Powersat

Matagora Island, Texas

As he sat in the last row of the spaceplane’s cabin listening Ato the countdown in his helmet earphones, Dan realized that all seven of the crew were lying on their backs with their legs up in the air, like women in the throes of passionate sex. He grinned to himself. They were all completely enveloped in their spacesuits, encased in thick layers of plastic and fabric. We couldn’t even masturbate in these outfits, he thought.

This is the first time I’ve ridden the spaceplane, he realized. All his other trips to orbit had been aboard Soyuz-type capsules either made in Russia or manufactured under license by a commercial builder. He wouldn’t pay the $10,000-per-pound price NASA wanted for the space shuttle, nor was NASA comfortable with the thought of carrying a money-grubbing industrialist into space instead of a scientist or engineer.

“T minus two minutes,” Dan heard in his earphones. “Internal power on. All systems go.”

Gerry Adair sat up front at the controls. Not that there was anything for him to do; the countdown and launch were all automated. Adair’s work would come later, once they had achieved orbit and had to make a rendezvous with the orbital transfer vehicle that was waiting up there.

“T minus ninety seconds. LOX pressure in the green. Hydrogen pressure in the green.”

Still no word about what caused the outage, Dan thought. Guess we won’t know for certain until we get there and see for ourselves.

“T minus sixty seconds. Life support on internal. Fuel cells on.”

Van Buren would call if she’d found out what’s wrong with the bird. Good thing this didn’t happen yesterday with all the VIPs here. Vicki must be throwing a fit by now, threatening to sue if we don’t let her leave the base. Tough. We can’t have her blabbing this story before we fix the satellite.

“Ten… nine… eight…”

Dan closed his eyes and gripped his seat’s armrests as hard as he could through his thick gloves. This beast kicks like a mule, he knew.

Worse. The rocket engines ignited and Dan felt as if he were being fired out of a cannon. A forty-ton anvil slammed into his chest; his eyeballs started sinking into his head. There were no windows along the cabin to look out of, and he couldn’t have turned his head anyway. He just sank into the cushioned acceleration couch and tried to breathe. He couldn’t lift his arms off the seat rests, couldn’t even wiggle his toes inside the heavy boots.

His vision blurred and everything turned a lurid reddish tint, like being in a photo lab with the safety lights on.

I’m too old for this sort of thing, Dan told himself. What in the Seven Cities of Cíbola made me think I should take this double-damned roller coaster?

After several lifetimes, the pressure eased somewhat. Dan heard a bang and felt the cabin shudder. Booster separation, his mind told him. The booster’s dropped away and we’re riding on the spaceplane’s engines now.

And then it all went away. The pressure vanished. Dan’s arms floated off the armrests. His stomach gurgled, but he remembered to refrain from making sudden head movements.

“Woo-ie!” one of the women whooped. “That was a ride!”

“Let’s do it again, Daddy!”

Dan grinned weakly and concentrated on not throwing up.

There was plenty of handshaking to do at Arlington National Cemetery. While the honor guard of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines got out of their trucks and began to arrange their ranks and flags, Senator Thornton worked her way through the VIP stand, saying hello and exchanging greetings with politicians and bureaucrats.

She noticed that Secret Service bodyguards were arriving now, trying to look unobtrusive as they scoped out the crowd with special electro-optical scanners disguised to look like fashionable sunglasses.

The president would be arriving soon, Jane knew. His motorcade of limousines and motorcycles has probably already left the White House and is making its way around the Lincoln Memorial.

It was somewhat ironic that the nerve center for the nation’s elaborate network of spy satellites was buried deep underground. Beneath enough reinforced concrete to survive even a nuclear strike, dozens of technicians monitored screens that showed virtually every square inch of the Earth’s surface, land and sea. Ships were being tracked, even submerged submarines. Not a truck or a train moved without some satellite high up in orbit watching it.

The room hummed with electrical power; it was large and generously air-conditioned, yet it still felt sweaty-hot and crowded, with all the technicians seated at row after row of consoles. Even on this holiday afternoon there was an intent man or woman hunched over each console monitoring each screen. The strip lamps along the ceiling were dim; most of the light came from the display screens, flickering eerily against the concrete walls.

Nothing much out of the ordinary was happening, though, so the duty officer should have been relaxed. She was not. A Navy lieutenant commander, she was a woman who ached for command of a capital ship at sea but instead was stuck with babysitting a bunch of spy eyes in the sky. She had been surprised when the deputy director of homeland security entered the monitoring center escorted by a pair of marines. In quick order, her surprise gave way to interest, and then to irritation.

“Track an electronic beacon?” she asked the deputy director for the third time. She looked again at the flimsy sheet of specifications he had handed her. “With this low a signal?” She shook her head.

The deputy director was in his midfifties, a lifelong bureaucrat who had been in the Treasury Department before Homeland Security had opened new paths for career advancement. He was good-looking in a chisel-featured, cosmetic-surgery way. He was accustomed to persuading people who were reluctant to comply with his wishes. He was not accustomed to being rebuffed, especially by a woman in uniform.

“Commander,” he said softly, over the muted hum of the consoles, “this request comes from the very highest level of the Homeland Security Department. The request originated with the FBI. It also has the CIA’s approval, I might add.”

“I don’t care if it comes from the Oval Office,” the lieutenant commander said. “That signal is just too weak for our birds to pick up. What kind of a freaking dumbjohn set up this pitiful little squeaker?”

“Ferret satellites have picked up signals a lot weaker than this one.”

Waving the spec sheet in his face, the captain said, “Yeah, but it’s not just the power of the signal all by itself. It’s the signal-to-noise ratio. Your beacon’s too goddam close to the port of Marseille. There’s all kinds of chatter coming out of the city, on every frequency you can imagine. It’d be like trying to listen to a mouse fart in the middle of some Italian opera.”

The deputy director performed a dramatic sigh. “So am I supposed to go back to the director of homeland security and tell him that you won’t even try to track their beacon?”

The lieutenant commander heard his unspoken words: That would not be a positive career move for you. She also realized that this must be just as important as he claimed, to get a deputy director down here on a holiday afternoon.

She stared at the spec sheet again, grumbled something too low for the deputy director to make out, and walked off to one of the monitoring consoles.