Ryan’s plan was to use the tether. The tether was used to drop garbage downward, but there was no reason it couldn’t equally well be used to sling the crew return vehicle outward. He calculated that four hundred kilometers of tether, twenty times the amount used for a garbage dump, would toss the little lifting body into an orbit with an apogee of five thousand kilometers above the Earth. “That’s into the Van Allen radiation belts,” he said, “but I’ll only be there for less than an hour, no big exposure concern there.” At the apogee of the orbit, he would fire the crew return vehicle’s little rocket perpendicular to the direction of the orbit, as well as two solid propellant STAR booster rockets stolen from the perigee kick motors of satellites being repaired on the station. The trick, as he pointed out, would be to gain altitude before trying to do the plane change. The farther away from the Earth, the easier it is to make a plane change, and the added five thousand kilometers that the tether boost could give him would make an enormous difference.
Radkowski closed his eyes, trying to picture the situation. He wasn’t good at doing math in his head. Five thousand kilometers, that was, what, three thousand miles. Slightly less than one Earth radius. “It’s still not enough,” he said.
“Right,” Ryan said. “Not enough. Yet. Okay, here’s what happens next. The return vehicle is screaming in from five thousand kilometers, see. It has a lot of excess kinetic energy to dissipate. So what happens? Here’s what happens. Highly elliptical orbit. I dip into the atmosphere. But, here’s the trick. I don’t just use the atmosphere to brake. The return vehicle has lift, right? It’s a lifting body. So I point it sideways. Roll the beggar over ninety degrees, use the lift as a vector. I can take my excess delta-vee, and I can turn it into plane-change vector. Two passes through the atmosphere, I’ve got the orbit circularized, and as a free bonus, I get my plane change. Piece of cake.”
“Shit,” Radkowski said. “Does that really work?”
Ryan had been spinning lazily end over end as he talked. As he finished talking, his head was in the middle of the lounge, his feet next to the computer console. He reached out with one foot and tapped the keyboard. The screen lit up. Ryan smiled. “Believe it,” he said. “I’ve got it all worked out in computer simulation.”
Radkowski nodded. What Ryan was looking for, he realized, was not for somebody to check his work—it was obvious that he had complete confidence in that. So what was he asking about? “You’re requesting for permission to use the CRV?”
Ryan Martin shook his head. “Radkowski, I’m not asking your permission. I’m going, whether you agree or not.”
“You take that CRV without permission,” Radkowski said, “and they’ll kick your ass so far out of the astronaut corps that you won’t need a booster to get into orbit.”
“Maybe they will.” He shrugged. “Nevertheless, permission or no permission, I’m not going to leave them to die.”
“Okay,” Radkowski said. “We’ll do it.”
Ryan reached out a hand to stop his slow spin and looked up at Radkowski in surprise.
“Just one minor detail,” Radkowski said.
Ryan smiled. “Name it.”
“This mission you’re proposing is dangerous as hell, more than likely it’s not going to work, and even if it does work, it may already be too late to rescue the Russians. Half-baked, untested, dashed-together schemes like this are a formula for killing pilots. There’s no chance I’m going to let you do it.”
“It’s not dangerous,” Ryan said. “I know I’m low on pilot-in-command hours, but the computer will be doing the flying. If it looks like I can’t make the rendezvous, the computer will tell me, and I will abort to Earth.”
“No, you won’t. You’d only end up killing yourself, and I’m not about to allow you do that,” Radkowski said. “I’m going to fly it myself.”
7
Descending
Rappelling down is the part of a climb that most rock climbers like least. To Trevor, however, rappelling was the best part. It gave all of the giddy thrill of hanging on a rope over immense heights, with far less work than actually climbing. He had rappelled long before he had ever climbed, driving with his older brother to the top of canyons in Arizona and rappelling down the cliffs. So he knew about rappelling.
Nevertheless, he watched Ryan as he fed rope out. The superfiber was different. The fiber itself was coated with a monolayer of fluoropolymer that gave it an incredibly low friction; this meant that the fiber was less likely to snag on protrusions or be sawed through by a sharp corner, but also meant that only the specially designed braking mechanisms worked well on it.
The commander was smooth and matter-of-fact about belaying down. Trevor had always descended a cliff in bounces, pushing off and dropping, letting the cable swing him back into the cliff like a pendulum. It was more fun that way. The commander, though, methodically paid out line through the braking fixture, and walked step by step backward, his eyes fixed on the rock at his feet.
Boring.
When the commander got to the rover, he called up “off belay,” and Ryan relaxed.
The next step would be harder. With one arm useless, and an ankle that would not take any strain, there was no way that Estrela would be able to rappel down the cliff.
Ryan strapped Estrela tightly into a harness and attached a belay line for safety.
“Santa Luzia,” Estrela said. “Be careful, will you?”
Ryan set the fiber into the winch. “I’ll do the best I can,” he said.
8
The Rescue
The tether launch from the space station had been flawless, a high-stakes game of crack-the-whip, with John Radkowski, alone in the crew return vehicle, at the very tip of the whip, flying off on a precisely controlled trajectory at the exact apex of the sling. He had kept his hands off the controls during the descent through the atmosphere. No human could maintain the knife-edge tolerances needed for a hypersonic lifting aeropass, and so the guidance computer, with its crystalline logic and perfect mathematical calculations, had done the flying, comparing the predictions of the computer model with the performance of the actual vehicle a thousand times a second, adjusting in real time for variations in exospheric density and discrepancies between the computer model and the actual vehicle.
Now, floating in the crew return vehicle, there was nothing left to do but wait for the slow pirouette of orbits to bring the Mirusha station into range. It seemed as if the vehicle was motionless, and the Earth, endlessly varying, flowing like a sluggish river beneath it. John Radkowski was waiting, alone in space. It was in situations like this, when he had nothing to do but wait, that Radkowski was alone with his inner resources, and found them wanting. He felt lost in an immensity of void stretching off in all directions, and with the realization pounding in from all around him that he was nothing, an insignificant speck in the universe.
The thought both comforted and terrified him.
Focus on the control panel. Check the fuel levels again, for the hundredth time. Check the battery voltages. Check the radios. Focus on the radar. Is that the Russian station? No, it’s still too early.
His breath came in short, shallow pants, and he struggled to control his breathing, to avoid hyperventilating.
Focus on the control panel. Breathe evenly. Is that signal acquisition?
Yes. The indicator light glowed with the acquisition of carrier, and then the radio spoke. “CRV-1, here is Nordwijk. We’ve got you on the screens.”
The voice spoke in a crisp, Scandinavian-accented English. “You’re looking good.”