"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 oxygen 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.