Phase Space (19 page)

Today’s launch would be the fourth flight of the four-booster configuration, and the first orbital test of the NERVA 3 nuclear tug. That NERVA was going to be sent around the Moon, unmanned, and then, the plan went, later in the year there would be a couple of manned test flights, and maybe a Moon mission as early as next year. It was all part of the plan to establish a nuclear silo up there on the Moon: more silent sentinels, warning off any possible aggressors.

The NERVA was the reason there were so many VIPs here, on this roof and in the VIP stand.

This would be the twenty-first Shuttle launch of the year, from the Cape and Vandenburg, and the ninety-first of the programme in all, since the first successful orbital flight, bang on schedule in 1977. This year alone there ought to be forty-four launches, maybe fifteen of them USAF missions, using the Air Force’s own two dedicated orbiters launched out of Vandenburg.

The Shuttle had turned into a magnificent success. Everyone had been determined to make it so, NASA, USAF and contractors alike. And Burdick, since he’d transferred from the Moon programme after it was closed down with Apollo 12, had been proud to play his part in that.

There was nothing about the Shuttle programme today that hadn’t been in the plans right back in 1969, even before Apollo 11 landed. But
Eagle,
Burdick guessed, had given everyone a little incentive to get it right. Stunt flights to the Moon could wait. Space was the high ground, and if America didn’t make it secure, the Soviets would, and there would be hell to pay.

And the Shuttle, with all its military applications – reconnaissance, interception, satellite recovery, hunter-killer capabilities, rescue and relief – was the key.

So here they were, operating five orbiters just as advertized, with an eleven-day airline-style turnaround between each flight, and with the components of Space Station Freedom, an outpost on that high frontier, already being assembled in plants in California and Texas and Alabama.

Anyhow, once old Walter Dornberger, von Braun’s old boss, had been brought out of retirement and started applying a little of that old Peenemunde discipline to the project, everything got a lot tighter.

The countdown went through smoothly, as it always did.

Up on the roof, Burdick did his share of the gladhanding and flesh-pressing. But he ducked out once the count neared its conclusion. He was here for the launch, after all.

At main-engine start, a bright white light erupted at the base of the orbiter, and white smoke squirted out to either side.

There they go, guys, three at a hundred.

Then the four solid boosters lit up, showering orange smoke, yellow sparks. The stack lifted off the ground, startlingly quickly, trailing a column of white smoke which glowed orange within, as if on fire. The plume of yellow light from the SRBs was incredibly bright – dazzling, like liquid light, like sunlight seen from the Moon.

There was clapping and hollering from the dignitaries and crew relatives. Burdick kept his binoculars clamped to his face.

The stack arched over onto its back and followed a steep curve away from its tower. Already the gantry was dwarfed by the smoke column. After ten seconds the Shuttle punched through an isolated thin cloud, threading it like rope.

The sound reached him after fifteen seconds: a crackling thunder which came tumbling down over him, sharp slaps over an underlying rumble.

It was a hell of a thing, he thought.

And then –

It looked as if the SRBs had detached a little early. The single vapour trail split up into five, the orbiter itself with its main engines burning white, and the four SRBs careening out of the smoke, like diverging fingers.

Shit, he thought.

The orbiter blew first, that big External Tank on its belly just cracking open, oxygen and hydrogen igniting in a single pure blast. And then the four SRBs went up like firecrackers around that central glare, destroyed by the Range Safety Officer.

We have no downlink at this time. We’re obviously studying the event.

He could still hear the routine rocket noise flowing over him, like a ghost, the sound of the disaster itself still suspended in the ruptured air.

The NERVA, he thought. How many pounds of fissile uranium had just been smeared over the Florida sky?

Reagan. They had to get the President under cover.

He looked around, through a crowd that had turned into a mob of screaming, crying people. There: Curtis LeMay had his arm around Reagan’s shoulders, and was hustling him away, towards the door from the roof. Burdick could hear what LeMay was saying to the ashen President.
We can’t tolerate this, sir. We have to consider eradication. I’m talking about Project Control, Mr President. We’ve been talking about this since the 1950s at the Air War College. We aren’t talking about pre-emptive strikes, sir,
but about the historic rollback of the Soviet Union. It’s time …
Old Nixon was nodding gravely.

Burdick stayed on the roof, a handkerchief on his mouth against the fall-out, until all the women and children had been escorted out of the open air.

January 1986:

As the pilots prepared for the interception,
Yeager
’s flight deck was like a little workshop, Burdick thought, glowing with the lights of Earth, and the crews’ fluorescent glareshields. The battle-ship-grey walls were encrusted with switches and instruments that shone white and yellow with internal light, though the surfaces in which they were embedded were battered and scuffed with age and use. There was a constant, high-pitched whir, of environment control pumps and fans.

Once more he had control pedals at his feet, a joystick between his legs. He felt at home. The Shuttle orbiter was a fine old warplane.

The Soyuz target had been over Iraq when
Yeager
launched from Vandenburg, and there had been a gap of ten thousand miles between them. But orbital mechanics brought him ever closer to his prey, at a rate of a thousand miles per orbit.

Anyhow there was no rush. The Shuttle was fitted with its extended-duration pack, solar panels that had unfolded from the payload bay like wings. They could stay up here for a month if they needed to.

Burdick even had time to send a message down a secure line to Fay at Vandenburg, and to Philip Jr, who was, at fifteen, a cadet at St John’s Military Academy in Wisconsin.

It was good to be back in command.

Since he’d been moved upstairs he was enjoying his assignment as head of the Office of Manned Spaceflight. But flying a desk was no substitute for flying Shuttle. At fifty-six, he’d thought he was too old to fly again, but Hans Mark – NASA Administrator, former Air Force secretary and physicist under Edward Teller – had persuaded him to come out of retirement for this one mission. Space Command needed all the pilots it could get right now, and even if this mission wasn’t the most glamorous of Project Control – those had to be the dramatic high-atmosphere swoops of
Adams
and
Falcon
and
Enterprise,
as they had dropped their bomb loads over the USSR, far out of reach of any intercept capability – cherry-picking the last Soyuz spy ship had to be the most technically challenging, and fun.

The ground track took them over the Soviet Union a couple of times. Even now, a month after Project Control had reached its spectacular climax, he could still see the glowing craters where the space centres at Volgograd and Kapustin Yar used to be. The whole country was pretty dark, although he could see cities burning around the rim of Russia itself: in the Moslem republics of south Asia, and the Baltic republics, and even the east European satellites.

Of course there was a price to pay. Before it collapsed, the Soviet government had shot off a few of its own nukes. Warsaw was gone, for instance. And there were rumours of trouble on the long Chinese frontier. But that was okay by Burdick. Everybody had taken the chance to kick the old bear when he was down, and Burdick guessed they were entitled.

Not that everyone agreed. Before the UN had been thrown out of New York there had been pretty near universal condemnation of the US’s actions, universal except for the British anyhow. But the UN were assholes. It was no more than you’d expect from a bullshit factory like that.

When he passed over the US, it was strange to see Florida from orbit, that big black scar down its evacuated eastern coast. Not that the loss of the Cape was so grievous. The
Aldrin
disaster, in the end, had just expedited LeMay’s plans to transfer all the Shuttle resources to the USAF. The climate at Vandenburg was a lot more stable for landings anyhow.

Funny thing that the
Aldrin
crash, which had spurred off Project Control in the first place, had turned out to be caused by a simple glitch, a fuel line that had perished from u-v exposure. Not sabotage at all. Burdick didn’t suppose it mattered. Control would have come about anyhow. There had been a whole string of provocations from the USSR: Afghanistan, their own unmanned Shuttle, the damn Salyut spy platforms. These things had a huge historic inevitability to them, it seemed to him.

His crew, all USAF officers, was working well, just like the drill. Even young Tom Gibson, up here on his third mission, who had spent half his time throwing up, was working well with the handheld laser-ranging device, checking Burdick’s position.

Burdick suspected he intimidated these junior guys. They all seemed so damn young. And how must he seem to them? – the only Moonwalker left flying, like some monolith from the past.

The youngsters were all wearing the smart new black uniforms of Space Command, with their thunderbolt flashes and bright logos. The uniforms looked good, and had struck a chord in the public mind, Burdick knew. Air Force Space Command seemed to represent a certain
order,
in a country beset by foes abroad, and trouble at home: revolutionaries everywhere, and polyglot cities, and hippies and anarchists and sex maniacs and drug addicts and activists and homosexuals and punk rockers and soaring crime …

The Rocket State,
they called it: the goal was a conflict-free society administered from above, dominated by technology and smart young men like these, embodying the eternal American values of piety, hard work, family and flag. Just like the USAF, and NASA.

Order, imposed from space.

And now that Project Control had been implemented, that order would spread across the planet:
Pax Americana,
in the face of which all the old illogical ethnic and religious differences would dissolve, and mankind would come to its senses, and progress to a better tomorrow.

And so on. Burdick accepted it all. It was a fine vision. He’d welcomed the executions of Jane Fonda and Jesse Jackson and John Lennon and the rest of those fellow travellers for their treasonous subversion, the hell with them.

But even so these new uniforms made him feel just a little uncomfortable. They were too close to the images from Germany he’d grown up with as a kid. It was a kind of easy glamour, he thought. He preferred good-old Air Force blue.

A couple more burns to tweak his orbit, and then they were closing fast on Soyuz. Burdick went through his terminal initiation burn, and then his rendezvous radar started to track the bogey. He assumed the low-Z position beneath the little Russian ship and used his reaction thrusters to push up towards Soyuz from beneath.

Now he could see Soyuz, through the little rendezvous windows above his head.

The body of Soyuz was a light blue-green, an unexpectedly beautiful, Earthlike colour. Soyuz looked something like a pepperpot, a bug-like shape nine feet across, with its fat Orbital Module stuck on the nose of the main body, a truncated cylinder, capped by the headlight-shaped Descent Module. Two matte-black solar panels jutted from its rounded flanks, like unfolded wings, and a parabolic antenna was held away from the ship, on a light gantry.

Soyuz was basically an Apollo-era craft, still flying twenty years later. It looked, frankly, like a piece of shit to Burdick.

Soyuz was floating right down into
Yeager
’s gaping-open payload bay, like a minnow drifting into the mouth of a shark.

Tom Gibson was working the RMS now, the remote manipulator arm. The RMS had a heavy industrial-strength cutting laser bolted to its end, and Tom just reached up and snipped off the solar-cell wings of Soyuz, snip snip, like cutting the wings off a fly. Those solar panels drifted away, sparkling as they twisted. It was expertly done, and Burdick didn’t even need to slow down his rate of approach.

The laser had come out of JPL, which had started producing some fine military applications since its weaponization in 1980.