Manna

by Lee Correy

  “You’ll be aboard.”

  “Who does the manifest say I’m supposed to be?”

  “Co-pilot with oversleep. You will be assigned instead. Is all arranged.”

  “By twelve-hundred hours, they’ll be looking for me, Omer, and somebody on the pad will recognize me.”

  “You want to put on my mustache maybe? Sandy, I have many friends at Vamori-Free. And people there do not like the idea of stopping freedom of space. The League of Free Traders has members other than space pilots.”

  “Landlimo people?”

  “Da! What does company name mean? Frontier is free and must stay free! What else we going to fight for?” The Mad Russian Space Jockey checked the nav computer. “In two minutes, bounce up to a thousand meters and get approach clearance to Area Seven-seven.”

  The launch area was identical to Area Seven-three but there was something different about the Toreva Class packet on the catapult. I mentioned it to Omer as we parked the aerodyne and sauntered across the pad, acting as couth as any pair of space jocks.

  “Has been refitted with ‘tracking enhancement’ equipment. It is actually partial hell-beam hardening,” Omer said quietly.

  “Who instigated that?” I wanted to know.

  “Ali.”

  Maybe all Commonwealth people weren’t such polite non-fighters after all.

  But when we got in the flight deck of the Tomahok, Omer told me, “Sandy, take the left seat. Fly it. I run nav and counter-measures.”

  “Is it that touchy out there now?”

  “Da. Engagement zones are expanded,” Omer explained. “United States, Europa, Bahia, all announce new requirements five days ago.”

  “Sounds like transition-to-war conditions.”

  “Maybe. Commonwealth ships have had some problems. Somebody soon maybe make a “mistake” with a Commonwealth ship,” Omer pointed out. “Or we get clearance that is wrong and takes us into engagement zone. So I got from Kevin Graham new data showing positions of all orbiting objects and load into computer. I will make sure clearance and trajectory do not lead us into danger.”

  Twenty minutes before noon, clearance came over the up-link. Omer checked it and gave me a thumbs-up. I accepted it. We made a straightforward departure with the catapult slinging the Tomahok into the air at a one-gee goose. I climbed out according to flight plan and watched while the air-breathers transitioned to scram-jet mode and finally lipped-over when the mains ignited at 60 kilometers. I wasn’t particularly looking for anything to happen at that point because we were still in international airspace over the Indian Ocean.

  The Tomahok was handed-off from Madras Center to LEO Orient Center as we ascended through a hundred kilometers. I expected something to happen then. It did.

  “Tomahok, this is LEO Orient Center. Amended clearance.”

  It came on the up-link. Omer shook his head. “Bojemoi!” he exploded. “Reject it!”

  “LEO Orient Center, this is Tomahok. Negative the amended clearance, sir.”

  “Tomahok, what’s your reason for refusal?”

  “What’s your reason for issuing this amended clearance, sir?”

  “AmSpace Command request through LEO Canambah Center.”

  “The amended clearance takes us into the engagement zone of Gran Bahia estacao baixo doze.”

  “Tomahok, stand by…Tomahok, amended clearance: De-orbit for Woomera landing. We can’t get you through.”

  I knew what to do, and I let it all hang out. “LEO Orient Center, Tomahok. Negative the amended clearance. We are initiating no-clearance flight under I-A-R Regulation ninety-one-point-eight. We’ll take her up to Ell-Five as filed under our responsibility to detect and avoid.”

  Omer reached over and clapped me on the right shoulder.

  There must have been consternation in LEO Orient Center because it took several seconds for the traffic coordinator to acknowledge. “Uh, Tomahok, Center, roger! Service is terminated. Proceed on your own responsibility. Retain your current beacon code.”

  I acknowledged and told Omer, “Get ready to thread the needle, Russkie! Let’s see if we’re good enough to make Ell-Five before somebody burns us with a hell-beamer!”

  Chapter 14

  Through LEO’s Jaws and the Ball of Yarn

  There I was, flat on my back at 30,000 meters, nothing between me and the ground but a thin regulation.

  I’d invoked a seldom-used International Aerospace Regulation that harked back to Earth’s oceans where a ship captain was an absolute monarch responsible for himself, his ship, and everything in it. It had been carried into the air by a rule that made the “pilot-in-command” solely responsible for the safety and operation of his aircraft and everything in it, regardless of what traffic coordinators on the ground told him.

  In effect, I’d told the space traffic people I’d fly without their help. Avoiding an engagement zone isn’t difficult if you know where it is. Space is mostly empty.

  The various STC Centers would continue tracking our beacon to keep other spacecraft clear of us. Military trackers would do the same in case we broached their engagement zones, which would mean Trouble for the Tomahok.

  I’d waived clearance while still under ascent thrust on our original trajectory to a 200-kilometer parking orbit. Our delta-vee margin was excellent even though the Tomahok was running with a full cargo bay of—would you believe it?—cotton underwear.

  Clothing wears out, and we hadn’t established any clothing industry in space yet.

  Spinning, weaving, dyeing, and tailoring are ancient technologies, but they were among the last to be adapted to the weightlessness of space. As for cotton, one of the Commonwealth’s primary products, nobody has yet developed an artificial fiber quite as comfortable.

  We had a lot of leeway in changing our flight path because the Tomahok had “bulked-out” before she “grossed-out”—the hold was filled long before maximum weightwas attained.

  “Russkie, I hope the League data’s good,” I told Omer. “Display our current flight path and the projected positions and engagement zones of other sky junk.”

  “Blinking blips aren’t in League data,” Omer reported. The Kazakh became laconic when he was under pressure, probably because he was thinking in Russian and mentally translating into aerospace English with adrenalin pumping.

  I studied the display. A blinking blip indicated a polar orbiting satellite. In parking orbit, we’d broach its engagement zone.

  “There’s our problem,” I pointed out. “AmSpace Command recon bird. That’s why the amended clearance. We’ll burn out of parking orbit to miss him. What are the options?”

  Omer punched the keypad. A series of trajectories came on the display. “Take high delta-vee option. It will be obvious we’re avoiding the reconsat.”

  “But we may run into trouble with this one, Omer,” I said, indicating another target with my finger. “It’s displaying no code. What is it?”

  Omer queried the computer. “Not in League data. Unknown.”

  “It’s got to be registered! I’ll query Center for identification.”

  “Let it be for now. We handle when time comes,” the Mad Russian Space Jockey suggested. “We take problems one at a time. Sandy, get us in parking orbit and watch engagement zones. I work on vector for transfer orbit to Ell-Five.”

  The mains shut down on schedule while I was punching up several special frequencies on the commscanner. “Omer, I’m going to monitor some Aerospace Force freqs in addition to unicom. Know any Kosmonautika frequencies?”

  “Da, but they are special side-banded and will sound ducky.”

  Without special receivers, suppressed-carrier sideband transmissions sounded like a duck quacking, but I’d learned to make sense of them. Anyone who flew military aerospace ships knew how because the adjustments on the receivers were so critical for proper reception that almost half the transmissions were ducky.

  Our burn out of parking orbit came as re-programmed. While we were under thrust, we g
ot a sensor alarm. “Targeting lidar!” I snapped. “Aerospace Force has seen us closing on the reconsat.”

  “We go laser-hard,” Omer said, reaching for the switch.

  “Negative!” I snapped. “They’ll see it, interpret it as a countermeasure, and try to burn us.” I indicated another target on the display. “That’s annotated as an unspecified military satellite; it’s a ten megawatt hell-beamer.”

  “Hokay, so we do a little tsig-tsag! Give me controls!”

  I did and continued to check displayed targets. Omer called out his actions. “Tsang plus-x ten meters per sec.”

  I got a surface temperature warning signal. “Warning shot without a call. That’s not SOP!” The Aerospace Force tapped the data stream from the world STC net and they knewwe were the unarmed Tomahok out of Vamori-Free.

  “Maybe you got wrong freq. We did not broach engagement zone of reconsat, and now they see us burn into new trajectory. So we are out of hard place under rock for now. You fly now.”

  Low earth orbit zone is tricky to work in. Velocities and closing rates are high. There isn’t much time to detect, track, make decisions, and maneuver. It’s full of sensitive earth-oriented reconsats that are automated and passive. They can’t defend themselves or maneuver. Even though such unmanned sky-apies are considered to be expendable scouts, my former colleagues were sensitive about them. Everyone knew where everyone else’s were, and nobody bothered them for fear of retaliation. Fortunately, sensitive satellites advertised themselves with “no trespassing” signals.

  Hell-beamers were another matter. They were unmanned with auto defenses. Unless they spotted the proper beacon password—which we didn’t have—they’d shoot at anything that broached their engagement zones. We had to stay clear of those. We’d been lucky once.

  Some that looked like hell-beamers weren’t; they were decoys or legitimate R&D space telescopes. The sensor signatures were the same. If you wanted to find out if one was indeed a hell-beamer, you had to make a hands-on inspection which was very risky not only because of the auto-defenses but also because some of them were booby-trapped.

  Nobody liked the hell-beamers, especially the League of Free Traders. But the low-powered ones in LEO were no threat to people on the ground. And nobody had been burned in space by them, so they were tolerated as a necessary evil.

  I didn’t like them right then.

  Omer pointed to a moving target on the display. “Soviet Black Tiger deep space fighter.”

  The Soviet pilot was maintaining a low closure rate and a respectable range.

  “He’s watching us. But so are these unmanned Soviet facilities,” Omer continued.

  “Russians do not trust equipment or people by themselves. Must always have dual data from machines and from people. If people data not match equipment data, people data discarded in favor of equipment data. Russians are strange.”

  “What do you think he’s up to, Omer? We’ve got no beef with the Socialist Hegemony.”

  Except the competing Soviet powersat proposal to China…

  Omer shrugged. “I am Kazakh. I cannot always read crazy Russian mind.”

  One would think that an aerospace “defense” team could act on receipt of danger data.

  But it couldn’t. It had to get approval from a general or political leader. The principle of “dual phenomenology” ruled. Like their Soviet counterparts sitting under Smolensk and Magnitorgorsk, the Americans under Cheyenne Mountain and Tincup required that two independent systems detect a situation. The weapons were too powerful to entrust to anything less.

  I’d been cashiered because I’d made a flagrant violation of that policy and because “he’s done it once so he’s capable of doing it again if he stays in.”

  That operational philosophy saved our butts as we threaded our uncleared way throughthe maze of space weapons systems.

  There was silence on the military freqs. Either all of the five military space powers were quietly observing us from their space watch centers or we’d selected now-unused channels. I suspected both.

  If we didn’t provoke them, they’d probably do nothing.

  “How about that Black Tiger, Omer?”

  “Changed orbit plane with us.”

  “New target?” I asked, indicating a blip.

  Omer shrugged. “Nyet. Same no-code unidentified as before.”

  “What and who is it?”

  “Not Soviet. All Kosmonautika ships use beacon codes. Soviets always follow rules to letter, get others to do dirty work for them.”

  “Not American, either. The Aerospace Force follows the rules, too.”

  “I watch it.”

  “You do that. Where’s the data for the matching burn at L-5?”

  Think of Earth as being at the bottom of a funnel-shaped well whose walls become less steep as you climb away from Earth.

  Paint the walls of the funnel in zones of different colors to represent the various space traffic control center jurisdictions. The ones nearest Earth at the bottom of the funnel are controlled from national centers that are, you hope, in communication with one another and swapping data. The ones further out are watched by seven other centers located in GEO.

  And the ones in the nearly-flat upper part of the funnel are four in number centered on L-4, the Moon, L-5, and a huge “uncontrolled sector” stretching around lunar orbit from 30-degrees ahead of L-4 to 30-degrees behind L-5 where there wasn’t anything then.

  Now spin the funnel so the bottom part representing a distance up to 50,000 kilometers goes around once in 24 hours. Spin the top part from 50,000 kilometers altitude out to a half-million kilometers at the lunar rate of 29.5 days.

  Located on the walls of this madly turning multi-colored funnel are marbles spinning around its surface fast enough so they don’t fall down the funnel. Some of them are deadly marbles; come close and you’ll burn. Others are big and fragile, but massive enough to destroy your ship if you hit one. Still others are ships like your own, plying space for fun, profit, or military purposes. An unknown number of the last are capable of whanging you with various and sundry weapons.

  Your mission: without coming afoul of any of this, get to the flat tableland on top, then locate and dock to a group of fly-specks called L-5.

  Try it on your computer. Good luck.

  The Black Tiger had a respectable range but sidled closer at a very low rate. Omer didn’t lay radar or lidar on him for more than two pulses in sequence over a period of a minute. He said the Black Tiger sensors had difficulty discriminating those dual-pulseranging blips from the howling storm of radar and lidar pulses bouncing around the Earth-Moon system.

  The unknown target also stuck with us.

  “Tomahok, this is Landlimo Prime Base. Anybody home?” the comm speaker barked.

  I recognized the voice. “Landlimo Prime, this is Tomahok. Hi, Vaivan!”

  “You’re supposed to be in the hospital, Sandy. What are you doing up there?”

  “Helping Omer fly the unfriendly skies of Earth.”

  “He doesn’t need you. He had another co-pilot assigned for this flight.”

  “He said his co-pilot overslept or something.”

  “The co-pilot was found drugged in the RON shack.”

  “I don’t know anything about it, Vaivan. But Omer really needs me. If I didn’t know what and where the military stuff is out here, you’d have lost a ship. Thank me for that some day.”

  “What’s going on, Sandy? Woomera Center reported you cancelled your clearance.”

  “Raise hell with Space Traffic Control for clearing us into the engagement zone of an American reconsat. And while you’re at it, complain that the United States Aerospace Force shot at one of your ships.”

  “Sandy, you and Omer are going to have to answer some questions. We’ve got rules and procedures…”

  “You hire two space jockeys, you think you get pussycats or tigers?” Omer broke in.

  “The General tells me if I think like slave I be treated
like slave. If you want no-think order takers, hire real Russians!”

  “Just get to Ell-Five, Sandy.” She wasn’t giving an order; she was expressing a wish.

  I told her I would but that we were getting busy and had to cut the chatter.

  We’d run a gauntlet of low-orbit facilities and were coming up on geosynchronous orbit.

  Although we were several degrees above equatorial GEO where most of the civilian facilities were, we had to get through the web of military satellites in inclined geosynchronous orbit, weaving paths around the planet like a ball of yarn.

  Omer asked the computer to enhance the very weak returns from these stealthed facilities. We were going to come close to some Japanese and European targets, but not within their engagement zones unless they’d changed them and we didn’t know it.

  That possibility didn’t bother me as much as the Soviet Black Tiger still nibbling at our track. Unlike a surface-to-space Black Bear, a Black Tiger had far more delta-vee than the Tomahok. He could make his move—whatever that might be—with a decreasing delta-vee requirement as we both climbed up the shallowing walls of the gravity well.

  I didn’t know his motive, but he made his move as we neared GEO and the ball of yarn.

  “He think we too busy getting through to watch him too,” Omer explained as we saw him make a delta-vee burn.”Comrade Astrabadi, got any idea of his intentions?”

  “Maybe he will have an accident with us.”

  “Our unidentified target has done something, too,” I said, pointing to the display.

  Omer studied it for a moment, then announced, “He will intercept the Black Tiger soon. A Black Tiger is sensor-blind in aft hemisphere except for attack warning radar. Unidentified is now operating with radar stealth. We see him only on lidar.”

  “Watch them. Report changes. I’ve got my hands full going through the ball of yarn,” I told him.

  But it happened before we got there.

  The unidentified overhauled the Black Tiger. Suddenly, the Soviet space fighter zanged sideways as if engaged in evasive maneuvering but kept going. The computer erased the old projection of the Black Tiger track on the display and flashed a newly projected track into the lunar sector of high Earth orbit beyond GEO…if the Black Tiger made it unscathed through the ball of yarn and the engagement zones there.