Aftermath (23 page)

"What would be the point of that?"

"Suppose that you encounter trouble during that period of reentry when ionization around the orbiter prevents the transmission of radio signals. Visual observation might then offer the only evidence of the nature of the difficulty."

"We don't anticipate trouble." Zoe glanced around the rest of the group, who were showing uneasiness in various ways at the implications of Wilmer's suggestion. "I guess we all like to think positive. But Wilmer is right. If anything were to go wrong with
Lewis,
the rest of you will need to learn all you can from our difficulties before
Clark
makes its own return from orbit. Celine, please make sure that the big scope is set up for continuous visual coverage of the reentry of
Lewis.

"Anything else? No?" Zoe went on casually, as though orbital reentry to a radically changed Earth in an untested ship was the most routine operation imaginable. "Let's get to it, then. I'm fond of the
Schiaparelli,
and it's been good to us. But I'm a little bit itchy to get home."

* * *

"Day" and "night" on the
Schiaparelli
violated human nature and common sense. The Mars ship was locked into the same orbit as ISS-2, and every ninety minutes brought a new dawn and a new sunset. It took five of those "days," almost eight hours, before the motion of Earth and ship were synchronized, and Zoe was able to say from the controls of
Lewis,
"We have thrust. See you all down there."

Celine and the other three were in the control room of the
Schiaparelli,
where they could receive radio inputs from
Lewis
and visual images from the biggest of the onboard scopes. She looked at Jenny, Reza, and Wilmer and felt a strange uneasiness. Zoe, Ludwig, and Alta had not always been in the same cabin with her on the
Schiaparelli;
for much of the time on the return journey, they had all hidden themselves away from each other. But in a sense the other six had been "there," all the time. They had formed a unit, working together in the greatest feat of human exploration ever undertaken.

Now they were split, and even when they came together again on Earth it would not be the same. Something had been lost in that moment of
Lewis
's departure. Celine hated the feeling of loneliness.

At the moment the orbiter was still close to them, and they did not need a scope to see the blue-white flare of its nuclear rocket. But
Lewis
dropped away steadily, losing altitude and velocity, and as the minutes passed the ship as seen without the scope dwindled to a fiery spark. It was beginning the long arc down to the atmosphere of the Earth.

"Everything is nominal." Zoe's voice was clear over the telemetry. "The control routines are behaving exactly as we hoped and expected. You will lose radio contact with us in eight minutes."

Even when ionization induced a temporary radio silence, the image of the orbiter would still be picked up by the big onboard telescope and displayed on the control-room screen. Celine looked, and saw that
Lewis
had already switched off its engine and turned for the nose-first reentry. The image of the orbiter was tiny but quite clear. She even imagined she could make out the dots of people's heads in the cabin's transparent viewport.

She glanced at the display showing elapsed time. Only nine minutes since first thrust. It felt much longer.

"Looking good." Zoe sounded a fraction fainter, but maybe that was Celine's imagination. "We are losing altitude as planned and are already experiencing atmospheric drag. We project loss of radio contact in five minutes and seventeen seconds, eight seconds ahead of schedule. Report back receipt of this signal."

Celine did so, automatically. The Earth below was invisible. It was still night there, though in another nine minutes Celine would look down onto a sunlit United States.
Lewis
was heading for a single-step reentry. There would be no "bounce" aerobraking as they had used it on Mars, skimming into the upper atmosphere and out again several times, like a pebble skipped across the surface of a lake and shedding velocity on each transit. The Earth orbiters and landers all accomplished reentry in a single pass. Aerodynamic and thermal forces were much greater that way, but the ships were designed to take it.

"The hull indicates an increase over predicted temperature," Zoe said. Her voice was overlaid with the faintest hiss and crackle. "Parameters are still within the predicted range. Ionization is beginning, somewhat ahead of schedule. We expect radio blackout in two minutes and eleven seconds, seventeen seconds ahead of schedule. Report back receipt of this signal."

Celine glanced at the other three in the control room. Jenny was serious, following the flight parameters coming over the telemetry and nodding approval. Reza was smiling, moving his hands as though he were flying the
Lewis
himself. Wilmer alone seemed worried, his hand to his chin and his heavy brow furrowed.

"Hull temperature is rising more rapidly." The distortion in Zoe's voice was greater. "It is a good deal more than predicted. I have to lessen the angle of attack and I project a change in downrange landing distance. I am taking manual control of orbiter attitude. We expect radio blackout in fifty seconds."

More than a minute ahead of schedule. Much too soon.

"Refer to visuals," Jenny said softly. Celine looked at the display from the big scope and saw on it a bright arrow trail. The
Lewis
was the silver tip at the head of the arrow.

Celine gave one rapid glance at the unmagnified display. The tiny mote of the
Lewis,
a hundred and more miles beneath the
Schiaparelli,
was not visible. She said urgently, "
Lewis,
we are losing radio contact. Report if you are hearing us."

The radio signal telemetry sounded in her ears as a loud hiss of static, within which every trace of Zoe's voice had been lost. The control board provided the real-time power spectrum of the telemetry, and it was pure white noise.

"They are entering the period of maximum drag and maximum ionization," Celine said—an unnecessary comment for the others in the control room, who knew it as well as she did, but needed for a full record of events. "This has occurred sixty-six seconds ahead of prediction. Radio contact has been lost."

The display from the big scope also showed the nominal flight trajectory for the
Lewis
as it had been calculated ahead of time. The two curves, computed orange and observed yellow, were diverging. Celine could see the separation increasing as she watched. The real ship was falling far behind its simulated twin.

"The atmospheric drag force is way high," Wilmer said suddenly. "The reentry angle must be too steep. It's as though they made an attitude correction the wrong way."

It was useless to ask how he knew—he had his own inexplicable way of making estimates. It was also pointless. The big scope was still providing its display. As Wilmer was speaking, the silver arrow tip brightened.

"Black body equivalent temperature of
Lewis
's hull, forty-two hundred degrees," Jenny said. She was reading the output of the
Schiaparelli
's bolometer. "That exceeds predicted maximum by six hundred degrees."

Still well within tolerances. The exotic materials of the orbiter's hull were rated up to fifty-four hundred degrees. But a normal reentry never came close to that. And Celine did not need the bolometric output to tell her that the temperature of
Lewis
's hull was still increasing. The silver arrowhead had become a blaze of blue. Telemetry was a roar of static in her ears.

"Go
up
," Reza said urgently. He was working imaginary controls, pulling back on them. "Forget the one-shot reentry. Go higher, take another shot later."

Radio silence was two-way. There was no chance that Zoe Nash could hear him. Frictional heating surrounded the racing orbiter with a blaze of ionized gases.

"Black body equivalent temperature of
Lewis
's hull, six thousand degrees." Jenny's voice was a dead whisper. Then, with urgency, "Cool
down.
You can't take that for long."

She was right. As she spoke, the blazing arrow tip vanished. It was replaced by a puff of white, round and delicate as a cotton ball.

Celine did not cry out. She leaned forward and covered her face with her hands. That innocuous cottony cloud was an incandescent rage of flaming gas. In its heart were Zoe Nash, Ludwig Holter, and Alta McIntosh-Mohammad, reduced to their component atoms in
Lewis
's fiery explosion.

They would be carried away by the pendent winds, blown and dispersed by the restless violence of the atmosphere. If the three crew reached a single final landing place, no one would ever know it.

The control room was silent except for Reza's harsh breathing. Celine rocked backward and forward, unable to weep or to make any sound. All she could think was that Zoe, supercapable and superconfident Zoe, had been wrong.

Zoe would not be down on Earth in two days. Zoe would not be there ever.

15

The snow had ended. The wind was dropping away to nothing, and with the loss of cloud cover the night had become bitterly and unnaturally cold.

The ancient frigate chugged south at a leisurely eight knots, while at the bow Saul Steinmetz stood hatted, gloved, and swaddled in winter clothes. His brain was buzzing after a two-hour whirlwind of snap executive judgments that everyone else in government seemed too scared to make. One side effect of Supernova Alpha was Saul's own apparent apotheosis. No one questioned his authority to do anything.

The buck stops here.
Good old Harry Truman, he said it better than anybody. But it would be nice to think you were making
right
decisions.

Saul was alone, but not, he was sure, unobserved. Even if the frigate crew could conquer their natural curiosity at having the President on board, his security staff were still on duty.

One week ago, heavy rains had pushed the river far above flood stage. The level was lower now, but when the snow melted the waters would rise again, farther than ever. The only evidence for wild conditions upstream lay in the large amount of carried sediment. At night, the heavy suspension of reddish mud did not show. The water lay thick and black as oil, parting smoothly before the old warship's advance.

Saul stared downstream. A light was blinking there, alien in its slow staccato. A warning? No, a message, that was much more reasonable. A message intended for this ship?

Peering at the point of light and wondering about its meaning, Saul allowed his mind to wander away to more personal questions. Was he going to learn something, as he believed, or was he running away? A thousand things needed doing back in his White House second-floor office. Auden Travis was the most diplomatic of aides, but his face had made his views clear when Saul said where he was going. There had been some kind of fight between Auden and Yasmin Silvers. Maybe tonight Saul would learn the cause.

And what was it between Saul and Tricia? Why had she called, out of the blue, after a two-year silence?

It was certainly not for lunch and a casual how-are-you. Tricia's whole history showed that she did nothing casually.

She had been born Patricia Stennis, poor in Toledo. At age eighteen she had gone to work for the country's biggest software company, where the next year at a Detroit trade show she had caught the eye of the aging majority shareholder. Six months later they married and she moved to California. She became Patricia Stennis Leighton, and soon after that, Patsy Leighton. She had been totally devoted and loyal to her husband for four years—until, suddenly and surprisingly, they had divorced.

One year after that Patsy was in Houston, the wife of an oil baron whose ranch sprawled across three hundred square miles and embodied an excess of all forms of bad taste. Trish Beacon, as she was now, enjoyed—or endured, though she would never admit it—two and a half years of Lone Star lifestyle, until finally she and Bobby Beacon divorced.

The next fall Trish married into some of the oldest money in the country. She moved readily, maybe even eagerly, from west Texas to Delaware. Again, she was unswervingly loyal to and admiring of her husband. Saul first met her at a reception in Wilmington when she was two years into her third marriage. She was now Tricia Chartrain. He found her breathtakingly attractive. She seemed to take little notice of him, then or at other dinners and social functions where their paths crossed. Always, she talked admiringly of her husband, Willis Chartrain.

A year later, she called Saul at his Atlanta office. She and dear Willis had divorced—she would prefer not to talk about it. She was in town for a few days, and without an escort for a dinner party. She remembered that Saul's headquarters were in Atlanta. Would he, as a great favor, consider being her dinner companion?

Would he? He had ended a long go-nowhere affair two months earlier, soon after the primaries made it clear that he had a good shot at the party nomination. But Saul was Saul. He set the machinery to work, and had a detailed report on Tricia in less than a week. Patricia Stennis/Patsy Leighton/Trish Beacon/Tricia Chartrain had played around some in Toledo and elsewhere when she was very young, but in her marriages she had been either faithful to her husband or infinitely discreet. An association with Tricia was unlikely to ruin Saul on the campaign trail.

In fact, the report came too late. Saul and Tricia had become lovers on the night of the dinner party. They remained that way, passionate and committed and inseparable, for the next six months. She had a way of devoting herself, totally and unreservedly, to Saul and his interests. It was intoxicating, something he had never known before. He knew that he would give her anything, or give up anything for her.

Anything, until the day his political advisers came to meet him on the campaign trail in Oregon. Tricia was away, spending a day or two with old friends from the Patsy Leighton software days in San Francisco. The message delivered to Saul was quite clear. They had the poll results and the analysis. Married to Tricia, Saul would lose his bid to be President.