“Five, four, three…”
To Parker, the voice of his burned and bandaged brother had the faraway sound of being hailed by a distant voice through a thick and silent snowstorm.
“Two… One!”
Parker tensed his grip on the handrails.
Nothing.
No sound. No vibration. No debris in the windows or clanging against the glass hull. No flash of fire through the shimmering orange night.
Parker’s sweating face scanned Mother’s green face. The little screen flashed “IGNITION PAYLOAD ASSIST MODULE. TVC NORMAL. ATTITUDE HOLD, PAM.”
“Ignition!” Enright called. Only his television told him that PAM’s engine with 17,630 pounds of molten thrust had begun its 83-second burn to push LACE to a flaming death dive through the atmosphere. She would slam into the air in 25 minutes over the desolate Indian Ocean a thousand miles from any land.
“Ignition plus 20 seconds. Thrusting. Range 2 miles.” Enright calmly read his television numerics, which confirmed Endeavor was pulling away from LACE as PAM’s engine continued to slow LACE’s orbital velocity fatally. A telemetry transponder in PAM beeped engine and ranging signals to Mother.
Shuttle was bedrock solid as PAM blazed against the black sky. If the rocket was scorching Endeavor’s underside, her crew could not feel it. They would rely on Soyuz to make an eyeball inspection of Endeavor’s belly tiles and wheel wells. Significant tile loss would jeopardize Shuttle’s return to Earth.
“One minute. Still burning… Four miles behind now. Slant range two miles, Skipper.”
“Ah huh.” Befuddled with horse medicine, Parker’s mind was elsewhere.
PAM’s attitude thrusters were programmed to keep the braking rocket horizontal for maximum deceleration and to hold a slight sideways tilt to the thrust vector. This off-center component of the rocket burn would push LACE both downward and away from Shuttle.
“At 70 seconds, 6 miles behind us, 3 below, 3 point 9 miles cross-range.”
The AC released his grip on the handrails. He had held so tightly that his long fingers ached. Flexing his knees, he floated three feet above the aft flightdeck floor.
“Shutdown! LACE delta-V at minus 897.” Enright’s television confirmed in feet-per-second that LACE’s orbital velocity had slowed by 612 statute miles per hour. Her death dive had begun. “Range 9 miles behind us. Crossrange 4 point 3. She’s on her way now, Skipper!”
“Guess so, Jack.”
Nineteen minutes into the eighth hour of Endeavor’s long day aloft, the command pilot was not ready to relax. His right leg pounded hotly, his joints ached, and Shuttle had six minutes left inside the Anomaly zone with LACE’s laser well within striking distance.
In the darkness broken only by Shuttle’s orange tail glow, Endeavor flew 35 degrees south of the Equator bound for the southern tip of Africa. The glass starship flew on her left side, tailfirst. Outside, the dark payload bay glowed orange only ten miles above the descending LACE.
Parker could feel a distant uneasiness. The fighter pilot in his bones could taste the killer satellite out there in the darkness.
“Range, Jacob?” The AC kept his face close to the overhead window which faced the distant South Pole. Somewhere in the blackness, Soyuz was 400 yards away. The tone of Parker’s voice made Enright feel the hairs on the back of his neck.
“Twelve below, 10 cross-range, 07 behind… And closing.”
There was surprise in Enright’s voice over the intercom. His blistered and swollen face had pushed from his fuzzy mind the subtleties of orbital mechanics: LACE had been slowed by the PAM engine. But by braking LACE’s velocity, the death ship had been pushed down into a lower orbit designed to intersect the atomsphere in twenty minutes. Enright’s mind slowly wrapped around the grimness in Parker’s voice: In its lower, steeply elliptical orbit, LACE must actually speed up. Kepler’s law of orbital physics demanded as much. In her doomed descent, LACE was accelerating and was closing upon Endeavor from below. LACE would overtake Shuttle from underneath and would pass her in the night — with five more minutes to go within the Anomaly.
“Six behind, 15 below, 18 cross-range.” Enright was intense.
“I know. What say we roll over and give her our reflector blankets, Jack?”
Before the AC had finished, Enright was firing Shuttle’s RCS jets to roll the ship until she flew headsdown with the open bay and its mirrorlike blankets facing the invisible LACE somewhere behind and below and off to the side.
Although Shuttle’s RCS thrusters popped like howitzers, Parker could not feel them where he floated at the aft station. Nor could he feel the ship’s slow roll. Only the rolling of the spherical, black-and-white Eight Ball in the attitude director indicator confirmed that they were coming about. The ADI on the upper left wall of the rear bulkhead told the AC that he was standing on his head over a black ocean, 1,200 miles this side of the edge of the Anomaly.
“Five and a half behind and closing, 18 below, 21 crossrange, Will. You got him?”
Parker floated toward the rear overhead window. Through it, he squinted into the darkness toward the sea below. From the ceiling of the aft flightdeck, he could not see the tail’s orange wake.
“Negative, Jack.”
“Endeavor, Endeavor. Soyuz here. I am 450 meters out. You want I should approach?”
“Negative, Uri. Parker here. We are monitoring LACE coming in from the northwest. His track is about 22 miles north of us and 6 miles behind and overtaking. Hold short with your service module in minus-Z until he passes.”
“Understand. Will hold blunt-end-down. Soyuz standing by.”
“Okay, Uri… Jack?”
“Three behind, 21 below, 23 cross-range. Anything?”
“Still zip. Makes me itchy like the old days, Number One.”
“Yeh. I feel it, too. He’s 02 behind, 24 below, 25 outside.”
On a great circle of longitude joining the North and the South poles, the full moon was on the same meridian as Shuttle. The moon’s cold face cast its fuzzy reflection on the nighttime ocean well north of Endeavor. Parker caught a distant glint outside his overhead window against the black water.
“Wait one,” the AC called. He reached toward the rear panels and then spun slowly in mid-air to each side wall. He turned the knobs which dimmed the rear flightdeck lights. In the cozy gloom illuminated only by the red backlighting of the instruments, he returned to his ceiling windows.
“One behind, Skipper, 26 below, 27 out.”
Looking straight down from the ceiling window, Parker caught a faint white star twinkling beneath and well to the north side of his ship.
“Contact! Your ten o’clock high, Jack!”
Enright and Karpov both looked high to their left as they flew headsdown with Shuttle’s tail leading the starship’s nose across the dark sky.
“Have traffic!” Enright glanced at his television. “One-half behind, 29 below, 30 north… And there she goes!”
LACE sped under Shuttle well to the inverted portside off Enright’s left shoulder. The copilot in his captain’s seat looked to the north.
“He’s really hauling the mail, Will.”
“Yeh. I got him by overhead. Movin’ behind us. Time, Jack?”
“08 plus 24. One minute to go in here.”
Parker moved to the rear window facing the dark bay still orange around the tail and aft OMS pods.
“On your six!” The fighter pilot in the rear cabin watched LACE illuminated by moonlight as it disappeared behind Shuttle’s boxy stern, which housed the dead three main engines and the twin orbital maneuvering system pods. Each pod on either side of the tail contained a third of the ship’s reaction control system jets and the large OMS engines needed to bring Shuttle out of orbit.