The Glass Lady (31 page)

Enright bent his head to view the gauges beneath his chin on the top of the chestpack. The bottom portion of his clear helmet was optically ground to slightly magnify the small meters on his chest.

“Oxygen at 4.3 pounds relative, Skipper.”

“Super, Jack. Come on out.”

Enright disconnected the backpack's service and cooling umbilical line, unsnapped the PLSS from the wall bracket which held the pilot fast to the airlock, and he floated free.

Carefully, Enright stuck his helmeted head through the yard-wide hatch of the airlock. Parker guided his shoulders like an obstetrician at the moment of birth to prevent Enright from snagging the awkward million-dollar suit or the thick backpack on the hatch rim. The PLSS barely cleared the hatch.

“Thanks, Will.”

The suited copilot stood upright in the mid-deck. Sealed within his massive EMU, the pilot already panted from the effort of holding his arms down at his sides. The oxygen pressure in the suit, 4.3 pounds greater than the surrounding cabin pressure, made the arms rise, like blowing into an inside-out rubber glove pops out the fingers. Keeping the EMU's arms down required constant work by the pilot inside.

“Endeavor: Colorado with you via Hawaii at 04 plus 26.” The AC in his liquid coolant long johns heard his headset crackle. His partner listened to the ground call from inside his airtight fishbowl. Shuttle's internal wireless audio system exchanged radio signals with Enright's backpack radios.

“Gotcha, Flight,” the AC replied as he pressed his mike button. Both pilots floated with their feet slightly above the mid-deck floor. The stiff knee joints of his suit kept Enright's knees bent.

“Okay, Will. We have a good lockup on you. We're up-linking your state vectors now. How you guys coming?”

The Hawaii station beamed to Shuttle exacting, electronically encoded statements of her velocity and position across the sky. In her Guidance and Navigation mode running on one of the ship's four primary computers, Mother received and digested the navigation update from Earth. Her warm, black boxes memorized the information for crosschecking the three inertial measurement units humming in Endeavor's nose.

“We're fine up here, Flight. Jack is suited and on pure 0
₂
. He went internal on the PLSS at 04 plus 23. And I'm in my water pants.”

Enright floated beside the command pilot. On Enright's chestpack, a digital timer ticked upward past 00:04 to keep the flier appraised of his oxygen time remaining.

“Will: We want you on the flightdeck right now, please. Give us a call when you're upstairs. No delay, buddy. Only with you another five minutes this pass.”

Parker and Enright looked at each other. The AC shrugged. Enright held his ground by grabbing a ceiling handhold.

“Okay, Will. Go on up and leave Jack in the mid-deck. We want Jack to confirm placement of his EVA visor and to remove the sunshade from the mid-deck hatch. When you get upstairs, maneuver to minus-Z. Move out, guys.”

The Ground Controller knew that Enright's EMU suit would not fit through the ceiling access hole to the flight-deck topside. The Spacecraft Communicator's voice relayed from Colorado Springs failed to conceal the urgency.

“On it, Flight,” the AC called as he pressed his mike button. Parker floated headfirst into the airlock. Since his liquid cooling drawers had built-in feet like a child's sleeper, he was not uncomfortable in the cool cabin air. The AC floated out of the airlock. He carried another large helmet. This one was white all around except for a rectangular face area. Enright took the second helmet from the Colonel and he placed it carefully over his clear helmet. He twist-locked the new helmet to his neckring. The face region of the outer visor was a mirror, laser-proof. Standing beside Enright, Parker saw his own lined face in the reflection from the mirrored visor.

“Jack has the EVA visor in place, Flight. I'm goin' up.”

“Copy, Will. Call from upstairs,” the ground called impatiently.

Parker flew on his side to his bunk on the starboard wall. He retrieved the helmet from his orange pressure suit. When he pulled off his light headset and pushed the damp helmet and its anti-laser visor over his head, a communications cable dangled from the neckring of the helmet.

“AC goin' topside, Colorado.”

“Understand, Jack.”

Until Parker plugged in his cables on the flightdeck, he had no link to Shuttle's four S-band, phase-modulated antennae.

Four hours and twenty-nine minutes aloft, Shuttle passed over the island of Kauai, Hawaii, in full daylight.

The AC gave Enright a thumbs-up as the tall flier hauled his grossly swollen right leg through the ceiling hole. He left Enright alone below decks where the copilot went to work on the window cover of the egress hatch by the galley.

“With you, Flight,” the AC called from the upstairs, forward cockpit after he plugged in his communications cable. Drawing his lap belt across the waist of his liquid coolant underwear, he squinted into the fierce daylight of the flightdeck. “You with me, Jack?”

“On station down here, Will,” Enright radioed from below, where he fiddled with the circular window cover.

“Rollin' over, Flight,” the command pilot called from the forward left seat.

Endeavor's Digital Autopilot held trim with the ship flying on her left side and her white, glass-covered nose pointing northwest perpendicular to the line of flight.

Parker pushed several square, white, lighted pushbuttons on the center console between his seat and the copilot's empty seat. He took over manual control of the ship's reaction control system thrusters.

“I have the con,” the Colonel advised as he worked the rotational hand controller between his thighs.

“Understand,” the earphones crackled inside Parker's helmet.

With the RCS jets in vernier mode, the thrusters popped only instantaneously no matter how far the AC torqued the control stick in his right hand. He maneuvered the 100-ton starship slowly to avoid excessive loads upon the open doors of the payload bay.

Slowly, the vessel rolled rightside-up as Mother chose the best combination of Shuttle's 44 RCS thrusters to obey the pilot's hand commands.

“Heads up,” the AC confirmed when Shuttle's black belly faced the brilliantly blue Pacific. “Keep an eye on our Freon loop temperatures, Colorado.”

“Will do, Endeavor.”

With Shuttle flying rightside-up, the sun burned fully upon the open bay and upon the space radiators which require the cold shade of the inverted ship's shadow to do their work. Hence, Shuttle's normal belly-up attitude in space.

Without waiting for instructions, the AC cranked up the flow rate of the ship's freon coolant loops through which Endeavor sweats.

The ship's nose pointed northwest. Parker did not look over his left shoulder through the window where he knew LACE and Soyuz followed in tight formation. With Shuttle's port side toward their companion ships, Jacob Enright in the mid-deck looked directly at their nearby traffic through the hatch window in the port side.

The AC had been too busy concentrating on the forward horizon 900 miles distant and on the attitude indicator ball before his face to look outside. He returned the ship to Mother's magnetic mind with instructions to hold automatic trim. Then the Colonel turned his face to his two left windows.

“Damn” was all the command pilot said. “You got the view out there, Jack?”

“Sure do,” the intercom crackled from below decks.

The AC unconsciously touched his faceplate to confirm that his laser-reflective visor was down and locked.

“Who the hell is
that?”

The Colonel's voice was not anxious so much as it was annoyed as he spoke privately to Enright over the intercom. He sounded like a man who had not merely blown a tire, but had done it in the rain.

“Gettin' a might crowded up here, Flight.” This time, Parker depressed his mike button to energize the air-to-ground communications loop.

“Give us a visual, Will. Hawaii with you another minute only. Be advised we are on Channel B now and secure.” No one but Mission Control, not even the press, could listen to the conversation. Ordinarily, Shuttle air-ground transmissions are public property except when the crew is working with secret military payloads or when the crew is making a regular daily medical report to the ground.

“Understand Channel B, Flight,” the AC began. “Out Window Number One to my left, I have LACE maybe 120 meters off the port wingtip. Puts it about three points abaft the port beam, say 45 degrees behind me. Soyuz is out maybe 100 meters just left of our nose. And between Ivan and LACE is new traffic about 90 meters directly abeam of my seat. Soyuz is not between us and the new object . . . What the hell is it, Colorado?”

In Colorado Springs, the Space Command quickly digested the pilot's description to a triangle 300 feet on each side, with LACE, Endeavor, and the unidentified spacecraft each at one corner. Soyuz drifted 20 yards outside the triangular formation.

“Will: In twenty seconds, describe the contact.”

“She's about the size of Soyuz. Very similar in fact: Spherical head module with a cylindrical afterbody behind. All black, no running lights that I can see. Short antennas—I see two—between the sphere and the afterbody.”

“Okay, Will. You have your Angola bird. She's Chinese. Peoples Republic. Our people figure she went up on a Long March-3 booster. And she is manned. Keep Jack inside until we update you by California in four minutes. Losing you. . .”

The Long March-3 is the most powerful missile of the Peoples Republic of China. Standing 144 feet tall, the three-stage rocket returned the salvaged, U.S. satellite, Westar-6, back to orbit in April 1990. Westar had been retrieved from space by the shuttle in 1985. The relaunched communications satellite was renamed Asia Sat-1.

The Mission Commander sat in glum silence in his drawers with the dangling water tubes. He kept his visored faceplate close to the flightdeck's left side windows. With the sun already half up in the east, Parker had a dazzling sea behind three ships each barely three Shuttle lengths away.

“Can't be, Jack.” The AC did not touch his mike pushbutton for the voice-activated intercom.

“I know,” Enright radioed with his two bubble helmets pressed to the 12-inch-wide window in the mid-deck hatch. The round window was eight feet beneath the Skipper's seat upstairs. “They only launched—when was it?”

The command pilot was already reviewing his orbital plot maps. He scanned the Mission Elapsed Time numerics which ticked away in little glass windows on Panel Overhead-3 above the forward window of the copilot's empty seat. The timer indicated that Endeavor was 00 days, 04 hours, 33 minutes, and 08 seconds out, over the north Pacific. The ship's position was about 30 degrees north latitude by 145 degrees west longitude, some 1,300 nautical miles from California.

“No more than 54 minutes, Jack. That makes their rendezvous in only 158 degrees. They sure as hell didn't carry any out-of-plane error under power. That's for sure.”

“Like to go to their flight school, Skipper.”

“Yeh, Jack. Probably have to bone up on your Russki to do it.”

“How's the time-line, Will?”

“We're at 4 hours and 34 minutes, Jack.”

“Nice. That gives us two hours before we skirt the Anomaly region on Rev Five. And they want me to stay put burning up my O
₂
, down here while Colorado plays air-traffic control. Real nice.” The copilot in hard-suit floated close to his basement window.

“Reckon the backroom has its reasons, Number One. You'll get outside soon enough. 'Sides, they'll be on the horn in another minute.”

“I'll be here, Skip.”

Eleven hundred nautical miles due west of San Diego, the four vessels coasted in the perpetual freefall of orbit. Each ship was ever falling downward toward the blue-green December sea 130 nautical miles below. But so fast did they hurtle across the starless black sky of mid-morning that the curvature of the blue planet fell away over the horizon before the ships could plummet like meteors into the Pacific. As dictated by the laws of orbital mechanics, the Earth's far horizon, 1,000 miles to the east, fell away just steeply enough that the four ships would miss it by 150 statute miles for years. Were it not for the infinitesimal drag against the ships from high, stray air molecules and the photon wake of the solar wind, the four starships would freefall in their orbits forever.

“I have traffic in motion at my twelve o'clock low!”

At Enright's shout from below decks, Parker turned his face to his left window where he squinted behind his helmet's closed faceplate.

The black intruder, scorched slightly by the air friction heating of its launch, slowly pitched its round head upward. The Chinese craft stopped its rotation with its blunt bottom pointed seaward.

As Parker and Enright watched from 300 feet abeam, the cylindrical afterbody of the Chinese vessel opened lengthwise. A dishlike device perhaps two meters across protruded from the hull. It pointed at LACE, which rolled slowly against the emerald sea off Shuttle's left wingtip.

“Don't do it!” Parker shouted. He pushed his transmitter button without any notion as to whether the intruder or the ever-silent Soyuz-T were listening on Endeavor's FM frequency band of 2287.5 megahertz.

The eyes of the American airmen concentrated upon LACE three shuttle lengths away.

At the upper end of the vertically positioned LACE, a hemispheric shroud—like the roof of an astronomical observatory—housed LACE's lasing equipment and focusing mirrors.

“Don't be stupid!” Parker shouted through Endeavor's antennae. His cry filled his helmet's closeness.

LACE slid back a wide panel on its shroud faring which covered its Large Optics Demonstration Experiment innards. In the ferocious daylight of airless space, Parker could clearly see LACE's works twinkle within the shroud under the fierce sun, like a diamond turning be neath a jeweler's monocle.