3
Denver
The corporate crisis teams failed to notice when a lanky man with a salt-and-pepper crewcut slipped inside, as Charlie Grant’s near-ubiquitous presence in flight control was taken for granted. The operations director practically lived in the control center, having been known to keep a cot and fresh clothes in his office “just in case.”
“Morning, Charlie,” Penny said. “Surprised you didn’t beat me here.”
Grant lifted a mug of black coffee in salute, signaling that he’d in fact been here for hours. He conspicuously ignored the throng of executives, wading through them straight to her. “I’ve been down in the server farm with the IT guys,” he explained, just loudly enough for her to understand it was for the benefit of the gathered outsiders. Left unsaid was that he’d wanted to be absolutely certain they had locked down all of Shepard’s flight data on a secure off-network server. He leaned in close. “Anything new?”
“Called some friends at Johnson on my way here,” she said, referring to the manned spaceflight center in Houston. “They’re going to run it up the flagpole with the Deep Space Network in Pasadena.”
“DSN can cover a wider spectrum, that’s for sure. Let’s hope they don’t have to take it all the way up to NASA headquarters.” The agency’s new administrator was notoriously hostile towards the private space industry, Hammond in particular. “Pictures would be even better. They have anything that can see that far?”
She stared at a projection of the Moon on the far wall, as if brooding over it might tease out some lost detail. “National Recon Office might, but you need serious juice to re-task a spy sat.” It was something she could have made happen back when she worked for the agency.
Grant led her to his console and tapped at the screen. Shepard’s vital signs began playing out before flat-lining like a terminal hospital patient. “That’s Big Al’s last info dump, right up to LOS. About three thousand channels of information hiding in there, and probably not a damned thing we can do with any of it.”
Penny brooded over that. An earlier deal they’d reached with the Feds to lease frequencies from a relay satellite in lunar orbit had been inexplicably canceled, with no explanation offered except the boilerplate “needs of the government.” The irony was that no matter how this turned out, that same government was certain to require uninterrupted contact for any future trips despite having denied them access in the first place. “Art’s going to have to find a way to get our own comsat up there sooner.”
“Forget it,” Hammond’s voice piped up behind her. “Same reason you can’t make a baby in a month by putting nine women on the job. It takes what it takes.”
“Sorry, Arthur.”
Hammond waved it away. “I pay you to call it like you see it,” he said through his frustration. “Let me worry about the politics. But I agree: a missing ship would be a whole lot easier to find if they could’ve spared some bandwidth.”
“Might never have lost it in the first place,” Grant said sourly. “We don’t even have enough to put together a half-assed TLE.” A Two-Line Element described all of the variables they needed to model the ship’s orbit and predict where it would appear at any given time. Without it, they were stabbing in the dark. “But Audrey’s made a couple of swags at their next position out of blackout.”
Hammond leaned in expectantly. “And those would be?”
Grant swiped at one of the big wall monitors. The Moon zoomed into focus, encircled by a scattering of orbits depicted in different colors. “We considered two scenarios to narrow our search pattern: either they burned just long enough to make orbit before everything went to hell,” he said, “or they were on target but somehow lost comm and are exactly where they’re supposed to be.”
“Nice thought, but not likely.” It didn’t escape Hammond’s notice that they’d left out the other option: a wrecked spacecraft on the far side of the Moon. Perhaps it didn’t need saying, or maybe they just didn’t want to. “In the meantime, I want a status report on Grissom and a crew roster for the search party.”
. . .
John F. Kennedy National Spaceport
Cape Canaveral, Florida
Ryan Hunter cinched a worn Virginia Tech ball cap down over his head, shielding his eyes from the hazy sun climbing above the marsh. Not yet eight in the morning, and it was already turning steamy. He looked up and down the line of technicians strung along the pavement’s edge and motioned them forward.
While the Clipper spaceplanes were still earthbound, foreign object damage was their number one worry. The daily FOD walk was a painstaking ritual of combing over the parking apron for any stray bits that might otherwise get sucked down an intake and destroy some very expensive engines. As the launch hub’s manager, Ryan saw to it that everyone took personal ownership in preventing that. As their group slowly walked across the tarmac, people began to bend down at random and pick up small bits of debris. One took a folding knife from his belt, fished something out of a seam in the concrete, and pocketed it with evident satisfaction. No doubt whatever he’d found would be entered in a running competition for the most ridiculous piece of flotsam, the winners of which were ignominiously displayed in a trophy case tucked away in the maintenance office safely out of public view.
Ryan’s concentration was broken by the phone jangling in his hip pocket. He waved the others on without him as he fished it out. The line had just reached the front of the hangar, so he ducked inside beneath its shade. The building sat on an expansive new apron alongside the old Shuttle Landing Facility, a three-mile-long runway that had fallen out of use until Polaris leased it as the launch site for their orbital Clippers.
“Hunter,” he answered, not even looking at the caller ID.
“It’s Penny,” came the equally brusque reply. “Need you to drop whatever you’re doing for a minute, okay?”
“Already did,” he said with a hint of curiosity. Whenever she was that abrupt, it meant something was up.
“Can you confirm the status of your hot spare? Any maintenance gripes that we wouldn’t know about yet?”
Ryan faced the plane in question, a silver and black arrowhead sequestered in a corner of the hangar behind two other Clippers. “It’s clean,” he said. “Ready to go.”
“Keep it that way. If one of your other birds breaks, cancel the launch. The hot spare’s off limits until we say otherwise.”
Now that was weird. Denver typically left those decisions up to the manager on site. “Even if that causes us to miss a launch window?”
“Nobody gets that plane without me or Charlie approving it.”
Ryan frowned and made for his office. “Understood. So is this the part where you tell me what’s up?”
He could sense her caution over the phone. “We lost contact with Big Al about three hours ago. Just up and disappeared behind the far side,” she said, and laid out everything that had happened since.
He stopped in mid-stride and nearly dropped the phone. His head swam as a host of wild scenarios played out; none ended well.
“You still there?”
“Yeah,” he stammered. “How could it just disappear?” He felt ridiculous for asking. Whatever it was, things must have really gone to hell up there. Finally reaching his office, Ryan closed the door behind him and slid into the chair at his desk. He tapped at a keyboard and their flight plan appeared on his wall monitor. “That’s Simon’s crew, isn’t it—the one for that resource survey?”
“That’s the one,” she said. “The big question is what we do about it. Grissom’s not ready to carry paying passengers, but we’re not too worried about creature comforts. We can have it ready to break orbit in five days.”
Ryan barely heard her. His mind raced through the possible scenarios and their implications, and always at the center of them was Simon. For as much as they valued him for his expertise as a former space station astronaut, he owed him a deep personal debt…
“Ryan?”
After all, the man had saved his skin and sacrificed his career in the process…
“Ryan.”
“Sorry,” he muttered, like a schoolboy caught daydreaming. “It’s a lot to process. I let it get personal.”
“Figured as much,” she said. “You can think it over on the way out here. Art’s already sent the Gulfstream.”