The glass greenhouse was silent. The Admiral’s tired face looked upward through the glass roof, and with his mind’s eye, through the concrete ceiling, through the hundreds of feet of earth, through the Pentagon above, into the early-winter afternoon a week before Christmas, and through the tranquil, coldly blue sky to where a winged starship pursued her deadly target.
“How’s the view, buddy?”
“CAVU everywhere, California,” Parker called from his place at Enright’s left side in the rear of the flightdeck. He peered into the open payload bay through the rear window at his face. As Endeavor flew on her side, over the sill of the bay the coast of southern California passed with brilliant clarity: what airmen call CAVU for “ceiling and visibility, unlimited.” Raising his face to the aft overhead window, the AC could see LACE tumbling slowly with a dazzling blue Pacific beneath it.
“Magnificent, Buckhorn. Real pretty down there. Sure doesn’t look like winter.”
“Never does here, Will. You’re directly over San Diego right now. Coming up on 03 hours, 05 minutes, 30 seconds, MET. And your next sunset is in 27 minutes.”
“Copy that, Colorado,” the floating AC drawled.
“Your vitals look stable, Endeavor. We’ll be with you Stateside for another sixteen minutes. We’re looking at a real good data dump downlink. Your OI telemetry is very clean… Ah, the backroom boys want you to pace yourselves to get out to the target, secure the grapple fixture, affix the PAM, and maneuver clear of the target well before 08 hours, 16 minutes at the very latest. If possible, they want the job done and you guys out of there before 06 plus 47. Copy?”
“Copy, Flight, eight and a quarter for sure, and 07 hours if able… What’s the deal?”
“Backroom wants the target safed before you enter the South Atlantic Anomaly on rev six, at eight and a quarter. You’re going to pass within 80 miles of it though on rev five at 06 plus 47.”
The two airmen who floated at the aft station looked at each other.
“Okay,” Enright cut in as Endeavor shot over New Mexico’s San Jose River and 11,300-foot high Mount Taylor three minutes east of San Diego.
In a moment of silence over the air-to-ground link, the pilots returned to steering the Plasma Diagnostics Package at the end of the manipulator. They waved the arm over Endeavor’s open backside.
“Good data coming down from the PDP, Will,” the Spacecraft Communicator in the mountains of Colorado Springs radioed. His voice traveled at the speed of light over land wire to California for transmission to Shuttle by the huge dish antenna at Goldstone, California.
Endeavor coasted on her side over the eastern horizon at her speed of five miles per second. She left Goldstone out of radio range in her dust at 3 hours 9 minutes into the flight. Endeavor had already traveled 53,000 miles since leaving the ground.
“With you by Northrop,” the ground called as Endeavor passed 130 nautical miles above Roy, New Mexico, and the southern Rockies. Ordinarily, the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico only talked with Shuttle flights during a landing at Northrop’s sandy runway.
Deep within the bowels of the Rocky Mountain bunkers of the U. S. Space Command, a computer’s silicon heart twitched and television screens blinked with the curved plot lines of orbital paths. Across a row of television monitors, three small dots moved in single-file formation over an outline of the southwestern United States. The blip farthest west was slowly gaining on the two images ahead of it. The lead dot crossed the screens from west to east directly over Galena, Kansas. Two American fliers piloted the small, lead blip. In the upper corner of the screen, numerics ticked past 03 hours, 11 minutes. Beside the numbers was the word “Shuttle.”
“Endeavor, Colorado via White Sands. We show Soyuz maneuvering up there. What can you see? Standing by…”
The two fliers in the sky raised their helmeted faces to the two overhead windows of the aft flightdeck. As Endeavor flew on her port side with her nose pointing northward, the overhead windows, one above each crewman, faced west toward the ground track already flown. The ship was directly beneath the white sun which bathed the three vehicles in blinding, painful daylight.
“Flight,” Enright called, with his face floating close to the portside ceiling portal. “We’re pretty much subsolar here. Quite a bit of washout in the high sun angle. But Soyuz is approaching from the target’s far side. Yeh, there goes one of her thrusters. She’s braking, I’d say. Call her range maybe 50 meters from the target. Puts Brother Ivan about 100 meters from us. She’s stopped now.”
“We confirm, Jack. Thank you.”
As the three ships in tight formation sped over the Midwest just south of St. Louis, only 6½ flying minutes past San Diego, Endeavor passed out of radio range with White Sands.
“Endeavor: Mission Control Colorado with you now by MLX.”
“Afternoon, Florida,” Parker called to the Cape Canaveral antenna.
“Copy, Will. With you another 10 minutes. If you can do it, please keep one eyeball on the payload bay and the other on Soyuz.”
“No sweat, Flight. We’re trained to do anything the job requires,” the AC drawled. His mouth was still dry from his inoculation and his legs remained very far away. The command pilot was as high as his lofty office and his twangy voice brimmed with “can do.”
“We believe that, AC. Thanks.” The voice from below did not carry the AC’s exuberance.
Ninety seconds east of the Mississippi River, Endeavor silently buzzed Moorehead, Kentucky. Parker peered intently over the centerline sill of his overhead window. He scanned the blindingly white, thin snowcover upon the Blue Grass country. He imagined the white fences surrounding fields of plump Thoroughbred mares, all in the seventh month of their pregnancies and anxious to foal come May. He saw only barren earth, but his sweating nostrils flared with the sweetly musty smells of freshly brushed horses. He could taste it. It was enough to know that they were surely down there.
As the three ships flew across the southeastern states, Parker and Enright concentrated on flying the manipulator arm and its cumbersome payload. Loaded, the arm moved slowly at two-tenths foot per second. They steered the arm outward where the arm reached 50 feet into space above Shuttle’s cockpit. The Plasma Diagnostics Package pointed westward toward LACE and Soyuz on the target’s far side.
“Endeavor, we just got a spike of energy through your PDP downlink. Check your target. Do it now.”
The ground’s voice was full of business as the three vessels coasted over Chesapeake Bay just south of Pocomoke City, Virginia. Shuttle left the American coastline behind at 03 hours, 15 minutes into the mission, barely ten minutes east of California.
“Don’t see anything unusual out of Window Seven, Flight. Sun still too high for seeing any real detail.” Parker studied the two ships beyond his overhead window.
“Nothing unusual out Window Ten, either,” Enright called as he looked through the window in the rear wall which overlooks the payload bay. He could see their company beyond the open sill on Shuttle’s port side.
“Okay, Endeavor. Keep an eye outside for anything from Soyuz. Anything at all…”
“Like what, Flight?”
“We don’t know, Jack… LOS via Florida in fifty-five seconds. Continue with the PDP survey. See if you can map the center of the target’s wake. We’re watching it closely down here. With you another six through Bermuda network. We lost the flux spike, whatever it was.”
The two weightless airmen busied themselves with the RMS arm which dangled above Endeavor’s flightdeck. The end effector hung above Shuttle’s white nose. The arm’s wrist camera drooped toward Shuttle and sent a picture of the six forward windows to the television monitor beside Enright.