Brown, Dale - Independent 01

by Silver Tower (v1. 1)

  Schultz watched as Baker maneuvered himself around and floated out of sight down the ladder to the middeck level of the crew compartment.

  “Now to get those cargo bay doors,” Schultz said. With Ann floating beside him, he made his way to the aft flight deck instrument panel. Ann looked out the windows facing into the cargo bay but it was too dark to make out any detail.

  “Panel R13 has the door controls,” Schultz was saying. Over interphone he said, “Check power levels for cargo bay doors, Colonel Sontag.”

  Sontag checked the power distribution panel near his right elbow. “Switches set.” Next he checked a bank of three ammeters, switching the monitor controls through each of the fuel cells to check their output. “Power’s on-line, Marty.”

  “Rog.” To Ann, Schultz said, “Okay. Electrical power runs the hydraulic motors that operate the doors. There are also electrical backups, plus the doors can be opened and closed by the remote manipulator arms and even with an emergency space walk if necessary. The radiators deploy after the doors are fully open.” Then over interphone Schultz reported: “Doors coming open.”

  “Clear to open,” Colonel Will said.

  Schultz activated the controls. Instantly the payload bay was bathed in a brilliant blue-white light that reflected off the aluminum insulation covering the Skybolt laser module. The space shuttle Enterprise was flying upside down in relation to the earth’s surface, so Enterprise’s sky was the earth—and Ann was seeing this “sky” for the first time. “My God....”

  The Enterprise was just crossing the dawn-line between Hawaii and Australia. It looked like a relief map being lighted from the side— each island in Micronesia, it seemed, was visible in stark detail. They could recognize the Solomons, the Samoas, even the New Hebrides Islands. There were a few puffs of clouds but otherwise it was like looking at a meticulously rendered painting of the whole South Pacific.

  “Ann?”

  “It’s ... beautiful... so immaculate....” She said quietly. Schultz nodded. “I never stop being awed by it myself. If that sight doesn’t move you, you belong in a rubber room.” He turned to the interphone. “Bay doors open. Radiators deployed. No damage so far as I can see on the radiators.”

  “Copy,” Sontag said. Will double-checked his readouts with Mission Control through a direct UHF radio and data-link originating in a station antenna farm at Yarra Yarra in western Australia.

  “Mission Control confirms clear for orbit and rendezvous with Armstrong.”

  It was some two hours later when Ann peered out the forward windscreens into the gray-black void, but all she could see were a few stars too bright to be obscured by the brilliance of earth. “Colonel Sontag, you must have X-ray vision if you can see that station out there.”

  “It’s still very faint,” he said, “but it’s there. Mostly it looks like another star.”

  She shook her head. “I’m going back to the aft console.” The pilots nodded and continued scanning their instruments.

  Marty Schultz had deployed the shuttle’s remote manipulator arm and had scanned space for a few minutes with the arm’s closed-circuit camera at high magnification, but it wasn’t until Enterprise was ten miles away from the station that he spotted it.

  “It looks like a toy, like a Tinker Toy, from here,” Ann said.

  “When they first launched it they treated it like one,” Schultz told her. “People, some people, called it a boondoggle, big waste of money that could better be spent carpeting the Pentagon hallways. A lot of us were afraid it would end up like Skylab—a blaze in the sky and a crash to earth.”

  Kevin Baker, still trying to get his balance in this world of microgravity, maneuvered beside Page and Schultz at the aft crew station, saying, “I remember that too well, and the argument over who owned the space station. The U.S. taxpayer spent billions launching it and a conglomerate of scientists, some of them not even from the U.S., managed to put a clamp on any military research aboard it. You would have thought the station was a broken-down tenement building the way they talked about it. The Silver Sausage... the space suppository... remember?”

  Ann nodded, straining for a better view of the station. “But this Brigadier General Saint-Michael apparently did a good job changing people’s minds.”

  “That he did,” Schultz said, “and everyone’s taken the station very seriously since. That toy, Ann, weighs in at about five hundred tons. What you see is the product of twenty shuttle sorties over four years, plus another dozen unmanned supply rockets. Thirty billion dollars worth. The world’s most expensive condo, you might say....”

  As Enterprise drew closer to the station more details could be seen, and on the screen Ann pointed to a tiny dot just below the station.

  “Is that your Thor system?” Ann asked Baker.

  “Sure is, ten nonnuclear interceptor rockets, a laser decoy discriminator and a radar detector and tracker. The Thor is our first antiballistic missile defense system in thirty years. Simple, lost cost, and effective—if I do say so myself....”

  Attention was soon diverted to the TV screen, filling with the image of the station, and the crew was ordered back to their seats for docking. Schultz stowed the camera and remote manipulator arm back into its cradle in the cargo bay and shut down the aft console. “Crew ready for docking,” he reported.

  Within a mile of the station the digital autopilot had reduced Enterprise's forward speed to one thousand feet per minute. A thin laser beam from the space station lanced out toward Enterprise, toward the two sensors on the forward and rear ends of the cargo bay. The forward sensor was a large lens that focused the laser alignment beam onto the aft sensor. The digital autopilot would make tiny corrections to the shuttle’s course whenever the laser beam drifted off the aft sensor, in this way aligning Enterprise with the docking tunnel on Silver Tower.

  With near-magical precision the computers controlling the Enterprise's reaction-control system thrusters positioned the docking adapter in the cargo bay within a few feet of Silver Tower’s docking tunnel, which was then maneuvered over the adapter, and the two docking rings locked and sealed into place. Next an open-latticework support beam was extended and locked into cleats in Enterprise's cargo bay. The support beam strengthened the union between the two spacecraft, effectively making them one unit. Finally the connecting tunnel between the docking module and Enterprise's docking adapter was pressurized to two atmospheres and checked.

  “Adapter leak check is good, Armstrong,” Colonel Sontag reported to the docking officers on Silver Tower. “Docking complete. Over.”

  “Checked over here, Enterprise from the docking officer aboard Silver Tower. “Welcome aboard. You’re clear for crew transfer.”

  “Roger. Thanks.” On interphone Sontag announced, “Docking complete, crew. End of the line.” Ann, Baker and Schultz sent up congratulations to Enterprise's commander and pilot, but Colonel Will waved them off.

  “The autopilot did most of it, and frankly it was a lousy job. I could’ve gotten us right on the mark.” Will then directed shutdown of most of Enterprise's systems and began preparation for transfer to the station, with Sontag and the rest of the crew moving downstairs to the transfer area on the middeck.

  Colonel Will pressurized the airlock and air space, and he and Sontag checked the pressure readouts. “Sixteen p.s.i. in both areas,” Will said, undogged the first hatch leading to the airlock, then rechecked a second pressure gauge for the airlock itself. Satisfied, he opened the heavy steel door to the airlock.

  “See you,” he said, checked a POS mask and rebreather in the airlock and strapped on the face mask. Sontag closed the airlock chamber door and sealed it tight, and Will checked the pressurization gauge leading from the airlock to the transfer tunnel, then undogged the upper airlock hatch. There was a slight hiss of equalizing air but no sign of leaks or damage.

  “Welcome aboard, Colonel Will,” a voice said above him. Will looked up through the transfer tunnel to see a youngish Space Command airman
smiling down at him.

  Will unstrapped his face mask and glared at the technician. “You’re supposed to wait until I open my airlock hatch, John.”

  “I was right behind you, sir,” Airman John Montgomery told him. “Believe me, Colonel, I’m not going to let myself get sucked into your cargo bay.”

  “One day that’s going to happen.” Will turned and unlocked the airlock hatch leading to Enterprise's crew compartment. He wasn’t smiling. “Clear for transfer, crew.”

  One by one the crew of Enterprise floated up and out of the airlock and into Silver Tower’s spacious docking-control module. Sontag, the last one leaving Enterprise, latched and double-checked each hatch behind himself; Enterprise would now be sealed up and apart from the station.

  ARMSTRONG SPACE STATION

  It was a long thirty-foot journey along the four-foot diameter transfer tunnel. The crew members were met at the other end by technicians who helped them through and gave them sneakers with stiff Velcro “hooks” on the soles.

  A man with gold braid on his lapel stepped forward. “Welcome to Silver Tower. I’m Colonel Jim Walker, vice-commander and deputy commander for operations around here.” He shook hands with the newcomers, Ann and Baker. “I hope these pirates gave you a good ride.”

  Walker was another one of the so-called typical space-soldiers Ann had met in the Space Command, which was responsible for all space- based defense. He looked young for his rank, thin but not too tall, with a nearly bald head. His manner and appearance suggested quiet intelligence, not the old-fashioned domineering military presence—a scientist or engineer instead of a soldier. Most of the members of Space Command, drawn from the ranks of the military’s scientific elite, were like that. In college they might have been labeled “computer weenies”—on Silver Tower they were commanders, leaders, innovators. To Ann he said, “I’m looking forward to working with you on your project.”

  “Thanks to you I have a project to work on. I’ve heard it was you who applied the pressure to finally get the Skybolt project approved.”

  “Thanks, but General Saint-Michael is the mover and shaker around here. He was the one who set things going.”

  “Is General Saint-Michael—?”

  “You’ll be meeting him soon. He’s been occupied most of the day with repairs on our main data-link transmitter.”

  “I hope it’s not serious,” Baker said.

  “No, but it needed the general’s direct attention. He’s like that. Nothing’s too big or too small.” The deputy commander led Ann and Baker through the small docking module and then through an overhead hatch. At first it seemed all the eight main pressurized modules on Silver Tower were the same small size as the docking-tunnel connector or at most a larger version of the spartan working interior of the space shuttle. When Ann entered the first module, she found out she was wrong.

  It was spacious and well lit. Two senior officers and four technicians hovered in front of control panels, sipping coffee and exchanging reports. Green plants and flowers—natural carbon-dioxide scrubbers—sat Velcroed to pedestals around the module.

  “This is the command module,” Colonel Walker said as the group floated up through the small connector into the module. “All communications, earth surveillance and station operations are conducted here. The general’s work area is over there.” General Saint-Michael’s work area, Ann noticed, was different from everyone else’s in at least one respect—it had a chair. The men who served under the general were expected to stand, anchored to the deck by their Velcro sneakers or attached to variable-height work platforms. Fuzzy Velcro loops were everywhere—on the ceilings, walls, floors, even on instrument panels.

  Baker pointed to the module’s “ceiling.” “Instrument panels on the ceiling, Colonel? Why?”

  Walker turned to Baker. “Tell me, Mr. Baker—which is the ceiling? Is that the ceiling ...?”

  Walker detached himself from the Velcro “floor” and floated up to the ceiling, hovering a foot above Ann’s head. He anchored his feet to Velcro footholds molded into the “side” instrument panels. “Or is this the wall? In space, and especially on Silver Tower, conventional up and down don’t exist—they mean something else. If we create a module with five hundred square feet of earth-conventional floor space, we can in effect triple that amount by mounting some instrument panels on the ceiling. The cost of building materials is cut by more than half. A few years ago we had a new technician on board who got so confused about which way was up—literally—he got real sick. This was back when Silver Tower wasn’t any more than two tin cans. He’d gotten up a few hours earlier than anyone else and was walking on the walls for two hours before realizing that the floor was down there. We’ve now made a yellow-colored Velcro loop carpet for the ‘floor’ to end the confusion. Anyway, we keep monitoring and auxiliary controls up here. Someone using them keeps out of the way of people using the conventional control panels and we double or triple our work space. It all takes some getting used to but after a few days you’ll be swinging around the cabin like you were born here.”

  Walker detached himself from the ceiling, floated back to the deck and motioned to a group of two technicians and an officer manning a large. multiscTeened unit that looked like an air traffic controller's console. 'The SBR. space-based radar, operators are there. They scan preprogrammed areas of the Soviet Union and other countries for any missile-launch activity as we fly over them. The radars on Silver Tower can detect and track any object larger than three thousand pounds at almost any altitude—even on the ground or below the surface of the water. We also can tie in with geosynchronous infrared satellites for missile-launch detection. Right now the SBR is tied into Dr. Baker’s Thor missile garage tethered beneath the station. Eventually we’ll be in direct control with and have control of hundreds of Thor missile garages in earth orbit, directing the strategic missile defense of the whole damn northern hemisphere.”

  He turned to Ann. “Your laser system is what’s got us really excited. If you’re correct in your prediction that a one-minute laser barrage will have the power to destroy hundreds of missiles, we may have the ability to neutralize the whole Soviet nuclear arsenal.”

  “If it works, Colonel,” Ann said. ‘The problems we need to overcome are still pretty huge.. . , For now. I’d put my money on the Thor missiles.”

  Walker accepted that with a shrug, then led the way to the next module, which was like the command module except a bit less organized. Again, four technicians manned the module, two of them positioned in front of large banks of equipment.

  ‘This is the experimentation module,” Walker said. “Personnel and equipment are moved in and out of this area on a weekly basis. Some weeks it’s bacteria—others it’s transformers or superconductive circuits. All of the equipment bays are temporary—we can remodel this entire module in half a day. Dr. Baker, this will be your office.” “Great, it’s bigger than my lab at Los Alamos.”

  Walker led them through the side hatch into a long glass-lined connecting tunnel, 'This leads to the second parallel column of modules. We’ve built each of these connecting tunnels with thick Plexiglas so that it can double as a sort of observation deck. The view is.., well, see for yourself.”

  The view was breathtaking. The entire space station was spread out before them, a science fiction movie come to life.

  Far below them the center open-framed keel stretched far out into space, almost out of sight. Nearly a thousand feet long and fifty feet square, the keel held large silverized fuel tanks, mounting and equipment housings for a variety of antennas, and miles of pipes and tubes snaking throughout. Beneath the keel were mounted the huge curved space-based, phased-array radars, their football-field-sized electromagnetic eyes continuously scanning planet earth beneath them. At the very ends of the keel were four solar energy collectors, each twice as large as the radars—massive, delicate, incredibly thin-looking sheets of glass aimed at the sun.

  “On earth those collectors would weigh eight
y tons apiece,” Walker said. “Up here, of course, nothing. We use a tiny, fifty-horsepower electric motor to keep them pointed at the sun. They supply enough power for two stations. While the station is in sunlight they provide direct energy. We also use them to recharge a bank of cobalt-hydroxide batteries for emergency use and to break down waste water to produce hydrogen and oxygen for our fuel cells and station thrusters.”

  “Is that what you’ll use to power Ann’s laser?” Baker asked him.

  “Unfortunately, no,” Ann answered for him. “We need ten times more collectors for just one burst. We’ll use a small nuclear MHD reactor to power the laser.”

  Baker pointed toward the very ends of the keel. “The station thrusters are also out there on the keel?”

  “Right,” Walker said. “Five small hydrogen rocket engines on each end of the keel. They fire automatically about two dozen times a day to correct the station’s altitude, attitude, alignment and orbit. They’re also used to move the station if necessary.”

  “And you get the fuel for that from water?”

  “Right again. We use electrolysis chambers powered by the sun to crack waste water into hydrogen and oxygen gas that’s collected and stored in those tanks out there. We bring up a shuttle full of water about once every two months, and we also get water from the fuel cells, where we recombine hydrogen and oxygen to produce electrical power and water. In an emergency a full complement of twenty crewmen can survive up here for six months without resupply.”

  They continued through the thick Plexiglas tunnel to the next module. Ann and Baker found themselves in an immense structure many times larger than the command module and laboratory modules they’d just left.

  “This is a complete Skylab module, the first component of the original NASA space station launched two years ago,” Walker explained. “This segment of the station was first lofted before full-scale shuttle flights resumed. As you can see, it’s as large as the third stage of a Saturn booster, sizable enough for the experimentation we were doing originally, but certainly not now.