She pretended not to hear and slapped the box back into its slot, snapped the latches shut, maneuvered toward Saint-Michael to another relay box and nearly jammed Saint-Michael in the ribs as she removed it. "Excuse me, sir."
"Listen, Page, you had better get that damned chip off your shoulder. It's too much baggage for this station—"
Ann ripped a twelve-inch-square circuit board out of the relay box with an angry yank. "Yes, sir. I'm sorry, Sir." She avoided his stare and went back to her work space to find a replacement circuit board.
"You know this test will fail, too, don't you?" Saint-Michael said.
Ann turned on him. "Thanks for the vote of confidence, General. But that's all right. I knew that's how you felt right from the beginning. You never wanted this project—"
"You have got things screwed up… " He shook his head. "How did you ever get picked for this project? Sure as hell not for your glorious personality."
She plugged the new circuit board into its slot. "I'm here, sir, because this is my project. If you don't think it'll work, if you think it's all a waste of time, that's your prerogative—"
"I didn't feel that way at first. I guess it's your wonderful attitude that jams my gears—"
"My attitude has nothing to do with this project or your gears…"
"Has everything to do with it."
She ignored that and moved back to her work station, punching buttons on the keyboard hard enough to rattle the desk.
" 'My' laser, 'my' module, 'my' project. This isn't your anything," he said.
"I designed it…"
"Did you build it? Did you fly it up here? Did you hook it up by yourself? Are you going to test it yourself? Now that there's a glitch in it, I suppose you think you're going to fix it yourself. It won't tie into the SRR, it won't isolate from the stations' batteries, it won't lock on, it won't hit what it's supposed to hit. But Ms. Super Scientist is going to fix it in fifty minutes by herself, and by God she's going to have a successful second firing or else."
Ann stared at the computer screen, her lips tight. Saint-Michael was on a roll. "Far be it from you to ask for help from any of us lowly military people. Your laser won't tie in with the SBR? Well, we happen to have three SBR experts on board this station but you haven't — consulted any of them. You have a tracking problem? We have Kevin Baker, a thirty-year veteran in space-tracking hardware and software on board, but you haven't talked to him… Let me make some wild guesses here. You also haven't asked one single person, on this station or on the ground, for help. You're not in contact with anyone at your lab in Boston or your corporation in California. No one on this station knows anything about your systems. As a matter of fact, I'll bet I'm the only person on this station who's ever been inside this module since it's been activated. How am I doing?"
Ann's fingers stopped tapping on the keyboard. She looked up from her work-desk at Saint-Michael, shrugged, kept quiet. "Ann, this is a tremendous project. The first space-based antiballistic missile laser. Two hundred megawatts of energy. Capable of destroying a hundred missiles a minute, maybe more. It's a fantastic device. And it works — the laser works exactly as advertised. You've done a tremendous job."
"I hear a 'but' coming."
"You're right," the general said, smiling in spite of himself. "But… no one person can be an expert on everything. You designed the Skybolt module to 'snap together' with Silver Tower. It's a technological marvel that the thing works at all. But there's a problem, and you're stuck—"
"I am not 'stuck."
"Then why did you replace that relay circuit board?"
She narrowed her eyes, then picked up the circuit board she had removed from the electronics rack. "This? It's a tracking interface channel multiplexer board. It controls the logic channels between the SBR and the laser-mirror aiming unit…"
"But you said in Control that everything checked out OK. And your last-second self-test, which repeated out in the command module, said everything was ready. Now, how did you know which board to replace?"
Her eyes lost some of their anger, refused to meet his. "I'm… I'm trying certain critical circuits. One might be… be fused or shorted—"
"Or maybe you happen to have a spare of that particular board. Maybe you felt the wed to try something, anything, before the next Agena pass. After that, you have at least twenty-four hours to hunt for the real problem before the next pass.
She stared at her workbench. "Let me make a suggestion. If you agree, I'll pass along a request from you to meet with Colonel Marks, Kevin Baker, Chief Jefferson and Technician Moyer just before the shift change. I'll tell them you'd like to talk with them about the beam test and Skybolt's interfacing problem."
He glanced over his shoulder toward the command module. "I can almost guarantee that those guys will be tickled to get their hands on Skybolt. You'll get help out your ears. It couldn't hurt."
She looked up from her workbench. "You really do want to help?"
He touched her lightly on the shoulder. "We all want to help. And it's nothing personal, so don't get all crazy on me. We're involved in the success of this wonder device of yours, too. Hell, I might even get another star if it works… promotion by association, you might say."
She allowed a smile, then typed in a command on her keyboard and went to her microphone. "Control, this is Skybolt."
"Go ahead."
"Second Skybolt beam test is postponed for a systems check. Skybolt is in stand-by. MHD is deactivated."
"Copy and confirmed."
She looked at Saint-Michael. "I'll ask the others to meet with me, General. I guess it's about time we got acquainted."
Three days later the space station's crew gathered in the command module to hear an announcement from Saint-Michael. As was his habit, the general got straight to the point. "We're moving Silver Tower," he said.
"Moving?" Colonel Marks said, clearly upset. "Where? I haven't heard anything about this…"
"You have some special feeling for this particular orbit, Wayne?"
"It's just… unexpected, Skipper."
"Space Command and the Pentagon have brought a few items of interest to my attention that I think we can help out with. For the first time since Thor was first deployed on this station, Armstrong Station has a chance to act less like an orbiting laboratory and more like a tactical fighting unit. The primary objective of the move is reconnaissance. We have the most sophisticated space-based radars in the world on this station, but right now they're only used to scan empty sky above Russian missile silos and scan for aircraft flying over the pole. We've become little else but a redundancy, and I think we should be doing more."
Heads nodded. Ann knew that what Saint-Michael was saying was right. Silver Tower tended to be thought of solely as the perfect place to conduct weapons experiments for the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. The Skybolt project was only one of several being conducted on board the station — others included Kevin Baker's Thor experiment, and experiments on superconductor technology and space-based radar miniaturization. Silver Tower usually had as many civilians on board as military men, and the station's docking ports were always occupied. "So what's the job?" Colonel Walker asked. "Who are we going to spy on?"
Saint-Michael brought out a chart that he had been keeping beside his work station and Velcroed it to an instrument panel. It was a Mercator projection map of the globe with a wavy line drawn through it. The uppermost crest of the line passed over Iran; the lower part of the line passed between Chile and New Zealand over the south Pacific Ocean. "I propose moving Armstrong Station to a seven-hundred- by one-hundred-mile elliptical orbit. Three-hour orbit; two hours and ten minutes over Africa and lower Asia. One-and-a-half hours within direct scanning range of Iran. And I want it in the very same track on each orbit. "