CHAPTER 54

My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle.
-- Job 7:6

20 August

Sherry Cooper listened to the request beamed down from orbit. The man making the request was Marcus Grant. News reports had already re-identified him as one Paul Volnos, a former volunteer on Ace Roberts's shoestring project. That explained the name of his space station, at least.

"...then we have Laurence Poubelle's people mount it on his Seven-Four-Seven and fly it over to Kennedy Space Center for launch. After Joseph Lester plays it up on GSN, I expect everyone in the Experimental Spacecraft Association and a lot of others to flood NASA with demands to permit the launch from one of the smaller, functional pads."

"There's something in all this I don't understand," Sherry said. "Aurora's still in a polar orbit. Why can't we simply land her at Kennedy and sidestep the whole airplane bit?"

A sheepish silence hung in the orbital void as Paul realized his failure to think in three dimensions. After a few seconds, he said, "Yes, that does sound less complicated."

***

Vox populi, vox Dei is the purported philosophy of a democracy. Although America comprised fifty states united in a constitutional representative republic, the concept still held enormous power over the uninformed. Hundreds of thousands of calls clogged telephone trunks on Capitol Hill. The switchboard operators at the White House threatened to resign. Fax machines burned out under the stress of incoming pleas, petitions, and outright demands. Myriad voices bombarded radio and interactive-video call-in shows with almost unanimous approval for the mavericks.

President Crane, so close to being dumped by the electorate in November, threw his unqualified support behind what he called "the valiant New Frontierspersons" and issued an executive order compelling NASA, Space Command, and the FAA to render any and all assistance to Freespace Orbital in its landing at KSC and subsequent re-launch. The only help Sherry Cooper asked for, however, was that the sundry agencies stay out of her way.

Leora Thane awaited the return of Aurora with something more than a major investor's anticipation. Vandenberg prevented her from witnessing the spacecraft's launch due to certain indiscretions uncovered during her security check and also to her status as non-essential personnel. Kennedy Spaceflight Center, nominally civilian and suddenly under the harsh glare of scrutiny, allowed Freespace -- and Thane -- much more leeway. Her tourist-industry wealth had paid for the hasty renovation and upgrading of the modest blockhouse in which she stood, dressed in a white skirt, blue-striped blouse, and navy blazer, watching the blue-white dot in the sky grow brighter and larger as it seemed to fall straight toward the small pad that four decades earlier served to launch Redstone and Atlas rockets.

"Geez, here's a view you don't want to give the clients," she muttered. "Who wants to see tons of flaming machinery hurtling down at them?"

Her question bounced off deaf ears, since all in the blockhouse focused their attention on bringing the unmanned spacecraft down to a pinpoint landing. Throttling the fuel and oxidizer flow to the twenty ærospike motors, the software -- nudged now and then by Thom Brodsky's commands -- brought the reentry-scorched rocket to a hovering standstill ten feet above the concrete and fifty yards from the launch pad gantry.

Dust and steam billowed out from beneath the exhaust wash, hiding the ship. Bits of gravel hurled toward the wide, squat, and thick blockhouse windows. Using the glow of the rocket plume as his guide, Brodsky gradually decreased the thrust until the contact lights glowed green. Amid the cheers of his co-workers, he shut down the engines and the egg-shaped orbital semi-luxury liner eased to a rest upon its three landing gear pads.

Thane turned to Cooper and smiled broadly. "See? What did I say? If you had sent me up with twenty rubberneckers, we'd have some pocket change right now."

Sherry, releasing a sigh of relief at the landing, raised her eyebrows in a gesture of exhaustion and said, "Leora, you can go up with the flight after this next one and garner a load of free publicity."

Thane laughed. "Have you seen these nails? They normally don't do anything more strenuous than endorse checks. But I'll pitch in for the sake of the business."

"Great. Now let's see if this bird really does have a three-day turnaround time."

***

"Damn," Poubelle muttered.

"What's wrong?" D'Asaro tried to peer over Poubelle's shoulder to see what was the problem, but the seat harness prevented any movement.

"My arm. I'm getting the same sort of transient loss of control I ran into on the first flight. The nerve feedback feels uncomfortably like a cramp."

"Will it interfere with reentry?"

She saw him shrug, saw his cybernetic arm twitch.

"I'll try to control it. You be ready to take over with the Dead Larry scenario."

"Very funny." Chemar resented the term more than Poubelle realized. Between their good-natured japes and their bedroom passion lay a calm center of love that neither took lightly. She knew he would give his life to save hers, and she to save his. Life without him was unthinkable to her. Live forever or die together was her motto. And she personally had no desire to die, so she intended that the Dead Larry scenario would remain just that -- a scenario.

Nomad hurtled through Space backward at the moment, in preparation for retrofire. Backward and upside-down, so that the colorful expanse of Earth spread before their field of view, filling the cockpit with bright, soft light. She gazed down at her hands floating effortlessly in free fall. The diffuse glow that filled the cockpit -- heavenly light from an earthly source -- made her pressure suit seem a very light shade of black, almost a grey. The instruments and controls looked warm and otherworldly. She realized that she truly could live there forever, if he lived there with her. That thought, however, she deferred for later. Right then, her instruments displayed the countdown to retrofire.

"All right," Poubelle said. "Let's see if the engine turns over after a day."

"Sixteen days," she said, having counted the sunrises and sunsets they experienced every forty-five minutes, one each per ninety-minute orbit. Each one appeared or vanished with startling speed and breathtaking colors. She took a last glance at Earth, then turned her attention to co-piloting Nomad.

I'm coming back here, she thought. No matter what, no matter how.

"APU's are up to power," she said. "Tank pressure's optimal. Attitude is right on the numbers. Turbo's up to speed. Here it comes."

The blast of rocket power pushed them firmly against their seats, quickly throttling up to a full three gravities of deceleration. The spacecraft groaned and creaked, emitted loud clunks and high pings, shuddered and shook as if about to break apart. After a few moments that seemed to make the chronometer slow down its count, the engine throttled back.

"Good burn," Poubelle said, relief and amazement interleaved in his voice. His right arm jerked upward suddenly. "Damn it!"

"Okay," D'Asaro said, tapping carefully at the keyboard. "Taking over yaw and roll controls to orient us for airbraking."

A few gunshot-like firings jerked the Earth away from their view, replacing it with the sharp, star-studded velvet sky in which a furious Sun majestically rushed aftward. Nomad dropped Earthward nose up at a high angle of attack, though not quite as high as a shuttle orbiter on reentry.

"The arm's all right," he said. "I'll fly it in. Just be ready to take over now and again."

"Aye-aye, Cap'n. Sealing up port window." An exterior shield, designed to cover the left half of the canopy in order to prevent charring, slid backward and locked into place. It served as a last-chance maneuvering option, just in case the VR helmet gave out.

The black bolt, dropping into a lower orbit to compensate for its slower velocity, began to skirt the edges of the perceptible atmosphere. This translated into a series of jostling bumps as the spaceplane encountered variations in the thickness of the air at ninety miles altitude. At nearly five miles a second, differences of even a few molecules per cubic inch added up to an immense number of collisions on the belly of the spacecraft.

"Skin temp eight hundred," Chemar noted.

The altimeter proved worthless at such speed and altitudes, so readouts came from computer interpolation of GPS information. What Poubelle noticed caused him to bellow: "What the hell?"

Reentry and the subsequent airbraking created a sensation of increased weight downward in the seat and slightly forward. Both pilots detected a sudden decrease in both vector components concomitant with his outcry.

"We've Sängered!"

D'Asaro knew the term. Named after the German scientist Eugen Sänger, inventor of an X-15-like winged spaceplane, it meant skipping across the atmosphere the way a stone skips across a pond, done intentionally to extend a low-altitude flight. When unintentional, it meant missing one's landing mark by hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of miles.

"We won't skip too far," Poubelle growled. "We're going to come down somewhere southeast of Mojave."

"How far southeast?"

"Way far!" He punched rapidly at the keyboard with his live hand. "I'm switching the FMS to energy management and tracking only. It's seat of the pants time!"

He edged the nose of the spaceplane lower, teasing at the line between Sängering upward and cutting too deeply into the atmosphere. Ramming back toward Earth at hypersonic velocities left little leeway for the middle ground. The blackness of Space faded, replaced by a purpling sky that glowed with the ionized plasma of superheated air. The FMS lost contact with the global positioning satellites during this period of reentry, relying on inertial navigation and guidance provided by its ring-laser gyros, the pilot's view in the VR goggles provided via the cameras, most of which remained sealed from the glare of plasma and the charring from bits of burning Nomad.

Poubelle made no sound for the next few minutes; no hummed tune, no meditative whistle, no unconscious trill escaped his lips. His entire being concentrated on easing the tons of metal and composites through its narrow, flaming corridor of unbelievably marginal safety back to terrestrial speeds and less heavenly altitudes. Every few seconds, the ship rocked with turbulence. Metal creaked, rivets strained, joints vibrated. From somewhere beneath their seats, wisps of smoke snaked up to cloud the cockpit's nitrogen atmosphere.

"Leading edge skin temp sixteen-fifty," Chemar said. "Approaching redline."

Poubelle said nothing but "Roger." Then his robot arm spasmed and he said, "Take over!" Chemar tightened her grip on the controls to continue the descent while he sought to regain management of his prosthetic.

The turbulence smoothed out, the superheated air around them cooled back to visibility, and the GPS signal returned.

"We're home," Poubelle said calmly. "I've got the stick."

"Where's home, though?" she asked, sliding aside the port protective shield for a non-VR look. "Is that the Grand Canyon?"

He opened the shields that covered the VR cameras and looked all around, then referred to his energy management system and GPS information. Immediately, he eased the stick and rudder into a hypersonic clockwise turn. "I can tell you this," he said. "We're not landing at Mojave. We'll be lucky to land it in California. No need to make hypersonic Sturns to bleed off airspeed, that's for sure."

The energy management system kept track of where the unpowered hypersonic glider could land by displaying an oval footprint on the digital map. The ellipse marked the maximum distance the ship could glide without hitting something hard and earthen. At forty miles altitude and Mach 4, the footprint covered a large area, but not large enough to include the Mojave desert. Its major axis just barely touched Palm Springs to the northwest and El Centro to the southeast.

"Can't make it to Palen or Ford." Both were dry salt lakes to the northeast. "Damn!" He kept tight control on the aircraft despite his outburst. "We just lost NAF El Centro. They've got a ninety-five hundred foot runway."

"Oasis is smack dab in the middle. Want to try for our own runway?"

"We'd be safer splashing down in Salton Sea. Hey! Palm Springs! Eighty-five hundred feet plus the overrun they added last year!"

"God knows we can use overrun," she muttered, examining the EMS footprint. "That's right at the northern edge, though, and it's not improving as we drop." The ship creaked and rumbled a bit. "We're at Mach three, altitude twenty-two miles."

He took a deep breath. "I can do it. Do we have any fuel left?" He turned his eyes toward that portion of the floating readout in the VR. "Hmm. About five seconds worth."

"What are you planning?"

Poubelle knew better than to keep secrets from his co-pilot. "We may need a final burst of power to get us home. The EMS will give us enough warning on that."

He checked the GPS locator, confirmed his course with the VORTAC beam from Thermal Flight Service Station, then switched the radio over to 121.5 to issue the warning that an unpowered supersonic spaceplane was headed in their direction.

Nomad dragged its cone of sonic thunder northeast of Superstition Mountains, rattling windows in Westmorland and Calipatria. He came in high over Salton Sea, so high that the vast date palm orchards were mere deep-green squares surrounding the deep blue body of water. He ignored angry transmissions from aircraft operating in the Kane MOA, preferring to maintain his heading and keep an eye on the EMS footprint. Angering them further, he actuated the explosive charge on the lower half of the ventral fin, blowing it off to provide clearance for the rear skids. The jettisoned chunk of burnt metal splashed into the briny depths of the inland sea. Palm Springs still hung just within or beyond the far end of the oval, sensitive to minor changes in Poubelle's input.

Off to his right -- through his VR glasses, not the partially scorched viewing port -- he saw the Desert Air Sky Ranch landing strip near the northeastern shore. Farther north, and smack on the coastline, lay his own too-short airfield. Off the left side of the plane -- on the opposite shore -- lay the town of Oasis.

Nomad shook with a sudden violence. "Under Mach One," he said. "Subsonic."

"That ought to please the people below us," Chemar said.

"Really? I've always loved sonic booms. Like knocking on the door to the future." He glanced once more at the display. As they closed in on Palm Springs, the terrain below them rose from the level of Salton Sea -- 236 feet below sea level -- to just about sea level at Indio, to Palms Springs's 462 above.

Poubelle used too much energy banking to get around the Thermal landing pattern. His destination now lay firmly outside the EMS footprint. Not normally a perspiring man, he began to drench his suit with a cold sweat.

"All right," he sighed. "Restart the turbine and let's light this candle again."

***

Many of the citizens of La Quinta had heard about the spaceship dropping powerlessly in their direction. Inured to the savage summer heat, they stood outside with binoculars scanning the skies and radios tuned to the news.

"There it is!" someone yelled. All eyes turned toward the black spot at 10,000 feet.

All of a sudden a bright orange flame erupted from its tail and the swiftly moving rocket accelerated with startling speed. As suddenly as it began, the flame sputtered out. It provided enough thrust, though, to drive Nomad supersonic once more. Seconds later, the desert rumbled with the violence of its passage through the wall of sound.

***

"That's got it!" Poubelle said, raising the nose in order to bleed off some of the speed in exchange for slowing the rate of descent. Returning once again to subsonic speeds while passing over the growing community of Palm Desert, the Palm Springs airport came into view. He vented what little fuel remained and dumped the peroxide from the exoatmospheric maneuvering rockets, then turned the radio to the control tower frequency, 119.7 mHz.

"Palm Springs tower, this is experimental spaceplane Nomad on heading three-ten approaching unpowered. Request clearance for emergency landing, over."

"Roger, Nomad, you are expected. Be advised that FAA officials are present to oversee your arrest, over."

"Roger that. Please advise them that my bloodsucking lawyers are on their way to throw my bail. Over."

Chemar gazed out the port window to see the series of small cities that created one long chain from Indian Wells to Palm Springs itself. The desert below the eastern foothills of the San Jacinto mountains consisted of an astonishing crazy-quilt of innumerable golf courses. Dropping through 3,000 feet, she could make out a vast army of players and wondered how many interrupted their game to glance upward at the passing rocket plane.

No more time for sightseeing. Poubelle shouted "Take over!" as his robot arm malfunctioned in the clinch.

Chemar tightened her grip on the stick and placed her feet in contact with the rudder pedals.

"Runway in sight," she said. "Energy sufficient. May even need air brakes. Cycling gear." The two rear skids and the forward wheel dropped flawlessly with loud bangs that made the fuselage tremble. The greater drag caused a perceptible increase in the descent rate.

"Play her out," Poubelle urged. "Stretch it."

"Shut up, lover," she said with cool firmness.

Other aircraft circled above the landing pattern, avoiding the winged missile approaching the runway. Golf courses merged into a single green blur as Nomad dropped toward the surface with a 250 mph forward velocity.

She opened the air brake thirty per cent. The brake comprised two panels in the lower part of the dorsal fin, hinged on the leading edge and actuated by twin piston rams in the rear that shoved them into the air stream to bleed energy from the spacecraft. Their drop rate increased while their airspeed decreased.

Poubelle bit his tongue while D'Asaro maneuvered in toward the runway with consummate skill. His arm once more obeyed him, but he chose not to interrupt her efforts.

"Looking good," someone in the tower commented calmly.

Nomad descended in a nose-high attitude that made it impossible for her to see the runway. Lacking Poubelle's VR goggles, she relied entirely on the belly radar and the cumulative effects of her simulator training.

"One hundred feet," the radar said over her headset. She kept the nose up at the appropriate angle of attack. "Fifty feet." Her grip on the stick tightened.

The skids hit with a body-jarring slam to scream across the skillet-hot pavement.

"Contact!" the tower needlessly announced as the X-15 skidded down the runway in excess of 200 mph. Desert gulls shrieked and flapped out of the way, rodents skittered away to their holes, and snakes soaking up a few extra calories of body heat slithered into hiding.

Immediately Chemar rammed the stick forward to push the nose wheel onto the ramp. On such a short -- for them -- runway, she dared not risk porpoising back into the air. The wheel hit, the tire squealed, and the spaceplane raced down the runway, now at the halfway point and still at triple-digit speeds. She opened the air brake to maximum.

"One-fifty," she read off. "One-forty."

"Uh, Nomad, be advised you're eating up runway with about three thousand feet left."

"Roger tower," she said, grunting with her effort to steer. "Be advised this thing has no brakes."

"We copy. Be advised that you're headed straight for the Shell station beyond the runway."

"Down to ninety," she noted, all the while keeping the nose pointed straight down the runway. "Could you ask them to shut off their gas pumps?"

"Already done," the voice from the tower noted. "I suppose you're not interested in their brushless car wash, either?"

"Roger that." Her voice sounded calm, but her heart pounded audibly as the end of the runway still sped toward them at sixty miles an hour. The police had closed Ramon Road just in case, and it was probably a good idea.

"Oh God," Poubelle muttered. "Not again!"

Nomad skidded to the end of the runway, sliding onto the overrun at thirty miles per hour. The overrun consisted of grey-white gravel, into which the nose wheel sank and the skids bit. With a terrible lurch and crash of tearing metal and ripping composite, the wheel and rear skids sheared away from the fuselage. They skidded along the overrun, gravel shooting out from beneath them like a wake. Chemar strained to catch a glimpse of where they were headed, but she was not at an angle to see what lay straight ahead.

Then came another jarring impact that threw them down and forward. The ventral fin dug into the gravel to act as an anchor. The stress proved too much for Nomad, which split in half at the belly, slamming the rear section to the ground and stopping all forward momentum with a sudden, final surge of forward-gees for the crew. The nose of Nomad touched and pierced the cyclone fence at the end of the property line.

Nomad lay halfway inside the airport perimeter and halfway out, bent and cracked in the middle like a bug whose back had been broken by a giant's thumb. Smoke leaked from the peroxide tanks and hydraulic fluid dripped down to the crisp white sidewalk paralleling Ramon Road. A small cloud of mist from the ruptured cryogenic tanks swiftly dissipated in the heat like ghosts vanishing at daybreak.

In an instant, sirens wailing, the crash unit and HazMat team arrived to drench the spaceplane in fire-suppressant foam. Police, FAA officials, and airport security followed, with the press bringing up the rear.

"Cheated death again!" Poubelle said cheerily.

"I wish to God you'd find something else to say whenever you land." Chemar watched the foam spatter the windshield. "I know that any landing you walk away from is a success," she said with a sigh, "but I have to say that this is the most embarrassing moment of my life."

Removing the useless VR goggles, Poubelle turned off the power switches, locked the fuel lines, and said, "Death is the only embarrassment you can't live down. You did what I couldn't -- you brought us down safely -- so don't sell yourself short. Now let's put on our best smiles and don't forget to wave before we're clapped in irons."

He opened the cockpit hatch and emerged, looking around at the gathering crowd and waving triumphantly. Chemar eased out of the cramped interior and turned to lock the compartment holding their mementos. The lawyers would retrieve them eventually.

The FAA official read them a short-form of charges while the police first seized Poubelle, then Chemar.

"Ooh," she said, gazing at the agent with her riveting golden eyes and playfully batting her lashes. "Real handcuffs, not plastic zip-ties!"

"Give me your arm," the officer said to Poubelle.

"Glad to oblige," he responded, undoing the seals on his suit, disconnecting his prosthetic at its shoulder bayonet connector, and handing the unit -- still twitching -- to the shocked policeman.

Chemar broke into uncontrollable laughter at the sight, relieved to be alive, their flight a success, and to know that an unquenchable joy for life still filled her man's heart.

Poubelle grinned at the FAA agent standing off to one side and asked, "So, how much do I tip the arresting officer?"

The skycop stared at him coolly and said, "A dollar more than you'll ever have."


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