Brown, Dale - Independent 01

by Silver Tower (v1. 1)

  “America is a spacesuit-environment craft. As long as I prebreathe oxygen and stay in a spacesuit I’ll be just fine.”

  “Jason, you don’t know that,” Dr. Matsui said from behind him. Saint-Michael didn’t bother turning around. “The lower pressure in the suit could trigger a seizure. The excitement, the adrenaline—even the noise could set you off. And if there was an emergency—rapid decompression, a suit puncture—”

  “Then we’re out both an HTS pilot and a station commander,” Stuart finished for him, “and we bring you back in America's cargo hold, along with all your crew.”

  That last hit Saint-Michael hard. His crew. Would he be endangering them by heading up the mission? It was one thing to take chances with his own life, but with the lives of the crew.... He scanned the faces of the others in the room. What he saw renewed his determination.

  “Look, General,” Saint-Michael said, “there’s no denying I’ll be risking my hide by going up there. We all will. It goes, as they say, with the territory. But I think the chances are better than even we’ll put that station back in business. Right now, all things considered, ‘better than even’ seems like pretty good odds.”

  Stuart said nothing for a long moment. Then: “Like I said, Jas, I’ll take your proposal to the Pentagon. I’ll tell them you want in—let them decide.”

  Good old Martin Stuart, Saint-Michael thought. Always an expert at passing the buck. Well, nothing to do now but wait... and hope. His thoughts drifted... then fixed on an image of Jim Walker stepping into the lifeboat. That look on his face. What was it? A parting look... a final farewell... ?

  Saint-Michael’s own face hardened as he stood in the Space Command conference room. Somehow, some way, he had to get back on board that station.

  The Chevy Blazer turned off the main highway, down a graded dirt road with a large sign that read “Calhan Municipal Airport Welcomes You.”

  Ann looked at Saint-Michael. “An airport? You live on an airport?” “I get that reaction all the time. I guess I’m one of the few people who’ve gotten the chance to fulfill a childhood fantasy. When I was a kid, I used to wash airplanes, pump gas and sweep out hangars to pay for flying lessons. I got my pilot’s license before I got a driver’s license. I was always at the airport. Years later, when I was reassigned to Colorado Springs, I began hunting around for a place and ran across this abandoned county airport. Thirty acres, a hangar, fuel storage, a house, a terminal building and a paved runway. Plus I’ve got fresh air—sweetened once in a while from the stockyards up the road—the open sky, and the Rocky Mountains. And all it cost me was the back taxes. Paradise.”

  They pulled up in front of an old but imposing ranch-style house surrounded by trees several hundred yards from the terminal building. Ann was surprised to see a beacon light revolving on a tower near the terminal.

  “The airport’s active now,” he explained. “Another deal I made with the county.”

  “Doesn’t the noise ever bother you? It would drive me crazy.”

  “It’s not that active. Besides, I’m hardly ever here.”

  “You have your own plane?”

  “Yes. A beauty.” They got out of the car and made their way through the darkness to the house. “Of course, if the docs at Space Command don’t give me a clean bill of health I’ll have trouble flying even my Piper Malibu.”

  He punched a code into a keyless door lock and swung the door open. To her surprise, lights immediately went on in the foyer and front two rooms.

  “I’m also into gadgets,” he said “If houses can be described as ‘high tech,’ then this one is.” He helped her take off her coat and hung it in the front closet just off the white tiled foyer.

  “It’s warm in here,” Ann said “You keep the heat on all the time when you’re gone?”

  “Another gadget. Before I leave headquarters I call home. When the computer answers, I punch a code into the phone that tells the computer to turn on the heat or air-conditioning, outside lights, everything—it even makes a pot of coffee.

  Ann smiled back, pleased to be seeing a new side of him.

  He led her into the great room, an oak-paneled palace dominated by a cathedral ceiling and a massive stone fireplace. She sat on a leather sofa in front of the fireplace, and he poured a snifter of Grand Marnier for both of them. When he returned with the liqueur he was pleased to see her curled up against one of the big arm pillows.

  “You look right at home,” he said. She smiled, accepted the snifter.

  He went to the fireplace and within a few minutes had a roaring fire built, then returned to the sofa and sat beside her, watching the logs being consumed by the blaze. After a while she moved toward him— Ann Page was neither coy nor a tease—and put her head on his shoulder. He reached over and brushed her hair from her forehead.

  “It’s peaceful here,” she said. She looked up at him, watched the reflections of fire in his eyes. “What do you think they’ll say? I mean, about reactivating the station? About your going along?”

  “I’m counting on a yea to both points.”

  “But what if—”

  “I can’t think about that now,” he said. “I think my desire to get back to the station, the feeling I’ve got to and will, is what’s helped me fight off this damn sickness. And you’ve been an important part of it. I hope you realize that.”

  “Jason....”

  He would have been a fool or worse not to understand that the time was now. He kissed her. She pressed against him, holding the kiss for as long as possible. When they parted, they looked into each other’s eyes, reading thoughts and desires—the same for them both.

  “Make love to me, Jason. Now.”

  And General Saint-Michael, for once in his life, did precisely as he was told.

  Afterward they shared the unspoken feeling that their loving time together was unlikely to be repeated soon. The dark void of space lay ahead, a place with no promises, and a future unknown.

  THE PENTAGON

  The computer-synthesized voice that came through the Pentagon’s “safe-line” sounded like Jason Saint-Michael, but General Stuart could tell immediately that a machine had answered. No matter. It was five o’clock in the morning in Colorado, seven a.m. in Washington. Give the man a rest.

  When the voice was replaced by a beep, Stuart said, “Jason, Stuart here. I just left a meeting with the Joint Chiefs. The president and his cabinet were listening in on a video teleconference. Not the news you’d hoped for, I’m afraid. The secretary of defense is dead set against the station and he convinced the president to deny your request.

  “I’m real sorry, Jason, but the decision is to give you a medical retirement. America will be piloted by Hampton. The crew will be responsible for salvaging bodies and boosting Skybolt into storage. That’s it, Jason. Sorry.. .”

  As he returned the receiver to its cradle, Martin Stuart admitted to himself that he had been hoping to get Saint-Michael’s machine He and Jason had knocked heads a fair amount over the years, but he'd always respected the young general, considered him a brilliant field commander. It would have given him no pleasure to tell Saint-Michael directly that Space Command no longer had use for his services. So he was a coward. In this case, he had no apologies. He just hoped Jason would come to accept it. But did he really believe there was a chance of that?

  CHAPTER 10

  October 1992

  McAULIFFE HTS SPACEPORT, NEEDLES, CALIFORNIA

  This was no longer the world’s most extraordinary flying vehicle, Ann thought, and they were no longer a crew of highly skilled astronauts and engineers: this magnificent spacecraft called America was nothing more than a glorified hearse, and they were the pallbearers. They were being sent to do a dirty job, with the whole world looking on.

  Ann and Marty Schultz were observing the loading of America's cargo bay two days prior to launch. They stood on a steel arch over the massive spaceplane watching huge cranes and scores of workers maneuver supplies into the cargo
bay. Ann’s first glimpse of America had been so striking that, for a moment, she’d forgotten the reason for their voyage, forgotten the pain of knowing that Jason would not be joining her. “She’s beautiful. Really beautiful,” she had said when they’d climbed on top of the observation arch for the first time.

  Schultz had first taken her on a walk-around inspection of the huge space vehicle. Unlike the husky, boxlike STS space shuttles, America was a sleek, rather ominous-looking craft. It was twice as large as the shuttles, closely resembling an oversized version of the Mach Three- plus U.S. Air Force SR-71 Blackbird military reconnaissance plane (the fastest aircraft in the world until America had come along), with its pointed hawknose bow sweeping gracefully out toward its broad, flat fuselage and impossibly thin edges.

  The craft was built primarily of an exotic metal called rhenium, which was stronger and lighter than titanium and more heat resistant than reinforced carbon-carbon. The cockpit, crew cabin and cargo bay rose out of the top of the smooth black-and-gray rhenium body in a graceful hump, blending smoothly into the broad, flat tail. The sides of the fuselage flared out into short, thin wings that, a few minutes after launch, would swing into the body when their lift was no longer needed. Two short, rounded vertical stabilizers jutted out of the top of the fuselage near the tail, pointing in toward the spine. But most impressive about America was her three large engines: long, boxy devices slung under the fuselage with rows of dividers and chambers throughout. Ann had walked around to the front part of the engine and, out of habit and curiosity, looked into the engine inlet. To her surprise she could see right through the engines. She asked the obvious question:

  “Where the hell are the engines?”

  “Those are the engines,” Marty explained, welcoming the chance to lecture her on something he knew a good deal about. She understood and kept quiet. “Those are the scramjet engines—supersonic ramjets. Instead of using fan blades to compress air like ordinary aircraft jet engines, the scramjet uses what’s called a Venturi—the internal shape of the engine itself—to compress air for ignition. The underside of the fuselage is an integral part of the engine, slowing and cooling the air before it enters the Venturi.

  “A conventional turbofan or turboramjet engine is limited to around Mach three-point-five; it just can’t suck more air. A simple ramjet engine is far more fuel efficient and can go as fast as Mach five or six—a lot of early military antiaircraft missiles were rocket-boosted ramjets. Ramjets are limited by the metals used in their construction, which bum up or disintegrate at high speeds. But a scramjet is designed to use its hydrogen fuel as well as its composite construction to cool the inlets. That helps the internal parts withstand the hypersonic speeds over Mach five.

  “Once the heat and disintegration problems were solved we were ready to race. There theoretically is no upper limit to a scramjet’s speed, but Mach twenty-five is enough for our purposes: that’s orbital speed.” Marty pointed to the rail rack below the space planes. “Since a scramjet engine can’t suck in air by itself, the spaceplane is shot down this track on a rocket sled to get enough air going through the engine for ignition. At about two hundred miles an hour the Venturi in the scramjets begin to work, and America lifts herself off the sled.”

  “But how do the engines work in space?” Ann asked. “There’s no air up there.”

  “These engines are hybrids: they’re true scramjets in the atmosphere but they convert to liquid-fueled rocket engines once there’s no more air passing through the engine. America's primary fuel is hydrogen, with oxygen to bum it. As you know, oxygen is supplied in the atmosphere at lower altitudes. As America climbs and the air thins out, the front of the scramjet engine gradually louvers closed and oxygen is fed gradually into the engine from the ship’s fuel tanks as needed. The scramjet becomes a true rocket engine at about seventy miles altitude. The spaceplane is really a big fuel tank: everything except the crew cabin, cargo bay and avionics bay is fuel storage.

  “On return it’s just the opposite: hydrogen and oxygen fuel are mixed in the engines until there’s enough oxygen flowing through the Venturi from the atmosphere to sustain ignition. The scramjets can be used almost all the way to landing, so America can land at almost any long runway. Los Angeles International and San Francisco International are our designated alternate landing sites, but if necessary we can fly all the way across the country in one hour to find a more suitable one.”

  As Marty talked Ann couldn’t help thinking about Saint-Michael. He had not been with her these past two days while she trained for hypersonic spaceplane duty at the Space Command HTS flight simulator at Little Rock, then went to Southern California for the launch. Although he didn’t say so, she guessed that after seeing her off in Colorado Springs he’d flown to Washington to appeal the ruling that had grounded him. She doubted, though, that he’d be able to convince the Joint Chiefs to reactivate the station, and as each new hour passed and she failed to hear from him, the possibility of his getting his way seemed less likely.

  She looked up to see America's cargo bay doors fully open, the silver radiator lining reflecting the blaze of hundreds of spotlights surrounding the craft. Even though the spaceplane was twice as large as her older, less sophisticated cousins, her cargo bay was the same small size. Indeed, dwarfed by the sheer size of the spaceplane, the cargo bay seemed to have been installed as an afterthought. One glance at its payload, though, brought the mission’s grim reality into sharp focus.

  Most of the cargo bay was occupied by the two PAMs, payload assist modules—large liquid-fueled rocket engines with remote-controlled guidance units and a mounting adapter. It would be Ann’s job, with help from Marty Schultz, to attach the Skybolt laser module to the PAM, align it pointing away from earth and activate it. Using steering signals from Falcon Mission Control on earth relayed through the NASA TDRS satellite relay system, the PAM would boost the laser module into a six-hundred-mile storage orbit, giving Space Command another few months to assemble a shuttle sortie to retrieve the modules. Even though America's cargo bay was the same size as a shuttle’s, the spaceplane was not designed to bring large objects like Skybolt back from space. A second PAM was being carried as a spare or, if the first was successful and if there was time, to boost Armstrong Space Station’s command module itself into a storage orbit.

  A huge crane was lowering a large cylindrical object, eight feet in diameter and ten feet long, into the forward part of the cargo bay. For some reason its stark simplicity made it even more painful to look at. This was a spacebome crypt, a huge coffin, the device that would be used to bring back the bodies of the crew of Armstrong space station and the space shuttle Enterprise.

  Ann looked at it, then turned away. “It looks like an old fuel tank,” she said to Marty.

  “It is,” he said. “The kind brought up on shuttle flights to refuel satellites. It’s been heavily insulated to protect the...” he paused, swallowed hard, “the crew during reentry. The cargo bay can get as high as a thousand degrees Fahrenheit during reentry.”

  She touched him lightly on the shoulder, “I don’t like what we’re doing here,” she said. “We’re being pushed around by the Russians, even told when and how to claim our own dead. Damn, I really wish Jason. .. General Saint-Michael were going with us. Somehow right up until now I thought he’d manage it....” (As, she thought, he’d managed to make love to her after a sickness that would have kept most men in a hospital for weeks....)

  The American and Soviet carrier battle groups were still separated by over two thousand miles of ocean, but even one-eighth of a world apart they had already started the first few tentative steps toward a conflict both knew was all but inevitable.

  The Nimitz carrier group had moved out into the Arabian Sea to allow its escort ships room to spread out more and maneuver at higher speeds. The group had been augmented by three frigates, two cruisers and two armed reserve supply ships from Diego Garcia, the tiny island naval base south of India. It was still enforcing a stric
t blockade of Soviet-bloc ships trying to enter the Persian Gulf, which prevented the weakened Brezhnev from refueling from Iran, and airlifted fuel and supplies were not sufficient to allow the Soviet carrier battle group to operate at peak efficiency.

  The Americans had sent several flights of B-52 bombers with F-15 fighter escorts from Diego Garcia to shadow and test the response pattern of the huge Arkhangel carrier group, which had just crossed the Eight Degree Channel west of Sri Lanka and was now in the Indian Ocean. The B-52s, the assault aircraft of choice because of their fuel capacity, were armed with twenty-four Harpoon medium- range antiship missiles apiece, making them formidable threats against the carrier fleet.

  But the Arkhangel was not about to let the B-52s anywhere near the fleet. The Soviets first engaged the B-52s as far as three hundred miles away from the carrier, using their Sukhoi-27 Flanker carrier-based fighters in seemingly never-ending streams. The Soviets knew that at high altitude the B-52s’ improved Harpoon missiles had a range of one hundred miles; they simply doubled that figure and set up a stiff air cordon. The Su-27s were docile at three hundred miles, shadows at two hundred and fifty miles and aggressive in warning off the B-52s and their escorts at two hundred twenty miles. Warning shots were fired at two hundred miles, with more emphatic verbal warnings given.

  The F-15s were at a huge disadvantage. They had to leave their vulnerable KC-135R and KC-10C aerial refueling tankers far behind, out of range of the Su-27s, so their combat range was severely limited. The B-52s could count on enough fighter protection only to break through the first wave of Su-27s from the Arkhangel; then they were on their own for the last dangerous one hundred miles to their launch points.

  The B-52s obeyed the very last verbal warnings received and turned around right at the two-hundred-mile point. Even so, they were able to accomplish their primary mission, which was to collect valuable data on the shipbome tracking and acquisition radars that had been sweeping them, as well as radar data from the Su-27s that had pursued them. But the scraps of information the B-52s collected did not alter the basic fact: it was going to be a nightmare, if not an impossibility, trying to get close to the Soviet fleet.