Powersat

Caracas, Venezuela

Except for the toilet facilities, it wasn’t so bad living at the airport overnight, Van Buren thought. The Venezuelan soldiers patrolling around the area were stiffly polite; their captain—the only one who spoke English—was friendly and as helpful as possible. Two portable toilets had been wheeled up on the back of an army truck; one whiff of them and Van Buren avoided them as much as she physically could. She and her crew slept in the Citation’s cabin: not all that comfortable but not bad once the army rolled up a portable generator to keep the plane’s air conditioner going.

Van Buren talked with Dan Randolph every hour or so and was in constant touch with her launch crew back in Texas. She and her team worked from laptop computers networked to the command and control equipment stowed in the plane’s cargo hold. Using the laptops, they could follow the spaceplane’s flight as it orbited serenely three hundred miles up, circling the Earth every ninety-six minutes. That’s the theory, Van Buren said to herself. We’ll see if it works in the real world. Everything was happening in such a rush, they had to check out the laptops’ links with the command system while in flight from Texas.

It’ll work, Van Buren silently reassured herself. Then she added, God looks out for fools and drunks.

The plan was to bring the plane down on its sixth orbit, nine hours after its launch, which meant Van Buren’s people would have to send a signal to the spaceplane’s control system, ordering it to make a maneuver that would alter its orbit so that it would be aligned properly for a landing at Caracas.

Van Buren sat in a seat in the rear of the Citation’s cabin studying the display screen of the laptop wedged behind the chair in front of her. Its keyboard rested on her lap and she had a headset clamped over her short mouse-brown hair.

Everything’s going fine, she saw, peering at the readouts from the spaceplane’s internal sensors. They could get data from the bird only when it was within range of Matagorda or Caracas; Dan had refused to ask NASA to allow them to use the agency’s TDRS satellites to relay the plane’s telemetry signals.

As the signal from the spaceplane faded out over the horizon, Van Buren looked up at her cohorts, each of them bent uncomfortably over a laptop just as she was.

“One more go-round,” she called out, “and we bring her home.”

They responded with a faint smattering of approval. “Yahoo,” was the strongest term she heard, and that sounded sarcastic, tired.

The incoming message light in the corner of her screen began to flash yellow. Van Buren touched a key and saw HQ: DAN RANDOLPH scroll across the bottom of the screen.

She clicked on his name and Dan’s image appeared on the screen. He looked tired, too. He hasn’t slept any more than I have, Van Buren realized.

“How’s it going?” Dan asked.

“Fine,” she replied. “Except for the Porta Potties. I don’t think they’ll last another whole day.”

He grinned at her. “Bring the bird in and you can spend the night in the finest hotel in Caracas.”

“On the company?”

“Sure. What’s a little more red ink?”

In Washington, Senator Thornton awoke from a troubled sleep. She vaguely remembered a dream, something about Dan being in space, soaring weightlessly away from her while she watched from the ground, helpless, her feet mired in mud or cement or something; it took all her energy to take a single step while Dan floated like a child’s balloon farther and farther away from her.

She sat up in bed, reached for the TV remote control unit on the night table, and turned on one of the twenty-four-hour news channels.

More bombing in Israel. She saw a shattered building, bloody bodies sprawled in the street. Smoke and the chilling wail of ambulance sirens. Not waiting to find out who did what to whom, she clicked through a dozen channels. Local news, children’s cartoons, a cooking show, a pair of political analysts discussing the approaching season of primary elections. As if they know anything about it, Jane groused silently.

Nothing about the spaceplane. Nothing about Dan.

She went back to Fox News, turned up the volume, and went into the bathroom. Half an hour later she was showered, combed, dressed in a light blue skirted suit with a pale lavender silk blouse. Still not a word about Dan’s spaceplane.

Out of sight, out of mind, Jane thought. Dan launched without telling anyone so the news media are snubbing him. Certainly NASA’s not holding news conferences about a private space operation. Not this one, at least.

But that’s going to end, Jane knew. The top item on her agenda this morning was to start the machinery rolling for a Senate investigation of Astro Manufacturing Corporation’s unauthorized launch. She wasn’t on the science committee but Bob Quill was, and he had agreed to call for the investigation.

The nerve of the man! Jane felt all the old anger rising within her. The unmitigated insolence. To launch that rocket without telling anyone, without informing the proper authorities. The gall. That iron-clad ego of his.

Yet, as she checked her lipstick in the mirror by the apartment’s front door, she saw she was smiling. That’s Dan, she told herself, her anger melting away. If only he’d let me help him. If only he’d play by the rules.

She frowned at her image in the mirror and shook her head. If he played by the rules he wouldn’t be Dan Randolph. And you wouldn’t still be in love with him.

“Idiot!” Jane snapped at the face in the mirror. Then she left her apartment, heading for a day’s work in the Senate. As she went down in the elevator a new thought struck her. Dan’s got to land the spaceplane sooner or later. The news media will be all over him then.

There were more than a dozen phone messages on Dan’s computer screen that morning, most of them from news reporters. And April hadn’t shown up for work. That’s not like her, Dan thought. The kid’s been ultrareliable. Then he remembered that she had left early yesterday afternoon. He considered calling her apartment, but the upcoming landing of the spaceplane drove that idea out of his mind almost before he had thought of it.

Still, it bothered him. With his computer Dan could run his office pretty well without her, and he could even get his own coffee down at the machine on the hangar floor. Instead, he decided to drive down to the blockhouse and follow the landing on the big screen there.

Before he could get up from his desk chair, though, Claude Passeau barged into the office with two other men right behind him, both of them wearing gray business suits, both looking like high school principals trying to seem tough. A pair of government bureaucrats, Dan realized: Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

“You betrayed me!” Passeau said without preamble. “You launched your rocket without permission. You did it behind my back!”

Dan realized the FAA administrator was speaking for the guys behind him. He smiled pleasantly as he got to his feet.

“I didn’t need your permission, Mr. Passeau,” Dan said. “I have all the permissions that are required for a launch, all signed on the dotted line by the various local, state, and federal agencies involved.”

Passeau pointed a finger at him. “But you’ll need FAA approval for landing that aircraft.”

“And you won’t get it,” said Tweedledum, on Passeau’s left.

“You’re in deep trouble, Mr. Randolph,” said Tweedledee.

Raising his hands placatingly, Dan said, “Gentlemen, you’re assuming that the plane is coming down in U.S. airspace.”

All three men stared at him.

“It’s not.”

“It’s not? How can you—”

Stepping around his desk, Dan said, “Come with me, boys. I was just going over to the blockhouse to watch the landing from there.”

Lynn Van Buren was thinking, We’re coming up to the point in the reentry trajectory where the 01 vehicle failed. If we’re going to have a problem, it’ll be in the next few minutes.

“Reentry sequence initiated,” called one of her team, sitting in the seat across the aisle from her.

Van Buren realized she was sweating in the plane’s cramped cabin, even though the air conditioning was turned up full blast. It was a cloudy morning outside; tropical thunderheads were already building up over the mountains that blocked their view of the sea.

Good thing we’re bringing her in now, Van Buren said to herself. Another hour or so and we’ll have thunderstorms drenching the area.

“Reentry initiated.”

She saw the readings for the temperature sensors on the plane’s nose, underbelly, and the leading edges of the wings begin to climb steeply. The rising curves were all well under the red curve that marked maximum allowable temperature, though. So far so good, she thought

“Pitch-up maneuver in ten seconds.”

This is it, Van Buren told herself, her pulse quickening. This is where 01 failed.

“Confirm pitch-up maneuver.”

On Van Buren’s laptop screen the little icon representing the plane was smack on the curve that displayed the nominal reentry trajectory. No problems, she saw. Then she silently added. So far.

“Max heating.”

“Max aerodynamic stress.”

She held her breath. The plane was on automatic, guided entirely by its onboard computer. Van Buren knew she could override the onboard system if she had to, but she dearly wanted to avoid that. Let the bird come in on its own, she repeated over and over, like a mantra.

Something flashed. Van Buren winced and glanced out the plane’s window. A deep roll of thunder grumbled out there. No! she screamed silently. Hold off! Let me bring the bird back to the ground first!

“Initiating bleed-off turns,” said the woman in the seat in front of her. The spaceplane was starting a series of three wide turns to slow itself down enough for the landing.

“Mach eight and dropping.”

“Turn one completed.”

The Mach numbers were spiraling down. The worst is over, Van Buren thought as she stared at her screen. She’s through reentry. No problems.

“Turn two completed.”

Another flash of lightning. “Dammit, hold off!” Van Buren grumbled in a whisper. More thunder.

“Turn three completed.”

A louder, sharper crack.

“That wasn’t thunder,” somebody sang out Sonic boom, Van Buren knew.

“Can you see her?”

They had mounted a camera atop the Citation’s fuselage and slaved it to the airport’s radar. Van Buren clicked on the camera view.

“There she is!” she shouted. The plane was racing across the clouds, a double vapor trail streaking off its wing tips.

“Come on home, baby,” someone said in a fervent prayer.

“Landing gear down.”

“Speed two-ten… two-oh-two… one-ninety-six…”

Van Buren shoved her laptop under the chair in front of her, jumped to her feet, and rushed to the plane’s hatch. It was slightly ajar. She pushed it all the way open and raced down the metal steps, ducked beneath the Citation’s wing just in time to see the sleek silvery spaceplane touch its wheels to the runway with a screech and a puff of rubber.

The rest of the team piled out of the Citation as the spaceplane rolled to a stop well short of the end of the runway.

“Yahoo!” This time the cheer was heartfelt.

Rain began to spatter down. Big fat drops splashed all over them. The Venezuelan soldiers around the perimeter of their area stood in amazement as they watched this gang of loco gringos dancing in the downpour.