Test Pilot's Daughter II: Dead Reckoning (4 page)

At the same time, Christina Matthews had become the most famous astronaut who ever lived. She had done the impossible, pulled the trigger at just the right moment to save the crew from a fiery death as the second missile ignited the main fuel tank. She was in great demand for personal appearances, but NASA covered her in a heavy blanket of security. No question at all, al-Qaida wanted her dead. After the explosive demise of Lazer and sabotage of Endeavor, she was a marked woman. Her life changed dramatically. It had morphed into the miserable existence of celebrity, hounded by Paparazzi and smothered by bodyguards. She so missed running down to the corner Burger King for a juicy Whopper or jogging the streets of her neighborhood at night. She couldn’t even go the toilet alone.

Christina was in the cafeteria at Johnson Space Center--JSC--when she heard a rumor she was taken off the crew for STS-733.
Are you kidding me?
she thought.
That can’t be!
It would be the first orbital test of DROID. Hustling down the hall in a burst of rage, bodyguards in tow, she saw Rhani Hussein coming out of the Director’s office.
Formalities can go straight to hell!
she thought as she stomped past the secretary. The older lady arose with a look of horror as Christina sailed past.

“Hey, you can’t. . .”

Charles Winston Scott looked up when the door banged open, “Sorry Stick, you’re not going. That’s final.”

“No way! You gotta let me go. That’s my baby you’re testing. I worked three years on the friggin’ thing. Don’t tell me you’re gonna send that Rhani kid up there with my DROID!”

“That’s right.”

“Listen, I don’t have to fly the mission, just put me on as a mission specialist.” She was willing to compromise.

“Are you shittin’ me? You’ve already attracted one hit job, Stick. You’re a damnable curse, a homing beacon for trouble. I should’ve never let you go on that last one with all the letters. You go up there again and terrorists will be all over NASA. We still don’t know who did it, and we’ve only got one shuttle left. Mr. Rhani Hussein is a very accomplished young astronaut, and he’ll do just fine.”

“No he won’t.” She lost it, “He won’t do at all!
Charles you can’t pull me off. This is all I got. I’ve sacrificed everything for this fucking program. . .
everything,
do you hear? Even my husband.”

He looked at her in a snarl and barked, “New Hope will
never
carry another goddam woman if I have anything to do with it! I’ve had enough trouble with you females. . .I’ve had it!”

She did her best to calm down and control her tone. Christina Matthews wasn’t known for tact. “You don’t have to publicize it, Charles, but you must let me go. This is bigger than the both of us. The President wants me up there. Critical to national pride. . .get back on the horse and all that crap.”

“Now don’t start pulling rank on me. I don’t want you in that shuttle, and it’s my call. I’m still the boss around here!” he slammed his fist down on the desk.

Not quite the debutant type, she wasn’t good at taking
No
for an answer. With one hand on each hip, she bent over his desk and looked right into his eyes. It was a laser beam stare that would drill a hole in the strongest opponent. “We’ll just see about that,” she said calmly.

“You little
bitch!
You keep the goddam President out of this!” Scott looked like his head was going to explode.

Christina towered over him. “Well, I don’t know about ‘little.’ Listen boss, Gleason said I could call him anytime. I think he liked having his picture made with me. Don’t you know? I’m a political gold mine.”

She had had just about enough of this asshole. She turned and walked out of his office knowing he would have little choice. If he hadn’t already, President Gleason would instruct him to let her fly, and
she figured
, Probably in the Commander’s seat with full press.

* * *

The imaginary countdown was T-minus-three weeks for STS-733. There was so much tension in the briefing room, it smelled of perspiration, Christina on one side, Rhani on the other. She didn’t trust him, but there was no way to get him off the crew. She had been picked to pilot the mission, and her flight crew sat around in large stuffed chairs.

Director Scott walked in with his assistant, Jenny. She was carrying a stack of folders. A chubby four-star General followed. Military were rare at JSC. When they saw the brass they all looked at each other in a silent inquisition trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

“Okay,”
Christina said, “who’s going to war?”

“I know you’re all wondering, so I’ll just blurt it out,” Scott said. “New Hope STS-733 will have a secret objective, not to be shared with the press.”

The crew chattered, goofy-wide-eyed like,
Hey, I didn’t sign up for this.

“For one thing, the fact that Stick will be pilot is not to be disclosed until after the mission. I got the administration to compromise on that one. I know it’s a little last minute, but I’ve added Rhani Hussein on this flight. I want someone other than Stick out there testing that robot, someone a little more, shall we say, unbiased? The official objective of 7-3-3 will be to test the new DROID docking technology. And, here’s the secret part,” he scanned the room as if looking for spies, “if it works like we think, a military DROID will intercept the Soyuz 23.”

“Soyuz 23?” Christina asked.

“Why didn’t I know about this?” Jake Tibits, mission copilot, complained. He was a true professional, age forty-nine, call sign Arrow, and he didn’t like surprises. “We didn’t train for that.”

“Shut up, Arrow.” Scott gave him a stern look. “General Wallace would you be so kind to fill in the crew?”

The four-star stepped up to the podium. “The Soyuz 23 payload was supposed to be an Iranian weather satellite. The Ruskies put it in orbit when Iran paid two-billion dollars in oil money. Quite a sum for a weather bird, no? We have recently learned it’s not a weather satellite after all. It’s military. . .designed to guide the new long range Iranian missiles toward targets in the United States.”

“What?” Arrow shouted.

“Yes, and if you haven’t heard, those missiles were acquired from the Russians, and they’re armed with nukes. They got at least ten.”

“Are you kidding me?” Christina gasped. “Well, what the hell are you waiting for, why don’t you just shoot it down?”

“I’d love to.” Wallace blurted. “President Gleason is worried about the political fallout of such an aggressive move. We have enough trouble with the Iranians as it is. Their nukes can target Israel without the satellite.”

“Okay then, so what are we supposed to do? We’re not military,” Arrow insisted.

“You’re goin’ up there to test the DROID,” Scott answered, “same as before.”

The mission had been well publicized as one step necessary to put an unmanned spacecraft on Mars, take samples and return to earth. Landing a probe on the Martian surface had been done, but returning samples without astronauts was a challenge. Such a feat required automated docking of the landing module with its orbital mother ship. All prior docking operations had been done manually, under the guidance of a human pilot. It was impossible to accomplish a Mars docking remotely from earth because of the distance and lag time in controls. NASA believed there was sufficient oxygen in the Martian soil at one site to support a manned station, but wouldn’t know for sure until actual samples had been thoroughly tested.

Christina scratched her head. She knew her invention had another potential application which hadn’t been discussed with the public. If it worked, it had the ability to intercept ICBMs. Technically speaking, automated docking and suborbital intercept were one and the same, but it was important to make sure the technology was viable before investing in weapon systems. A properly designed array of DROID attack vehicles had the potential for the
Star Wars
shield Ronald Regan envisioned back in the ‘80s. Orbital laser destroyers had been a thing of science fiction, because of the enormous amount power required and the sheer inefficiency of lasers. A laser big enough to take out an ICBM would be so large it couldn’t be launched.
Star Wars
lasers were nothing more than a bluff, a smoke and mirrors game to force the Russians to abandon the weapons race.
The truly amazing thing is,
she thought,
it worked!
Hey, luck beats management.
In the face of “orbital lasers,” the Russians threw up their hands, and the once great Soviet menace collapsed.

On the other hand, now that technology had advanced, orbital attack robots like DROID carried an air of true feasibility. As a matter of fact, any vehicle that could deliver a cloud of dirt in front of an ICBM would be devastating. Sand or dust would pit aerodynamic surfaces to the point that reentry would be self destructive. “Just dust?” a professor had asked when Christina defended her PhD dissertation. “Right as rain,” she answered. “All you need is a few buckets of sand. The hard part, of course, is delivering it to the right place, with the appropriate direction and velocity.”

Wallace spoke in a deep southern drawl, “I’d like to caution everyone in this room that what you’re about to hear is classified, Top Secret.
We built a DROID attack vehicle capable of capturing the Soyuz 23 payload. It can approach, verify that it isn’t friendly and either bring it back to the shuttle or destroy it. We need to collect evidence with close range photos before we take action in case the Iranians mount a protest. We believe they won’t say a word because of the UN. Such a satellite is in direct violation of all the anti-proliferation mandates. The UN’ll slap an embargo on Iran that’ll shut ‘em down, cut off the oil.”

“So when do we get training on this?” Arrow pleaded.

“No time for that. You are to maintain schedule. We’ll provide a trained specialist to operate our system,” Wallace said. “That’s all you civilians need to know right now. Just make sure that DROID gets up there and does its business.” Wallace got out of the way and let Scott step in.

“That’s it for today, people,” he said. “Remember this is absolutely classified, not a word to anyone outside this room, not even your spouse.”

Your spouse. . .your spouse.
It echoed in the darkest corner of Christina’s mind. It was like a dagger to her heart. Tears fell on her jumpsuit. Surprised by the upwelling of emotion, she had never really thought of Lazer as “her spouse.” He had been the love of her life and her best friend. Even after all that had happened on her last mission, she was still hurting for him. But she was a true professional, so she sucked it up and choked back the tears.

* * *

“Hey kid, what are ya
doin’ in here?” asked one of the new technicians as Michael Jacobs walked up to the simulator.

Not again,
he thought. Michael was 29 with a PhD in Nuclear Engineering from MIT. Slightly overweight because of an active sweet tooth, he was the oldest of the four astronauts in the FAA program. Not much of a flyer, but he was one of the smartest young people in America. At six-two, he stood taller than most, but he had a baby-face, and people often addressed him that way.
I need to grow a beard,
he thought.

A size 10 head carried and extra large dose of brains with a whopping I.Q. of 195. His work on cold water reactors at MIT yielded results for the first time in history, and he invented a new source of power for future Lunar and Martian stations. Both the Moon and Mars had enough metals and oxygen in the surface soil to be harvested as fuel. It was just a matter of finding the right sites and developing systems for excavation and refinement. A little shy around females, there was only one girl Michael really cared about: Christina Matthews.

Called Twinky by his NASA buddies, Michael was a good looking young man, with pleasant features and a lily-white complexion. He had been in serious “heart” with Christina for years. She was a bit gangly, but he thought she was gorgeous, and he admired her achievements. He figured she was the only female on earth who could keep up a technical conversation at his level. Some of her work in electro-optics at Georgia Tech had transferred to MIT while he was still there. Ever since he saw her give a speech, he fell head over heels. One nerd after another, it was a perfect match. The only problem was, she was married. As a young wife she had been totally dedicated to her husband and, now that Lazer was gone, she was difficult to reach. Although she was always polite, Christina wouldn’t give him the time of day, and that just made him crazy. Like most young men, he yearned for what he couldn’t have, the forbidden fruit, the holy grail. Although he was always busy training for his own mission, Michael could never get Christina out of his head.

Sitting in a booth in a restaurant, he envisioned her with wild excitement. She had made it abundantly clear that her lingering feelings for Lazer took her out of the dating game, but out of the blue she agreed to join him for dinner. Actually, she asked to meet with him
.
Of course, that was no simple task since she would be draped by a mob of bodyguards. She picked the Longhorn Steak House just outside the JSC campus.

Michael watched the door, getting quite nervous as she was twenty minutes late. Finally, he looked up from his half-stein of beer and saw her coming with an entourage. The entire restaurant went silent. Christina was a superstar in the local papers, and they all stared as if she was the Queen of Sheba. She pointed at Michael and bodyguards marched her across the room.