AMERICA ONE (30 page)

They needed a full rotation, climbing all the time to reach the 360,000 feet mark, 40,000 feet above the Kármán line, the official entry into space, where they would, hopefully, disappear after the explosion, and employ the new Cloaking Device.

“Forty-nine thousand feet, reducing thrust….leveling out…..going into dive,”
stated Bob and now it was up to him to get them as high as he could, release them and then get out of the way.
“46….45….43….41….39…. pulling out, full thrust, now I’m feeling the added weight, Jonesy, nose coming up 515 knots, five knots faster than before and fifteen over her limit… 41….45….48….51….52….Release activated…52,500…..52,750. That’s it guys, speed 420 knots, 52,900 feet. God Speed, Jonesy, VIN!”

The shuttle was already rolling out of the rear of the
Dead Chicken
and, as before, VIN watched as the larger aircraft crept away above them. Bob lowered the right wing to get her out of the way as they began to drop like a roller coaster. Her nose was still pointing to the blackness above her as VIN was ordered to ignite the first-stage rockets.

“Wings fully extended,”
stated Jonesy calmly as VIN pushed the ignite button and they heard the roar from behind them.

“First stage ignition and active,” replied VIN as he felt the jolt in his back, looked up to see the C-5 high above them and about a hundred yards to their starboard side and beginning to descend as they suddenly took off like a rocket and within a split second the mother ship had disappeared below them out of view.

“We have ignition, climbing through 64,000 feet at 670 knots, everything looking good….71,000 feet, 810 knots….79,000 feet, 930 knots….90,000 feet, Mach 2….135,000 feet, Mach 4,”
counted out Jonesy as they rapidly climbed.

“Good luck, and fly safe, Mr. Jones,”
said Ryan from the C-5 as he watched the vivid plume of the twin rockets already far above and miles to the east of them.

“One hundred eight-seven thousand feet at Mach 9, 7,000 knots, exact same speed and altitude as the first trip,”
stated Jonesy.

“Still perfect exit,”
stated ground
“you looked beautiful, as good as your first flight. Your exhaust trails are now out of sight of ground.”

“Roger that, it’s getting dark up here again, the sun looks beautiful, changing color, and right where I wanted it. Make a note guys, this sun is a real help. We need to exact the changes in time and seasons, and thanks to the sun less work has to be done once we get up here…..approaching second-stage activation; 230,000 feet at Mach 15.”

“Second-stage igniter ready,” VIN reported to Jonesy.

“Record slight change in flight; the first-stage lost power at 241,000 feet, not 230,000 feet, stated Jonesy to ground control. “Ignite,”
he ordered VIN and the craft continued heading further into the upper atmosphere.

“
The program with full cargo had second-stage ignition at 241,000 feet,”
stated Ryan still only half way down to the ground in the
Dead Chicken
.
“Perfect height, Mr. Jones!”

The force in VIN’s back was gone and he went through the checks on the new liquid hydrogen motors. “All readouts show perfection my side,” he stated in the internal intercom.”

“Going through 265,000 feet at Mach 16 under full power…280,000 feet…I’m decreasing the hydrogen throttles, power to 90 percent. Two hundred ninety thousand feet and I’m getting minimum thruster control, turning onto computerized controls. Flight control under auto-pilot, power reducing to 85 percent, speed Mach 18, I’m manually using top and bottom thrusters 1 and 2 to turn us upright. Speed Mach 19.5, altitude 300,000 feet, computer says we are still climbing on our exact exit path,”
added Jonesy.

“Changing heading with port thruster 1.5 degrees to starboard, time to head towards the equator,”
replied ground control now monitoring the five onboard computer readouts.
“Your speed and exit path are perfect.”

“Roger that,”
replied Jonesy relaxing a little.
“Power increasing to 89 percent, computer shows us climbing through Mach 21, wow 16,000 miles an hour! I’ve never flown so fast and it all looks so slow from up here. Forty-one minutes to the completion of Rotation One. Over.”

VIN looked at the earth below them as they departed its atmosphere ever so slowly.

“Climbing through 333,000 feet, Mach 22.”

“Congratulations Mr. Jones, you are now 60 miles, 100 kilometers above earth and in an official Lower Space Orbit, or LSO. Again, a job well done!”
stated Ryan over the C-5’s radio as his aircraft was on finals to land.

It was now peaceful in the shuttle, the main work was done, the five computers aboard were doing their jobs and now the pilots only had to monitor their progress for the next half an hour.

Over southern Europe they began to close in on the equator, the shortest trip around the earth and tie themselves into a similar orbit with many of the satellites above them, including the Russian station only 22 miles above them, the International Space Station’s orbit 71 miles, or 220,000 feet above the station, and a couple of thousand miles in front.

“Three hundred fifty-eight thousand feet, speed Mach 23. Computers reducing hydrogen power to 15 percent. Cut off in twenty seconds,”
Jonesy stated to ground control.

“Computers ready to transfer onto third-stage motor,” VIN reported. The liquid hydrogen motors had done their job and now it was time for the deep space ion thrust drives to be tested for the first time.

Thirty minutes later the time came to open all the cargo doors to release the package. First Jonesy opened the outer roof doors of the shuttle, then the inner
Astermine One
spacecraft roof doors. Small explosive release nodules were fired releasing the explosive package from the spacecraft, the explosions directed the cargo slowly out of the open doors. Once it was away, all the doors were closed and VIN watched as the large package, the size of a small car slowly floated away from them.

“Three hundred seventy-nine thousand feet, shuttle outer doors ready for test. We are go for our next phase, to open and test outer doors.”

Jonesy was following procedure to hide what was really going on up there. The whole team knew that the entire communication was being eaves-dropped on by dozens of listeners around the world.

“Ten seconds to doors open stated Jonesy five minutes later. “Nine….eight….seven…. something is floating off into space. It is already two miles away from us. Nevada we have a problem, Nevada we have a problem. Something is wrong aaaaagh…….!”

Nevada to Sierra Bravo I do you copy over
?” asked ground control as a bright explosion in space could be seen only by the most powerful equipment on earth.
“Nevada to Sierra Bravo I, do you copy over?”

For twenty minutes ground control tried to pick up communications with their “lost” shuttle. They could not.

Meanwhile, VIN had activated the Cloaking Device as soon as the shuttle’s cockpit had been lit up by the massive blast behind them.

Jonesy dialed in full throttle to the ion thrusters and gradually their speed increased and so did their next two orbits around earth. He changed their orbital pattern to coincide with the Russian satellite’s daily orbit program and on the second orbit climbed to the same altitude, now only a thousand miles behind. The International Space Station was still far higher and was several thousand miles behind them.

They needed to lock themselves onto the dormant satellite before the ISS would pass over them in five hours’ time, only 500 miles south of them and 70 miles higher.

“Forward hydrogen thrusters on, ion thrusters at zero power. We need to reduce speed by 500 knots,” VIN stated. They both had taken off their helmets to speak to each other. To the rest of the world, they were just dust in space.

Ryan’s cell phone rang. He had been down nearly twenty minutes and was wondering who would be the first to call him; a great way to find out who was watching them. He answered the phone.

“Mr. Richmond, General John Mortimer here, from the Pentagon, Adjutant to the Chief of Staff. I’m sorry to see that your first attempt hasn’t been successful.”

“I’m sorry too, General. We were so close. It seems that the outer shuttle doors had something to do with the accident.”

“It seems so. Sorry for the sad death of your pilots. Were they military personnel?”

“Yes, a Colonel Maggie Sinclair was our co-pilot. The chief pilot was civilian. I’m sorry for her accident. Do you want me to contact her family?”

“No, that is not necessary. We will do that from our side, through her commander at Nellis. Does this mean that your chances of winning the space race are over, Mr. Richmond?”

“No, General, just put us back thirty days. We have our back up shuttle,
Silver Bullet II
which can still win the race. Of course it depends on how ready the other two teams are to send up their next attempts. As I said, we need thirty days to check out what happened and rectify the situation.”

“Thank you, Mr. Richmond. I will be interested if you have any new information. Good luck, Mr. Richmond.” And the cell phone went dead for a second, until it rang again.

“Ryan Richmond.”

“Mr. Richmond, Tom Ward here, Langley Virginia. It seems that your first attempt exploded just before completing one orbit. You must have just missed winning the space race by an hour or so of space flight. Bad luck, can you tell me what happened? We saw the explosion.”

“Yes, we wanted to test the outer doors while orbiting. We had several important tests to complete in a short time, and opening the shuttle doors shouldn’t have caused a problem. The rest of the craft was totally sealed off, just like the NASA shuttles, and once we go through the computer readouts, I’m sure we will find and rectify the problem before our backup shuttle is launched in just under a month from now.”

“I think you had better hurry Mr. Richmond. Word is out that the other American company in the race is ready to launch.”

“And I’m sure you are totally correct in your information Mr. Ward, but we can’t go any faster, and we have lost two good pilots today.”

Several more calls came in as he said goodbye to the previous caller. The FBI wanted to know if there were any ideas of a terrorist plot. The Air Force called from Nellis, giving him their condolences and telling him that any family members of Colonel Sinclair would be notified.

Then the Assistant Director, West Coast operations of the National Security Agency gave his condolences, and wanted to know what had happened. The fourth call was from a Russian government official wanting to know what had happened and finally Ryan’s only friend in politics, the ex-president of the United States called to give his condolences and ask what had gone wrong. He was the only caller who actually seemed concerned.

The last two calls were the weirdest, though. First a polite Chinese sounding person who didn’t tell him his name, wanted to know why his space vehicle had exploded. This foreigner seemed to want to know very detailed information and ten minutes after Ryan hung up, a gentleman from India phoned and politely wanted to sell him parts for his next spacecraft. After that he turned the phone off.

Meanwhile in space, the two recently “deceased” pilots were getting on with their jobs. There were no more communications until the shuttle was docked with the Russian satellite. Once on board the station used an old, different, sort of scrambled radio, which only the Russians working with Ryan could remember how to use. It was a Morse code decoder, which could scramble any Morse code fed to it. The scientists knew of only three remaining decoding books to have survived. Ryan had one of them, there was one in the satellite and nobody knew where the third one was; the scientists hoped that it wasn’t presently being used.

“We are within thirty feet from the space station,” said VIN. “Jonesy, it’s time for me to head out.”

The large and odd-looking satellite was floating in formation off their starboard bow. It was shorter than the shuttle by about twenty feet, but shaped like rectangular box, not the ‘beer can’ shape Jonesy called it. On one corner was the command module, the first part that had blasted off into space. Connected to the command module were docking ports with hatches to two of the other sections. To the side of the command module was a much longer piece of the station, a long hallway with storage bays and cargo canisters around the outside. From this section, two smaller modules—living quarters about fifteen feet cubed, placed side by side—were connected to the hallway section through single hatches on the opposite side to the command module. On the further end of the hallway module and the two shorter modules was a third long module that was connected by hatches to the hallway and command modules. It covered the entire top area of the space station and the wing-type solar panels stuck out from this section. This was the communal work area.

VIN counted the three docking bays they were going to use frequently during the next several months.

Jonesy pushed a button which, like a submarine periscope, started to raise the tall, three-foot wide docking tube placed in the rear wall of the cockpit and in between the empty rear passenger seats. Within minutes, Jonesy helped VIN on with his helmet and jet pack, and VIN entered, the inner hatch was locked, and silently VIN floated upwards towards the second outer hatch. Both men had practiced this exit maneuver often on the ground, and for the first time VIN didn’t need to use the docking port’s inner ladder to climb upwards and out of the craft’s roof, he just floated out.

The docking port tube stood three feet out of the shuttle’s roof, and once the inner hatch was checked to be tight, the air was allowed to escape out of the tube, and Jonesy turned the port control switch to open the outer hatch. The spacewalker, VIN, with a rope tied to a D-ring inside the tube then floated out of the port, his eyes riveted on the second already extended tube of
Astermine One
, fifteen feet behind the shuttle’s port and towards the rear of the craft. Jonesy had already raised the exact same docking tube on
Astermine One
from the shuttle’s flight deck.