Oh, Jesus! Simultaneously, then.
He understands what has to happen. Intrepid is now spinning at several revolutions per minute to the left, and it will get worse as he pulls nose up. But with nose up, the boom should be slammed into the up-locks, and if he pulls on the T-handle at exactly the right moment…
There is no time to think about it and Kip stays hunched over in the seat and unrestrained as he grabs the stick and pulls it back, feeling an amazing increase in g-forces as the belly of the space plane becomes perpendicular to the relative airflow, slowing him. The spin to the left becomes a blur, and he’s having to pull almost to the stops to get twenty degrees nose high.
Now!
His entire body is protesting at the elephant of force that’s just jumped on his back, crunching him down as he hears the boom clang into position. He yanks hard on the T-handle, pulling it out to the stop before the sickening feeling of a broken cable registers in his head. Intrepid has transitioned back to slightly nose down again, and he realizes the T-handle has come completely out with no resistance on the line.
Oh no!
Something on the forward panel has changed, though, and as he strains to look, the warning light is gone. Somewhere on the left is supposed to be a locked indication, but he feels himself about to pass out, his vision reducing to a tunnel ahead of him as he leans forward against what feels like five g’s, and finally spots it.
Locked! God, I did it!
Kip forces his torso back into the reclined command chair and fumbles for the seat and shoulder harnesses, the very act of getting back in clearing his vision.
One hundred ninety thousand feet, he reads. When his eyes have cleared, he realizes the left spinning is slowly stopping, the world outside slowing from a blur back to identifiable landscape, the curvature of the Earth still pronounced, but the horizon showing a distinct atmospheric glow.
The indicated airspeed is climbing through a hundred and ten knots now, the downward true through-the-airspace velocity slowing toward the speed of sound. His entire body is hurting from the fight with the g-forces and he has to remind himself to look back at the checklist. The procedure is only half complete. If the hydraulic system can’t lock a wayward tail boom, it can’t unlock it and move it downward, either, and with the tail in the flipped-up position, Intrepid is uncontrollable.
The g-forces are slowly diminishing with his speed as he once again concentrates on the checklist items, wondering what other T-handles he’ll have to find.
He’s missed a section, Kip realizes. He never checked to find the circuit breaker for the hydraulic pump, and apparently there’s a backup pump as well.
Once more he leans forward, remembering the slightly higher kick panel compartment with the circuit breakers before recalling the panel of breakers overhead. His head hurts but he forces himself to focus on the placards next to each breaker until he locates one that has, indeed, popped out.
Primary Tail Boom Hydraulic Pump. That’s it!
He pushes the small round button-type breaker in, feeling the click and hearing the tiny mosquitolike whine once more as the forward panel shows the pressure rising.
Thank God! he thinks, realizing he’s solved the problem perhaps too soon. The tail shouldn’t be reconfigured until sixty thousand feet and Intrepid is only coming through a hundred and fifty thousand.
But he’s steady at last, facing generally south, and he thinks he can make out the Rio Grande River as it defines the Texas-Mexico border around El Paso, somewhere to the southwest.
Which means I’m coming down in southeastern New Mexico.
The computer map is still not showing and he attacks that problem now in frustration, searching for the right button before the map suddenly swims into view on the lower screen, his position clearly indicated over the moving map of New Mexico.
One hundred two thousand.
As soon as the tail is realigned he’ll be a flyable glider with only one chance at landing. He can glide miles in any direction then, but where should he go?
Somewhere on the panel he knows there’s a switch or a button that’s supposed to project potential landing sites, but he can’t tell where it is.
He strains to look outside, but he’s still too high to make out a strip of concrete a mile or two long.
I can’t be too far from Roswell, or maybe Cannon Air Force Base.
Surely, when he gets under sixty thousand feet, something will pop up. But why won’t the computer help now?
He tries the checklist as he comes through eighty thousand, the downward speed now slowing transonically below six hundred miles per hour, but if there’s a section on how to get the map computer to display emergency airfields, he can’t find it.
Seventy thousand.
The tail boom transition will be at sixty thousand, and he checks his ears, straining to hear the tiny whine of the hydraulic pump against the roar of the airflow around the space plane.
Okay, let’s see… I’ll need to know where the landing gear switch is, and the approach speed.
The handle is easy. It’s a small recessed switch on the left side of the panel, and he remembers enough to know there’s some sort of air bottle that blows the gear down and in place. But he knows there are no speed brakes or flaps, and Intrepid’s speed just before landing will be close to two hundred miles per hour, it’s stubby wings providing lift only in the most cursory way.
The altitude is coming through sixty thousand now, the ship buffeting slightly, and Kip goes back to the page on tail reconfiguration.
“Hold twenty-degree-nose-down attitude until booms unlock and hold attitude until down locks are engaged, then recover from dive being careful not to exceed three g’s in the pull-up.”
He pushes the stick forward, feeling the engagement springs working the manual flight control surfaces and watching the ADI for the appointed twenty-degree nose-down attitude.
There. Twenty down.
He pushes the buttons for boom release and retraction and hears the whine increase as everything begins to change. When he was hundreds of thousands of feet above, moving the booms upward caused little but mechanical shuddering, but now the nose is pitching down severely as the tail aligns and he can see the indicated airspeed rising and feel, and hear, the slipstream increase.
Two green lights flash on, indicating both tail booms are locked, and he pulls hard, feeling the g-forces climb as he searches for a meter or an indication of how heavy they are. He thinks he knows what three g’s feel like, and he holds that until the nose is up and he realizes he’s no longer riding a spacecraft, he’s flying a high-speed, heavyweight glider, and probably headed in the wrong direction.
I don’t want to go due east, do I?
He looks back down at the screen, relieved suddenly to see airfields indicated, apparently in response to the reconfiguration of the tail. But the direction he’s now flying, at nearly five hundred miles per hour, is showing no airports within the purple arc on the screen that he assumes is his gliding range and he banks back left, startled at the responsiveness of the craft and frightened by the descent rate which is over twelve thousand feet per minute.
He can barely see anything through the small windows with the seat pitched back, and he remembers he’s supposed to change it upright again. He moves the two levers on the right of the command chair, relieved when the seat slides back into a normal pitch.