"Forward, Robert L - Rocheworld 01 - Rocheworld (The Flight of the Dragonfly) 5.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Forward Robert L)

The woman in the copilot seat was working the controls, her strong capable hands making tiny adjustments as her eyes alternated views of the flight display and the curved arc of the horizon outside the windshield. She was a very tall, superbly-built young woman with blue eyes and a blonde mane of long hair -- a California palomino. While she nervously handled the controls, the other woman's calm test-pilot voice quietly guided her through the reentry procedure.
"...Keep nose at right attitude, Shirley. Also watch those nose and wing thermometers. If nose go down, we dive in too fast. If nose go up, we skip out, miss landing field, and have to dump our nice Super-Shuttle in the ocean. Hold steady now ... that is good. That is very good."
The vacuum outside the windshield started to have some substance. They could look out at the wings and see the dull red glow of the protection blanket. Bits of dust and frost were swept from between the expansion cracks in the frothy protective skin as the thin supersonic wind flew by.
There was a dull thud. The view outside the windshield started to roll.
"What's happened, Arielle?" said Shirley, her voice tight with panic. "There's no roll response!"
Arielle didn't move, but her eyes were studying a distant corner of the status board where a red light had come on.
"Attitude control propellant tank is busted," she said. "Shut him down and bring up auxiliary system."
Shirley searched over the board, found the proper switches and flicked one down, then the other up. The new propellant tank pressure dropped as Shirley used the jets to reverse the roll and bring the heavy spacecraft around.
"You let nose get low," Arielle remarked calmly. Shirley looked out the window at the wings. The white-hot incandescence left green-yellow streaks in her vision as she glanced back and looked at the temperature indicators. They were all high, with the right wing indicator well above the danger line.
"Take over!" pleaded Shirley, "I'm going to lose it."
"You doing just fine," Arielle replied in a soothing tone. "You already have nose up. Besides, we may have computer glitch if consoles be switched now."
The air was getting thicker. The temperature indicators were dangerously high, but as the massive craft shed its orbital energy to the air outside, the temperatures started to drop. They were nearly through the critical reentry phase.
"You start switch to aerodynamic controls?" Arielle reminded and was pleased to see that Shirley had anticipated her.
There was another warning klaxon and the spacecraft started to roll again. A red message light flashed, indicating that the main hydraulic system was failing. Shirley reached to switch on the backup system. Arielle started to warn her that she should turn off the malfunctioning system first, but just then the high pressure oil hit the inactive actuators and jerked them wildly about. The nose dipped, and the view outside started to whirl violently. The windshield turned red, glaring white, then black...
* * * *
A cool Arielle popped the top of the Super-Shuttle trainer and stood up. She stared over the head of the shaken Shirley at a grinning black face peering over the top of the simulator console.
"Thomas St. Thomas!" she said severely. "She's third time on a reentry and you dump two breakdowns at her. You be shamed! Look at her!"
Shirley quickly recovered, gave them both a weak grin and extracted her long frame from the copilot seat.
"The trouble with that landing wasn't Thomas's fault, it was the simulator. It's so realistic I was fooled into thinking it was the real thing and panicked. Shall we try it again?"
Arielle was about to protest when the door to the simulator room opened and the Chief Administrator of the Johnson Space Center strode in, followed by a few newstapers.
"Don't you three ever take a break from training?" he said as he approached. He stopped, looked at the names on the front of three envelopes that he held in his hand and reading them off, passed them one at a time to the three astronauts.
"Captain Thomas St. Thomas, Arielle Trudeau, and Shirley Everett."
Thomas got his open first.
"YAHOO!" he hollered. "I'm going to Barnard."
He looked at the expressions on the faces of the two women as they looked at their letters, then he hollered again, "YAHOOO! We're ALL going to Barnard!!"
He leaped over the console, picked up Arielle, whirled her around once, and deposited her on the top of the simulator. He started to pick up Shirley, but she just stared him down with her two-centimeter height advantage. He passed her by and proceeded to pump the hand of the Chief Administrator vigorously as the newstapers got it all on tape.
The Houston TV stations that night ended their news program with a shot of the three astronauts -- Thomas with one arm around Shirley's shoulder and talking, while Arielle stood in front of the other two. She looked out of place. One would have thought she was a beauty queen, with her pretty face and short curly hair, rather than what she was -- one of the best aerospace pilots in the world. As usual, it was Thomas that had the last word as their pictures faded for the commercials.
"We're going to the STARS!!!"
* * * *
It was another drizzly winter day in Washington, DC, so George stood in the narrow portico at the front of the Space Administration Headquarters building and waited for the crew to arrive while Jinjur and Dr. Wang were upstairs checking out the meeting room with the Space Administration staff. The first to arrive were Caroline Tanaka, fiber-optics engineer and astronomer, John Kennedy, mechanical engineer and nurse, who bore a striking resemblance to his distant relative, Captain Anthony Roma, lightsail pilot from the Space Marines, and Katrina Kauffmann, former nurse and now a biochemist with a specialty of levibotany. She would help Nels Larson and Dr. Wang keep the hydroponics tanks and tissue cultures healthy. They had all flown into town yesterday and had spent the morning across the street at the National Air and Space Museum. During a lull in the rain they ran down the short block on Sixth Street to where George was waiting. He greeted them and sent them upstairs to the briefing room.
It was five minutes later when he saw a tall uniformed figure come up from underground on the Metro escalator on Maryland Avenue. It was Colonel Alan Armstrong. He had taken the Metro over from the Pentagon. He shook hands with George perfunctorily.
"I look forward to being in your command," said Alan coolly. "I think I'll go see if General Jones needs any help."
Just then a Space Administration station wagon pulled up with the three astronauts. They had flown in that morning in their trainer aircraft. Alan, seeing that two of them were women, paused to wait. The first one up the steps was a good-looking young black man. He headed for George and stuck out his hand.
"Hi! Colonel Gudunov. Remember me? I was one of your students in flight school."
"I never forget a one, Thomas," said George, smiling and shaking his hand. He turned to Alan.
"Alan," said George. "I'd like you to meet three of your crewmates, Captain Thomas St. Thomas, Shirley Everett, and Arielle Trudeau. This is Colonel Alan Armstrong."
They shook hands around. At the end, Alan kept hold of Arielle's hand and looked quizzically at her face.
"Such a gorgeous creature you are," he said in a flattering tone. "I'm sure I've seen you before ... say ... weren't you Miss Quebec in ought five, just before Quebec separated from Canada?"
Arielle blushed. "Yes," she admitted, "but the Quebecois always want to live in past. I want to live in future, so like rest of Canada, I leave Quebec and become citizen of Greater U.S."
Alan took her by the arm. "Let me take you to the meeting room," he said. "I know the way." Ignoring the others, he took her off.
A humming sound in the distance became louder. A high-powered sports car appeared, working its way down Independence Avenue through the Washington traffic. They turned to watch as the fiery-red Liberian Sword pulled into the reserved parking area in front of the building. A security guard compared the licence plate with the numbers on a list and went down to put a special card under the windshield-wiper blades. A tall, redheaded woman dressed in a green satin jump suit that matched her green eyes unfolded herself from the front seat and strode up the short flight of steps toward them. Her long thin legs glistened in their shiny, green, high-heeled alligator boots.
George stared in fascination at the legs. _Probably the new mutation-green stock from the hide farms_, he thought. He started forward to greet her, but Thomas beat him to it.
"I bet you're the famous Red Vengeance," said Thomas, sticking out his hand. "Few people can afford a Sword, much less drive it so well. Y'know, you're the dream girl of the heavy-lift pilots. We'd all like to take a prospecting trip with you."
Red raised her eyebrows and shook his hand politely. "Not all at one time, I hope," she said, with a faint smile on her face. "I'm Elizabeth, and you?..."
"Thomas," he said. "Thomas St. Thomas, and this is Shirley Everett, and over there is Colonel Gudunov.
Red stared for a long moment at George as she slowly extracted her hand from Thomas's grip. George tried to return the look but finally had to glance away from the deep green eyes. He coughed nervously.
"We're all here," he said. "Let's go up to the briefing room."
Jinjur was waiting at the podium in the front of the briefing room when they entered.
"Get yourself a hot cup of coffee to ward off the chill and have a seat," said Jinjur. "Thomas? You'll be talking right after me, so get your viewgraphs out."
After introductions around, Jinjur returned to the podium. "Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. I don't know all of you well now, but since I am going to be spending the rest of my life with you, I hope that soon you'll all be my friends." She paused, and took a sip out of a coffee cup that had the laser and lightsail emblem of the Space Marines on one side and black letters spelling "THE BOSS" on the other.