“Relax.” He breathed deeply, slowly. Plenty of time later to be afraid.
She could never watch that huge damned thing moving along the desert floor without feeling her lungs were going to explode. She couldn’t help it. Some silly thing in the back of her mind told her that if she held her breath through the long, pounding run on the desert she would be able to help the giant claw its way into the air. Whatever the cause, she was never able to remind herself to breathe. She waited until the thunder rolled slowly down the long desert strip; no movement yet. The giant sat poised, black strength and fury, the engines howling, throwing back swirling plumes of kerosene smoke that built into a great cloud rolling over hard and dusty sand. Then came that bare shift in sound, the signal that brakes had been released and metal was dragging itself ponderously forward. From this distance she could not see the tiny silver dart beneath the wing, had no view of the terrible little machine her lover was strapped and sealed into. But at such moments, as the giant rushed closer and closer, she held her breath, sucking it deeply into her lungs, her nails biting into her palms. This time, only one palm would show the signs of her inner strain. Unknowing, her other hand holding the arm of Dr. Wells, she would make him the victim of her gouging nails.
Jan Richards watched the monster rush toward them. She saw the great wings flexing, the upward bend of metal that told of lift changing the forces on the wing. She knew the signs, had watched this same scene many times before, but no matter how many times, it was always inner torment, with her breath held until she needed desperately to breathe, and did so explosively, her heart pounding. The takeoffs were almost the worst; only the landings were worse. The seconds dragged on and on, and the great machine seemed to take forever in its sluggish early motion. But now it had speed, and she knew enough of the world of flight to know that at such times speed was everything. It was control and lift, it was life, and she wished speed—Godspeed!—to the great black shape, and then it was almost on them, malevolent in its suddenly swooping approach. Then it was alongside, directly before them, and she saw two things at the same moment, the silver shape of the tiny aerospace machine, with a glimpse of the pressure helmet within—she saw that and she saw the nose wheel of the B-52 rise away from the desert, and the breath rushed out of her. The nose rotated higher, and then daylight showed between the clumsy main gear and the desert floor. Now the thunder crashed back against them, shaking their bodies, and she turned to bury her head in Dr. Wells’s shoulder as the stink of kerosene washed over them. When she looked up again the black cloud stretched high into the bright desert air, a winged destroyer at its head. Two black minnows flashed into view, cracking the morning wide with their own thunder. The chase planes on their way to ride tight formation with Steve Austin until he would outstrip them and arrow away from the planet itself.
“Checklist complete. Over.”
Austin nodded to himself within the helmet. “Okay,” he said. “Stand by, Roadrunner. Cleaning up the office.”
“Roger.”
Austin stuffed the checklist into its enclosure by his right arm, pressed on the velcro seal. One last, careful look around the office. Everything in the cockpit was clean. Just about that time.
“Cobra to Roadrunner,” he called the drop officer in the bomber. “Ready for final count.”
“Right, Steve. Three minutes coming up. Please call off your tank pressures and qualify valves armed.”
They went through the final predrop checklist quickly. As they moved down into the last sixty seconds the personal tones faded away. Crisp, no-nonsense exchanges now, broken by a personal touch only when the man in the wicked little M3F5 led the way.
“Cobra,” they called Steve Austin. “On my mark, one minute.” A pause for five seconds, then: “Mark! Sixty seconds and counting.”
“Roger, Roadrunner.” Steve Austin flicked his eyes over the gauges, glanced again, swiftly but steadily, at every control and lever and dial. He didn’t bother to glance to his sides to check the position of Chase One and Two. The big, black SR-71 jets would be sitting well to each side, slightly higher and behind the B-52; the moment he dropped away and lit up, they’d be on him like faithful sharks. Until he left them behind.
“Thirty seconds.”
“Okay,” he said. The bright-orange hand swept around the timer. At ten seconds the drop officer called it out. At the count of zero he would—
“Drop!”
“Right on the money,” Austin said easily, feeling the old gut-sinking feeling as he went from solid gravity to that momentary free fall of dropping away from the giant ship above him. There was a brief glance at the earth nine miles below, a scan of mountains flattened out by height; the scratch-pen pattern of roads and a quilt of irrigated farmland. Only the reassuring glance to orient himself. The M3F5 dropped away at angles forty-five. He’d allow himself only a drop of one mile. By then he had to have everything on the stove. He hit the final pressure switch with his left hand, moved it to the throttle. Big bastard of an engine back there. Same design they had in the lunar module. Reliable and gutsy. He moved the throttle forward into ignition phase. It came instantly. The invisible hand threw him back against the seat. He nodded in approval, pulled back on the stick just slightly. No need to lose more altitude. Good; he’d dropped only three thousand feet so far. The stick came back some more as the throttle moved inexorably forward under his left hand. Then he had full power and the thunder howled freely behind him, riding a long flame studded with diamond shock waves. He arrowed the nose higher and higher, taking up a slant of seventy degrees, booming up and out of atmosphere, and he knew everything was in the slot and behaving when he heard the sounds of his own breathing in his helmet. Other sound was far behind him now; he felt the vibrations of controlled thunder. And he’d lost the sky. Vanished; gone. Snap your fingers; just like that. No more blue. Not even dark purple. Black. The black of space. No stars yet; hell, he was still sunblinded. There was only that velvety, impossible black.
“Cobra, this is Tracker.”
“Roger, Tracker,” he said easily.
“You’re right on the money, Cobra. Smack on.”
“Okay.”
He was too busy for chatter. Not yet. He still could see only sky. Or what had been sky. He crashed upward into blackness. A moment for a glance to his left. His eyes drank in the sharply curving horizon. God; that sight! He forced himself back to the instruments. No time for sightseeing here.
At 280,000 feet he eased the nose down, began coming back on power, brought her to minimum thrust. Control with the small rocket ports in the tail section and the bow; spatters of energy to move in vacuum. That, and the big engine on its gimbals. Just enough to change the flight path, as he began now, a clumsy but effective turn, a wide sweep above and almost beyond the planet, practicing what other men would soon be doing when they flew the big Orbiters of the shuttle program back from beyond the edge of space.
The fuel alarm light spattered red at his eyes. Right on time. Quickly he eased the throttle back full; shut her down evenly before she could sputter. The latter could tumble him up here like an insane cartwheel, so precariously fine was his balance. He was prepared for anything. No fun in being a skateboard on sheer ice going out of control. He tensed as a great hollow bang behind him signified clean shutdown. Good; he hit the nitrogen-pressure switch to flood the tanks and dump the volatile fuel through the lines. He was flying now strictly on centrifugal force. He could modify his attitude but it didn’t mean a thing if he flew sideways or backwards. Until he hit air, that is. Then he had to be in exact position—the nose up, just so; the silver wedge positioned and balanced in such a way the nose and belly would act as a heat shield to slough off the fiery touch of friction.
But for a few moments now, a precious interlude in the midst of flight-plan demands, this mission was for him. He topped the great parabolic arc at 328,000 feet, more than sixty miles high, and as he brought the nose down steeply to command the world before him, the horizon
curved sharply away on either side to remind him he was back home where he belonged. At the edge of the world and far beyond that. He was light-adjusted now and the brighter stars invited him. Familiar, too; stars by which they had navigated precisely to another world a quarter of a million miles distant. Low over the horizon, a sliver of promising crescent, he saw the edge of the silent rocky globe he had once walked on. The awe returned to him, seeped through his bones and brought the taut feeling. The cosmos itself . . .
Something tugged at metal outside.
“Christ!” That damn sightseeing again. It was a drug from which he had to tear himself free. He could get in trouble quickly up here; the silver wedge was feeling the first wisps of atmosphere, heating up now. The lights were on. Time for a brief check with the ground before he’d be in the communications blanket, the silver wedge surrounded with a fiery sheath of stripped atoms.
“Cobra to Tracker. Over.”
They were sitting on the radio. “Roger, Cobra. Go ahead.”
“Confirm start of reentry. Got the heat light on, and the zero-zero-five-g light is also on.”
“Roger, Cobra. We confirm start of reentry.”
He permitted himself the small luxury. “I’m bringing this mother home.”
Regrettably, the horizon began to flatten.
CHAPTER 2
He had to imagine the silver wedge as a machine slicing its way from orbit back into the atmosphere. That was the whole idea of the mission, to test the equipment and the procedures for the big Orbiters that would be flying at the close of the decade. He lacked the speed of an orbiting ship, but everything else was phased into his flight. Enough to make it an acid test, anyway. Which is why NASA wanted an experienced astronaut for the flight program. You can’t beat the attitude of the man who’s been there, and Steve Austin had come back into the atmosphere once with a speed of seven miles a second.
But slamming back into air with the Apollo took less out of you than handling, this tricky little bastard. In Apollo you flew a ballistic entry with some lift to control where you’d screw your way down through atmosphere before going to the parachutes. The lifting bodies had to handle both assignments. Function as a spacecraft out of atmosphere, but function as an aircraft when the air became dense and nasty with decreasing height. It called for more than simply surviving reentry. He had to fly the thing down, work his way through great descending curves, pick an airfield and then grease the mother back onto unyielding ground.
A neat trick to carry off, but if it worked, all the way from out there in vacuum, it meant the future spaceships wouldn’t splash down into an ocean, they wouldn’t need huge recovery forces, and they could pick home plate. Any runway a few miles long would do. In fact, they were really pushing him against the wall with the M3F5; the wedge would land a good fifty miles an hour faster than the big ships being prepared for orbital operations.
He used the small control rockets to bring up the nose, measuring every inch of his attitude against the lighted globe on the panel before him. Sharp lines against the golden sphere told him degrees of attitude above or below the horizon, and indicator lights helped him keep the nose pointed on a line directly along that of his flight path. Coming in with a sideways crab could demolish the ship and incinerate it with unexpected friction. That sort of nonsense could ruin your whole day.
The glow came before he expected to see the heat ripping away from the ship. At first it was a bare hint of pink, deepening swiftly to orange and then to fiery, bloody red that left nothing to the imagination. Shock waves pounded through the metal by his feet, and Austin laughed silently as he felt his toes curling within the pressure boots. As if that instinctive, helpless human gesture would alleviate two thousand degrees of hell should the epoxy resin of the shield fail anywhere! The heat would come through the ship like a bazooka shell and with all the explosive results of an actual blast. But the heat shield held, as Austin expected it to do, and the automatics held the attitude right where it belonged. The ship rocked and sometimes it shivered to hammering blows, and if he hadn’t once seen pieces and chunks of heat shield streaking past the window of Apollo, he would have had the living hell scared out of him. He was tense enough; he would never have claimed he wasn’t always afraid, but experience with Apollo and years of test flying managed to keep the pucker factor down to a level he could live with.
Then he was through the heat pulse. He breathed a sigh of relief, for from this moment he was master. He cut the automatics and went back to manual control; now the stick in his right hand and the pedals beneath his boots worked familiar flight controls, even if he lacked even a smidgin of power. He kept the nose down, the silver craft plunging earthward with supersonic speed. A hell of a ride; not an ounce of thrust and he was still well above the Mach, the machine honey smooth to his touch. It might not be the same when he went transsonic. Sometimes the plunge back through line center, from supersonic down through the transition range, went smoothly, Sometimes it didn’t.
Like right now. The wedge slid abruptly, a crazy yawing motion that came out of nowhere. No wings, really, to lock her steady with lift, to bring a wing up or down. No ailerons out there with which to play instinctively. Just that triple-damned bathtub shape and the three flaring fins, and somewhere, somehow, a shock wave streaming off the bathtub shape hammered against one of those fins, or locked its movable surface in a steel vise, and she threw her nose to one side, a sickening yaw that caught even his swift reflexes by surprise.
What had been smooth as honey became a washboard increasing its violence with every second. He hoped the ship would stay glued together until he dropped down to subsonic speed, but for the moment it was touch and go. Behind him he heard the three flaring fins buffeting, the forces acting upon them sending a thrumming sound through metal, a discordance picked up by the entire metal shape. The harmonics went through metal and through his seat and grated on his teeth. He couldn’t see the fins but he knew they were twisting and flexing, and he thought of the ejection seat that could punch him away from this suddenly savage little beast. He pushed that from his mind; he brought his ships home unless they shredded on him in the air. He tried to fight the controls but this was no longer an airplane; he was a prisoner in a rounded metal coffin giving explosive birth to shock waves that both astounded and frightened him. From the curving prow, bands of gray, gleaming light streamed stiffly back, a ghostly pattern streaking to each side. Curving around the nose, reaching up and back, were broader bands flowing out and intersecting those from the sides in a ghostly, flickering procession. They were knife-sharp, crystalline, weird, impossible.
They were terrifying.
He knew that the shock-wave vise hammering the little machine could dissipate, or the waves might flow together and—No more time to think. She snapped over on her side, the horizon straight up and down before him, and he knew he’d lost her. She was berserk, a demon running wild. Despite the harness strapping him in he felt the forces hurling liquids about within his body. The wedge spun nose over tail, the horizon cartwheeling insanely. She spun flatly, inverted. He was mashed to one side by the alternating g-forces as she stood on her nose and whirled. He felt like a rag doll, the pressure oscillating, hurling him to the edge of blackness from positive g, then exploding his brain in red as reverse acceleration gorged his brain and eyes with blood. He knew his blood sloshed back and forth, breaking small veins, distending his main system dangerously. Instinct kept his hands working the controls, instinct that had always brought him through before but was worthless at this moment. How long the hellish ride went on he couldn’t know. No sense of time. He realized seconds were racing by, time was building—and running away from him—because he was starting to hyperventilate. Pure oxygen in his system. Fighting the punishment, he was breathing in short, jerking gasps, flushing the carbon dioxide from his lungs, almost on the brink of passing out. A sudden savage blow, slamming his head to the side of the canopy. He lapsed into a gray world, hazy, fighting for coherency. He
was struggling to raise his right hand back to the stick when the silver craft broke free.
Subsonic. Shock waves behind him. He listened to his hoarse, gasping breathing. Habit, instinct, training—blind memory—moved his right arm and his legs. He brought her out of a careening dive, transformed a bulletlike plunge for the desert floor into a swooping, controlled curve. He studied the altimeter. Thirty-two thousand. He had room. Plenty of room, but where the hell was he? He couldn’t see that well yet. Spots went through his vision, through a red film hazing his eyes.
Then he heard the voice, insistent.
“Do you read, Cobra? Chase One calling Cobra. Do you read? Come in, Cobra, come in. Do you—”
He gasped out the reply. “Chase One, uh Cobra, ah, here. Read you. How—”
“Have you got control, Steve?”
“That . . . that’s affirmative, Chase. Better give me a . . . a fix. It’s been a hairy ride.”
“Steve, we’re about ten miles behind you, closing fast. Take up a heading of two six zero. Got it? Two six zero.”
Cyborg 01 - Cyborg Page 2