"Titan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

Day 1181

Alone in the humming calm of the flight deck and with her feet padding at the Teflon sheet — with all the lights subdued save for the small instrument glows, surrounded by the soft sounds of her mother’s voice, her own breathing and the high-pitched whir of the pumps — Nicola Mott stared upwards at the moons of Jupiter.

The crop yields continued to fall, and the transmission of mutations to successive generations was rising. Some plants, like the strawberries, refused to flower altogether. Rosenberg had talked about the reasons for this — inappropriate cell structures, poor fluid transmission — but Mott just tuned him out. The science really didn’t matter right now; in a sense, it never had.

They just had to find solutions with their available resources. Ways to survive.

So they were improvising. Rosenberg had designed a new plant growth unit to work in the centrifuge arm, where the plants could be subjected to a high percentage of a G for most of each day. That meant transferring some of the farm’s equipment — lamps, the air blower system, racks and nutrient baths and reservoirs — into the cramped arm cabin.

It was a long and difficult job, to which they were all having to contribute, under Rosenberg’s reluctant supervision. It wasn’t going to be a complete answer; the growing area inside the arm would be nothing like sufficient to fulfil their needs. And the arm wasn’t shielded from radiation so well as the farm itself. But Rosenberg’s hope was that stronger growths in the arm, coupled with at least some provision from the original farm, would close the gap in their requirements, before they started to go hungry.

The biggest drawback was the loss of the centrifuge for the crew.

They had reinstalled the exercise cycle, up on the flight deck, where there was still a little room. But not the treadmill.

That pissed Nicola Mott. It had been proven, all the way back to Skylab, that a treadmill was a much better way of exercising a range of muscle groups than a cycle. In her opinion it was just another example of the crew’s collective laziness and incompetence, which would lead them all, ultimately, into disaster.

Anyway, she had got on with devising her own solution.

She improvised a treadmill. It was just a slippery sheet of Teflon that she bolted to the floor of the flight deck, behind the pilot’s seat. She could balance herself with a hand on the seat in front of her, and just walk along, her feet slithering on the slippery pad. She wore socks, so her feet could slide more easily. It wasn’t as effective as the real thing; too often she stubbed a toe on the bolts that held the Teflon in place, and because she couldn’t vary the resistance, generally it was muscle fatigue that stopped her working. But she found if she worked at it long enough her calves, tendons and toes got a real workout.

And so, here she was. She had slapped a softscreen on the wall, and as she worked she listened to a message from her parents, relayed from their home in Cambridge, England. She didn’t trouble to watch too carefully; the quality was low because of reduced capacity anyhow, and her father was prone to providing her with badly-shot home movies overlaid by her mother’s slow, monotonic speech. Right now, for instance, there was a shaky pan of the new rice paddy fields around Ely in Cambridgeshire.

…You remember your cousin Sarah,her mother said. Came down with CJD, didn’t she. She was only twenty-two. Such a pretty girl. She chose the euth clinic, you know, even though Mary — your aunt Mary, you know, her mother — said it was un-Christian, What a mess the whole thing is. Of course we don’t have blood donors now, all our transfusion blood is flown in from abroad, and the Tories say the government’s blood tax is too high. Quarantine, they call it. The French were the first — typical bloody French, your father says — when they poured all that concrete down the Channel Tunnel. Oh, John Major died. There was a program on the telly. I didn’t realize he was the last Tory Prime Minister, who’d have thought it…

Her mother’s face, on screen now, was a ruin, the left side imploded, cratered. She had come down with a prion disease related to Creutzfeld-Jakob, non-fatal but disfiguring, the prions steadily sculpting the soft cells of her flesh.

It had taken Mott herself a hell of a lot of tests to be proven fit to come to the States, to get into NASA.

She had come a long way from Cambridgeshire.

…Everything was different here.

Discovery was now five hundred million miles from the sun — five times the distance of Earth from the parent star. As the mission had unfolded the inverse square law had worked inexorably at the sun’s radiation and size; from here the sun was still brilliant — at magnitude minus seventeen, much brighter than any star or planet seen from Earth — but its disc was tiny, like a flaw in the retina, like a distant supernova, like nothing she had seen from the surface of Earth. The light it cast had a strange quality, too: almost the light of a point source, the shadows stretching over the orbiter long and sharp.

Even the sun was different here, transmuted into something alien by distance.

As Discovery’s separation from Earth had grown, and the lag of radio signals from Houston had risen to an hour and a half round trip, it was as if their tenuous link to home had stretched, broken.

Now Earth was just a spark of blue light close to the shrinking sun, the place the high-gain antenna pointed. And those remote voices, from Mission Control and in the back rooms of Building 30 at JSC, with their detailed reams of advice and instruction — trying to control the crew, as once they had choreographed Moonwalkers, step by step — seemed to have little to do with their situation, here, suspended in extraordinary isolation in this outer darkness.

It was taking a while to sink in, after four decades of the culture of the ground control of spaceflight, but out here, as they sailed past the moons of Jupiter, the crew of Discovery was truly alone. There was nothing to fall back on but what they had brought along with them, for better or worse, and whatever ingenuity they could apply.

Your father’s talking about a holiday. He wants to go to Mega-Power — you know, the turbine tower, that Dutch monstrosity in the North Sea. Apparently they have restaurants and a hotel and shop, four miles high. All covered over, of course. Fancy that. But I wouldn’t trust it, not after the leak of that huge cloud of ammonia last year…

Directly above her head Mott could see the half-disc of Jupiter. It glowed salmon-pink in the flat sunlight. Discovery was coming no closer than two million miles to the planet — twenty-five Jupiter diameters — but even so the giant world showed a sizable disc, like a big pink coin held at arm’s length, four times the size of the Moon in Earth’s sky. On the sunlit hemisphere she could make out the stripes of the ammonia ice cloud bands, brown and white and orange stripes, streaked and curdled with turbulence along the lines where they met. She couldn’t see the Great Red Spot, and that was a disappointment. But Jupiter’s day was only ten hours or so; perhaps the planet’s disc would stay visible long enough for the Spot to be brought into view.

And Mott could see some of Jupiter’s moons, strung out in a line parallel to the equator of their parent.

Io — a little larger than Earth’s Moon — lay between its parent and the sun, about two Jupiter diameters from the cloud tops, its illuminated hemisphere a sulphur-yellow spot of light. Ganymede, twice as far from Jupiter as Io, sat behind its parent, its ice surface glittering white. Europa and Callisto, the other large moons, were harder to spot; eventually she found Callisto as a bright white spark against the darkness of Jupiter’s shadowed hemisphere.

It only took Io, the innermost of the large satellites, a day or so to travel around its orbit around Jupiter. If she stayed up here long enough, Mott would get to see the moons turn around their parent in their endless, complex dance…

The compact Jovian system was oddly charming. Like an old-fashioned orrery, a clockwork model of the Solar System. But Jupiter was eleven times the diameter of Earth. And its moons, if freed from Jupiter’s grip, were large enough to have qualified as planets in their own right. Ganymede — out here, a spark dwarfed by Jupiter — was the largest moon in the Solar System: larger than Titan, larger, in fact, than the planet Mercury.

In a window frame of this beat-up Shuttle orbiter, she could see five worlds, clustered together in one gigantic gravity well.

But, she thought, there was no life here, not even — as far as anyone could tell — on that slush ball Europa. There was no life for a half-billion miles in any direction, save within the battered walls of this spacecraft, the bubble of air which sheltered her.

Damn it all. She wished Siobhan could see this. That remote death, back in the heart of the Solar System, was losing its power to hurt her now. But still, what a waste, what a meaningless, cruel waste.

No, I want to go to the hedgerow museum in Hampshire, Apparently they still have some ptarmigans there, the last ones. Oh, I have to tell you, you wouldn’t believe the price of potatoes in the shops. All the sweetcorn you could ask for, but it’s not the same… We know you are still missing Siobhan, love. We know you two were pals. You take care of yourself, and try not to fret about it all too much…

Pals. Her parents had never known — or had preferred not to know — about Libet’s true relationship with their daughter. Her parents had been young in the 1970s, hardly the Victorian era. Mott wondered if there was something in the human genome which dictated that no generation could accept the sexuality of its offspring.

But, out here, it hardly seemed to matter, like so much else.

Discovery’s path — whirling around the inner planets, and then out past Jupiter to Saturn — was actually similar to that of Cassini, which had come this way more than a decade before. But since then Jupiter and Saturn had wheeled through their grand orbits, of twelve and twenty-nine years, and they weren’t in such a favorable position for Discovery’s slingshot as they had been for Cassini. Discovery needed to come in a lot closer than Cassini, to extract still more energy from Jupiter, the most massive planet in the Solar System.

But that meant the orbiter had to penetrate deep into Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

Mott knew she, and the rest of the crew, were paying a price. Jupiter’s magnetic field was ten times as powerful as Earth’s, and its magnetosphere — the doughnut-shaped belt of magnetically trapped solar wind particles — stretched fifty Jupiter diameters, far beyond Discovery’s current position. Right now heavy solar wind particles, electrons and hydrogen and helium nuclei, which circled, trapped, in Jupiter’s magnetosphere — ten thousand times as energetic as those in the Van Alien belts of Earth — coursed through the fabric of the ship, and her body.

Arguably this place, the magnetosphere of the most massive planet, was the most hostile section of deep space in the Solar System. And here she was, staring out the window at it.

Mott stayed on the flight deck as long as she could, exercising in Jupiter light.

She slowed her pace on the treadmill. She hung onto the pilot’s seat for a moment and let her aching legs drift, deliciously, in the balm of microgravity, bearing no weight at all. Then she swivelled and pulled herself to the instrument panel at the back of the flight deck, and looked out over the orbiter’s instrument bay.

Discovery was passing Jupiter with its payload bay turned up to the giant planet and its system, instruments straining, the big high-gain antenna pointing at remote Earth, lost now in the glare of the sun. The point-source sun and pink Jupiter, at right angles to each other, cast complex multiple shadows over the blocky, blanketed equipment in the payload bay, and over Discovery’s curving wings.

It was impossible to reconcile the awesome spectacle up here with the squalor and crap of their lives inside the spacecraft — the shitty, failing systems, the endless slog of their daily lives.

But there had been no other way to get here, to see this.

She towelled off her sweat, wrapped up her softscreen, and went back to the hab module.

Rosenberg clambered into Apollo Command Module CM-115, through the tight little docking tunnel in its nose, past the compartments containing the drogue and recovery parachutes and their mortars and the forward reaction control system.

He came down into the big pressurized crew compartment in the mid-section, descending on it from above. There were three couches in there, side by side on their backs. They were just metal frames slung with grey Armalon fiberglass cloth, so close together he was sure it wouldn’t be possible for three adult humans to pack in there without rubbing shoulders, elbows and knees against each other.

Rosenberg wriggled into the center couch, the Command Module Pilot’s. He spread out his manuals on his knee.

He was here as part of his in-flight training program. He was never going to be a pilot, but he had to learn how to fly an Apollo — in case of contingency — all the way to the surface of Titan.

The Command Module was like a small aircraft, upended, its interior coated with switches, dials and cathode ray displays. The lights were subdued, the glow in the cabin greenish from the CRTs. Directly in front of him there was a big, gun-metal grey, one-hundred-and-eighty-degree instrument panel, glistening with five hundred switches. There were control handles on the commander’s couch armrests: the attitude controller assembly on the right, which was used to control the reaction thruster assemblies, and the big thrust-translator controller on the left, which could be used to accelerate the craft forward or back. For this unique mission, the attitude control would also be used to direct a paraglider, a shaped parachute which would guide Apollo down to a safe landing on Titan’s slushy surface.

There was a smell of plastic and metal; all around him the fans and pumps of the Command Module clicked and whirred.

The windows seemed small and far away; he was pretty much surrounded by metal walls, here, and even though the side hatch was still open, he felt closed in.

The Command Module showed Apollo’s priorities: it had been built to keep people alive, not to let them sightsee, or do any of that fancy science crap en route to the Moon.

He turned his attention to the instrument panel.

There were toggle switches, thumb wheels, push buttons, rotary switches with click stops. The readouts were mainly meters, lights and little rectangular windows. There were tiny joysticks and pushbuttons: translational controllers, to work the Command Module’s clusters of attitude rockets. He experimented with the switches. They were protected by little metal gates on either side, to save them being kicked by a free-fall boot. He worked his way across the panel, practising flipping the dead switches, getting used to the feel of them.

There were little diagrams etched into the panel, he saw, circuit and flow charts. He consulted his manuals. All the switches were contained by one diagram or another. Once he started to see the system behind the diagrams, he began to figure the logic in the panel, how the switches clustered and related to each other.

He surveyed the cabin, checking he understood the contents of the lockers.

The equipment bay beyond the left-hand couch contained components of the environment control system, including the control unit. The bay in front of this held more life support equipment such as a water delivery system, and doubled as a clothing store. The right-hand bay contained more food, and the extremely clunky Apollo-era waste management systems: plastic condoms, and bags within which you had to catch and treat your turds. In a bay ahead of this Rosenberg found medical kits, survival gear and modern-looking camera equipment. In the aft bay, beneath the couches, were components of pressure suits.

If you docked with a Lunar Module, Rosenberg learned, you stowed your docking probe in that aft bay, and the circular tunnel cover in the left-hand bay…

In the lower bay at the foot of the center couch he found guidance and navigation electronics. Communications equipment was also crammed in there, along with batteries, food and other equipment.

There was also a tiny, beautiful sextant and telescope, for navigating between Earth and Moon.

GM-H5 had been built four decades earlier, to fly to the Moon. But now it had been rebuilt, to some extent. CM-115 had been upgraded to stand a space soak of six years. Its attitude control system was to be based on nitrogen, which would not degrade in space. Hydraulic systems, which might freeze, were replaced by systems of wires and electric motors. The cooling system had been replaced by a water-based design, because chemicals in the old system like glycol were corrosive and couldn’t be stored over long periods. A thermal blanket cocoon had been fitted over the Command Module’s heatshield, to protect it from micrometeorite damage. The life support systems — some of which dated back to the Mercury era — had been upgraded to Shuttle technology. And so on.

The main challenge, in learning to handle this thing, was going to be the computer system.

Rosenberg spread a softscreen over his knee, opened up a manual, and began to poke at the Command Module’s DSKY — pronounced “disky,” the little computer touch-control pad. The technicians had torn the heart out of Apollo’s computers, but had to leave the same interface. Anything else would have meant pulling the ship apart, and nobody had got the confidence to do that.

The DSKY was not a softscreen — not even much like the keyboard, mouse and monitor technology he had grown up with. There was just a block of status and warning lights labelled PROG and OPR ERR and UPLINK ACTY and COMP ACTY… He began to study their meanings.

Tentatively, he started to punch the keypad. The pad wasn’t even qwerty; it contained a blocky numeric pad, with addition and subtraction signs, and eight function keys with tiny lettering: VERB, NOUN, ENTER, RSET, PRO, others. The keypad was used to construct little command sentences, to communicate with the computer. There were about a hundred verbs and nouns he would have to know.

He practiced loading a rendezvous program. He touched the surface of his softscreen, and a little prompt panel opened up. He told the computer he wanted to change the program: he pressed the VERB function key, and then 3, 7, ENTER. He gave it the new program: P31, a rendezvous mode. 3, 1, ENTER. He asked for data. VERB 0, 6; NOUN 8, 4. Five-digit numbers flashed up on the display area. That was the velocity change he’d need for the next maneuver.

The display could show decimal numbers, angles, octal numbers, time… He could only tell which was which by context, following his checklist.

The flight load had dozens of programs. Rosenberg would have to learn which was which, learn to select them without thinking. There wouldn’t be much help for him, if he had to run this stuff in anger. But then, nobody said it would be easy.

And besides, he was kind of enjoying this. It was like solving a series of little logical puzzles.

They nearly didn’t have computers in the old Apollos at all, he’d learned. Not everyone had agreed they needed them for navigation and rendezvous; ground control could cover all of that. Two arguments got computers in here. The first was the Russians. What if those Soviets tried to disrupt communications with Houston? The astronauts needed some way to get around the jamming by doing their own calculations. And the second was that NASA wanted to prepare for longer-duration missions, such as the flights to Mars that had never been funded: far enough away, you can’t afford to wait out the minutes, or hours, it might take for some number to come up from the ground; you needed a local processing ability.

Fear and dreams, he thought, that’s what had driven the computer technology, and everything else about Apollo, and maybe now the Titan mission as well. Fear and dreams.

The DSKY system was so counter-intuitive it was going to be tough to learn. But he had six years to study it, en route to Titan; if he ever needed to fly this ship he’d be able to play the crummy little gadget like a piano.

And anyhow he enjoyed the work. He enjoyed being tucked away, alone, in this humming little cabin with all its gadgets, occupying his mind with creaky old computer codes. It was a break from the complexities of life support, and his ambiguous and increasingly unwelcome role as ship’s doctor, and the sour relationships that prevailed in the hab module.

And besides, Rosenberg found himself being slowly seduced by the Apollo.

He loved the endless lockers, the compact equipment, the careful design and storage, the way everything was tucked away.

When he was a kid, he’d built himself a den cum spaceship something like this. It was just a plastic tent hung up inside a climbing frame. He had little food boxes in there, and stocks of soda, and a rolled-up Army-surplus sleeping bag in one corner, and a couple of boxes of cold lights. He’d landed on a hundred planets in that little ship, all of them contiguous with his mother’s back yard; He would peer through muddy plastic portholes, then creep out of his ship with his torch and his walkie-talkie and explore; but the main joy was to huddle back in the safety of his den, cocooned by his materiel and equipment, the stuff of his portable world, and write up his log.

Sad little bastard, he thought bleakly.

Anyhow, what was Apollo but the apotheosis of all dens?

And what did that say about Isaac Rosenberg? By launching himself off on this endless spaceflight, was he braving a new frontier, or retreating to some cozy fantasy of his lonely childhood?

It was best, he had learned much earlier in this mission, to avoid self-analysis.

Sitting alone inside the quiet Apollo, he worked his way through his manuals, learning how the old spaceship was flown.

Benacerraf had instituted a weekly crew meeting.

They were facing so many problems now, she figured they couldn’t afford to indulge in their habitual acrimonious isolation from each other. They had to discuss their problems, come up with solutions, parcel out pieces of work.

Much as she hated the idea herself.

And so, now, the four of them hooked legs or arms around stanchions and struts, their postures taking on the stooping crouch of the neutral-G position.

They looked, Benacerraf thought, like four birds of prey, perched on some metal branch.

“…We traced the root cause of the heart arrhythmia problems,” Rosenberg was saying, reading from a softscreen which was suspended in the air before him. The computer folded softly like a bird’s wing, the letters and numbers shimmering across its surface. “It was a trace element deficiency.”

Benacerraf said, “What trace element?”

“Potassium. You find it in sea water and in various salts, like carnallite and sytvine. Potassium is essential in the biocycles. Its salts are used as fertilizers in the farm’s nutrient solution, which—”

“Cut to the chase, asshole,” Angel said mildly, his eyes closed.

Rosenberg said, “In the potable water we have a limit of three hundred forty milligrams per liter. We’ve actually been recording a level of a tenth that.” He scratched his face. The problem is partly the excess peeing we all do. Potassium, along with other stuff, gets flushed out of the system. So it has to be replaced. Now I’m spiking the potable water with electrolytes, specifically potassium, to restore the balance.”

“So will we have long-term heart problems because of this?” Mott asked.

“Probably.” Rosenberg shrugged. “But this is not a regime in which we’re aiming for a long and healthy old age anyhow. I wouldn’t worry; it’s just another bogeyman to bite us, in a long line with all the others.”

Benacerraf found Rosenberg’s thin voice fantastically irritating, as he droned through his lists of facts. “So tell me what caused the deficiency in the biocycles.”

“It has to be the SCWO,” Rosenberg said, his eyes studiously on Benacerraf’s face.

Angel showed no reaction, his face hidden by his beard.

Rosenberg doesn’t want to take him on. So, Benacerraf thought wearily, it’s up to me to confront this asshole again, to take on the burden of responsibility for us all.

“Bill, the SCWO is your baby. We’ve been having problems with it for years. And now this potassium crap.”

Angel shrugged, his body moving minutely in the air as his center of mass shifted. “What do you want me to tell you? Look, we knew when we launched that the SCWO was immature technology, a risky piece of equipment to haul along. Basically the damn thing works. Hell,” he said, leering casually at Mott, who looked away, “you know that, or we’d all be knee-deep in Rosenberg’s pale shit, right? But we still get a lot of corrosion of the surfaces in there — it’s a hostile environment, and there are a shit-load of toxic gases which—”

“Bill, I’ve been relying on you to fix it. And now I hear this.”

“I’ve nursemaided the damn thing half way to Saturn already,” Angel snapped. “I’m a pilot, not a plumber.”

“You have to get it right, Bill. Right to the last decimal place, of the last trace element. That’s what it takes.” She felt herself slipping into peevish anger. “Don’t you see that? Why should I have to tell you what to do, how to do it? Why can’t I trust you to do your job…?”

She noticed Mott folding her arms over herself, and rolling her eyes, escaping inward.

Damn it, she thought. We set ourselves the trap again. And I fell into it.

Angel was still blustering, justifying his negligent work on the SCWO. And Rosenberg, unfortunately, was going into lecture mode. He put his hands to his temples, his own long hair and wispy beard drifting around his face, and he started telling Angel stuff he already knew: about the instability of their miniature biosphere, the lack of buffering reservoirs of essential elements like potassium, the way the balance had to be monitored and adjusted constantly by the crew…

Angel started yelling back at Rosenberg, who just closed his eyes and droned on. Their voices seemed amplified in the dingy metal tube of the hab module.

Benacerraf knew she needed to find some way of defusing the situation. But, she thought wearily, why me? Why is it always me who has to be the peacemaker, to eat shit, to make Bill calm down and force Rosenberg to look up from his softscreen and dry Nicola’s eyes over her girlfriend — why me?

The meeting broke up, acrimoniously, with no real outcome. Mott went to her sleep compartment, Rosenberg to the farm.

And Angel…

Benacerraf watched, discreetly, as Angel took up position near the water spigots of the galley. And, with his skinny, spindled legs folded under him, he started to play with water. Angel took a syringe now, for example, and filled it with water from a spigot. When he pressed the plunger, slowly and carefully, injecting water into the air, a small bubble grew from the needle’s tip. He jerked the needle away and the water took the form of a tiny planet, floating in the air. Angel worked his needle and produced a whole set of the little water globes, drifting in the air around his head.

Then he took smaller syringes from a set he’d improvised from medical waste, and injected the bubbles with iodine, grape juice, diluted orange juice, to stain them blue, green, yellow, red. Soon he had a whole Solar System, Benacerraf thought, with a miniature Mars and Earth and Jupiter, floating around his bearded head as if around a sun. Angel’s eyes followed the little spheres, entranced.

Now Angel tried to herd his little water planets together, with his open palms. The water spheres were clammy to the touch; if Angel was gentle they bounced away from his palm as if coated with some fine elastic membrane, but if he wasn’t so careful the balls of water would cling like some jellyfish, spreading over the surface of his palm. With one such glob dangling from his palm, he shook his hand gently, up and down; the spherical cap rippled symmetrically, clinging to his skin.

In microgravity, water’s surface tension became dominant, and tried to haul it constantly into the shape of a sphere. But with a little ingenuity a lot of bizarre shapes could be conjured out of this most basic of materials. And it fascinated Bill Angel.

Angel spent hours turned in on himself like this, with his syringes and lathes and bizarre, oscillating shapes. And as he stared into the shimmering meniscus of some new sphere or torus, he seemed, to Benacerraf, to be peering into some world of his own, a private place the others couldn’t share, a place he could escape to, as if the water forms were projections of his own mind.

Rosenberg had his own theory about Bill. So he’d told her privately. He thought Bill was ageing too quickly. There were studies that showed how cosmic rays caused irreversible damage to nervous tissue. For instance, the response of nerve cells to muscarinic neuro-transmitters, which helped muscle-controlling neurons communicate, deteriorated. Maybe this was happening to Bill, Rosenberg speculated. Maybe space was turning him into a decrepit old man, before their eyes.

She suspected Bill had gotten wind of this, in fact. He had taken to sleeping at one end of the hab module, surrounded by big batteries with lots of nickel and cadmium, which gave him good shielding. But it was probably too late.

Benacerraf was no expert on abnormal states of the mind. But she hadn’t tried to discuss this with Mission Control. She wasn’t sure who would be listening any more anyhow. And on a planet where local wars were flaring over water management problems, the image of gaunt Americans playing head games with the wet stuff on some dumb Buck Rogers mission halfway to Saturn would not play well with the public.

On and on Angel fiddled, while Discovery, cradling its little nest of light and warmth, sailed further from the sun.

Around the U.S. carrier Independence, the Pacific stretched to the horizon, as flat and still and steel-grey as the deck of the carrier itself, its sluggish waves reflecting the cobalt blue of the cloudless sky. Even the rest of the battle group was out of sight, over the horizon.

The sun was low, the light harsh, and Gareth Deeke was grateful for his cap and sunglasses.

A single aircraft stood ready on the deck: a McDonnell-Douglas F-28, its slim form sixty feet long, its delta wings all but obscured by the snaking hoses of the fuelling tankers — kerosene and hydrogen peroxide — which surrounded it. The F-28’s thermal shield, plated over its upper hull, gleamed white as snow in the Pacific sunlight.

The F-28 was Deeke’s aircraft.

The Independence was four hundred miles from the Chinese coast, and two hundred miles from Taiwan, to the south-east of the island. And it was a matter of hours — less, perhaps — from the initiation of a U.S.-China war. But, suspended in this instant of calm, the ship could have been anywhere, Gareth Deeke reflected, anywhere on the surface of this watery planet; and it could have been transported to almost any time in the last half billion years.

He was pretty much alone up here, save for the service techs. He’d been here for a time, but he wasn’t bored. He was standing on alert. He had stood on alert many times before, in his long career.

He had a choice of being up here or going down below, to sit with the other pilots and chew on pizza and mixed vegetables and watch softscreen CNN reports on the progress of the Chinese preparation for invasion.

His preference was clear.

Besides, he didn’t exactly mix easily with the others. They respected his ability and experience, but most of the guys, with one eye on their own careers, shied away from a man with a past as tainted and complex as Deeke’s.

It didn’t trouble him. At least, not away from the cramped confines of his quarters, where he had too much time to think. He wasn’t troubled by anything here: up on the flight deck, in the salt air.

A shadow flickered across the deck. Deeke looked up.

It was a Condor, an unmanned surveillance plane built by Boeing. The Condor was a light, subsonic craft with a single turbofan engine. It was big, with the wing span of a 747, and it could hover at sixty thousand feet for a week without replenishment, scanning the ground with high-resolution radar and electro-optic sensors. Condors — and their smaller cousins the DarkStars — had become a common sight in areas of tension like this, wheeling through the air like expectant birds of prey…

There was a low beeping.

He lifted his wrist. A softscreen patch on the back of his hand was scrolling with symbols.

The Chinese ships were leaving harbor. It had started. Deeke grinned.

He turned on his heel and headed for the personal gear room.

The hot war had started two weeks ago; Deeke had followed it closely, expecting his call.

Taiwan’s president, after his latest reelection, at last came out openly in favor of a declaration of formal independence from Beijing. China responded immediately, and the Taipei stock market hit the floor.

It took three days for Beijing to assemble a hundred thousand troops in the embarkation ports in the provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong. Taiwan put its armed forces on their highest level of alert and mobilized its reserves, and asked the U.S. for arms shipments under the Taiwan Relations Act.

The next day, Taiwan naval patrols in the Strait had been fired on by Chinese “fishing boats.” They returned fire, and China proclaimed that a “hostile act against ordinary Chinese people.” In response, China announced a naval blockade of all the tankers ferrying oil to Taiwan.

Air battles started over Taiwan, mass flights of ancient Chinese Russian-built Sukhois against Taiwan’s more modern Western-built F-16s and Mirage 2000-55. The technology was a mismatch, but the numbers were telling: after a couple of days China had achieved a tentative control of the air over the Strait.

The Great Helmsman himself had appeared in Tiananmen Square to announce that if Taiwan didn’t capitulate, the invasion would begin.

Maclachlan responded by saying that an invasion of Taiwan would amount to a declaration of war with America. And besides, China’s control of the Strait didn’t amount to a hill of beans, said Maclachlan; not with the U.S. carriers, and F-15s in Okinawa, ready to join the action.

Anyhow it didn’t seem likely the Chinese could secure a beachhead, even without the U.S. coming to the aid of Taiwan. And a failed invasion could cost fifty percent casualties.

But the Chinese had nukes, and ICBMs. They could simply wipe Taiwan off the face of the Earth.

Nobody was too sure about what the U.S. would do in that circumstance. Did the Americans, asked the Great Helmsman, care as much about Taiwan as about Los Angeles?

The Chinese would have to be dumb, or desperate, to take such a step. But they were indeed desperate, Deeke thought.

For decades they had watched the U.S. cozying up to India, recognizing Vietnam, selling F-16s to Taiwan, forging alliances with Japan, trying to work for a united Korea under Seoul allied to the U.S.

From the Chinese perspective, it looked like a ring around China. Which, of course, it was.

And besides, there was one way the Chinese could win… Which was why Deeke was here.

So matters stood. Now, they were all waiting.

Deeke emerged in his flight suit, with an oxygen mask, straps everywhere, a parachute on his back, survival kits for several environments tucked into pockets, emergency oxygen, intercoms.

He walked up to the F-28.

Close to, the plane looked something like a miniature Shuttle orbiter, with the underside of its fat delta wing coated with black silica-based thermal protection tiles, and the upper hull layered with a gleaming white felt blanket, patched with black around the attitude control nozzles. The felt blanket gave the plane an oddly clumsy look, he thought; it lacked the metallic sleekness of the hulls of conventional aircraft. But that blanket was plastered with USAF logos, and his own name and rank, picked out under the canopy.

The F-28 looked what it was: a plane built for space, America’s first rocket plane since the X-15.

Although the basic rocketry would have been recognized by von Braun, in every other way the F-28 was a child of the twenty-first century.

The concept was based on proposals touted in the 1990s by space enthusiasts for a fast-turnaround, relatively cheap, single-stage-to-orbit military spaceplane. When Xavier Maclachlan came to power, and after extensive lobbying by the USAF, he wasted no time in pulling Lockheed Martin out of NASA’s doomed RLV development, and ordering the accelerated development of what became the F-28 for the Air Force.

Needless to say, it had come in way over budget. But even so the cost was manageable. The F-28 was designed to work with existing runways, fuel distribution systems, non-specialized hangars and standard handling equipment… The only novelty was the use of kerosene and concentrated hydrogen peroxide to burn in the plane’s five engines, to give the F-28 a high power to weight ratio.

The cost of the whole project had been about equivalent to two Delta IV launches, less than the cost of a single Shuttle launch. For that price, the USAF had gotten itself a whole new aerospace craft.

Gareth Deeke was just grateful that a new chain of command — via Hartle, up to President Maclachlan — had brought him and his skills and experience here, to head up the USAF’s newest battle wing. The USAF didn’t have so many rocket-plane pilots that it could afford to ignore a man like Gareth Deeke, age or not.

Two techs helped him climb up and lower himself into the cockpit of the F-28. The rocket plane’s white-tiled walls were only just wide enough for him to squeeze in.

The elemental countdown dialogue with his controller inside the carrier began as soon as he strapped into his seat; around the plane, the stubby, shielded fuelling tankers withdrew.

“Data on,” he said. “Generator reset. Hydraulic pressure, check. Electrical pressure, check. Rudder, check…”

“One minute, Gareth.”

“Rog. Master arm is on, system arm light is on…”

“Ready for the prime.”

“Prime, igniter ready. And precool, igniter and tape…”

“Thirty seconds.”

Inside the craft, there was little similarity with 1970s Shuttle technology. This cockpit was high-tech: the walls were coated with softscreens, which reconfigured to suit each successive flight phase, and his helmet offered head-up and virtual imaging, overlaid on his view through the canopy. Now, the systems worked him calmly through the final preparations.

“…Fifteen seconds.”

“Pump on,” Deeke said. “Good igniter.”

“Five seconds. Looks good here, Gareth. And three, two, one.”

Deeke braced.

The noise of the F-28’s five rockets rose to a roar.

In his glass bubble Deeke was slammed in the back, suddenly cocooned in light and noise and vibration. The carrier deck whipped away, exposing the grey, bone-hard surface of the ocean. The plane swivelled back, pitching suddenly upwards, so that he lost sight of the ocean.

The F-28 rose almost vertically. Twisting his head, he glanced down: the carrier was already lost, remote, a patchwork of blue grey adrift on the wider hide of the ocean.

Then, in a few seconds, the sky faded down to a deep pearl blue.

At thirty-five thousand feet he levelled off. The plane was a little isolated island of reality, gleaming white felt and warm air and hard surfaces, up here in the mouth of the sky.

There was a tanker aircraft waiting for him here. The F-28 carried a full load of fuel, but it needed replenishment of its heavy oxidizer for its final leap into space. With practiced ease, he slid the replenishment nozzle mounted in the nose of the plane into the dangling cup trailed by the tanker. The replenishment took just three minutes.

When it was done, the tanker pulled away.

Deeke hauled the nose of the plane upwards. The rockets howled again, and the Gs rammed him hard into his seat; his head was pushed into his shoulders, and his vision tunnelled, walled by darkness.

There was the mildest of vibrations as the craft went supersonic, and then the ride got a lot smoother, the noise of the rockets dying to a whisper. The cockpit now was a little bubble of serenity, of cool, easy flying; meanwhile, he knew, sonic thunder was washing down on the ocean below.

Eighty thousand feet. He moved the throttle to maximum thrust, and he was pushed back into his seat by four and a half G. He was already so high he could see stars above, in the middle of the day; so high there were only a few wisps of atmosphere, barely sufficient for his plane’s aerodynamic control surfaces to grip.

Ninety thousand feet; thirty two hundred feet per second. The Pacific spread out beneath him, the shining skin of the world.

There was a rattle of solenoids, a brief squirt of gas beyond the cockpit. His reaction control thrusters had activated.

The rockets shut down with a clatter.

He was thrust forward against his restraints as the acceleration cut out, and then he drifted back again.

He had gone ballistic. He was weightless inside the cabin, and it felt as if his gut was climbing up out of his neck. Up here, coasting in near-silence, he lost all sensation of speed, of motion.

He was fifty miles high. The sky outside his tiny cabin was a deep blue-black, and the softscreen displays gleamed brightly. He could see the eastern coast of Asia all the way from Japan to the Philippines, with the distinctive teardrop shape of Taiwan directly beneath him; it was all laid out under him like some kind of relief map. Up ahead the Earth curved over on itself, looking huge and pregnant, and at the horizon’s rim he could see the thick layer of air out of which he’d climbed.

Just like the old days.

Then there was a final kick from his rocket engines, the injection into space.

On orbit, he opened the F-28’s payload bay doors.

The payload deployed automatically. It was a small, complex satellite with a compact rocket booster. As it unfolded from the narrow payload bay the satellite looked like a fat, ungainly toy, illuminated from beneath by the glowing blue skin of Earth.

A spring mount pushed the satellite away from the F-28. Then the main solid-rocket booster pack opened up; Deeke could see orange smoke and debris gush from the fat, squat nozzle.

He watched the satellite arc away, upwards, directly away from Earth. It was heading for geosynchronous orbit, to hover over Borneo.

Thus, less than twenty minutes after receiving the order to launch, Deeke’s mission was complete.

The satellite was a derivative of Aquacade technology. It was a communications link, one of the final pieces in the U.S. forces’ electronic coverage of the battle zone around Taiwan. It would enable other satellites — Milstar communications birds, Keyhole surveillance craft; others — to communicate directly with each other, rather than via signals to ground stations. The satellite-to-satellite links would make the system virtually impregnable to Chinese attempts at jamming or interception.

The only real Chinese threat to the U.S. forces, in fact, was their stock of cruise missiles: the M-12 intermediate-range weapon, originally a derivative of the Scud but now heavily upgraded, and generally recognized as China’s best piece of kit.

But with the surveillance systems successfully deployed, no M-12 would be able to get more than twenty miles from its launcher without intelligence on it being fed down to the battlefield. Deeke doubted, in fact, that a single cruise would get through the antimissile batteries.

Information was the key to this war. Information flowed throughout the U.S. and Taiwanese forces. Every ship, every land vehicle, every infantryman, airman and sailor was suffused with computer technology, linked directly or through the satellites. The forces, joined by the technology, were like a single organism, ready to respond as if united by a central nervous system.

There were, in fact, more warriors in this conflict deploying computers than firing weapons.

The Chinese, with their crude human-wave strategies and resources, had only the rudiments of this technology. It was like a conflict between time travellers. As if a Roman legion had taken on a band of Australopithecines.

The war might take some days to play out yet, and no doubt many lives would be lost. But for China, Deeke reflected, it was already lost. The containment was going to continue.

He cleared his helmet of its displays. For a few seconds, he allowed himself to look out through the sparkling clearness of his canopy.

Here — for the next few minutes anyhow — he was suspended between the curve of Earth below, the stunning blackness above. His mission was achieved, his fuel spent.

He felt an odd stab of emotion. It’s so beautiful, he thought. So beautiful.

Below him, hundreds of thousands of men were swarming like ants to meet each other in a conflict that would be all but invisible from this height. Across the thin sky of Earth, aircraft and missiles scratched contrails; far above him, twenty-two thousand miles from Earth, artifacts of the most advanced nation on the planet clustered, to observe and monitor and warn.

And right now, there were four human beings — four Americans — suspended between Jupiter and Saturn, engaged in the most extraordinary adventure yet conceived by man. And his role in that adventure had been to try to shoot them down on takeoff.

But space travel was an absurdity. The journeys were magnificent, but there was nowhere to go, nothing but a series of lethal landscapes, floating like islands in the sky.

And if the U.S. had reached for the stars, like a soaring tree, its enemies — first the USSR, now the Chinese — would have had no hesitation in spreading over the face of the planet to cut away its trunk.

Gareth Deeke had no doubts as to the strategic correctness of the massive U.S. military investment of the last fifty years. No doubts, in the end, about his own role in the ludicrous Titan adventure. Military spending had caused the Soviet Union to implode, with barely a shot being fired; now it would enable the U.S. to contain China indefinitely.

Space had nothing to do with humanity. Down there, in the eternal blood and mud and dust of the two-dimensional battlefields of Earth, was where history was shaped. It had always been thus, and would always be thus.

And it was possible, he thought, that over Taiwan this day, the shape of the planet’s destiny for the next century might be determined.

He closed the payload bay, and, briskly, he prepared his ship for reentry, and the long glide home to the salt flats around Edwards Air Force Base in California.