The Glass Lady (20 page)

“COAS alive,” the AC said to himself. “Manual CSS.”

Parker peered into a small mirror at the base of the COAS periscope. Several stars were visible on a circular grid on the mirror. Using control stick steering, the AC commanded the tail thrusters to slowly move Endeavor's nose until a single bright star moved to the center of the recticle grid on the palm-size mirror.

“Mark!” the AC called as a star momentarily centered on the mirror. As he spoke, he punched the attitude reference pushbutton to the left of his round attitude indicator at the upper left comer of the forward instrument panel. Mother instantly logged the angle between Shuttle and the star which the pilot had first identified for the computers. He twisted the control stick between his thighs until another bright star crossed the COAS sight as Endeavor's nose moved sideways among the stars of the southern hemisphere.

“And, mark!” the pilot said as he pushed the ATT REF button again. With two identified stars in the hopper, Mother compared their angles and the information reduced with the attitude information coming through the two-star-trackers working automatically outside.

“And Mother says the COAS and the trackers are in agreement, Jack.”

“Super, Skipper. Glad we don't have to go VFR On Top today.” Enright looked outside as they passed within 180 miles of Kangaroo Island on Australia's southern coast. No town lights could be seen from 125 miles above the pitch darkness. “Sure can't see any kangaroos down there, Skip.”

Endeavor coasted wings level, heads-up, toward Australia's southeast land mass. The ship would glide between Melbourne and the island of Tasmania.

“Endeavor: Configure AOS by Orrora.”

“Howdy, Canberra. With you loud and clear. We shot a good COAS sight. We're doin' fine.”

“Copy, AC. Downlink is real solid at 61 minutes MET. So how goes your first hour in the sky, Endeavor?”

“Havin' a ball, Flight. Target is four miles ahead and seven above us,” Enright called. He greatly enjoyed the sensation of weightlessness, although the puffy flush in his face was warm and uncomfortable.

“You're two minutes from open water, Endeavor. We'll be with you another four minutes.”

“Okay, Flight,” the AC drawled. “Jack is up to his eyeballs with our little fuel cell boil-over. I'm configuring the ARS for sunrise. Give us a minute, Flight.”

“Sure, Will. Take your time.”

The Colonel worked Panel Left-One beside his left shoulder in preparation for the 270 degrees Fahrenheit heat which would come with sunup.

“Secondary flash evaporator, high load evaporator on, duct B. Cabin fans A and B to on and water loop One bypass to manual, Two bypass to auto. And we'll cool the cabin air a bit here.”

The AC worked his switches at his left.

“Okay, Canberra. With you now.”

“Roger, Will. At sixty-three minutes, you're crossing the coastline. Can you see Sidney about 180 miles to your left?”

“Ah, lookin', Flight,” a Kentucky twang drawled in the black sky above Australia's eastern shoreline where everyone slept at 2 o'clock in the morning.

“Just barely, Flight. Some cloud cover down there.” The AC squinted down toward a hazy patch of light, like a light bulb wrapped in cotton.

“Say, Flight, is it really summer down there?”

“Eighty in the shade, Jack.”

“Surely is dark down there.”

“Roger that, right seat. Happens every night about this time. Losing you in about ten seconds. Keep an eye on your freon loop temps after daybreak. You're Go at sixty-five minutes.”

“Bye, Australia . . . Ready to roll, Will.”

The AC commanded the computers to roll Shuttle onto her white backside. Tail and nose RCS thrusters worked together as Endeavor executed a slow wing-over. After a minute of rolling, the RCS jets popped to arrest the roll bringing Endeavor to a stop upside down. Coasting nose forward, Shuttle's black glass belly faced the starry sky where a billion white, red and blue stars shone without twinkling.

Without sound, Endeavor coasted across the black South Pacific. Six hundred miles and two flying minutes behind the ship's inverted tail, Australia rolled over the edge of the dark, sleeping planet as the white speck against the sky hurtled across the sea.

Like six white birds flying in tight formation across a black sky, the illuminated windows of the lighted flightdeck moved against the stars. Jacob Enright looked over his right shoulder and looked upward toward the sea below his upside-down office.

“Look at that!” Enright exclaimed into his triple pane window.

Far below, the black Pacific glowed a faint fluorescent green like phosphorescent paint spilled into a well. The sea glowed in a ribbon 50 miles long.

“Plankton, Jack. Glows when seawater disturbs it. A school of fish will light it up. Only dolphins won't light it. A dolphin can swim at thirty knots without generating a twitch of vortex turbulence. The perfect airfoil . . . If we could fly dolphins, we would be on Mars by now.”

The Aircraft Commander spoke into his window. He spoke softly, prayerfully.

Two and a half minutes after losing contact with Orrora, Australia, Endeavor crossed latitude 30 degrees south, 120 miles southeast of Norfolk Island. Just at the Earth's invisible horizon, 750 nautical miles to the northeast, the mystic Fiji Islands lay in a tropical summer's night. An hour from home where it was the dead of winter, Endeavor flew in the airless silence of a South Pacific night.

An hour and twelve minutes aloft, Shuttle coasted above the Tongatapu Islands, 1,500 nautical miles south of the Equator.

“Looks like a contact, Skipper.”

Flying nose first, upside down, Endeavor's radar beacons had been searching the nighttime sky for the radar footprint of LACE. But the beacons had wandered aimlessly at the speed of light to bend toward the very edge of the universe. Until now.

“Got a MAP, Jack?” The Colonel squinted at the green CRT before him where print and a graphic, three-dimensional box slowly rotated like a teenager's video game.

“Looks like we have a message acceptance pulse, Will.”

“Soyuz?”

“Don't think so. Not in this radio spectrum, Skipper . . . There.”

The video graphic cube steadied as the two pilots with their heads nearly touching peered into the open graphic box on the television.

“LACE?” the command pilot inquired gravely.

“I'm interrogating it again.”

Enright's left hand worked his computer keyboard and Mother instantly sent her encrypted electromagnetic waves of greeting out to the planet's far corner.

“And we have our baby, Skip. Solid lockup. Range five thousand meters.” The hairs on Enright's neck tingled.

Both fliers jumped into their shoulder harnesses when one of Endeavor's nose jets barked out a plume of orange flame into the darkness just eight feet in front of their faces. Mother was automatically maintaining their even keel upside down. Each pilot smiled sheepishly.

“Might close in here, buddy.”

Jack Enright nodded at his captain.

“Best tell Mother, Jack.”

Without words, the copilot in the right seat which his floating body barely touched tapped at the keyboard's black keys. The computers reached out into the black vacuum with electronic fingers which wrapped around LACE'S black body.

“See anything, Jack?” Both men peered into the darkness.

“Can't even see the stars with these floodlights in here.”

Seventy-six minutes out, Endeavor glided 720 miles east of Samoa toward the Equator 900 miles to the north. At the Earth's far eastern comer, the curvature of the horizon was visible as a hair-thin band of pink with blackness above and below. Because Shuttle flew bottoms-up, the curving pink lines of their South Pacific sunrise looked from the flightdeck like an airy smile with the Earth's reddening limb curving up at its edges.

“Mornin', Skipper.”

“And to you, Number One, 'Bout time to go out to fetch the newspaper from the front porch.”

“Watch that first step, Will.”

Both pilots chuckled 14 minutes from their next ground station contact. They watched the upside-down horizon turn quickly from pink to red to orange as the sun's white disk erupted over the edge of the world with an explosion of blinding daylight like a magnesium flare.

From the top of their helmets, the pilots pulled a tinted visor down over their closed faceplates advertised as laser-proof.

Far below, the sea was still black and colorless as the ship raced in daylight toward the sun. On the South Pacific islands beneath Endeavor's white backside, the horizon was only three miles away and the new sun had a long way to go before it climbed over the edge to awaken the gold-skinned islanders. For Shuttle, the horizon where the sun sat was a thousand miles distant. Endeavor flew in daylight which the palm trees below would not feel for another hour.

Two minutes after the dazzling sunrise 720 miles northwest of Tahiti, the black glass bricks on the underside of Endeavor's wings and body were baked by full daylight. The flash evaporators sweated profusely as the freon in Shuttle's veins warmed to the blinding sunlight.

Flying upside down and racing over the gray sea 80 minutes from home, Enright's window faced north and the left seat pointed toward the south. The copilot squinted outside to search for Christmas Island 750 miles to the northwest. He could see only endless green sea in morning twilight. Wisps of clouds dotted tiny islands where turtles and crabs were the only life stretching in the morning sunshine. The clouds covered the islands but not the ocean. Two minutes and 600 miles from crossing the Equator, the upside-down command pilot squinted east toward the dozens of cloud-covered islands of French Polynesia.

The pilots watched their green television screens, which depicted their target ahead of them and moving eastward with Endeavor. The shuttle was lower than LACE, which gave the pilots a faster orbital speed than their target. As their range closed, the glass starship would catch LACE from below and would move steadily upward toward the laser satellite. During the final moments of the chase, during Terminal Phase Initiate, Shuttle would pass underneath LACE and would end the game of space tag by coming up east of LACE and ahead of it. The final rendezvous would then be shot from a position in front of LACE in a matched tandem orbit.

“Rev Two, Skipper,” Enright called as Endeavor crossed the Equator northbound 82 minutes into the mission.

Unlike prior American manned spacecraft whose orbits were numbered from the west longitude meridian of Cape Canaveral, Shuttle orbits, or revolutions, are counted from the point where Shuttle crosses the Equator while flying from south to north. As Endeavor sped over the Equator, she began her second Earth revolution, although her position along the orbital track was still 4,000 nautical miles west of Cape Canaveral. Her second revolution thus began after only five-sixths of a complete orbit around the earth.

“Eight minutes to acquisition of California voice, Jack.” Endeavor would travel 2,400 miles during that eight minutes over open water before hearing from the ground. They pursued LACE alone with Mother's warm black boxes at the helm. Their first United States landfall would be Texas in thirteen more minutes after a pass over northern Mexico.

The white sun was low in the eastern sky. On the blue-green sea 128 nautical miles beneath the inverted shuttle, it was 7:30 in the morning. With Endeavor's nose and black belly between the cockpit and the morning sun, the flightdeck went dark gray, just dark enough to make reading impossible. The center annunciator panel's forty lights illuminated white, yellow, and red for an instant. Then the warning lights and all of the cabin floodlights went out.

There was only the gray gloom and a silence absolute as the lights and the three televisions and the cabin fans went dead.

The two pilots sat quietly in the silent semi-darkness. To keep their weightless arms from floating against the instrument panels, the pilots tucked their hands into their chest straps. There were no simulations for Mother suffering a stroke.

“So I was jest wond'rin', Jacob,” the AC drawled calmly, like any old farmer talking over the back fence with his cousin from 'cross the creek.

“Yeah, Skipper,” the copilot asked with his very best, downhome “so how's your old mare?” voice.

“Meant to mention it: Did you pay the 'lectric bill 'fore we left this mornin'?”

“Didn't have time, Skipper. Do it when we get home.”

“Reckon that explains it,” said the Colonel in the half darkness.

“Think we could mail it in?”

“Think you can find the mailbox, Number One?”

Both airmen chuckled in the air which was quickly becoming stuffy without cabin and suit fans.

“Think Mother's state vectors are off the line, too?”

“Don't even
think
it, Will.”

The two pilots abandoned their gallows humor. Parker reached over his head to Panel Overhead-13.

“Let's see, Jack. Circuit breakers, Essential Bus 1BC are all closed, rows A and B. Essential Bus 2CA, breakers closed. And Essential Bus 3AB, also all closed. She's alive here. Try your side, Jack.”

Enright felt for the long instrument panel, Right-1, by his right elbow. He tried to get his face closer to the barely visible array of 96 switches, pushbuttons, and circuit breakers on the single 12-by-32-inch electrical systems panel braced to the cockpit wall.

“Okay, Skipper. AC controller, all nine breakers, still closed. Let's put AC bus sensors One, Two, and Three, from auto-trip to off. Inverter AC-1 to on, AC-2 to on, and AC-3 to on. Let's try control bus power, DC Main A to reset, DC Main Bravo to reset, and Main Charlie to reset.”

“Damn” was all Parker said when the cabin lights blinked on, along with the three green televisions. The hum of the cabin fans filled the stale flightdeck.

“How can air from a bottle taste so sweet, Skip?”