"Clear to open," Colonel Will said.
Schultz activated the controls. Instantly the payload bay was bathed in a brilliant blue-white light that reflected off the aluminum insulation covering the Skybolt laser module. The space shuttle Enterprise was flying upside down in relation to the earth's surface, so Enterprise's sky was the earth — and Ann was seeing this "sky" for the first time. "My God…"
The Enterprise was just crossing the dawn-line between Hawaii and Australia. It looked like a relief map being lighted from the side — each island in Micronesia, it seemed, was visible in stark detail. They could recognize the Solonions, the Samoas, even the New Hebrides Islands. There were a few puffs of clouds but otherwise it was like looking at a meticulously rendered painting of the whole South Pacific.
"Ann?"
"It's… beautiful… so immaculate," she said quietly. Schultz nodded. "I never stop being awed by it myself. If that sight doesn't move you, you belong in a rubber room." He turned to the interphone. "Bay doors open. Radiators deployed. No damage so far as I can see on the radiators."
"Copy," Sontag said. Will double-checked his readouts with Mission Control through a direct UHF radio and datalink originating in a station antenna farm at Yarra Yarra in western Australia. "Mission Control confirms clear for orbit and rendezvous with Armstrong. "
It was some two hours later when Ann peered out the forward windscreens into the gray-black void, but all she could see were a few stars too bright to be obscured by the brilliance of earth. "Colonel Sontag, you must have X-ray vision if you can see that station out there."
"It's still very faint," he said, "but it's there. Mostly it looks like another star."
She shook her head. "I'm going back to the aft console." The pilots nodded and continued scanning their instruments.
Marty Schultz had deployed the shuttle's remote manipulator arm and had scanned space for a few minutes with the Ann's closed-circuit camera at high magnification, but it wasn't until Enterprise was ten miles away from the station that he spotted it. "It looks like a toy, like a Tinker Toy, from here," Ann said. "When they first launched it they treated it like one," Schultz told her. "People, some people, called it a boondoggle, big waste of money that could better be spent carpeting the Pentagon hallways. A lot of us were afraid it would end up like Skylab — a blaze in the sky and a crash to earth."
Kevin Baker, still trying to get his balance in this world of microgravity, maneuvered beside Page and Schultz at the aft crew station, saying, "I remember that too well, and the argument over who owned the space station. The U.S. taxpayer spent billions launching it and a conglomerate of scientists, some of them not even from the U.S., managed to put a clamp on any military research aboard it. You would have thought the station was a broken-down tenement building the way they talked about it. The Silver Sausage… the space suppository… remember?"
Ann nodded, straining for a better view of the station.
"But this Brigadier General Saint-Michael apparently did a good job changing people's minds."
"That he did," Schultz said, "and everyone's taken the station very seriously since. That toy, Ann, weighs in at about five hundred tons. What you see is the product of twenty shuttle sorties over four years, plus another dozen unmanned supply rockets. Thirty billion dollars worth. The world's most expensive condo, you might say…"
As Enterprise drew closer to the station more details could be seen, and on the screen Ann pointed to a tiny dot just below the station. "Is that your Thor system?" Ann asked Baker. "Sure is, ten no-nuclear interceptor rockets, a laser decoy discriminator and a radar detector and tracker. The Thor is our first antiballistic missile defense system in thirty years. Simple, lost cost, and effective — if I do say so myself…"
Attention was soon diverted to the TV screen, filling with the image of the station, and the crew was ordered back to their seats for docking. Schultz stowed the camera and remote manipulator arm back into its cradle in the cargo bay and shut down the aft console. "Crew ready for docking," he reported.
Within a mile of the station the digital autopilot had reduced Enterprise's forward speed to one thousand feet per minute. A thin laser beam from the space station lanced out toward Enterprise, toward the two sensors on the forward and rear ends of the cargo bay. The forward sensor was a large lens that focused the laser alignment beam onto the aft sensor. The digital autopilot would make tiny corrections to the shuttle's course whenever the laser beam drifted off the aft sensor, in this way aligning Enterprise with the docking tunnel on Silver Tower.
With near-magical precision the computers controlling the Enterprise's reaction-control system thrusters positioned the docking adapter in the cargo bay within a few feet of Silver Tower's docking tunnel, which was then maneuvered over the adapter, and the two docking rings locked and sealed into, place. Next an open-latticework support beam was extended and locked into cleats in Enterprise's cargo bay. The support beam strengthened the union between the two spacecraft, effectively making them one unit. Finally the connecting tunnel between the docking module and Enterprise's docking adapter was pressurized to two atmospheres and checked. "Adapter leak check is good, Armstrong," Colonel Sontag reported to the docking officers on Silver Tower. "Docking complete. Over. "
"Checked over here, Enterprise," from the docking officer aboard Silver Tower. "Welcome aboard. You're clear for crew transfer."
"Roger. Thanks." On interphone Sontag announced, "Docking complete, crew. End of the line." Ann, Baker and Schultz sent up congratulations to Enterprise's commander and pilot, but Colonel Will waved them off. "The autopilot did most of it, and frankly it was a lousy job. I could've gotten us right on the mark." Will then directed shutdown of most of Enterprise's systems and began preparation for transfer to the station, with Sontag and the rest of the crew moving downstairs to the transfer area on the middeck.
Colonel Will pressurized the airlock and air space, and he and Sontag checked the pressure readouts. "Sixteen p.s.i. in both areas," Will said, undogged the first hatch leading to the airlock, then rechecked a second pressure gauge for the airlock itself. Satisfied, he opened the heavy steel door to the airlock. "See you," he said, checked a POS mask and rebreather in the airlock and strapped on the face mask. Sontag closed the airlock chamber door and sealed it tight, and Will checked the pressurization gauge leading from the airlock to the transfer tunnel, then undogged the upper airlock hatch. There was a slight hiss of equalizing air but no sip of leaks or damage. "Welcome aboard, Colonel Will," a voice said above him. Will looked up through the transfer tunnel to see a youngish Space Command airman smiling down at him.
Will unstrapped his face mask and glared at the technician. "You're supposed to wait until I open my airlock hatch, John."
"I was right behind you, sir," Airman John Montgomery told him. "Believe me, Colonel, I'm not going to let myself get sucked into your cargo bay."
"One day that's going to happen." Will turned and unlocked the airlock hatch leading to Enterprise's crew compartment. He wasn't smiling. "Clear for.transfer, crew."
One by one the crew of Enterprise floated up and out of the airlock and into Silver Tower's spacious docking-control module. Sontag, the last one leaving Enterprise, latched and double-checked each hatch behind himself; Enterprise would now be sealed up and apart from the station.
CHAPTER 7