“Before you lose us by Yarradee, Endeavor, we’d like you to run a COAS shot as soon as you can. Let us know how it flies before you lose Orrora. Your S-band is breaking up at…”
“So long, Yarradee… Okay, Jack. I’ll take a shot here with the COAS. We’ll have Orrora contact in two minutes.”
“ ’Kay, Skipper.” Enright was busy fiddling with his electrical controls and meters.
As Endeavor skirted Australia’s southern coastline, Parker reached overhead to instrument Panel Overhead-One, where he turned on the COAS power. To the left of a four-inch-square panel containing 25 white computer status lights above the AC’s forehead, the eight-inch-long tubular sight of the space sextant, the Crew Optical Alignment Sight, came to life.
“COAS alive,” the AC said to himself. “Manual CSS.”
Parker peered into a small mirror at the base of the COAS periscope. Several stars were visible on a circular grid on the mirror. Using control stick steering, the AC commanded the tail thrusters to slowly move Endeavor’s nose until a single bright star moved to the center of the recticle grid on the palm-size mirror.
“Mark!” the AC called as a star momentarily centered on the mirror. As he spoke, he punched the attitude reference pushbutton to the left of his round attitude indicator at the upper left comer of the forward instrument panel. Mother instantly logged the angle between Shuttle and the star which the pilot had first identified for the computers. He twisted the control stick between his thighs until another bright star crossed the COAS sight as Endeavor’s nose moved sideways among the stars of the southern hemisphere.
“And, mark!” the pilot said as he pushed the ATT REF button again. With two identified stars in the hopper, Mother compared their angles and the information reduced with the attitude information coming through the two-star-trackers working automatically outside.
“And Mother says the COAS and the trackers are in agreement, Jack.”
“Super, Skipper. Glad we don’t have to go VFR On Top today.” Enright looked outside as they passed within 180 miles of Kangaroo Island on Australia’s southern coast. No town lights could be seen from 125 miles above the pitch darkness. “Sure can’t see any kangaroos down there, Skip.”
Endeavor coasted wings level, heads-up, toward Australia’s southeast land mass. The ship would glide between Melbourne and the island of Tasmania.
“Endeavor: Configure AOS by Orrora.”
“Howdy, Canberra. With you loud and clear. We shot a good COAS sight. We’re doin’ fine.”
“Copy, AC. Downlink is real solid at 61 minutes MET. So how goes your first hour in the sky, Endeavor?”
“Havin’ a ball, Flight. Target is four miles ahead and seven above us,” Enright called. He greatly enjoyed the sensation of weightlessness, although the puffy flush in his face was warm and uncomfortable.
“You’re two minutes from open water, Endeavor. We’ll be with you another four minutes.”
“Okay, Flight,” the AC drawled. “Jack is up to his eyeballs with our little fuel cell boil-over. I’m configuring the ARS for sunrise. Give us a minute, Flight.”
“Sure, Will. Take your time.”
The Colonel worked Panel Left-One beside his left shoulder in preparation for the 270 degrees Fahrenheit heat which would come with sunup.
“Secondary flash evaporator, high load evaporator on, duct B. Cabin fans A and B to on and water loop One bypass to manual, Two bypass to auto. And we’ll cool the cabin air a bit here.”
The AC worked his switches at his left.
“Okay, Canberra. With you now.”
“Roger, Will. At sixty-three minutes, you’re crossing the coastline. Can you see Sidney about 180 miles to your left?”
“Ah, lookin’, Flight,” a Kentucky twang drawled in the black sky above Australia’s eastern shoreline where everyone slept at 2 o’clock in the morning.
“Just barely, Flight. Some cloud cover down there.” The AC squinted down toward a hazy patch of light, like a light bulb wrapped in cotton.
“Say, Flight, is it really summer down there?”
“Eighty in the shade, Jack.”
“Surely is dark down there.”
“Roger that, right seat. Happens every night about this time. Losing you in about ten seconds. Keep an eye on your freon loop temps after daybreak. You’re Go at sixty-five minutes.”
“Bye, Australia… Ready to roll, Will.”
The AC commanded the computers to roll Shuttle onto her white backside. Tail and nose RCS thrusters worked together as Endeavor executed a slow wing-over. After a minute of rolling, the RCS jets popped to arrest the roll bringing Endeavor to a stop upside down. Coasting nose forward, Shuttle’s black glass belly faced the starry sky where a billion white, red and blue stars shone without twinkling.
Without sound, Endeavor coasted across the black South Pacific. Six hundred miles and two flying minutes behind the ship’s inverted tail, Australia rolled over the edge of the dark, sleeping planet as the white speck against the sky hurtled across the sea.
Like six white birds flying in tight formation across a black sky, the illuminated windows of the lighted flightdeck moved against the stars. Jacob Enright looked over his right shoulder and looked upward toward the sea below his upside-down office.
“Look at that!” Enright exclaimed into his triple pane window.
Far below, the black Pacific glowed a faint fluorescent green like phosphorescent paint spilled into a well. The sea glowed in a ribbon 50 miles long.
“Plankton, Jack. Glows when seawater disturbs it. A school of fish will light it up. Only dolphins won’t light it. A dolphin can swim at thirty knots without generating a twitch of vortex turbulence. The perfect airfoil… If we could fly dolphins, we would be on Mars by now.”
The Aircraft Commander spoke into his window. He spoke softly, prayerfully.
Two and a half minutes after losing contact with Orrora, Australia, Endeavor crossed latitude 30 degrees south, 120 miles southeast of Norfolk Island. Just at the Earth’s invisible horizon, 750 nautical miles to the northeast, the mystic Fiji Islands lay in a tropical summer’s night. An hour from home where it was the dead of winter, Endeavor flew in the airless silence of a South Pacific night.
An hour and twelve minutes aloft, Shuttle coasted above the Tongatapu Islands, 1,500 nautical miles south of the Equator.
“Looks like a contact, Skipper.”
Flying nose first, upside down, Endeavor’s radar beacons had been searching the nighttime sky for the radar footprint of LACE. But the beacons had wandered aimlessly at the speed of light to bend toward the very edge of the universe. Until now.
“Got a MAP, Jack?” The Colonel squinted at the green CRT before him where print and a graphic, three-dimensional box slowly rotated like a teenager’s video game.
“Looks like we have a message acceptance pulse, Will.”
“Soyuz?”
“Don’t think so. Not in this radio spectrum, Skipper… There.”
The video graphic cube steadied as the two pilots with their heads nearly touching peered into the open graphic box on the television.
“LACE?” the command pilot inquired gravely.
“I’m interrogating it again.”
Enright’s left hand worked his computer keyboard and Mother instantly sent her encrypted electromagnetic waves of greeting out to the planet’s far corner.
“And we have our baby, Skip. Solid lockup. Range five thousand meters.” The hairs on Enright’s neck tingled.
Both fliers jumped into their shoulder harnesses when one of Endeavor’s nose jets barked out a plume of orange flame into the darkness just eight feet in front of their faces. Mother was automatically maintaining their even keel upside down. Each pilot smiled sheepishly.
“Might close in here, buddy.”
Jack Enright nodded at his captain.