Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  There was nothing about the Shuttle programme today that hadn’t been in the plans right back in 1969, even before Apollo 11 landed. But Eagle, Burdick guessed, had given everyone a little incentive to get it right. Stunt flights to the Moon could wait. Space was the high ground, and if America didn’t make it secure, the Soviets would, and there would be hell to pay.

  And the Shuttle, with all its military applications – reconnaissance, interception, satellite recovery, hunter-killer capabilities, rescue and relief – was the key.

  So here they were, operating five orbiters just as advertized, with an eleven-day airline-style turnaround between each flight, and with the components of Space Station Freedom, an outpost on that high frontier, already being assembled in plants in California and Texas and Alabama.

  Anyhow, once old Walter Dornberger, von Braun’s old boss, had been brought out of retirement and started applying a little of that old Peenemunde discipline to the project, everything got a lot tighter.

  The countdown went through smoothly, as it always did.

  Up on the roof, Burdick did his share of the gladhanding and flesh-pressing. But he ducked out once the count neared its conclusion. He was here for the launch, after all.

  At main-engine start, a bright white light erupted at the base of the orbiter, and white smoke squirted out to either side.

  There they go, guys, three at a hundred.

  Then the four solid boosters lit up, showering orange smoke, yellow sparks. The stack lifted off the ground, startlingly quickly, trailing a column of white smoke which glowed orange within, as if on fire. The plume of yellow light from the SRBs was incredibly bright – dazzling, like liquid light, like sunlight seen from the Moon.

  There was clapping and hollering from the dignitaries and crew relatives. Burdick kept his binoculars clamped to his face.

  The stack arched over onto its back and followed a steep curve away from its tower. Already the gantry was dwarfed by the smoke column. After ten seconds the Shuttle punched through an isolated thin cloud, threading it like rope.

  The sound reached him after fifteen seconds: a crackling thunder which came tumbling down over him, sharp slaps over an underlying rumble.

  It was a hell of a thing, he thought.

  And then –

  It looked as if the SRBs had detached a little early. The single vapour trail split up into five, the orbiter itself with its main engines burning white, and the four SRBs careening out of the smoke, like diverging fingers.

  Shit, he thought.

  The orbiter blew first, that big External Tank on its belly just cracking open, oxygen and hydrogen igniting in a single pure blast. And then the four SRBs went up like firecrackers around that central glare, destroyed by the Range Safety Officer.

  We have no downlink at this time. We’re obviously studying the event.

  He could still hear the routine rocket noise flowing over him, like a ghost, the sound of the disaster itself still suspended in the ruptured air.

  The NERVA, he thought. How many pounds of fissile uranium had just been smeared over the Florida sky?

  Reagan. They had to get the President under cover.

  He looked around, through a crowd that had turned into a mob of screaming, crying people. There: Curtis LeMay had his arm around Reagan’s shoulders, and was hustling him away, towards the door from the roof. Burdick could hear what LeMay was saying to the ashen President. We can’t tolerate this, sir. We have to consider eradication. I’m talking about Project Control, Mr President. We’ve been talking about this since the 1950s at the Air War College. We aren’t talking about pre-emptive strikes, sir, but about the historic rollback of the Soviet Union. It’s time … Old Nixon was nodding gravely.

  Burdick stayed on the roof, a handkerchief on his mouth against the fall-out, until all the women and children had been escorted out of the open air.

  January 1986:

  As the pilots prepared for the interception, Yeager’s flight deck was like a little workshop, Burdick thought, glowing with the lights of Earth, and the crews’ fluorescent glareshields. The battle-ship-grey walls were encrusted with switches and instruments that shone white and yellow with internal light, though the surfaces in which they were embedded were battered and scuffed with age and use. There was a constant, high-pitched whir, of environment control pumps and fans.

  Once more he had control pedals at his feet, a joystick between his legs. He felt at home. The Shuttle orbiter was a fine old warplane.

  The Soyuz target had been over Iraq when Yeager launched from Vandenburg, and there had been a gap of ten thousand miles between them. But orbital mechanics brought him ever closer to his prey, at a rate of a thousand miles per orbit.

  Anyhow there was no rush. The Shuttle was fitted with its extended-duration pack, solar panels that had unfolded from the payload bay like wings. They could stay up here for a month if they needed to.

  Burdick even had time to send a message down a secure line to Fay at Vandenburg, and to Philip Jr, who was, at fifteen, a cadet at St John’s Military Academy in Wisconsin.

  It was good to be back in command.

  Since he’d been moved upstairs he was enjoying his assignment as head of the Office of Manned Spaceflight. But flying a desk was no substitute for flying Shuttle. At fifty-six, he’d thought he was too old to fly again, but Hans Mark – NASA Administrator, former Air Force secretary and physicist under Edward Teller – had persuaded him to come out of retirement for this one mission. Space Command needed all the pilots it could get right now, and even if this mission wasn’t the most glamorous of Project Control – those had to be the dramatic high-atmosphere swoops of Adams and Falcon and Enterprise, as they had dropped their bomb loads over the USSR, far out of reach of any intercept capability – cherry-picking the last Soyuz spy ship had to be the most technically challenging, and fun.

  The ground track took them over the Soviet Union a couple of times. Even now, a month after Project Control had reached its spectacular climax, he could still see the glowing craters where the space centres at Volgograd and Kapustin Yar used to be. The whole country was pretty dark, although he could see cities burning around the rim of Russia itself: in the Moslem republics of south Asia, and the Baltic republics, and even the east European satellites.

  Of course there was a price to pay. Before it collapsed, the Soviet government had shot off a few of its own nukes. Warsaw was gone, for instance. And there were rumours of trouble on the long Chinese frontier. But that was okay by Burdick. Everybody had taken the chance to kick the old bear when he was down, and Burdick guessed they were entitled.

  Not that everyone agreed. Before the UN had been thrown out of New York there had been pretty near universal condemnation of the US’s actions, universal except for the British anyhow. But the UN were assholes. It was no more than you’d expect from a bullshit factory like that.

  When he passed over the US, it was strange to see Florida from orbit, that big black scar down its evacuated eastern coast. Not that the loss of the Cape was so grievous. The Aldrin disaster, in the end, had just expedited LeMay’s plans to transfer all the Shuttle resources to the USAF. The climate at Vandenburg was a lot more stable for landings anyhow.

  Funny thing that the Aldrin crash, which had spurred off Project Control in the first place, had turned out to be caused by a simple glitch, a fuel line that had perished from u-v exposure. Not sabotage at all. Burdick didn’t suppose it mattered. Control would have come about anyhow. There had been a whole string of provocations from the USSR: Afghanistan, their own unmanned Shuttle, the damn Salyut spy platforms. These things had a huge historic inevitability to them, it seemed to him.

  His crew, all USAF officers, was working well, just like the drill. Even young Tom Gibson, up here on his third mission, who had spent half his time throwing up, was working well with the handheld laser-ranging device, checking Burdick’s position.

  Burdick suspected he intimidated these junior guys. They all seemed so
damn young. And how must he seem to them? – the only Moonwalker left flying, like some monolith from the past.

  The youngsters were all wearing the smart new black uniforms of Space Command, with their thunderbolt flashes and bright logos. The uniforms looked good, and had struck a chord in the public mind, Burdick knew. Air Force Space Command seemed to represent a certain order, in a country beset by foes abroad, and trouble at home: revolutionaries everywhere, and polyglot cities, and hippies and anarchists and sex maniacs and drug addicts and activists and homosexuals and punk rockers and soaring crime …

  The Rocket State, they called it: the goal was a conflict-free society administered from above, dominated by technology and smart young men like these, embodying the eternal American values of piety, hard work, family and flag. Just like the USAF, and NASA.

  Order, imposed from space.

  And now that Project Control had been implemented, that order would spread across the planet: Pax Americana, in the face of which all the old illogical ethnic and religious differences would dissolve, and mankind would come to its senses, and progress to a better tomorrow.

  And so on. Burdick accepted it all. It was a fine vision. He’d welcomed the executions of Jane Fonda and Jesse Jackson and John Lennon and the rest of those fellow travellers for their treasonous subversion, the hell with them.

  But even so these new uniforms made him feel just a little uncomfortable. They were too close to the images from Germany he’d grown up with as a kid. It was a kind of easy glamour, he thought. He preferred good-old Air Force blue.

  A couple more burns to tweak his orbit, and then they were closing fast on Soyuz. Burdick went through his terminal initiation burn, and then his rendezvous radar started to track the bogey. He assumed the low-Z position beneath the little Russian ship and used his reaction thrusters to push up towards Soyuz from beneath.

  Now he could see Soyuz, through the little rendezvous windows above his head.

  The body of Soyuz was a light blue-green, an unexpectedly beautiful, Earthlike colour. Soyuz looked something like a pepperpot, a bug-like shape nine feet across, with its fat Orbital Module stuck on the nose of the main body, a truncated cylinder, capped by the headlight-shaped Descent Module. Two matte-black solar panels jutted from its rounded flanks, like unfolded wings, and a parabolic antenna was held away from the ship, on a light gantry.

  Soyuz was basically an Apollo-era craft, still flying twenty years later. It looked, frankly, like a piece of shit to Burdick.

  Soyuz was floating right down into Yeager’s gaping-open payload bay, like a minnow drifting into the mouth of a shark.

  Tom Gibson was working the RMS now, the remote manipulator arm. The RMS had a heavy industrial-strength cutting laser bolted to its end, and Tom just reached up and snipped off the solar-cell wings of Soyuz, snip snip, like cutting the wings off a fly. Those solar panels drifted away, sparkling as they twisted. It was expertly done, and Burdick didn’t even need to slow down his rate of approach.

  The laser had come out of JPL, which had started producing some fine military applications since its weaponization in 1980.

  The crippled Soyuz settled neatly into the payload bay, as if the Shuttle orbiter had been designed for the job. Which, of course, it had.

  Burdick got into his EVA suit and, with two of his crew, made his way out through the airlock in back of the flight deck. The big bay doors were gaping open, the silvered Teflon surfaces of their radiator panels gleaming in Earthlight. The bay itself was a complex trench, crammed with equipment, stretching sixty feet ahead of him.

  Soyuz sat where it had settled, an ugly insect shape, cluttering up the bay.

  The others worked their way around Soyuz, strapping it into position for the glide home. Burdick made his way to the nose of Soyuz, to the complex docking hatch there.

  The hatch was already open, the docking probe disassembled. He was, it seemed, expected.

  Burdick, alone, pushed his way into the Orbital Module. There were bright floodlights here. He shut the hatch behind him, as he’d been trained, and worked a control panel. He heard a hiss, as air gushed into the module.

  The Orbital Module was a ball just big enough for one person to stretch out. It would have been discarded to burn up during the re-entry, so it was packed full of garbage: food containers and clothing and equipment wrappers, like a surreal blizzard. This crew had been going home, when their country went up in flames.

  When the pressure was restored, Burdick cracked his bubble helmet and took it off. There was a stale smell, and his ears popped as pressure equalized.

  The hatch to the Descent Module opened. Burdick drifted through.

  The Descent Module cabin was laid out superficially like an old Apollo Command Module, with three lumpy-looking moulded couches set out in a fan formation. Big electronics racks filled up the space beneath the couches.

  There was a single cosmonaut here, in an open pressure suit, staring up at him from the centre couch. He was squat, dark, his face as wide as the Moon. He looked to be about Burdick’s age.

  ‘Dabro pazhalavat,’ he said. ‘Welcome. I am Colonel Sergei Kozlov.’ He held up a little tray, with food. ‘Bread and salt. A traditional Russian greeting.’

  ‘The hell with it.’

  ‘Take the damn bread, General Philip Burdick.’

  Burdick hesitated. Then he floated down, and took the bread. He chewed a little of it. It was heavy, sticky.

  ‘You know my name?’

  ‘Konyeshna. Of course. You were a Moonwalker. I saw you approach, on the surface of the Tranquillity Sea.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I was teleoperating Lunokhod. I saw you wield your rock. It massed, I hazard, more than you collected as geological samples to bring home.’

  ‘We weren’t there for fucking geological samples.’

  ‘Indeed not. And you are not here for scientific purposes now, are you?’

  ‘Nor you, sir. We know this Soyuz is stuffed full of results from your surveillance activities on the Salyut.’

  ‘That is true. But what does it matter? General Burdick, I am the last serving Soviet officer. I have no one to report to.’

  Burdick discarded his bread. ‘Colonel, you’ll come onto the flight deck, and we’ll take you home.’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘The United States.’

  ‘Will there be TV cameras? Will you parade me?’

  ‘We’ll land at Vandenburg. The air base in California.’

  ‘Konyeshna. Where I aim to apply for political asylum.’ He grinned. ‘Does that surprise you, General? But what have I to return to? The radioactive winds which blow across the steppe? Your slow dismantling of my nation?’

  ‘Rebuilding. We’ll rebuild your country. We aren’t barbarians.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Kozlov said dryly. ‘But it was unnecessary. Don’t you see that, General? We were no threat to you. Not really. Nor was Lunokhod. On the Moon, we were only curious, as you were. We were going to change anyway. We had to. We couldn’t afford to keep up with you. You could have waited. A little patience.’ Kozlov smiled. ‘But I forgive you. Come. I am impatient to see your wonderful Space Shuttle.’

  Kozlov began to remove his couch restraints.

  September 1993:

  Burdick was impatient to see Phil’s Space Shuttle.

  Here he was actually cutting his lawn, a real old geezer thing to do, here in the middle of Iowa. Just what he’d always imagined retirement to be, back home in small-town America, where he’d started from. Well, hell, he was sixty-three now, and thanks to the mess space radiation had made of his central nervous system – so the surgeons told him – he looked and felt a lot older. He was entitled to his gentle retirement.

  Fay came out with a glass of chilled lemonade, and to remind him that the flight was due overhead.

  He cut the mower’s engine. Grass clippings sank to the ground, slower than Moondust. He took off his hat and wiped the sunblock off his nose.

 
He limped to the porch chair. His right leg was paining him again, the one he’d broken a couple of times already. Premature osteoporosis, they said, all that bone calcium leached away in his piss in space, but what the hell.

  He sat down, to wait to see Phil.

  While he’d been cutting, ruminating, the sun had gone down on him. The first star was out: Venus, undoubtedly, down there on the horizon. There was one hell of an aurora tonight, reaching down from the north. Never used to get auroras in southern Iowa when he was a kid. Something to do with the bombs, the weather girl said.

  There was some reading matter on the seat. Here was the speech by Curtis LeMay, venerable Chief of the Air Force, that he’d given to the USAF Association National Convention, out at Albuquerque. It was about his Sunday Punch scheme.

  … and even as we have crushed the heart of Asia, we have to look further ahead.

  President Reagan’s decision to punish China’s assault on Space Station Freedom was brave and correct. Let the ruins of the Forbidden City stand forever as a monument to our determination to maintain our grip on the high frontier, space! And yet the Chinese leadership continues to defy us, in every international forum.

  And meanwhile, the incursion in Turkey of the Arab League under Saddam Hussein is equally unacceptable. Our pre-emptive nuclear assault on Iraq was surgical, necessary and justified. Contrast that with Saddam’s recent assault, with Chinese CSS-2 missiles, on our Space Command base at RAF Fylingdales, England, exploiting a dirty and unreliable warhead.

  We must not allow the warlords of darkened Asia to believe that we can be defied with impunity. Remember, these people are not like us! They are calculating, amoral machines. We must demonstrate our strength of arm and will to them. We have the whole of the future, the whole of infinite space, before us to conquer. But we must act now. We must show we are ready! …

  The word was LeMay had Reagan’s ear.

  Not that anyone knew how much that meant. Even as the Constitution was being bucked again to allow Reagan to run for a fifth term, the rumours were that Reagan’s Alzheimer’s was becoming pronounced, and his veep, Nixon, was the real power behind the throne. Burdick didn’t suppose it mattered.