“I remember. Ball-ache that it will be, you’re right.”
“The press is to be given no access to the flight articles until they are in the advanced testing phase. Launches of the project hardware will be broadcast, as will telemetry and photography from the missions. The nature of the capture process will be kept secret until the asteroid is safely in Earth orbit. We will prepare a press pack giving details of the sophisticated robots we intend to use to mine the asteroid, but they will not be a patch on the actual robots we will use, which I have designed.”
“Way to go, Hal”.
“If one or more of these measures is skipped, or a mistake is made in the security of the operation, I am under orders from both Takanli and Holdrian to abort the process. It will happen as we have planned, or not at all,”
Hal had obviously been programmed for hard-ball. “You got it, Hal. That’s how it’s going to be.”
We spent three days much like that, hammering out different parts of the plan, adding details here, removing unnecessary pieces there, crafting it into a workable shape. It was mind-bendingly complex. Hal had a good handle on the whole thing, thank God – without him, I’d have been up to me knees in paper and emails and getting nowhere – and he was gradually able to automate our communications, leaving me free for other tasks.
His first task (well, given he was performing seven tasks simultaneously, it is hard to call anything ‘first’, but you know what I mean) was to find us an airfield, preferably big enough to operate our ships and either build or convert hangar spaces on site. We had Google Earth, of course, and detailed Internet searches fed Hal information on each site. Almost all were ex-military airfields, fighter or bomber stations from the Second World War, and some had closed comparatively recently. Almost all of the old bomber stations, which had the longest runways, were built over, converted back to farmland, or in use as motor racing circuits or car test tracks. Some were used by private glider groups or by the Army as parachute training grounds. Finding an exact match for such specific requirements would be tricky.
Even Hal was getting mildly frustrated, I saw. “The information is too incomplete”, he would moan, having performed yet another search and found nothing. “We are in need of up-to-date intelligence.”
I thought about this. “Well, short of driving out to these places… how many are there on the list, right now, Hal?”
“Two hundred and seven.”
Shit. “What would help?”
“Up-to-the-minute photographic reconnaissance of the site, and communications with their owners”. This was more often than not the Ministry of Defence, so Hal and I put together an email requesting information on thirty of the most likely sites. We didn’t expect a very favourable response, particularly given that we were asking for permission to operate a spaceplane from their airfield. The other owners were either private individuals or flying clubs. We fired off emails or, when addresses weren’t available, sent good old-fashioned letters. Hal picked up the language very quickly and I could generally leave him to it.
“Go For Broke, winner of the 4.20 at Doncaster, £4,680 profit.” This short, precise commentary peppered each afternoon. We were up to £80,000 and Hal showed no sign of slowing down. Or losing.
“What about reconnaissance, Hal?”
He thought for a second. “May I borrow your garage over night?” Hal had a plan, he revealed, and I agreed.
“Actually, I’ll pull the car out now and leave you to it. Reckon I’m going to hit the replicator and then get some sleep.” It was already 11pm, I’d forgotten to eat since lunch and I was whacked by the extended day of planning with Hal.
“Did anyone on Takanli ever offer you a sleep inducer?”
I gave an amused snort. “No, Hal. Most of the people I spent time in bed with weren’t really interested in putting me to sleep.”
“I’ve added one to the build queue.” Brunel and Forager continued to work miracles. Their latest achievement was the redesign of kitchen. While Hal and I worked in the living room, they had stripped out and replaced the cabinets, plumbed in a new washing machine and the dishwasher they had made, produced a glorious hardwood dining table and high-quality chairs, and installed broad, granite worktops with plenty of space. It could have won design awards.
I polished off dinner – octopus salad and lobster thermador with a few chilled, crisp glasses of Chardonnay – and was more than ready for bed. Brunel trundled over and handed me a device which resembled a pair of headphones. “These will help you sleep, and make your rest time more efficient. You will wake when the device senses that your mind has rested sufficiently.”
I gratefully headed up to bed. Laying back, I tried to ignore the odd feel of the cold, metal headphones. Within a minute, though, I could feel myself drifting off to sleep most enjoyably. I dreamt about flying over a large city. I could see it laid out in front of me, could sense the design of the streets. A large river ran through the centre and I flew down its length, ducking under bridges and zooming over the masts of tall ships at anchor.
I awoke feeling alert and wandered to the shower as usual. Feeling refreshed, I put clothes on and was half way down the stairs when I realised it was still dark outside.
“Hal? I’ve been asleep for only forty-five minutes and I feel tremendous.” As a response, Hal emitted a gleeful chuckle modelled on one of mine. He was growing on me yet further.
“You might want to see what’s going on in the garage”, he reminded me. “Work is almost complete.” I set him working on the Nikkei Index and headed out past the car to the garage. There were soft clanking sounds coming from within and the occasional flash of light which could only have been a welding torch. Forager, Brunel and one other construction robot I quickly named Wright, were working on a winged device which looked for all the world like a remote-controlled airplane. The wings emerged at ninety degrees to the fuselage, there was a meaty-looking propeller on the front, even a canopy with a little model pilot sitting in an ejection seat. The robots were working on the rudder assembly, slotting together the different parts and then testing the cables which ran through the fuselage to the control hub behind the cockpit. It looked mightily impressive. Then the two flipped the machine over to work on the underside.
A sliding cover which ran the length of the fuselage retreated to reveal a suite of cameras and a hard disc. I set my communicator on its walkie-talkie setting. “Hal? What exactly have you guys built here?”
“It is a remote-controlled reconnaissance aircraft, designed to emulate the features of a recreational model”, he answered, his voice tinny through the communicator’s speaker. “It has a range of six hundred miles at an altitude of six thousand feet and its propeller sound is actually inaudible at ground level. Its cameras have the same resolution as spy satellite equipment, and the hard disc is a re-formed Red Cube, giving virtually unlimited storage.”
I returned, stunned as usual, to the living room where Hal and I plotted a photo tour route for its maiden flight. This would start in about four hours and take in two hundred or so possible airfield sites. Hal was almost salivating at the thought of all this fresh data to analyse. We worked through the morning, stopping only so that I could gobble down a large breakfast of eggs, bacon and toast produced by the master-chef replicator.
There was an email from the Ministry of Defence, Hal reported. “They are interested in meeting with you to discuss your plans for utilising a disused airfield. Apparently”, he found after some research, “the MOD is planning another round of budget cuts and this will include the selling off of some real-estate deemed surplus to their requirements.” This was good news.
Hal replied, and by mid-morning we had fixed up a meeting for 3pm for the following day. Plenty of time to retrieve our data from the drone, so we’d be armed with as much information as possible. Plenty of time to have dinner with Gemma afterwards, too. I felt the beginnings of arousal at the very thought.
“Hal, if we’re actually going to meet
with these people, I want to do more than just a chat about old runways. Let’s show them we’re serious. Could we bring a spaceplane design, just to show them we’re on the case?” Hal began trawling through the various designs and showed a number of them on the TV. This is where we had to be careful. If the design was too whacky, they would think we were cranks who had no chance of pulling this off. If it were too over-engineered and cautious, we’d appear unable to keep costs down. Hal found a happy medium.
“There is a company in the USA called Scaled Composites”, he announced, “who have entered into an agreement with Virgin Galactic to build spaceplanes for their tourist project. The design is excellent, and with further modifications, an orbital version with a decent payload capacity can be produced.”
Hal walked me through their project. A large carrier aircraft would haul the spaceplane up to 60,000ft and then release it. The spaceplane would proceed under its own power into a sub-orbital trajectory, providing the passengers with a period of weightlessness and views of the Earth from space. It sounded like a load of fun. The price tag was $200,000 and there was no shortage of punters.
“This design is not sufficient for our purposes”, he concluded, “but with upgraded engines for both ships, and an enlarging of the overall scheme, this would seem the most logical choice at our current juncture”. He explained that a single-stage system would come across as too sci-fi. We needed the carrier aircraft to make the project look possible. Hal spent the rest of the day on it, feeding me updates as he went.
Back in the garage, the drone was fuelled and ready. Hal had designed it to take off on a regular road or flat area of grass, so I rather brazenly wheeled it out onto my own street and prepared for takeoff. This was mid-morning on a Thursday and few people were around. I teed up the drone in the centre of the road, prayed silently that it was as quiet as Hal had boasted, and told Hal to let it rip.
The little plane powered up, propeller spinning incredibly fast, released its brakes and shot forward down the street like a dragster. It cleared the houses at the end of the road by a hundred feet and quietly ascended into the sky on its first mission. Hal was receiving good telemetry, he noted, and would keep me updated.
“The Olympic Games begin today. Would you like me to place bets?”
“Have at it, Hal”. He made me £40,000 or so each day. I just hoped no-one from the authorities would notice. I knew that Hal was careful to place his bets at a large variety of bookmakers, and I trusted him to take care of business. “Where have we got to, financially?”
Hal totted up our accounts. “Just under £900,000, and that should rise past two million over the next two weeks.” That would give us serious cash to bring to the attention of the Ministry at our meeting tomorrow. That reminded me...
“Gemma? Hi, yeah, it’s me… Nice to hear your voice too… Well, I’m great thanks, and I wondered if you were free tomorrow night… yeah, really… I’ve got a meeting in town at 3pm but I should be finished by five if you want to grab some dinner or something… oh you are? Well, that’s great…Sorry?... Yeah, I had a great time too… can’t wait…. About tomorrow… Where?... Of course I can…. No problem. I’ll give you a call when I get out of this meeting…. Yeah, me too. Bye… yeah, bye.”
We passed the rest of the day working on the spaceplane design. Hal had absorbed past designs from NASA, British Aerospace and others, and come up with a conventional two-stage design within which the spaceplane would carry all of its own propellant and have a payload capacity of eleven tonnes to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Just as importantly, the spaceplane could be refuelled and turned around in just three hours, enabling each craft to deliver multiple missions each day.
By the time midnight came around, we had nailed down the presentation we were going to give the Ministry and I was, once again, worn out. I decided on some natural sleep tonight, and had no trouble drifting off. Out in the garage, Brunel and Wright were working on a scale-model of our spaceplane idea. Hal, comfortable in his seat on the sofa, was busy making me money. And Gemma was lying in her warm bed in London with a long, thick vibrator deep in her pussy, back arched in a tremendous orgasm, imagining our next opportunity to be together.
Chapter XXXVI: Mr. Lockman goes to London
The Great Western train was packed, hot and annoyingly slow. I had travelled at three times the speed of light, for Christ’s sake, and now I’m reduced to this. I had to get Hal working on a better form of personal transport for getting to London. With meetings like this one an inevitability, certainly until I had permission for the different aspects of the project, I really couldn’t be bothered with the long slog into Paddington, especially jammed between sweaty commuters who were just as short-tempered as I was.
Hal, on this occasion, was personified by an ordinary-looking laptop. We had hard-wired the machine to remain in constant wireless contact with him, hijacking a couple of satellite channels to make it work. Hal assured me this was not detectable, but we added to our list of things to build; one personal communications satellite, geosynchronous orbit. Not exactly the kind of thing you could pick up on sale at Tesco, I mused to myself.
After an eternity we rumbled into Paddington and I ditched the Tube in favour of a cab. It just shouldn’t take people this long to get around, I grumbled to myself. Perhaps I had been spoiled by the Relocation devices on Holdrian, and my lightspeed-capable Cruiser, but I remembered finding this whole process tedious even before I had left Earth. The cabbie was cheery enough, but moaned about the traffic.
“Congestion charge?” he muttered incredulously. “You must be effing jokin’. Pull the other one…” I sat back and watched London operate. It was, and still is today, a spectacular city but I preferred so many others. Bangkok, for all its pollution and insanity was an exhilarating ride. Manhattan was endlessly diverting, impressive with its towering skyscrapers. I actually liked Edinburgh better than London, not that I would tell anyone here that.
We pulled up to the MOD building in Whitehall and I made my way through about a dozen security checks. The building was surrounded by concrete bollards, installed since the terrorist threat had emerged. I had actually been in London, and on a tube train no less, during the attacks of 7th July. There’s something else I might be able to help with, I thought to myself, as I showed my passport to yet another armed security guard.
I was escorted through to the lobby of the building and was directed to a third floor waiting room by an attractive receptionist. The place had an austere feel to it, like a low-key version of a commercial office building, but with a certain stiffness in the air. I wondered what the hell they would make of me, hoping that it wouldn’t result in being escorted roughly from the building by armed men.
“If you would follow me, please?” A blue-uniformed staffer took me through to an office marked ‘Keith Howles’, under which was ‘Undersecretary of Economic Affairs, Royal Air Force.’
Howles was the tallest human I had met in a long time and he had a remarkably firm grip. “Pleasure to meet you… won’t you sit down?” I took the chair opposite his desk and glanced around his office. There were a couple of framed certificates, his BA from Cambridge and some service memorabilia. He looked too young to have retired from flying. Injury, maybe? He sat behind his desk, buzzed the staffer for coffee and asked how he could help me.
“Well, Mr Howles…”, he stopped me, ‘Keith’, he insisted, “I’m developing a plan to encourage growth in the UK high-technology sphere by designing, constructing and flying orbit-capable spaceplanes from a disused RAF airfield.” Howles looked suitably impressed and began taking notes on a conventional legal pad. Try a lectern, I mused to myself. Far more efficient.
“And what would be the purpose of the flights?” Excellent question. This guy seemed right on the ball.
“To put in place an infrastructure which would allow space tourism and week-long stays at an orbiting hotel”, I lied enthusiastically. “Our predictions have our first paying guests arriving at an orbitin
g facility in less than 24 months.”
He raised an eyebrow at that one. Perhaps I had made a mistake. So many companies had boasted the quick delivery of high-technology devices, and then had egg on their faces when they couldn’t come up with the goods.
“Do you have a prototype?” I opened my bag and folded out the scale model Brunel and Wright had finished in my garage overnight. It showed a sleek, white plane, not unlike a Cruiser but somewhat larger, seated atop a huge, white carrier plane about the size of a 747 but with six jet engines. I got my laptop organised and hooked it up to a small screen on the far wall of his office, began clicking efficiently through the presentation.
Howles was genuinely impressed, but one had the feeling he’d been brought ideas like this before. I immediately found that I was right. “I was on the team which evaluated HOTOL back in the early 80’s”, he confided. “How do I know this design won’t falter in the same way? I mean, it is rather ambitious.”
Therein lies the problem, I thought to myself, and the chief reason why Britain no longer leads the world in technology. Ambitious? You should be embracing the ambitious, not pouring cold water on it. I hid my distaste and pressed on.
“Well, firstly the HOTOL design, from the outset, was trying to bite off more than it could chew. A single-stage, air-breathing ramjet, wasn’t it?” Howles nodded. “Well, our system eliminates the need for air-breathing technology by carrying all the propellant onboard the second stage, the orbital spaceplane. The carrier plane simplifies things further by boosting the spaceplane up to 80,000 feet using conventional propulsion. And finally, the LOX-Hydrogen combination is well understood and highly efficient. These spacecraft would only need a normal runway of around 7000ft to become safely airborne, and relatively simple fuel storage onsite, for which we already have designs.”
Voyage Page 34
