No surprise there, I guess, he thought. In its own way, Hangar Three was also a sacred space — though one dedicated to space-age aviation rather than to the deity. Come to think of it, he realized, maybe that impression wasn’t as sacrilegious as it first sounded. To the despair of his English teachers in school, he’d never been much of a poetry fan, but some of “High Flight,” written by a pilot who’d been killed during the Second World War, had stuck with him… especially the last couple of lines, where the poem talked about putting out your hand in space and touching the face of God.
Now that he could see more clearly, Brad focused on the big, black, blended-wing craft parked in the middle of the hangar. To a layman’s untutored eye, it would look a lot like a larger version of the SR-71 Blackbird, only with four massive engines mounted under its highly swept delta wing instead of two. But to someone like him, who’d flown this model before, the distinctive shape was instantly recognizable.
That was a Sky Masters S-19 Midnight spaceplane — equipped with revolutionary LPDRS (Laser Pulse Detonation Rocket System) triple-hybrid engines. Those “leopard” engines, able to transform from air-breathing supersonic turbofans to hypersonic scramjets to pure, reusable rockets, were powerful enough to propel the spaceplane into Earth orbit. At the same time, the spaceplane, like its smaller counterpart, the S-9 Black Stallion, and its larger cousin, the S-29 Shadow, could take off and land on ordinary runways built for commercial airliners.
“Hey, kid, you planning to do any real work this afternoon?” a tall, lanky man called from the foot of a high rolling ladder pushed up against the S-19’s open twin cockpit canopies. “Or are you just here sightseeing?”
“Hey, Boomer!” With a cheerful grin, Brad waved back at Hunter “Boomer” Noble, the chief of aerospace engineering for Sky Masters and its lead test pilot for the reactivated S-series spaceplanes. “Sorry I’m late, but we had a slight problem on the last simulator run that I had to sort out.”
“Shit,” Boomer growled. “Tell me a newbie didn’t just break one of the company’s incredibly expensive machines?” Sky Masters Aerospace ran some of the world’s most advanced flight simulators out of a converted hangar at the other end of the airport. Mounted on massive Hexapod-system hydraulic jacks, the full-motion simulators could be configured to mimic the flight characteristics and capabilities of virtually any aircraft — everything from single-engine turboprops to fifth-generation fighters like the F-35 Lightning II on up to the S-series spaceplanes. Between the company’s immersive, virtual-reality simulator programs and its expert instructor pilots, Sky Masters made a tidy profit training fliers for airlines and even the armed forces of several smaller U.S. allies.
“‘Break’ is a harsh word,” Brad said judiciously. “But I guess our trainee did bend it a little.”
Boomer winced, probably imagining the outraged memos from corporate accounting that were likely to land on his desk. “Bent it how, exactly?”
“Well, it looks like a couple of the Hexapod actuators froze up when the simulator pod tried to spin end over end.”
“No fucking way,” Boomer said in disbelief. He pinched the bridge of his nose hard and closed his eyes for just a second. “Which one of our merry band of aspiring astronauts managed to mess up a simulator like that?”
“Constable.”
“The Brit?”
Brad nodded. Peter Charles “Constable” Vasey had flown Harrier jump jets and other high-performance aircraft for the Fleet Air Arm. Several years before, bored out of his skull by peacetime service, the former Royal Navy flier had signed up with Scion. Since then, he’d flown a wide range of different aircraft for the private military company, taking part in a number of dangerous covert missions around the world. When offered a shot at flying spaceplanes for the new Sky Masters — Scion joint venture, the Englishman had naturally jumped at the chance.
From everything Brad could see so far, Vasey was a gifted pilot whose only weakness might be a tendency to push his luck and his aircraft to the limit. Kind of like me, he admitted to himself.
“What the hell did he do?” Boomer demanded.
“He tried to roll the S-29 in hypersonic flight,” Brad said, not bothering now to hide his amusement.
Boomer stared back at him. “You’re bullshitting me.”
“Nope,” Brad said virtuously. “Scout’s honor. That’s what he did.”
“And, pray tell, what was Comrade Vasey’s airspeed when he decided to commit virtual suicide?” Boomer asked, with yet another deep sigh.
“Mach eight.”
“Jesus Christ.” Boomer shook his head in sheer astonishment. At one hundred thousand feet above sea level, Mach 8 meant the spaceplane was traveling at nearly forty-eight hundred knots. “What made that lunatic Brit think it was a good idea to try rolling a freaking spaceplane at Mach-fricking-eight — right in the middle of God’s own little turbulent hell of skin friction and shock-wave heating?”
Brad laughed. “Constable told me he just wanted to find out what would happen in a maneuver at that speed. Plus, he was kind of curious to see how the simulation would handle something so crazy.”
“And?”
“Apparently, he and his copilot got one heck of a ride before the system went down and they lost power.” Brad’s grin grew even wider. “I believe it, too. When we overrode the locks and pried the simulator door open, they were hanging almost upside down in their harnesses.”
Boomer eyed him suspiciously. “Who was flying in the other seat during this little jaunt?”
“Nadia,” Brad said simply.
“Nadia? Nadia Rozek? Your Nadia?” Boomer whistled. “Oh, man. Please, please, tell me she killed that goofball Vasey with her bare hands when you got them unstrapped.”
“Nope, I’m afraid not.” Brad shook his head in mock sadness. “She was too busy whooping it up. She said it was more fun than all the thrill rides at Disneyland and Universal Studios combined.”
“Swell,” Boomer said wryly. “Look, Brad, I need you to ride herd on Vasey. Rein him in a little, okay? At least enough to satisfy the suits like Kaddiri and Martindale that we aren’t running a total lunatic asylum here.”
Brad nodded his agreement. Dr. Helen Kaddiri was the president and chairman of Sky Masters. Her Scion counterpart was former U.S. president Kevin Martindale. Neither was especially noted for having much of a sense of humor — at least not when it came to paying unexpected repair bills for expensive equipment.
Since he was one of the few surviving people with real-world spaceplane experience, Brad had been named second in command of the reactivated S-series flight program, which meant maintaining day-to-day discipline among the eager, hard-charging men and women they were training as crews was mostly his job. He couldn’t pretend it was a task he enjoyed, but if that was the price of getting into space again, it was a price he was completely willing to pay. “Maybe I’ll have Constable write ‘I will not break my spaceplane without permission’ on a whiteboard a couple of thousand times,” he suggested.
Boomer snorted. “Think that’ll work?”
“Probably not,” Brad conceded. Mulling it over, he looked up at the sleek silhouette of the S-19 Midnight parked next to them. “Then I guess I read him the riot act. Warn him to cool his jets, or Mr. Vasey’s Wild Simulator Ride will be the closest he’ll ever get to actually flying one of these babies. That should settle him down a little.”