Parker floated toward the front cockpit, where he stopped at the center console between the two seats. With his legs flexed off the floor, he balanced with his left hand on Enright’s right shoulder. He glanced above the center windows to the digital timer ticking up past Day 00: 07 Hours: 40 Minutes. Nothing but blue water and a vertical horizon glowed beyond the six forward windows, each pane the largest piece of heat-resistant, optical quality glass ever forged. Still on her left side, Endeavor in tight formation with LACE and Soyuz passed the sixth revolution’s northernmost declination of 38 degrees north latitude, 1,600 miles west of San Francisco. Their ground track bent southeastward from there. When they made landfall over North America this pass, they would overfly only San Diego and the southern corner of California. This revolution would take them across the States for only one minute. On the next revolution — if Endeavor survived its direct entry into the South Atlantic Anomaly — they would miss North America altogether.
Enright had requested a ground track plot which glowed green on the center of the three forward televisions. A fly-size Shuttle winked three inches to the left of the graphic coastline of California.
“How long to SAA transit, Number One?”
“Thirty-six minutes. Real tight, Will.”
“Yep. Target looks stable.” Parker scanned the left television screen which Enright had tapped into the deployed arm’s camera.
“Let’s go in, Jack.”
“Want the wheel, Skipper?” Enright looked over his right shoulder.
“Your bird, Number One.”
As Parker spoke, Enright felt his blistered face rub painfully against his antibiotic-soaked bandage. He was smiling as he energized the control stick between his knees and the translational hand controller at the upper left corner of the forward instrument panel.
“We’re moving in, Soyuz. Can you move back ten meters?” Enright released his mike button on the control stick between his thighs.
“Soyuz in motion,” a Russian accent called. Through Endeavor’s forward windows, the three pilots could see Uri Ruslanovich back the Soviet ship away from Shuttle’s tail. The Russian, who flew alone, wore Enright’s smile as the Soviet flight engineer assumed his own first command.
Parker pushed off Enright’s seat back. The AC floated on his backside to the rear of the flightdeck. With his back facing the flightdeck floor seven feet below him, he stopped with his face close to the starboard overhead window. His stocking feet were against the ceiling behind Karpov’s head.
“Soyuz still moving,” Parker called from the rear. “She’s all-stop now, well behind us, Jack. You’re clear.”
Parker pushed off the ceiling and he righted his long, thin body at the remote manipulator system station at the rear wall. His back faced Enright up forward in the commander’s seat.
There was an audible pop from Endeavor’s front end as a thruster on each side of Shuttle’s nose fired together with downward-firing jets in each of the two tail pods. With Shuttle on her left side, the jets fore and aft firing downward pushed the ship horizontally to close the distance to LACE. At Enright’s hand commands to the THC handle, Mother chose the jets to fire, each with 870 pounds of thrust. Small vernier thrusters, each with only 24 pounds of force, fine-tuned Endeavor’s slow trajectory toward LACE.
“Endeavor, Endeavor: With you at 07 plus 44 by Gold-stone,” the ground called by the California antenna just over Shuttle’s eastern horizon. “Good downlink here. We’ll be updating your state vectors momentarily. We show you in motion. Status please?”
“We’re Go here, Colorado,” Enright radioed. His tight pressure pants had revived him. “I’m in the left seat, our guest is in the right seat, and the AC is on the RMS. We’re sealed at 14 point 6 on the ARS. And we are inbound on the target.”
“Understand, Jack. We’ll be with you by the States another fourteen minutes, including a UHF pass via Northrop. We remind you of SAA transit in thirty-two minutes. You are time-critical… Will? Watch your arm rates while Jack is in motion here.”
“On it, Flight,” Parker called from his aft post. He watched through the rear window and the overhead window as the remote arm flexed with each pop of Endeavor’s thrusters. On the top center of the Canadian console which controlled the arm, a PORT TEMP light was illuminated yellow. The arm’s three motors strained to absorb the thrusters’ forces, which made the 50-foot-long arm twang with each firing jet. Mother’s green television also flashed a SYSTEM ALERT warning. The AC anxiously looked upward as LACE approached with a glaring, blue-green sea behind it. The arm wobbled as a battery of up-ward-firing jets ignited in Endeavor’s nose and tail. Karpov jumped reflexively against his lap belt as twin plumes of orange flame erupted before his forward window.
“All stop,” Enright called with LACE only fifteen feet beyond the open bay. Parker watched the arm’s far end sway through a foot-long arc.
“She’s really dancin’,” the AC called.
“We see it down, here, Will. Doesn’t look critical… Jack, do you have room to roll left ten degrees to put the arm in the shadow of your starboard wing?”
“Ah,” the AC interrupted. “Let’s just sit tight and let Mother work.”
“We’re sitting,” Enright acknowledged before Colorado could protest.
“We copy, Endeavor,” the ground replied formally. “Please dump your PDP data by OI downlink when you can.”
“Comin’ at ya now,” Enright radioed as he reached over his head and over Karpov to the rows of toggle switches and circuit breakers on forward panels Overhead -14, -15, and -16.
As Enright checked his payload signal conditioners, the AC floated at the rear starboard panel arrays with his back toward Alexi Karpov.
“Okay, Flight,” the Colonel began from the rear. “At Panel A-2, payload data interleaver power off; payload encryptor power on; encryptor on; coding transmitter on; network signal processor transmitting bit rate to high; S-Band mode high by transponder Number Two; S-Band power amplifier Number Two on; and, S-Band pre-amplifier Number Two on. Moving on, Flight: OPS recorder Number Two, power on; Number Two recorder to playback in Maintenance Loop One; recorder speed set at three; and, we’re running.”
Parker glanced at the mission timer ticking up through 07 hours 45 minutes.
Before being jettisoned overboard by Enright, the Plasma Diagnostics Package had sniffed LACE’s electromagnetic wakes much like the wake of a ship underway. The PDP fed its electronic sniffs to one of Endeavor’s two operational instrumentation pulse code modulation master units. Simultaneously, the Operational Instrumentation system’s Master Timing Unit had slipped time tags into the stream of recorded information to identify each sniff later on. PCMMU Number Two then routed the data to Network Signal Conditioner Number Two. The steady flow of PDP sniffs then flowed at the computer speed of 128,000 data bites per second into Operations Recorder Number Two. In the recorder, the PDP information was stored, awaiting the command from the crew to beep the recorded data to the ground. At Parker’s order, the recorder let its encoded sniffs flow into Endeavor’s FM Signal Processor. The signal processor fed the time-tagged data to one of Shuttle’s FM transmitters which directed the computerized plasma sniffs at a frequency of 2250 megahertz to the ship’s S-band antenna quads. Mother automatically selected the best antenna for beaming the signal to the great dish antenna at Goldstone, California.
“Your S-band downlink looks real clean, Endeavor. We hope to digest it for you before we lose you in thirteen minutes.”
“ ’Kay. The AC is with the RMS and we’re station-keeping at the target.”
“We see it, Jack. You are Go to deploy and affix the PAM to the target. We remind you that sunset is coming up at 08 hours and 01 minute. SAA follows in darkness at 08 plus 16… You’re up against the wall on time-line, Jack.”