Starfire Page 4

  “You do this at night?”

  “Of course,” Boomer said matter-of-factly. “Some missions require night ops, and of course it’s always night where we’re going.” As he was speaking, Boomer pulled off a tiny bit of power, and all forward motion stopped. “Midnight Zero One, stabilized in contact position, ready for contact,” he radioed.

  “Roger, Zero One,” the female-voiced computer replied. A nozzle extended from the end of the boom, and moments later they heard and felt a gentle CL-CLUNK! as the tanker’s nozzle slid into the slipway and seated itself in the refueling receptacle. “Showing contact,” the computer voice reported.

  “Contact confirmed,” Boomer said. On intercom he said, “All I do now is follow those director lights and stay on the tanker’s center line.”

  “If the tanker is fully computerized, shouldn’t the receiver aircraft be able to do a rendezvous by computer as well?” the passenger asked.

  “It can—I just prefer to fly the thing in myself,” Boomer said.

  “Impressing the VIP on board, right?”

  “After what you’ll see today, sir,” Boomer said, “I and my meager flying skills will be the least impressive things you’ll see on this flight.”

  “You said ‘bomb,’ not ‘fuel,’ ” the passenger said. “We’re not taking on fuel?”

  “First we’re taking on a special liquid oxidizer called B-O-H-M, or borohydrogen metaoxide, ‘bomb’—basically, refined hydrogen peroxide,” Boomer said. “Our engines use BOHM instead of liquid oxygen when we switch to pure rocket engines—it’s impossible, at least with today’s technology, to transfer supercooled liquid oxygen from a tanker aircraft. ‘Bomb’ is not as good as cryogenic oxygen, but it’s much easier to handle and far less costly. We don’t take on any ‘bomb’ before takeoff to save weight; we’ll take on jet fuel last so we have the maximum for the mission.”

  It took over fifteen minutes to download the thick oxidizer, and another several minutes to purge the transfer system of all traces of BOHM oxidizer before switching over to begin transferring JP-8 jet fuel. Once the jet fuel began transferring to the Midnight spaceplane, Boomer was visibly relieved. “Believe it or not, sir, that was probably the most dangerous part of the flight,” he said.

  “What was? Transferring the BOHM?” the passenger asked.

  “No—making the switch from BOHM to jet fuel in the tanker’s transfer system,” Boomer admitted. “They rinse the boom and plumbing with helium to flush all the ‘bomb’ out before the jet fuel moves through. The boron additives in the oxidizer help create a much more powerful specific impulse than regular military jet fuel, but mixing BOHM and jet fuel, even in tiny amounts, is always dangerous. Normally, the two mixed together needs a laser for ignition, but any source of heat, a spark, or even vibration of a certain frequency can set it off. The experiments we did at Sky Masters and at the Air Force test centers made for some spectacular explosions, but we learned a lot.”

  “Is that how you got your nickname, ‘Boomer’?”

  “Yes, sir. Perfection requires mistakes. I made a ton of them.”

  “So how do you control it in the engines?”

  “The laser igniters are pulsed, anywhere from a few microseconds to several nanoseconds, to control the detonations,” Boomer explained. “The stuff goes off, believe me, and it’s massive, but the specific impulse lasts just an instant, so we can control the power . . .” He paused, long enough for the passenger to turn his helmeted head toward him, then added, “. . . most of the time.”

  They could virtually feel the second passenger in the back stiffen nervously, but the passenger in the front seat just chuckled. “I trust,” he said, “that I won’t feel a thing if something goes wrong, Dr. Noble?”

  “Sir, an uncontrolled ‘leopards’ explosion is so big,” Boomer said, “that you won’t feel a thing . . . even in your next life.” The passenger said nothing, but just did a big nervous “GULP.”

  The JP-8 transfer went much faster, and soon Colonel Faulkner was helping the front-seat passenger to get strapped into his seat in the back beside the plainly still-nervous second passenger. Soon everyone was seated and the crew was ready for the next evolution. “Our tanker is away,” Boomer said, “and as planned he’s dropped us off over southwestern Arizona. We’ll make a turn to the east and start our acceleration. Some of the sonic boom we’ll create might reach the ground and be heard below, but we try to do it over as much uninhabited area as we can to avoid irritating the neighbors. We’re monitoring the flight computers as they finish all the checklists, and we’ll be on our way.”

  “How long will it take?” the first passenger asked.

  “Not long at all, sir,” Boomer replied. “As we briefed on the ground, you’ll have to deal with the positive G-forces for about nine minutes, but they’re just a bit more than what you’d feel taking off aboard a fast bizjet, strapped into a dragster, or on a really cool roller coaster—except you’ll feel them for a longer period of time. Your suit and the design of your seat will help you stay conscious—in fact, you may ‘red out’ a little because the seat is designed to help keep blood in your brain instead of the G-forces pulling it out, and the more pressure you get, the more blood will stay.”

  “How long will we have to stay in orbit before we can chase down the space station?” the passenger asked. “I’ve heard it sometimes takes days to link up.”

  “Not today, sir,” Boomer said. “The beauty of the spaceplane is that we’re not tied to a launch pad set on one particular location on Earth. We can make our own launch window by adjusting not only our launch time but changing our insertion angle and position relative to our target spacecraft. If we needed to, we could fly across the continent in just a couple hours, refuel again, and line up on a direct rendezvous orbit. But since we planned this flight so long ago, we could minimize the flying, gas up and go, and save fuel just by planning when to take off, when and where to refuel, and being in the right spot and right heading for orbit. By the time we finish our orbital burn and coast into our orbit, we should be right beside Armstrong Space Station, so there’s no need to chase it down or use a separate Hohmann transfer orbit. Stand by, everyone, we’re starting our turn.”

  The passengers could barely feel it, but the S-19 Midnight made a sharp turn to the east, and soon they could feel a steady pressure on their chests. As directed, they sat with arms and legs set against the seats, with no fingers or feet crossed. The first passenger looked over at his companion and saw his chest within his partial-pressure space suit rising and falling with alarming speed. “Try to relax, Charlie,” he said. “Control your breathing. Try to enjoy the ride.”

  “How is he, sir?” Gonzo asked on intercom.

  “Hyperventilating a little, I think.” A few moments later, with the G-forces steadily rising, he noticed his companion’s breathing became more normal. “He’s looking better,” he reported.

  “That’s because home base reports he’s unconscious,” Boomer said. “Don’t worry—they’re monitoring him closely. We’ll have to watch him when he wakes up, but if he got the anti-motion-sickness shot as he was directed, he should be fine. I’d hate to have him blow chunks in his oxygen helmet.”

  “I could’ve done without that last bit of detail, Boomer,” the conscious passenger said wryly.

  “Sorry, sir, but that’s what we have to be ready for,” Boomer said. He was astonished that the passenger didn’t seem to be having one bit of difficulty breathing against the G-forces, which were now exceeding two Gs and steadily increasing as they accelerated—his voice sounded as normal as back on Earth. “Battle Mountain may adjust his oxygen levels to keep him asleep until the medics are standing by.”

  “My home base won’t like that,” the passenger pointed out.

  “It’s for his own good, believe me, sir,” Boomer said. “Okay, everybody, we’re approaching Mach three and fifty thousand feet, and the ‘leopards’ are beginning to transform from turbofan engines to supersoni
c combustion ramjets, or scramjets. We call this ‘spiking,’ because a spike in each engine will move forward and divert the supersonic air around the turbine fans and into ducts where the air is compressed and mixed with jet fuel and then ignited. Because there are no spinning parts in a scramjet as there are in a turbofan engine, the maximum speed we can attain goes to around fifteen times the speed of sound, or about ten thousand miles an hour. The scramjets will kick in shortly. We’ll inert the fuel in the fuel tanks with helium to avoid having unspent gas in the fuel tanks. Stay ahead of the Gs.”

  This time, Boomer did hear some grunts and deep breaths over the intercom as moments later the engines went completely into scramjet mode and the Midnight spaceplane accelerated rapidly. “Passing Mach five . . . Mach six,” Boomer announced. “Everything looks good. How are you doing back there, sir?”

  “Fine . . . fine, Boomer,” the passenger replied, but now it was obvious that he was fighting the G-forces, clenching his stomach and leg muscles and pressurizing a lungful of air in his chest, which was supposed to slow blood flowing to the lower parts of his body and help keep it in his chest and brain to help him stay conscious. The passenger looked over at his companion. His seat had automatically reclined to about forty-five degrees, which helped his blood stay in his head since he couldn’t perform the G-crunches while unconscious. “How . . . how much . . . longer?”

  “I hate to break it to you, sir, but we haven’t even gotten to the fun part yet,” Boomer said. “The scramjets will give us the maximum velocity and altitude while still using atmospheric oxygen for fuel combustion. We want to conserve our BOHM oxidizer as long as possible. But around sixty miles’ altitude—three hundred and sixty thousand feet—the air will get too thin to run the scramjets, and we’ll switch to pure rocket mode. You’ll feel . . . a little push then. It won’t last long, but it’ll be . . . noticeable. Stand by, sir. Another ninety seconds.” A few moments later, Boomer reported: “ ‘Leopards’ spiking . . . spiking complete, scramjets report full shutdown and secure. Stand by for rocket transition, crew . . . back me up on the temp and turbopump pressure gauges, Gonzo . . . standing up the power, now . . . good ignition, rockets throttling up to sixty-five percent, fuel flows in the green, throttles coming up . . .” The passenger thought he was ready for it, but the breath left his lungs with a sharp BAARK! at that moment . . . “Good primary ignition, nominal turbopump pressures, all temps in the green, stand by for one hundred percent power, here we go . . . ready . . . ready . . . now.”

  It hit like a car crash. The passenger felt his body crushed backward into his seat—thankfully the computer-controlled seat was anticipating it, simultaneously reclining, cushioning, and bracing his body weight against the sudden force. The nose of the Midnight felt as if it was aimed straight up, but that feeling lasted only a few moments, and soon he had no idea of up or down, left or right, forward or backward. For a moment he wished he was unconscious like his companion, unaware of all these strange, alien forces battering his body.

  “One-six . . . one-seven . . . one-eight,” Boomer announced. The passenger was not quite sure what any of that meant. “Passing four-zero . . . five-zero . . . six-zero . . .”

  “Are . . . we . . . doing . . . okay, Boomer?” the passenger asked, trying with all his might to suppress the growing darkness in his vision that indicated the beginning of unconsciousness. He pretended he was a bodybuilder, flexing every muscle in his body, hoping to force enough blood into his head to keep from dropping off.

  “We’re in . . . in the green, sir,” Boomer replied. For the first time in this entire damned flight, the passenger thought, he could detect a hint of pressure or strain in Hunter Noble’s voice. His tone was still measured, still succinct and even official, but there was definitely a worried edge to it, signifying even to a newbie space voyager that the worst was yet to come.

  Crap, the passenger thought, if Hunter Noble—probably America’s most oft-traveled astronaut, with dozens of missions and thousands of orbits to his credit—is having trouble, what chance do I have? I’m getting so tired, he thought, trying to fight the damned G-forces. I’ll be okay if I just relax and let the blood flow out of my brain, right? It won’t hurt me. The pressure is starting to make me a little nauseous, and for God’s sake I don’t want to barf in my helmet. I’ll just relax, relax . . .

  Then, moments later, to his complete surprise the pressure ceased, as if the turnscrews on the vise that had been pressing on his entire body simply disappeared after just a few minutes. Then he heard the surprising, completely unsuspected question: “You doing okay this splendid morning back there, sir?”

  The passenger was somehow able to reply with a curt and completely casual, “It’s morning, Dr. Noble?”

  “It’s morning somewhere, sir,” Boomer said. “We have a new morning every ninety minutes on station.”

  “How are we doing? Are we doing okay? Did we make it?”

  “Check out your detail, sir,” Boomer said. The passenger looked over and saw the man’s arms floating about six inches above his still-unconscious, reclined body, as if he were sleeping while floating on his back in the ocean.

  “We’re . . . we’re weightless now?”

  “Technically, the acceleration of gravity toward Earth is equal to our forward velocity, so we’re in effect falling but never hitting the ground. We are hurtling toward the Earth, but Earth keeps on moving out of the way before we hit it, so the net effect feels like weightlessness,” Boomer said.

  “Say what?”

  Boomer grinned. “Sorry,” he said. “I like saying that to Puddys. Yes, sir, we’re weightless.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We’re currently cruising past Mach twenty-five and climbing through one hundred twenty-eight miles’ altitude up to our final altitude of two hundred and ten miles,” Boomer went on. “Course corrections are nominal. When we stop coasting at orbital speed, we should be within ten miles of Armstrong at matching speed, altitude, and azimuth. It looks very cool, sir, very cool. Welcome to outer space. You are officially an American astronaut.”

  A few moments later Jessica Faulkner drifted back to the passenger cabin, her eyes still alluring behind the closed visor of her space-suit helmet. The passenger had seen plenty of astronauts floating in zero-G on television and movies, but it was as if this was the first time he had seen it in person—it was simply, utterly unreal. He noticed her movements were gentle and deliberate, as if everything she touched or was about to touch were fragile. She didn’t seem to grasp anything, but she used a few fingers to lightly touch the bulkheads, ceiling, or deck to maneuver herself around.

  Faulkner checked on Spellman first, checking a small electronic panel on the front of his space suit that displayed conditions in the suit and the wearer’s vital signs. “He looks okay, and his suit is secure,” she reported. “As long as his gyros don’t tumble when he wakes up, I think he’ll be fine.” She drifted over to the first passenger and gave him a very pretty smile. “Welcome to orbit, sir. How do you feel?”

  “It was pretty rough when the rockets kicked in—I thought I was going to pass out,” he replied with a weak smile. “But I’m doing all right now.”

  “Good. Let’s get you unbuckled, and then you can join Boomer in the cockpit for the approach. He might even let you dock it.”

  “Dock the spaceplane? To the space station? Me? I can’t fly! I haven’t hardly driven a car in almost eight years!”

  Faulkner was unstrapping the passenger from his seat, using tabs of Velcro to keep the webbing from floating around in front of them. “Do you play video games, sir?” she asked.

  “Sometimes. With my son.”

  “It’s just a video game—the controls are almost identical to game controllers that have been around for years,” she said. “In fact, the guy who designed them, Jon Masters, probably did that on purpose—he was a video-game nut. Besides, Boomer is a good instructor.

  “Now, the secret to maneuvering around in f
ree fall is remembering although you don’t have the effects of gravity, you still have mass and acceleration, and those need to be counteracted very carefully, or else you’ll end up pinging off the walls,” Faulkner said. “Remember that it’s not the weightless feeling you feel floating in the ocean, where you can paddle to move about—here, every directional movement can be countered only by opposing the acceleration of mass with opposite and equal force.

  “Once we’re on station, we use Velcro shoes and patches on our clothes to help secure ourselves, but we don’t have those yet, so you’ll have to learn the hard way,” she went on. “Very easy, gentle movements. I like to just think about moving first. If you don’t consciously think about a movement before you do it, you’ll launch yourself into the ceiling when your major muscles get involved. If you just think about getting up, you’ll involve more minor muscles. You’ll have to overcome your mass to start moving, but remember that gravity isn’t going to help you reverse directions. Try it.”

  The passenger did as she suggested. Instead of using his legs and hands to push up off the seat, he merely thought about getting up, with light touches of a few fingers of one hand on a handhold or seat armrest . . . and to his surprise, he started to float gently off the seat. “Hey! It worked!” he exclaimed.

  “Very good, sir,” Faulkner said. “Feel okay? The first time in zero-G upsets a lot of stomachs.”

  “I’m fine, Jessica.”

  “The balance organs in your ears will soon have no ‘up’ or ‘down’ direction and will start feeding your brain signals that won’t correspond to anything you see or feel,” Faulkner explained. The passengers had been briefed on all this back home, but they had not undergone any other astronaut training such as simulated zero-G work underwater. “It’ll be a little worse once you get to station. A little nausea is normal. Work through it.”