A Tower in Space-Time (The Stasis Stories #5)

by Laurence Dahners

  Gunnar came in the door so she walked over to him. “Do you know where Kaem is?”

  “Down at Staze East. Lee’s spaceplane went up for an automated flight off the launcher yesterday. If everything went well on that flight, today they were going to go up themselves.”

  “What?!” Arya exclaimed, a tight band constricting her chest at the thought of Kaem riding in untested technology.

  “They’re going to take a ride,” Gunnar said patiently. “It’s not dangerous. We’ve set up the passenger compartment so it stazes during takeoff and landing. Or, anytime something seems wrong. They’ll probably be the safest people on earth.”

  “You’re not going to be there with them?” she asked. Rationally she knew Gunnar wasn’t the kind of wise older man you could count on to keep them from doing something foolish, but…

  “Nope,” Gunnar said in his usual grumpy fashion. “Someone has to do some work around this place,” he winked, “to keep our bean counter from having heart attacks.”

  “Wait. Is Mahesh down there?” she asked hopefully. Prakant seemed wise to her.

  Gunnar nodded, “Said he wouldn’t miss it for the world. Sent up hundreds of rockets working with Space-Gen but they’d never let him go up himself.”

  Maybe Mahesh isn’t all that wise either, she thought.

  Gunnar interrupted her train of thought. “You should go down there. Check the place out” He grinned, “Make sure they aren’t about to do something stupid.”

  The idea struck her like a thunderbolt. I should see more of Staze than my business models, she thought. “Maybe I will,” she said, trying to make it sound like a concession rather than the boondoggle she thought it was.

  She checked, learned the flight yesterday had been perfect, and confirmed they were planning to launch at midday. Feeling a little giddy, she called for an Uber.

  ~~~

  Arriving at Staze East, Arya got out feeling a little surprised. It all seemed… kind of rough and ready… not finished at all. The tower itself was gleaming perfection. It rose into the eastern sky and vanished into the distance. Where are the other two legs that are supposed to be bracing it? she wondered.

  Someone broke into her concentration, saying, “Ms. Vaii?”

  Blinking, she saw it was one of the aerospace engineers Lee had hired away from Space-Gen. “Um, yes?”

  “I’m Teri Nunsen,” the woman said. “I work with April Lee?”

  “Yes, I recognize you,” Arya said, smiling. “You’re the basketball fan that came from Space-Gen.”

  Nunsen smiled, “I am. Um, you looked puzzled. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Yes,” Arya said, a little embarrassed. “I don’t see the other two legs that I thought were supposed to be forming a tripod with this limb of the tower?”

  Nunsen turned and looked, then turned back to Arya. “It’s a pretty common question. The human eye can only resolve objects down to about one-sixtieth of a degree of their field of vision. At twenty miles, that means you wouldn’t be able to see anything smaller than thirty feet wide. Since those legs are only about five feet in diameter, they’re just not visible from here.”

  “Oh,” Arya said, embarrassed because their presentation to the Governor had talked about how they’d be hard to see. “Um, shouldn’t I be able to see the flashing lights?”

  “To reduce light pollution, each one’s aimed to keep its light above the horizon. Since we’re below the horizon for each of those lights, they’re barely visible at night and not at all in the day.” She smiled, “You’d see ’em if you were up in the air though. Um, are you down here to watch the launch? I could take you over. I’m on the way there myself.”

  “That’d be great,” Arya said. As they walked, she said, “Were you in on the design of the space plane?”

  “Yeah,” Teri said enthusiastically. “It’s been so much fun!”

  “How… are you finished with it already?” Arya asked, hoping she didn’t sound like a worrywart. “I thought it took years to design and build a plane?”

  “It did,” Teri grinned, “before Stade.” She shrugged, “A lot of the engineering that used to go into planes was spent designing something strong enough, but spending a lot of time working to achieve a design with that strength that weighed as little as possible. None of that applies anymore. If Stade’s more than a millimeter thick, it’s strong enough. If we want it to be lighter yet, we just cast it in vacuum. Now the design process is limited to aerodynamics and arranging the mechanicals. The aerodynamics for the space plane are mostly aimed at achieving a shape that’ll result in the least sonic boom. The design element we spent the most time on was how to fold the wings inside it and then extend them when we’re descending and landing.” She laughed, “Even there Stade’s properties are a huge help. A wing that’s only a millimeter thick doesn’t require much space inside the fuselage.”

  “But… what about all the flaps on a wing? Surely your wing has to be thicker than a millimeter to hold the motors that move the flaps, doesn’t it?”

  Teri laughed delightedly, “Yeah, that was a big problem. Until Mr. Seba asked us if we couldn’t just rotate or tilt the entire wing up and down a little, rather than just a flap at the trailing edge. Turns out it works fine. Maybe not as perfect as a wing that can be reshaped with flaps, but pretty damned well. And the decrease in complexity and the increase in fuselage volume makes it an immensely worthwhile tradeoff.”

  “What about all the… other stuff? Radar, radio, instruments, all that stuff?”

  “Most of that we just bought off the shelf from people who supply aircraft builders. We adjusted the aircraft to fit existing equipment instead of designing equipment to fit the aircraft.”

  They’d arrived at a room with windows that faced the tower as it rose into the eastern sky. Arya noticed the glass in the windows had Stade wires in it. To protect us occupants should anything go wrong with the launch? she wondered with a little trepidation.

  “There’s Mr. Seba,” Teri said, pointing and starting to walk his way.

  Arya trailed along, suddenly reluctant.

  Teri said, “Mr. Seba, you have a visitor.”

  Kaem turned, his eyes focused on Teri momentarily, but then they jumped to Arya. “Arya!” he exclaimed, stepping around Teri and heading for her. He started to lift his arms as if to hug her, but then dropped them. Still, he had a huge smile, “Did you come down to watch the launch?!”

  Arya nodded, aching to lift her own arms and hug him. She just nodded. “I made it in time?”

  “Barely!” he said excitedly. “We should be launching in another few minutes.”

  “This one’s going to have living passengers?” she asked, worry tinging her voice.

  “Not exactly passengers. Mahesh insisted on going, so maybe you could consider him a passenger. Otherwise, our test pilot, Jerome Gilliam, and Lee are taking it up. As the designer, she wants to see how it flies from the inside instead of just monitoring telemetry. And she can troubleshoot if needed.”

  Arya blinked, ecstatic that Kaem wasn’t going himself, “Where are they going to land?”

  “Depends on Lee. They’ll at least go around the Earth and land back here. That should take about eighty-seven minutes, plus some time for slowing and joining traffic patterns. Maybe an hour and a half.” He shrugged, “But Lee might decide to go around again.”

  “Why not just turn around somewhere over the Atlantic and come back?”

  Kaem tilted his head as he contemplated. “Um, a five-minute flight would put them about 1,300 miles out over the ocean, going about 7.7 kilometers per second in the wrong direction. They’d have to fire retros in order to descend enough to do some aerobraking. Once they got down to a flyable speed and altitude, they’d have to make a big circle to turn back this way, then fly back at a much slower speed than they went out. They could fly supersonic, but it’d still take them almost two hours to fly back here after they finished turning around.”

  Ar
ya blinked, “It’d take longer to turn around and come back than to go all the way around the Earth?”

  Kaem frowned, “Maybe the pilot would know how to shave some off of that. I’m not sure how long it’d take to rotate the craft so they could use their engine as a retrorocket and slow down enough to descend back into the atmosphere. Maybe he could do that fast enough that they wouldn’t get so far out to sea.”

  “Couldn’t he just use the spaceplane’s rocket to slow to a stop and blast back this way?”

  Kaem’s eyes widened, “They’re going to be going hellafast when they come off the end of the rail. 7.7 kps is over 17,000 miles per hour. Making a turn in the atmosphere would use a lot less fuel than trying to completely reverse it with the rocket. They’d have to install extra fuel tanks to carry enough fuel for that.” He hesitated, “Going all the way around’s a lot more economical, which, uh, makes you happy, no?”

  She grinned at him, “So, you’re saying that I should stick to numbers that have dollar signs attached and leave the physics ones to you?”

  Kaem gave her a warm smile. “I wouldn’t be so crude as to point out that you just made a little joke.”

  Arya gave him a little punch on the shoulder.

  A sudden hush fell and Kaem turned to face the window.

  Arya followed his gaze and thought she felt a faint trembling through her feet. A long, tapered cylinder appeared on the rail outside the window and moved away out along the tower at about the pace of an accelerating car. She turned to Kaem, “Why so slow? I thought this thing took off like a rocket?”

  He shrugged, “It accelerates at less than two-tenths of a gee, less than the average car can do, for the first twenty kilometers because we don’t want to cross the sound barrier until it’s beyond the coast. That part of the launch takes about three minutes. Once it’s out over the ocean it jumps to fifteen gravities and does the remaining 180 kilometers of the rail in under a minute.”

  Watching the space-plane move off got a little boring, especially after it’d gone far enough it was out of sight. Arya looked around the room to see who she knew, but her eye caught on a big screen showing Prakant, Lee, and a stranger, presumably the pilot, Jerome Gilliam. They were all wearing flight suits with Staze’s logo on them. That’s live video of them on board, she realized.

  Suddenly the video blinked out. At the same time, the gentle tremble she’d felt in her feet got rougher and more obvious. She grabbed Kaem’s arm, “What happened?!”

  “They’re accelerating at fifteen gees. There’s a lot of power being transferred from the flywheels to the launch chain. Even though we’ve worked hard to balance everything there’s still some vibration.”

  “No!” she waved at the screen. “Their video went out!”

  “Oh,” he said, looking that way. “Fifteen gees is too much to tolerate, so their compartment’s been stazed. The screen to the left of that one shows all parameters are nominal.”

  Sure enough, fifty seconds later the screen lit with their images again. Gilliam scooted up and his eyes took in the instruments, then he relaxed.

  Arya nudged Kaem and pointed to the screen, “He hasn’t taken the controls!”

  “No. The flight’s automatic at this point. Some would call it ‘autopilot.’ He won’t need to do much until they’re coming back around the world and getting ready to land.”

  She frowned, “How’d he learn to fly this thing anyway? Simulators?”

  “Hard to ‘simulate’ the flight of something that’s never flown, though the engineers did draft a program that approximated its actual flight better than we expected. He used it before the first flight, mostly for instrument familiarization, then he practiced flying it remotely and eventually for real. They did the test flights down at the Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Only crashed it once.”

  “What!”

  Kaem grinned. “Crashed it on purpose. Into the ocean with the interior in stasis to ‘prove out the safety system.’”

  Arya breathed a sigh of relief but gave Kaem a glare.

  He continued, “Once the plane was certified, he flew it back here and landed it at Norfolk International. One of our blimps carried it back to the launch tower from the airport.”

  Arya felt her eyes widen, “You’re going to want to build a landing strip here aren’t you?!”

  Kaem rubbed her shoulder, “Relax. Yes, it’d be helpful to have a landing strip, but it can wait until we’ve got money coming in from the flight launch program.”

  Arya looked over at the screen. Prakant and Lee were bent over their displays, presumably monitoring incoming data. She looked at Kaem, “This is going to get pretty boring isn’t it?”

  He laughed, “We’re changing the world! How can that be boring?!”

  “Kaem,” she said reproachfully.

  He laughed again, “Yeah. It’s gonna be boring for an hour and a half or so. If you weren’t here, I’d be getting on my laptop and trying to get some work done. But, if you’d like, I could take you on a tour of Staze East?”

  Giving him a shy smile, she asked, “What’s a girl gotta do to get invited to lunch around here?”

  Kaem’s face registered shock, then brimmed with happiness. He waved toward the back of the room. “Right this way ma’am.”

  As they walked toward the back, one of the engineers manning desks in the room popped up out of his chair, “Mr. Seba, can we discuss the performance of the flywheels? We’re going to need more power to launch the full hundred metric tons at fifteen gees.”

  “It’ll have to wait, Rogers,” Kaem said airily, without slowing. “I’ve promised Ms. Vaii a tour of Staze East. Why don’t you come up with options for me to look at when I get back?”

  Arya leaned closer, “You can stop and answer his questions.”

  Kaem gave her a wide-eyed look but spoke quietly, “I can not! Not when I’m on my way out to lunch with the love of my life!”

  Arya rolled her eyes but didn’t make a retort.

  ~~~

  There were apparently several Ubers standing by at Staze East because one had pulled up to the entrance by the time they got there.

  Kaem directed it on a little tour of the grounds on their way off Staze’s land.

  “Isn’t there a place to get coffee or lunch here on the campus?” Arya asked.

  “Um, no,” Kaem said as if surprised.

  I should’ve come down here before now, Arya thought, frowning. “There should be. We want our employees to be happy.”

  Kaem pulled back to look at her, “Are you suggesting we get into the restaurant business too?”

  “No!” Arya said, surprised he’d think that. “No. We just lease space to someone at a really good rate. Perhaps for a small percentage of the profits. Just advertising the possibility should get people thinking. There should be a lot of people anxious to get in on the ground floor of the business around a space launch facility.”

  “That sounds great,” Kaem said. “Um is that something you could do for us? I don’t think anyone down here knows squat about how to make that happen.”

  Patting his arm reassuringly, Arya said, “That’s what us business managers are for.”

  Kaem tilted his head, “Why don’t we have something like that at Staze West?”

  “There’re all kinds of nice little places in walking distance,” she frowned at him, “not including Bonnie’s.”

  “Hey! I thought that was a good place to go if we didn’t want anyone to see us?”

  Arya rolled her eyes, “It was certainly an effective choice for that objective. But I’d rather give away the company’s secrets than eat there again.”

  They were getting out of the Uber and walking into a tiny, and apparently ancient, café. Kaem said, “You’re probably going to say the same thing about this place. Their grilled cheese sandwich is okay. But even I can make a grilled cheese.”

  “Oh my God!” Arya said, looking around the inside. “Is this where everyone
eats?”

  Kaem laughed, “No. Most bring their lunches or order fast food delivered from the next town.”

  She gave him a side-eyed glance, “It’s no wonder you’ve been having to date so many different women if you’ve been taking them to places like this.”

  Kaem grinned, “You’re really getting into the jokes aren’t you?”

  She sniffed, “Only ones at your expense.”

  Kaem ordered a grilled cheese and Arya ordered a salad, figuring that no one could screw up a salad.

  It turned out that Joe’s grill could make a terrible salad.

  Kaem let her have part of his grilled cheese. It was better than the salad, though not great.

  Still, his sharing it with her made her feel cared for…

  Chapter Seven

  The Herald, Chesapeake, Virginia—Over just the past six months, Staze Inc—based in Charlottesville, but with a large campus just west of Chesapeake—has become the center of the space launch world. The immense though slender tower most of you have probably seen going up into the southeastern sky—the one that goes up so far it vanishes into the distance—has been sending up satellites and spacecraft at an ever-increasing pace. Two the first month. Five the second month. Several per week since then, with the record so far being three in one day.

  The world has turned to southeastern Virginia for space launch because Staze’s tower uses electrical power to shoot a craft up that rail and into orbit. They launch to orbit for a mere twenty-five million dollars—about one-half to one-quarter of the cost of a traditional multistage rocket launch. These launches are far less polluting than a rocket, and, despite some early fears and protests, make significantly less noise than the takeoff of a jet aircraft.

  Staze says they expect to lower the cost even further in the future. In addition, the capsules and spacecraft Space-Gen and GLI are using to send things up to orbit are fully reusable because they’re made of Stade. Stade is the immensely strong material developed by Staze. Currently, it’s exclusively licensed to those two companies for space uses. That means that the costs of launch vehicles are also going to be lower than they have been in the past.