Titan (32 page)

Now Deeke took his left-side stick, to work the RCS manual controls. He dipped the nose of the X-15.

The horizon rose over the lip of the mailbox window before him. My God, he thought. I’m too damn old for this.

Earth was a brilliant blue floor beneath him, set beneath a darkened sky. To his left and right, he could make out the whole of the eastern seaboard of the U.S., from New York bay to his left, Florida obscured by its ragged coating of cloud below him, and to his right, set in the glittering blue skin of the ocean, a lumpy, brown-green mass that must be Cuba. He was still climbing, thrown by the rocket thrust out of the atmosphere like a stone. The curvature of the planet was clearly visible, as was the layer of denser atmosphere that surrounded it.

And, directly ahead of him, a pillar of orange-white vapor came climbing out of the atmosphere, filled with bright sunlight, arcing gracefully away from him. At the tip of the pillar there was a jewel of yellow-white light, a droplet of brilliance brighter than the sun itself.

The stark simplicity of that thrust out of gravity’s bonds was unbearably beautiful, astonishing, like a direct challenge to God.

Through gaps in the cloud Jackie could see the solid rockets fall away from the stack, still trailing dribbles of smoke and flame. There was a ragged cheer from the stand behind her.

Once started, the solid rockets couldn’t be stopped or throttled down, unlike liquid boosters; once the solids were lit, the orbiter—and its crew and that huge explosive tank of hydrogen and oxygen strapped to its belly—were just along for the ride, until the SRBs expended themselves.

So getting rid of the SRBs was a good sign. And—

And suddenly there was a second contrail in the sky, spider-web thin, climbing up from the southwest.

She heard some muttering from the press stand behind her. “What the hell can that be? A chase plane?”

But there were no chase planes during a launch. The whole area was supposed to be kept clear.

It was difficult to follow the track, through the breaks in the cloud deck. But it looked to Jackie’s inexpert eye as if that second trail was heading straight for the climbing Shuttle stack.

“NASA have confirmed SRB sep, Linebacker.”

“Rog.”

At this point in its ascent profile
Endeavour
was climbing towards Mach Four, Deeke knew—but even so the X- 15 was outrunning it. It was the only aircraft in the world which could have done so.

Now there was one more decision point, one more gate to pass through.

It took one more second for the confirmation to come.

“Linebacker, you are go to deploy. Repeat, go to deploy.”

The pure oxygen in his helmet seemed to have turned his mouth dry as Mojave dust.

“Linebacker, do you copy? You are go to deploy.”

“… Affirm, Canaveral. Copy that. Go to deploy.”

There was one major addition to the X-15 control panel, a small flip-up softscreen display. Deeke reached forward and lifted this now. It showed a schematic gunsight, and a bright starburst, representing the Shuttle, over to the left of the screen.

He took the RCS control in his left hand. The reaction control system was a set of simple hydrogen peroxide rockets. Deeke used the system in bang-bang mode, where he just pulsed the RCS rockets by shoving at the control stick. When he didn’t get the response he wanted, he applied another impulse. And he took care to move in just one axis at a time, to keep control.

In stages, blipping his RCS, he turned the nose of the X-15 as it soared through its ballistic profile. All Deeke had to do now was to center the Shuttle starburst in the little toy gunsight.

Point and shoot.

After a couple of minutes, still closing on
Endeavour
, he got the starburst centered.

It was a firing solution.

The digital display came up with a small qwerty keypad, for him to punch in an enabling code.

He held his gloved hand over the pad.

His whole life hung on this moment, the actions he took in the next few seconds.

Somehow, although he’d rehearsed it, in simulations and in his head, he’d never quite believed he’d have to face this. All he’d really wanted was a way to get back into the cockpit of an X-15, one last time, before he subsided into old age.

“Canaveral. Do I still have go for deploy?”

“Linebacker, you have go for deploy. Repeat—”

“Affirm.”

He thought of the blank faces of the ground crew and suit techs, of Hartle sitting like a spider in its web at the heart of Cheyenne.

What right did Deeke have to entertain doubts? What right did he have to oppose such certainty?

His hesitation melted away. He tapped in the code with confident keystrokes. He could barely feel the pad through his thick gloves.

He felt a solid clunk beneath him. That would be the pyrotechnic bolts severing the ASAT from its berth in the belly of the X-15, and pushing it away.

It was done.

For a moment he heard and felt nothing else. The X-15 continued to arc upward through its ballistic profile, climbing towards its peak altitude of two hundred thousand feet. His attitude was drifting off a little; he would have to correct it…

There was a burst of yellow-white light beneath him.

He could see a slim pencil, trailing a blob of fire and billowing smoke, white and clean, like the smoke from the Shuttle’s own solid rocket boosters.

Deeke corrected his attitude drift with blips from his RCS. He lifted his nose, so that the horizon was hidden by the sill of his window. He didn’t particularly want to witness the last act of this drama, when it came.

He closed up the little digital pad; it had served its purpose, and had no further function.

The ASAT arced away from him, towards the sunlit horizon, over the lumpy cloud.

“Smooth as glass, Houston. To software mode 103…”

With the solid boosters discarded,
Endeavour
was driven upward solely by her main engines, the External Tank feeding propellants through its connecting pipes. The ride became easier; liquid boosters provided a much smoother thrust than solids. The whole stack seemed to purr, like some huge sewing machine, every part working in harmony with the rest.

Benacerraf found herself grinning, the exhilaration of the launch getting to her.

Way to go,
she thought.
Way to go.

The ASAT, developed by Boeing in the Reagan years, had been in storage for two decades.

Now, called upon at last, it functioned perfectly.

It was actually a three-stage solid-propellant rocket. It controlled its attitude using three large movable fins on its tail. It carried an infrared sensor and eight small telescopes to help locate its target. It was intelligent, to some degree, containing an on-board computer and a laser gyro.

The first stage fell away, and the smaller second stage burned briefly, accelerating the ASAT to many multiples of the speed of sound.

Then the second stage was discarded.

The ASAT was designed for airborne launch, primarily from an F-15, and was actually capable of knocking satellites out of low Earth orbit. So it was overdesigned for this particular mission. That was not seen as a problem, by the mission planners.

The final stage of the ASAT was basically a smart projectile, which would use the momentum imparted by the rocket boosters to hurl itself at its target. It spun itself up now, and used the fifty-six small rockets in its outer hull to obey its guidance system and keep it on its course. It carried no explosive; it was designed to destroy its target by direct collision, impacting with the force of a shell from a battleship’s main gun.

It closed rapidly on the infrared glow it perceived before it. But the target was large, complex, with many sources of heat; accuracy would be difficult to achieve.

There was a bang: loud, deep, solid.

The flight deck shuddered, over and above the usual rattling of equipment and loose gear.

Benacerraf was startled. She remembered nothing like this from the sims, or her first flight.

Libet turned to Angel, her mouth open. “What was that?”

Marcus White called up with a routine message. “
Endeavour
, you have two-engine transatlantic abort capability.”

Angel said, “Copy, two-engine TAL.” His voice was flat, the response automatic; Benacerraf could see that his attention was focused on a main engine status display. “Houston,
Endeavour.
I think we might have a situation here. I’m reading a climb in the fuel pump operating temperature, on main engine number one.”

“
Endeavour
, Houston. Say again.”

“I have a multisensor fuel pump temp rise on engine one.”

“Copy that,
Endeavour.
Stand by…”

Tell me this isn’t happening, Barbara Fahy thought.

In her mind she replayed those final, stunning pictures from the big FCR screens, over and over again: the remote, blurred image of the Shuttle stack still rising smoothly, with the SRBs slowly diverging—and then that shocking incursion from the edge of the picture, a second contrail that had cut obliquely across the complex shape of the orbiter.

Some asshole
shot
at us.

I still can’t believe this is happening, she thought. Who the hell would try to shoot down a Space Shuttle? The Chinese, maybe?

The controller called Booster was trying to get her attention. “Flight, Booster.
Flight
.”

She tried to reply; she felt her mouth working, but no sound emerged, as if the components of her body were becoming disengaged, the systems breaking down.

At last she forced out a word. “Go.”

“Confirm that temperature rise in the center engine. If we pass through nine hundred fifty we’re heading for an auto shutdown. We’re working on the hypothesis that there’s been a collision of some kind, probably with one of the discarded SRB s. We—”

“No. Booster, that’s wrong.”

“But—”

Somehow it made it easier for her that she wasn’t the only one, here, who couldn’t believe this. “We all saw it, damn it. Someone just drove into us. We’ve been hit a glancing blow by some kind of projectile. Prop, Egil, DPS, are you working with Booster on this?”

“Confirm, Flight.”

“Flight, capcom. What do I tell the crew?”

She took a breath. “Stand by, Marcus. Let’s just keep monitoring. We haven’t lost anything yet; we still have all three engines.”

But, she wondered, for how long?

To Benacerraf, it was like a rerun of the disintegration of
Columbia
’s final mission, the slow, almost laborious unraveling of catastrophe. Not again, she thought. Dear God, whatever happens, I can’t go through that again.

Angel turned to Libet, and Benacerraf could see him clench a fist, big knuckles white. “Houston, we heard a bang, just after SRB sep. A loud bang. We have a real issue here.” His voice had a sharp edge.

“We’re working on it, Bill,” Marcus White said. “Four minutes twenty. You have negative return. Do you copy?”

That routine call meant that, whatever the emergency, the abort option of returning to the launch site—in a drastic powered maneuver that would have pointed the Shuttle back towards Canaveral and used its main engines to slow it—was no longer available.

And it was a reminder that the events of the launch were continuing around them, bang or no bang; that Benacerraf was still trapped here, inside this slowly exploding bomb.

Angel said, “I Houston, I’m watching this damn engine temperature reading here. It’s still climbing. Over nine twenty degrees—”

“We’re copying,
Endeavour.
Hold on that.
Endeavour
Houston. Negative TAL now.”

“Copy, negative TAL.”

Another abort option had passed out of operation. Now i was impossible for the orbiter to attempt to cross the Atlantio and land at the emergency airstrip, at Zaragoza in Spain.

“Four minutes fifty seconds,” White said. “We’re still with you guys.”

Despite the situation, his tone was even, deep, immensely reassuring to Benacerraf. This is a man who has been to the Moon, she thought. Marcus won’t feed us bullshit. He will make sure we’re okay.

Angel was hunched forward, against the acceleration, studying his main engine temperature gauge.

If only, she thought, White was here in the cabin with them.

Angel said, “Okay, the center engine has gone through its red line. Do you copy? Nine hundred fifty centigrade. And—’

Benacerraf felt an immediate decrease of acceleration, a lessening of the Gs that pressed her against her seat. The flight deck was filled with a loud, oscillating tone. Four big red push-button alarm lights lit up on the instrument panels around the cabin.

Angel pushed a glowing button on a central panel, above a CRT, to kill the alarm. “Master alarm,” he snapped.

I know, Benacerraf thought bleakly.

Just to the right of the lowest of the cockpit’s three CRT screens was a small cluster of three lights. They were mair engine status lights. Benacerraf saw that the centermost light had turned red.

“We lost the center engine,” Angel called. “It got too hot and shut itself down.”

“We copy,
Endeavour
” Marcus White said. “
Endeavour
, Houston…” The capcom fell silent.

“We’re waiting,” Angel said heavily.

Deeke tried to keep from looking out of the cockpit.

What would he see? —a cloud of dispersing liquid oxygen from a ruptured External Tank, the bright orange glow of RCS hypergolics, fragments of the orbiter wheeling out of the plume, like another
Challenger
?

Had it worked?

… He approached his peak altitude. Deeke began to push his nose down, with RCS blips, so that he climbed to the top with a ten-degree nose-down attitude.

In the moment of stasis at the top of his trajectory, he saw the Earth, spread out before him, through his mailbox window.

The world was very bright, like an inverted sky. Under the nose of the aircraft it curved away, in all directions, as if he were poised above some huge blue dome. Out ahead, he could see the ocean, a deeper, bluish gray color. The atmosphere was clearly visible, as a layer of blue haze over the Earth. Above him there was only blackness.