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CHAPTER 42

Turkey Economic Exclusive Zone, Black Sea

Tuesday

4:47 a.m. Turkey Time (TRT)

Monday

9:47 p.m. Eastern Time


Michael felt the modified nine-millimeter weapon magnetically stuck to his chest armor. It was big and clunky and had very large mechanisms so it could be manipulated while wearing a space suit and looked like nothing that resembled either a pistol or a rifle. But it was a firearm designed to use in space while wearing a space suit and he had practiced with it over the past few years. It gave him comfort. At the moment, he reveled in that comfort. While he was excited about moving forward with the plan and finally seeing it come to fruition, the thought of being on top of a new and untested version of a thirty-year-old rocket with a rushed launch schedule made him a bit apprehensive. Jebidiah and Vladimir, on the other hand, seemed as happy as kids at Christmas. Or maybe this was just more of their element. Michael was certainly not in his.

“Control, we had the slosh baffle indicator on stage 1 flash red for a second then went back to green,” Jebidiah said over the comm channel. “Is that a problem?”

“Copy, Vyrezka. That was a circuit breaker reset causing that light to blink. We saw that in the dress rehearsal. Stage One Slosh Baffle telemetry shows green here. No problems. T-minus ninety seconds and counting.”

“Ms. Stinson, I hope you did your job well!” Vladimir said.

“Colonel, I hope you do yours well. Good luck gentlemen.”

“Be advised that rendezvous will be sooner than expected as we are on a launch window putting us three orbits early. We have updated the guidance burn package,” Stinson said. “This puts us nearly three hours ahead of schedule in all regards.”

“Understood, Control,” Vladimir said. “Main power to igniters is green.”

“Copy Vyrezka, igniters showing green. T-minus fifty-seven seconds.”

“You are being very quiet, Comrade M!” Vladimir said. “Be happy, my friend! We are going to space today or will die trying. Either way is great with me. This is our fortune and time to be bold, my friend!”

“I’ll prefer the first one, V. I’ve never been a big fan of the whole ‘die trying’ thing,” Michael said. He looked through the virtual display at the little stuffed animal hanging from a string tied to the ceiling of the capsule. The plush stuffed black, brown, and beige animal’s eyes stared back at him. Vladimir had called it a Cheburashka when he had hung it up. Michael had no idea what that was. Or for that matter, why it was there.

“I’m with you on that one, M,” Jebidiah agreed. “I’ll forego the die trying part.”

“Control, we show all tanks at full pressure!” Jebidiah announced. “Propellant feed umbilical detach sequence start. Power umbilicals detach sequence start.”

“Copy, Vyrezka.” There was a slight pause. “We are showing Prop and Power umbilicals detached. T-minus twenty-nine seconds.”

“Hydraulic generator startup has been initiated,” Vladimir said. “Showing full power on main engine gimbals. Thrust vector control and inertial guidance mode is active.”

“Copy, Vyrezka. Lock-down clamps detach.”

“Detach light is green. Tower is down.”

“Ten, nine, eight…”

“Ignition startup sequence on!” Jebidiah said.

Michael gripped his armrests tightly as he felt the rocket beneath starting to vibrate to life. He took a deep breath and tried to relax his mind. He watched in his virtual view built into the helmet visor an outside camera view of the platform that Control was feeding them. The Dorman space-suit helmet visors had the same functionality as the Dorman virtual display sunglasses. The video was perfectly clear in ultra-resolution. Michael assumed it was from cameras on the command center on the yacht.

“…three, two, one!” Stinson’s voice was suddenly drowned out by the sound of a million rivers rushing by during a freight train convention during a tornado. “Ignition! We have ignition!”

The liquid oxygen mixed with the kerosene rocket fuel and ignited, throwing green flames out the base of the RD-171 engines that roiled into an expanding pillar of white exhaust all around the base of the rocket and across the modified oil platform. Michael watched his virtual view in awe but at the same time gritted his teeth. He’d been in very heated firefights before and in knife and gun battles to the death, but he’d always been in control in those situations. At the moment, the rocket could explode and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. Needless to say, he was nervous. He was nervous as hell.

“Vyrezka, you have cleared the launchpad.”

Vladimir shouted something in Russian that was unintelligible as far as Michael was concerned. He suspected it was along the lines of a cowboy whoop. The whooping was drowned out by the ever-increasing noise of the rocket engines and the capsule shaking.

“TVC powering up! Big current draw!” Jebidiah said excitedly. The Thrust Vector Control system, which consisted of the powered gimbals used to steer the four separate RD-171 nozzles in order to control the rocket’s trajectory, was making corrections and in turn was showing up on Jeb’s panel as electrical current being drawn from the Hydraulic Generator Power Supply System.

“Roll maneuver initiated!” Vladimir shouted over the noise. “HGPSS is in the green.”

“Copy Vyrezka, roll maneuver package is active. HGPSS telemetry looks good,” Stinson told them. “Pitch angle adjusted for inclination insertion. You are looking good, Vyrezka! You are looking good!”

“Clock shows launch plus a minute twenty-three, twenty-four,” Jeb announced. “Approaching Max-Q.”

“Throttle at eighty-two percent,” Vladimir said.

Michael watched as the Cheburashka, a stuffed Russian bear—or whatever the damned thing was—spun and bounced wildly at the bottom of the string above the center console. His own body felt like it weighed over three or maybe four hundred kilograms. He made no effort to move. Even blinking was difficult. He was amazed that the stuffed bear didn’t have an effective weight large enough to break the string holding it to the ceiling of the capsule. Then there was a loud violent-sounding explosion that rattled throughout the rocket capsule that startled him.

“Mach one!” Vladimir shouted.

“Jesus, that was loud,” Michael muttered but then suddenly some of the vibrations diminished and the ride smoothed out. There was still extreme force pressing him into his seat but it wasn’t as violent.

“Going for throttle up!” Vladimir shouted.

“Roger, Vyrezka, you are go for throttle up.”

A brief moment passed and then Vladimir said, “Mach two.”

Michael was forced into his seat even harder as the modernized new version of the Zenit-3SL with a manned capsule on top pushed past the speed of sound by a factor of more than two and raced toward orbital altitudes, continuing to increase speed. The force against him continued to increase to nearly bone-crushing weights. Michael was glad he had strong bones.

“Vyrezka, initiate throttle-back sequence.”

“Copy, Control. Initiating throttle-back sequence.” Vladimir replied.

As the rocket climbed higher and higher the atmosphere became less dense, creating less dynamic pressure against the hull. With less pressure against the rocket the thrust increased, adding more gee loading to the occupants. If the rocket were allowed to accelerate unchecked it would attain gee loads of five to six times Earth’s gravity. While the astronauts could survive such a trip, prolonged exposure to such high loads could cause injuries that they didn’t need. It would also totally exhaust them. Hence, there was the “throttle-back sequence.” The flight computer would start throttling back the RD-171, keeping the acceleration at a steady four gees. That was going to last for another minute or so and would be taxing enough on the crew.

“Hang on! Staging in fifteen seconds!” Vladimir said. Michael could do nothing but hang on. “…Three! Two! One!”

Bang! Bang!

The Zenit pyrotechnic charges blew the stage faring as the small RD-8 second-stage vernier rocket fired, pulling them away from the still hot, burning but now separated first stage. Then a few seconds later another force thrust Michael back into his seat as the second-stage main engine, an RD-120, ignited and continued to accelerate them higher and faster to space. The Cheburashka swung erratically back and forth and bounced up and down so violently Michael wondered just how heavy the thing would feel if he tried to hold it. And he still wasn’t certain that the thing wasn’t some joke or version of fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror of a hot rod car that cosmonauts used as a show of their prowess. He then wondered why they hadn’t used fuzzy dice. Vladimir had assured him that the stuffed animal was a necessity that Americans never understood. It had a purpose. All the Soyuz capsules had them. Michael just gritted his teeth and watched. And watched. And watched. The Cheburashka watched back, not blinking a stuffed eyelid.

“Launch plus seven minutes!” Jebidiah said. “SECO coming up in thirty.”

“Copy, Vyrezka, Second Stage Engine Cut-Off in twenty-four, twenty-three…”

Michael watched the clock in his virtual view as it ticked down to SECO. Suddenly, the capsule was very quiet. The little stuffed bear above his head floated about almost motionlessly. And then Michael completely understood why it was there. He got it. The thing was an accelerometer. The bear would tell them if they were in microgravity or if they were being accelerated. It did have a purpose.

There was a moment of microgravity while the computers updated the capsule’s whereabouts and generated Kalman filters to predict the right sequence of burns to raise and circularize their orbit. The onboard systems connected to as many of the American Global Positioning Satellites and as many Russian Global Navigation Satellite System satellites as they could detect. From each of those detections the flight computer used timing delays and signal multipath calculations to create a precise two-line-element sequence to feed back into the state vector of the spacecraft. Once the computer knew where they were, how fast they were going, and where they had been most recently, it could determine where it needed to go and what it would take to get it there in the way of rocket burns.

“Vyrezka, we show you at an inclination of fifty-one point six degrees, an elliptical orbit with apogee predicted to be two hundred and ninety-two kilometers. Be prepared for Hohmann Transfer burn on perigee. Phasing burns currently being calculated. We are handing off all flight control to you now, now, now. You have the ship.”

“Copy that, Control. Vyrezka is autonomous,” Vladimir said. “Onboard flight computer has us under control. Great work Control.”

“Vyrezka, be advised that all comms will now be cut and you are on your own. We have initiated Sink and Swim here. Do you copy?”

“Good Copy, Control. Thanks for your help and good luck down there. I hope your boat is fast enough,” Vladimir said and then flipped the comm to the internal channel only. “You heard her, comrades! Vyrezka has control. Welcome to space, gentlemen. Welcome. To. Space.”


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Framed