One Thousand Years (7 page)

“Why
move higher?”

The
elevator doors opened. Vinson continued as they walked down the long
hallway. “At that altitude, we orbit the Earth at the same
rate that it turns. Then the ship can remain stationary directly
over the same spot, focused on the European continent, without
expending energy.”

He
took lengthy strides that made it awkward for McHenry to keep up.
Vinson continued, “There is one disadvantage. It is a
predictable orbit.
We assume the enemy will scan there first.
That is why this goes against Luftwaffe doctrine.
But with a smaller pattern of satellites,
the SS will want a constant view over Europe.”

They reached an intersection with an open hatch in the corner. It went to
a tube that ran vertically up to the hangar. Vinson jumped in and
grabbed the ladder. Suddenly weightless, he held on effortlessly
with one hand. “Has the doctor taken you here before?”

“No,”
McHenry answered, waiting in the doorway. He knew something was
strange in the tube. Vinson was barely holding onto the ladder.

“Just
follow me. There is no gravity in here. It is quite normal, so do
not be afraid.” Then he climbed up out of sight.

Not
knowing what to expect, McHenry jumped and tried to grab the ladder
as casually as Vinson had done. He missed the intended rung and
clumsily grabbed onto the next one. His coordination was unprepared
for the drop in gravitation. He held tight. The experience felt
like the whole ship was falling. Mindful that Vinson was watching,
McHenry maintained his composure.

“Are you all right down there?”

McHenry
looked up at Vinson floating in the tube several yards above him.
“Just fine. It's only a bit of a surprise, that's all.”
It really was worse than that but it felt better after he closed his
eyes momentarily and could imagine he was really falling. The
weightlessness in the tube confused his senses.

“Dr. Evers had warned that you might not like it in here,” said
Vinson. “We can go back and see the Tigers after you have
fully acclimated yourself. I understand it must be hard if you have
never been weightless before.”

“No,
I can handle it.” McHenry climbed one rung at a time, hugging
the ladder with his legs. Actually, he had been weightless before.
He just didn't want to tell Vinson it was while dive-bombing. It's
different without an aircraft fuselage around him.
He looked back down at the tube's entrance.
“I don't understand the physics of the sudden drop off.
That's not supposed to be possible.”

“You
have time to learn,” said Vinson, almost at the hatch.

They
didn't have far to go. The hatch above wasn't more than twenty yards
away, and they moved swiftly. It opened when Vinson was nearby, and
McHenry hurried his pace. They floated through to the hangar deck.
The entire section had no gravity.

“Now
I know why nobody wears hats,” said McHenry.

The
enormous hangar deck was a busy place. Men and women, all wearing
Luftwaffe blue, worked on terminal stations or at one of the
spacecraft parked at one of the three mooring latches. Each black
ship was 100 feet long with no visible windows.
A dark gray swastika,
Luftwaffe emblem and serial number adorned the tail sections.
One of the latches was vacant.
McHenry guessed a ship was out on a mission.

Each
of the spacecraft moors rested flat against the curvature of the
entire ship. There was no real sense of up and down. The entire
area was weightless, and people worked at stations facing in all
directions. Vinson and McHenry clung to one of the railings that
stretched across the hangar, but McHenry noted that some of the
linemen wore control belts and could fly about the hangar.

“That
looks like fun.”

“Oh,
it is. Every child gets to play like that. Even when you grow up,
you never get bored of it. But it is dangerous to play in here when
there is flight activity. There is a Tiger out retrieving satellites
already. This other is being serviced, but they should not be long.”
Vinson pointed to men working near the door. “When they are
done, we will have a look inside.” They settled in to a spot
along the railing where they could wait.

“Now,”
McHenry began, “what about the Grauen?”

“Ah,
the Grauen,” Vinson sighed. “We think the Grauen have
been watching us since soon after Earth's first radio transmissions.
No one is really sure. They are considerably more advanced than we
are and have probably been traveling the stars for millions of
years.”

“Millions
of years!” McHenry repeated, looking again at the ships on the
dock. “I can't imagine what kind of society that must be.”

“And
that is the problem. Neither can we. They don't talk to us, and we
can't find their home planet. A barrier was recently discovered in
space that no one has ever returned from. We think they come from
that direction.”

“A
barrier? Like, a wall in space?”

“Yes,”
Vinson said, nodding. “We call it the Far Wall. It was
discovered five years ago, and it is vast. Every ship that went into
it just disappeared. We even sent survey ships to the edge, but they
disappeared, too.”

“Is
that even possible?” asked McHenry, more a statement than a
question.

“No,
it is not possible in any way we understand. And we understand a
lot.”

“Who
started the war?” McHenry asked after a pause. He liked Vinson
but assumed the Reich was at fault.

Yet
Vinson was not playing along. “This is not much of a war.
There had been many incidents over time, beginning with the first
stories about sightings of their ships and abductions. It did not
become a major concern until they destroyed a Luftwaffe ship on the
ground in Djibouti. That was five hundred years ago, and we have
been shooting at them ever since.”

“Djibouti,
Africa?”

“Yes.
It was the best place to launch rockets back in the late
twentieth-century. Any failures fall safely into the Indian Ocean.
And it took less fuel to reach orbit from central Africa because it
is so much nearer the equator than Peenemünde. You see, they
needed every advantage back in the early times. It is not important
at all now but most of the large Luftwaffe spacecraft are still
assembled there.”

The
linemen had turned toward the adjacent spacecraft and jetted off in
that direction.

“Let's
go,” said Vinson. He sprang forward and floated along the
handrail. McHenry followed, feeling that he was finally getting the
hang of it.

The
hatch was a circular opening with no sign of an actual door. A
ladder extended from inside, with some German lettering along the
side in gray print. McHenry could not read what it said, but it
reminded him of the “NO STEP” warnings stenciled on
his own aircraft.
He almost felt he was in familiar territory.

They
crawled through the open hatch and followed a narrow crawlspace to
the cockpit, which was dimly bathed in a red light. Two seats faced
forward, although it was large enough to accommodate four. They
stared at a grid-squared wall in what appeared to be a distance
larger than McHenry knew the Tiger could be. Once fully inside,
McHenry turned behind and saw that the grid extended fully 360
degrees behind him as well. He reached back to feel the wall that he
could not see. It was all an optical illusion of a sort. Even the
way he came from was now part of the grid.

“It's
like magic,” McHenry said.

“Yes,”
Vinson said, smiling. “It is a little like magic to me, too,
and I know how it works.”

Each
seat had two control sticks. Any other controls and gauges would be
on a small panel before them, except for a panel on the side that
retracted when Vinson pushed it. “The SS officer uses that for
scanning and library functions.”

McHenry
nodded but kept looking at the indicators on the main panel before
them, trying to guess what it could all mean.

Vinson
swung into one seat. A black strip came out from underneath and held
onto his chest and waist. McHenry hesitated only a second and then
took the other seat. The strip was soft, holding him firmly but
comfortably in place.

“
Rechner, aufleuchten!
” Vinson commanded. The grid disappeared,
replaced by a view from inside the hangar.

McHenry
looked behind him. It was as though the rest of the Tiger had
disappeared around them. But like the view in
Kontrolle
, there were
reticles and grid marks and numbers around the view.”

“Where
did it all go? Are we invisible?”

“It's
still there,” Vinson explained. “This is a composite
from the sensors. Or, I guess you might think of them as cameras.”

“I
don't know what you mean by ‘composite.’”

“There
is a sensor array all around this ship, with many different views.
The rechner assembles this image from all those pictures to make it
appear it is one view all around the ship.”

McHenry
focused on the reticles and grid marks overlaying the view. “So
this is really something like a picture that the machine draws for
us?”

“Very
much like that, but it is all based upon what is really out there.”

“I
see,” said McHenry, now willing to accept the view as it was.
It didn't matter that he still wasn't sure whether it was real or
fake. It was useful. He put his hand on the stick. “So how
do I fly this thing?”

“It
is only a little bit like an airplane. We do not rely only on the
stick control.” Vinson reached to the panel. “These are
the vital engine functions. If we were about to leave on a mission,
the rechner would show this as the engines were initializing, and
then again whenever I needed to know more details than were displayed
on the dome background.”

McHenry
stared at the panel, attempting to make sense of it. He began to see
that the numbers, some of them changing as he watched, were like the
needles on his gauges. The legends were mostly abbreviations, all of
it in German.

“How
do you start the engine?” asked McHenry.

“It
is not one engine. A Tiger has over twenty-four thousand drivers, or
what you might call engines.”

“Is
there no thrust from this engine?”

“Exactly.
It is a reactionless drive.”

McHenry's
eyes narrowed. That was an impossibility, he thought, but he had
seen too many of them already. “Okay, how do these engines
start up?”

“They
start in phases. We could bring out this display and start each
phase ourselves, but the rechner does that better than a man ever
could. The rechner usually knows the mission we are assigned. It
will start the engines when we give the command and set up the
navigation. It could take us all the way there and back if we want
it to. The stick is for making quick flight adjustments, and for
manual combat maneuvers.”

“It
seems to me that the machine does a lot of the work for you,”
McHenry surmised. “I guess there is a lot for it to do.”

“Well,
it is not like it was in your day. A pilot has a different role than
just flying the craft. You probably need to become more acquainted
with the rechners.”

“I
guess so,” said McHenry, realizing that was going to be his
next task.

A
sense of inadequacy overwhelmed him. He had thought this could have
been his best chance to escape. He was alone with only one other man
on a spacecraft that could very likely be capable of taking him down
to his base in Italy. Perhaps even straight to the United States.
Or maybe directly to Berlin, he thought, where he could drop a
powerful space weapon on Hitler's Nazi bunker
...
If only he could fly this thing now.

Besides,
he realized, Vinson was too kind a soul to bash his brains in, even
if he hadn't been so much larger — and almost certainly much
stronger.

“Have
you ever flown one of these in combat?” he asked.

“Never,”
replied Vinson. “Grauen sightings are rare. The Reich has had
no other enemies for over five hundred years. There might be one
reported every three or four months, but I haven't been so lucky.”

“Really?
Don't Barr and Bamberg have Iron Crosses? How did they get those?”

“My
friend, you have no experience of our times,” said Vinson.
“They have been flying for a couple hundred years. That is
long enough to have seen combat. Perhaps not as much as you have,
but they have seen more than enough.”

McHenry
allowed that to stand. It was clearly true. The Tiger may have had
a stick and something like a window, but it was not an airplane. He
had a thousand years to catch up on.

“See
this,” said Vinson, fiddling with the panel. The background
image disappeared completely, replaced by a field of stars with the
Earth below.

McHenry
held back expressing his astonishment, but he did look behind to see
if the
Göring
was anywhere nearby.

“We
are now in game or simulator mode,” Vinson explained. “We
use this for training. I will be able to show you how we do things.”

“You
mean, we hadn't really moved, and we're still in the hangar,”
said McHenry, unsteadily. The only comparison he could think of was
Hollywood.

They
practiced flying through space while Vinson explained the simple
basics. They spent ten minutes working this way, and McHenry slowly
got a feel for the controls.

“When
you first learned to fly, did you make passes over the airfield?”

“Yes,
they're called touch-and-goes.”

Vinson
reconfigured the simulator again. This time McHenry could understand
what Vinson was doing even if he couldn't quite follow along. They
were now positioned at low orbit just at the edge of space, at a
steep descent.

“We
will do a touch-and-go over Berlin,” Vinson said. “You
couldn't practice like this in real life, but in simulation, we can.”