Delta Green - страница 20

for repair or retrofit.

An unbalanced set of spokes (balance being unnecessary in zero gravity) reached out from the hub and were capped with variously sized modules that housed command, energy, residential, and experimental spaces. The other side of the hub, called the “hot” side since it was exposed to the sun, mounted a massive solar array. The energy developed from the solar panels supplemented that which was provided by the nuclear reactor in Spoke Nine, and the heat bled from the collectors was pumped through exchangers to maintain a constant temperature within the station.

From Delta Red’s current position, Haggar couldn’t see the utilitarian solar panels. Her view was less functional and more impressive. The outer skin of the station was laminated with white plastic for its reflective quality, but the visual effect was that of a single, cold, and massive star projected forward from a movie screen filled with distant stars.

Her significance in the totality of the universe was always dramatically apparent to her in these moments. The calculated output of significance would have a lot of zeros and a decimal point ahead of her number.

“Reentry attitude, Country.”

“Coming up,” she said and eased back on the control stick, firing thrusters that slowly brought the nose up and the tail down, inverting the MakoShark until she was sailing her orbit in reverse. Above her head was the Earth, shimmering with diffused color. She tapped the hand controller forward a couple of times, initiating thruster bursts that counteracted, then canceled the motion.

“I have a reentry track and time,” Olsen said. “Eighteen minutes, Lynn. Time for a few hands of bridge.”

Olsen was a bridge fanatic and was good enough that opponents were hard for him to find.

He was also an expert with the weapons systems and computers. In addition to the variable weight data of personnel, cargo, fuel load, and pylon loads, he had keyed in their desired altitude and geographical coordinates over northern Africa, and the computer had determined their final weight and center of gravity. In a weightless environment, the weight of various objects that could be carried aboard a HoneyBee or a Mako were derived from a master list maintained on the space station’s mainframe computer.

The spacecraft computer ran a test profile of the reentry flight, casually determining just what was possible, and if it accepted the data, planned the initial reentry burn, its duration, the angle of attack, and the trajectory.

Since, unlike the Space Shuttle, the Mako craft could achieve powered flight after reentry into the atmosphere, the windows of opportunity were larger and more frequent.

“I already owe you twelve dollars,” Haggar told him. “Let’s set up the rocket checklist instead.”

“How mundane,” Olsen said, but brought up the checklist on the small screen.

Haggar activated the rocket control panel. The two rocket motors operated on solid-fuel propellent and were considerably safer than liquid-fueled engines. The drawback to solid-fuel rocket motors had always been the lack of control. Typically, the solid fuel was encased in a cylinder, and once ignited, burned at a steady rate, raising pressures and exhausting through a nozzle, until the fuel was expended. For the MakoShark, the designers had developed a pelletized solid fuel which was stored internally in wing-mounted tanks. Under the pressure of compressed carbon dioxide, the pellets were forced into the combustion chambers at a rate determined by the opening of non-blowback valves. The valves were the throttle control, and Haggar could vary the thrust output from fifty-five percent to one hundred percent, from sixty-eight thousand to one hundred twenty-five thousand pounds of thrust on each of the two nacelle-mounted rocket motors.

Olsen double-checked her, using the same checklist on his own screen.

“How’s the fuel supply?”

“Ten-point-one thousand pounds,” Haggar said. “We’re showing two-two time.”

“And the CO-two reserve?”

“Twelve thousand, six hundred PSI.”