The Medusa Stone

Cape Kennedy, Florida October 1989

Seated on his back for the last three hours and strapped to four and a half million pounds of explosives, Air Force Captain Len Cullins listened impatiently to the monotonous drone of the launch director. He assumed the lack of emotion was meant to reassure the flight crew, but he found the voice irritating beyond reason. With his first launch only two minutes away, Cullins still had time to fantasize about reaching through the radio link and strangling the director in his air-conditioned control center several miles away. The thought made him smile behind the dome of his helmet’s face shield.

“Atlantis, this is Control. H-two tank pressurization okay. You are go for launch. Over.”

“Roger, ground. We are go for launch. Out,” Cullins intoned by rote.

The seconds dripped by, ground control and Cullins speaking in a prescripted speech devoid of any of the drama for what was about to take place. Outside the orbiter’s heat-resistant windows, the deep black of the night shrouded eastern Florida. The stars beckoned and Cullins knew in a few minutes he would reach them. “Light this candle, for Christ’s sake,” he muttered.

“Atlantis, you are on your onboard computers. Over.”

“Roger.”

When Ground finally reached the critical final seconds of the countdown, Cullins could no longer hear the throb of the auxiliary power units or the fans and motors that hummed in the cabin. To him, all was silent in those last moments.

“Five… four… we have main engine start…” Within a third of a second, the orbiter’s main engines were pouring out a million pounds of thrust, white-hot exhaust searing the metal launch platform of pad 39A. However, all of this power did nothing except sway the Atlantis slightly forward on its mounts, what astronauts called “twang.” From the pilot’s seat, Cullins could not yet see the light from the controlled detonation of the liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel, but the noise generated by the combustion shook Atlantis violently. For a brief instant he wondered just what the hell he had gotten himself into.

“Three… two… one…”

Just as the spacecraft righted itself from its expected wobble, the solid rocket boosters ignited, each of them putting out more than double the power of the orbiter’s internal motors. It was as if Len Cullins and the other three men of the shuttle’s crew had been collectively slammed against a wall. At the moment of ignition, thousands of gallons of water were dumped under the multiple exhaust nozzles in an effort to reduce the deadly vibrations caused by the roar of her throaty power plants. The water turned to billowing clouds of steam that reflected the fiery yellow exhaust.

“And we have liftoff.” No shit!

In five seconds, the shuttle cleared the tower, and it was as if dawn had come to the Florida coast long before sunrise. The shuttle rose up and out of the mangrove swamps on a flaming trail of plasma that slashed the night like a knife stroke, chemical energy becoming kinetic so quickly that forty seconds after lift-off, the sound barrier was broken and then broken again only a few moments later. In two minutes, as the solid rocket boosters belched the last of their fuel, the orbiter was traveling four and a half times the speed of sound and was already twenty-eight miles above the earth.

While the onboard computers manipulated fuel flow into the Atlantis’ internal engines to keep G-forces below three times normal, Len Cullins felt as if his body was being smeared into the contoured seat. Training had prepared him for this, but he still couldn’t believe the feeling. So simple a matter as lifting a gloved hand from the armrest took nearly all of his strength.

“Atlantis, we have SRB separation.”

“Roger. What a sight!” Cullins exclaimed.

The twin boosters attached to the bulbous external tank blew away from the orbiter like Catherine wheels, the last of their fuel spinning them in blazing arcs of fire and hot gas. And still the orbiter climbed, accelerating the entire time, past Mach ten like a mile marker on an empty interstate.

At an altitude of sixty-two miles, the crew was treated to the sun rising over the diminishing horizon. Even as they gasped like primitives at the reassuring sight, the Atlantis powered out of the atmosphere, to the realm where the Earth was little more than a painted backdrop, stripped of its warmth and beauty by the frigid vacuum of space.

“Atlantis, Ground. You are negative return. Do you copy?” Negative return meant that the orbiter was too high and too far downrange to land at their emergency fields in North Africa or Europe. Either Atlantis made it into space or died trying.

“Roger, Ground,” Cullins replied to Houston Control, which had taken over the flight from Cape Kennedy as soon as the craft had cleared the launch tower. Ground Control for America’s space program was located in Texas because of Lyndon Johnson’s machinations during the program’s infancy, a legacy that had since cost the agency millions in redundancies.

Eight minutes after the first rumble of the orbiter’s main engines, they sucked the last of the fuel from the external tank, and suddenly a profound silence rushed in on the crew. It was at that exact moment, when the thrust of the engines died, and his arms lifted off his chair to float like swaying kelp in a tidal pool, that Cullins realized he had slipped Earth’s bounds. He’d also done something every person in the world envied. He’d obtained a childhood dream.

“Atlantis, Ground. Go for ET separation.”

“Roger. External tank separation… now.”

Explosive bolts shoved the huge tank from the orbiter, and it began its long tumble back into the atmosphere, where it would harmlessly burn up.

“Gravity may be a law,” Dale Markham, the payload specialist seated behind Cullins, joked. “But Newtonian mechanics is one hell of a ‘get out of jail free’ card.”

Two hours after reaching orbit, with the payload bay doors open to vent excess heat, the crew got down to their primary mission task. They were already feeling the debilitating effects of zero gravity, and by tomorrow the crew would be about worthless. Therefore, NASA had scheduled a payload launch as soon as the shuttle had reached a stable orbit 250 miles above the planet.

Len Cullins and the other three men were still running on the adrenaline from the launch, yet nausea was becoming more than a nuisance and would soon impair them all. Videos and practice aboard NASA’s converted Boeing 707 Vomit Comet could not prepare them for what it truly felt like to be in perpetual free fall. Sitting grim-faced in the pilot’s chair, Cullins promised himself that he would not be the first to throw up the steak and egg breakfast prepared for them in Florida.

“Atlantis, Ground, prepare for transfer to Vandenberg for payload deployment.” Vandenberg Airforce Base in California was in charge of the satellite in the shuttle’s cargo bay, and its safe deployment was the principal mission for the shuttle’s launch despite NASA’s official press release about a communications satellite.

“Roger,” Cullins said, and swallowed quickly, his stomach roiling just a few inches below his throat, his salivary glands on overdrive. “Vandenberg, go ahead, this is Atlantis.”

“Atlantis, this is Vandenberg. We show green across the board for payload deployment.”

“Roger, Vandenberg, we are go for payload deployment. Deployment is eighteen minutes.” Cullins knew the window for launching the satellite from the cargo bay was very narrow due to the bird’s particular mission. He switched to the internal radio net. “Dale, you’ve got eighteen minutes. How you doing back there?”

“Breakfast wasn’t nearly as good coming up as it was going down, but I’m about ready,” Markham replied.

Markham and the other payload specialist, Nick Fielding, were standing at the aft crew station, and until the satellite was safely away from the orbiter, total control of the shuttle had been turned over to them. Fielding would work the orbiter rotational controller that affected Atlantis’ pitch, yaw, and roll, while Markham’s specialty was the Canadian-built manipulator arm. Theirs was an exacting task due to the delicacy of the orbiter and payload and the effects of microgravity. Both men had heard the rumor that the Defense Department satellite, code-named Medusa, had cost two and a quarter billion dollars, and now its safety was their responsibility.

“Screw up this one, Dale, and we’ll never see a tax refund check again,” Fielding quipped as he used the joystick controller to lift the manipulator arm out of its storage rack.

“Atlantis, this is Vandenberg. Ground track has you nearing position, payload release in eleven minutes.”

“Roger that ground, eleven minutes,” Markham replied. He felt as though he was about to be sick again.

“You okay, Dale?”

“Never better.” Markham belched wetly. “What’s our attitude?”

“We’re on the marks, nose down at 90 degrees,” Fielding said.

“I still don’t like this. The original mission planned for a full day of systems checks and practice with the manipulator arm before deploying the payload.”

“We would have had it if the launch had gone off as planned yesterday. Blame Mother Nature for a windstorm, not the Air Force for bending their rules,” Markham replied. “Besides, I don’t mind saying I’ll be relieved when this thing is out of the cargo bay. Have you heard what it can do?”

“Stow it, gentlemen, and get on with the task at hand.” A gruff voice came from behind them. Colonel Mike “Duke” Wayne was the shuttle commander and had the ultimate responsibility for this flight. Unlike the rest of the crew, the bristle-haired colonel had been in space before, on an early mission aboard Challenger also run by the Air Force in coordination with the National Security Agency.

Watching a video monitor and occasionally peering through the window, Markham twisted the manipulator arm until it had grasped the Medusa satellite’s grapple, all the while aware of Wayne’s steady gaze. Looking out over the cargo bay, the shuttle’s vertical stabilizer was just a thin white line against the blackness of deep space.

“Four minutes, Lieutenant Markham,” Wayne said.

“Roger,” Markham replied without taking his eyes off the video feed from the manipulator’s elbow camera, showing the satellite’s orientation within the sixty-foot cargo bay. Until the Medusa was deployed and its solar panels and transceiver dish extended, it resembled a large, dark ice cream cone. Even with the cargo bay floodlights at full power, the satellite’s skin appeared to be a darker shade of black than the space beyond, its radar-absorbing material seeming to consume light like a man-made black hole. The tip of the one visible sensor looked like the barrel of a large-caliber cannon, but was composed of intricately woven wires of what appeared to be gold.

Working the joystick like a surgeon, Markham lifted the Medusa out of its cradle. On land, the manipulator arm had less strength than an average man, but in the void, it could easily handle the eleven-ton satellite. Like the appendage of some monstrous insect, the fifty-foot arm eased the satellite upward so it hung suspended over the floor of the cargo bay.

Markham sucked in a breath in an effort to calm his churning stomach. A slight twitch on the controller could slam the Medusa against the side of the shuttle or launch it on an unstable orbit, and he was about to be sick. He safed the arm by locking it into position, reached for a motion sickness bag, and vomited.

“I’ve got the Medusa launch,” Nick Fielding said, quickly taking over.

Markham smiled a weak thanks, his deep Florida tan faded to a sickly shade of green. As soon as he floated away from the aft crew station, Colonel Wayne stepped onto the variable-height work platform situated before the manipulator arm controls. “Vandenberg Control, this is Atlantis. We are prepared for payload separation on your mark. Attitude match confirmed.” Wayne’s brusque competence was like a steadying hand to Fielding, who didn’t particularly want the responsibility of the launch.

“Atlantis, this is General Kolwicki. “Is that you, Duke?”

“Affirmative, sir. Atlantis standing by for countdown. We’re all ready for our vacation.”

Normally, NASA’s tight budget called for orbiter crews to carry out scientific experiments after completing their primary mission objectives in order to maximize time in space and justify the staggering cost of launching a shuttle into orbit. However, the launching of the Medusa was deemed so critical that for the four days the shuttle was to remain in orbit, the crewmen were nothing more than sightseers, free to use their time as they saw fit. NASA had insisted that the crew remain in orbit for the extra days in order to perpetuate the deception about this military flight.

“Atlantis, this is Vandenberg Control. One minute from my mark for payload release… Mark.”

Markham, Fielding, and Cullins might have heard rumors about the Medusa but only Wayne knew its true capabilities. Medusa wasn’t just the single satellite in the cargo bay; it was an entire system, five platforms in total, four of them already in orbit and bearing down on the Atlantis. The final component, the satellite they were about to launch, was the crux of the system and had cost almost half of the $2.25 billion budget.

Designed to be the eyes of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the Medusa was unlike any spy satellite ever built. Military planners knew that Soviet doctrine called for several silos and hardened bunkers for each of their nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. They could use these sites at random, secretly moving the missiles on trucks in an attempt to foil American targeting. Thus, a Russian launch could come from any number of places, many of them unknown or untargeted. It was a horrifying version of a card shuffle. Even with an unlimited budget, the Pentagon could not build enough laser defenses to cover all possible Soviet and Eastern European targets. In order for Star Wars to be successful, the U.S. needed to pinpoint the actual silos and bunkers where the rockets were housed at the time of launch. This way, if a launch ever occurred, the space-based lasers would already be locked on at the moment of liftoff and not waste precious seconds trying to acquire their target. To accomplish this, the Pentagon needed a new type of spy satellite that could look down from space and see through the rock and concrete and steel shelters and reveal Russia’s most closely guarded secrets.

Medusa worked like a ground-penetrating sonar but employed charged subatomic particles rather than sound waves. The four receiver satellites that were currently orbiting in a diamond formation were poised to receive bounce-back information from the principle positron gun mounted on the about-to-be-released Medusa. Much of the science behind Medusa was beyond Wayne’s understanding. He did know the Medusa mounted a plutonium reactor to create and fire the positrons and utilized the theorem of electromagnetic repulsion to receive the rebounded particles for collection by the other satellites. In computer modeling, Medusa could accurately detect a hardened missile silo, tell if it was currently storing an ICBM, pinpoint its command bunker and support tunnels, and even discover the underground piping conduits for power cables and dedicated communications lines. Medusa could see through the oceans as if they were glass and find nuclear submarines no matter how deeply or silently they were running. It was so precise that a detailed map of a mine field could be produced after just a few sweeps, beamed to a command post in real time, and give the exact position of every buried enemy explosive.

“Atlantis, this is Vandenberg. Targets now four miles distant, closing at eight miles per minute. They are two thousand feet above your orbit.”

“Roger, Ground. Fifteen seconds.” Colonel Wayne’s eyes locked on the digital counter, his finger poised on the release trigger.

Because of the shuttle’s attitude, the four receiver satellites were approaching Atlantis’ belly, sliding by at a slightly quicker relative speed. The crew would not be able to see them until they had passed, appearing above the shuttle’s tail on their silent journey.

“Atlantis, stand by for payload separation in… three… two… one. Mark.”

Wayne jerked the trigger on the control stick at the same time Nick Fielding activated the maneuvering thrusters to ease the shuttle lower in orbit to avoid colliding with the satellite.

Even as Wayne was stowing the manipulator arm, the computers on board the Medusa woke to the commands of Ground Control. Like an umbrella, the satellite began to open, solar-collection panels extending that would charge the craft’s internal systems and help in its attitude and orbital changes. The energy output of the plutonium reactor only powered the positron wave gun. Moving the satellite around the planet was accomplished with a solar/chemical rocket that would need fuel replenishment every one to three years.

Watching through a video screen, Wayne and Fielding stared in awe as the Medusa grew in size, panels built to exacting tolerances telescoping and unfolding like Japanese origami. In moments, the ice cream cone shape had transformed into a cruel phantom that was stooped over the earth like vengeful gargoyle. Medusa looked like Death, if Armageddon’s messenger had been fashioned by man.

“Here come the Four Horsemen,” Fielding muttered.

The four receiver satellites appeared over the shuttle’s tail, faint glimmers against the star field. Just as they came into view, the Medusa received a command from Vandenberg, and a thin wisp of expended fuel pulsed from one of its jets. It accelerated away to join the others.

Len Cullins had come to the aft flight deck and looked over Fielding’s shoulder. “Makes you wonder what we could accomplish if we spent our time creating rather than destroying, huh?”

Wayne looked at him sharply. “You even think that way again, I’ll have you court-martialed.”

“What the hell was that?” Alarm piqued Nick Fielding’s voice. He was staring out the window, angling his body so he could track the hurtling satellites.

“What?” Wayne asked, turning away from Cullins.

“I saw a flash right behind the receiver birds, like the sun reflecting off something metallic.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, sir. It was only for a second, and they’re getting too far away to see clearly, but I definitely saw something.”

Wayne opened a channel to Vandenberg. “Ground Control this is Atlantis. We have a visual of debris behind Medusa. Can you confirm? It appeared to be in dangerous proximity.”

“Roger that, Atlantis.” The ground controller could not mask the anxiety in his voice. “We just got a flash warning from U.S. Space Command at Colorado Springs. They’re bumping up the power to their radar station at Cavalier Air Station in North Dakota, but preliminary telemetry puts it on a collision course. Stand by.”

“What was it, Nick?” Cullins asked.

“I don’t know. It didn’t look big, but there’s no way to really tell.”

“Atlantis standing by,” Wayne said to Vandenberg Control.

Several seconds ticked by. Only the sound of the shuttle’s machinery and the low moans from Dale Markham punctuated the silence.

“Vandenberg Control to Atlantis. Duke, this is General Kolwicki. We want you to change attitude and increase the speed of your orbit to give us a visual assessment of what’s happening. Whatever’s behind the Medusa is so small we can’t get an accurate fix.”

“Yes, General. Changing attitude now.” Wayne nodded to Fielding, who had moved back to his station at the reaction control system. Using small bursts of gas, the shuttle swung 90 degrees until it was in a head-down position facing the fleeing Medusa.

“Atlantis, ground track shows you gaining on Medusa at fifty feet per minute. Please increase orbital speed. Distance to Medusa, one thousand yards.”

“Roger, Ground.”

While Wayne and Fielding remained at the aft crew station, Len Cullins ducked back to the cockpit to look through the main view windows as they hunted down the unidentified object dogging their five birds. He slid into his molded seat and stared into the emptiness, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever Fielding had seen. He could hear Wayne speaking with General Kolwicki, the head of America’s space command, through the communications net.

“Range, five hundred yards. Whatever’s chasing our birds will overtake in fifteen seconds.”

Cullins began counting backward in his mind. At eight seconds he could see the five satellites glimmering just above earth’s hazy blue horizon. They looked like golden fireflies at this distance, their details lost in the planet’s reflective glow. At four seconds, he could see them more clearly; the central bodies of the receiver platforms with their spiderweb collection dishes spread wide. At two seconds, he saw a dull silver flash behind one of the receiver satellites, so brief that had he not anticipated it, he would have thought it a chimera.

Ground control called out “Now,” and a magnetic torque wrench lost during a Gemini space walk twenty-five years earlier, one of a hundred thousand pieces of space junk, passed through the collection dish of one of the satellites, latched on to a steel casing panel, and unbalanced the entire unit. The violence of the impact was lost in the void because there was no sound, but it hit with the force of a bullet and the receiver satellite began to tumble. As a horrified Cullins watched, it flipped three times before slamming into the main satellite.

“Oh shit, we’re going to lose it.” Cullins heard the unperterbable General Kolwicki shout.

“That’s affirmative, General,” Cullins said as he watched Medusa start falling toward earth.

Two hundred and sixty miles below the Atlantis, General Reginald Kolwicki watched America’s most expensive military accident unfold. In just three and a half minutes, Medusa went from crowning achievement to unrecoverable debacle. Telemetry from the positron gun platform confirmed that the satellite was in a degrading orbit and that it would not respond to ground commands to fire its maneuvering rockets. It was falling, and there was nothing the forty assembled men and women in the control room could do to prevent it.

“Try the autonomous flight program,” Kolwicki said to a computer technician who’d been typing furiously, trying to regain control of Medusa.

“No response, sir. The central processor is off-line.”

“Are you getting anything from the damned thing?”

“Positron gun is on stand-by, and all encryption routines are nominal.”

“Great. Medusa is about to burn up in the atmosphere, but it wants to still take pictures and keep the data a secret.” Kolwicki growled at the irony. “How much longer?”

“Medusa will enter the atmosphere in twenty-five seconds. Total loss in thirty seconds at the most.”

“Shit.” A career military man who saw his career burning up in outer space, Kolwicki had no options. “What’s the bird’s position?”

“Over North Africa, tracking southeast. It’ll burn up above the Indian Ocean.”

“Might as well turn on the positron gun as she goes down. Maybe we’ll gain something from this snafu.” Kolwicki felt like a ship’s captain knowing his command was going under and still ordering full steam ahead.

“Sir?”

“Just do it,” he snapped.

Fingers flying in a blur, the tech snapped off several commands. The plutonium reactor keyed up, beaming supercharged positrons back to earth in a swath that cut across northern Africa from Chad, across Sudan and Ethiopia and finally to Djibouti and Somalia. In all, it took “pictures” of two thousand square miles, but its data was incomplete. Several passes over the same area would be necessary to gather enough information to allow analysis of the subsurface topography. It was only after the satellite began entering the atmosphere and the friction-induced heat climbed dangerously that Medusa shut down in an automatic safety mode to prevent a radioactive accident.

In Greek mythology, Medusa was a witch whose stare could turn men into stone. As Medusa fell from space and was enveloped in a white hot fireball of its own immolation, the satellite studied the barren African wasteland. Buried under tons of rock and stone, it saw something that man had hidden more than two thousand years ago in the hope that it would never be allowed to escape. Like its ancient namesake, Medusa’s glance would bring death.