Powersat (The Grand Tour)

by Bova, Ben

  “Strictly business, chief,” Van Buren said, fixing the headset over her mouse-brown hair. “Strictly business.”

  They went through the final checkout swiftly. One by one, the technicians reported that the subsystems they were monitoring were set to go. It’s a simple machine, Dan told himself as the technicians went through their checklists. No moving parts, practically. But it’s got a lot of pieces to it. A lot that can go wrong.

  The last item on the checklist was the receiving antenna station. One hand pressing the earphone to the side of her head, Van Buren called White Sands. “Rectenna farm ready and waiting,” she announced.

  Dan wet his lips, then said, “Okay, let’s do it.”

  The head engineer gestured to the master console. No one was sitting at it.

  “I thought you’d like to press the button yourself, chief,” she said.

  Dan hesitated, then shook his head. “No, Lynn. That’s your job. I won’t deprive you of it.”

  Her brows hiked up. “You certain?”

  “The pleasure is all yours,” Dan said, surprised at the superstitious dread that kept his hands jammed in his trousers pockets.

  Van Buren wasn’t superstititous. “Okay then.” She raised her voice so that everyone in the crowded, tense room could hear her. “On my mark, five seconds and counting. Mark!”

  Dan knew that the team at White Sands heard her, too.

  “Three … two … one.” Van Buren leaned ostentatiously on the red button that activated the satellite.

  “Section one is go,” sang out one of the techs.

  “Section two, full output.”

  “Section three okay.”

  One by one the fifty component solar panels began converting sunlight into electricity.

  “Inverters powering up.”

  “Magnetron one, on.”

  “Magnetron two …”

  The magnetrons converted the electricity into microwave energy.

  “Antenna powering up.”

  The antenna was a compartmented metal box nearly a mile long that focused the microwave power and beamed it toward Earth.

  Suddenly Dan realized he didn’t remember if the checklist included making certain that the antenna was pointed correctly at the rectenna farm. It has to be, he told himself. They use a laser beam as a guide. If it strays out of the rectenna field the magnetrons turn off automatically. Yet he couldn’t recall if he’d heard anyone check out the beam’s aim.

  Van Buren gave a sudden whoop. “White Sands is receiving power!”

  Dan raced her to the console that displayed the data White Sands was transmitting. Leaning over the seated technician’s back they saw the power curve ramp up almost exactly along the predicted curve. Five hundred megawatts. A thousand. Dan’s insides were churning. He could feel his heart thumping so hard it was threatening to break through his ribs. Two gigawatts. Four. Six.

  “Ten gigawatts!” Van Buren hollered at the top of her lungs. Everyone roared. Dan grabbed his chief engineer and danced in the aisle between consoles with her. Technicians threw their headsets in the air.

  “Break out the champagne!” somebody yelled.

  Dan waved his arms and shouted as loudly as he could, “No celebrating until she’s run for thirty minutes! Then we’ll shut her down and head for Hangar A. That’s where the champagne’s stashed.”

  More quietly, he said to Van Buren, “And I want the bird on the pad, ready to go.”

  “You won’t need it,” she said confidently.

  “I hope you’re right,” said Dan. “But get her set on the launchpad, anyway.”

  Then he noticed that al-Bashir had his cell phone pressed against his ear, jabbering away over the noise of the impromptu celebration.

  BAIKONUR, KAZAKHSTAN

  It was just after three A.M. when the van carrying Nikolayev, Williamson, and Bouchachi stopped at the base of the gantry tower. The three men clambered down stiffly from the van onto the steel flooring, each of them encased in a cumbersome, dull orange spacesuit, the visors of their fishbowl helmets open. A dozen technicians in quilted coats and leather hats with earflaps bustled around them. The big Proton rocket loomed above them all, illuminated glaringly by huge spotlights, icy white vapor wafting from its upper stage.

  “The world’s most reliable rocket,” Nikolayev said cheerfully. “Safer than driving automobile.”

  Williamson scowled at the Russian and his faked joviality. “Let’s get on with it, then,” he said, heading for the open cage of the elevator.

  Bouchachi, shivering from the cold even inside the thick spacesuit, clumped glumly after him.

  As the elevator creaked and groaned slowly upward, Nikolayev asked, “You know of red hands disease?”

  Bouchachi’s eyes widened. “What are you talking about?”

  Nikolayev explained that in the old days of the Soviet Union, guest cosmonauts from communist nations were allowed to ride up to the Salyut space stations for short visits. When a Hungarian cosmonaut returned to the ground after a week in orbit, the medics were disturbed to find that his hands had turned red. They feared some strange space malady and wondered what to do about it.

  “Finally, one of doctors asks Hungarian about his red hands,” Nikolayev went on. “Hungarian says, ‘Of course I have red hands. I am guest on Russian space station. Every time I went to touch anything in space station one of Russians slapped my hands.’”

  Nikolayev laughed heartily, while Bouchachi managed a polite smile and Williamson frowned.

  “I understand,” Bouchachi said as the elevator stopped at the uppermost level. “We are guests aboard your spacecraft. We are not to touch anything.”

  “Or you get red hands,” Nikolayev warned, still laughing.

  There were six more technicians waiting for them at the top level. The wind was howling up there, cutting icily. The sky was dark and full of stars. Williamson turned a full circle on the steel platform, searching for one particular star that should be bright and steady low on the horizon. The powersat. He couldn’t see it. Of course not, he realized. It’s on the other side of the world.

  Two of the technicians touched his shoulders and nudged him toward the hatch of the Soyuz TMA spacecraft. Williamson had practiced this a hundred times in the simulators, but somehow this time was different. He stubbed his booted foot on the lip of the hatch and would have toppled to his knees if the technicians hadn’t been there to hold him up. They literally lifted him off his feet and shoved him through the hatch, boots first.

  Inside, the spacecraft was as cramped as a sardine tin. Grumbling inwardly about how stiff his spacesuit felt, Williamson clambered over two of the couches that had been shoehorned in among all the equipment and controls, then slid awkwardly into the farthermost couch, banging his helmeted head on a protruding electronics box as he leaned back.

  Nikolayev slipped in next to him, so close that their shoulders pressed against each other. “Is easier once we reach orbit,” the Russian said confidently. “In zero gravity this coffin gets bigger. You’ll see.”

  Bouchachi clambered in hesitantly. He was still settling into his couch when the technicians closed the hatch and sealed it.

  We’re in for it now, Williamson thought. No way out.

  Nikolayev adjusted the pin microphone inside his helmet and began chattering with the controllers in Russian. After several minutes he said, “Down visors.” He slid the visor of his helmet down and it sealed with a click. Williamson and Bouchachi did the same.

  “Now we wait,” Nikolayev said, his voice muffled by the closed helmets. His cheerful demeanor was gone. He looked totally serious to Williamson.

  Got to piss, Williamson realized. There was a relief tube in the suit, but he wasn’t certain he was connected to it properly. The dour technicians, mostly Asians, who had helped them get into the spacesuits had paid little attention to the plumbing. Would it short out some electrical circuits if it leaks? Williamson wondered. He decided not to try it. I’ll wait. I can hold
it.

  He heard thumps and grinding noises. Pumps starting up? he wondered. Or something gone wrong. The tight, hot little metal sarcophagus started vibrating like a tuning fork.

  “Ten more minutes,” Nikolayev said.

  More bangs and groans. Metal expanding, Williamson told himself. Or contracting. He thought he heard the wind keening outside. A storm coming up?

  “Five minutes,” said the Russian. “Everything automatic from here on.”

  The big rocket was coming to life. Pumps gurgled, pipes shuddered, the lights on the instrument board six inches in front of their faces blinked several times, then steadied. Most of them were green, Williamson saw. A display screen lit up with a complex of grid lines and colored curves.

  Nikolayev adjusted a dial below the display screen, but it didn’t seem to have any affect on the image.

  Williamson and Bouchachi had radios in their suits, earphones built into their helmets. But Nikolayev had not bothered to patch them in to the circuit he was listening to.

  The cosmonaut said something in rapid, fluent Russian. Then he broke into a big grin and nodded inside his transparent bubble of a helmet. “Da, da! Dah sveedahnyah!”

  Once they lifted off, Williamson knew, there would be no more communications with Baikonur.

  Something exploded. For a flash of an instant Williamson was certain that the rocket had blown up and they were about to be killed. Then an enormous invisible hand squeezed down on his chest so hard he could barely breathe. His arms were too heavy to lift off the seat rests. Pain and terror flaring through him, he managed to turn his head toward Nikolayev. The Russian’s face looked as if someone were flattening it out with an invisible pressing iron.

  The noise and vibration were terrifying. Williamson couldn’t see Bouchachi, on the other side of the Russian. The pressure got worse and all of a sudden Williamson’s bladder let go. He heard a moan and wondered if it was his own tortured voice or Bouchachi’s.

  And then it stopped.

  It all just suddenly stopped. No noise, no vibration, no pressure. Williamson saw his arms floating up off the seat rests as if they had a will of their own. He turned his head to look at Nikolayev and a surge of dizziness made his eyes water. He felt as if he were going to upchuck.

  “Zero gravity,” said Nikolayev happily. “In forty-five minutes we make rendezvous with transfer rocket.”

  Williamson wondered if he could survive forty-five minutes without heaving up his guts into the fishbowl helmet.

  MATAGORDA ISLAND, TEXAS

  “Now remember,” Dan shouted, standing in the middle of the hangar floor,”this was just a rehearsal. Tomorrow’s the real thing.”

  Hardly anyone paid any attention to him, they were all swilling champagne, laughing, pounding each other on the back. Even Niles Muhamed, normally as grim as the angel of death, was shaking up bottles of champagne and spraying them on whoever happened to be in range of the cold, white geyser.

  “Give it up, chief,” said Lynn Van Buren, her inevitable dark pantsuit stained with Muhamed’s champagne spray. “They’ve earned an afternoon of fun.”

  Frowning with helplessness, Dan said, “I don’t want them hung over tomorrow.”

  “They’ll be okay. Let them let off steam. They’ll get a good night’s sleep.”

  Van Buren drifted off into the crowd and Dan slowly realized that he was alone. Joe Tenny wasn’t there to share this moment with him. Claude Passeau had gone back to New Orleans. Even April was nowhere in sight.

  I wish Jane could’ve been here, he said to himself. She’ll come down tomorrow but Scanwell will be with her. And six hundred other VIPs and news people. Vickie Lee, most probably. Wonder if she’ll stay the night.

  Feeling suddenly unbearably sad, drained, disappointed like a man who had spent his last ounce of energy to reach a mountain peak only to find that it wasn’t worth the struggle, Dan walked slowly toward the stairs leading up to his office and his apartment. Then he stopped. No sense going up there with all this noise going on down here.

  There’s no place for me to go, he realized. No place at all. He began to drift through the crowd, looking for April. She’s going to have a lot to do tomorrow, with all the news media coming in. Better make sure she doesn’t get too much champagne into her.

  Off in the farthermost corner of the hangar, away from the whooping, sloshing crowd, al-Bashir was speaking quietly, intently, to April. One hand holding a plastic cup of California champagne, he leaned against the metal wall of the hangar with his other hand, neatly pinning April against the wall.

  “France?” April asked. “You mean Paris?”

  “Marseille, actually,” he said smoothly. “On the Mediterranean. We can go to Paris afterward, if you like.”

  April looked surprised, almost alarmed. But she murmured, “I’ve never been to France.”

  “Marseille is not far from the Riviera,” al-Bashir said. “They make the world’s best bouillabaisse there.”

  “I’ve heard of that. It’s like a sort of fish stew, isn’t it?”

  “With certain exotic ingredients added.”

  “Like saffron?”

  Al-Bashir smiled. “You’ll love it.”

  “But there’s so much to do here,” April said, her eyes evading his.

  “We can leave tomorrow afternoon, after the turn-on ceremony. Surely Dan owes you a few days’ vacation.”

  “I really don’t think I could …” Her voice faded away.

  Al-Bashir put his arm down and stood up straight, almost at attention. “You will have your own hotel suite, I promise you. You’ll be perfectly safe.”

  A slight smile touched her lips. “Can I trust you?”

  “Of course,” he lied.

  As soon as she got to her apartment that evening, her head buzzing from the champagne, April phoned Kelly Eamons in Houston. No answer. She left messages on both Kelly’s office line and her cell phone.

  Saturday evening, April thought. She’s probably out on a date.

  April fell asleep as she sat in her living room recliner watching a detective show on television. It always worked out so neatly on TV: they caught the murderer in one hour flat, even taking time-outs for commercials.

  The phone rang and she instantly snapped awake.

  “Hi, April. It’s me, Kelly.”

  Holding the cordless phone as she got up from the recliner, April said, “Let me put you on the computer, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  It took a few moments for April to boot up her desktop machine and get Kelly’s freckle-faced image on her screen. Once she did, she told the FBI agent about al-Bashir’s invitation.

  “To Marseille?” Eamons echoed. “That’s a major narcotics port.”

  “Narcotics? Do you think … ?”

  Eamons’s brows knit “There’s nothing linking him to drugs. Nothing linking him to much of anything, outside of his connection with that bozo Roberto.”

  “He seems nice enough,”April said half-heartedly.

  “I don’t like the idea of you being alone with him. In France, yet.”

  April tried to make light of it. “What’s he going to do, kidnap me and carry me off to his harem?”

  “He has a harem, you know. In the city of Tunis.”

  “Really?”

  Frowning, Eamons said, “We’ve checked with the CIA about him. He seems to be nothing more than a big-time international businessman. A billionaire.”

  “But you think he might be linked to the murders here at Astro.”

  “It’s only a straw,” Eamons admitted. “But it’s the only straw we’ve got.”

  “Maybe if I go with him we can learn more,” April suggested.

  “Maybe if you go with him you could get hurt. Badly.”

  April replied, “He doesn’t want to hurt me. He just wants to go to bed with me.”

  “And what do you want?”

  Without an eyeblink’s hesitation, April said, “I want to find out who killed Joe Tenn
y. And Pete Larsen.”

  “And that test pilot.”

  Nodding, April said, “And what they’re planning next.”

  “That’s damned dangerous, April.”

  “But he doesn’t know I’m working with you. He just thinks I’m an available woman.”

  Eamons’s scowl deepened. “He wants to fly off to Marseille tomorrow afternoon?”

  “After we turn on the powersat, yes.”

  “We’ll have to act fast, then.”

  “And do what?”

  “I’ve got to round up a medical team and get them down there tonight,” said Eamons.

  “A medical team?”

  “You’re going to get an implant.”

  “I’m on the pill,” April blurted.

  Eamons shook her head. “Not for contraception, silly. This implant is a microtracker. We’ve got to know exactly where you are every second you’re with him.”

  GATHERING FORCES

  Sunday. dawned cloudy and gray. Not a good omen, Dan thought, looking out his window as he got dressed. Shirt and tie this morning, he told himself. You’ve got to look like the successful, prosperous captain of industry.

  April was at her desk, on the phone, when he entered his office. But she looked drawn, tired, as if she hadn’t slept all night. Nervous? Dan wondered. Well, she’s had an awful lot to do these past couple of weeks, and today’s going to be the busiest day of her life.

  Once he had booted up his computer he saw that Mitch O’Connell’s name was at the top of his to-call list. Dan clicked on the name and the phone made the connection.

  “There’s about a hundred and fifty of ’em picketing out by the main gate,” the security chief said, his heavy-jawed face grim.

  “Are they making any trouble?” Dan asked.

  “Not yet. But wait till the VIPs start showing up.”

  Dan thought swiftly. Jane and Scanwell were flying in, as were many of the other invited guests. They’d come right in to the airstrip, bypassing the perimeter gate. But the news people would be coming in their vans and they’re the ones the pickets want to impress. Soon as they see the TV vans they’ll start harassing the limos trying to get through the main gate.