The Orphan in Near-Space (The Space Orphan Book 2)

by Laer Carroll

  Riku put down the hamburger he was about to bite into. "Boss, you can't pass this up. A free bizjet, all our own!"

  "Whoa," said Nicole. "Free ain't free. We'd have to park it someplace, and pay for maintenance, and exercise it to keep it from deteriorating."

  Klaus nodded, busy with his steak. All of the crew now had pilot's licenses, but his was for fighter jets and he'd been more personally involved in the very expensive process of keeping an aircraft operational. Over a few year's it could add up to more than the initial cost of the craft.

  Jane finished her mouthful of spaghetti and meatballs and sipped her iced tea.

  "I like the idea, if we can get Gallegher to supply spare parts and lend us a tech team to do repairs when it needs it. Kate, do you think the Vision is going to be viable commercially? If the jet is going to be a useless unsupported toy it would have to go to the boneyard."

  The US Air Force maintained a huge aircraft boneyard at Davis-Monthan air base in Tucson, Arizona, the largest such junkyard in the world.

  "My guess is Yes, considering that the small bizjet market is looking up. But let me do some homework and get back to you on that."

  <>

  A few days later Kate gave Jane an encouraging report and, with Jane's approval, set up a day for the group to receive the jet and get a day's training in its use and upkeep. They set out a week later in a Flyt van to travel to Long Beach, about 35 miles south. The city was one of several mid-size cities along the LA Metro coast and home to one of the largest seaports in the world.

  Long Beach Airport was a busy regional airport a few miles in from the coast. Gallegher Air was one of several occupants of the business park on the eastern edge of the airport. They arrived at 9:30 and went to the front office of Gallegher. The security officer at the reception desk made a phone call and a few minutes later a distinguished-looking older woman came hurrying out to meet them accompanied by a tall thin Asian. She approached Jane and held out a hand to shake.

  "Captain Kuznetsov! So glad to meet you face to face finally instead over a Scope session. And who are your friends?"

  Alexandra Gallegher was the co-owner of Gallegher Air and the friendly face of the company, at least to general public. Her husband Jacob was the technical face and probably out fulfilling that function, perhaps in Washington, D. C. Austin Wang was the head engineer of the Vision project and Jane had "Scoped" with him most of the several technical people on the project.

  Jane said, "I'll introduce our people at the meeting. How about we get some coffee on the way there?"

  "Good idea!" The woman and her companion turned and led the way to a snack room and from there to a meeting room deeper in the building.

  The room was the usual long room with an oval table in its center and a large wall TV screen on its far wall. A dozen people rose from chairs when Jane, Gallegher, and their companions arrived. Gallegher ordered everyone to sit, took a chair at the head of the table nearest the door, and motioned Jane and her crew to seats to her right which had been left open for them.

  Introductions were a bit noisy as Jane had Scoped with several of the Vision technical crew, as had her crew who at one time or another communicated with the Vision people. The general mood was friendly.

  "Well," said Gallegher, capturing the attention of everyone, "this is a glad day for us here at Gal Air. With FAA approval we can finally start selling the Vision Business Jets and ramp up production of them. Sally, our sales head, tells me we have quite a lot of interest in the short-haul and private jet market. We have high hopes some of them will turn into substantial orders. But we'll see.

  "Meanwhile, we have the pleasant task of turning over Proto 3 to the person, and the people, who gave us so much useful help in getting her made."

  Jane said, "We're happy to have helped. That's one of our main jobs, after all, in the Air Force, to help private enterprise fill the skies with safe and capable aircraft."

  "And of NASA," Kate added. "Our little group at JPL is almost as much a part of NASA as of the Air Force."

  Jane nodded.

  Gallegher took back attention and set out the agenda for the day. It included an hour and a half briefing of the Air Force crew by the Vision staff, followed by a long lunch at the main Long Beach Airport restaurant.

  "Quite a nice place," said Austin Wang. "A few years ago LBA had a second major expansion and they upgraded the restaurant."

  With that Gallegher left and the briefing began.

  <>

  None of it was new to Jane. Nevertheless, she listened and watched the info shown on the TV screen with every sign of interest. However, most of her attention was spent via Robot on exploring Gallegher, other tech businesses in the airport business park, then the airport itself.

  Then she expanded Robot's explorations to ferreting out spy cells. Long Beach and its surroundings being home to a lot of advanced-tech companies it was sure to have several. Most were from China and Russia, but also from some of the US's allies. By lunch time she had several additions to her database of suspects.

  The lunch was every bit as good as Wang had said. It had the plus that he'd made reservations in the Sky Overlook balcony of the restaurant that gave everyone a good view of the flight line and the aircraft taking off and landing.

  <>

  The first stop in the afternoon was the hangar in which the "Vision New Century Business Jet" was located. The building was quite large and contained several of the smaller personal aircraft which were the mainstay of Gallegher's business. The company was almost thirty years old and was one of the largest of the couple dozen small-aircraft makers in the United States.

  Wang, the head engineer for Vision and also head of pilot training, showed off the Vision jet to Jane and her crew.

  The body was that of most bizjets, pressurized at need to 52,000 feet, about ten miles, where the air pressure was less than 10% of ground level. It had the usual T shape with straight wings and a V-shaped "swallow tail." It stood several feet off the ground, supported by a tricycle landing gear.

  Where it differed from other bizjets included the belly. Wang bent down and pointed out the four long blue strips underneath covering the electromagnets which were half of the floater system. The other half was four red strips covering the telemagnetic inducers which would make the concrete or other surface beneath the craft the same polarity as the magnets. Together they would lift the entire vehicle four feet off the surface when the wheels were retracted into their housings.

  "We tested the floater system with loads three times the full weight of the Vision. This was partly for safety reasons. Also because we REALLY don't want our first try at the business-jet market to fail for any reason."

  He moved to put a hand on the nearest wing root. As Jane knew from her help to Gallegher this fat part of the wing housed two long oval slots above and below the wing. Louvers above and below the openings would open when the craft took off. The upper louvers would filter out coarse dust and larger debris. The bottom louvers would direct the air flow straight down or to the back or front. This would push the plane forward or backward, forward to take off, backward to slow down forward movement or even back up. Then as the plane picked up forward speed on takeoff the louvers would tilt into position to cover the slots.

  "Using these lift-jets alone," said Wang, "the Vision will move backward at ten miles an hour and forward at almost thirty miles an hour. The floater system added gives another ten miles an hour forward or backward. So the Vision is pretty nimble on its feet. Then..."

  He ducked under the wing and led the way for the Air Force crew to the rear third of the plane. There on each side was a "can" with a grill covering the forward opening. He laid a hand on the one nearest him, only a foot or two above his head.

  "This is your main air jet. It and its companion will push a fully loaded Vision to almost 500 miles per hour. Not as fast as the larger business jets, but plenty fast enough for our projected customers."

  He turned and lifte
d a remote.

  "Watch. This is the last feature of the Vision."

  He pushed three buttons in a code sequence. The outer two-thirds of each wing slowly began to fold upward until they locked into an almost tent-like position above the body of the craft.

  "This is normally how you would store the Vision. It gives you the ability to park it in a fairly crowded space. You can also take off and land with the wings up for a similar reason: to travel from or to a crowded surface.

  "We've put a lot of design effort and testing into this feature. Luckily there's a lot of prior engineering going back before World War II, mostly by the Navy for their carrier-based aircraft. As with the floater mechanism we over-engineered this capability."

  He turned more toward Jane.

  "So, how do you want to proceed with the certification flights? Captain, you want to go first?"

  <>

  Jane did indeed go first as pilot with Wang as the copilot. They ran through a checklist that exercised all the capabilities of Proto 3. The last was a maximum-speed transit of almost a hundred miles distance which was done out over the ocean in much less busy air space. They followed this with several stall and recovery tests, first high then low over the ocean.

  The Vision performed just as it should. Jane had been almost certain it would since she in her cyborg state had long-distance snooped on the Vision program since its beginning and her suggestions to the project engineers had all addressed issues they likely would not have found.

  Back on the ground Jane spoke to her crew. "I want Klaus to be next and, Austin, be extra hard on him. He's going to be my chief pilot in the future. Then either Nicole or Rick. You two can flip coins as to who goes after him. Kate, you'll go last. I have an appointment and I want you along on it."

  "Where to, Cap?" said Riku.

  "Boeing. The local main headquarters are less than a mile away. I've got a cab coming in about five minutes. Have fun, folks."

  While they waited outside the Gallegher main building Jane gave Kate a fuller explanation. She'd decided to support Boeing's High Flyer program to create sub-orbital vehicles using the space jet. They were going to pin down some preliminary agreements on just how much help she and her crew would give. That would then have to be presented to Jane's bosses to get--or deny--the use of her and her crew's assistance to Boeing.

  The Boeing meeting done she and Kate returned to Gallegher in plenty of time for Kate to do her own familiarization flight. Then she and her crew took formal possession of the Proto 3. After goodbyes, with Klaus in the pilot's seat and Nicole in the copilot's seat, they lifted off for the trip to the El Monte Airport with still an hour of daylight left. At a low cruising speed of 350 miles per hour it took them less than ten minutes before they landed.

  Most of that time the crew spent arguing over the name they'd give Proto 3, Klaus only contributing a couple of names because he was spending most of his attention on piloting. When they guided Proto 3 into the rented hangar space at the airport the four were still arguing, Jane abstaining from the decision.

  <>

  In the following days Jane flew co-pilot with each of her crew and drilled them in the use of Princess, the name selected after a series of coin tosses eliminated other names. She trained them hard in safety procedures, especially stall avoidance and recovery.

  Then she set up a schedule by which each of her crew would go to El Monte and bring Princess to JPL each day and return her to El Monte at the end of the day. She showed off the jet to a succession of JPL managers and engineers as part of her informal outreach program. It was also the center piece of a JPL community outreach program later that summer. This was a yearly event in which JPL opened up the lab for one day and had a festival centering on the large plaza between the visitor center and the main high-rise office building just to its north.

  Princess was not only a show piece. Jane and her crew did a succession of tests and wrote papers on their findings: taxiing on prepared and rough terrain using the floater mechanism, taking off from and landing on rough terrain using the floater mechanism and the main jet engines, using just the lift-jets and the main engines, and using all three mechanisms.

  Also on the long Thanksgiving weekend Jane took Natalie and her family to San Francisco for a day. Cruising at 420 miles per hour at 32,000 feet it took an hour and a half, including five minutes on the ground at El Monte Airport and twenty minutes at San Francisco International. All the kids were thrilled to sit in the co-pilot's seat and feel the yoke and foot pedals make tiny adjustments as Jane flew the plane.

  <>

  The week before Christmas the LA Times did an article on Jane for their Sunday Magazine. Jane spent a few hours with a reporter for several days at JPL. It began with slightly long introduction and ended on a speculative note.

  US Space Force Captain Jane Kuznetsov is a paradoxical figure. I met her at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena after witnessing the landing of the Gallegher 'Vision' business jet which the company gave the Space Force for the technical advice it gave the company which made the jet possible.

  Accompanied by Kate Schiller, the Captain's executive officer, I was directed to look east out over the Arroyo Seco nature park which separates JPL from Pasadena proper. The trim jet, painted white and Space Force blue, soared over the mostly dry creek bed at a few hundred feet high.

  It passed over us, slowing and lowering as it came till it was over one of the two helicopter landing pads shared by JPL with the Los Angeles Fire Department emergency response station on the south edge of JPL.

  It stopped dead in midair. Then its wings folded almost daintily upward till it made a tent above the slender craft. They call it Princess, and it's easy to understand why. It floated downward like a swan settling, almost silent on its landing jets. A few feet from the concrete its wheels came down and it floated gently to rest.

  Shortly the door in its side rotated down and out came Jane--after you've met her you can only think of her by her first name--dressed in a tee-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. Short, slender, looking like a sixteen-year-old blond cheerleader, she advanced with a hand out for a shake. She has a smile like a sunrise.

  Yes, I know. I'm being star-struck. Me, the tough reporter (or so I sternly remind myself) was quickly charmed, enfolded in an effortless charisma.

  Yet this same harmless-looking girl (hard to remind oneself she is a woman) was embedded with the Marines for six weeks while attending the Air Force Academy. She left them with the nickname The Terminator. And the hard-bitten soldiers were not joking. Some reports (perhaps apocryphal) suggest she had a high body count in Venezuela, dealt only with a combat knife.

  She is soon all business....

  ...As we parted almost as an afterthought Jane mentioned that she had recently written a highly mathematical theoretical paper on hyperspace. Very controversial in the ivory tower set, it posited that communication via hyperspace might achieve speeds over a thousand times the speed of light. If accepted by academics (highly doubtful) it would overturn Relativity as a corner stone of modern physics.

  All this from a dab of a girl! Captain Jane Kuznetsov, paradox.

  Jane was not pleased with the Terminator paragraph but was overall pleased with the piece. The reporter had presented all Jane's talking points without too much error. These included the serious research Jane and her crew was doing for the Space Force and how it was being turned into useful results such as the Sikorsky and Gallegher efforts.

  It also mentioned the space jet assistance they were giving JPL for Surveyor and several other JPL projects, including the Mars Phobos/Deimos study, the Mercury Lander program, and the Jupiter probe.

  Overall she thought the Space Force would be pleased with the publicity it got from the Sunday Magazine piece and a few other shorter pieces published in various magazines. At least, she and her crew hadn't been yanked out of JPL and reassigned.

  <>

  In February of the new year Jane was invited to attend the opening o
f Boeing's Space Jet Testing Facility on the World Space Station. She could not get approval quickly enough from her bosses for the considerable expense of attending physically so attended via a video conference link. She did want to visit the facility and do other tasks on the space station, so had Kate put in the paperwork for her and her crew to do so.

  Approval came back in three weeks, a fairly short period in bureaucracy timeline, especially one which involved two different cooperating organizations: NASA and the Air Force. Kate remarked on this, saying that they must still be happy with Planetary Defense Study Group 6, their official designation.

  "Hah!" said Riku. "When all Jane does is schmooze people and dream up ridiculous hyperspace theories?"

  Nicole smacked his nearest arm. "Better dreaming up that rather than coming up with yet another variation of miso soup to impress Mary and her family."

  Riku's girlfriend Mairu was part of a family which, like Riku's, owned a Japanese restaurant chain. Her family was based in LA, his in New York City.

  He rubbed his biceps, said. "First, Ow!, assault of a fellow officer. Second, my recipe was added to their frozen food line."

  Kate's eyes were focused on the images being shown on her vear but she glanced at the two and raised an elegant eyebrow.

  "Shut up, you two. Grownups are busy here."

  She returned her gaze to her vear and shortly said, "Boss. There's a launch window on Monday of next week at 10:30 which still has enough seats for all of us. Reserve it?"

  "There's some business we need to take care of at Edwards. What's the next available launch window?

  "Friday. At 10:30. Reserve that?"

  "That'll work, Kate." She looked at Nicole and Riku, who both shrugged.

  "Klaus, can you hear us? Can you get away for three or four weeks starting next week?"

  Jane had to raise her voice as he was in his cubicle on his computer, while the rest of them were in Jane's office.