Powersat

Matagorda Island, Texas

“For a suit, you’re not a bad engineer,” Tenny said, his dark jowly face dead serious.

Dan took it as a compliment. He was kneeling alongside the twisted wreckage of what had once been the spaceplane’s nose cap. Tenny was squatting on the hangar floor, facing him. Claude Passeau stood on the other side of the nose cap, looking almost elegant in his neatly creased slacks and jacket, although he had pulled his bow tie loose from its collar.

Even this late at night the hangar had been buzzing with government investigators and Astro technicians. With Passeau’s help Dan had shooed them all home. Now only the three men remained in the brightly lit hangar.

The twisted bits of remains from the spaceplane were laid out precisely in their proper places inside the taped outline of the vehicle’s swept-wing shape, exuding a faint odor of charred metal. Every time Dan looked at the wreckage he felt his guts wrench. But he forced a rueful grin.

“Coming from you, Joe,” Dan replied, “that’s pretty high praise.”

Passeau said, “Your degree was in engineering, wasn’t it?”

“And economics,” Dan replied. “Double major.”

“And then you went to Japan to work for Yamagata Corporation.”

Dan got to his feet. “You know a lot about me.”

With a shrug, Passeau said, “You interest me, Mr. Randolph.”

“Dan.”

“Thank you.” Passeau touched his moustache with a fingertip, then said, “Why did you go to Japan? Weren’t there jobs in the States?”

“Not the kind of jobs I wanted. The U.S. space program was just spinning its wheels: scientific research but not much else. Yamagata was building a power satellite. Just a demo, of course, but it meant I could get into space and work in orbit. Real work, building something practical up there three hundred miles high.”

Tenny clambered to his feet, too. “I never been up there. You get space-sick?”

“A little woozy the first hour or so,” Dan admitted. “After four or five flights, though, you learn to adjust. Then it’s terrific.”

“Zero gravity, you mean,” Passeau said.

“I hear the sex is terrific,” quipped Tenny.

Dan laughed. “I wouldn’t know. We were in spacesuits most of the time.”

“You spent weeks up there on each mission, didn’t you?” Passeau asked.

Nodding, Dan said, “Yep. But there were only a handful of women up there and they were all Japanese. They wouldn’t have anything to do with a ketoujin.”

Tenny smirked. “That’s how he got his nose busted.”

“Really?”

“No, but Joe likes to think so.”

The three men laughed mildly. Then Tenny brought them back to the here-and-now.

“The nose thruster’s fuel control valve is wide open,” he said, jabbing a thumb at the twisted wreckage. “It should be shut.”

“It might have been jarred loose when it hit the ground,” said Passeau.

“Maybe,” said Tenny. “But take a look at it. It’s locked in the open position.”

Dan took the battered assembly from Tenny’s hands and tried to close the valve. It refused to budge. “Joe’s right,” he said to Passeau. “It’s locked in the open position. If it had banged open from the crash it’d be flapping loose.”

Passeau fingered his moustache again, thinking. “Then the thruster must have fired during reentry.”

“And kept on firing until all its fuel was exhausted,” Dan added.

“What could have caused that?” asked Passeau.

Dan shot a warning glance at Tenny.

“That’s what we’ve gotta find out,” the engineer said.

“And quickly,” Dan added.

Tenny puffed out a breath. “Well, we ain’t gonna find it standing around here until the sun comes up. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve got a home and a family that expects to see me now and then.”

Sighing, Passeau said, “I’m living in your wonderful Astro Motel, the only facility between here and civilization, until this investigation is finished.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “And their bar closed two hours ago.”

Dan thought of all the nights he had spent at hotel bars, and the women he had picked up at them. “You’re not missing much, Claude,” he said.

Passeau hiked his brows suggestively. “One never knows. To give up all hope would be a tragedy.”

Laughing together, the three men began walking slowly out of the hangar, leaving the wreckage behind them. Dan nodded to the uniformed security guard standing at the tightly closed hangar door. Two more guards were supposed to be on duty, he knew. Probably making the rounds.

He walked Passeau and Tenny to the parking lot, where the FAA inspector got into his rental Buick Regal and Tenny hauled himself up into his remodeled Silverado. The only pickup in Texas that ran on hydrogen fuel. But then, only someone who had access to Astro’s hydrogen facility could find enough fuel to run the truck. Not even the NASA center near Houston had a hydrogen generation system.

Dan waved the two men good night and headed for his own compact apartment up on the catwalk back inside the hangar.

The thruster’s fuel valve was commanded to open and lock during reentry, he mused as he started up the steel stairs. Somebody sent a bogus signal to the bird.

He stopped halfway up the stairs, his footfalls echoing off the hangar’s metal walls. Which means, Dan said to himself, that somebody really did deliberately sabotage the spaceplane. Hannah’s death wasn’t an accident. It was murder.

Slowly, he started up the stairs again, running it through his mind. Which means that somebody was able to override our command codes and radio the bogus signal to the plane’s computer. Which means that the saboteur had access to our command codes.

As he opened the door to his one-room apartment, Dan came to the inescapable conclusion: Which means that there’s a spy in my company somewhere. A saboteur who wrecked the spaceplane and killed Hannah.