Starfire

by Dale Brown

  “As long as you don’t tell me you want to go up there again, sir.”

  “I think I’ve had my share of excitement for a lifetime,” the president said. “Would this make Brad the first teenager in space?”

  “Unless you don’t count the dogs and chimps that have already been sent up, yes,” Ann said. “I hear Brad’s been asking to go up on station for a while.” Her expression turned serious. “Initial thoughts, sir: risky. If the flight fails, the son of a very popular and high-value figure gets killed, and your space initiative might go out the window, like after Challenger and Columbia. Not good.”

  “But if it succeeds, it could be awesome, yes?”

  “Yes, it certainly could, sir,” Ann Page said.

  “Then let’s make it happen,” the president said. “We’ll send McLanahan and maybe a female member of his team up for the first use of the thing.” He shook his head. “I remember the first time Patrick brought Brad to the White House. He looked around and said, ‘Boy, Dad, you sure work in an old place.’ ” The president’s expression turned serious. “Speaking of Brad McLanahan . . .”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I didn’t tell you this, because I thought the fewer who knew the better, but back last spring Brad McLanahan found out, so I think you should too.”

  “Found out what?”

  Phoenix took a deep breath, then said, “Last year, right after the Chinese attack on Guam, a private counterintelligence group led by former president Martindale went out to Guam to collect information on the hacked utilities and to see if there was any other evidence of a Chinese intelligence presence on Guam.”

  “Scion Aviation,” Ann said. “I remember. What does that have to do with Brad McLanahan?”

  “One of Scion’s teams had Brad under surveillance after that break-in at Patrick McLanahan’s columbarium in Sacramento,” the president said. “They wanted to make sure that the same Russian agents that broke into the crypt wouldn’t target Brad. Turns out they did target him and actually attacked three times. Scion’s guys saved him.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Ann said, “but I’m still confused. Why is Scion Aviation International doing surveillance on Brad McLanahan? Isn’t that a job for the FBI? If he’s a target of a foreign direct-action team, he should be under full FBI counterespionage protection.”

  “It’s because of one of the members of Scion,” the president said. He looked directly into the vice president’s eyes and said, “Patrick McLanahan.”

  Ann’s only visible reaction was simply a few blinks. “That’s impossible, Ken,” she said in a toneless voice. “You got some bad information. Patrick died over China. You know that as well as I.”

  “No, he didn’t,” the president said. “Martindale found and revived him, but he was in bad shape. In order to keep him alive, they placed him in a Cybernetic Infantry Device, one of those big manned robots.” Ann’s face was beginning to transform into a mask of stunned disbelief. “He’s still alive, Ann. But he can’t live outside the robot. Unless they can heal him, he’ll be in there for the rest of his life.”

  Ann’s eyes widened and her mouth formed an astonished O. “I . . . I can’t believe it,” she breathed. “And he can operate the robot? He can move around, communicate, everything?”

  “He has some incredible abilities,” Phoenix said. “He operates sensors and all the robot’s capabilities, and can communicate with anyone in the world—I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s listening in on us right now. Patrick McLanahan and the robot is a one-man Army platoon—maybe an entire Army battalion and Air Force division combined.” Phoenix sighed and looked away. “But he can never leave the fucking machine. It’s as if he’s trapped in the Twilight Zone.”

  “Amazing. Just amazing,” Ann said. “And Martindale has got him doing operations with Scion?”

  “Skating on the very edge of the law, I’m sure, like he always did,” Phoenix said.

  “Ken, why did you tell me this?” Ann asked. “I might never have found out.”

  “I know you and Patrick are friends,” the president said. “But the main reason is that I feel bad that I didn’t let you in on it from the beginning. You’re my closest political adviser and my closest friend, except for my wife, Alexa. The whole stuff with Brad McLanahan reminded me of the mistake I made when I didn’t trust you with my decision to keep Patrick alive and not tell anyone. I wanted to correct that mistake.”

  “Well, thank you for that, Ken,” Ann said. She shook her head, still in a state of disbelief. “What a thing to keep bottled up. No one else knows except Brad? Not even his family?”

  “Just Brad and a few of Martindale’s guys,” Phoenix said.

  “Glad you got that off your chest, aren’t you, sir?”

  “You bet I am,” the president said. “Now, let’s get back to the other, unreal world: politics and elections. I want to really push the space initiative hard in the closing days of the campaign. I want to talk with teenagers in space, make lots of visits to, and give speeches in front of, hypersonic spaceplanes and rocket boosters, and help throw the switch on electricity fired from space. We may be down in the polls right now, Ann, but we’re going to pull this out—I can feel it!”

  SEVEN

  He is not worthy of the honeycomb. That shuns the hives because the bees have stings.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  REINHOLD AEROSPACE ENGINEERING BUILDING

  CAL POLY

  THE NEXT DAY

  “This is our mission control room, otherwise known as one of our electronics labs,” Brad McLanahan said. He was standing before a group of foreign journalists, bloggers, photographers, and their translators, giving for the umpteenth time a tour of the Starfire project at Cal Poly. With him were Jodie Cavendish, Kim Jung-bae, Casey Huggins, and Lane Eagan. The room was stuffed with a dozen laptop computers, control and communications gear, and network interface boxes with hundreds of feet of CAT5 cables snaking away into walls and under the climate-controlled floor. “It’s not as large or as nice as NASA mission control, but the functions are very similar: we monitor the major components of Starfire such as the microwave generator, nantenna and rectenna steering, power control, and beam control, among many others. Although the astronauts on board Armstrong Space Station have ultimate control, we can issue some commands from here—namely, we can pull the plug if something goes wrong.”

  “Are you collecting solar energy now, Mr. McLanahan?” one reporter asked.

  “We’ve been collecting and storing solar energy for about three weeks now,” Brad replied. “The solar-energy-collection-and-storage systems were the first to be attached to Armstrong Space Station.” He motioned to a large model of the station that the team had set up for the press. “These are the nantennas, or nanotube sunlight collectors, designed by Jodie Cavendish, assisted by Kim Jung-bae, whom we call Jerry around here. They are double-sided so they can collect sunlight directly from the sun or reflected off the Earth. Here on the truss are ten two-hundred-kilogram lithium-ion capacitors, each capable of storing three hundred kilowatts, designed by Jerry Kim. We’re not going to fill them up for this test, but you can see we have the capability of storing three megawatts of electricity on the station, just with this small experimental system.”

  “How much energy will you fire on this test?”

  “We’re planning on shooting a total of one-point-five megawatts,” Brad said. “The station will be in range of the rectenna for approximately three minutes, so you can see we’re going to send a lot of juice to Earth in a very short period of time.” He pointed to a large poster-sized photograph of a round object sitting in a desert landscape. “This is the rectenna, or receiving antenna, which will collect the maser energy, designed by Jodie Cavendish along with Casey Huggins,” he said. “It is two hundred meters in diameter, installed out on the White Sands Missile Test Range because it’s a large secure area that can be easily cleared of aircraft. As you can see in this photo, we only have the rectenna and
some pointing controls and data-monitoring equipment—we’re going to measure how much electricity is being received, but we’re not going to store or put any electricity into the grid on this first test. Lane Eagan here wrote the software and programmed the computers here on Earth and up in Armstrong to allow us the precision we need to hit that rather small target from two hundred to five hundred miles away.”

  “Why do the test in a large isolated area, Mr. McLanahan?” a reporter asked. “What would happen if the maser energy from the space station hit an aircraft or object on the ground, like a house or a person?”

  “It would be like putting a metal dish in a microwave oven,” Brad said. “The maser beam is mostly microwave energy, designed and built by Casey Huggins and Jerry Kim, but collimated with Armstrong’s free-electron laser subsystems to strengthen and help aim the energy.”

  “You’re going to fire the Skybolt laser?”

  “No, not at all,” Brad replied. “The Skybolt laser system uses a series of electromagnetic gates to channel, strengthen, and align the free-electron laser beam. We’ve disconnected the free-electron laser and have installed Casey Huggins’s microwave generator, power by the stored solar energy. We’re going to use the Skybolt subsystems to do the same thing with the microwave energy: strengthen, collimate, and focus it, and then we use Skybolt’s aiming subsystems, thanks to Jerry Kim, to send the energy earthward.

  “But to answer your question: We really don’t know what would happen exactly, so we don’t want anyone anywhere near the beam when we fire,” Brad went on. “We’re going to close a lot of airspace before we set Starfire off. Obviously Starfire is more suited for firing the energy into isolated areas, to spacecraft, or even to the moon, so firing the maser into populated areas won’t necessarily be an issue, but we will be making the aiming control and beam propagation better and better as we go on, so the rectenna can be smaller and the dangers greatly reduced.”

  Brad fielded a few more questions, but the last one was a doozy: “Mr. McLanahan,” a very attractive female reporter standing in front, with long jet-black hair, dark eyes, full red lips, a killer body, and a very slight European accent began, “you are very good at giving credit to the others on your team for all the things they have done to contribute to this project . . . but what have you done? Which components have you built? What are you with this project, if I may ask?”

  “To tell the truth, I haven’t built any components,” Brad admitted after a long moment of consideration. “I consider myself the scrounger, like the character Flight Lieutenant Hendley in the movie The Great Escape.” The woman blinked in confusion, obviously not knowing whom he was referring to but making a note to find out. “I came up with an idea, found the best students, scientists, and engineers I could find and had them explain the science to me, contributed a few ideas of my own, put them to work, and repeated the process. I get the team whatever they need for their phase of the project: money, assistance, computer or lab time, equipment, parts, software, whatever. I also conduct progress meetings and helped prep the team for our presentation to the school for summer lab space, before our project received funding from Sky Masters Aerospace.”

  “So you’re more like a coach or project manager,” the woman said. “You aren’t really the quarterback: you don’t actually pass the ball, but you train the team, get the equipment, and supervise the coaching staff.” She didn’t wait for a response, and Brad didn’t have one to give her in any case. “But you are a freshman student of engineering, are you not?”

  “Sophomore student of aerospace engineering, yes.”

  “Perhaps you should consider a different field of study?” the woman said. “Business, perhaps, or management?”

  “I want to be a test pilot,” Brad said. “Most of the best test-pilot schools in the United States require a degree in the hard sciences, like engineering, computers, math, or physics. I chose aerospace engineering.”

  “And are you doing well in it, Mr. McLanahan?”

  Brad was a little surprised to find himself being asked so many personal questions—he had prepped to answer technical questions from foreign science and space journalists and bloggers, not answer questions about himself. “I managed to finish my freshman year and start my sophomore year,” he said. “I guess my grades are average. If I need help, and I do, I ask for it. If I don’t understand something, I’ll find someone to explain it to me.” He looked around the lab for any more upraised hands, then turned back to the woman and found her looking directly at him with a slight smile, and he gave her one in return. “If that’s all, folks, thank you for—”

  “I have one more surprise announcement that I would like to share with all of you,” Cal Poly president Dr. Marcus Harris said from the back of the room. He stepped up to the lectern next to Brad. “The station manager of Armstrong Space Station, retired Air Force general Kai Raydon, recently spoke with the White House, and has received authorization from the president of the United States to fly two Starfire team leaders to Armstrong Space Station to observe the Starfire test shot.” The reporters broke out in applause.

  Harris put an arm around Lane. “I’m sorry, Lane, but you’re too young, but it will happen soon. The flight will be in just one week, and they’ll be aboard Armstrong Space Station for approximately three days. In the case of Brad, Jodie, and Casey, if they accept this offer, they would become the first teenagers in space, and if Jung-bae accepts, he will be only the second Korean to fly in space, and by far the youngest.” More applause, then frantic scribbling.

  “The White House said that their preference is a male and female team leader,” Harris went on, “but that’s up to the Starfire team to decide. The selectees will need to pass a comprehensive physical exam, but as we saw last spring with President Phoenix, you seem to just need to be a healthy and courageous person to fly in space—and, I’m proud to say, that includes Casey Huggins, who, if she accepts, will not only be the first female teenager in space but will also be the first paraplegic in space.” The applause was even louder and longer this time.

  “I will let the team talk amongst themselves and their parents, and then I’d like to meet with them myself,” Harris said. “But this is an outstanding opportunity and a rare honor for our Mustangs, and we couldn’t be prouder.” More applause, led by Harris, and the press conference broke up.

  “Holy crap!” Brad exclaimed when the Starfire team was alone in the lab. “What an opportunity! How should we decide this? Sorry, Lane.”

  “No problem,” Lane said. “I get airsick anyway.”

  “Who wants to go?”

  “You have to go, Brad,” Lane said. “You’re the project leader. We couldn’t have done this without you.”

  “Damn straight,” Casey said.

  “Besides, just like your new friend—that pretty female reporter in front who was making goo-goo eyes at you—said: what the bloody hell else do you do around here?” Jodie quipped, and everybody got a good laugh out of that. Jodie gave Brad an accusing and inquisitive—and maybe a jealous? Brad wondered—eye but said nothing more. “And where did that Great Escape thing come from?” She then switched her voice to that of James Garner playing the character Hendley in the movie. “ ‘You want to talk about hazards? Let’s talk about hazards. Let’s talk about you. You’re the biggest hazard we have.’ ” Another round of laughter.

  “All right, all right, very funny,” Brad said. “Let’s see how this works out. I’m going to fly in space soon enough anyway, I can guarantee you that, so if anyone else wants to take this opportunity, I’ll defer. Jodie?”

  “Not me, mate,” Jodie said. “I like sand and surf and sea level—even Cal Poly is almost too high above sea level and too far from the beach for me. Besides, I don’t want to be anywhere else but right here in this lab watching the monitors when Starfire lets loose.”

  “Jerry?”

  The thought of going up into space didn’t seem to make Jung-bae too comfortable. “I don’t know,” he
said uneasily. “I would like to design and test spacecraft someday, but as far as flying in orbit in one . . . I think I will pass. Besides, I want to be out at White Sands monitoring the rectenna and maser output. We are still having problems with the lithium-ion capacitors. We are storing plenty of power, but we occasionally have problems transferring the power to the microwave cavity.”

  “I’ll get some more experts to help you with that, Jerry,” Brad said. He turned to Casey. “Then it’s just you and me, Casey. What do you say? It’s your maser—you should be up there.”

  Casey’s face was a mixture of apprehension and confusion. “I don’t think so, Brad,” she said. “I don’t like people looking at me at airports or department stores—a paraplegic around a dozen astronauts on a space station? I don’t know . . .”

  “Well, just think, Casey—the last things you need in space are legs, right?” Brad said. “You’ll be just like everyone else up there. No wheelchairs in space, lady.”

  She looked down at her wheelchair, her eyes averted, for a long moment . . . and then her head and arms snapped up and she shouted, “I’m going into space!”

  The team went through a dry run of the test-fire procedures until late in the afternoon, then had a meeting with university president Harris and passed along the news of who was going to fly to Armstrong Space Station. Harris immediately scheduled the flight physicals for the next morning, after which he would make the announcement to the media. It wasn’t until early evening that they were able to go home. Brad had just arrived at his apartment building in Poly Canyon and was about to carry his bike and backpack up the stairs when he heard, “Hey, stranger.”

  He turned and found Jodie, her laptop backpack in hand. “Hi, you,” he said. “We’re not strangers. I see you every day.”

  “I know, but only at school. We live in the same complex, but I hardly see you around here.” She nodded toward Brad’s bicycle. “Were you just going to carry your bike and backpack up five flights of stairs, mate?”