and started shooting pure oxygen into his lungs under pressure to keep him from asphyxiating. Although he was quite uncomfortable, the pressure was not painful, just disconcerting. Could a crewmember stand this kind of pressure flight after flight? he wondered. How long could someone serve with the Black Stallion before something bad happened?
After what seemed like an eternity — but he knew from flying the simulator that it was less than eight minutes — the engines shut down. Suddenly the cockpit was deathly quiet and the G-forces, which had built up to about four times the normal force of gravity, stopped suddenly as well. The sudden quiet and relief from the pressure on his chest made Patrick pause in fear. What caused that sudden stoppage? Was everything OK? Was this the end…?
“General?” Patrick found he had his eyes closed and his breathing had all but stopped. “General sir?” Still no response. Then, louder:
Patrick took a deep breath, like a free-diver coming up from three minutes underwater, then blurted out, “What?”
“Welcome to space, General,” Boomer said.
Patrick opened his eyes — and he saw the Earth from space for the first time. The view was simply unbelievable. He had to look on his supercockpit display to see what he was looking at: it was northern California and Nevada, all the way from Lake Tahoe to the Pacific Ocean — at least five hundred miles in all directions. The edge of the Earth was rimmed in bluish-white; the sky was absolutely stark black. He still had a sense of altitude and velocity: he could discern differences in altitude of peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range, and he could see enough ground details to get a feeling of how fast they were traveling over the ground. As he watched in absolute awe, the Bitterroot Mountains hove into view, and on the horizon he could start to see the snowcapped Rocky Mountains. The speed was amazing.
“We made it,” Patrick breathed, quickly regaining his composure. “Station check.”
“In the green up here, General,” Boomer said. “You okay up there, sir?”
“I’m in the green.” He moved his arms and shoulders experimentally, then took a couple deep breaths. “Everything seems OK. How did the Stud do?”
“Another typical suborbital insertion,” Boomer said casually. “Altitude seventy-four point two-one miles, velocity Mach twelve point one-two-eight. Fuel flows looked a little high on number four — I’ll give that a check when we get back. Good job, General. You just earned your astronaut wings — any flight above sixty miles is considered a space shot.”
“Thanks, Boomer.” He tore his eyes away from the beauty and grandeur around him and checked all of his instruments, flipping quickly through all of the different display pages on the supercockpit screen. “On course, on speed,” he reported. “Fuel levels in the green.”
“Always the navigator, eh, General?” Boomer chided him. “Sit back and enjoy the ride, sir — you’re in space. Only a handful of humans have ever done this.”
The air inside the cockpit was filled with tiny bits of floating dust and dirt and the occasional tiny washer, which Patrick collected and put into a plastic bag. He then took a pencil from a storage compartment near his right elbow and let it go in front of his face to watch it hover in mid-air. He had done that a few times in terrestrial aircraft, putting it in a gentle dive so the object fell at the same speed as the aircraft, making it seem “weightless.” But that had lasted only seconds, and the windscreen had been filled with clouds or the ground coming up to meet him. This would last for a lot longer period of time, and his windscreen was still filled with clouds and Earth, but at this rate he wouldn’t hit it for quite some time.
“Feeling OK up there, General?” Boomer asked.
“No problems so far,” Patrick said. That wasn’t quite true, but he wasn’t going to admit anything else.
He had been fortunate in his Air Force career and had only been airsick a couple times, during really violent maneuvers or disorienting, smoky, tense situations as in combat, but he never suffered from plain motion sickness. Right now there were no violent maneuvers going on; there was stress, certainly — they were over seventy miles in space, cruising at almost seven thousand miles an hour — but in microgravity, with no real sense of up or down, he could feel that creeping queasiness building in the pit of his stomach. The shoulder and lap belts helped to maintain his sense of weight and orientation, and he had to turn his attention to his assigned tasks instead of stare out the windscreen and think about how high up he was — or even try to determine which way was up. Despite Boomer’s rakish tone and the immense beauty outside, it was not hard for Patrick to turn his mind to the task at hand. This was not simply a joyride: they had work to do.
Patrick made several radio calls and entered commands into his computer terminal. “We’re ready for payload release,” he announced a few minutes later. “Range reports clear. Bomb doors coming open…Meteor away. Doors closed.”
The BDU-58 Meteor was a simple orbital delivery system designed specifically for the XR-A9. It was nothing more than a large heat-shielded container fitted with a liquid-fuel rocket booster, guidance system, datalink communications system, and payload release mechanisms. Once the BDU-58 was released, the first stage rocket motor pushed the weapon down and away from the Black Stallion, then up on a tongue of fire into its own Earth orbit. Once in orbit, the Meteor’s rocket engine could push the spacecraft out of orbit, change course, or propel it to a higher or differently shaped orbit, depending on the payload. After releasing its payload, the Meteor could be deorbited and allowed to burn up in the atmosphere, or it could be retrieved by another spacecraft, brought back to Earth, and reused.
On this mission, the Meteor carried three inert test articles, each weighing about twelve hundred pounds. The Meteor would be deorbited at a particular point in its orbit, penetrating all the way through the atmosphere in order to protect the test articles inside; then each test article would be released at different altitudes above the target area. Each test article had a triple-mode guidance system that would locate targets using millimeter-wave radar, infrared, and satellite steering signals, but then each test article would “tell” the other which target it was tracking and the quality of its target identification and lock, so the other test articles could locate and attack other targets. The test articles had tiny winglets that allowed it to home in precisely to its target or glide long distances if necessary to locate targets. When released from extremely high altitudes, the test articles could glide for as far as two hundred miles, or loiter over an area for several minutes searching for targets.
“Payload released successfully, bay doors closed,” Patrick reported. “It’ll make two orbits, then attack its targets inside the White Sands Missile Test Range.”
“I’d hate to be under those bad boys when they come in,” Boomer remarked. “Okay, sir, we’ll alter course slightly southeast, then in exactly eleven minutes and nine seconds we’ll start our descent for Washington. Let me brief you on the descent procedures…”
“I’ve got a better idea, Boomer,” Patrick interrupted. “How about we take her up?”
“Up? You want to go to a higher altitude?”
“No. Let’s take it up…into orbit.”
“Are you sure, sir? That wasn’t on the flight plan.”
“I’m sure.”
“But during takeoff…”
“I’m okay, Boomer — really. Maybe I blacked out a bit, but I feel fine now.”
“I’m thinking about re-entry, that’s all,” Boomer said. “The g-forces are heavier and more sustained.”
“I’ll be fine…Captain,” Patrick said, adding the formal title “Captain” again to signify his desire to terminate the discussion.
“Yes, sir.” There was only a slight hesitation as Boomer considered whether or not to use his prerogative and not do this, but he decided that the required phase of this flight had been accomplished — if the general became incapacitated, it wouldn’t affect mission completion. Besides, what aviator wouldn’t want to fly into orbit if he had the chance? “Ready when you are, General,” Noble responded. “Let me make a few changes to the flight plan and get them entered into the computer…” It took only a few minutes, with Patrick carefully monitoring Boomer’s inputs and the computer’s responses. “Done. Isn’t there anyone you need to call first? Don’t we need to get permission from someone?”
“Nope. Let’s do it.”
“You got it, sir. I’ve got computer control and engine monitoring.”
“I’ve got the aircraft.”
“You got the leopards. Ready anytime you are.”
