“Okay! Okay! There were others, up above Ms. Coleman. I think one of them was Coleman’s boss, the Humanity Labor PR Director.”
“That’s Vaughn. What about Martín?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know! Maybe—I just heard some bigwig in Humanity Labor, no names. It was the government, see?”
My blood ran just a bit colder. “What do you mean?”
“Vaughn and someone on the Humanity Labor board were gonna get cabinet posts once the Feds took over the Beanstalk. And all of us stood to make a lot when that deal goes through. But that’s all I know!”
But it was enough.
I turned my gaze to the projected outside view, still there, still impossibly beautiful. As the pod slowly rotated end-over-end, Earth seemed to swing around us, vast and huge and glorious. There was something else out there, too, something tiny and glittering in the sun. At first, I wondered if it was the approaching tug, but it was still too early for that. After a while, I finally figured out that it was a horseshoe-shaped bit of metal, gleaming as it tumbled in the light—probably a piece of our railguide that had snapped off in the explosion and was following us down.
Over the past ten minutes, we’d fallen another 5,400 kilometers. I checked the time, and noted that we’d been falling for a total of twenty-three minutes, and were now at an altitude of less than 24,000 kilometers…a third of the way to impact. There was still no evidence of our movement other than that slow tumble, but Earth had definitely grown over the past twenty minutes, swelling to fill almost thirty degrees of black sky.
I looked for the Beanstalk, but couldn’t spot it. By now, of course, our lateral velocity had carried us something like fifty kilometers from the Stalk. If I knew just where to look, I might be able to spot its acquisition lights or safety strobes.
Amazing that the largest and greatest of humankind’s engineering achievements would be invisible only fifty kilometers away.
My PAD chirped at me.
“Harrison.”
“It’s Katrine Garcia, Captain. I just wanted to tell you that the tug’s release went as scheduled. The tug is approaching your current position now, with a relative velocity of two kilometers per second, at a range of thirty-five kilometers. You should be able to see it in less than a minute.”
“Right! Thanks, Katrine.” I turned to Lily. “Let me use your PAD.”
“My PAD!” She had it open in front of her. “Why?”
“Because you have the high-end model, not this cheap PD-issue toy,” I told her. “And I need to reconfigure it to fly a spaceship.”
We had thirty-six minutes to impact.
Chapter Twenty
Day 9
I started off by configuring the input holography to something resembling a simplified Striker cockpit, moving my hands to extend the virtual screen to its widest extent, then laying out the keyboard as I wanted it. Yaw, pitch, roll, thrust—I couldn’t make an exact copy of a Striker S/A-94 control panel, but there was no need for perfect fidelity. I did want each joystick to be where I could reach for it instinctively.
Flying a spacecraft is absolutely nothing like flying an airfoil. You can’t bank, you can’t stall, you can’t use a rudder to turn, and you can’t use the lift generated by your wings because there’s no air around you to work with. Every meter per second in one direction must be exactly countered if you want to stop, and the ghost of Sir Isaac Newton is looking over your shoulder with each maneuver.
Lily’s PAD was a nice model with lots of bells and whistles that I would never use normally, but the enhanced holographics were really nice, and they would stand me in good stead in a few minutes. She offered me a feedback handfilm, and I accepted. Squirt a few drops on your hands, and it spreads out and solidifies, creating a layer over your skin just a few molecules thick. Nano-processors in the mix pick up signals from the PAD, and trigger nerve endings in your skin to create an illusion of pressure when you move a virtual joystick, or press a holographic button.
Sweet.
Katrine Garcia gave me the necessary access codes, and I began typing, identifying myself and logging on to the controller running the approaching spacecraft. Normally, the tug would have been run from the SEA control center up on Midway, but we were far enough away now that teleoperating from a distance was going to be a problem. There would be a time delay of almost a tenth of a second round-trip between Midway and the tug. That’s not much, especially with human reflexes as slow as they are, but the tiny increments add up. Besides, they would be watching through a single, fairly narrow-field camera. I’d have that camera, too, but I’d also be able to see the approach and docking through the beanpod’s interior display.
And every little bit helped.
On the holographic screen hanging in the air in front of me, I could see the view through the tug’s nose camera, and could see the bronze cigar-shape of the beanpod now seven kilometers away and swiftly growing larger. Glancing up from the display, I saw the tug directly, a pinpoint of light growing brighter.
Nudging the attitude controls, I fired bursts of hydrazine to flip the tug end-for-end, then engaged the main engine. I gave it full throttle-up, killing my Earthward velocity kps by kps.
Moments later, the tug streaked toward the pod, tail-first and balanced on an invisible stream of hot plasma. Passengers started cheering, but then it flashed past, a hundred meters distant, and vanished again against the face of the growing Earth.
“Don’t worry, people,” I called to them. “It’ll be back. I just need to match vectors.”
And that was the tricky—and time-consuming—part. For fifteen minutes, I jockeyed that WT-20, killing its Earthward velocity, matching our lateral vector, and slowly, slowly creeping up on the tumbling bronze cigar. And all the while my fuel reserves dwindled.
After a while, I became aware of Lily sitting beside me, mumbling. I glanced over and saw her watching me through that silver orb stuck to her left eye. “What are you doing?” I asked, mildly annoyed.
“Filming you conducting the rescue of the century,” she said.
“Why don’t you wait and see if we survive to watch it?”
“Give a girl a break, huh? You stole my computer. So I’m going to record you being a hero.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Nonsense. This is the story of a lifetime for me, you realize that? I get you capturing a terrorist, then saving our tails.”
“If this doesn’t go well,” I replied, fighting with the virtual controls in front of me, “you can film the ground rushing up to meet us…splat.” I glanced up at the Earth, now overhead again. “Your own documentary: ‘Bug on a Big, Blue Windshield.’”
She put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re doing fine.”
How did she know? I shrugged her hand away. “Sorry. But I need to concentrate on this…”
What I was trying to do was bilocate, and it wasn’t easy.
Your brain doesn’t care whether visual input is traveling the eight inches or so from the eyeball to the visual cortex at the back side of your brain, or coming in by radio across a million kilometers. If the interface is good enough, you can kind of lose yourself in the action, feel like you’re not inside a tumbling beanpod with eleven other scared people, but actually inside that rugged little tug out there, maneuvering in for rendezvous and grapple.
Every good fighter pilot knows what it’s like to become his ship, and that’s what I was trying to accomplish. My mind, transfixed by the sharp image on the screen hovering in front of my face, was inside the Ranger; my body, though, could still feel the tumble of the beanpod playing hob with my inner ears, could feel the blast and sweep of hard white sunlight sweeping from one side of the pod to the other, alternating with a flood of softer, blue light each time Earth drifted past.
And, somehow, I was aware of all of those eyes on me as I fought the tug in.
The remote-piloted tug was fifteen meters long—a spherical working end with four long, cylindrical fuel
tanks, and a rocket nozzle astern. Four robotic arms were neatly folded behind the head, and a single, cyclopean eye peered from the blunt prow. Once, the ugly little craft had been painted a pristine white, but God only knows how many years of bumping around outside of Midway and the other geosynch structures had left the paint faded, scratched, pitted, and sandblasted, with patches of rough, gray metal showing through.
A lot of the more modern tugs and work pods are nuclear powered, with small gas-core fission plants heating reaction mass to produce thrust. This one, fortunately, used exotic fuel—metastable N-He64, usually called “meta.” Helium atoms excited into a metastable quantum state by lasers were packaged with nitrogen atoms in a metallic matrix within insulated high-pressure tanks. Heating causes the helium to revert to its normal state, releasing the tremendous energy used in packing the stuff.
A rocket’s efficiency is measured by specific impulse, or Isp, a figure, in seconds, that can be described as impulse—thrust multiplied by time—per unit of propellant mass expended. The liquid hydrogen-oxygen rocket engines of the early space age had an Isp of around 460 seconds.
Meta, on the other hand, has an Isp approaching 3200 seconds, making it far more efficient than conventional fuels—as efficient, in fact, as gas-core nuclear engines—and bringing with it the added advantage of not scattering the highly radioactive debris from a fission reactor across eastern New Angeles if this didn’t work.
I would have to watch my fuel tank integrity closely. If the insides of those insulated tanks got too hot during reentry, the entire remaining fuel load could revert in a rather spectacular fashion, and our dust would be sifting down out of the stratosphere for years to come.
Right now, though, the beanpod, gleaming in the sunlight as it toppled slowly end over end, seemed to hang just in front of me, moving slowly closer.
“SEA-Control,” I said. “Check me. I read range: fifty-five meters, closing at four meters per second.”
“We confirm that, Beanpod…now forty-seven meters, closing at four mps.”
I triggered another burst from the forward maneuvering thrusters. “Forty meters, three mps. Thirty-five…thirty.”
This next bit was the really tricky part. The beanpod wasn’t tumbling fast—it looked like about one complete rotation every forty seconds—but it represented a lot of mass. If I was going to have a chance of pulling this stunt off, I needed to stop the tumble.
And that would take time, precious time that I did not have.
If I wasn’t careful on approach, one end of that falling, 140-ton monster would swing up, over, and down, smacking the tug like a fly. I was approaching from about thirty degrees off the spin axis so I should be able to avoid that problem; when I got very close, though, I would have to latch on to the pod without getting thrown clear and without hitting so hard that I made things worse…much worse.
Another maneuvering burst. Two meters per second. Getting close, now…
Someone screamed. I glanced up, and saw the tug against the disk of the Earth, just meters away, its arms outspread like some titanic, spindle-legged spider. It drifted with our spin, so I focused again on the holographic display screen in front of me. Almost there…
“Beanpod,” Garcia’s voice said. “You’re looking good. Range ten meters…eight…six…”
Fire thrusters!
“Four meters…three…two meters…”
Two of the outstretched work arms hit the side of the pod, scraping along the surface as I continued drifting in. “Contact!” I called.
I began wishing I had four hands—no, six—as I reached for the recessed grapple-holds to either side of that otherwise smooth and gently curving surface, deployed the remaining two arms, and fired the thrusters again to bring my relative velocity down to zero. The momentum of the rotating beanpod slewed me sharply sideways, but I managed to snag one grapple and lock it.
I fired maneuvering thrusters, adjusting pitch and yaw…then snagged a second hand-hold.
I felt the shudder through my seat. On my display, the pod’s tumble appeared to have stopped, but that was an illusion. Stars, Earth, and sun all were drifting past behind the beanpod, now, as the tug and pod tumbled together. The rate of spin was a bit slower, though—about one rotation per fifty seconds, I guessed. I extended the remaining two arms to snag two more grapple-holds and locked them down.
“SEA-Control, I have a solid dock.”
Several members of my personal audience cheered, but I ignored them. Now I had to stop the tumble.
That was another worry. My maneuvering thrusters, located in a ring around my center of mass and encircling the fuel tanks so that they faced all directions, didn’t use meta. Instead, they used the monopropellant hydrazine. Hydrazine is less efficient as a rocket fuel than meta, but it’s easier and safer for maneuvers that require a delicate touch.
Watching my attitude indicators, I put my hands over the thruster controls and waited…waited…then fired, holding the jets open as the rate of spin slowed…slowed…slowed…
…and release.
I glanced up. The tug’s shadowed belly was pressed against the pod’s hull, all four arms wide-stretched to hold it in an obscenely intimate embrace.
And Earth was visible almost directly on the deck below us.
“SEA-Control, I’m reading an arrest of RVC. Can you confirm?” Their radar was a lot more accurate than my eyes.
“Beanpod, we read you with a rotational velocity component of less than point four degrees per second.”
Four-tenths of a degree per second? That was one complete rotation every fifteen minutes. Not bad for seat-of-your pants…and certainly good enough for now.
What was the time? Fourteen minutes to impact. Seventy-five hundred kilometers left to fall.
“Copy, SEA-Control. Test firing main thrusters, two second duration, in three…two…one…fire.”
The main engine fired, metastable helium releasing from its high-energy imprisonment and blasting silently into the void. I felt the pod jolt…and then I bit off a short curse as the stars and Earth began wheeling once again. Damn!
“Cease firing! Cease firing!” Garcia screamed at me.
So far as I knew, this sort of thing had never been attempted before, strapping an engine to a free-falling beanpod and trying to decelerate it. I’d hoped that the pod was massive enough that planting the rocket motor off-center like that wouldn’t destabilize it…but the powerful meta-fueled engine’s shove against us was off-center, putting us back into a spin, one going in the other direction, now. At least the spin seemed to have only a single component. A complex spin would have been much harder to straighten out.
Again, I jockeyed the maneuvering thrusters, slowing, then eliminating the spin. I would have to reposition myself at the bottom end of the cigar—kind of like balancing a tall stack of plates on my head.
But first, while I was up here near the center of the beanpod, I would have to do something about the parachute.
With the rotation arrested, I released my mechanical death grip on the pod, then maneuvered around to the other side. According to the beanpod schematics I’d been looking at earlier, the parachute compartment was located amidships, just about where the restroom and drink service compartment was located. There was a meter-thick swelling there, with some nasty scarring on the outer surface.
It was at this point that each beanpod had its diamagnetic railguide mounted, embracing the superconducting elevator rail that ran up the Beanstalk. The bomb, obviously, had been attached at this point, blowing the railguide apart and knocking the pod clear of the Beanstalk. The parachute access hatch was located below the railguide mount, and only a brief inspection was necessary to show me that it was welded shut.
I suppose the weld could have been accidental—caused by the force of the explosion, but somehow I doubted that. I remembered looking at the pod through the transplas back at the midway concourse, and seeing the reflected blue flicker of a spot welder.
Who ha
d gotten into SEA Control and hijacked a work pod? It was even possible that Coleman or Jones or someone else had done it through a PAD in the Midway concourse. All they would have needed was the access code and an off-duty pod with a welding arm mounted on it.
Ten minutes left to impact. Call it six thousand kilometers left to fall.
Our speed had been increasing over the past hour as Earth’s gravity relentlessly accelerated us. We would max out at 11 kps—escape velocity—and the extra speed was carving away at our remaining time.
Bringing up one of the tug’s arms, I extended a heating element and began working at the weld. It was a single spot, a rushed job, and I soon had the metal hot enough that I could pry the edge of the panel up. The locking mechanism appeared undamaged, at least, and after a few more anxious moments, the panel release appeared to be working.
“We confirm your parachute panel is operational,” Garcia told me.
Good. Because I was running out of time. Seven minutes. Forty-two hundred kilometers at 10 kps.
With short, controlled bursts from my hydrazine thrusters, I drifted down to the back end of the beanpod, flipped, and reached out with all four arms. Garcia had pointed out four grapple-holds down there, evenly spaced around the hull. I grabbed hold, positioned the camera view directly on the beanpod’s pointed end, and pulled.
My vid flickered, then went out as the end of the beanpod crushed my camera eye. The housing, though, would serve as a centering mount. Snugged in as tight as the mechanism could manage, I locked all four arms in place, took a deep breath, and said, “Right, everybody! Acceleration in three…two…one…go!”
I fired the main thrusters.
On-board the beanpod, we all felt the shudder as the meta-rocket’s thrust took hold, followed by the abrupt, crushing sensation of weight…lots of weight.
In fact, it was just half-a-G for the test, but it felt like a lot more after almost an hour of free fall.
“SEA-Control!” I called. “We have main engine burn! It feels like we’re balanced okay!”
Android: Free Fall Page 28