The helicopter thp-thp-thpped its way across the Los Padres National Forest. The heavily wooded park was lush and green, the jagged gash of the San Andreas fault unmistakable as the chopper raced over it. Spectacular scenery and engine roar alike conspired to preempt conversation. The burly, ruddy-faced pilot, in any case, wasn't terribly talkative.
Kyle peered past his reflection at the countryside sliding by beneath. The trip from Los Angeles to Vandenberg Air Force Base was, as the crow rolled the flat tire, roughly 150 miles. The view from the aptly designated scenic highway would have been superb. In a simpler world, he would have loved to have driven, Dar beside him, sharing breathtaking vistas of coastal mountains and rocky shore.
Of course, in a simpler world, a mission this dangerous would never have been conceived.
While he yearned for the impossible, he could hope that the roads to VAFB not be clogged by misinformed protesters, nor half the world's weather disrupted by El Niño. The same climatological phenomenon that kept this forest so verdant had his wife leading a State Department delegation from Indonesian drought zones to Peruvian flood plains. The squall line barely visible to the west, far out over the Pacific, might or might not be another manifestation of El Niño. Would weather delay today's launch? Obstruction by natural causes seemed so unfair. Wasn't it enough to face the technological superiority of the Krulirim?
The taciturn Air Force captain flying Kyle over the protesters pointed at something to the south. One of the Channel Islands? A ship? A noncommittal answering grunt seemed to satisfy her. It was just as well Kyle wasn't driving; the scenery had already lost his attention. He could not keep his mind off his problems.
The world's problems, Dar would have insisted, not his. The point of semantics made not a whit of difference. For five years, Kyle's had been a lonely voice, often the only voice, championing today's mission. For five years, he'd kept all doubts to himself—there were enough advocates for inaction. For five years, he'd awakened each day wondering if this were the day a growing deficit, or international hostility, or political expediency finally overwhelmed his tenacity.
And for five years after the fiery destruction of the Consensus, the flotilla of alien satellites circled overhead. Had they been a part of Clean Slate? In theory they had been neutralized . . .
As the helicopter began its final descent to the VAFB airfield, Kyle again rephrased his thoughts. After five years of preparations, he was about to test theory with six people's lives.
Tantalizingly just beyond humanity's reach circled three failed-in-orbit masersats. These inert satellites had gone untargeted in both Twenty-Minute Wars. The first time, that omission had reflected expediency—more obviously dangerous targets had drawn Earth's fire. By the second conflict, leaving alone these three satellites was a matter of strategic calculation.
Phase Two of Clear Skies aimed to retrieve one of those nearly intact artifacts.
A space shuttle could take a masersat on board— if it could climb far above its four-hundred-mile altitude limit, and if it could achieve polar orbit. Two extraordinarily big ifs. Raising the shuttle's altitude meant refueling it in orbit. Refueling meant somehow lofting large amounts of fuel into space in a vessel with which the shuttle could mate. Flight-testing a large-capacity space tanker could hardly be done in secret.
Nor could the preparations be hidden for a new shuttle launch site. Populated regions north and south of Florida precluded initiating polar missions from Cape Canaveral. Another coastal location was required. Somewhere, should the worst again happen, with ample empty ocean to its south. Someplace like Point Arguella, California—which, not coincidentally, lay within the borders of Vandenberg AFB.
All this activity by a reinvigorated American space program—and involving a launch site within a military base—was anathema to the international community. In a world that believed—or, as in Russia's case, where realpolitik favored pretending to believe—that benevolent aliens had left behind orbiting guardians, renewed astronautical ambitions by the slayers of those masersats were intolerable.
But protests, worldwide boycotts, and the grinding recession notwithstanding, after five arduous years of preparation, it was finally time to execute Phase Two.
When, finally, the weather held and the Navy drove a flotilla of seagoing protesters from the restricted seas off Point Arguella, when at last the first manned mission ever to launch from Vandenberg AFB rose on a bone-jarring, ear-shattering, column of fire . . . it was tremendously, awe-inspiringly, and blessedly anticlimactic. Kyle exited the massively blast-proofed Launch Control Center as soon as it was safe, gazing southward until the last faint speck of a spark disappeared. The contrail twisted and tore as the winds along its length assailed it.
"Way to go, Endeavor!" Ryan Bauer gave Kyle a congratulatory slug in the shoulder. The general had become a fixture at Space Launch Complex Six (SLC-6, "Slick Six" to the locals). "I can't tell you how good that feels."
Kyle couldn't argue. But still . . . "That was the easy part."
"What is it Britt says about you? Every silver lining has a cloud."
"I should have been on board! I could have been. Plenty of payload specialists have been shuttle-trained in two months—I could have afforded that." But the President had nixed it, for "national security" reasons. Damn it.
"What payload would you have overseen, besides a stomach full of butterflies?"
"A head full of insight about Krulirim." A seagull fluttered to a landing by Kyle's feet. "How many of the crew have that background?"
"None—which is why you're here. Should this mission fail, we'll need more than ever what's in your head." Bauer grabbed Kyle's arm, turning him until their eyes met. "Leading isn't always done from the front. Trust me: I know what it's like to order others into battle."
"Hopefully, it won't come to battle." Kyle swallowed hard. "But there's plenty of risk even if the masersats stay dormant."
The cabin cruiser bounced and shuddered, bludgeoning a path through high seas. Darlene for the umpteenth time patted her sleeve. The Dramamine patch was still on her arm, and still unequal to the task. With each wave crested, the boat and her stomach fell out from under her, to return an instant later with a bone-jarring impact. The worst of the storm, supposedly, was now pummeling Mexico.
"I said," yelled Roone Astley, the ambassador to Costa Rica, "the weather is much better." It was his boat, and he stood with maddening assurance on what Darlene considered a bucking deck. He motioned to starboard. "The sky is getting lighter."
Another lurch of the boat sent her reeling. Astley caught her before she fell. The bite of breakfast she'd foolishly taken rose threateningly in her gorge. Yes, the sky was brighter, which only made more horrifying the view of the shoreline they were paralleling. The tropical downpour whose trailing edge continued to lash the boat had stalled for three days over the narrow Pacific coastal strip. The rain-saturated mountainside had come rumbling down in two.
They were nearing one more village washed away by mudslide. Except for the occasional stone chimney, nothing but snapped tree trunks at odd angles emerged from the muck. Pounding waves had churned the encroaching mud into an enormous stain stretching hundreds of yards into the ocean. Objects that thankfully could not always be identified bobbed in the darkened sea. Many were corpses, already bloating from decomposition. It was hard to imagine anyone surviving the disaster. With the houses buried, she couldn't begin to guess what the population had been. Hundreds, surely. And they'd passed a dozen such tragedies already. "This is horrible," she said. "You know I have emergency funds to release. What else can the US do?"
Astley paused for a staticky announcement from the marine radio before answering. "What the Costa Ricans urgently need is emergency supplies and logistical support. They're getting some from the EU and Japan. I doubt they'll take such visible aid from us."
The hull slammed into another wave trough. Darlene staggered. "Another government still officially enraged at us? Have we made no progress?"
"We're still the murderers who drove away the Galactics, and with them the secret of free fusion power." He throttled back briefly, for reasons she was too landlubberly to understand. "They'll take our money, of course, if we give it privately."
The worst thing was, this immense, slow-moving tropical depression wasn't an isolated event. This year's El Niño phenomenon was the worst in years. As America's goodwill ambassador, she'd been traveling from catastrophe to catastrophe for weeks. Drought and uncontrollable forest fires in the western Pacific, storms in the eastern. How had her country fallen so low in the world's esteem that accepting American disaster relief was an embarrassment? And knowing what she did about the aliens . . . the rage against the US was so unjust.
The Krulirim! Her watch confirmed a belated, jet-lagged recollection of the date. Today was Kyle's big launch. Guiltily, she wondered how the end of Clear Skies was going.
NASA practice for the shuttle was to separate the orbiter from its external tank when the pairing reached ninety-seven percent of orbital velocity. In a fuel-wasting maneuver, the manned orbiter aimed its tank, just before that decoupling, for a dramatic splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The logic was to safely dispose of the tank rather than have them accumulate in orbit.
This was an Air Force mission, and the start of a new practice. The now nearly empty tank stayed with the orbiter all the way into a circular orbit at an altitude of 150 miles.
"Target on visual," drawled Major Tara "Windy" McNeilly, the Endeavor's laconic pilot. Closed-circuit TV gave the ground team a pilot-eye view of the dartlike fuel carrier being overtaken by the orbiter. The waiting tanker—basically an unmanned and stripped orbiter replete with fuel—had been launched from Slick Six weeks earlier. It had been parked in a higher orbit until needed, then lowered in preparation for Endeavor's launch. "Ten klicks."
In simpler times, the first manned launch from Vandenberg and the first shuttle to carry its ET into orbit would have been enough experimentation for one flight. For today's mission, the novelty had just begun. Minute by minute, hour by hour, tension built. The spacewalk to attach radio-controlled attitude jets to Endeavor's about-to-be-jettisoned external tank. (Built-in thrusters would have required extensive ET modifications and unmanned shuttle test flights—time Kyle was reluctant to spend.) Remotely piloting the tanker to Endeavor's now-separated ET. Docking, refueling, and undocking—and repeating that dangerous maneuver until it was routine. Rendezvousing again with the partially refilled ET (no human spacecraft could carry a full ET's worth of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into orbit). Mating Endeavor with its refueled ET . . . remembering throughout how the botched docking of a much smaller resupply capsule had almost killed everyone aboard the late, lamented Russian Mir.
"Piece of cake," said McNeilly as she completed the final docking. She unbuckled and floated free in the small cabin, making microgravity bows. Colonel Craig "Tricky" Carlisle, her restrained mission commander, waited until the disconnect valves in both orbiter and ET reopened before flashing thumbs-up. A middeck camera showed four more beaming faces.
The expressions in mission control were equally happy. Kyle found an unused mike, then shot a questioning look at the capsule communicator, who nodded her go-ahead. "I suggest you folks get some sleep. Your next stop is going to be really interesting."
Two astronauts floated free, the orbiter having backed off to a distance that made tethers impractical. Puffs of compressed gas from the backmounted MMUs, manned maneuvering units, nudged them closer and closer to their quarry. The black, vaguely insectile masersat absorbed most of the illumination from their helmet-mounted lights.
"It's as we expected," said Major Anson "Big Al" Buckley. "The wings are covered in a repeating pattern, a grid of squares connected by fine lines. It sure looks like a solar-cell array."
"Agreed." Major Juanita Gonzalez, a woman of few words, was cursed with the unavoidable astronaut-corps nickname of "Speedy."
Thousands of miles away, Kyle overcame the urge to scream with impatience. Solar cells weren't today's issue. "Can you fold the wings?" CAPCOM relayed the question. The masersats could not have exited the cargo-bay airlocks of the Consensus unless the struts folded—nor could one fit aboard Endeavor with its wings extended.
"Negative on that. No visible hinges, buttons, switches, or cranks." On the telephoto view broadcast from the Endeavor, only a tiny gap appeared between Buckley and the satellite. From the camera's frame of reference, the astronaut was floating on his head.
"I'm stumped," admitted Gonzalez. "I'm clueless how the twenty-seven-toed buggers fold the wings."
The spacewalkers tried a few tentative pushes and shoves, to no avail; the wings did not budge. "Okay, propose we go to Plan B."
CAPCOM looked to Kyle and Ryan Bauer for approval. Kyle triple-checked the IR view of the screen. Just solar heating, as far as he could tell. He nodded. "Roger that, Speedy."
On Endeavor's video, the astronauts were seen to deploy small, shiny tools: cordless power saws. Gloves and bodies conveyed a trace of electric-motor whine into the spacesuits, to be picked up by helmet mikes. Plan C, if needed, involved small shaped charges. "Here's luck for a change," said Big Al. "These spars cut like butter."
Not entirely good luck . . . Kyle had hoped to use a spar stub as a grappling point for the orbiter's robot arm. The stumps sounded too soft for that purpose, which took them to Plan B-and-a-half. Gonzalez jetted slowly around the alien artifact, trailing double-insulated braided steel cable. The astronauts snugged the loop loosely about the masersat's waistlike indentation with a sturdy metal ratcheting clamp. Strong brackets with heavy-duty knobbed posts were secured under the cable, and the clamp ratcheted until the cable was taut. The spacewalkers jetted back to the waiting shuttle, each with an alien solar panel in hand.
"All set," said the mission commander finally. It meant the spacewalkers were back aboard and the wings stowed in the cargo bay. It meant Evelyn Tanaka, the only civilian aboard but NASA's unchallenged master at operating the shuttle's robotic arm, was ready to reach out and make history. It meant "Windy" McNeilly was set for another close encounter. The orange-insulated cable and chromed brackets made the waiting satellite far more visible than on initial approach. "Houston, six votes here for loading up this bad boy and doing a boogie on down."
All eyes were on Kyle. "Lots of ayes here, too, Commander."
Forty minutes later, with the long-sought satellite securely locked into a cargo-bay cradle, Kyle allowed himself to truly believe this was going to work.
Darlene clung to the railing, the gale streaming the remains of her breakfast away from the boat. Foul taste in her mouth aside, she felt better. That was not the same as feeling well.
Several embassy marines had accompanied the ambassador; one left the cabin to check on her. She couldn't recall his name. "Can I get you some water, ma'am?"
Sky, sea, and mud-covered land . . . everything was gray. Something caught her eye. Not far behind them, a pier stuck out to sea. The jetty, like the village that had once owned it, was mostly buried in mud, but the last twenty feet or so were uncovered. Huddling on the end of the pier was . . . something. "Do we have binoculars?"
"Yes, ma'am." He returned quickly with a pair. "Here."
The binoc view only amplified the apparent motion of the boat. Ignoring her nausea, she swept the glasses along the shore. There! A child of uncertain age was trapped on the end of the pier, clinging desperately to a piling around which her arms scarcely reached. Between crashing waves, the girl waved frantically. Her mouth gaped, but Darlene could hear nothing over the roar of the sea. She handed back the glasses. "Sergeant. Watch that jetty." She half ran, half slid into the cabin, to see if the ambassador could, somehow, rescue the child.
The cursing that erupted behind her made plain, before the boat had scarcely begin to turn, that the storm had claimed one more victim.