Chapter Twenty-one
Friday 10:16 a.m.
Tanzan Mino closed his eyes and sighed. The financial portions of the protocol would still stand on their own; the arrangement could be salvaged somehow; it would merely require finesse.
The shocked faces of the Soviet brass standing behind him told of their dismay. Daedalus, the most marvelous vehicle ever created, had literally been within their grasp, and now . . . both prototypes destroyed.
But at least, at least it hadn't fallen into the hands of the
Americans. No more humiliating episodes like that in 1976 when the traitorous Lieutenant Viktor Belenko defected with a MiG 25 Foxbat, exposing all its secret electronics to the West.
Friday 10:16 a.m.
A slam of acceleration hit him, and he felt a circle of black close in on his vision. It was the darkness of eternal night, the music of the spheres. His last sight was the airspeed indicator scrolling past Mach 6.1. Almost four thousand miles per hour.
The starship Daedalus had just gone hypersonic.
He didn't see it, but look-down radar had shown the two Acrid AA-9s exploding a thousand feet below. When the scramjets powered in, the infrared-homing AAM lost its lock on them and detonated the other missile, sending a supersonic shock wave through Daedalus. AAMs, however, were now the least of their problems.
Skin temperature was pushing 2,200 degrees and the cockpit was becoming an incinerator. At forty-eight thousand feet they were rapidly turning into a meteorite.
His vision was gone, but just before losing consciousness he shoved the hydrogen throttles all the way forward and yanked back on the sidestick, sending them straight up into the freezing black above.
Friday 10:19 a.m.
"Altitude seventy-three thousand feet. Airspeed nine thousand knots."
"Petra, raise helmet." He was slowly regaining his sight as the G-loads began to recede. The cockpit was an oven, overwhelming its environmental control equipment, clear evidence vehicle skin temperature had exceeded design.
"Confirmed. Helmet raising."
Although his vision was still black and white, he started easing back on the throttles and checking around the cock
pit. Eva was beginning to stir now, rising and struggling with her safety straps, Androv remained slumped in his G-seat.
"You okay?" He rose and moved toward her. "I think I blacked out there for a second or so."
"I'm going to make it." She shifted her eyes right. "But I'm not so sure about . . ."
"Don't worry." The Russian snapped conscious and immediately reached to begin loosening his straps. "I've been through heavy G-loads before." Suddenly he stared up at the screens, pointed, and yelled. "Hypersonic! Zoloto! You didn't tell me. I almost can't believe-"
"We almost lost it. Skin temperatures reached-"
"Japanese ceramic composites, my droog. No other material could have done it. And now the atmosphere is thinning. When we hit eighty thousand feet, or maybe eighty-five, skin temperature should stabilize down around a thousand degrees. That's 'room temperature' for this vehicle." He paused and grinned. "Liquid hydrogen. It's a fantastic fuel, and a terrific coolant. Of course, if this catches on and we stop using alcohol coolant in our MiGs, I don't know what the Soviet Air Force will all drink before payday."
Vance glanced at their vector. They were over the Bering Sea now, with a heading for who knew where.
Mach 11.3 and climbing. The Daedalus was pressing effortlessly toward the darkness above. Time to think about what was next.
"How much of this wonderful liquid hydrogen do we have?"
"Just enough to do what I've been planning for a long time." He edged over and touched Vance's shoulder. "I'm deeply in your debt. You made it possible. Now there's only one thing left. The ultimate!"
Vance looked at him and realized immediately what he meant. Why not!
"Do we have enough oxygen?"
"Extra cannisters were loaded because of the two Mino Industries pilots. I think we have about ten hours."
"Then I vote we give it a shot," he said, turning to Eva. "What do you think?"
"What are you talking about?"
He flipped up his helmet visor. "If we can achieve Mach 25 by around a hundred thousand feet, we can literally insert into orbit. It'd cause a diplomatic flap the size of World War Three."
She slumped back in her G-seat. "Is it really possible?"
"Of course," Androv said. Then he laughed. "Well, I hope so. I've been thinking about it for a couple of months now. I actually programmed Petra to compute the precise thrust required, orbital apogee and perigee, everything. The first Sputnik had an apogee of one hundred miles and a perogee of one hundred twenty-five miles. I've calculated that at Mach 25 I could propel this vehicle into roughly that orbit. To get out we can just do a de-orbit burn. Set the compressors on the ramjets for retrofire and cold-start them."
"So we can hold Tanzan Mino's cojones hostage for a while and have some fun," Vance smiled. "What do we tell Petra?"
"I'll give her the coordinates, but you've got to handle the stick. We need to hit Mach 25 above 98,600 feet, then shut down the engines with split-second timing. She'll tell you when. If I computed it right, we should just coast over the top."
"Got it." He looked up at the screens on the front wall of the cockpit. Their altitude was now 87,000 feet, and then-speed had reached Mach 18, over ten thousand miles per hour. They were cracking world records every millisecond. And the cockpit was starting to cool off again as the thinner atmosphere reduced friction on the leading edges. They'd survived the thermal barrier. Coming up was the emptiness of space.
He watched as Androv called the routine in Petra's silicon memory where he had stored the orbital data, then ordered her to coordinate it with their current acceleration, altitude, and attitude.
Confirmed, she was saying. Reducing alpha by two degrees. She'd already begun modifying their flight profile.
"You are approximately four minutes and thirty-seven seconds from the calculated orbit. Will fuel controls be manual or automatic?"
Vance glanced over at Androv. Here at the edge of space, were they really going to turn their destiny over to a talking computer? This game could turn serious if Petra somehow screwed up.
"Let's keep the throttles on manual."
"I agree," he nodded. "Too much could go wrong."
"If we don't like the looks of anything, we can always abort."
"Petra," Androv commanded, "throttles will be manual."
Affirmative. If she felt slighted, she wasn't saying anything. Four minutes.
"We'd all better strap in," Vance said, "till we see how this goes."
The screens above them were still flashing flight data. The strut temperature in the scramjets, where a supersonic shock wave was providing the compression to combust hydrogen and the rush of thin air, had stabilized at 3,100 degrees Fahrenheit. Androv stood staring at the screens, and a moistness entered his eyes.
"If my father could have seen this," he finally said in Russian. "Everything he designed has worked perfectly. He dreamed of this vehicle, talked of it for so many years, and now finally . . . to be murdered on his day of triumph."
Eva looked at him. "Maybe his real dream was for you to fly it. To create something for you."
He paused, as though uncertain how to respond. The look in his eyes said he knew it was true. The pain and anger seemed to flow through him like electricity.
"Before we are finished, the world will know of his achievement. I intend to make sure of it."
"Three minutes," Petra announced. "Reducing alpha by three degrees."
The screen above reported that they'd reached Mach 22.4. Their altitude was now ninety-three thousand feet.
She's leveling out, Vance thought. Are we going to make it, or just fade in the stretch?
The scramjets were punching through the isolation of near-space now, the underfuselage scooping in the last fringes of atmosphere. He doubted if there'd be enough oxy
gen above a hundred thousand feet to enable the engines to continue functioning, but if they could capture the vehicle's design speed, seventeen thousand miles per hour, they still could coast into the perigee curve of a huge orbital elipse.
He looked at the screens again. They were now at Mach 23.7, with two and a half minutes left. The complex calculus being projected on Petra's main display now showed their rate of acceleration was diminishing rapidly as the atmosphere continued to thin. Maybe, he thought, there's a good reason why no one has ever inserted an air-breathing vehicle into orbit before. Maybe all the aerodynamic and propulsion tricks in the world can't compensate for the fact that turbines need to breathe.
Petra seemed to sense they were in trouble. "Constricting venturi by seven point three," she said. "Reducing alpha by four degrees."
She was choking down the scramjets and leveling them out even more. Their thrust to weight ratio-which at thirty thousand feet had been greater than one, meaning they could actually fly straight up-was dropping like a stone. It was now down to 0.2. Daedalus was slowly smothering.
But now their velocity had reached Mach 24.6. Almost, almost . . .
"Thirty seconds," Petra said, as though trying to sound confident. She was busy sampling the combustion ratio in the scramjets and making micro adjustments to the hydrogen feed.
Androv spoke into his helmet mike. "I'm beginning to think we won't make it. Petra is now probably estimating thrust based on faulty assumptions about oxygen intake. There's nothing left up here to burn. There'll be no need to abort. The edge of the atmosphere is going to do it for us." He looked up at the big screen and said, "Petra, project image from the nose camera, rotated to minus ninety."
"Confirmed," she replied and flashed an image sprinkled with stars. Then the camera swept around, and the massive screen at the end of their cabin brought into view the edge of a wide globe that seemed to be composed of shimmering blue. It was the North Pacific.
"I just wanted to see this," he said wistfully. "I once took a MiG 25 to seventy-three thousand feet, but it was nothing to compare. We're in space."
"I've been eavesdropping on satellites for years," Eva commented. "But this gives it all a whole new perspective."
"Ten seconds. Prepare to terminate hydrogen feeds."
The airspeed indicator now read Mach 24.8. Closing. . . .
Vance reached for the heavy throttle grips, watching the final seconds tick down.
. . . four, three, two, one . . .
"Terminate hydrogen feeds."
He yanked back on the handles, feeling a dying tremor flow through the vehicle. The airspeed indicator had just hit 17,108 mph.
In the unearthly silence that followed, Petra's synthetic voice cut through the cabin. "Preliminary orbital coordinates are computed as perigee 101.3 miles, apogee 117.8 miles. Duration is one hour and twenty-seven minutes. Radar altimeter will provide data for second iteration of calculations in thirty-six minutes."
The engines were completely shut down now as they coasted through the dark. Nothing could be heard but hydraulic pumps, air conditioners, light groans from zero-gravity-induced stresses in the massive fuselage.
"Zadroka!" Androv shouted. "We've done it! Maybe there is a God."
Now, as Daedalus began to slip sideways, like a liner adrift at sea, the nose camera showed they were passing over the ice-covered wilds of northern Alberta.
Vance felt a sudden rush of fluids from his extremities, where they had been pooling because of the G-forces, upward into his face and torso. The sensation was one of falling, hanging on to his seat. Clumsily he unfastened his G-seat harness and pushed up to . . .
He sailed. Across the cockpit. At the last instant he twisted, trying to right himself, but before he could he'd slammed into the bank of video monitors on the opposite wall.
"Jesus!"
"Sweetie, you look like a flying fish." Eva drifted back in her seat, loving him all over again.
"I feel like a newborn deer trying to stand up." He rotated and carefully pushed himself off the ceiling, repressing the instinct to kick like a scuba diver. "But remember the old Chinese proverb. Don't criticize a man till you've floated in his shoes for a day."
"Darling, it's a dream come true. I'm finally weightless," she laughed. "At last, no more dreading to get on a scale."
"The pain in my arm is gone," Androv spoke up again, renewed satisfaction in his voice. "We've just performed our first medical experiment in space. It's good for gunshot wounds."
"I'd like to perform another experiment," Eva said. She was slowly extracting herself from the G-seat. "What kind of electrical system do we have on board?"
"We have a massive battery section, kept charged by the turbines," Androv replied. "All these electronics require a lot of power."
"So we could transmit?"
"Of course. We're designed for that."
"What are you planning?" Vance looked over as he drifted back across the cockpit.
"A small surprise for Tanzan Mino." She was twisting around as she floated next to her straps. "Let me start preparing the laptop. I knew there was a reason why I brought it." She reached down under the seat and pushed it out, where it floated.
"I want to hook this into Petra." She reached up and awkwardly retrieved it. "Is there any way I can?"
"There's provision for laptop interface. They worked so well on the American shuttles, our people installed an identical setup here." Androv swam slowly to the console, then flipped down a panel, revealing a serial port. "You can connect it there. The wiring's in place."
Vance twisted and checked their coordinates. They were now at latitude 56 degrees, longitude 109 degrees, headed over central Canada. "Incidentally, so much for North American air defenses. No radar interrogations whatsoever."
"That's because of our Stealth design," Androv said. "We have almost no radar signature. Not only are we a menace to the world, we're invisible."
Vance floated down and settled into the central G-seat. The more he learned about the Daedalus, the more unsettling he found it. What should they do with this monster? Maybe turn it over to the UN as a monument to technology gone amuck, to high-tech excess. At last, he thought, man has achieved the ability to move anywhere on the planet, at speeds as fast as the laws of physics will allow, and do it invisibly. Maybe it should be called the Shadow.
"Okay." Eva interrupted his thoughts. "I've finished tying in the Zenith. We're about to go live from the top, gentlemen, the very top. I'm going to send the protocol to every wire service in the world. What better credibility than to be downlinked live from space?"
Vance looked at the picture from the nose camera. They were over the Atlantic now, which meant they'd soon be passing over the Soviet Union, with line-of-sight horizons that stretched from Europe to Asia.
"Why settle for print?" He had a sudden thought. "How about television? With all this video gear, we should be able to put together something that would transmit. The Baikonur Cosmodrome has receiving facilities. We see Soviet cosmonauts in space all the time. And they'll be directly under us. We also could make the evening news all over Japan if we broadcast to the Katsura tracking facility."
"Good thinking, but I've got an even better idea." She seemed to pirouette in weightlessness. "Japan already has DBS, direct broadcast satellites, and there are home satellite dishes all over the country. It's the Global Village. So why don't we just cut in for a special bulletin?"
"Why not." He pointed to the ill-fated cockpit camera Tanzan Mino's technicians had installed above the entry hatch. "Matter of fact, we probably could just use that, if we could hook it into some of the electronics here on the console."
He floated up, half drifting and half swimming, and inspected the camera, convincing himself that it was still in working condition. And it had to be wired into something. Maybe now all they needed to do was flip the right toggles. The console switches numbered, by his conservative estimate, approximately three hundred.
"Let me see
what I can do." Androv floated down and immediately started to work, toggling, testing, watching the display screens as various messages were scrolled.
"Petra," he finally commanded in Russian, "give me a positive connect between UHF display-read and video output terminal 3-K."
"Interface confirmed."
Suddenly a video screen fluttered, ran through a test series of colored bars, then threw up a picture of the cockpit as seen from the camera above the hatch. Vance studied the image of three figures floating in a confined space outfitted with electronic hardware and a giant wing-shaped hood over the central seat. On TV their cockpit looked like the flight deck of some alien vessel in Star Trek IX.
"We're on." Eva waved at the camera. Her image on the screen waved back.
"Okay," Vance said. "Now for the tricky part. Transmission."
Androv smiled as he drifted up again. "That's actually the easiest of all. Remember this vehicle was originally intended-supposedly-as a near-earth research platform. There're plenty of downlinks, in keeping with the need to transmit data, as well as general propaganda functions. We can use any frequency you want, even commercial broadcast channels."
"So why don't we go live worldwide? Just give everybody an inside look at the planet's first radar-evasive space platform."
"Petra has a listing of all commercial satellite channels, just to make sure she doesn't inadvertently violate one of them with a transmission. Let's pull them up and see what they are." He flipped several toggles on the wide console, then told Petra what he wanted. He'd no sooner finished speaking than the large screen that supplemented her voice was scrolling the off-limits frequencies.
"Okay," Eva said. "Let's start with the data channels belonging to world-wide newsprint organizations- Reuters, the Associated Press, all the rest-and send a copy of the protocol. It'll just appear on every green screen in the world. Then we can pick off frequencies used by television news organizations and broadcast a picture postcard from here in the cockpit."
"Sounds good." Androv turned to look at the screen. Quickly he began selecting numbers from the banned list, moving them to a new file that would be used to specify parameters for the broadcasts.
Vance watched, shifting his glance occasionally to the view from the nose camera. Below them clusters of light from central Europe's largest cities beamed up, twinkling lightly through the haze of atmosphere. He reached over and flipped the camera to infrared and sat watching the back-radiation of the North African deserts, now blots of deep red on the southern horizon; then back to visible again, noticing two parallel ribbons of light that signified habitations along the length of the Nile. The world, he was thinking, really is a Global Village. She was right. There's no longer any place you can hide from the truth.
"Eva, when you feed the protocol to the wire services, note that there'll be a transmission of some live video at-" he glanced up at the digital readouts on the screens, "how about at 0800 hours, GMT?"
"That's in twenty minutes."
"Should be enough time, don't you think?"
"Sounds good to me. And to show you I'm brave, I won't even fix my hair."
"You never looked more beautiful, even that night out at
the palace. Don't change a thing." He turned to Androv. "How about doing the talking? First in Russian and then in English? We'll write the English part for you."
"It will be my pleasure, Comrade. My fucking pleasure."
"Daedalus," Vance said, mostly to himself. "He found a way to escape the maze of Mino. We did too. It's easy. You just use your wings and fly."
Friday 8:47 a.m.
Kenji Nogami settled the telephone back into its cradle and reached for the television's remote selector. The set was currently scrolling a special text being distributed over the Reuters financial-service channel. Very interesting.
He shoved aside the pile of new Mino Industries Eurobond debentures, to make room for his feet on the teakwood surface of his desk. BBC had just informed him they'd taped an accompanying video segment and were planning to broadcast it in thirteen minutes, at nine o'clock. At least that's what Sir Cecil Ashton, director general, had just warned. As the London banker for Mino Industries, he had told Sir Cecil he officially had no comment.
No comment was required.
He reached into a drawer and drew out a box of Montecristo Habana No. 2s, noting sadly there were only three left. With a frown he picked up his pocket Dictaphone and made a note to his secretary to stop off at the tobacconists on Threadneedle, just down from the Bank of England, and get another box.
A hypersonic aircraft. So that was what it had been about all along. And now some Russian test pilot had stolen it, taken it to orbit, and was planning to land it at Heathrow in three hours, there to turn it over to Westminster Union Bank, the London financial representative of Mino Industries Group.
Perfect timing. The thought immediately occurred to him that this would be ideal collateral for the billions in phony Eurodollar debentures he was being forced to issue for Tanzan Mino. Finally, finally he had the man by the bollocks. Who, he wondered, did he have to thank for this godsend?
Yes, it was shaping up to be quite a morning. Perhaps a trifle early for a cigar, but . . .
He flicked the TV off the Reuters text and onto BBC-1.
". . . would appear to be further evidence of the growing technological supremacy of Japanese industry. As this commentator has had occasion to note in times past, the lines between civilian and military technology are rapidly vanishing. That Japan's so-called civilian research sector could create the high-temperature ceramics required for such a vehicle, even as European and American military research has failed to do so, speaks eloquently of the emerging shift in world . . ."
He rolled down the sound a bit. The commentator went on to mention that all Mino Industries representatives- both here in London and in Tokyo-named in the announcement from orbit had refused either to confirm or deny the story.
He noted the time on his Omega, then smiled, leaned back, and snipped the end off his cigar.
Friday 11:00 a.m.
"Mino-sama." The man bowed low. "NHK just telephoned your office in Tokyo, asking for comment."
"Comment about what?"
"They have received some text off a satellite."
"What? What did they receive?"
"It was purportedly the English translation of a secret protocol, an agreement between Mino Industries and the Soviets. Naturally we denied it in the strongest possible terms."
"It has to be some preposterous fabrication. I can't imagine how anything so absurd could have-"
"That's actually the problem, Mino-sama. NHK says they received it from a manned space station, but they've checked with NASDA and have been assured there are currently no astronauts in orbit by any nation."
"In orbit?" My God, he thought. Daedalus didn't go down; she went up. With the protocol aboard.
How did they manage to get her hypersonic? Androv was wounded. He couldn't possibly have handled the G-forces. Which meant-
Vance.
"Tell NHK if they broadcast one word of this libelous, unsubstantiated hoax, they should be prepared to face legal action." His face had become a stone mask as a sepulchral hush settled over Flight Control.
"I will inform them," the man bowed again. He hadn't had the courage to tell the oyabun the rest of what NHK was now receiving . . . along with half of the citizens of Japan via their new direct-broadcast satellite dishes.
Friday 9:00 a.m.
Kenji Nogami thought the picture was a little indistinct at first, the hues slightly off. But then somebody in BBC's technical section corrected the color balance, making the tape's blues and greens and reds all blue and green and red.
Yes, now he could make it out. A cosmonaut was drifting across the camera's view, suspended. It made him ponder briefly the phenomenon of weightlessness. Curious, really, that it was all a matter of where you were.
One wall of the cockpit was lined with video
terminals, and at the end was a massive screen currently displaying the Daedalus Corporation logo, a double ax. Nice advertising, he thought. Coca-Cola probably feels envious. Overall it was a classy job, no two ways about it. The oyabun didn't do things by halves.
Well, this was one marvel Her Majesty's government would be happy to get their hands on. For his own part, not a bad piece of collateral. Must have cost billions in start-up investment.
Then he got a better look at the figure and realized
something was wrong. One side of his white environment suit was stained red. And he seemed to be nursing a bandaged arm as he drifted up toward the camera.
"Stradstyve," he began, "Ya Yuri Andreevich Androv. . . ."
The cosmonaut then proceeded to deliver a long-winded speech in Russian that Nogami could not follow and the BBC had not yet translated. He seemed to be growing angrier and angrier, and at one point he gave a long disquisition about someone named Andrei Petrovich Androv. He was obviously a Soviet test pilot. Who else could fly that creation? Given the looks of the cockpit, it was a quantum advance in high technology.
Nogami leaned back, his match poised. The good part, the part in English, was coming up. That's what Sir Cecil had said. The Russian segment had been for broadcast in the Soviet Union, had the local spin. The English part was for the world. And for Tanzan Mino.
Who was now in deep, deep trouble. Murder, fraud, a global conspiracy-they all were there, and even more damning for the way the story had come to light. The medium was the message.
About that time the cosmonaut who'd identified himself as Soviet Air Force Major Yuri Andreevich Androv drifted to the side, permitting a better view of the cockpit. That's when Nogami noticed two other individuals. One appeared to be a woman-leave it to the Soviets, he smiled, to know about good public relations-also wearing an environment suit, her helmet momentarily turned away. The third appeared to be male, also in an environment suit and flight helmet. Sir Cecil hadn't bothered mentioning them, since Air Force Major Androv had done all the talking.
Then the male cosmonaut in the center drifted up and began opening his visor, some kind of curved glass that reflected the yellow sodium lights in the ceiling. He grappled with it a moment, then in annoyance just yanked it off and tossed it to drift across-
Nogami stared at the face. Mother of God!
He was laughing so hard he almost missed his Montecristo when he finally whipped up his match. . . .
###
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