Powersat (The Grand Tour)

by Bova, Ben

  “How soon can we begin to move the satellite?” he asked the Egyptian.

  “Bouchachi reports that they are nearly finished attaching the new antenna.”

  “So?”

  “Once it is attached they can begin beaming power at high intensity.”

  Al-Bashir looked at his wristwatch. He had set it to Eastern Daylight Time, the time zone for Washington, D.C.

  “The president will begin his speech in another hour.”

  Perspiration sheened the Egyptian’s bald head. “They should be finished by then.”

  “Can we begin to move the satellite now?”

  “It would be better to wait until they are finished with the antenna.”

  Al-Bashir frowned, stroked his beard impatiently, then said, “I want it moved now. I want that antenna aimed at Washington. Now.”

  “But—”

  “You have the proper coordinates.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But what?” al-Bashir snapped.

  “We can activate the attitude control thrusters through the relay satellite,” the Egyptian said, his eyes shifting nervously, “so that the antenna points at Washington.”

  “Then do it.”

  “But we can’t uplink communicate with our workers on the satellite. We only have a downlink from them.”

  “The plan calls for our maintaining radio silence, except for sending the command codes to the attitude thrusters. What of it?”

  “They might be hurt when the satellite begins to shift its position.”

  “Hurt? How can they be hurt? Everything is weightless up there.”

  “But not massless. Objects still have mass.”

  Al-Bashir shook his head angrily. “Bah! An academic quibble.”

  “It’s more than that,” the Egyptian insisted. “If we don’t warn them that the satellite will begin to shift its position before they are finished attaching the new antenna—”

  “Are you afraid they’ll float off the satellite?”

  “No, they’re attached by tethers.”

  “Then start the maneuver now.”

  “It’s wrong—”

  Al-Bashir slapped him. Hard. Without his consciously deciding to, his hand flashed out and caught the Egyptian flush on his round, stubbled cheek. The crack made the technicians look up.

  “I am in command here,” al-Bashir said, his voice cold with fury. “You will do as I say.” Looking at the staring technicians, he added, “All of you!”

  The Egyptian stood speechless, the finger marks of al-Bashir’s hand white against his nut-brown cheek.

  “Move the satellite to its proper position,” al-Bashir said. The Egyptian turned and nodded to one of the technicians, who began tapping quickly on his computer keyboard.

  GEOSYNCHRONOUS ORBIT

  “D’you think that thing will be in the way?” Williamson asked, pointing a gloved thumb toward the powersat’s original antenna, floating free now and drifting alongside the satellite like a huge metal ice floe.

  Bouchachi shook his head inside his helmet. “No, it is already far enough to be no problem.”

  “Good.”

  The two men were bolting the new, smaller antenna onto the output port from the magnetrons, working slowly in their cumbersome suits. Even though no sound could be heard in the vacuum of space, Williamson could feel the vibration of his power drill through the thick fabric of his gloves. Bloody gloves are a pain in the arse, he said to himself. The gloves were as stiff as thick cardboard; it was hard to flex the fingers enough to grip the power tools firmly. He had almost fumbled the drill out of his reach twice now.

  Bouchachi worked steadily and kept himself from asking about Nikolayev. He knew that Williamson had killed the Russian. Can an infidel become a holy martyr? Bouchachi asked himself. What matter? That is for Allah to decide. Allah, the all merciful, the all compassionate. He hoped that Nikolayev might find a place in Paradise. Even though he had not been fully aware of the purpose of this mission, they could not have accomplished anything without him.

  In his helmet earphones Bouchachi could hear Williamson breathing hard. The work was much more difficult than they had anticipated, and it was going slowly. Panting with exertion himself, he raised his left arm to look at the watch on the set of instruments fastened to his wrist.

  “Nearly finished,” Williamson said.

  Bouchachi blinked sweat from his eyes. I wish I could wipe my face, he said to himself. I’m drenched with perspiration. Suddenly he lurched with fear. Are the microwaves cooking me? Am I being boiled alive by the microwaves?

  No, he told himself. We turned off the power output. There will be no microwaves coming out of this infernal machine until we finish attaching this antenna and turn on the power once more.

  Still, it took an effort for him to make his hands stop shaking.

  “Hey, what’s that?” Williamson said.

  “What?”

  “Thought I saw a puff of smoke or something.”

  “Smoke? Impossible.”

  “It was something.”

  “It couldn’t be smoke. Not here.”

  “There it is again!”

  This time Bouchachi caught it, out of the corner of his eye. A wisp of glittering gas, gone almost before the eye could register it.

  “The attitude control jets,” he said. “They’re moving the satellite.”

  “But we’re not finished yet!”

  “They grow impatient, down below.”

  “I don’t feel us moving.”

  Bouchachi almost smiled. He started to explain, then thought better of it. Why try to teach the laws of inertia at this point?

  “Good thing we’ve got the new antenna almost nailed down,” Williamson said. “We’d have a helluva time if it’d still been hanging loose.”

  Ah, thought Bouchachi. He does understand Newton’s laws, at least a little.

  Aloud, he said, “We still have much work to do.”

  “We’ll finish on time,” Williamson answered. “Or close to it.”

  Dan felt excited as a schoolkid as he tugged on the leggings of the spacesuit. He realized he hadn’t been in space for more than five years.

  What was it Da Vinci said? he asked himself. Something Leonardo wrote after he tried out one of the man-carrying gliders he’d built. The words came to him:

  Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the Earth with your eyes turned skyward. For there you have been and there you long to return.

  Something like that, Dan said to himself as he wormed his arms through the sleeves of the spacesuit. Smart cookie, old Leonardo. Pretty good painter, too.

  Tucking his bubble helmet under one arm, Dan clumped out to the briefing room, where the rest of the crew waited. For there you have been and there you long to return, he repeated silently. I’m going back into space!

  The briefing room was small, most of the floor space taken up by eight comfortably padded astronaut-type reclining chairs. Five spacesuited people were already seated, two of them women. Gerry Adair stood in his suit at the front of the room and led the abbreviated briefing. Dan waited in the back and listened respectfully. Ride the spaceplane to low orbit, rendezvous with the OTV parked there and ride it to the powersat. Then find out what’s wrong with the bird and fix it.

  “That’s why we make the big bucks,” Adair kidded. “So let’s get this bird back on the air.”

  Before they could push themselves out of their chairs, Dan said, “One other thing, people. This is a test of our whole concept. If we can fix that beast and get it running properly, we’ll have proved that the powersat idea will work. Everything we’ve done so far is hanging on what we-do in the next few hours.”

  Adair grinned at him. “Gee, boss, I thought you were going to give us that old ‘band of brothers’ bullshit from Shakespeare.”

  “That too,” Dan quipped back at him. “Now let’s get going.”

  Al-Bashir peered at the small TV perched on a tabletop in the vill
a’s basement. Satellite news was showing the assemblage of notables gathering at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery.

  “The president of the United States is due to arrive in less than half an hour,” the news commentator was saying. “In the meantime, a crowd of more than twenty thousand has gathered for this day of remembrance …”

  Al-Bashir smiled grimly. They’ll remember this day, he said to himself. Oh, yes, they will remember it.

  April found that the door to her bedroom was not locked. She pushed it slowly open and looked down the hallway. No one in sight.

  Walking slowly, she approached the staircase leading downstairs. She went down the carpeted stairs and looked around. No one in the spacious, well-appointed living room, either. The house seemed to be deserted, although through the living room windows she could see several cars and vans parked out front.

  If I had the keys I could drive out of here, she told herself. But to where? I’m in a foreign country. I don’t know the roads. I can’t even speak the language.

  “Can I help you?”

  Whirling about, April saw the same Asian woman standing at the opposite end of the living room. She had changed from her flight attendant’s uniform into a flowered bikini, topped with a gauzy see-through cover-up over it. April suddenly felt shabby, wrinkled and grubby in the same dress she’d worn for—how long now? It must be twenty-four hours, at least.

  “Can I help you?” the woman repeated.

  “I … I got hungry,” April said. “I was looking for the kitchen.”

  “I’ll fix you a luncheon tray,” the woman said, smiling. “I’ll bring it up to your room.”

  “But I—”

  “Please return to your room. Mr. al-Bashir left very specific instructions. He wants you in your bedroom when he finishes the work he’s doing.”

  MATAGORDA ISLAND, TEXAS

  As he sat in the last row of the spaceplane’s cabin listening Ato the countdown in his helmet earphones, Dan realized that all seven of the crew were lying on their backs with their legs up in the air, like women in the throes of passionate sex. He grinned to himself. They were all completely enveloped in their spacesuits, encased in thick layers of plastic and fabric. We couldn’t even masturbate in these outfits, he thought.

  This is the first time I’ve ridden the spaceplane, he realized. All his other trips to orbit had been aboard Soyuz-type capsules either made in Russia or manufactured under license by a commercial builder. He wouldn’t pay the $10,000-per-pound price NASA wanted for the space shuttle, nor was NASA comfortable with the thought of carrying a money-grubbing industrialist into space instead of a scientist or engineer.

  “T minus two minutes,” Dan heard in his earphones. “Internal power on. All systems go.”

  Gerry Adair sat up front at the controls. Not that there was anything for him to do; the countdown and launch were all automated. Adair’s work would come later, once they had achieved orbit and had to make a rendezvous with the orbital transfer vehicle that was waiting up there.

  “T minus ninety seconds. LOX pressure in the green. Hydrogen pressure in the green.”

  Still no word about what caused the outage, Dan thought. Guess we won’t know for certain until we get there and see for ourselves.

  “T minus sixty seconds. Life support on internal. Fuel cells on.”

  Van Buren would call if she’d found out what’s wrong with the bird. Good thing this didn’t happen yesterday with all the VIPs here. Vicki must be throwing a fit by now, threatening to sue if we don’t let her leave the base. Tough. We can’t have her blabbing this story before we fix the satellite.

  “Ten … nine … eight …”

  Dan closed his eyes and gripped his seat’s armrests as hard as he could through his thick gloves. This beast kicks like a mule, he knew.

  Worse. The rocket engines ignited and Dan felt as if he were being fired out of a cannon. A forty-ton anvil slammed into his chest; his eyeballs started sinking into his head. There were no windows along the cabin to look out of, and he couldn’t have turned his head anyway. He just sank into the cushioned acceleration couch and tried to breathe. He couldn’t lift his arms off the seat rests, couldn’t even wiggle his toes inside the heavy boots.

  His vision blurred and everything turned a lurid reddish tint, like being in a photo lab with the safety lights on.

  I’m too old for this sort of thing, Dan told himself. What in the Seven Cities of Cíbola made me think I should take this double-damned roller coaster?

  After several lifetimes, the pressure eased somewhat. Dan heard a bang and felt the cabin shudder. Booster separation, his mind told him. The booster’s dropped away and we’re riding on the spaceplane’s engines now.

  And then it all went away. The pressure vanished. Dan’s arms floated off the armrests. His stomach gurgled, but he remembered to refrain from making sudden head movements.

  “Woo-ie!” one of the women whooped. “That was a ride!”

  “Let’s do it again, Daddy!”

  Dan grinned weakly and concentrated on not throwing up.

  There was plenty of handshaking to do at Arlington National Cemetery. While the honor guard of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines got out of their trucks and began to arrange their ranks and flags, Senator Thornton worked her way through the VIP stand, saying hello and exchanging greetings with politicians and bureaucrats.

  She noticed that Secret Service bodyguards were arriving now, trying to look unobtrusive as they scoped out the crowd with special electro-optical scanners disguised to look like fashionable sunglasses.

  The president would be arriving soon, Jane knew. His motorcade of limousines and motorcycles has probably already left the White House and is making its way around the Lincoln Memorial.

  It was somewhat ironic that the nerve center for the nation’s elaborate network of spy satellites was buried deep underground. Beneath enough reinforced concrete to survive even a nuclear strike, dozens of technicians monitored screens that showed virtually every square inch of the Earth’s surface, land and sea. Ships were being tracked, even submerged submarines. Not a truck or a train moved without some satellite high up in orbit watching it.

  The room hummed with electrical power; it was large and generously air-conditioned, yet it still felt sweaty-hot and crowded, with all the technicians seated at row after row of consoles. Even on this holiday afternoon there was an intent man or woman hunched over each console monitoring each screen. The strip lamps along the ceiling were dim; most of the light came from the display screens, flickering eerily against the concrete walls.

  Nothing much out of the ordinary was happening, though, so the duty officer should have been relaxed. She was not. A Navy lieutenant commander, she was a woman who ached for command of a capital ship at sea but instead was stuck with babysitting a bunch of spy eyes in the sky. She had been surprised when the deputy director of homeland security entered the monitoring center escorted by a pair of marines. In quick order, her surprise gave way to interest, and then to irritation.

  “Track an electronic beacon?” she asked the deputy director for the third time. She looked again at the flimsy sheet of specifications he had handed her. “With this low a signal?” She shook her head.

  The deputy director was in his midfifties, a lifelong bureaucrat who had been in the Treasury Department before Homeland Security had opened new paths for career advancement. He was good-looking in a chisel-featured, cosmetic-surgery way. He was accustomed to persuading people who were reluctant to comply with his wishes. He was not accustomed to being rebuffed, especially by a woman in uniform.

  “Commander,” he said softly, over the muted hum of the consoles, “this request comes from the very highest level of the Homeland Security Department. The request originated with the FBI. It also has the CIA’s approval, I might add.”

  “I don’t care if it comes from the Oval Office,” the lieutenant commander said. “That signal is just too weak for our birds to
pick up. What kind of a freaking dumbjohn set up this pitiful little squeaker?”

  “Ferret satellites have picked up signals a lot weaker than this one.”

  Waving the spec sheet in his face, the captain said, “Yeah, but it’s not just the power of the signal all by itself. It’s the signal-to-noise ratio. Your beacon’s too goddam close to the port of Marseille. There’s all kinds of chatter coming out of the city, on every frequency you can imagine. It’d be like trying to listen to a mouse fart in the middle of some Italian opera.”

  The deputy director performed a dramatic sigh. “So am I supposed to go back to the director of homeland security and tell him that you won’t even try to track their beacon?”

  The lieutenant commander heard his unspoken words: That would not be a positive career move for you. She also realized that this must be just as important as he claimed, to get a deputy director down here on a holiday afternoon.

  She stared at the spec sheet again, grumbled something too low for the deputy director to make out, and walked off to one of the monitoring consoles.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  From the giant structure of the power satellite, 22,300 miles above the equator, an invisible sword of energy lanced down toward Washington, D.C., powerful enough to kill anything in its path. It touched the ground in Bethesda and marched south-southeast, piercing the fat little clumps of cumulus cloud that floated across the land as it swept inexorably toward its target: Arlington National Cemetery.

  Birds fell out of the sky, their feathers scorched, their innards exploded by the sudden blast of heat. Grass curled and browned as the beam swept by. Newly leafed trees puffed tendrils of smoke. Like a finger of death the energy beam swept slowly across the District of Columbia. The water of the Potomac sizzled briefly as ten thousand million watts of energy crossed the river and reached Arlington.