Plague Ship

This was the other reason Eric couldn’t eat and had slept only fitfully the night before. Success today would mean he had killed a man who had been more of a father to him than the man who had raised him.

“You okay, son?” Jack Taggart asked as they were putting on their flight suits in a locker room behind the hangar office. The space plane’s cabin was pressurized, so the suits were little more than olive drab overalls. “You look a little green around the gills.”

“A lot on my mind, Colonel,” Eric replied.

“Well, I don’t want you to worry none about the flight,” the former Shuttle pilot drawled. “I’ll get us there and back, no problem.”

“I can honestly say that the last thing I’m concerned with is the flight itself.” A technician stuck his head into the room. “Gentlemen, you’d better shake a leg. Flight director wants Kanga rolling in twenty minutes.”

Taggart snatched up his helmet from his locker and said, “Then let’s go light this candle.” There were two reclined seats behind the pilot’s position in the sleek space plane, ’ Roo. Eric had spent the early morning hours securing his computer and the transmitter into one of them. He eased himself into the second and kept his hands away from his chest, as workers belted him in as secure as a Grand Prix driver. Above him was a pair of windows, through which he could see the underside of the mother ship.

There were small windows on either side as well. Taggart was in front of him, talking to flight director Rick Butterfield.

Eric jacked his helmet into a communications port and waited for a pause in Taggart’s conversation to do a radio check on the flight frequency, before switching over to another frequency, though he could still hear the pilot in one ear.

“Elton, this is John, how do you read me? Over.” Hali Kasim had picked the code names from the Elton John song “Rocket Man.”

“John, this is Elton. Reading you five by five. Over.”

“Elton, prepare to receive telemetry on my mark. Three, two, one, mark.” Eric hit a key on his laptop so that Hali could monitor the flight and the Russian satellite in real time aboard the Oregon . He’d even rigged a webcam so his shipmates could see what he was seeing.

“John, signal looks good. Over.”

“Okay, we’re about ten minutes from rollout. I’ll keep you updated. Over.”

“Roger that. Good luck. Over.”

The big hangar doors rattled open, bathing the cavernous space in the ruddy light of a new day. There were enough workers on hand to push Kanga out onto the apron. On the edge of the runway sat a ramshackle mobile home that was the flight director’s control center. Its roof bristled with antennae and a pair of revolving radar dishes.

“How you doing back there?” Taggart called over his shoulder.

Before Eric could reply, the two turbojets mounted on the top of Kanga’s fuselage roared into life.

Taggart repeated the question over the radio, because it was too loud to speak comfortably.

“Getting a little excited,” Eric confessed.

“Don’t forget, I’ll flash a red light on your console when we’re ten seconds from the end of the burn. It’ll turn yellow when we’re at five and green when the rocket motor cuts out. At that moment, we’ll be at an altitude of roughly seventy-five miles, but once the motor runs dry we start falling immediately. So do your thing fast.”

“You got it.”

“Here we go,” Taggart announced as Kanga started to taxi.

The gawky mother ship, with its droopy wings, rolled onto the runway and turned sharply to align with the center stripe. It began to accelerate immediately, the engines keening at full power. Designed for the sole purpose of getting ’ Roo up to its launch altitude of thirty-eight thousand feet, Kanga wasn’t the most dynamic aircraft in terms of performance. It used up nearly the entire runway before transitioning into the air to start its long, stately ascent. Out the side window, Eric could see its bizarre shadow racing across the scrub desert. It looked like something out of a science-fiction movie.

It took an hour for the plane to spiral up to altitude. Eric spent the time double-checking his equipment.

Taggart merely sat quietly in his seat, playing a Game Boy flight simulator.

They were ten minutes early, according to Eric’s timetable, so the plane carved lazy figure eights in the sky. High above them, the Soviet satellite was fast approaching. Unlike the Shuttle or the International Space Station that orbited parallel to the equator, the Orbital Ballistic Projectile weapon swept over the globe from pole to pole. In this way, it crisscrossed every square inch of the planet in fourteen days, as the earth revolved beneath it. It was currently over Wyoming, coming on at almost five miles per second.

In its present orbital track, it wouldn’t arrive over Eos Island for another week, which was why one of the signals Eric had to send was to fire its maneuvering rockets and change its vector. If everything went as planned, the satellite would be in range to fire one of its rods in less than eight hours.

“Coming up on T minus one minute,” Eric heard Butterfield announce. “All boards are green.”

“Roger that, Ground. Sixty seconds.”

A timer on Eric’s console began to click backward, while the digital speed indicator mounted on the dashboard remained pegged at four hundred miles per hour.

“Thirty seconds . . . Ten . . . Five, four, three, two, one. Go for separation.” The pilot aboard the mother ship released a lever that held ’ Roo clamped to the aircraft’s belly. The space plane fell free for a few moments, to get distance from Kanga, before Taggart toggled the liquid-rocket motor.

To Eric, it felt as if every one of his senses was assaulted at the same instant. The roar of the engine was like standing at the base of a waterfall, a palpable sensation that beat on his chest. The airframe’s vibrations forced him to clutch the armrest while he was slammed back into his seat, as if by a giant fist.

His body shook inside his skin so much it felt like someone was rubbing him with sandpaper. His mouth had gone dry from the dose of adrenaline sent shooting into his veins. Focusing hard on the speedometer, he saw that, in seconds, they were nearing the sound barrier.

The g-forces kept him pressed into his reclined seat, as Taggart pointed the nose ever higher, the vibrations getting progressively worse, and Eric feared the airframe would come apart in midair. And then they burst through the sound barrier. The vibrations diminished, and while he could still feel the thrust of the engine they were traveling faster than its throaty snarl, and it grew noticeably quieter.

One minute after the motor kicked in, they burst above a hundred thousand feet, and Eric was finally coming to grips with the ride. His heart rate slowed, and, for the moment, he let himself enjoy the space plane’s raw power.

The airspeed gauge hit two thousand miles per hour and they still accelerated. Looking over his head, he noticed the sky darkening rapidly, as they roared up through the atmosphere. As if by magic, stars began to appear, faintly at first but brightening. He had never seen so many so clearly. Gone was the twinkle caused by their light passing through earth’s atmosphere. They held steady, and their numbers swelled, until it looked as though space was made of light rather than darkness.

He knew if he stretched out his hand, he would be able to touch them.

The indicator in front of him suddenly flashed red. He couldn’t believe four minutes could pass that quickly. Straining against the g’s, he moved his hand over to the laptop.

“Ten seconds,” he said on the frequency the Oregon was monitoring. If Hali replied, it was lost in the rocket’s din.

The altimeter was still reeling off numbers in a blur. They hit three hundred and ninety-four thousand feet when the light went yellow, and, in those last five seconds, they rose another mile. The indicator turned green just as they hit the four-hundred-thousand-foot mark.

Eric typed in the command, as the rocket motor consumed the last of its fuel and the cyclonic pumps that fed it went quiet. The g-forces that had hammered him into his seat suddenly released him, and the silence left his ears ringing. They had gone weightless. He had often experienced moments of it on roller coasters, and on a few flights with Tiny Gunderson, when they were fooling around, but this felt different.

They were on the very edge of space now, not playing tricks with gravity but almost out of its reach.