IV
"How's it look, Emmy?" The Dutchman belted himself into his couch.
I nodded. "Not bad, Major." I tapped at the screen. "That's the best landing zone, if you want to make contact at that village."
"Does mean a bit of a hike if we have to go out and meet the locals."
"Yes, sir, but it's flat enough to give me a bit of room to bring the shuttle down."
"Oh? You need a lot of room for error?" He flicked a finger against his own wings. "Back when I was using these for a living, I didn't."
I didn't answer that. For one thing, I didn't believe that the Dutchman had been all that hot a pilot in his youth; he didn't have the look. For another, anything I said to that effect was sure to get me gigged for insubordination.
I pointed at the monitor. "Maybe you want to pick another village, sir? The nearest flat ground to the village you picked out has no margin for error, not unless we blast something clear."
"Hmm." Norfeldt puffed on his cigar for a moment, then examined the stub and pitched it into the oubliette. "Shit. I guess I can use the exercise. We'll do it your way."
Trying to ignore the way the white-and-blue bulk of the planet overfilled the screens, I ran the ballistics program again, just to be sure.
"What are you doing, Emmy?"
"Everything's fine, sir. The comp knows where we are, and there's nothing else in this sky; I should be able to rendezvous by radar, if necessary."
He snorted. "Kid, if we have to depend on you to pantseat it back up here, we're in deep shit. Some problem with the computer?"
"No, sir. It's just stan—"
"Academy chickenshit, again. Emmy, if we ever lose the computer, we're dead. So don't waste your sweat taking precautions against it."
"But—"
"Shut up. How much margin do you figure to have? About a klick-second of delta-vee? At best?"
"Almost."
He pulled another cigar out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth, unlit. Even the Dutchman wasn't fool enough to smoke during a reentry; a bit of ash accidentally hitting me in the eye could mean me dumping the shuttle.
"Exactly," he said. "You're not good enough to pull a ground-to-orbit seat-of-the-pants rendezvous with just a klick-second margin. Nobody is. So don't worry about it, eh? That's why we have tell-me-a-hundred-times built into the astrogation module."
He turned to look at McCaw and Buchholtz, who were belted in their couches. McCaw sat back, his eyes half closed, while Buchholtz stropped his Fairbairn knife intently.
The Dutchman sighed. "Put the sticker away, Kurt; we're undocking."
Regretfully, Buchholtz gave the blade a quick buffing, then slipped it into its sheath.
"Quit stalling, Emmy," the Dutchman said. "According to the comp, we've got about three minutes to undock, or we have to wait an orbit." Norfeldt waved his cigar. "You're on. Let's see how hot a pilot you really are."
You don't use a joystick for point-to-point in space; I unshipped it, locking it into its socket with a solid chick, then cracked my knuckles as I settled myself into my couch. I thumbed for some wing just for practice, and then gave each of the pedals a trial push.
"Stand by," I said. I armed and pushed the undock button, and then pulled my harness just a bit tighter as the shuttle thunked itself loose from the orbiter.
I used the attitude jets to kick us gently away, and waited, watching the orbiter move away. You don't want to fry your orbiter with the exhaust of the shuttle's main engines.
Slowly, slowly, it receded.
Enough. I turned the shuttle until the belly cameras and computer agreed with me that we were flying tail-first. You have to do that, in order for the engines to slow you enough so that you hit atmosphere. Of course, if you and the computer forget to flip it back over after the burn, you're dead.
"Here we go." I punched program and ignite.
It was magic time.
There are trickier propositions than dropping the shuttle portion of a Contact Service scout down to a planet's surface, but not many. Part of it is numbers—skin alloys can only go to a classified but finite temperature; braking spars and variwings can only take so much pressure—but a lot of it is feel.
Now, I'm not the greatest admirer of flight modules in copters and atmosphere-only fixed-wing craft—before the Academy, I spent a lot of time and money on bandit circuits—but for reentry variwings, they're an absolute necessity. At, say, Mach 25, just barely inside an atmosphere, an attitude change—usually adjustment of angle of attack—has to be done by attitude jet. The same change at Mach 2 is going to be a careful mixture of jet and elevon; at, say, four hundred klicks per hour it's going to be entirely elevon, and whatever it is will take much more elevon to do it.
Even a flier as good as I am can't make a smooth transition between using attitude jets and elevons the way the computer does. With fly-by-wire, any adjustment—say, bringing the nose down a couple of degrees while rolling to port to go into a bank—takes exactly the same movement of stick and pedals, and, with appropriate feedback, feels the same.
Which lets the pilot pay attention to flying. And there's plenty to do. The trick is to try to get both low enough and close enough to the landing zone so that on landing you don't have to burn the engines one second longer than necessary—the juice may come in handy for getting back up to the orbiter.
If you miss the orbiter, no matter by how little, there's no recall, no matter how many tonnes of fuel are waiting for you up there.
In any case, flying isn't something I have to think about. I just do it—and I'm damn good. In less than an hour, the shuttle was safely down.