The Glass Lady

by Douglas Savage

  “Yes, I like it here. How strange, now: my country is losing the Balkans, and I shall lose your beautiful Chesapeake Bay. Oh well, the shellfish are almost all gone now. And what’s left are poison.”

  The Jennifer Lee steered toward a row of wharves where dozens of little boats were moored. The air was heavy with the stench of rotted fish in freezing salt air.

  “Can you make a living fishing, Nikolai?” the nauseous man inquired between stomach convulsions in the rough sea close to the docks.

  “Yes,” the boatman said firmly. “I certainly can’t do my other job after today.”

  Just shy of the clapboard dock, the big seaman turned to face his sickly passenger who had been dropped off 15 minutes earlier by a Coast Guard cutter.

  “What will you do, Nikolai, when the oyster beds run dry?”

  On the dock, two black cars with government plates waited.

  “Fish for something else. My people have always been fishermen.”

  The Jennifer Lee banged gently into the dock.

  “I wish you luck . . . next year on the water, Nikolai.”

  The big man blinked moist eyes at the back of the bilious bureaucrat who stumbled toward his dark car.

  “With you, Endeavor, at 03 plus 27. Your downlink is clean and crisp.”

  “Thanks, Flight,” the AC answered from his command seat in the front of the flightdeck. As Shuttle had approached the western edge of the listening range of the Dakar station in Senegal, the command pilot had strapped himself into his front left seat. There, he was powering up the ship’s celestial sextant, the Crew Optical Alignment Sight. The COAS would back up the two star trackers in Shuttle’s nose for aligning the inertial measurement units’ platforms by a star sight.

  “COAS warmin’ up, Flight,” the AC reported from his seat over blue sea 800 miles west of Africa. With Enright standing at the aft station where he handflew the remote arm, the AC forward had to make the slowest possible attitude maneuvers to track his stars after sundown five minutes away. Only instantaneous firings from Endeavor’s smallest RCS thrusters would protect the outstretched manipulator arm from dangerous strain during maneuvers.

  At the aft crew station, Enright steered the deployed RMS arm back toward Shuttle’s tall tail fin. Stretching the arm outright such that none of the joints were flexed would lessen the swaying moments induced in the 50-foot-long arm as Endeavor changed positions to search for navigation stars for the COAS sight. The tubular COAS periscope mounted before Parker’s face was fixed in Shuttle and could not move to search the sky. The two star-trackers gimbaled about in their shoe-box-size containers to search on their own for bright stars.

  “Endeavor: Colorado via Dakar. Backroom says the field spikes recorded by the PDP may be from a communications laser on board Soyuz. Probably a blue-green laser similar to our submarine laser communications.”

  “Oh,” the AC mumbled as he worked Mother’s black keyboard. His mind befuddled by horse tranquilizer, he failed to press his mike button.

  “You copy that, Endeavor?”

  “Gotcha, Flight,” Enright called from the rear station.

  “Roger, Jack,” the voice called remoted through the African coastal station near the already-darkening eastern horizon. Evening twilight came to the starship sixteen times faster than as seen from Earth.

  Three and one-half hours into the mission on Shuttle’s third revolution, Endeavor crossed the west coast of Africa. In four minutes, the ship would lead LACE and Soyuz back out over open sea as they left Africa’s western bulge for the Atlantic west of Africa-proper. For the blink of an eye, Endeavor was directly over the tracking station at Dakar 150 statute miles below. Then she was gone.

  “Endeavor, we have another word for you from the backroom boys: One of our recon survey satellites in synchronous orbit 23,000 miles above you is getting some kind of ultra-light, molecular out-gassing near Luanda, Angola. Could very well be a missile venting hydrogen vapors. No word from our guys in trenchcoats on this. We want you to execute a roll maneuver using DAP in vernier-B to take a quick look when you overfly the area at 03 plus 39 plus 40. You should be wrapping up your P-52 alignment by then. Copy the time?”

  “Got it, Flight,” the AC drawled from his left seat in the forward cockpit. “Copy that way-point and we’ll roll after the IMU sights. Shadows really getting longer down there.”

  The command pilot’s visored head was close to the two side windows over his left shoulder. With Endeavor flying on her port side with her nose pointing north, the pilot looked over his left shoulder straight down to the dusky African countryside. Shuttle cruised into the veil of evening twilight and sunset over Guinea. The small nation Ivory Coast drifted silently into view in the waning daylight at a speed of 300 miles per minute.

  Not more than four feet behind Parker, Enright stood at his station at the portside rear bulkhead, where he stabilized the remote arm for the Colonel’s navigation maneuvers. The copilot floated erect with his knees bent and his boots locked to the floor. He strained his neck muscles against his helmet’s neckring to raise his face to the square window above his body.

  Peering into the darkness beyond the overhead window, Enright watched the sun flatten upon the far western horizon. Between the twilight horizon’s band of orange-and-blue ribbons at sunset, he could see clearly the black and slowly rolling hulk of LACE. On the death ship’s far side, the silent Soyuz glowed orange as the dying sun lapped at the long wings of solar electrical cells along the flanks of Soyuz.

  As Shuttle flew into the darkness of the planet’s nighttime shadow, the AC ordered Mother and the digital autopilot to roll Endeavor rightside-up.

  Just beyond Parker’s triple-pane, forward windows, the two star-trackers scanned the moist blackness of heaven for navigation stars memorized by Mother. “Where are we by the eternal stars?” beeped Mother at the speed of light over her wire ganglia. And the mass memory unit replied: “Ten degrees north latitude by eleven degrees west longitude at 03 hours and 32 minutes since leaving home.” Armed with her dead-reckoning bearings guessed by memory, Mother commanded the minus-Z tracker to look straight up for the faint star Markab in the sprawling constellation Pegasus. The star-tracker found the pinpoint of light overhead. The minus-Y tracker just ahead of Parker’s left shoulder looked sideways toward the black western sky as Endeavor flew heads-up with her nose pointed to the north. Mother ordered this tracker to look for the star Altair halfway to the horizon in the constellation Aquila.

  Mother chose her stars based upon her electronic dialogue with her three inertial measurement units, which felt where Shuttle ought to be. Mother found her stars in the corners of the black sky where her magnetic memory told her to look. This meant that the uncorrected IMU alignment was within half a degree of true.

  Working his computer keyboard, Parker gave Mother permission to convert her star sights into torque angles which command the IMU gyroscopes’ gimbals to swing just enough to sense true local vertical and local horizontal. Each IMU was aligned with a slightly different bearing to allow cross-checks among them until the next IMU alignment.

  “P-52 complete, Jack,” the AC called by intercom to Enright behind him. “Right on, Number One. No need to recompute the reference stable member matrix.”

  “Roger, Skip,” Enright said. “So where are we?”

  “Right here,” the AC chuckled.

  “That’s a comfort, Will,” Enright laughed.

  “Ah, Flight? The IMU is aligned all balls.”

  “Copy, Endeavor. Real fine. LOS Dakar momentarily. We remind you to roll heads down before Angola in six minutes to check on their activities down there. You’re Go to stow the RMS and to begin EVA prep to get Jack outside by the States. At 03 plus 34, you look fine all vitals . . .”

  The ground’s voice broke up in a wave of static as Shuttle sped over the horizon.

  Shuttle coasted out over open water after passing Abdijan, the capital of Ivory Coast, West Africa. Leaving Africa’s western bulge
behind, the ship would cross open sea for six minutes and 1,800 miles before returning to the land mass of central Africa. Radio silence would last ten minutes before acquisition of signal, AOS, through the NASA station in Botswana near the city of Gaborone, 190 miles northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa.

  With Endeavor flying rightside-up, Parker peered into the COAS periscope recticle before his face. He had raised his helmet faceplate to get his eye closer to the small mirror at the base of the Crew Optical Alignment Sight. As an old sailor, the AC could not resist consulting his space sextant. Gently nudging Shuttle’s nose among the stars, he found the star overhead which Mother had shot. Since the COAS can only look overhead, he could only use it to check the minus-Z startracker which also looks only upward. Working his computer keyboard, he fed his eyeball sighting from the COAS to the computer’s navigation and control programs. The left of the three green televisions on the center forward instrument panel blinked and confirmed that Mother’s sight was reliable. “Man in the loop,” the real pilots in the astronaut corps called it. Parker inserted an airman’s eyeball into the loop at every opportunity.

  Behind the AC, Enright steered the heavy plasma diagnostics package at the end of the RMS arm. He directed the PDP toward its berth in the open bay.

  Flying the arm in manual-augmented mode, Enright eased the PDP into its latches on the OSS pallet in the stern of the bay. When the RMS panel and the shoulder-high television monitor confirmed to Enright the security of the stowed package, Enright squeezed the pistol-grip trigger in his right hand. The arm’s end effector unit released the wire snares holding the PDP’s grapple probe. The EEU backed away from the berthed PDP canister.

  “PDP secured, Skip.”

  “Sweet music, Number One. Advise when you’ve put the arm to bed.”

  Enright steered the arm’s joints until the arm was stretched out straight. He directed the arm toward the cradle and latches on the bay’s portside sill. Gently, the copilot aligned the arm with its three latch posts. All three latches grabbed and held the 900-pound arm.

  “Manipulator secured; all latches rigidized, Will.” The small windows on the RMS console showed the end effector coordinates at X01195 inches, Z044.77 inches, and Y0108.0 inches from the datum zero point.

  “Super, Jack. Catch your breath, buddy.”

  “Right on that one,” Enright sighed into his voice-activated intercom. His face, new to zero-gravity, felt swollen and warm. His suit ventilation bathed his flushed face with the scents of rubber and sweat. “Mind if I stroll downstairs a minute, Will?”

  “Take a magazine with you, Jack.”

  “Just so it ain’t Aviation Week!” Enright sighed as he pulled his plugs and thick hoses from his hot suit. He opened his faceplate to breathe the flightdeck’s cool, dry air. Even the cabin’s sterile, bottled atmosphere smelled like morning by the sea after the stuffy suit’s humid breath.

  Enright slowly flew without weight, head-first, down the floor hatchway behind the front seat where Parker floated against his lap belt.

  In mid-air, Enright somersaulted to his feet beside the dark and curtained window in the wall hatch of Shuttle’s mid-deck basement. Holding his body steady with one hand on a wall handrail, he hit the row of light switches for the mid-deck compartment.

  In darkness, after 03 hours and 36 minutes, Shuttle flew over the Equator southbound 200 miles northwest of and 130 nautical miles above the Pagula Islands.

  Enright’s empty, bulky suit stood rigidly like a third crewman beside the sealed side hatch. Wearing only his white, long woolies, Enright backed into the cramped stall of the zero-gravity biffy. He strapped his seat belt to his waist and he eased his stocking feet into the foot restraints.

  Powering up the electric biffy raised the sound of a cake mixer. At his crotch, ballast air sucked the copilot’s urine into the plastic cup between his bare thighs. The rush of air countered the weightlessness which would have sent yellow globules upward to the flightdeck were it not for the little cup’s air suction. Beneath the commode’s seat, Enright’s breakfast rode a rush of ballast air suction deep into the biffy. Under the seat, the knife blades of hinged slinger tines spun at 1,500 revolutions per minute. The flying blades are designed to shred solid waste and spread it as a gruel on the walls of the inner commode. To Enright, the space pot sounded like he rode a kitchen blender. Each crew member of Shuttle is officially allotted 0.12 kilograms (0.27 pound) of solid body waste per day. The sitting copilot wondered if he had just blown his daily quota. The noisy system of rushing air current and whirring blades tormented Enright’s throbbing head. But he retained sufficient energy to smile at the vision of his female astro colleagues riding the little cold cup between his naked legs.

  With his right hand, Enright felt for the commode’s control panel beside his right knee. Squeezing out of the narrow stall, he was momentarily unnerved by the presence of his empty suit, which still hovered at attention beside the latrine. Cabin air currents had raised the suit’s empty right sleeve up past the round neckring. The headless suit appeared to salute the skivvy-clad airman.

  Enright tumbled slowly as he wrestled with the suit to climb back into the rubbery cocoon. After he closed the long belly zipper, he fetched his helmet from the corner where the wall meets the ceiling. The inside cheekpads of the helmet felt coldly wet with perspiration where it covered the pilot’s face.

  Enright adjusted his helmet as he rose through the ceiling hole to the upstairs flightdeck. He floated up behind Parker. Floating over the center forward console, Enright carefully eased into his right seat beside the command pilot. After pulling his lap belt across his middle, Enright plugged into his communications jacks and his two air hoses.

  “Feel better, buddy?” the AC drawled.

  “Much. Thanks.” Behind his closed faceplate, a revived Enright grinned. “I’m an evil man, Skipper,” Enright said with mock gravity in his voice.

  “Thought about little Sally riding the million-dollar, house-outback, aye, Number One?”

  For an instant, Enright looked with surprise at his captain. Both pilots laughed out loud over the voice-activated intercom.

  The square face of the mission timer before their faces ticked past 03 hours, 40 minutes. While Enright had been below, Parker had rolled Endeavor and had pitched her nose toward the Earth. They flew upside down over the dark coastline of Angola. The faint lights of the capital city of Luanda marked the sea’s edge far below in the darkness.

  They flew heads down four minutes before contact with Endeavor’s next ground station.

  The two airmen still chuckled at their private humor. The laughter stopped when the darkness below erupted into a momentary flash of intensely white light just east of Luanda.

  11

  “With you, Endeavor, by Botswana, at 03 plus 44. How do you read?”

  “Gotcha, Colorado. We’re just sittin’ and catchin’ our breath up here. For a while there, young Jack looked like he got rode hard and put away wet. But we’re both right and tight now.”

  The AC’s bouncy voice reflected his newly acquired space legs. To his weightless body and his anesthetized leg, Endeavor was growing roomier and homier even in the narrow forward flightdeck. Enright’s rooky wings also felt more like flying as Shuttle cruised over sleeping Zimbabwe. Far below in the darkness, the clocks on the walls read 8:45 as the two pilots flew on their left sides above Africa.

  “Super, Will.”

  “And we had a real display of pyrotechnics five minutes back over Angola.” The AC’s ungloved hand worked the mike button floating close to his chest and his two hose fittings. Mother and the autopilot held trim with Shuttle flying on her port side with her nose pointing northward toward the Equator 1,200 nautical miles away in the darkness.

  “Backroom would like some details, Endeavor. Only with you on this station for another four minutes.”

  Parker did not reach for the floating Push-To-Talk switch when he saw Enright reach for his.

  “Rig
ht seat here. Looked like daylight down there just for a few seconds. After the initial burst of light, we followed a brilliant contrail for a good minute. Lost it when Soyuz crossed the field of view behind us. No mistaking a missile, Flight. Be under us somewhere. Eastern trajectory for sure. You got anything from your eyes in the sky?”

  “Nothing yet, Jack. We hope to get a skin track via Yarradee station in fifteen. Could you see any staging activities from whatever it was?”

  “Negative on that,” the second in command answered.

  “Copy, Jack. We’d like you to begin your EVA activities when you can. You can grab a bite first if you want. This rev, we lose you by Botswana in two minutes. You’re with Australia twelve minutes later. LOS Australia by Yarradee after eight minutes of contact. Sunrise 04 minutes later at 04 plus 12 MET. From LOS Yarradee to Hawaii acquisition is twenty minutes. Stateside contact is for twenty minutes. We’d like to have Jack close to going outside over the States . . . Got all that?”

  “Sure,” the AC said casually. He took no notes.

  “And when you go downstairs with Jack, Will, we remind you to do your first CO2 absorber insertion.”

  “Got it, Flight.”

  “Roger, AC. Don’t forget to plug in downstairs.”

  “You betcha, Colorado. Leavin’ you for a minute here.”

  Both pilots slid their seats back along their floor tracks. After opening their visors to breathe cabin air, they pulled their biomedical and radio plugs, and unlocked their belly air hoses. The two hoses in front of each seat floated upward like snakes.

  Parker eased himself feetfirst into the hole behind his seat. Enright floated helmet first down the access hole behind his own seat.

  In the floodlighted mid-deck, Parker’s boots hovered above the floor in the 2,625 cubic-foot compartment. Enright did a zero gravity handstand with his feet braced upon the ceiling which was 7 feet above the floor in the 16-foot long mid-deck.

  “You’re upside down, buddy,” Enright grinned through his open faceplate.