The Glass Lady (43 page)

“Hard latch, Jack!”

The man-size PAM with a rocket nozzle at its base was firmly latched to LACE's mid-line grapple fixture.

“Super, Will! Let's arm the thing and begin our pitchup . . . Soyuz? We're positive rigidize on the target. You can back off at earliest opportunity.”

“Soyuz in motion, Endeavor. Thank you.”

Enright and Karpov up front, flying on their left sides, could not see Soyuz off Endeavor's tail section. But Parker through his overhead windows could see the Soviet vessel behind Shuttle.

In the moistly black sky over Brazil 20 degrees south of the Equator, Parker saw the orange flash of thrusters on Soyuz as she slowly backed away from Shuttle and LACE close to Endeavor's open bay.

“Rotating,” Parker called as he commanded the arm's wrist joint to flex. The end effector slowly twisted to lay the upright, 10,000-pound LACE on her side.

“Five minutes, Will. Feet wet,” Enright called. At 08 hours 11 minutes, Shuttle left Vitoria, Brazil, behind as Endeavor, with LACE in tow, and Soyuz sped past the coastline for the South Atlantic and 11,000 miles of open water.

The remote arm gently laid LACE on her side. A full minute ticked by as the target with the PAM attached assumed a horizontal position with the PAM rocket nozzle pointed toward Shuttle's tail. LACE's ten-foot-long, blistered body was parallel to the open bay.

“Ready for pitch program, Number One.”

“Okay, Skip. Four minutes . . . Soyuz: Endeavor rotating. You clear?”

“Clear!”

Major Karpov in his coveralls watched Enright disengage the digital autopilot and energize the control stick steering.

“CSS alive, Will.”

Parker floated at his aft window. Outside, the moon was directly over Mali in central West Africa, halfway between England and the Equator. As Shuttle flew on her side with her nose pointed northeast, Enright and Karpov had the cold white moon in their center forward windows. It looked brilliant but small without air to magnify its face.

Enright pulled back on his rotational hand controller. Mother chose the best thrusters in Shuttle's twin tail pods. Parker saw orange plumes erupt upward in the darkness on each side of Endeavor's tail fin.

Shuttle pitched upward. Since she lay on her left side, her motion as seen from the sea was a flat, counterclockwise maneuver as her body's longitudinal nose-to-tail axis remained horizontal.

Enright stopped his rates when his green television told him that Shuttle's tail pointed toward the direction of flight, southeastward. Endeavor moved backward toward the South Pole. This aimed the PAM motor against LACE's orbital path. PAM's rocket engine would thus brake LACE's speed.

When Shuttle stopped her maneuver, her nose faced South America far to the northwest.

“Three minutes, Skip!” Enright sounded anxious. “Dump it!”

“Pre-arm electrical bus armed.” The AC carefully read the PAM ignition checklist printed on the aft television screen. “Signal interface unit disabled.” He turned off the PAM electronics left in its bay cradle to prevent electrical interference. The AC sent his commands to PAM by radio when he tapped out coded instructions on the aft computer keyboard. His moist fingers moved slowly. He had to get it right the first time. “PAM guidance on.” PAM's own liquid-fueled attitude thrusters would hold LACE's horizontal position when Shuttle disconnected from the PAM.

“Two minutes, Skipper!”

“PAM motor armed.” The command pilot had triggered the PAM's internal firing mechanism. The braking rocket would ignite automatically in 180 seconds, ready or not.

“Damn,” Enright sighed. “Puts us a minute long, Will.”

The payload assist module engine would fire in three minutes, but LACE and Shuttle would enter the SAA zone in two.

“Yeh, Jack . . . Okay to release our babies. Get ready to fly, Number One.”

Enright had his left hand poised on the translational hand controller and his right hand gripped the attitude control stick between his thighs.

The Crew Activity Plan had called for LACE and PAM to be freed at least half an hour before PAM ignited. That would give Endeavor ample time to back away from PAM before ignition. Now, PAM's rocket would go in their faces, and go well within the South Atlantic Anomaly. At their velocity of 17,500 statute miles per hour, the mission time-line was an immovable object. LACE would be one minute and 300 miles inside the Anomaly when PAM's rocket fired to drive LACE into the sea.

Parker squeezed the pistol grip in his right hand to release the end effector's hold upon PAM.

The three snare wires did not move.

A yellow PORT TEMP caution light on the RMS panel flashed as a warning tone wailed.

“No joy, Jack!” Parker pumped the release trigger in his large right hand like a .44-40 at high noon.

“One minute to transit, Will. Two minutes to PAM ignition.”

Jacob Enright spoke very calmly. He could have been in the Singer Mission Simulator with a cup of cold coffee on the center console between himself and Alexi Karpov. The pilot's reflexes inside the Russian inspired him to tighten his seat belt.

“Damn,” the exhausted, sore Aircraft Commander sighed. He had not bent his metal in a flying machine for ten years. He hesitated with his tired face close to his rear window.

“Forty-five seconds to transit, Skipper.”

“Okay, okay!”

Parker reached for Panel A-14 by his inflamed and throbbing right thigh.

“RMS shoulder guillotine to jett!” the AC shouted.

Explosive charges silently ignited in the remote arm's shoulder mount, where the arm joined Shuttle's portside sill under Parker's nose. He saw the expensive elegant arm, still attached to the PAM, separate from Endeavor in a tiny cloud of insulation scraps and severed wire bundles. The 100-million-dollar mechanical arm was space junk.

“Hit it, Jack!”

The open payload bay faced LACE with PAM and the crooked arm dangling from it.

Enright's left hand jerked the THC handle. Upward firing thrusters in Endeavor's nose and tail pushed the starship back from LACE. The jets fired for ten seconds and stopped. Aft, Parker anxiously watched the amputated arm as it cleared the bay sill while Shuttle backed off ponderously.

“Bay clear! Roll, Jacob!”

“Clear, Soyuz!” Enright shouted as he backed blindly away from LACE.

Above the forward windows, the event timer ticked down the seconds until Shuttle, Soyuz, LACE, and PAM pierced the invisible electromagnetic wall of the Anomaly in the middle of the South Atlantic.

. . . 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . .

Parker stared at the timer in front of his sweating face.

. . . 2 . . . 1 . . . Zero.

Making five miles per second beneath the untwinkling stars, Endeavor entered the South Atlantic Anomaly, 2,000 miles east of Porto Alegre, Brazil, 30 degrees south of the Equator. The small television on the panel to Parker's left ticked down through 55 seconds to PAM automatic ignition.

Forward, the left of Enright's three televisions showed the horizontal situation display blinking out the distance from Endeavor to LACE. The kinetic energy imparted to Shuttle by her momentary thruster firing carried the manned starship sideways away from LACE. The green numerics climbed slowly through 10 meters, 20 meters, 30 meters.

“Roll initiated!” Enright called. He commanded Mother to choose her best reaction control system jets to roll Shuttle over until her black belly faced LACE and PAM's rocket, now 40 meters away.

Slowly, Endeavor's wings rolled over in the eternally silent nighttime sky.

Parker gritted his teeth at the slow roll rate Mother maintained to prevent snapping off the great, open doors of the empty payload bay.

“Thirty seconds to ignition. Fifty meters,” Enright chanted as Shuttle flew momentarily upside down with her wings horizontal. The wingover continued slowly as the flightdeck rolled away from LACE.

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.