Powersat

Matagorda Island, Texas

Dan and Lynn Van Buren walked slowly around the sleek, needle-nosed spaceplane. Even sitting here in the hangar she looks eager to fly, Dan thought. Dan wanted to reach up and touch her smooth, cool metal skin, but he could feel Niles Muhamed’s fiercely proprietary stare boring into his back.

“How’d your meeting with Garrison go?” Van Buren asked as they walked slowly around the craft.

“The old man’s sitting tight and waiting for me to cave in,” said Dan. “Funny, but I got the feeling al-Bashir is willing to bend a little.”

“Are you going to cave in? A billion and a half—”

Dan frowned at her. “Ever hear of Frank Piasecki?”

She thought a moment “Wasn’t he one of the early helicopter pioneers? Invented the heavy-lift chopper, the one they called ‘the flying banana.’”

“Right. He got himself into the same fix we’re in, needed capital to keep his company going. So he let the Rockefeller brothers stick their nose under his tent.”

“Oh-oh. I can see where this is going.”

“Yep. Next thing you know, Piasecki’s kicked out and the money boys sell his company to Boeing. It’s Boeing’s Vertol division now and dear old Frank is moldering in his grave.”

Van Buren said nothing, but from the expression on her face Dan thought she understood.

“So how’s oh-two coming along?” he asked, pointing to the spaceplane sitting on the hangar floor.

“She’s ready to go,” Van Buren said, grinning. “She’s a real flying machine.”

He grimaced. “Tell it to the FAA.”

“They won’t allow it? Not even unmanned?”

Dan looked down at her. Van Buren was a good two inches shorter than he. “Don’t you mean ‘crewless’? You’re getting politically incorrect, kid.”

She didn’t laugh, didn’t even smile. “I’m beginning to understand why you don’t want the government involved in anything you do.”

“Damn! We’ve got the best spacecraft that’s ever been built, and we can’t even get it off the double-damned ground.”

Nodding sympathetically, Van Buren said, “Passeau won’t allow it?”

With a bitter laugh, Dan replied, “He said he can’t stop us from launching it, that’s not under his jurisdiction. But he won’t give us permission to fly in U.S. airspace. That is under his jurisdiction and he won’t allow it.”

“Damn.”

“I can’t blame him,” Dan admitted. “His higher-ups would fry his balls if he let us fly the bird before the accident investigation has found the cause for the crash.”

“Double damn,” Van Buren said fervently.

Dan grinned at her. “You’re starting to sound like me.”

“Great minds run in similar ruts, chief.”

Dan ambled slowly around the silvery, stubby-winged spaceplane one more time, thinking of all the red tape he’d been forced to go through to be able to operate his company. He almost laughed when he remembered his chief counsel’s face as the lawyer told him they needed a fireworks permit from Calhoun County before they could launch a rocket from Matagorda Island. Fireworks! Dan thought That’s where a sixteen-story-high, twelve-hundred-ton rocket booster fit into the local bureaucracy. Fireworks.

“What’s funny, chief?” Van Buren asked as they walked out of the hangar into the bright hot morning sunlight.

Squinting in the glare, Dan said, “We’ve got all the permits we need to launch a booster, don’t we?”

She shrugged. “Guess so. That’s a problem for the legal department, not engineering.”

“As long as it’s not a crewed launch, nobody aboard.”

“The spent booster breaks up over the Atlantic,” Van Buren said. “But the spaceplane has got to come back here and land.”

“And the FAA won’t approve a flight plan, even crewless,” Dan repeated.

“What’re you driving at, chief?”

Dan quickened his pace, heading back to Hangar A and his office. The plump Van Buren chugged along beside him, puffing.

“Okay. We launch out over the Gulf, same as usual. Can you work out an orbit so that the spaceplane’s reentry track isn’t over the States?”

“Not over the U.S.?”

“Right,” Dan said, pushing through the personnel hatch in the hangar’s closed sliding doors. “The bird’s orbit can cross the States; it’s high enough above controlled airspace so the FAA doesn’t have anything to say about it. But when it comes in for reentry it’s got to stay out of U.S. airspace.”

Following Dan up the stairs toward the catwalk offices, Van Buren puffed, “She’s got… some translational… latitude…”

At the top of the stairs Dan whirled on her and pointed his index finger like a pistol. “Work it out, Lynn. Fast. And don’t let anybody else know about it.”

“But—”

“No buts! Get it done.”

She saw how utterly serious he was. “Okay. You’re the chief.”

“Nobody else on this,” Dan warned. “Use your laptop and keep it with you wherever you go.”

She grinned at him, her cheeks dimpling. “Even when I go to the toilet?”

“Even when you’re making love,” Dan answered.

He watched the engineer as she hurried back down the stairs and toward her office, a nondescript woman in a plain dark blue blouse and matching slacks. And a brain that might be the difference between keeping my company or selling out to the sharks, Dan thought.

He breezed into his office, waving hello to April at her desk as he passed. She always looked startled when he bounced in like that. But she didn’t try to stop him or tell him that he had calls to answer or meetings to see to. Good, Dan thought as he slid into his desk chair. He booted up his desktop computer and saw that he had a clear agenda right through to two P.M., when the chief accountant was due for his weekly funeral dirge. And then a telephone conference with two of his biggest shareholders, in preparation for the coming quarterly meeting of the board of directors.

So what am I going to tell the board? he asked himself. Do I say we’re hanging on by a fingernail or do I tell them the truth and say we’re hanging, all right, and not by the neck, either.

The office is so damned quiet! he realized. We’re slowing down to a walk. Worse, a limp. In another few weeks we won’t even be able to crawl. Unless…

It can work, Dan thought as he swiveled the chair to look out at the midmorning scenery. Quiet outside, too. None of the bustle of trucks coming in and out, people hustling from building to building, boosters being towed out to the launchpad. This company is dying, sinking beneath the waves and gasping for air.

He jumped to his feet and stepped to the window that overlooked the hangar floor. Only a half-dozen FAA people meandering among the bits of wreckage. Dying, he repeated to himself.

Well, by god we’ll go out with a bang, not a whimper. Launch the spaceplane on its booster. Unmanned. The whole flight under control from the ground. But not from here. From a remote site, someplace where the murdering sons of bitches can’t find us. Once the bird’s in orbit, shift the orbit so that when it reenters it’s not over any part of the U.S. If the saboteurs don’t know where the ground track is, they won’t be able to screw up the flight.

And then land the bird. Back here in Matagorda? She’d have to fly into U.S. airspace for that. Maybe we ought to avoid that altogether. I’ll have to work with Lynn on that.

He laughed aloud. Passeau will shit a brick!

Dan didn’t realize how hard he was laughing until April poked her head through his door and asked if he was all right.