CHAPTER 48

Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

18 August

Falling. Falling. This time from an impossible height. She was strapped spread-eagled in the center of the circular space station pinwheeling through the blackness of Space. The blues and browns of Earth careered around her. The sun flashed on and off. She felt the bite of atmosphere, heard the rush of wind in her ears, then screamed as the searing heat of reentry burned her flesh and bone. All that survived the flames was her shuttle pin, which grew larger and shinier until it was the size of the real shuttle. Larger, till it dominated the skies.

"Wake up." Marcus Grant crouched with one knee on Tammy Reis's bed.

"Paul?" she said groggily.

He sat on the bed to lay a hand on her shoulder. "It's time."

"I can't go yet," she murmured. "I have too much to--" She rubbed her neck and opened her eyes wider. "Paul? What..."

"We blast off today. Someone else made it to orbit and all eyes are on them. It's the perfect diversion."

Suddenly alert, Tammy sat up in bed, the covers slipping from her naked form. "This is it? We're leaving Earth?"

He nodded. "I've scrambled the ground crews. Everything's being stowed and locked down. The crew's boarding and making final preparations." He gazed at her intently, grave deliberation in his eyes. "I want your tracking pin."

Except for the Flying A keychain and the mysterious cryopack in her personal preference payload, it was the last remaining link to her past, and her only connection to NASA and the NSA. Without even stopping to consider the break this made with everything she once held holy, she said, "It's on the dresser." Then she reached out and touched his arm. "Paul..."

He gazed at her. She saw in him now a love as deep and wide and tall as she knew smoldered inside her own heart.

"We have to go now," he said softly.

Her fingers clasped his arm and gently pulled him closer. "Then we have to say farewell to Earth."

He seized her firmly and fell to the sheets. "Tammy," he whispered, kissing her neck, her cheek, her lips. "If we die today..."

"If we die," she said, rending his shirt from his shoulders and inhaling her lover's sweet scent, "we'll die together in the greatest adventure any two could ever share!"

They moved as one and she felt a familiar sensation overwhelm her, this time not with terror but with joy.

"I'm falling," she whispered. "Falling."

"Falling where?" he asked breathlessly.

"Into ecstasy. Into love. Into you, Paul. Into you."

***

"Where's Marcus?" Donahue asked. She wore -- as did most of the others -- the official Grant Enterprises flight uniform over her matching skintight pressure suit. The much looser outer layer consisted of a maroon jumpsuit with grey piping and loads of cargo pockets. It was comfortable, functional, and, on Joscelyn at least, sexy even to those who did not see the far less utilitarian outfit underneath. She had cut her long red hair short for the liftoff, as had many of the others. They gathered around her by the crane as the ground crew prepared the massive SSTO for liftoff.

Though early in the pre-dawn hours, everyone was awake and charged with the near-atomic thrill of anticipation. Haley gazed quickly around from his vantage on the cherry-picker, lifted four feet high to form an impromptu dais. Lights shone one the crew and on the lower sections of the pods, where tanker upon tanker pumped cryogenic fuel into the cavernous tanks of the space station. A cold mist flowed down the walls of the pods to form a fog in the humid night air. He shrugged. "Let's proceed. I'm sure he'll be coming soon."

"All right, people!" Donahue called loudly. "I know this is extremely short notice, but you've all been briefed about the South Bronx launch. Mr. Grant feels that it's now or never as far as the element of surprise goes. I want the flight crew to post themselves in front of their respective pods and wait for the lift to come to you." Clipboard in hand, she began to check off names. Nearly everyone was present. "Where's Tammy Reis?" she asked.

"Present!" said a voice from the rear. Tammy -- in uniform -- edged her way to the flight crew section.

Joscelyn noticed that Grant, his grey hair shorn down to its sandy-blond roots, had arrived with Reis at the periphery and now strode through the crowd of nearly twenty to jump on the crane and climb up into the cherry-picker. She sensed something different in his demeanor and instantly knew where he had been. In a pained silence, she handed him her clipboard and stepped to the rear of the pallet.

Joseph Lester and Hillary Kaye -- videocam on her shoulder -- recorded the event for posterity. Lester had met his goal of weight loss and proudly wore his size 42-long jumpsuit as proof that he would not encumber the flight with any excess baggage. His cheeks glowed ruddily with excitement and heady expectation.

"Not much to say," Grant began. "We're all here -- thanks, Joscelyn -- and we're ready to go." He gazed at the expectant eyes watching him, at the faces of every kind that waited for some sort of benediction, some blessing for their leave-taking, their eagerness tempered only by the anxiety any emigrant feels at the point of imminent departure from one's lifelong home.

"We've practiced this a hundred times," Grant said. "And now that it's actually happening, I realize that we've never really done this before at all. No one has. Astronauts going to the Moon knew that they would return if all went well. Cosmonauts onboard Mir endured a short tour of duty by most earthly standards. I think we must assume the attitude of puritans and pilgrims: we're embarking on a one-way voyage fraught with danger and with promise. We'll only be two hundred nautical miles from home, but it will be as if a sea greater than any on Earth separates us from our former home.

"America was the New World for half a millennium. Now all of Earth is the Old World. Our new world will be just these sixteen enclosures -- for a while, anyway -- and we few settlers will be the entire population of this new frontier -- for a short time, at least. We are a new community, bound not by nation, race, or class, but by one single, burning desire: to live and work in total freedom. To do that, though, requires the paradox that we confine ourselves to these tiny, fragile vessels under rules of conduct that would chafe even the most humble indentured servant. We do this because we know that freedom is not the measure of how large is your cage but how open is your future. On Earth, our futures are closed, constricted, and bleak. In Space, our futures loom as large as the Universe!" He glanced at his watch. "Everybody--"

"Before you dismiss us," Chad said quickly, "I'd like to introduce a couple who just arrived today who will be accompanying us on our trip. You may recognize him as the H. G. Wells of our age. He wrote the books that inspired us all our lives. Ladies and gentlemen, Rex Ivarson and his wife Grace!"

At the sound of thundering applause, Rex turned to wave lightly to the crowd, a little bewildered by the attention.

"They love you," Grace, squeezing his hand with warm tenderness.

"I'm just a writer," he whispered to her above the din. "The engineers who made this happen deserve the applause."

"They wouldn't have done this without your inspiration." She smiled at her husband's genuine humility, knowing it stemmed not from a deprecating self-effacement, but from an utter lack of self-obsession. This man was obsessed by science, by Space, by the future; he could not see his own greatness in his quest for such supreme goals, and that made him all the greater in her eyes.

A cheer arose from the crowd. Grant, surprised at his outpouring of passion and at his workers' emotional response, stepped backward, nearly losing his balance. Glancing at Joscelyn and Chad, then at Tammy, he nodded toward the toroid. "Let's go," he said quietly, then, to the crowd, "Flight crew -- prepare to board!"

***

In the next hour, all their planning became the template from which was drawn the chaotic reality of such a complex undertaking.

Tammy and Jon Franck conducted a walk-around check of the spacecraft, accompanied by the head of the ground crew. Each of the sixteen ærospike engines was given a thorough once-over.

The trench had become a frigid, foggy pit due to the cryogenic fumes. Six large positive-displacement blowers labored relentlessly to draw off the dangerous hydrogen-oxygen mix and disperse it a few hundred yards away from the circular pit. Because of that, a constant, cold draft blew over the workers below.

The rest of the emigrants stowed their personal items onboard and sat awaiting their destiny in soft seats on the topmost deck. Some sat in pairs, others sat alone. In either case, the spacefarers were surrounded by the absolute maximum amount of cargo they could cram into the confines of the cabin and still expect to achieve orbit with reasonable certainty. For the next quarter-hour, the ground crew prepared the space station for blastoff, checking all electrical and fuel systems.

Tammy adjusted her five-point harness, verified that her helmet was strapped securely behind her seat, and slipped the Bose noise-canceling headphones over her ears. Unlike many in the crew, she had opted to leave her tresses intact. One woman, with medium length hair, had cut hers military-short, thinking it would save a pound or two of mass. At Tammy's suggestion, she weighed it, only to discover that the savings amounted to five ounces. "I'll keep my hair," Tammy told Grant, "and leave my pocket change behind."

Now -- with the aid of Ta'Shawn Wilkes -- she hacked her way into every global positioning satellite network around the world, enabling the onboard computer to calculate a collision-avoiding flight path into Low Earth Orbit.

"Begin flooding the moat," she read from the computerized checklist. Down below, workers hastily exited the trench and opened valves that drained the encampment's water tower into the circular excavation.

***

"Tammy?"

"Yes, Paul?" She turned to see him in the cockpit doorway. With his dyed-grey hair replaced by short spikes of blond, he looked as young and eager as the teenager with whom she once dreamed of conquering Space. She never dreamed, though, that it would be this way, from this place, after such a life as she had led.

He smiled with a nonchalant self-satisfaction. "Before we light the fuses, I just thought I'd tell you that I've arranged a little demonstration for you."

She nodded to Franck. "Take it," she said.

"Don't get up," Volnos said. "Just switch your FMS screen to auxiliary."

The video screen, one of four set in the control panel, lit up with a radar image of the Arabian Sea with Sri Lanka at the far lower right and the Strait of Hormuz at the upper left. Dead smack center lay a bright blip executing a 180° turn from due west to due east.

"That's a remote-piloted airplane," Grant explained. "A surplus UAV we bought during Russia's going-out-of-business sale. It's outfitted with a radar multiplier so that its image is magnified to that of a C-130. It's also carrying your shuttle pin."

Tammy glanced up from the screen to gaze at his confident expression. She knew instantly what he planned to show her. "You think they'll fire blindly, without even confirming their target?"

He nodded. "Four minutes ago, I activated a solenoid that bent the wings up to activate the emergency signal."

From the upper left edge of the screen -- somewhere in the Gulf of Oman -- a startlingly swift radar image raced in an arc toward the UAV image.

"Submarine launch," he muttered. "They wanted to be sure they had something nearby."

The missile flight path overtook the UAV. Then both disappeared from the screen.

After a silent moment, Grant said, "Do you understand, finally, what your joining NASA meant to me?"

"I thought I could change it," she said without emotion. "Weed out the corruption."

Grant shook his head. "You can't weed evil out of evil ground. You can only abandon the desecrated earth and move on. And that's what we're doing." He reached past her to switch the screen back to its normal display. Pulling back, he paused long enough to touch his lips to hers. "Pilgrims leave their past behind them," he whispered, "and are born again in the new world."

"I love you, Paul."

He smiled as he eased out of the cockpit. "Then punch a hole in the sky."

***

The onboard computer, with its powerful neural-net parallel processor, did most of the work that would otherwise have required dozens of technicians. Even so, the systems on each of the pods consisted of simple, non-redundant, do-or-die components. Everyone -- except perhaps the two children onboard -- knew what risks they ran. As the count approached zero, heartbeats soared.

At T-minus six minutes, the fuel and oxidizer tanks were topped off and sealed. Liquid nitrogen, heated by gaseous helium, pressurized the LOX tanks; in the LH2 tanks, a similar system used helium and a separate vessel of hydrogen fed past a catalyst.

At T-minus three minutes, twenty seconds -- as the ground crew withdrew far beyond the berms -- Joscelyn Donahue's voice crackled over the airwaves.

"All hatches confirmed sealed. Cabin pressure on internal."

At T-minus two minutes, everyone locked on their helmets and checked their oxygen flow. It was more an act of faith than of safety. If any of the pods lost pressurization, the odds stood nearly at unity that a catastrophic breakup would follow.

"T-minus sixty seconds," the computer's voice announced. "All systems autonomous." From that point on, the sixteen pods -- each containing 24,000 cubic feet of fuel and 8,000 cubic feet of oxidizer -- were armed and ready for launch.

T-minus 55:

Haley sat alone in Pod Four, overcome with an attack of panic. Here he sat on the verge of everything he had ever dreamed and sacrificed for, and all he wanted was to be back in Long Beach in his cozy apartment, cruising The Net. It was easier just dreaming, he realized with a sickening drop in his stomach. The hard part is to take action.

He watched the constant stream of information cascade up his computer screen like a numerical geyser. He noted minor malfunctions here and there, then watched with nervous satisfaction as each one was corrected, bypassed, or noted and ignored by the computers or crew.

T-minus 45:

In Pod Seven, Melissa Lundy gazed upward through the polycarbonate of her helmet and the tiny window. She wished for all the world that Jack could have been here with her. He might have, too, if his devotion to NASA and his ardent love for the Shuttle had not taken him to his death. And what would her son Alan think when the crew introduces itself from Space? She gripped the hand rests and vowed to worry about it later.

T-minus 30:

Joscelyn, sitting beside Grant in Pod Three, concentrated totally on monitoring the fuel.

"Optimum pressure," she said over the intercom.

His fingers racing over the keyboard, Grant said, "Begin pre-heat fuel flow."

T-minus 20:

"All systems optimal," Haley noted. "We're go for liftoff."

"T-minus ten," Tammy said. "Igniters armed."

Hillary Kaye made one final adjustment to the videocam she had attached to the seat and pointed at Joseph Lester, the other occupant of Pod Two. Similar cigarette-sized cameras provided views of several other pod occupants, all feeding into her multiplexed digital 3-D HDTV recorder. This was one event she wanted to capture in its entirety. Her tense fingers gripped the hand rests as she stared straight ahead and held her breath.

Lester wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and pray, but he gazed at the minicam and spoke.

"This is it, ladies and gentlemen. The Universe... or nothing!"

T-minus 6:

Tons of liquid hydrogen flowed into the sixteen plug engines, feeding into each pod's 720 combustion chambers, There it mingled with tons of oxygen and flowed outward. Pyrotechnics ringing the edge of the moat generated a cascade of sparks, igniting the explosive mixture.

Tammy Reis felt the rumble of the fuel flow, then the thunder of the engines. For a moment, nothing more happened.

Outside, though, the engines blasted into the circular pit, exploding downward against the water with crushing force. The water absorbed the shock wave created by the downblast and converted the engines' exhaust into steam and scattered droplets. The water only survived for a few seconds. It was all that was needed.

"Three," Tammy counted. "Two." She watched the stream of commands the computer sent to the multitude of systems. "All engines running!" She took a deep breath.

"Liftoff!"

The engines throttled up to full power with the roar of a million thunderbolts. Tammy thrilled to the familiar elevator-up sensation that marked the first slow, gradual rise.

The ground crew watched in awe from several miles away as a flaming circle of fire arose from the desert valley. Steam, smoke, and dust billowed outward from below to choke the lungs and sting the flesh.

The toroid, as terrifying and stunningly beautiful as an avenging angel's haloed ascension, lifted straight up for a few seconds, then pitched eastward at a 1° angle, making a slow, graceful gravity turn as it climbed ever higher, arcing toward the dim colors of dawn. Behind it trailed a comet's tail of exhaust that high altitude winds immediately sheared this way and that as the first rays of the morning sun transformed the streak into broad brushstrokes of rainbow hues.

Tammy's blood pounded furiously in her ears. She welcomed the ever-mounting crush of acceleration as most women would embrace a lover. As she had embraced Paul. This was what she lived for. This was what she thought she would never experience again.

It did not take long for the flying ring to encounter Max-Q.

Metal groaned and shrieked under the unfamiliar ærodynamic pressures. Tammy kept watch on the computer screen, which depicted airflow around the outer rim and through the center of the ring. As the massive toroid approached transonic speeds, the airflow through the center constricted. The ride grew rougher, the atmosphere resisting the onslaught of the ever-accelerating ring. Tammy, a pilot in name only since the computer handled every aspect of thrust, attitude, and burn rate, watched the Mach number climb toward one as drag coefficient exceeded 1.1 and the flow-through hole narrowed to near nothing. A tremendous, low-frequency shudder reverberated through the vessel fighting mightily to maintain a steady ascent. A rosette pattern of shock waves began to form around the leading edge of the pods. Then -- with a soul-shaking rumble -- the entire five-and-a-half kiloton spaceship slammed through the sound barrier and roared upward through the dawn sky.

"Mach One," Tammy said through gritted teeth as the flight instantly smoothed out. "Airflow through center did not choke off. We're on our way."

At 261 seconds into the flight, the outer three rows of combustion chambers on each pod shut down. Though this further reduced the thrust -- which declined steadily as propellant pressure and flow decreased -- due to the ærospike engine design, this changed the area ratio of the exhaust bell, resulting in the increased fuel efficiency needed to achieve orbit.

Through the windshield that now seemed to be overhead, the deep blue-purple sky let Tammy know that she once again headed into Space. This time, though, it would be forever.

An ivory sphere rose over the limb of the turquoise planet just barely visible at the edge of the viewing port. Gibbous, bright, and achingly perfect, the Moon crossed the port for a moment, and Tammy Reis gazed at it with a joy and wonder underscored by the triumphant euphony of the rocket engines.

All the suffering of the last several years meant nothing now. As she rode on an arc of fire with her crew, she realized that nothing needed to be the way it had been. All the bitterness, the hatred, the betrayal -- all of it -- need never have happened.

She watched the monitors, her body and hands idle as the computer controlled the ascent of humanity's first pure, free, and permanent space settlement.

She was rising.

Rising!

***

The pressure of acceleration continued to increase, mashing Paul Volnos into the seat. Never before had anything so simultaneously thrilling and terrifying overwhelmed his soul. Literally breathtaken, he wanted to yell, but his awestricken lungs lay paralyzed by the sensations surging within. At eighty miles altitude and 3 gees, he struggled to maintain consciousness while increasingly convinced that the dizzying acceleration would never cease. Just as panic began to overtake his rational processes, the incredible pressure ended suddenly and he became instantly weightless. No jolt, no forward lurch accompanied the change. Just pressure, then the incredible sensation of free fall.

The engines shut down safely and the colossal structure continued upward in silence on a ballistic trajectory into the blackness of Space. The life-or-death question was whether their trajectory would place them safely in orbit or take them back down to incineration in the atmosphere.

***

The answer that appeared before Tammy's trained eye -- displayed as a table of different orbital elements on the FMS screen -- sent an electric jolt of alarm through her heart.

She fought the feeling of vertigo and nausea that accompanied weightlessness to ask Jon, "Are you seeing the numbers I'm seeing?"

"Yes." His voice lost any drawl it once had. "We didn't make it."

"We must have miscalculated payload mass." She looked over at him with a deadly serious expression. "Estimate time until orbital decay while I talk this out with Houst--" She froze. There was no Houston, no ground control, no team of scientists, technicians, or engineers to devote millions of man hours to rescuing them. They were utterly alone in the void.

"Paul?" she asked over the intercom.

"We made it!" he responded excitedly. "We're in orbit!"

"Not quite," she said. "We're in an orbit too low to maintain for long. We'll keep rubbing atmosphere at every perigee, which will slow us and drop us lower and lower until we deorbit. And this thing's not built for return trips."

"Can we raise it with a second engine burn?"

"Forget that," Franck said. "No more fuel."

"How about reaction rockets?"

"They're angled to impart a spin, not to provide axial thrust."

Franck's voice suddenly brightened. "Our orbit won't decay severely for at least a week. We can get out of this."

"How?"

Tammy gazed at the computer screen, thinking about the nineteen others whose fates depended upon the immutable physics of orbital mechanics. She felt no need to pray. Either their human ingenuity would save them or their destiny was sealed. Any god she imagined tolerated no idle whining.

Forcing her hands to the keyboard where gravity now absent would once have held them, she flexed her arm and wrist muscles in familiar old ways -- space shuttle ways -- as she pounded the keys in search of a solution.

Outside shone a harsh Sun amid velvet darkness.


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