The Glass Lady

by Douglas Savage

  Parker turned off the bay floodlights as Shuttle rolled over. When the last arc light went dark, the AC squinted into an orange neon tube.

  Endeavor flew inside ball lightning.

  “Jesus have mercy,” William McKinley Parker whispered. At his left beneath the orange rear windows, the small television blinked -20 . . . -19 . . . -18 . . .

  “All stop!” Enright recited over the intercom activated by his rapid breath.

  Shuttle flew with her portside wing pointing seaward, her starboard wing aimed at the black sky and her tail pointing southward into the direction of flight. Endeavor’s black underside and its thousands of fragile glass tiles faced LACE and the fury of PAM.

  Since Shuttle’s tail flew into the direction of flight, it cleaved the magnetic flux of the South Atlantic Anomaly. The 26-foot-tall tail and rear bay glowed orange as she plowed through ionized oxygen atoms. The outside of the six forward windows did not glow.

  Through the orange wake of ions aggravated by local magnetic disturbances, Parker could see Soyuz faintly, two hundred yards farther along the flight track. Uri Ruslanovich had maneuvered his vessel around so only the round, blunt bottom of his service module faced Shuttle and LACE.

  “Ten, nine, eight . . .”

  In his sweat-soaked headset, Parker heard Enright’s calm voice. The copilot sounded very far from where the AC floated. Parker braced his weightless, pain-weakened body with a ceiling handrail in his left hand and a wall handhold in his right. He looked blankly out the rear window by his face.

  “Five, four, three . . .”

  To Parker, the voice of his burned and bandaged brother had the faraway sound of being hailed by a distant voice through a thick and silent snowstorm.

  “Two . . . One!”

  Parker tensed his grip on the handrails.

  Nothing.

  No sound. No vibration. No debris in the windows or clanging against the glass hull. No flash of fire through the shimmering orange night.

  Parker’s sweating face scanned Mother’s green face. The little screen flashed “IGNITION PAYLOAD ASSIST MODULE. TVC NORMAL. ATTITUDE HOLD, PAM.”

  “Ignition!” Enright called. Only his television told him that PAM’s engine with 17,630 pounds of molten thrust had begun its 83-second burn to push LACE to a flaming death dive through the atmosphere. She would slam into the air in 25 minutes over the desolate Indian Ocean a thousand miles from any land.

  “Ignition plus 20 seconds. Thrusting. Range 2 miles.” Enright calmly read his television numerics, which confirmed Endeavor was pulling away from LACE as PAM’s engine continued to slow LACE’s orbital velocity fatally. A telemetry transponder in PAM beeped engine and ranging signals to Mother.

  Shuttle was bedrock solid as PAM blazed against the black sky. If the rocket was scorching Endeavor’s underside, her crew could not feel it. They would rely on Soyuz to make an eyeball inspection of Endeavor’s belly tiles and wheel wells. Significant tile loss would jeopardize Shuttle’s return to Earth.

  “One minute. Still burning . . . Four miles behind now. Slant range two miles, Skipper.”

  “Ah huh.” Befuddled with horse medicine, Parker’s mind was elsewhere.

  PAM’s attitude thrusters were programmed to keep the braking rocket horizontal for maximum deceleration and to hold a slight sideways tilt to the thrust vector. This off-center component of the rocket burn would push LACE both downward and away from Shuttle.

  “At 70 seconds, 6 miles behind us, 3 below, 3 point 9 miles cross-range.”

  The AC released his grip on the handrails. He had held so tightly that his long fingers ached. Flexing his knees, he floated three feet above the aft flightdeck floor.

  “Shutdown! LACE delta-V at minus 897.” Enright’s television confirmed in feet-per-second that LACE’s orbital velocity had slowed by 612 statute miles per hour. Her death dive had begun. “Range 9 miles behind us. Crossrange 4 point 3. She’s on her way now, Skipper!”

  “Guess so, Jack.”

  Nineteen minutes into the eighth hour of Endeavor’s long day aloft, the command pilot was not ready to relax. His right leg pounded hotly, his joints ached, and Shuttle had six minutes left inside the Anomaly zone with LACE’s laser well within striking distance.

  In the darkness broken only by Shuttle’s orange tail glow, Endeavor flew 35 degrees south of the Equator bound for the southern tip of Africa. The glass starship flew on her left side, tailfirst. Outside, the dark payload bay glowed orange only ten miles above the descending LACE.

  Parker could feel a distant uneasiness. The fighter pilot in his bones could taste the killer satellite out there in the darkness.

  “Range, Jacob?” The AC kept his face close to the overhead window which faced the distant South Pole. Somewhere in the blackness, Soyuz was 400 yards away. The tone of Parker’s voice made Enright feel the hairs on the back of his neck.

  “Twelve below, 10 cross-range, 07 behind . . . And closing.”

  There was surprise in Enright’s voice over the intercom. His blistered and swollen face had pushed from his fuzzy mind the subtleties of orbital mechanics: LACE had been slowed by the PAM engine. But by braking LACE’s velocity, the death ship had been pushed down into a lower orbit designed to intersect the atomsphere in twenty minutes. Enright’s mind slowly wrapped around the grimness in Parker’s voice: In its lower, steeply elliptical orbit, LACE must actually speed up. Kepler’s law of orbital physics demanded as much. In her doomed descent, LACE was accelerating and was closing upon Endeavor from below. LACE would overtake Shuttle from underneath and would pass her in the night—with five more minutes to go within the Anomaly.

  “Six behind, 15 below, 18 cross-range.” Enright was intense.

  “I know. What say we roll over and give her our reflector blankets, Jack?”

  Before the AC had finished, Enright was firing Shuttle’s RCS jets to roll the ship until she flew headsdown with the open bay and its mirrorlike blankets facing the invisible LACE somewhere behind and below and off to the side.

  Although Shuttle’s RCS thrusters popped like howitzers, Parker could not feel them where he floated at the aft station. Nor could he feel the ship’s slow roll. Only the rolling of the spherical, black-and-white Eight Ball in the attitude director indicator confirmed that they were coming about. The ADI on the upper left wall of the rear bulkhead told the AC that he was standing on his head over a black ocean, 1,200 miles this side of the edge of the Anomaly.

  “Five and a half behind and closing, 18 below, 21 crossrange, Will. You got him?”

  Parker floated toward the rear overhead window. Through it, he squinted into the darkness toward the sea below. From the ceiling of the aft flightdeck, he could not see the tail’s orange wake.

  “Negative, Jack.”

  “Endeavor, Endeavor. Soyuz here. I am 450 meters out. You want I should approach?”

  “Negative, Uri. Parker here. We are monitoring LACE coming in from the northwest. His track is about 22 miles north of us and 6 miles behind and overtaking. Hold short with your service module in minus-Z until he passes.”

  “Understand. Will hold blunt-end-down. Soyuz standing by.”

  “Okay, Uri . . . Jack?”

  “Three behind, 21 below, 23 cross-range. Anything?”

  “Still zip. Makes me itchy like the old days, Number One.”

  “Yeh. I feel it, too. He’s 02 behind, 24 below, 25 outside.”

  On a great circle of longitude joining the North and the South poles, the full moon was on the same meridian as Shuttle. The moon’s cold face cast its fuzzy reflection on the nighttime ocean well north of Endeavor. Parker caught a distant glint outside his overhead window against the black water.

  “Wait one,” the AC called. He reached toward the rear panels and then spun slowly in mid-air to each side wall. He turned the knobs which dimmed the rear flightdeck lights. In the cozy gloom illuminated only by the red backlighting of the instruments, he returned to his ceiling windows.

  �
�One behind, Skipper, 26 below, 27 out.”

  Looking straight down from the ceiling window, Parker caught a faint white star twinkling beneath and well to the north side of his ship.

  “Contact! Your ten o’clock high, Jack!”

  Enright and Karpov both looked high to their left as they flew headsdown with Shuttle’s tail leading the starship’s nose across the dark sky.

  “Have traffic!” Enright glanced at his television. “One-half behind, 29 below, 30 north . . . And there she goes!”

  LACE sped under Shuttle well to the inverted portside off Enright’s left shoulder. The copilot in his captain’s seat looked to the north.

  “He’s really hauling the mail, Will.”

  “Yeh. I got him by overhead. Movin’ behind us. Time, Jack?”

  “08 plus 24. One minute to go in here.”

  Parker moved to the rear window facing the dark bay still orange around the tail and aft OMS pods.

  “On your six!” The fighter pilot in the rear cabin watched LACE illuminated by moonlight as it disappeared behind Shuttle’s boxy stern, which housed the dead three main engines and the twin orbital maneuvering system pods. Each pod on either side of the tail contained a third of the ship’s reaction control system jets and the large OMS engines needed to bring Shuttle out of orbit.

  “I have it, Jack!”

  Parker’s deep voice filled the darkened flightdeck.

  The AC facing aft grabbed the attitude control stick located in the center of the rear instrument arrays between the two rear windows in the wall.

  “I got it!” Parker shouted hoarsely.

  The command pilot violently jerked the rotational hand controller. Instantly, Mother fired a battery of jets in the two OMS pods sending out fiery plumes on each side of the inverted tailfin.

  Outside, the long vertical tail was no longer orange, although the rear walls of the bay still glowed. The tall tail was a flat, faint blue-green: the color of high-intensity, laser light.

  The tail thrusters pushed Shuttle’s hindquarter skyward and the inverted nose dipped toward the sea.

  “What the . . .” Enright craned his neck to look back at Parker.

  “We’re hit! We’re hit, Jack!”

  The AC steered the tail out of the eerie green glow which lasted five seconds.

  “Damn!” Enright shouted as warning horns blared and lights flashed on the Caution and Warning panel on the upper center of the forward instrument panel between him and Karpov.

  “Left OMS! APU temp!” Enright read the two flashing caution lights.

  The Colonel worked his attitude hand controller. Slowly, the heavy ship came to a stop with her body vertical. Out the rear window, Parker saw the tail fin move slowly across a faint starfield visible with the cabin lights dimmed. With Shuttle’s rear end pointing straight up, the square stern of the open payload bay moved southeast across the bright, southern constellation Canis Major at 08 hours 24 minutes. Just northeast of the upright tail, Sirius, the heavens’ brightest star, moved like a brilliant white beacon.

  “Hittin’ the lights, Number One.”

  Parker cranked up the flightdeck lights. Enright glanced at the mission clock under his forward windshield.

  “08 plus 25, Skip. We’re out.”

  Endeavor darted vertically out of the Anomaly over open water 550 statute miles southwest of Cape Town, South Africa.

  “There it is, Jack.”

  The AC had powered up the payload bay lighting. He looked through the harsh glare in the bay to the tail section. To the port side of the tail’s base, the left OMS pod was enveloped in a brown cloud of vaporous monomethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide escaping from laser-melted and ruptured fuel tanks. Within the thickening cloud were chunks of heatshield tiles. A tangled mess of pipes and tubing protruded from the left OMS pod.

  “That’s all she wrote on the left OMS, Jacob.”

  The Aircraft Commander’s voice was very calm, very matter-of-fact. The consummate aviator: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. We’re circling Newark in this little thunderstorm up here. Ah, Number One is feathered and Number Two is running a little hot. But, ah, we’ll be at the old gate right on time. Thank you for flying with us tonight. Hope to see you all again real soon.”

  “Yeh, Will. Goin’ to zero-zero on Left OMS consumables.” Enright squinted through his bandages at the glass meters above the right-center window above Karpov’s anxious face.

  “Check on Brother Ivan, Jack.”

  “Right . . . Soyuz, Soyuz. Endeavor has sustained maneuvering system damage aft. No cabin damage. Status there? Over.”

  Enright, Parker, and Major Karpov waited.

  “Soyuz, Soyuz. Endeavor. Over?” The voice was Parker’s as the lighted bay filled with brown gas which glistened with sublimating frost in the frozen nighttime vacuum.

  “Uri!” Alexi Karpov pressed his mike button. Perspiration beaded upon his face round and puffy from twenty hours of weightlessness.

  “Endeavor, Endeavor: Configure AOS by Botswana at 08 plus 26. With you for 45 seconds only. We show you zip on Left OMS tanks with two hot APUs. LACE is well inbound now, 90 ahead of you, 70 cross-range, 37 below. Good work, guys! . . . Advise status. LOS in 20 seconds.”

  “AC here, Colorado . . . We took a broadside from your blackbird. I dumped the RMS arm . . . Left OMS up in smoke . . . Suspect internal damage aft fuselage with APU damage . . . Negative contact with Soyuz. This is Endeavor.”

  “Oh . . .” The ground was lost in static as Shuttle rounded the southern tip of Africa over water. Another 25 minutes of Indian Ocean out of radio range lay ahead.

  “When’s sunup, Jack?”

  “Ah . . . in 14, Skipper.”

  “ ’Kay. Try Soyuz again.”

  “Soyuz, Soyuz. Endeavor. Over?”

  As Enright spoke, Karpov leaned forward to look up under the top sill of his windows. He saw only darkness.

  “Could be antenna damage, Alexi.” Enright’s voice was unconvincing.

  “n’Da . . . Yes. Could be,” the Russian pilot sighed at Enright’s right.

  Endeavor’s downward pointing nose drifted to the left as seen from the front seats. No RCS jet had fired. Parker in the rear saw the tail slowly tilt to his left against faint stars overhead.

  “She’s venting from the left OMS, Jack. Bit of a lateral movement from the outgasing. Real garbage pile out here.”

  “Yeh, Will. I see us yawing to portside . . . Soyuz, do you read Endeavor?”

  “Maybe come around. Get the bay lights on him.” Parker watched the brown cloud dissipate in the payload bay.

  “In motion, Skipper. Left OMS idle-cutoff.”

  Enright threw a battery of switches on a center ceiling instrument cluster. He closed whatever propellant lines remained in the left tail pod.

  The copilot turned Shuttle on her nose by using the nose jets and the right-only OMS pod’s RCS thrusters. Endeavor rolled clumsily with a slight wobble. She was not designed to fly without half of her tail thrusters.

  The vertical tail rolled with the ship still upright. Parker squinted into the black sky beyond the bay’s brilliant arc lights.

  The payload bay slowly came around to face southward in the Indian Ocean 35 degrees south of the Equator. Parker peered through his aft overhead window behind Karpov to the position of Soyuz and her lone pilot, Uri Ruslanovich, Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Mechanical Engineering.

  All three pilots in Shuttle exhaled at the same instant the bay’s harsh glare fell silently upon an enormous cloud of white gas, bent scrap metal, and frozen liquid globules, barely visible in the nighttime distance 600 yards from Endeavor.

  16

  Will Parker had seen the same yellow cloud of rubble exactly four hours earlier. His mind recognized it before his heart had time to absorb the ugliness.

  Having rounded the southern tip of Africa, Endeavor sped northeast toward the Equator 2,000 nautical miles away. In the darkness over the Indian Ocean, th
e crippled starship flew alone. First there had been three vessels among the stars, then four, then three again. Now there was one ship badly mangled and a cloud of wreckage a quarter mile from Shuttle.

  “Alexi, I am truly, truly sorry.” Enright broke the sullen silence where he floated against his lap belt at Karpov’s side. “So very sorry.”

  In the aft section, Parker blinked his moist eyes which looked into the brightly lighted bay. The sixty-foot-long cargo hold still carried a brown cloud leaking from Shuttle’s ruptured tail. An airman feels his ship’s pain, like a mother for her child. The haggard Colonel ached inside.

  Major Alexi Karpov turned his wet eyes toward the large window at his right shoulder in the copilot’s seat. “They will issue a proper statement, of course: The Soviet Union has lost a brave son.’ Our governments are so good at that.”

  “A brave son,” Parker sighed into his voice-activated microphone at his lips.

  “My country has lost a son,” Karpov said slowly, fogging the window with his anguish. “But I have lost a brother.”

  “All of us have, Alexi,” Enright offered.

  Endeavor, alone, flew through the darkness 540 nautical miles south of Madagascar a thousand miles east of Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

  “How long to sunup, Jack?”

  Enright looked at his mission clock: Day 00: 08 Hours: 33 Minutes.

  “Eight minutes, Skip.”

  “We have to shoot an IMU alignment . . . We must carry on, Alexi.”

  “Yes, Colonel. Fly your fine ship.”

  “Rollin’, Skipper.”

  Enright put Shuttle into a slow roll. She came about until her wings were level. Flying heads-up, Enright yawed the nose around laterally until Endeavor flew rightside-up with her nose pointing northward. The starboard wing pointed eastward along the direction of flight.

  The two star-trackers under Enright’s left window searched the heavens for navigation stars. He laid his swollen, bandaged face close to the silver-dollar-size reflecting mirror at the base of the crew optical alignment sight. The COAS tube protruding from the cabin ceiling scanned the southern sky’s few conspicuous stars.