Powersat

Matagorda Island, Texas

“So what’ve you come up with?” Randolph asked.

Tenny scowled at him. “Hey, it’s only been a few days, boss. These things take time.”

“Time is the one thing I don’t have, Joe. I need an answer fast.”

Dan was sitting on the edge of his chair, toying nervously with the sleek silver-painted model of the spaceplane that he kept on his desk alongside the square, flat replica of the power satellite. When he realized what he was doing he put the model down as if it was a hot coal.

Seated backward on one of the conference table chairs, his beefy arms across its back with his chin resting on them, Tenny said, “It’s gotta be the attitude thruster. Damn thing misfired and pitched the nose down.”

“You’re sure?”

“Hell no! But it’s gotta be that. Nothing else makes sense. Telemetry shows everything going fine, everything nominal until the goddamn nose pitches down. At that point in the reentry it was the worst thing that could happen. Absolutely the worst.”

“The telemetry shows that the thruster fired?”

“The friggin’ telemetry doesn’t show shit!” Tenny snapped, waving his arms angrily. “At that point it goes blooey. Just turns into fuckin’ hash. Not worth a thimbleful of piss.”

Randolph leaned back in his chair. He had seen Tenny in many different moods, but never had the engineer been so crude.

“We need to find the thruster in the wreckage,” Tenny said, more calmly. “So far we haven’t recovered the nose section.”

“So what makes you think—”

“It hadda be the thruster. Just at the wrong goddamn instant. Talk about Murphy’s Law! If the thruster had fired a coupla seconds earlier, or even later, Hannah could’ve compensated, got the bird back under control. But it hadda go right then, right at that fuckin’ microsecond. Put the bird into a dive that nobody could recover from. Heat load, aerodynamic load, goddamn structure broke up.”

“And the telemetry went out?” Randolph asked again.

“Yeah. Just went into hash, like it was being jammed or something.”

“Jammed? You mean, like somebody was jamming the frequency?”

“Yep. Just like that.” Tenny sunk his chin back onto his hairy forearms.

“Deliberately jamming?”

Tenny’s brows went up. “Deliberately?”

Randolph nodded.

“Jesus Q. Christ,” Tenny muttered. “You think somebody did it on purpose?”

“You tell me.”

The engineer sat up straighter. “If it was deliberate…”

“Sabotage,” said Randolph. “Murder.”

“Whoever did it would have to know our telemetry codes.”

“Could that be done?”

“The thruster’s controlled by the flight computer. You’d have to know the whole friggin’ computer code, then override it and put in a new command to fire the thruster at that point in time.”

“Maybe it wasn’t jamming,” Randolph suggested. “Maybe it was the new command, sent in from an outside source and strong enough to override the existing program.”

Tenny looked as if he had just discovered ants crawling over his body. “They’d have to know the whole computer program, all the codes, the time sequence… everything.”

“That means it’s somebody on the inside. Somebody here.”

Shaking his head hard enough to pop vertebrae, Tenny replied, “Naw. It couldn’t be. We know everybody here. We’ve worked with ’em for years, Dan. None of them would do it, kill Hannah. It couldn’t be!”

Randolph felt a wave of anger rising in him. Somebody here, somebody who’s worked for me for years, deliberately sabotaged the spaceplane. Deliberately killed Hannah. Some sonofabitch that I’ve trusted.

“They wouldn’t have to know that the plane was going to crash,” he said slowly. “They’d just be selling information to make some extra bucks.”

“Corporate espionage,” Tenny growled.

Keeping his voice calm, flat, Dan asked the engineer, “Can you come up with a better explanation?”

Tenny swung a leg over the chair he’d been sitting on and got to his feet. “When I do, I’ll let you know.”

He started for the door. Dan saw that both his hands were balled into fists.

“Joe.”

Tenny stopped and turned back toward Randolph.

“Keep this between you and me. If we do have a rat in with us, I don’t want him to know that we suspect anything.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“Nobody else, Joe. Not even Lynn. And especially not Passeau. Just you and me.”

“That’s gonna slow things down, if I have to do all the checking myself.”

“Nobody else.”

Tenny nodded, accepting it. “Gotcha.”