The AC had been too busy concentrating on the forward horizon 900 miles distant and on the attitude indicator ball before his face to look outside. He returned the ship to Mother’s magnetic mind with instructions to hold automatic trim. Then the Colonel turned his face to his two left windows.
“Damn” was all the command pilot said. “You got the view out there, Jack?”
“Sure do,” the intercom crackled from below decks.
The AC unconsciously touched his faceplate to confirm that his laser-reflective visor was down and locked.
“Who the hell is that?”
The Colonel’s voice was not anxious so much as it was annoyed as he spoke privately to Enright over the intercom. He sounded like a man who had not merely blown a tire, but had done it in the rain.
“Gettin’ a might crowded up here, Flight.” This time, Parker depressed his mike button to energize the air-to-ground communications loop.
“Give us a visual, Will. Hawaii with you another minute only. Be advised we are on Channel B now and secure.” No one but Mission Control, not even the press, could listen to the conversation. Ordinarily, Shuttle air-ground transmissions are public property except when the crew is working with secret military payloads or when the crew is making a regular daily medical report to the ground.
“Understand Channel B, Flight,” the AC began. “Out Window Number One to my left, I have LACE maybe 120 meters off the port wingtip. Puts it about three points abaft the port beam, say 45 degrees behind me. Soyuz is out maybe 100 meters just left of our nose. And between Ivan and LACE is new traffic about 90 meters directly abeam of my seat. Soyuz is not between us and the new object… What the hell is it, Colorado?”
In Colorado Springs, the Space Command quickly digested the pilot’s description to a triangle 300 feet on each side, with LACE, Endeavor, and the unidentified spacecraft each at one corner. Soyuz drifted 20 yards outside the triangular formation.
“Wilclass="underline" In twenty seconds, describe the contact.”
“She’s about the size of Soyuz. Very similar in fact: Spherical head module with a cylindrical afterbody behind. All black, no running lights that I can see. Short antennas — I see two — between the sphere and the afterbody.”
“Okay, Will. You have your Angola bird. She’s Chinese. Peoples Republic. Our people figure she went up on a Long March-3 booster. And she is manned. Keep Jack inside until we update you by California in four minutes. Losing you…”
The Long March-3 is the most powerful missile of the Peoples Republic of China. Standing 144 feet tall, the three-stage rocket returned the salvaged, U.S. satellite, Westar-6, back to orbit in April 1990. Westar had been retrieved from space by the shuttle in 1985. The relaunched communications satellite was renamed Asia Sat-1.
The Mission Commander sat in glum silence in his drawers with the dangling water tubes. He kept his visored faceplate close to the flightdeck’s left side windows. With the sun already half up in the east, Parker had a dazzling sea behind three ships each barely three Shuttle lengths away.
“Can’t be, Jack.” The AC did not touch his mike pushbutton for the voice-activated intercom.
“I know,” Enright radioed with his two bubble helmets pressed to the 12-inch-wide window in the mid-deck hatch. The round window was eight feet beneath the Skipper’s seat upstairs. “They only launched — when was it?”
The command pilot was already reviewing his orbital plot maps. He scanned the Mission Elapsed Time numerics which ticked away in little glass windows on Panel Overhead-3 above the forward window of the copilot’s empty seat. The timer indicated that Endeavor was 00 days, 04 hours, 33 minutes, and 08 seconds out, over the north Pacific. The ship’s position was about 30 degrees north latitude by 145 degrees west longitude, some 1,300 nautical miles from California.
“No more than 54 minutes, Jack. That makes their rendezvous in only 158 degrees. They sure as hell didn’t carry any out-of-plane error under power. That’s for sure.”
“Like to go to their flight school, Skipper.”
“Yeh, Jack. Probably have to bone up on your Russki to do it.”
“How’s the time-line, Will?”
“We’re at 4 hours and 34 minutes, Jack.”
“Nice. That gives us two hours before we skirt the Anomaly region on Rev Five. And they want me to stay put burning up my O2, down here while Colorado plays air-traffic control. Real nice.” The copilot in hard-suit floated close to his basement window.
“Reckon the backroom has its reasons, Number One. You’ll get outside soon enough. ’Sides, they’ll be on the horn in another minute.”
“I’ll be here, Skip.”
Eleven hundred nautical miles due west of San Diego, the four vessels coasted in the perpetual freefall of orbit. Each ship was ever falling downward toward the blue-green December sea 130 nautical miles below. But so fast did they hurtle across the starless black sky of mid-morning that the curvature of the blue planet fell away over the horizon before the ships could plummet like meteors into the Pacific. As dictated by the laws of orbital mechanics, the Earth’s far horizon, 1,000 miles to the east, fell away just steeply enough that the four ships would miss it by 150 statute miles for years. Were it not for the infinitesimal drag against the ships from high, stray air molecules and the photon wake of the solar wind, the four starships would freefall in their orbits forever.
“I have traffic in motion at my twelve o’clock low!”
At Enright’s shout from below decks, Parker turned his face to his left window where he squinted behind his helmet’s closed faceplate.
The black intruder, scorched slightly by the air friction heating of its launch, slowly pitched its round head upward. The Chinese craft stopped its rotation with its blunt bottom pointed seaward.
As Parker and Enright watched from 300 feet abeam, the cylindrical afterbody of the Chinese vessel opened lengthwise. A dishlike device perhaps two meters across protruded from the hull. It pointed at LACE, which rolled slowly against the emerald sea off Shuttle’s left wingtip.
“Don’t do it!” Parker shouted. He pushed his transmitter button without any notion as to whether the intruder or the ever-silent Soyuz-T were listening on Endeavor’s FM frequency band of 2287.5 megahertz.
The eyes of the American airmen concentrated upon LACE three shuttle lengths away.
At the upper end of the vertically positioned LACE, a hemispheric shroud — like the roof of an astronomical observatory — housed LACE’s lasing equipment and focusing mirrors.
“Don’t be stupid!” Parker shouted through Endeavor’s antennae. His cry filled his helmet’s closeness.
LACE slid back a wide panel on its shroud faring which covered its Large Optics Demonstration Experiment innards. In the ferocious daylight of airless space, Parker could clearly see LACE’s works twinkle within the shroud under the fierce sun, like a diamond turning be neath a jeweler’s monocle.
For an instant Parker and Enright were diverted to a yellow plume from a nose thruster on Soyuz. Slowly, the triple-module, 23-foot-long Soviet craft backed away from the tight formation. The high sun glinted blindingly from Soyuz’s two solar cell wings, 35 feet from tip to tip.
The relentless sun, high and east of the four ships, washed out the details of each vessel’s body. Parker could see a very faint green glow upon LACE’s body in a direct line with the antenna-dish device protruding from the Chinese craft.
Endeavor’s command pilot jerked reflexively in his long johns against his loose lap belt when a thick, blue-green beam burst out of LACE’s open shroud.