The Glass Lady (44 page)

Although Shuttle's RCS thrusters popped like howitzers, Parker could not feel them where he floated at the aft station. Nor could he feel the ship's slow roll. Only the rolling of the spherical, black-and-white Eight Ball in the attitude director indicator confirmed that they were coming about. The ADI on the upper left wall of the rear bulkhead told the AC that he was standing on his head over a black ocean, 1,200 miles this side of the edge of the Anomaly.

“Five and a half behind and closing, 18 below, 21 crossrange, Will. You got him?”

Parker floated toward the rear overhead window. Through it, he squinted into the darkness toward the sea below. From the ceiling of the aft flightdeck, he could not see the tail's orange wake.

“Negative, Jack.”

“Endeavor, Endeavor. Soyuz here. I am 450 meters out. You want I should approach?”

“Negative, Uri. Parker here. We are monitoring LACE coming in from the northwest. His track is about 22 miles north of us and 6 miles behind and overtaking. Hold short with your service module in minus-Z until he passes.”

“Understand. Will hold blunt-end-down. Soyuz standing by.”

“Okay, Uri . . . Jack?”

“Three behind, 21 below, 23 cross-range. Anything?”

“Still zip. Makes me itchy like the old days, Number One.”

“Yeh. I feel it, too. He's 02 behind, 24 below, 25 outside.”

On a great circle of longitude joining the North and the South poles, the full moon was on the same meridian as Shuttle. The moon's cold face cast its fuzzy reflection on the nighttime ocean well north of Endeavor. Parker caught a distant glint outside his overhead window against the black water.

“Wait one,” the AC called. He reached toward the rear panels and then spun slowly in mid-air to each side wall. He turned the knobs which dimmed the rear flightdeck lights. In the cozy gloom illuminated only by the red backlighting of the instruments, he returned to his ceiling windows.

“One behind, Skipper, 26 below, 27 out.”

Looking straight down from the ceiling window, Parker caught a faint white star twinkling beneath and well to the north side of his ship.

“Contact! Your ten o'clock high, Jack!”

Enright and Karpov both looked high to their left as they flew headsdown with Shuttle's tail leading the starship's nose across the dark sky.

“Have traffic!” Enright glanced at his television. “One-half behind, 29 below, 30 north . . . And there she goes!”

LACE sped under Shuttle well to the inverted portside off Enright's left shoulder. The copilot in his captain's seat looked to the north.

“He's really hauling the mail, Will.”

“Yeh. I got him by overhead. Movin' behind us. Time, Jack?”

“08 plus 24. One minute to go in here.”

Parker moved to the rear window facing the dark bay still orange around the tail and aft OMS pods.

“On your six!” The fighter pilot in the rear cabin watched LACE illuminated by moonlight as it disappeared behind Shuttle's boxy stern, which housed the dead three main engines and the twin orbital maneuvering system pods. Each pod on either side of the tail contained a third of the ship's reaction control system jets and the large OMS engines needed to bring Shuttle out of orbit.

“I have it, Jack!”

Parker's deep voice filled the darkened flightdeck.

The AC facing aft grabbed the attitude control stick located in the center of the rear instrument arrays between the two rear windows in the wall.

“I got it!” Parker shouted hoarsely.

The command pilot violently jerked the rotational hand controller. Instantly, Mother fired a battery of jets in the two OMS pods sending out fiery plumes on each side of the inverted tailfin.

Outside, the long vertical tail was no longer orange, although the rear walls of the bay still glowed. The tall tail was a flat, faint blue-green: the color of high-intensity, laser light.

The tail thrusters pushed Shuttle's hindquarter skyward and the inverted nose dipped toward the sea.

“What the . . .” Enright craned his neck to look back at Parker.

“We're hit! We're hit, Jack!”

The AC steered the tail out of the eerie green glow which lasted five seconds.

“Damn!” Enright shouted as warning horns blared and lights flashed on the Caution and Warning panel on the upper center of the forward instrument panel between him and Karpov.

“Left OMS! APU temp!” Enright read the two flashing caution lights.

The Colonel worked his attitude hand controller. Slowly, the heavy ship came to a stop with her body vertical. Out the rear window, Parker saw the tail fin move slowly across a faint starfield visible with the cabin lights dimmed. With Shuttle's rear end pointing straight up, the square stern of the open payload bay moved southeast across the bright, southern constellation Canis Major at 08 hours 24 minutes. Just northeast of the upright tail, Sirius, the heavens' brightest star, moved like a brilliant white beacon.

“Hittin' the lights, Number One.”

Parker cranked up the flightdeck lights. Enright glanced at the mission clock under his forward windshield.

“08 plus 25, Skip. We're out.”

Endeavor darted vertically out of the Anomaly over open water 550 statute miles southwest of Cape Town, South Africa.

“There it is, Jack.”

The AC had powered up the payload bay lighting. He looked through the harsh glare in the bay to the tail section. To the port side of the tail's base, the left OMS pod was enveloped in a brown cloud of vaporous monomethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide escaping from laser-melted and ruptured fuel tanks. Within the thickening cloud were chunks of heatshield tiles. A tangled mess of pipes and tubing protruded from the left OMS pod.

“That's all she wrote on the left OMS, Jacob.”

The Aircraft Commander's voice was very calm, very matter-of-fact. The consummate aviator: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. We're circling Newark in this little thunderstorm up here. Ah, Number One is feathered and Number Two is running a little hot. But, ah, we'll be at the old gate right on time. Thank you for flying with us tonight. Hope to see you all again real soon.”

“Yeh, Will. Goin' to zero-zero on Left OMS consumables.” Enright squinted through his bandages at the glass meters above the right-center window above Karpov's anxious face.

“Check on Brother Ivan, Jack.”

“Right . . . Soyuz, Soyuz. Endeavor has sustained maneuvering system damage aft. No cabin damage. Status there? Over.”

Enright, Parker, and Major Karpov waited.

“Soyuz, Soyuz. Endeavor. Over?” The voice was Parker's as the lighted bay filled with brown gas which glistened with sublimating frost in the frozen nighttime vacuum.

“Uri!” Alexi Karpov pressed his mike button. Perspiration beaded upon his face round and puffy from twenty hours of weightlessness.

“Endeavor, Endeavor: Configure AOS by Botswana at 08 plus 26. With you for 45 seconds only. We show you zip on Left OMS tanks with two hot APUs. LACE is well inbound now, 90 ahead of you, 70 cross-range, 37 below. Good work, guys! . . . Advise status. LOS in 20 seconds.”

“AC here, Colorado . . . We took a broadside from your blackbird. I dumped the RMS arm . . . Left OMS up in smoke . . . Suspect internal damage aft fuselage with APU damage . . . Negative contact with Soyuz. This is Endeavor.”

“Oh . . .” The ground was lost in static as Shuttle rounded the southern tip of Africa over water. Another 25 minutes of Indian Ocean out of radio range lay ahead.

“When's sunup, Jack?”

“Ah . . . in 14, Skipper.”

“ 'Kay. Try Soyuz again.”

“Soyuz, Soyuz. Endeavor. Over?”

As Enright spoke, Karpov leaned forward to look up under the top sill of his windows. He saw only darkness.

“Could be antenna damage, Alexi.” Enright's voice was unconvincing.

“n'Da . . . Yes. Could be,” the Russian pilot sighed at Enright's right.

Endeavor's downward pointing nose drifted to the left as seen from the front seats. No RCS jet had fired. Parker in the rear saw the tail slowly tilt to his left against faint stars overhead.

“She's venting from the left OMS, Jack. Bit of a lateral movement from the outgasing. Real garbage pile out here.”

“Yeh, Will. I see us yawing to portside . . . Soyuz, do you read Endeavor?”

“Maybe come around. Get the bay lights on him.” Parker watched the brown cloud dissipate in the payload bay.

“In motion, Skipper. Left OMS idle-cutoff.”

Enright threw a battery of switches on a center ceiling instrument cluster. He closed whatever propellant lines remained in the left tail pod.

The copilot turned Shuttle on her nose by using the nose jets and the right-only OMS pod's RCS thrusters. Endeavor rolled clumsily with a slight wobble. She was not designed to fly without half of her tail thrusters.

The vertical tail rolled with the ship still upright. Parker squinted into the black sky beyond the bay's brilliant arc lights.

The payload bay slowly came around to face southward in the Indian Ocean 35 degrees south of the Equator. Parker peered through his aft overhead window behind Karpov to the position of Soyuz and her lone pilot, Uri Ruslanovich, Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Mechanical Engineering.

All three pilots in Shuttle exhaled at the same instant the bay's harsh glare fell silently upon an enormous cloud of white gas, bent scrap metal, and frozen liquid globules, barely visible in the nighttime distance 600 yards from Endeavor.

Will Parker had seen the same yellow cloud of rubble exactly four hours earlier. His mind recognized it before his heart had time to absorb the ugliness.

Having rounded the southern tip of Africa, Endeavor sped northeast toward the Equator 2,000 nautical miles away. In the darkness over the Indian Ocean, the crippled starship flew alone. First there had been three vessels among the stars, then four, then three again. Now there was one ship badly mangled and a cloud of wreckage a quarter mile from Shuttle.

“Alexi, I am truly, truly sorry.” Enright broke the sullen silence where he floated against his lap belt at Karpov's side. “So very sorry.”

In the aft section, Parker blinked his moist eyes which looked into the brightly lighted bay. The sixty-foot-long cargo hold still carried a brown cloud leaking from Shuttle's ruptured tail. An airman feels his ship's pain, like a mother for her child. The haggard Colonel ached inside.

Major Alexi Karpov turned his wet eyes toward the large window at his right shoulder in the copilot's seat. “They will issue a proper statement, of course: The Soviet Union has lost a brave son.' Our governments are so good at that.”

“A brave son,” Parker sighed into his voice-activated microphone at his lips.

“My country has lost a son,” Karpov said slowly, fogging the window with his anguish. “But I have lost a brother.”

“All of us have, Alexi,” Enright offered.

Endeavor, alone, flew through the darkness 540 nautical miles south of Madagascar a thousand miles east of Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

“How long to sunup, Jack?”

Enright looked at his mission clock: Day 00: 08 Hours: 33 Minutes.

“Eight minutes, Skip.”

“We have to shoot an IMU alignment . . . We must carry on, Alexi.”

“Yes, Colonel. Fly your fine ship.”

“Rollin', Skipper.”

Enright put Shuttle into a slow roll. She came about until her wings were level. Flying heads-up, Enright yawed the nose around laterally until Endeavor flew rightside-up with her nose pointing northward. The starboard wing pointed eastward along the direction of flight.

The two star-trackers under Enright's left window searched the heavens for navigation stars. He laid his swollen, bandaged face close to the silver-dollar-size reflecting mirror at the base of the crew optical alignment sight. The COAS tube protruding from the cabin ceiling scanned the southern sky's few conspicuous stars.

Squinting into the COAS sight at eye level, Enright found the bright star Regulus in the constellation Leo about 40 degrees above the horizon to Shuttle's northeast. Into the computer keyboard at his right knee, Enright tapped in Star Number 26. Moving Shuttle's nose with his control stick to search the sky to the northwest, Enright found brilliant Sirius about 60 degrees above the planet's black horizon where the faint stars stopped. Enright plugged in Star Number 18.

Mother digested the star sights automatically made by the two star-trackers in the ship's nose. Her mass memory unit, which had memorized the sky, compared the star-trackers' sight reduction to Enright's eyeball observations. Mother resolved her sights at the speed of light by mental haversine functions. Satisfied that she knew her bearings and that she knew which way was up, Mother adjusted her three inertial measurement units for precession error. Mother worked with her Reference Stable Member Matrix.

“IMU aligned, Will. REFSMAT nailed down.”

Parker swam from the aft payload specialist station toward the forward cockpit. He stopped to float at the center, knee-high console between Enright and Karpov.

As the AC reached the back of Enright's left seat, the copilot was already rolling Endeavor onto her back to protect the radiators latched to the open bay doors from sunrise seven minutes away.

The AC scanned the third green television near Karpov. A video ground track displayed the bug-shaped shuttle over the southern Indian Ocean 700 nautical miles southeast of the great island of Madagascar. Radio contact was still 18 minutes away. On the television, their next network station was a circle one inch across with Okinawa at its center. At the bottom of the screen, numerics read REV 6 and MET:00:08:34:21.

“Next daylight landing window, Jack?” Shuttle can land only at fields equipped with microwave landing systems for instrument approaches. Such facilities with critically needed support vehicles are located only at Cape Canaveral, Edwards in California, White Sands in New Mexico, Hawaii, Okinawa, and the military field in Rota, Spain.