Delta Green - [16]

But it finally did.

Cartwright called to a master sergeant, “Bristol, let’s get those craft ready to roll.”

“Thank you, sir,” McKenna said.

Chapter Four

DELTA RED

Lieutenant Polly Tang, Brad Mitchell’s number two, waved through the glass port that overlooked the hangar. Over the radio, she said, “All clear, Delta Red. Good luck.”

Lynn Haggar clicked her transmit button. “Until next time, Beta.”

Over the intercom, Olsen reported, “All systems on line, Country.”

When she and Olsen had been formally adopted by the squadron, she had been given the nickname of Country Girl, but Olsen tended to shorten it.

She fired the nose thrusters, and spurts of nitrogen gas nudged Delta Red slowly backwards out of the bay. The motion was relative, of course, since the MakoShark was hurtling through space at the same 18,000 miles per hour as the space station, which orbited the earth at a mean altitude of 220 miles. The orbital period was 3.6 hours.

The craft reversed slowly from the hangar cell, and as soon as it was clear, she added two more bursts from the nose thrusters, then said, “All right, that’s enough. Close them up, Swede.”

Olsen punched the pad that sealed the carbon-carbon/Nomex/ceramic alloy panels over the nose thrusters. Without the protective doors in place, the nozzles would not survive the intense heat of reentry.

“Nose thrusters passive, panels closed,” he reported.

The gap between the satellite and the MakoShark increased steadily. The hangar doors closed with deliberate slowness, like flower petals folding, and the hangar’s interior lights winked out. And Lynn Haggar was left with the sight that brought her to the brink of awe every time.

When the doors of all twenty-eight cells were closed, twenty-foot-high black letters identified the station as:

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

SPACE STATION THEMIS

USSC-1

The hub of the station was a cylinder three hundred feet in diameter and two hundred feet in width. One half of it (this side) was constructed like a honeycomb, made up of eight hangar cells large enough to accept a Mako or MakoShark behind closed doors. Resupply rockets, fuel, and other stores could be ported in the smaller cells. Additionally, the module on Spoke Twelve was utilized for HoneyBee maintenance as well as for refurbishing satellites which were already in space. One of the tasks of the Mako vehicles was to collect faltering communications or surveillance satellites and bring them to Themis for repair or retrofit.

An unbalanced set of spokes (balance being unnecessary in zero gravity) reached out from the hub and were capped with variously sized modules that housed command, energy, residential, and experimental spaces. The other side of the hub, called the “hot” side since it was exposed to the sun, mounted a massive solar array. The energy developed from the solar panels supplemented that which was provided by the nuclear reactor in Spoke Nine, and the heat bled from the collectors was pumped through exchangers to maintain a constant temperature within the station.

From Delta Red’s current position, Haggar couldn’t see the utilitarian solar panels. Her view was less functional and more impressive. The outer skin of the station was laminated with white plastic for its reflective quality, but the visual effect was that of a single, cold, and massive star projected forward from a movie screen filled with distant stars.

Her significance in the totality of the universe was always dramatically apparent to her in these moments. The calculated output of significance would have a lot of zeros and a decimal point ahead of her number.

“Reentry attitude, Country.”

“Coming up,” she said and eased back on the control stick, firing thrusters that slowly brought the nose up and the tail down, inverting the MakoShark until she was sailing her orbit in reverse. Above her head was the Earth, shimmering with diffused color. She tapped the hand controller forward a couple of times, initiating thruster bursts that counteracted, then canceled the motion.

“I have a reentry track and time,” Olsen said. “Eighteen minutes, Lynn. Time for a few hands of bridge.”

Olsen was a bridge fanatic and was good enough that opponents were hard for him to find.

He was also an expert with the weapons systems and computers. In addition to the variable weight data of personnel, cargo, fuel load, and pylon loads, he had keyed in their desired altitude and geographical coordinates over northern Africa, and the computer had determined their final weight and center of gravity. In a weightless environment, the weight of various objects that could be carried aboard a HoneyBee or a Mako were derived from a master list maintained on the space station’s mainframe computer.

The spacecraft computer ran a test profile of the reentry flight, casually determining just what was possible, and if it accepted the data, planned the initial reentry burn, its duration, the angle of attack, and the trajectory.

Since, unlike the Space Shuttle, the Mako craft could achieve powered flight after reentry into the atmosphere, the windows of opportunity were larger and more frequent.