The airspeed indicator now read Mach 24.8. Closing….
Vance reached for the heavy throttle grips, watching the final seconds tick down.
… four, three, two, one…
“Terminate hydrogen feeds.”
He yanked back on the handles, feeling a dying tremor flow through the vehicle. The airspeed indicator had just hit 17,108 mph.
In the unearthly silence that followed, Petra's synthetic voice cut through the cabin. “Preliminary orbital coordinates are computed as perigee 101.3 miles, apogee 117.8 miles. Duration is one hour and twenty-seven minutes. Radar altimeter will provide data for second iteration of calculations in thirty-six minutes.”
The engines were completely shut down now as they coasted through the dark. Nothing could be heard but hydraulic pumps, air conditioners, light groans from zero-gravity-induced stresses in the massive fuselage.
"Zadroka!" Androv shouted. "We've done it! Maybe there is a God."
Now, as Daedalus began to slip sideways, like a liner adrift at sea, the nose camera showed they were passing over the ice-covered wilds of northern Alberta.
Vance felt a sudden rush of fluids from his extremities, where they had been pooling because of the G-forces, upward into his face and torso. The sensation was one of falling, hanging on to his seat. Clumsily he unfastened his G-seat harness and pushed up to…
He sailed. Across the cockpit. At the last instant he twisted, trying to right himself, but before he could he'd slammed into the bank of video monitors on the opposite wall.
"Jesus!"
"Sweetie, you look like a flying fish." Eva drifted back in her seat, loving him all over again.
"I feel like a newborn deer trying to stand up." He rotated and carefully pushed himself off the ceiling, repressing the instinct to kick like a scuba diver. "But remember the old Chinese proverb. Don't criticize a man till you've floated in his shoes for a day."
"Darling, it's a dream come true. I'm finally weightless," she laughed. "At last, no more dreading to get on a scale."
"The pain in my arm is gone," Androv spoke up again, renewed satisfaction in his voice. "We've just performed our first medical experiment in space. It's good for gunshot wounds."
"I'd like to perform another experiment," Eva said. She was slowly extracting herself from the G-seat. "What kind of electrical system do we have on board?"
"We have a massive battery section, kept charged by the turbines," Androv replied. "All these electronics require a lot of power."
"So we could transmit?"
"Of course. We're designed for that."
"What are you planning?" Vance looked over as he drifted back across the cockpit.
"A small surprise for Tanzan Mino." She was twisting around as she floated next to her straps. "Let me start preparing the laptop. I knew there was a reason why I brought it." She reached down under the seat and pushed it out, where it floated.
"I want to hook this into Petra." She reached up and awkwardly retrieved it. "Is there any way I can?"
"There's provision for laptop interface. They worked so well on the American shuttles, our people installed an identical setup here." Androv swam slowly to the console, then flipped down a panel, revealing a serial port. "You can connect it there. The wiring's in place."
Vance twisted and checked their coordinates. They were now at latitude 56 degrees, longitude 109 degrees, headed over central Canada. "Incidentally, so much for North American air defenses. No radar interrogations whatsoever."
"That's because of our Stealth design," Androv said. "We have almost no radar signature. Not only are we a menace to the world, we're invisible."
Vance floated down and settled into the central G-seat. The more he learned about the Daedalus, the more unsettling he found it. What should they do with this monster? Maybe turn it over to the UN as a monument to technology gone amuck, to high-tech excess. At last, he thought, man has achieved the ability to move anywhere on the planet, at speeds as fast as the laws of physics will allow, and do it invisibly. Maybe it should be called the Shadow.
"Okay." Eva interrupted his thoughts. "I've finished tying in the Zenith. We're about to go live from the top, gentlemen, the very top. I'm going to send the protocol to every wire service in the world. What better credibility than to be downlinked live from space?"
Vance looked at the picture from the nose camera. They were over the Atlantic now, which meant they'd soon be passing over the Soviet Union, with line-of-sight horizons that stretched from Europe to Asia.
"Why settle for print?" He had a sudden thought. "How about television? With all this video gear, we should be able to put together something that would transmit. The Baikonur Cosmodrome has receiving facilities. We see Soviet cosmonauts in space all the time. And they'll be directly under us. We also could make the evening news all over Japan if we broadcast to the Katsura tracking facility."
"Good thinking, but I've got an even better idea." She seemed to pirouette in weightlessness. "Japan already has DBS, direct broadcast satellites, and there are home satellite dishes all over the country. It's the Global Village. So why don't we just cut in for a special bulletin?"
"Why not." He pointed to the ill-fated cockpit camera Tanzan Mino's technicians had installed above the entry hatch. "Matter of fact, we probably could just use that, if we could hook it into some of the electronics here on the console."
He floated up, half drifting and half swimming, and inspected the camera, convincing himself that it was still in working condition. And it had to be wired into something. Maybe now all they needed to do was flip the right toggles. The console switches numbered, by his conservative estimate, approximately three hundred.
"Let me see what I can do." Androv floated down and immediately started to work, toggling, testing, watching the display screens as various messages were scrolled.
"Petra," he finally commanded in Russian, "give me a positive connect between UHF display-read and video output terminal 3-K."
“Interface confirmed.”
Suddenly a video screen fluttered, ran through a test series of colored bars, then threw up a picture of the cockpit as seen from the camera above the hatch. Vance studied the image of three figures floating in a confined space outfitted with electronic hardware and a giant wing-shaped hood over the central seat. On TV their cockpit looked like the flight deck of some alien vessel in Star Trek IX.
"We're on." Eva waved at the camera. Her image on the screen waved back.
"Okay," Vance said. "Now for the tricky part. Transmission."
Androv smiled as he drifted up again. "That's actually the easiest of all. Remember this vehicle was originally intended — supposedly — as a near-earth research platform. There're plenty of downlinks, in keeping with the need to transmit data, as well as general propaganda functions. We can use any frequency you want, even commercial broadcast channels."
"So why don't we go live worldwide? Just give everybody an inside look at the planet's first radar-evasive space platform."
"Petra has a listing of all commercial satellite channels, just to make sure she doesn't inadvertently violate one of them with a transmission. Let's pull them up and see what they are." He flipped several toggles on the wide console, then told Petra what he wanted. He'd no sooner finished speaking than the large screen that supplemented her voice was scrolling the off-limits frequencies.
"Okay," Eva said. "Let's start with the data channels belonging to world-wide newsprint organizations— Reuters, the Associated Press, all the rest — and send a copy of the protocol. It'll just appear on every green screen in the world. Then we can pick off frequencies used by television news organizations and broadcast a picture postcard from here in the cockpit."