars and gently adjust her field of view to spend longer than ten minutes on a region. It was fascinating technology, and she spent every available moment using it.

In an instant, her life suffered a massive upheaval. She saw something out of place. It was fast, had a tail like a comet, yet it wasn’t on any charts known to NASA. She’d discovered what would later be identified as IM86.

She followed its path across the solar system as it streaked toward the Sun. At first, she didn’t say anything into the comms. When she was certain, she asked, “Houston, did you see that?”

Then the alarms rang. Communications had been lost with Earth.

The Russian commander was calm and collected as he assigned tasks to each of his cosmonauts. It took Heather several minutes to find the commander and the top members of his crew. They’d huddled in a closed-off area that contained access to an array of monitors that showed all aspects of ISS operations.

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