Acid Sky (23 page)

Next to him, in the copilot’s seat, Simmons was busy with his thoughts. The cabin behind them was empty; there were no other passengers on the flight, although the freight hold was filled with supplies for the
Langley
.

Simmons was still irritated that he had been pulled off the
Denver
and told to take over down here, despite his protestations. The
Denver’s
reactor troubles were still not resolved to his satisfaction, and he was concerned about the remaining crew’s ability to deal with any emergency that came up while they were heading back to Earth. At least two of the other tug commanders could have done the job, he thought, and the only reason he could see for it was his rank; he was the most senior of the commanders over Venus right now.

There must be something serious going on if they wanted a lieutenant colonel there. He had been told very little about the reasons for Donaldson’s recall to Earth, but what he hadn’t been told, he could guess. Someone of Donaldson’s seniority and experience didn’t lose his command for nothing. It was most likely something about that accident earlier in the year, he thought. He wouldn’t be surprised if Donaldson was just being made to take the blame. Well, he would find out soon.

‘We’ll be landing in about fifteen minutes, sir,’ Hartigan’s voice broke in. Simmons nodded, and checked his seat straps again. Hartigan had warned him to expect a bumpy ride from the storm front that was sweeping across the sky ahead of them. He could see it ahead of them now on the horizon, a dark bank of brooding storm clouds against the featureless white of the cloud deck.

Simmons had been down to the carriers on several occasions, but with the last two years spent commanding the
Denver
, he wasn’t current on spaceplane landings, so Hartigan would be bringing them in today. Simmons was familiar with Hartigan’s experience and reputation, and felt confident and secure.

‘Airspeed Mach one and falling. Relight sequence.’

In their eyrie above the flight deck of the
Langley
, the control tower team watched the incoming blip of the spaceplane on the long-range radar.

The security door behind them clicked open. Shaffer emerged and took up the flight operations officer’s position by the rear window. He glanced at the situation board.

‘Are all the other aircraft back on board?’ he asked the tower controller.

‘Yes sir. Deck ops reports all secure and chained down. We’re heading out and away at full thrust as soon as we’ve taken this landing.’

‘Right.’ Shaffer felt a vague sense of unease move inside him. They had steered round storms before; why were they moving away so fast afterwards?

The carrier moved beneath him, a sudden lurch, and he put his hand out to steady himself. He glanced at the weather radar.

Holy fuck.
The wind vectors were all over the place. No wonder they weren’t hanging around any longer than they needed to. He stared at the swirling vortex of red for several seconds. The storm had grown in the last few hours, and it extended for nearly eight hundred kilometres, filling the sky ahead.

‘Sir, I’ve got the
Curtiss
on line, they’ve hit severe turbulence in a squall line and taken damage, they have to move north.’ The tower controller’s voice interrupted his thoughts. ‘That’s our last divert gone.’

‘What?’
Shaffer was suddenly alert.

‘We lost the
Wright
earlier – they had to move for the storm as well.’

‘So we’re taking a landing with no diverts available?’ Shaffer asked, his voice rising.

‘Yes sir, they’ve got to land here. We’re in the calmest weather.’ The carrier lurched again, sending coffee mugs flying.

‘They can’t land here – they’ve got to divert!’ Shaffer shouted. He ran to the situation display and punched up the positions of the two other carriers. The controller was right; the
Curtiss
was heading away north, and the
Wright
was far to the east of them. A wide green circle around the
Langley’s
position showed the diversion range of the spaceplane – it would run out of fuel before it reached either of the other carriers.

Shaffer started to sweat. It began under his armpits, in a trickle of fear that ran like acid down his sides.
There were no diverts.
He thought briefly of running for the door, getting back to the radar generators and repairing what he’d broken, but he knew he couldn’t get there in time. He couldn’t alert the tower to what was about to happen without implicating himself.

They were coming in.

He closed his eyes and thought quickly. What would you do, if you were coming in and there were no radio-based landing aids, and you had to land?

Use the ball. Hartigan was experienced enough to use the optical landing system on its own to make a landing. Might take a couple of tries, but he could do it. Yes. That was it. Try to relax. He scanned the sky through his binoculars; they must be getting close now.

‘Skydive One Five Two, Tower. we have you on localiser. Maintain current height to intercept glideslope.’

‘Tower, One Five Two. We are on course but we can’t see the localiser. I’m holding off dumping fuel. Do you want me to go round?’

‘One Five Two, roger, continue approach, await instructions.’ The tower controller punched some buttons, turned to Shaffer. ‘Localiser’s working, sir, it must be their receiver. They need to dump fuel now if they’re going to attempt a landing.’

‘Continue.’ Shaffer’s voice came from his mouth, but it wasn’t him talking. His hands clenched the binoculars so hard that they shook.

‘One Five Two, continue approach. You are number one for landing, below glideslope, report visual and fuel state.’

There was a pause before Hartigan’s voice responded.

‘One Five Two, roger, dumping fuel to landing weight.
’ Through his binoculars, Shaffer could see the long trail of boiling liquid oxygen stream from the tiny speck of the spaceplane. After a short pause, Hartigan’s voice came back again:

‘One Five Two, we can’t acquire the glideslope. Continuing on visual approach, please advise course and height.’

This time the tower controller reached out and pressed another button, and lights on the situation boards went red. ‘Sir, we have incoming recovery, no radio landing aids, no divert possible.’ The controller’s face had gone white.

‘Roger.’ Shaffer looked at the crewman at the next console. ‘Sound crash stations. Inform the captain we have an emergency.’ He pointed to the tower controller. ‘Bring them in.’

‘One Five Two, roger. You are below glideslope, on course and speed. Report visual and fuel state.’

‘One Five Two, carrier in sight. Fuel state is four decimal nine tonnes. Visual approach.’
Hartigan’s voice was calm, as if he was flying the approach in a simulator.

In the background, Shaffer could hear the sound of the emergency alarms sounding through the ship. He could visualise the scenes below him in the carrier; he could see the pressure doors sliding shut, the crew grabbing facemasks as they ran to their crash stations. If the spaceplane hit hard, it could easily breach the hull.

‘One Five Two, your fuel state four decimal nine. Landing lock negative, visual landing. Clear to land, release hook and immediate move to elevator when down.’

‘One Five Two.’

‘Arresting gear ready, Olympus four decimal nine.’

‘Control room ready, Olympus four decimal nine, landing full stop.’

‘Deck clear.’

‘Go landing.’ Now there were a set of green lights alongside the red
CRASH ALERT
sign on the tower controller’s console.

‘One Five Two, we have the ball, fuel state four decimal seven, established for landing.’

‘One Five Two, land.’

The litany of the landing exchange was done, and they were committed. Shaffer could see the incoming spaceplane now, its landing lights bright against the sky.

The carrier moved underneath him, and rolled suddenly to one side, then lurched upwards. Shaffer had to grab a console to stop himself from being knocked to the ground.

‘Wind shear. Wind shear,’
a computer added its voice to the klaxon.

‘Control room! Hold us steady!’ Shaffer yelled into the tower controller’s circuit.

‘We’re trying.’

He turned back anxiously to the incoming spaceplane. It was rolling from side to side, trying to keep up with the ship. ‘Wave them off! The deck’s not stable!’

On the deck outside, the green lights on the optical landing system changed to a flashing red, and the lines of deck lighting turned red.

‘Too late!’ The tower controller yelled as the spaceplane roared over the threshold, its engines screaming as Hartigan put power on. It straightened out, and for a moment, it looked as if it was going to make it clear of the carrier. Then another gust caught the carrier’s left wing, lifting it violently upwards. The giant spaceplane, caught in the swirl of disrupted air, ploughed into the rising deck, its landing gear shearing off with a
crump
that resounded through the carrier. It collapsed onto the deck, and its momentum carried it screeching across the deck lights, scattering wreckage behind it.

In the last few moments, Shaffer took the binoculars from his eyes and saw the spaceplane, a river of black smoke streaming from its underside, sliding in slow-motion across the flight deck, straight towards him.

Oh, no—

Liquid oxygen sprayed from its ruptured tanks in a fan of white vapour, turning it into a fifty-tonne bomb.

One wing scythed into the
Langley’s
tower, taking a huge chunk out of the base. The spaceplane, spinning wildly, screeched on over the wing and slid over the leading edge. It broke apart, sending wreckage and fuel into the intakes of the
Langley’s
outermost engine. Tonnes of metal, fuel and liquid oxygen plunged straight into the spinning blur of fan blades and compressor. The nose and forward fuselage of the spaceplane, shorn of its wings, fell away from the carrier, arrowing down towards the clouds below.

The
Langley’s
outermost engine exploded as its entire kinetic energy was released in a split second; the fan blades and compressor disintegrated and ripped outwards, tearing out huge holes in the right wing, and driving blade fragments deep into the neighbouring engine. The inboard engine’s compressor stalled with a huge
bang
and then gyrated to a shuddering, catastrophic halt, choked with debris and the gases from the first explosion.

The stream of call traffic from the tower was cut off abruptly when the spaceplane tore through its base, severing the communications links. The tower, half its supporting structure gone, toppled slowly over in the roar of the slipstream. For a moment, it looked as if it might hold, then as the
Langley’s
engines exploded in ruin directly underneath it, the entire structure toppled back and away in a shower of debris and severed cables. The remains of the tower tumbled over the back of the carrier’s wing, taking great chunks out of the structure before tearing through the main elevons as it fell off the back of the carrier and down into the sky.

A trail of black, radioactive smoke, flecked with fire, belched from the remains of the
Langley’s
engines. The reactor core had been torn open on the outermost engine, and the uranium fuel pellets blazed like fireflies as they streamed out of the stricken reactor. The innermost engine had stopped and was on fire. Another explosion tore through the twin engines, belching flames and debris from the severed stump of the tower.

Shedding wreckage from the damaged wing, the enormous carrier rolled slowly to the right, and began to fall from the sky like a wounded bird.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Colonel Donaldson was in his personal stateroom when the crash alert sounded. He had been changing into his uniform ready for Simmons’s arrival. The bruises from Shaffer’s attack made him wince, but he was damned if he was going to surrender his command in anything but full uniform.

The moment he heard the strident blare of the klaxon in the corridor outside, he dropped everything and ran instinctively for the control room, banging the doors open as he raced through his day cabin.

‘What’s happening?’ he demanded. The carrier moved suddenly beneath him, and he grabbed a console to steady himself.

Conway turned to face him. ‘Landing emergency, captain – incoming spaceplane can’t get a landing system lock, so they’re flying a manual approach.’

Donaldson moved swiftly over to the traffic radar display. The dot of the incoming spaceplane was aligned with the graphic of the
Langley’s
deck, and was moving closer with every second. The boresight camera on the optical landing aid showed the magnified speck of the craft, rising and falling against the crosshairs as it came in.

‘Jesus, we’ve got a pitching deck – can he go round?’

‘He could, but the conditions are getting worse; this is his best chance.’

‘Who’s flying?’

‘Hartigan. If anyone can pull it off, he can.’

The captain nodded grimly. ‘I suppose it’s too late to divert now?’

Conway pointed out the positions of the other carriers on the situation display. ‘The
Curtiss
was our last one, and they had to move out of diversion range a few minutes ago; they hit the edge of the storm and took damage to one of their rudders. Hartigan’s got to land here.’

The carrier heaved beneath them, more violently this time.

‘Caution, turbulence.’

‘Helm, hold her steady!’ Donaldson yelled above the noise of the automated voice alert. ‘Override the autopilot if you have to!’

‘It’s shearing too much, sir,’ the helmsman said, sweat beading on his forehead as the carrier rolled again.

‘Control room! Hold us steady!’
Shaffer’s voice came over the tower controller’s circuit.

‘We’re trying,’ Conway answered calmly, but his gaze flicked between the helm and the traffic radar, and the looming blip of the spaceplane. ‘They need to go round – we’re not stable,’ he muttered. Just at that moment, the wave-off lights illuminated.