Titan n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  In microgravity, water’s surface tension became dominant, and tried to haul it constantly into the shape of a sphere. But with a little ingenuity a lot of bizarre shapes could be conjured out of this most basic of materials. And it fascinated Bill Angel.

  Angel spent hours turned in on himself like this, with his syringes and lathes and bizarre, oscillating shapes. And as he stared into the shimmering meniscus of some new sphere or torus, he seemed, to Benacerraf, to be peering into some world of his own, a private place the others couldn’t share, a place he could escape to, as if the water forms were projections of his own mind.

  Rosenberg had his own theory about Bill. So he’d told her privately. He thought Bill was ageing too quickly. There were studies that showed how cosmic rays caused irreversible damage to nervous tissue. For instance, the response of nerve cells to muscarinic neuro-transmitters, which helped muscle-controlling neurons communicate, deteriorated. Maybe this was happening to Bill, Rosenberg speculated. Maybe space was turning him into a decrepit old man, before their eyes.

  She suspected Bill had gotten wind of this, in fact. He had taken to sleeping at one end of the hab module, surrounded by big batteries with lots of nickel and cadmium, which gave him good shielding. But it was probably too late.

  Benacerraf was no expert on abnormal states of the mind. But she hadn’t tried to discuss this with Mission Control. She wasn’t sure who would be listening any more anyhow. And on a planet where local wars were flaring over water management problems, the image of gaunt Americans playing head games with the wet stuff on some dumb Buck Rogers mission halfway to Saturn would not play well with the public.

  On and on Angel fiddled, while Discovery, cradling its little nest of light and warmth, sailed further from the sun.

  * * *

  Around the U.S. carrier Independence, the Pacific stretched to the horizon, as flat and still and steel-grey as the deck of the carrier itself, its sluggish waves reflecting the cobalt blue of the cloudless sky. Even the rest of the battle group was out of sight, over the horizon.

  The sun was low, the light harsh, and Gareth Deeke was grateful for his cap and sunglasses.

  A single aircraft stood ready on the deck: a McDonnell-Douglas F-28, its slim form sixty feet long, its delta wings all but obscured by the snaking hoses of the fuelling tankers — kerosene and hydrogen peroxide — which surrounded it. The F-28’s thermal shield, plated over its upper hull, gleamed white as snow in the Pacific sunlight.

  The F-28 was Deeke’s aircraft.

  The Independence was four hundred miles from the Chinese coast, and two hundred miles from Taiwan, to the south-east of the island. And it was a matter of hours — less, perhaps — from the initiation of a U.S.-China war. But, suspended in this instant of calm, the ship could have been anywhere, Gareth Deeke reflected, anywhere on the surface of this watery planet; and it could have been transported to almost any time in the last half billion years.

  He was pretty much alone up here, save for the service techs. He’d been here for a time, but he wasn’t bored. He was standing on alert. He had stood on alert many times before, in his long career.

  He had a choice of being up here or going down below, to sit with the other pilots and chew on pizza and mixed vegetables and watch softscreen CNN reports on the progress of the Chinese preparation for invasion.

  His preference was clear.

  Besides, he didn’t exactly mix easily with the others. They respected his ability and experience, but most of the guys, with one eye on their own careers, shied away from a man with a past as tainted and complex as Deeke’s.

  It didn’t trouble him. At least, not away from the cramped confines of his quarters, where he had too much time to think. He wasn’t troubled by anything here: up on the flight deck, in the salt air.

  A shadow flickered across the deck. Deeke looked up.

  It was a Condor, an unmanned surveillance plane built by Boeing. The Condor was a light, subsonic craft with a single turbofan engine. It was big, with the wing span of a 747, and it could hover at sixty thousand feet for a week without replenishment, scanning the ground with high-resolution radar and electro-optic sensors. Condors — and their smaller cousins the DarkStars — had become a common sight in areas of tension like this, wheeling through the air like expectant birds of prey…

  There was a low beeping.

  He lifted his wrist. A softscreen patch on the back of his hand was scrolling with symbols.

  The Chinese ships were leaving harbor. It had started. Deeke grinned.

  He turned on his heel and headed for the personal gear room.

  The hot war had started two weeks ago; Deeke had followed it closely, expecting his call.

  Taiwan’s president, after his latest reelection, at last came out openly in favor of a declaration of formal independence from Beijing. China responded immediately, and the Taipei stock market hit the floor.

  It took three days for Beijing to assemble a hundred thousand troops in the embarkation ports in the provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong. Taiwan put its armed forces on their highest level of alert and mobilized its reserves, and asked the U.S. for arms shipments under the Taiwan Relations Act.

  The next day, Taiwan naval patrols in the Strait had been fired on by Chinese “fishing boats.” They returned fire, and China proclaimed that a “hostile act against ordinary Chinese people.” In response, China announced a naval blockade of all the tankers ferrying oil to Taiwan.

  Air battles started over Taiwan, mass flights of ancient Chinese Russian-built Sukhois against Taiwan’s more modern Western-built F-16s and Mirage 2000-55. The technology was a mismatch, but the numbers were telling: after a couple of days China had achieved a tentative control of the air over the Strait.

  The Great Helmsman himself had appeared in Tiananmen Square to announce that if Taiwan didn’t capitulate, the invasion would begin.

  Maclachlan responded by saying that an invasion of Taiwan would amount to a declaration of war with America. And besides, China’s control of the Strait didn’t amount to a hill of beans, said Maclachlan; not with the U.S. carriers, and F-15s in Okinawa, ready to join the action.

  Anyhow it didn’t seem likely the Chinese could secure a beachhead, even without the U.S. coming to the aid of Taiwan. And a failed invasion could cost fifty percent casualties.

  But the Chinese had nukes, and ICBMs. They could simply wipe Taiwan off the face of the Earth.

  Nobody was too sure about what the U.S. would do in that circumstance. Did the Americans, asked the Great Helmsman, care as much about Taiwan as about Los Angeles?

  The Chinese would have to be dumb, or desperate, to take such a step. But they were indeed desperate, Deeke thought.

  For decades they had watched the U.S. cozying up to India, recognizing Vietnam, selling F-16s to Taiwan, forging alliances with Japan, trying to work for a united Korea under Seoul allied to the U.S.

  From the Chinese perspective, it looked like a ring around China. Which, of course, it was.

  And besides, there was one way the Chinese could win… Which was why Deeke was here.

  So matters stood. Now, they were all waiting.

  Deeke emerged in his flight suit, with an oxygen mask, straps everywhere, a parachute on his back, survival kits for several environments tucked into pockets, emergency oxygen, intercoms.

  He walked up to the F-28.

  Close to, the plane looked something like a miniature Shuttle orbiter, with the underside of its fat delta wing coated with black silica-based thermal protection tiles, and the upper hull layered with a gleaming white felt blanket, patched with black around the attitude control nozzles. The felt blanket gave the plane an oddly clumsy look, he thought; it lacked the metallic sleekness of the hulls of conventional aircraft. But that blanket was plastered with USAF logos, and his own name and rank, picked out under the canopy.

  The F-28 looked what it was: a plane built for space, America’s first rocket plane since the X-15.

>   Although the basic rocketry would have been recognized by von Braun, in every other way the F-28 was a child of the twenty-first century.

  The concept was based on proposals touted in the 1990s by space enthusiasts for a fast-turnaround, relatively cheap, single-stage-to-orbit military spaceplane. When Xavier Maclachlan came to power, and after extensive lobbying by the USAF, he wasted no time in pulling Lockheed Martin out of NASA’s doomed RLV development, and ordering the accelerated development of what became the F-28 for the Air Force.

  Needless to say, it had come in way over budget. But even so the cost was manageable. The F-28 was designed to work with existing runways, fuel distribution systems, non-specialized hangars and standard handling equipment… The only novelty was the use of kerosene and concentrated hydrogen peroxide to burn in the plane’s five engines, to give the F-28 a high power to weight ratio.

  The cost of the whole project had been about equivalent to two Delta IV launches, less than the cost of a single Shuttle launch. For that price, the USAF had gotten itself a whole new aerospace craft.

  Gareth Deeke was just grateful that a new chain of command — via Hartle, up to President Maclachlan — had brought him and his skills and experience here, to head up the USAF’s newest battle wing. The USAF didn’t have so many rocket-plane pilots that it could afford to ignore a man like Gareth Deeke, age or not.

  Two techs helped him climb up and lower himself into the cockpit of the F-28. The rocket plane’s white-tiled walls were only just wide enough for him to squeeze in.

  The elemental countdown dialogue with his controller inside the carrier began as soon as he strapped into his seat; around the plane, the stubby, shielded fuelling tankers withdrew.

  “Data on,” he said. “Generator reset. Hydraulic pressure, check. Electrical pressure, check. Rudder, check…”

  “One minute, Gareth.”

  “Rog. Master arm is on, system arm light is on…”

  “Ready for the prime.”

  “Prime, igniter ready. And precool, igniter and tape…”

  “Thirty seconds.”

  Inside the craft, there was little similarity with 1970s Shuttle technology. This cockpit was high-tech: the walls were coated with softscreens, which reconfigured to suit each successive flight phase, and his helmet offered head-up and virtual imaging, overlaid on his view through the canopy. Now, the systems worked him calmly through the final preparations.

  “…Fifteen seconds.”

  “Pump on,” Deeke said. “Good igniter.”

  “Five seconds. Looks good here, Gareth. And three, two, one.”

  Deeke braced.

  The noise of the F-28’s five rockets rose to a roar.

  In his glass bubble Deeke was slammed in the back, suddenly cocooned in light and noise and vibration. The carrier deck whipped away, exposing the grey, bone-hard surface of the ocean. The plane swivelled back, pitching suddenly upwards, so that he lost sight of the ocean.

  The F-28 rose almost vertically. Twisting his head, he glanced down: the carrier was already lost, remote, a patchwork of blue grey adrift on the wider hide of the ocean.

  Then, in a few seconds, the sky faded down to a deep pearl blue.

  At thirty-five thousand feet he levelled off. The plane was a little isolated island of reality, gleaming white felt and warm air and hard surfaces, up here in the mouth of the sky.

  There was a tanker aircraft waiting for him here. The F-28 carried a full load of fuel, but it needed replenishment of its heavy oxidizer for its final leap into space. With practiced ease, he slid the replenishment nozzle mounted in the nose of the plane into the dangling cup trailed by the tanker. The replenishment took just three minutes.

  When it was done, the tanker pulled away.

  Deeke hauled the nose of the plane upwards. The rockets howled again, and the Gs rammed him hard into his seat; his head was pushed into his shoulders, and his vision tunnelled, walled by darkness.

  There was the mildest of vibrations as the craft went supersonic, and then the ride got a lot smoother, the noise of the rockets dying to a whisper. The cockpit now was a little bubble of serenity, of cool, easy flying; meanwhile, he knew, sonic thunder was washing down on the ocean below.

  Eighty thousand feet. He moved the throttle to maximum thrust, and he was pushed back into his seat by four and a half G. He was already so high he could see stars above, in the middle of the day; so high there were only a few wisps of atmosphere, barely sufficient for his plane’s aerodynamic control surfaces to grip.

  Ninety thousand feet; thirty two hundred feet per second. The Pacific spread out beneath him, the shining skin of the world.

  There was a rattle of solenoids, a brief squirt of gas beyond the cockpit. His reaction control thrusters had activated.

  The rockets shut down with a clatter.

  He was thrust forward against his restraints as the acceleration cut out, and then he drifted back again.

  He had gone ballistic. He was weightless inside the cabin, and it felt as if his gut was climbing up out of his neck. Up here, coasting in near-silence, he lost all sensation of speed, of motion.

  He was fifty miles high. The sky outside his tiny cabin was a deep blue-black, and the softscreen displays gleamed brightly. He could see the eastern coast of Asia all the way from Japan to the Philippines, with the distinctive teardrop shape of Taiwan directly beneath him; it was all laid out under him like some kind of relief map. Up ahead the Earth curved over on itself, looking huge and pregnant, and at the horizon’s rim he could see the thick layer of air out of which he’d climbed.

  Just like the old days.

  Then there was a final kick from his rocket engines, the injection into space.

  On orbit, he opened the F-28’s payload bay doors.

  The payload deployed automatically. It was a small, complex satellite with a compact rocket booster. As it unfolded from the narrow payload bay the satellite looked like a fat, ungainly toy, illuminated from beneath by the glowing blue skin of Earth.

  A spring mount pushed the satellite away from the F-28. Then the main solid-rocket booster pack opened up; Deeke could see orange smoke and debris gush from the fat, squat nozzle.

  He watched the satellite arc away, upwards, directly away from Earth. It was heading for geosynchronous orbit, to hover over Borneo.

  Thus, less than twenty minutes after receiving the order to launch, Deeke’s mission was complete.

  The satellite was a derivative of Aquacade technology. It was a communications link, one of the final pieces in the U.S. forces’ electronic coverage of the battle zone around Taiwan. It would enable other satellites — Milstar communications birds, Keyhole surveillance craft; others — to communicate directly with each other, rather than via signals to ground stations. The satellite-to-satellite links would make the system virtually impregnable to Chinese attempts at jamming or interception.

  The only real Chinese threat to the U.S. forces, in fact, was their stock of cruise missiles: the M-12 intermediate-range weapon, originally a derivative of the Scud but now heavily upgraded, and generally recognized as China’s best piece of kit.

  But with the surveillance systems successfully deployed, no M-12 would be able to get more than twenty miles from its launcher without intelligence on it being fed down to the battlefield. Deeke doubted, in fact, that a single cruise would get through the antimissile batteries.

  Information was the key to this war. Information flowed throughout the U.S. and Taiwanese forces. Every ship, every land vehicle, every infantryman, airman and sailor was suffused with computer technology, linked directly or through the satellites. The forces, joined by the technology, were like a single organism, ready to respond as if united by a central nervous system.

  There were, in fact, more warriors in this conflict deploying computers than firing weapons.

  The Chinese, with their crude human-wave strategies and resources, had only the rudiments of this technology. It was like a conflict between time
travellers. As if a Roman legion had taken on a band of Australopithecines.

  The war might take some days to play out yet, and no doubt many lives would be lost. But for China, Deeke reflected, it was already lost. The containment was going to continue.

  He cleared his helmet of its displays. For a few seconds, he allowed himself to look out through the sparkling clearness of his canopy.

  Here — for the next few minutes anyhow — he was suspended between the curve of Earth below, the stunning blackness above. His mission was achieved, his fuel spent.

  He felt an odd stab of emotion. It’s so beautiful, he thought. So beautiful.

  Below him, hundreds of thousands of men were swarming like ants to meet each other in a conflict that would be all but invisible from this height. Across the thin sky of Earth, aircraft and missiles scratched contrails; far above him, twenty-two thousand miles from Earth, artifacts of the most advanced nation on the planet clustered, to observe and monitor and warn.

  And right now, there were four human beings — four Americans — suspended between Jupiter and Saturn, engaged in the most extraordinary adventure yet conceived by man. And his role in that adventure had been to try to shoot them down on takeoff.

  But space travel was an absurdity. The journeys were magnificent, but there was nowhere to go, nothing but a series of lethal landscapes, floating like islands in the sky.

  And if the U.S. had reached for the stars, like a soaring tree, its enemies — first the USSR, now the Chinese — would have had no hesitation in spreading over the face of the planet to cut away its trunk.

  Gareth Deeke had no doubts as to the strategic correctness of the massive U.S. military investment of the last fifty years. No doubts, in the end, about his own role in the ludicrous Titan adventure. Military spending had caused the Soviet Union to implode, with barely a shot being fired; now it would enable the U.S. to contain China indefinitely.

  Space had nothing to do with humanity. Down there, in the eternal blood and mud and dust of the two-dimensional battlefields of Earth, was where history was shaped. It had always been thus, and would always be thus.