Malachi set his music player on the small shelf at the left side of the seat, then slid his headset over the player’s ear buds, fiddling with the arrangement for a moment to get the proper alignment. When he thought he had it, he reached beneath his T-shirt and took the small metal key from the string around his neck, placing it into the inset below the keyboard. The key, which had a chip-based random number generator in its small cylinder, allowed him to enter his two passwords into the keyboard. Given the elaborate security procedures required to get in here, the system designers had decided only a few modest protocols would be required to operate the controlling unit; the screen flashed immediately with the main feed from Orbital Platform Three, which the twenty-one-year-old had come to operate.
At the same time, the other screens popped to life. Marie Telach, who was in charge of the operation, popped onto the Art Room video screen.
“Hey,” said Malachi to Telach.
“Hey yourself. You’re late.”
“Yeah, my shirt set off one of the alarms upstairs. Too much bleach — sniffer thought it was C-4.”
“There is a dress code, you know.”
Malachi grinned. She was undoubtedly referring to his jeans and T-shirt, which were a bit scruffy even for the NSA. Malachi relished his role as a bit of a rebel, albeit one with a patriotic cause. He could play the rebel because he was undeniably one of the best Ree-Vee ops on the planet, able to handle not only the complicated satellite platforms and their Vessels but also the high-speed F-47C and naval assets as well. (Ree-Vee op came from Remote Vehicle operator. The Vessels were like one-way space planes that were configured and launched from the satellites.) Ironically, Malachi had first attracted NSA attention for his math skills — he’d been accepted to Princeton as a fourteen-year-old — and had only stumbled into the occupation after an interviewer found him playing a version of AirCombat XXVII he’d hacked into a GameBoy cartridge.
“Our team is almost in place,” Telach told him. “We need those sensors down. Now.”
“That’s why I’m here.” Malachi popped the 3-D “sit-grid” supplied by the Art Room onto the screen in the center of his workstation. The grid was a computerized map showing his target. Based on satellite images, it could in theory be only a few minutes old. In this case, however, it had been constructed from the image library and was nearly a year old. There were not enough satellites and, frankly, not enough need, to have high-quality images of every corner of the Earth available 24/7. Malachi studied the view for a moment — it looked like a junkyard with some outer buildings — then keyed in the target destination.
The Vessels were essentially space-borne dump trucks, preloaded with different payloads. Three basic configurations were stored at the satellite platforms. All looked and operated the same. One held three dozen small sound sensors, bugs about the size of a quarter that could transmit back to the satellites for about four hours. Another held two dozen slightly larger motion sensors with roughly the same endurance. The last held a combination of both. The Vessels looked like small pipes with a sharp nose cone and blisters halfway down the side. The boosters had steering fins similar to those found on a standard air-to-air missile.
As the computer made its launch calculations, Malachi brought up the smaller panels on the left side of his console. He punched up a weather radar in screen one, updating himself on the progress of a storm he’d been briefed on earlier. Screens two and three had radar images of both the target area and a wasteland nearly a thousand miles to the northwest where the Vessel’s parts would scatter after destruct. Neither of the images was particularly fine; objects less than two meters in length, such as the Vessel he would be piloting, were essentially invisible. But they were enough to give Mal-achi a decent idea of what was going on.
At least one of the previous Vessels had refused to blow itself up, and the operators had been instructed to make sure they landed in as remote an area as possible if, in the irreverent slang favored by the tiny coterie charged with controlling the space weapons, they didn’t “go jihad.” It was therefore important to know that he wasn’t flying his self-destruct pattern into Army maneuvers. By the same token, he’d need to know if anything dramatic happened at the target area before making his drop.
By the time he returned his attention to the forward screens, the computer had calculated its launch, wing inflation, and ignition points, showing them in color-coded symbols on the main screen.
“Ready or what?” asked Telach.
“Almost,” he said, picking up his MP3 player. He slipped the RCA plug into his console and togged the number three preset. G*ngs*rfx’s “Buzz” ripped up and down his back, the bass good enough to set off a hum in the NSA earphones. “Ready to fly,” he said. “I need a target time.”
“Yesterday,” said Telach.
“Can’t you play some classical music?” asked Jeff Rock-man. Rockman was in the front row of the Art Room, running the agents on the ground. “Springsteen or something?”
“Baby, we were born to run,” said Malachi, typing in his command password to unlock the platform.
“How’s the Civic?” asked Rockman.
“Chip’s supposed to come today. We’ll see how we do,” said Malachi. “I got the Monsoon speakers in, though. Sounds awesome. Whole town shakes.”
“Cool.”
The computer queried for his mission authorization number; Malachi pounded it in, starting to catch the hard beat of the rap-metal song he’d dished into his buds. Malachi did a quick inventory check of the platform’s available bugs — it was due to be restocked by Shuttle next week — then selected one of the Mixed Bag Vessels as his entry vehicle. The main screen morphed to a video view of the interior chamber — the top of the platform was covered by a solar array, as much to avoid observation by other space vehicles as for power. He turned to screen two and toggled a preset to put the 3-D mission profile there. The computer was suggesting a class one fuse — actually, a solid-propellant rocket motor — but Malachi, working from experience and still worried about the weather, chose class two. He had to confirm his suggestion twice with the computer — an annoying nudge installed by designers who basically didn’t trust human pilots. Finally he watched on the main screen as the stubby motor rode down a track to the back of the selected Vessel.
The satellite platform’s parts were not unlike those in the sophisticated plastic-and-electronic Lego sets Malachi’s father had bought the prodigy when he was three, and if Malachi had been the nostalgic type he might have flashed on a scene or two of his dad, who had died in a traffic accident when Malachi was nine. But he wasn’t particularly nostalgic; he popped off his headset, grabbed the MP3 player, and got up, walking to the back of the Chamber, where the small galley included a large refrigerator. He bent to the bottom and took out a Nestle´’s strawberry drink (stocked here at his request), then took a straw from the counter and went back to his station.
“Today?” asked Telach.
“I was thinking today.” Malachi slipped back into his seat. The engine had been strapped to the Vessel. The computer indicated it was ready to launch and, in fact, had started to count down for him, albeit at ten minutes.
“Move countdown to sixty seconds,” he said, opening the bottle. He poked the straw through, still watching the screen. The computer ferried the missile from its assembly point, extending the long arm that held it until it was twelve feet from the bay. It then swiveled the missile slightly to obtain the proper launch angle. Platform Three was roughly twenty-four hundred miles to the southeast of the Vessel’s target and, in fact, was closer to Tehran than Moscow. The rocket would propel it toward Earth at speeds approaching Mach 6; it would hit the target area in just about an hour.
Or two and a half strawberry drinks.
When the countdown hit twenty seconds, the computer paused to ask Malachi for the go/no-go command. He quickly typed “GO”—it had to be capital letters, or the computer would freeze, yet another safety feature.
At
fifteen seconds, the computer again asked if it was allowed to launch. This time, Malachi gave verbal authorization, as did Telach from the Art Room.
The frame jostled up and down as the main screen filled with pure white tinged by red and yellow. By the time the video camera adjusted its aperture, the rocket was gone. Malachi left the image on the screen long enough to confirm that the launch had gone smoothly; the rail was intact, with no visible scorching. He then thumbed exterior camera two into the screen. The yellow diamond of the burning motor dominated the bottom left-hand quarter of the screen; he knew from experience the launch was a good one. He tracked it from the camera for a few seconds, then took one last big sip of his drink and set it aside.
An old Beck song from Odelay, “Where It’s At,” rammed through his ear buds as he quickly worked through the instrument readings. Malachi watched the rocket’s actual and projected trajectory on screen two, fingers starting to get twitchy. His control at this point was minimal, for all practical purposes limited to the rocket motor itself; it was like controlling an on-off switch that could be used a total of five times. The computer turned the dotted projected course into a solid line as the Vessel moved along, comparing it to a projected 3-D path that looked like a long tube of yellow spaghetti on the screen. Malachi watched as the rocket began dipping from the top of the tube toward the bottom; as it passed through the yellow into the black he killed the engine. Five seconds passed before the dotted line once more found the proper course; Malachi waited another three before initiating the relight. There was a slight delay in acknowledgment, almost enough to make him bite the inside of his cheek. The rocket engines had a mean failure ratio of some thing like.003, and the restart wasn’t a sure thing. But the delay was due to a tracking glitch on SpyNet, which was ferrying over information from DEFSMAC satellites — just working out the initials alone was a hassle — and after a slight hiccup the main screen showed the Vessel was now perfectly in the middle of the spaghetti tube. Malachi leaned back in his seat, soaking in “High 5” as the computer baby-sat the Vessel toward Point Hydra, where the winglets would be deployed and he would gain more control over the flight.
“Looking for an ETA,” said Rockman over sonic drone.
“On course and on time,” said Malachi. He clicked in the main flight screen — similar to a HUD that might be found in a fighter, it gave a crosshairs and artificial horizon against, in this instance, a simulated backdrop of space and Earth. The forward video camera wouldn’t transmit until much later in the flight.
“So you’re ready to put the new exhaust in?”
“Yeah. Gonna be wicked hot.”
“I’m thinking about buying a Camaro,” said Rockman.
“A Camaro?”
“Classic ’68. Has a rebored 302 in it. Engine is probably for shit, though. I’ve seen the driver and maybe I might trust him with a skateboard.”
“Can we have an all-around update, please?” asked Telach, who was addressing the entire team involved in the mission.
The chatter dissolved as the analysts tracking various developments gave terse briefings. Malachi fenced the updates off in a corner of his brain, concentrating on his space plane. He leaned toward the control screens, gradually falling into the zone. Once he was there, everything would be automatic. It was like typing; he wouldn’t have to look at the keyboard to know where his fingers were.
Five minutes from Hydra, the onboard computer did a series of system checks. They were all in the green.
He came over the Urals. Telach had to give the final okay to drop the sensors from the Vessel. He updated her regularly on the flight, even though she could track it from the Art Room.
“Preparing to deploy wings,” he told her, edging forward in his seat.
The blare of another new tune from G*ngs*rfx — a heavy metal — rap piece that found a way to incorporate a tuba — nearly drowned out Telach’s acknowledgment. Malachi got the view in his main screen; the computer helped out with a white box showing the Vessel. The streaking pipe was only forty-four inches long, counting the rocket motor. While theoretically detectable by three different Russian ground radars, the programming on all three would reject any returns from it as errors.
Malachi knew that for a fact, since he had helped develop the virus that placed the code into the systems.
The computer began counting down the seconds to Hydra. At H minus forty, Malachi cut the rocket motor but left it attached; the standard contingency plan called for using it to attempt to complete the mission if the winglets failed to deploy.
Not that they would. But you always had to have a backup.
At H minus three seconds, the computer flicked a small switch located nearly at the midpoint of the Vessel. This moved an actuator into position at the opening of four long tubes connected to the blisters on the pipe’s body. At precisely H zero, a small nanotrigger activated. A flood of hydrogen gas shot into the blisters. The thin metal around them, already partially burned and worn by the friction of the flight, burst away. Hydrogen, under somewhat less pressure, flowed into what looked like a compressed paper bag directly beneath the ellipses where the metal had blown away. Like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, the pipe sprouted a set of composite wings and steering fins from the bulges. Malachi got a tone from the computer that indicated the winglets had been properly deployed, then glanced quickly at the instrument data on screen one. There wasn’t time to scan the numbers — he looked only to make sure they were all green, rather than yellow or red. He saw green, then quickly typed the command to lose the rocket motor. As he did, the Vessel began sending its video image back to the platforms above, which in turn gave them to Malachi, supplying a real-time image for his forward display.
The separation pushed the nose up and the Vessel began to jitter, not only making it difficult to steer but also hampering the pilot’s ability to stop its spin and fly it like a normal aircraft. Malachi’s fingers flew to the right side of his keyboard, thumbing the bat on the bottom and then poking the large red arrow at the right, initiating commands to deflate the rear fin and push out the leading edge on the starboard wing. His fingers flew back and forth for nearly thirty seconds, until the craft was completely stable and on course. At that point he began controlling it using the yoke, which operated like a standard pilot’s control stick. His left hand rested at the base of a pad that could control the limited maneuvering rockets as well as the attack angles and dimensions of the winglets.
“Sensor launch in ten minutes,” he said.
“Hallelujah,” said Telach. “I thought I’d be filing my retirement papers before we got there.”
“They let you retire from this outfit?” asked Rockman. “I thought they just took you out back and shot you.”
“That’d be too easy,” said Telach.
Malachi was too busy to joke. Stabilized, the Vessel was now gliding through 200,000 feet at about Mach 5. The optimum speed for dispensing the sensors in the Vessel’s belly was just under Mach 1, and the computer showed they’d be going at least three hundred knots too fast. Folding the middle and fourth fingers of his left hand into his palm, he hit the top triangular buttons on his control pad simultaneously, telling the computer to inflate the leading edge pieces two degrees, the standard way to slow down the probe’s descent.
Ninety-seven percent of the time, the procedure worked perfectly. This time belonged to the other 3 percent.
The inflatable membrane on the winglet was made from a sandwich of metal and thin plastic alloys. One layer of the sandwich was pure copper, and while it had a number of advantages over other materials that had been tried in its place, it also had a tendency toward hairline creases that caused problems under high-stress regimes. Pretty much by definition, the entire flight was a high-stress regime, and when the leading edge inflated now, the crease caused a dent in the winglet geometry. Within seconds, the dent created a strong vortex on that side of the Vessel; the new stress point made a hole in that part of the wing.
&
nbsp; The hole was less than a millimeter, but it allowed a fair amount of hydrogen to escape. The winglet was constructed in small tubes or pockets, so structural integrity could be maintained, at least for a while. But even with the computer’s help, Malachi knew he was going to lose the battle to keep the Vessel from sliding into a spin.
“Problem?” asked Telach.
“I’m out of milk,” he told her, struggling with the controls.
Within a few more seconds, the control panel on the left went from yellow to red. Malachi opted for a trick he had practiced several weeks ago on the simulator — he jettisoned the winglets, guiding the probe entirely by the fins as if it were a missile. While doable, this complicated the sensor launch pattern.
“We’re going to be a little off-target,” he said.
“How much?” asked Telach.
“A little.”
In the simulations, he had managed to get about 75 percent of the sensors within five miles of the target.
Something moved behind him. Malachi jerked his head around, a shudder of shock running through him.
It was Telach. She came over to him and crouched next to his station. “You’re my man, Malachi. Do it.”
“Hey,” he said. While he appreciated the verbal stroke, her presence made him nervous. He tapped the keys with his thumb and pinkie, sweat pouring from his fingers.
“Ground team has to know — go or no go,” said Rockman. “It’s getting toward day out there. Should I bag it for tonight?”
“Hang on,” said Telach.
Malachi pushed his head down toward the keyboard, tilting his head toward screen two, where his course was projected. He was below the spaghetti tube by a good hunk.
“Go or no go?” asked Rockman.
“Just hang on,” said Telach.
The computer had calculated new launch data, recommending a sweeping arc as he approached the site. The pattern would rob so much momentum that he’d have to find a new self-destruct site, but he’d have to worry about that later. Malachi got a tone from the computer, counted another three seconds, then hit the keys as the diamond-shaped piper in his main screen glowed bright red.
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