mobilization order soon. The regular military’s got to get involved sooner or later.”
“We’ll be out of here in ten, if only your boy Noble would just shut his face for a second,” Hal said.
After taking one more security scan of the area to be sure there was no pursuit, the four commandos climbed inside the passenger module in the Black Stallion’s cargo bay. Boomer and his copilot started the engines, and in less than ten minutes they were racing down the highway-turned-airstrip and airborne.
“Just airborne, and we’re already close to emergency fuel,” said the Black Stallion’s copilot. The spacecraft flew east, but only long enough to just clear the Alborz Mountain range on the coast of the Caspian Sea, then they headed north, not more than sixty miles east of Tehran.
“No such thing as ‘emergency fuel’ on this flight, Dr. Page — there’s no friendly place to abort to within range,” Boomer said. “We either reach the tanker or we jettison the passenger module, then punch out.”
“Hey, I signed for this aircraft — no one is ‘punching’ or ‘jettisoning’ anything,” the copilot, Ann Page, said.
“I second the senator’s remark,” Hal Briggs said.
“I told you boys to call me ‘Ann,’” Page said. “Remember it’s costing you a shot of top-shelf tequila at the Bellagio every time you call me something other than ‘Ann.’”
“Crossing the coastline now,” Boomer said. “The computer will start the pre-contact checklist automatically when we’re within fifty miles of the tanker’s Mode Four transponder. You can follow along on the MFD if you’d like; the checklist routine will prompt you when you come to a check and response step.”
“Computers running checklists…what is the world coming to?” Ann mused. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I feel naked without a library full of paper checklists in a cubby around me.”
“You’ll get over it, ma’am,” Boomer said.
“You owe me another shot of tequila when we get home, Boomer — that’s the fifth time you’ve called me ‘ma’am’ on this flight,” Ann said. “By the time we’re back on the ground, I won’t have to buy myself another drink long past I retire.”
“Double or nothing if I plug the tanker on the first try,” Boomer said.
“You’re on — and no using any computers,” Ann said, laughing. She found it incredibly easy to relax with this crew. Although she sounded like a rookie, Ann Page actually had more miles in space than anyone on board the Black Stallion — in fact, she had three times as many miles in space as all of the men and women who wore astronaut’s wings in the U.S. armed services combined.
A native of Springfield, Missouri but a Navy brat who had traveled the world with her father, a nuclear guided missile cruiser skipper who had lost his life in a battle with the Russians in the Persian Gulf over a decade ago, Ann Page had never served in the military but had always been considered just as much a part of the armed forces as anyone who wore a uniform. Thin and athletic, with large green eyes and auburn hair she was unabashedly letting turn gray, Ann could have easily been confused with any female senior general officer — and in fact she was regularly treated as such by military and civilian leaders who knew her.
After receiving several degrees in physics, aeronautical and electrical engineering, and astronautics, Ann became the chief engineer and project manager of the most ambitious and topsecret defense program ever devised: Skybolt, a space-based laser weapon system, installed on Armstrong Space Station, America’s first military space station. Originally designed for the SpaceBased Radar system for the U.S. Air Force, Armstrong Space Station — nicknamed the “Silver Tower” because of its special silvery coating to protect itself from enemy laser attacks — with its two large electronically scanned radar arrays three times as big as a football field had been expanded and transformed from an unmanned radar array to a manned military space station.
Armstrong and Skybolt’s involvement in a Russian invasion of Iran over a decade earlier was crucial, and Ann Page and the station’s firebrand commander, Air Force Brigadier-General Jason Saint-Michael, became instant heroes. But the political controversy that arose over the offensive use of Skybolt — it proved to be just as effective as an anti-aircraft and anti-ship weapon as it was a defensive anti-ballistic missile weapon — became too much of a foreign affairs liability for the American administration. Skybolt was canceled, and Armstrong Space Station was converted once again to an unmanned orbiting platform, with only occasional maintenance visits made.
But the end of Skybolt didn’t mean the end of Ann Page. She continued to work on a variety of military, government, and even private space projects, becoming universally acknowledged as the Burt Rutan of space travel — any innovation, any new spacecraft, any risky or dangerous mission, and Ann Page was flying it. At the age of forty-eight she was elected to the U.S. Senate from California on a pro-military, pro-space exploration, and strong science education platform, even flying several times in space as a sitting U.S. senator, making speeches to Congress and doing TV talk shows and educational broadcasts to schools from space.
When the United States was hit in a sneak attack by the Russian Air Force and over a dozen air and missile bases had been destroyed, Ann Page decided not to run for re-election, and she disappeared from the world stage. What she actually did was join the U.S. Air Force as a civilian space systems designer and engineer, helping to build the next generation of space-based offensive and defensive weapons to help the United States defend itself better from another sneak attack. She was director of a secret program out of Los Angeles Air Force Base that sought to rebuild and redeploy the Skybolt space-based laser system when Patrick McLanahan asked her to join the Black Stallion program at Dreamland.
As compartmentalized as the Black Stallion project was, she had never heard of it before — but when she did, she instantly agreed to join. She had been involved with the America hypersonic space transportation system years ago, a combination scramjet-rocket-powered craft three times larger than the Black Stallion but with almost the same limited cargo capacity. Rapid and flexible access to space was the biggest challenge with working and defending space, Ann knew, and now they seemed to have the answer: the XR-A9 Black Stallion spaceplane. Not only were two of this beautiful little aircraft actually flying, but she had been asked to be in charge of building and standing up the first air wing of these amazing spaceplanes.
Needless to say, she jumped at the chance to work with McLanahan and the XR-A9—not knowing that her first mission was just days later, where she would have to fly into harm’s way. But she was in heaven — back in space, where she belonged, leading a brave bunch of airmen in a race to defend the United States of America, just like before aboard Silver Tower.
Ann heard a soft beep in her helmet and scanned the large supercockpit multi-function display for whatever the ship’s computer was trying to tell her. “Is that the tanker?”
“Yep. Acknowledge the alert…that’s it, hit the F-ten button…you got it, and that’s the computer running the pre-contact checklist,” Boomer said. “Step twenty-one is the first crew-response item. F-ten again to go back to the main…” But another beep stopped him short. “Okay, looks like the computer is telling us that our fuel status is outside the safe contact parameters.”
“Which means…?”
“We’re within five minutes of flame-out by the time we reach the pre-planned contact point, which means we’re in deep shit unless we do something,” Boomer said. “Okay. I don’t think there’s time to send a text message to the tanker, so let’s go ahead and break radio silence, use the encrypted UHF radio, and get the tanker over here now. Hit F-three for the comm panel…” But Ann had already switched over to the proper display. “Aha, good, a fast study. You’ve got the number one radio.”
“Sunshine to Mailman,” Ann radioed.
“Check switches,” came the reply on the channel, a warning that she was broadcasting in the clear on an open frequency.
“You need to give them the code-word for…”
“Screw that, Boomer,” Ann said. On the radio again she said, “Mailman, just put the pedal to the metal and get the hell down here now ’cuz we’re skosh on gas. You copy?”
There was a slight pause; then: “We copy, Sunshine. Pushing it up.” Within five minutes, the fuel warning went away as the tanker accelerated and the rendezvous point moved farther south. Once the two aircraft were twenty-five miles apart, the KC-77 tanker started a left turn heading north along the center of the Caspian Sea, rolling out precisely in front and a thousand feet above the Black Stallion in a picture-perfect point-parallel rendezvous.
“Genesis to Sunshine,” Boomer heard on his encrypted satellite transceiver.
“It’s God on GUARD,” he quipped. “Go ahead, Genesis.”
“Just a reminder: don’t zoom past the tanker on this one,” Patrick McLanahan said. “You’ll have one chance to plug him.”
