Chapter Nineteen
I can’t believe this is how we do it, Bowden said to himself for at least the tenth time as they prepared to de-orbit. Hrensku had shown him that they had a computer in the craft that could calculate the navigational data for the return trip. For some reason, though—and Hrensku didn’t want to talk about it any more than Kamara had—they weren’t big on autonomous programs and didn’t use them unless some sort of emergency required them to do so.
Not that it was much of a computer in any event. If Bowden had to compare it to something from his time, it was most like the computer in the A-6E Intruders from his airwing. Their computers operated at four hertz. The Intruder guys had joked, somewhat sarcastically, that it updated four times a second, “whether it needed to or not.” The programming in the interface craft’s computers might have helped NASA in the sixties and early seventies, but operating it would have been a lot like the first round of computer games he had played—uncomplicated and not entirely satisfying.
But that would have been better than the actual method the SpinDogs used. He’d been fairly horrified when he’d found out what was going to determine whether he lived or died on reentry. Hrensku was going to “eyeball it in.”
Too bad we can’t use the technology the Dornaani left us to do it better and smarter. He’d asked Murphy about it and was told the cultural backlash for using the technology they had access to would probably have led to several hundred of the SpinDogs dead and all the Lost Soldiers on a forever stroll beyond the airlocks—without benefit of vac suits.
“The 1960s called,” Bowden muttered. “They want their computers back. Sad thing is, I do, too.”
“What was that?” Hrensku asked.
“Nothing,” Bowden said louder. “I’m ready for the checklist.”
“Checklist?”
“Yeah. Don’t you have a checklist to make sure you don’t forget anything?”
“Of course there’s one, but I have it memorized. I know what I’m supposed to do.”
“How do you know you won’t forget a step?”
Hrensku tapped his forehead. “It is all here. Papers can be forgotten.”
“It would be easier on a slate.”
“And what if you had your list on a computer and it suddenly malfunctioned or ran out of power? You wouldn’t know what to do. I will.”
“But what if—?” Bowden stopped himself. Approaching reentry was the wrong time to argue the merits of having written checklists. Certainly, Hrensku had already shown he wasn’t interested in having the checklist on a tablet computer—an electronic flight bag—and he wouldn’t permit Bowden to even have one in his interface craft. “Never mind,” Bowden said. “So what do we do?”
“First we close all the doors and hatches.” Hrensku flipped a couple of switches and pointed to a section of the control panel where six lights glowed dimly. One was red, but after a couple of seconds, it went green. “All set.”
Hrensku pointed. “Flip the switch over there that says ‘toilet.’”
“Toilet?”
“Yes. It shuts the toilet and seals all the contents.”
“Got it,” Bowden said. Also added to the checklist I’m going to make.
Hrensku flipped the switch that brought up the craft’s gyro display. Typically, the SpinDog pilot had no use for it—and said repeatedly that it was better to not use it as a crutch—but it was marginally acceptable to use it for getting the right attitude for reentry. A small picture of the interface craft and a tunnel-like image filled the center screen. The display looked like something out of Star Wars, but designed by a five-year-old who had little concept of what he was trying to depict.
Hrensku pointed to the left screen—the one with the image of the craft—which now showed two different outlines of it. “The red image shows the current attitude,” Hrensku noted, “while the green one shows the attitude we need to be in for reentry. I must maneuver until I have superimposed the red or ‘actual’ craft onto the one representing the optimal attitude for reentry.”
Would it have been child’s play to design a computer program to accomplish the maneuver?
Yes.
Was doing so somehow anathema to the SpinDogs?
Also yes.
Bowden sighed to himself as Hrensku manipulated the controls and brought the craft into alignment with the desired attitude at almost the same time an image of the craft appeared at the end of the tunnel on the right half of the screen. It was shown above the tunnel.
“See?” Hrensku asked. “As expected, we are above our projected velocity. We must slow down.” He fired the main thrusters. After a couple of seconds, the image on the display began to drop into the tunnel. When it got to the center of the tunnel, Hrensku shut down the thrusters. Immediately, the green image on the left flipped around.
“Braking is complete,” Hrensku advised. “Now we adopt our reentry attitude.”
“How long do you have to do it?”
“It is not a race. We have about twenty minutes until we reach the edge of the atmosphere.” He shrugged. “You should do it this time.” He removed his hands from the controls. “Your craft.”
A little warning would have been nice. “My craft,” Bowden said, taking the stick. He then manipulated the thrusters until the two images on the left screen superimposed. The bottom of the craft was now aligned nose-first with respect to their orbit, with the nose pitched upward. The view out the side of the craft showed they were on the opposite side of the planet from where they were headed.
“Oh, I forgot,” Hrensku said. “You need to burn off the gas in the forward reaction control system.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. It is a safety precaution because that area experiences the highest heat of reentry.”
“A checklist could be used to remember this,” Bowden muttered.
“What was that?”
“I said, ‘Won’t firing the thrusters mess up our flight path and our attitude?’”
“Yes, it will. You will need to counter it with the aft thrusters.”
“Wonderful,” Bowden muttered. “Dumbest system ever.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing. I’m concentrating. What powers the thrusters?”
“Nitrogen tetroxide is the oxidizer, and monomethyl hydrazine is the fuel. The propellants are hypergolic—they ignite when they come into contact with each other.”
“I know what hypergolic is.”
“Oh, good. Well, they are fed into the engines, where they atomize, ignite, and produce gas and thrust.”
“And we’d be a lot better off without a bunch of them somewhere that is about to get really hot.”
“Correct.”
“That’s a stupid system,” Bowden muttered.
“What was that?”
“I can see why we’d want to get rid of them,” Bowden replied as he worked the controls to burn off the propellants, while still keeping the craft’s attitude relatively stable. Dust started falling slowly past his face. “Is that gravity returning?”
“Yes, we are starting to feel it more. I’ve got the controls.”
“You’ve got the controls,” Bowden replied.
A glow to his left caused Bowden to look out the window again. The sky had become a light pink, and, as he watched, it became a deeper pinkish red. He glanced at the display; Hrensku had the craft centered in the display. The glow from the window brightened visibly, going from red to orange.
“Looks like we’re in the atmosphere,” Bowden noted. He hadn’t felt nervous before, but now there was a whole swarm of butterflies in his stomach. Or is that gravity returning with more force? It felt more like butterflies.
“Yes,” Hrensku said, his voice a little louder. “Compression and friction are heating the air around us. Right now you’re in the middle of a three-thousand-degree fireball.”
Yep. Definitely butterflies.
“Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t call anyone; the radios will be out for another ten minutes due to the ionization effects.”
Unlike the movies he’d seen, there was very little feeling—no shaking or vibration, just the glow of the massive amounts of heat being generated by the interface craft’s atmospheric entry. He should have known Hollywood would make it worse than it was. He’d pictured the shuttle almost falling apart; the reality was much less scary…until he thought about the massive amounts of heat being held at bay only a few meters away, and the butterflies returned.
Eventually, the glow faded, and Hrensku waggled the wings. “I have atmospheric control,” he reported as he initiated the series of S-turns shown on the screen.
“Are we going to light the engines?” Bowden asked.
“You don’t want to fly a glider?” Hrensku asked with a smile.
“Not if I don’t have do.”
Hrensku sighed theatrically. “If you insist.” He flipped the switches and relit the motors, although he kept them at idle. “Still have a lot of velocity to bleed off.” He pointed out the window. “There’s the field. Want to land it?”
“Me?”
“Sure. You can land it, right?”
“Well, yeah, sure. I’ve done it lots of times. Just never after a flight to space.”
“Unless you land like a glider—which we’re not—it’s the same thing.”
“I’ve got the controls,” Bowden said.
“You have the controls.”
Bowden continued to do S-turns to slow the craft and then brought the throttles up slowly to bring the craft into the powered flight regime. Although he felt like it should have been different, the craft flew just like it had the last time he’d flown it in atmosphere. He brought it in to land, taxied to the makeshift base operations building, then powered it down and started the fifteen-minute wait while the craft cooled and the gases created on reentry dissipated.
Bowden released his seat belt and tried to stand, but only made it about halfway up before falling back into the seat.
“That is one of the hardest things about returning to the planet,” Hrensku said. “Readapting from zero gravity is difficult, especially if you’ve been gone a while.”
“Which I have.”
“Just go slowly, and it will come back to you.”
“Ready to go?” Hrensku asked as they walked out to the interface craft for Bowden’s first launch to space at the controls.
“Yeah,” Bowden said with a chuckle. “I finally just got readjusted to gravity again; must be time to leave.”
“Just so. Such is the life of an interface pilot.” He glanced at Bowden out of the corner of his eye. “Is that what they have planned for you? To be the Lost Soldiers’ interface pilot?”
Bowden shrugged. “I don’t know what they have in store for me.” Except “they” was Murphy, and he’d never kept anything this close before, not from his senior staff. Bowden did not find that particularly comforting.
“There must be something you Terrans are planning. To need these qualifications all of a sudden speaks to there being something going on.”
“Maybe.” Bowden shrugged. “If there is, though, I don’t know what it is.”
They put their gear in the craft and did the aircraft’s preflight while the loadmasters finished stowing the cargo. Although there wasn’t going to be anyone else on the craft with them, they were going back fully loaded with medicinals, food, and other stores for the habitats.
The preflight was fairly normal—a small leak to be fixed and a couple of bolts to be tightened—until they got to the cockpit. The landing gear lever was missing the round ball-like attachment on the end that was used to grip it, leaving just a metal post sticking out of the instrument panel.
Bowden got down on his hands and knees and searched the cockpit but couldn’t find it.
“It’s not necessary,” Hrensku said after five minutes of searching. “We’ll get a replacement at the spin when we get there.”
“That isn’t what we’d do back home,” Bowden replied. “If something was missing from the cockpit, the aircraft would be down until they found the missing item.”
He looked up to find Hrensku looking at him funny. “Down?” Hrensku asked. “Where would it go down to?”
Bowden chuckled. “Not physically down. The word in that case means ‘not flyable’ until they found the missing piece. We didn’t want it to get into the controls and bind something.”
“In this case, it is all right,” Hrensku replied. “The piece is big enough that it couldn’t have gotten into anything.”
“Where did it go, then?”
“Who knows? Maybe someone took it as a souvenir.”
“A souvenir? Why would someone take that?”
“Who is to say?” Hrensku shrugged. “This is the only craft, though, so we either take it or we don’t go flying today. And, if we don’t hurry, we’re going to miss our launch window.”
“Okay,” Bowden said slowly, not feeling entirely comfortable with it. Navy procedures were typically written in blood. If there was a procedure that had to be followed, that usually meant the reason for implementing the procedure was because someone had died. He shook off his misgivings—there really was no place for the knob to go in the cockpit; perhaps it had gotten loose and someone had taken it before it fell off.
They strapped in, fired up the craft, and taxied to the runway. They stopped just short of it so the maintenance crew could arm the RATO—the rocket-assisted takeoff—bottles. As conventional takeoff consumed a great deal of their dual-phase engines’ fuel—limiting cargo capacity to twenty percent of what could be lifted with RATOs—the interface craft usually used the rockets to get airborne and on their way to space.
“Your controls,” Hrensku said as the maintenance guys moved away from the craft. The leader held up two pins to show both bottles had been armed.
“My controls,” Bowden replied. Sweat prickled across his skin. Although he’d done RATO takeoffs before, usually the SpinDogs supplied the pilot for any RATO takeoffs. While they were fairly common, they were also dangerous, and there were a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong.
Bowden took a deep breath and visualized what he needed to do. In some respects, the RATO takeoff was similar to launching from a carrier. Once the button was pushed, there was no stopping until the assist was over. With a RATO, though, you actually rotated the aircraft while still boosting, so you had to make sure your seat was close enough to the instrument panel to reach everything. It was somewhat worrisome that the landing gear lever in front of him didn’t have the ball on the end of it, but once the gear was up, it wouldn’t be pointed at him anymore.
“Well?” Burg asked. “We’re going to miss our launch window.”
“Keep your pants on,” Bowden muttered.
“Why would I remove them?” Burg asked.
“It’s just an expression…never mind.”
He checked the runway and taxied out onto it. Bowden shrugged his shoulders, making sure the straps were set. “Ready?”
“I have been,” Hrensku grumbled. “Can we go now?”
“Sure.” Bowden put his finger over the RATO button. “Three, two, one.” He mashed the button and was pushed back into his seat. The force, however, wasn’t what it should have been. As the craft roared down the runway, it pushed against his control, trying to go to the right. The right rocket bottle had failed.
“Bad rocket!” Hrensku called.
“No shit,” Bowden muttered. He pulled back the throttles and fought to keep the aircraft on the runway. “Keep your damn hands off!” Bowden yelled as Hrensku’s hands moved toward the controls. “My plane.”
The craft streaked down the runway, and he had to keep forward pressure on the stick and pop the spoilers as their speed increased past the point where the craft was going fast enough to fly, and it tried to get airborne. As they passed the halfway marker—six thousand feet remaining—the operational bottle went out. It would be close, but Bowden knew he could still stop the aircraft.
He pressed the brakes while keeping the spoilers up. Nothing happened. He released the brakes, then jumped on them as hard as he could. The right one grabbed for a second, then it blew. The strut slammed into the ground and then ripped off, dropping the wing into contact with the dirt.
Bowden was thrown out of his seat and into the port window. There was an instant of pain, then everything went black.