Station Breaker

by Andrew Mayne

  "Brazil? What the hell?"

  "Would you prefer Africa or India?"

  "I'd prefer Cape Canaveral."

  "You won't make it to the ground. And if you do, through some small miracle, you'll never make it out of an interrogation room."

  "Jesus Christ."

  "David. I need you to follow my instructions very carefully. We only have a few minutes before we'll lose signal. First, give that chip to Wallman. Only him. Nobody else can be trusted."

  "Who the hell is he?"

  "He'll find you. What matters most right now is your survival. Go to the trunk and pull out Peterson's bag."

  I tuck the phone into my helmet, unhook my harness and drift over to the cabinet. There's a large black duffle bag inside.

  I place it into my old seat under the harness and take Bennet's console. "Now what?"

  "The Russians are going to figure out that you're taking a different reentry path. They won't be able to re-task the kill-sats fast enough, but they will be able to send long-range MiGs to intercept you in the air. They will fire upon you if you're over the ocean or an uninhabited area."

  "Well, fuck."

  "We have to land the Unicorn in a bay."

  "Jesus Christ."

  "If you're out to sea you'll never make it. They'll have a ground team en route. We can't let them get you or the package."

  "Wonderful. How about I just radio them that I surrender?"

  "You can't do that, David. Lives other than your own are at stake."

  "And you can't tell me why..."

  "I'm just one part of this. My job is to get you to the ground safely."

  "So I land in some Brazilian city?"

  "The trajectory touchdown is Rio de Janeiro."

  "Wonderful."

  "But when the Unicorn lands you won't be in there."

  "Come again?"

  "Bennet said you could pull this off."

  "And what happened to him?"

  "He died for a reason. Pull this off, and you'll make it. Lots of people will."

  "Pull what off?"

  "We're going to use the ship's emergency parachute to slow the descent of the Unicorn in the upper atmosphere instead of the retro rocket. We're then going to jettison the drogue chute and let the ship free fall for 10,000 meters so the MiG's can't get to you."

  "We?" I stare the phone in disbelief. "Great. Just great."

  "At 1,000 meters you're going to engage the thrusters at full throttle and then tilt the Unicorn at a twenty degree inclination."

  "Lord almighty. Why?"

  "Reach inside Peterson's bag."

  I unzip the duffle and see what's inside.

  "No fucking way."

  "David, it's the only way you survive."

  "Nobody has ever done this before."

  "Which is why the Russians and everybody else won't see it coming."

  12

  CRASH DUMMY

  WHY AM I going along with this? Because a drowning man will cling to anything, even the tail of a great white shark if it happens to swim by.

  Right now there's only one voice trying to steer me through this crisis. Although it very likely belongs to the person who instigated the entire situation.

  If I hadn't spun the ship when the mysterious robot voice told me to, I would either be dead or strapped down in K1 as the prisoner of a bunch of angry Russians.

  Now the voice on the sat phone is telling me I have to do a hybrid landing in the middle of a crowded tourist destination – but not actually land the thing. Oh, no, it gets better.

  When Elon Musk first proposed landing all the parts of a rocket back on Earth using propulsion instead of parachutes, everyone said he was crazy. When SpaceX finally pulled it off, everyone said it was the most obvious idea in the world. All the public and private space programs rushed to develop their own propulsive landing systems.

  The end result is that modern spacecraft like the Unicorn are designed to land back on Earth by doing two controlled burns. The first one in the upper atmosphere is intended to slow the ship down from 17,000 miles per hour to something just over the speed of sound, letting atmospheric drag then bring the Unicorn to terminal velocity around 200 mph. The second burn is the landing burn, gradually slowing the ship down so that it can nicely touch down with pin-point accuracy.

  If you wanted, you could land the Unicorn on the helipad of a skyscraper – assuming the top was covered in asbestos.

  That is a long way away from the days when you hit the upper atmosphere with enough uncertainty your splashdown zone was several thousand square miles of the Pacific.

  If you were just dropping from a stationary point above the earth, you could narrow that area down considerably, but since you're hitting the atmosphere angled at an incredible velocity, the place where you're going to land is on the other side of the horizon. And between you and that spot, there are all kinds of thermal variations, wind currents and other factors; including the fact that a one degree variation in your approach angle can affect your drag enough to widen the landing area.

  Computers helped a lot to narrow that zone. The Space Shuttle was also a big improvement. Because it was a controllable glider, you could fine tune its flight path and bring it down on a runway.

  However, powered landings were the real game changer. They meant a crew could touch down and look out the window and see their car in the parking lot – a far cry from waiting for an aircraft carrier to retrieve you from shark-infested waters.

  The key to a powered landing is letting the onboard system do all the work. The computer can do precisely timed engine bursts, sometimes lasting milliseconds, to finely adjust the landing path with minute precision.

  Out of all the times you want to have a human handle the controls, this is not it. Nobody has reactions fast enough to make that work. Sure, a good pilot could land the thing without making a crater, but trying to hit the X on the pad – and not the cafeteria skylight – is a different matter.

  And Mr. Mysterious just told me he wants me to take the stick at this most critical phase.

  But it gets even better...

  Even though this ship can launch and land entirely on rocket power, it has two backup parachute systems in the event there's an engine failure. The first one is opened in the upper atmosphere and serves as a drag chute to slow the ship down to a less ridiculous velocity. After that's jettisoned, a second one is opened to bring the ship to a more graceful landing over who knows where.

  Around iCosmos, we call this landing "caveman" style.

  But this isn't what the voice has planned for me...

  He's telling me to open the ship's emergency parachute at a high altitude instead of doing a reentry burn to slow my descent. This means that I'll actually be dropping a lot faster initially – theoretically to avoid those MiGs he says are waiting to catch me.

  However, when the Unicorn is at its most vulnerable, dangling from the second parachute, as easy a target as there is in the sky, he says don't use the chute. Instead, he wants me to have the ship free fall to Earth for a few miles, you know, no big whoop, then, THEN, at the point of no return, use all that fuel we didn't use on the reentry, to TAKE OFF AGAIN.

  Now, it's not like there's an infinite amount of fuel on this thing. It'll only take the ship so high, about 10,000 feet or so. But for anyone watching where I'm about to land, won't that be a surprise...

  They'll see the Unicorn drop down over the sunny bay – I think it'll be day there – then shoot up into the sky like a meteor in reverse – only not straight up.

  Of course not. That would mean it would come right back down where it almost landed.

  No sir. By tilting the ascent by 20 degrees, the Unicorn is going to shoot like a missile over Rio, the beaches, the Jesus statue and all the beautiful people in one giant arc, bringing the ship down in some monkey-infested jungle.

  Here's the really, really good part. When the Unicorn lands, probably on some lost temple, I won't be there.

  M
y mysterious friend wants me to do the unthinkable.

  Shortly after the Unicorn starts its fake-out relaunch, and at some point when I'm conscious and able to actually move, I'm supposed to pop the hatch and jump out with a parachute of my own, conveniently packed in Peterson's duffle bag.

  The burning question in my mind – other than will I live past the next few minutes – is why are there three chutes? Was this the plan all along?

  13

  BAILOUT

  "ARE YOU READY, David?" asks the voice on the speakerphone.

  "Define, "ready" for me. What are my other options?"

  "There are no other options. We'll probably lose contact when you get to ground. You need to find Wallman and bring him the chip."

  "Yeah, about that. How?"

  "I'll tell you when it's time to know."

  "What if I lose this phone?"

  "Don't lose it."

  "Yeah, but let's assume for a moment I do. Then what?"

  There's a very long pause that's disconcerting. Among all the planning for dramatic reentry burns and take-offs, my unseen friend forgot to account for the most basic situation – what happens if we lose contact?

  Besides what happens on the ground – assuming I make it there in one living piece – there's the question of the next several minutes. I'm not getting any telemetry from Nashville. This is flying blind at its worst.

  In the olden days, when a space capsule returned to Earth, it lost communication with Earth for several minutes because all the ionized air from the heat shield formed a kind of Faraday cage blocking radio signals. Reentry had to be carefully planned in advance and it was the pilot's job to make sure everything was on course.

  Since the Space Shuttle had such a large surface area, there was actually a gap in the ionized bubble above it where they could send and receive communications via satellite, get telemetry and carry on conversations all the way down.

  For smaller craft, like the Unicorn and the Soyuz, this problem persisted until the development of a laser-based system. It doesn't allow for huge data streams, but it's enough to get by. Having another set of eyes tell you everything looks fine is rather reassuring.

  In the simulator you train for all kinds of situations, including having no support from ground control.

  Theoretically, the Unicorn and Alicorn, the rocket that launches the Unicorn into orbit, can run entirely by themselves. If one second after liftoff a lightning strike took out mission control, the automatic systems would take the Unicorn to orbit and the Alicorn's two stages would either land on the pad if there was an okay to proceed signal, or dump themselves in the ocean.

  So, yeah, I don't have to have anybody on Earth in order to land, but it would be kind of nice.

  "David, we will lose contact during reentry. But I'm confident you'll know how to handle this. Put your parachute on now before reentry begins. Things will get bumpy."

  I reluctantly slide the harness over me. The straps are wide enough to go over my suit. Peterson, or whoever packed her bag put a little more thought into this than the voice on the phone.

  To make this work, I'm going to have to have my hand on the stick as I watch the altimeter and squeeze the throttle at the right moment, tilting the craft at an angle.

  So I don't drop the side hatch on a schoolyard filled with children, I'll have to blow it right when I'm over the bay – a bay I don't even know the name of.

  "Okay, I have your contact point. Once you land, go to the train station by the Maracanã football stadium. Someone will meet you there."

  "Did you just decide this now?"

  "We're trying to adjust to the situation."

  "What if there's a problem?" Bennet taught me to always have a backup.

  "Hold on...okay, if we lose contact on the ground look for more information from this Twitter handle..."

  A text message pops up saying "@CapricornZero."

  "Seriously? I'm trusting my life to someone who just decided to create a Twitter account based on an OJ Simpson movie?"

  "Focus on reentry, David. That's all you need to worry about now. Once you make it to the station, everything will be fine."

  I'm not sure if I like the totality of "fine." But there's no point in arguing that point right now. I'm about to dip down into the atmosphere and experience some severe turbulence.

  If I hit it wrong, I can bounce back up and miss my intended landing zone, so I keep a careful eye on the display panel.

  It starts to shimmy, then begins to jostle the craft like a speedboat crashing through waves – if the waves were hitting your hull at 17,000 miles an hour.

  Below me, the heat shield is starting to absorb all that energy. I pray that the Russians didn't poke a hole in the surface. One tiny gap is all it takes and the whole ship is lost.

  While the new Pica-Z material is self-healing and can fill in gaps created by micrometeorite strikes, I'm not sure if it has been tested for mad Russian lasers yet. I'll have to ask the iCosmos engineers if they really thought of every contingency...

  The first part of reentry feels like an airplane trying to slow down after a landing – pressing me into my seat as my body's inertia pushes against the spaceship which is now being slowed down by the thin air it's slamming into.

  Outside the window I can see the coronal glow of the ionized air. Technically speaking, the air is so hot the electrons leap out of their orbits and fly around like some kind of electric swinger party. Which means basically, I'm a giant neon sign right now.

  Now is a good time to close my helmet in the event of a hull puncture that could instantly incinerate me.

  I leave the phone next to my ear, although I haven't heard anything from my helper.

  Whatever system he was using to communicate with me, ain't going to work during this period. So if I want to mutiny and choose my own path, now is the time.

  I scan the options on my control panel and contemplate it.

  I could still adjust my reentry and bring myself down somewhere where I speak the language.

  It's crunch time, David. Yes, he probably saved me from the Russians, but that doesn't mean he's my pal.

  While I trust he doesn't want me to die before getting to the ground, he seems very adamant that I don't link back up with iCosmos or US authorities. And that, my friend, is a tiny bit suspicious.

  You have seconds to decide if you're going to say "Olá" or whatever the Brazilian-Portuguese version of hello is supposed to be, or try to land on US soil and pray the kill-sats are imaginary and the Russian ground teams don't reach you in time.

  Screw it. Let's see if the senhoras are wearing their string bikinis this time of year.

  If I don't die, it'll give me something to think about when I'm in Federal prison or locked up in some Siberian gulag.

  14

  FLY BY WIRE

  AS THE UNICORN bashes around like a golfball in a dryer, I keep my heavy hand near the control stick and watch the altimeter, waiting to manually release the drogue chute. Do it too soon and it'll shred itself apart. Wait too long and I'll still be burning the retro rockets as I crater myself in Guanabara Bay – that's the name my satellite map is showing me where my trajectory is taking me.

  Flying a spacecraft like the Unicorn isn't quite like anything else. Maybe the closest analogy is a helicopter, but even then the comparisons kind of end beyond up and down controls.

  At the root level, all fast-moving vehicles have their similarities – whether it's a Lamborghini or a high-altitude glider. You need to use finely tuned instincts to keep yourself from making a split-second mistake that can end your life.

  The first time I ever took control of a flying machine I was seventeen. The end of that summer, a few weeks after I had my eye surgery, I took a bike ride to the local airport on my one day off.

  Looking through the chainlink fence I saw an old guy in a windbreaker wiping the windshield of a white and blue twin engine Cessna 310.

  "You fly?" he asked me when he saw me watching
.

  Man, I can't tell you what that question meant to me in that moment. Here I was, a teenager on a rusty beach cruiser who couldn't even afford a car and this guy asked if I was a pilot. For a brief second I could have been a peer – not some Air Force and Navy recruitment office reject.

  "No," I replied.

  "You want to?" he said, dropping the wash rag into a bucket.

  I got my first good look at him. He was tall, tan and in his seventies but looked like a healthy fifty-year-old. There was a confidence about him you see in pro football coaches and generals.

  "Yeah. Some day."

  "How about today?"

  Today? "You mean right now?"

  He checked his watch. "A couple more hours of daylight. Why not?"

  Up until that moment I had been a bookish kid who played flight simulators and toyed with the idea of being a pilot, but the only ambitious thing I had done was make enough money to get my eyes fixed. Beyond that, it was a kind of "some day" dream.

  To be a pilot, not just the Saturday morning kind, but a guy who goes out there and pushes the envelope and tries to make the machine do things it wasn't supposed to, means having something in you that says, "Fuck it. Let's do it."

  Getting into an airplane with a stranger ranks right up there with accepting rides from creepers with vans and eating strange candy from the dude down the street who still lives with his mother and watches you through the window.

  Even worse, it's not like therapy can help you deal with the kind of fatal trauma you get when you're killed in a crash.

  I knew the sky was my destiny when my mouth said, "Yes," before my brain even processed the information.

  Mr. Sterner, that was his name, was breaking all kinds of rules when he casually asked me if I wanted to take flight in his plane.

  Sterner couldn't have cared less. He'd flown sorties in Vietnam, trained pilots in the Navy then left the service to go run an insurance business with his brother.

  He could give zero fucks what anybody told him was right or wrong.