A gasp from Horvath. He had come across the grisly scene inside the docking module where seven of the dead space command crewmen lay. He tried to blot it out, knew he never would. A few moments later he announced, "General, I'm in the connecting tunnel. It's depressurized, but the Skybolt module is showing pressurized. And I can see lights on in the galley module and in Skybolt. I see some damage, but it looks minor—"
Thank God, Ann said to herself.
"General," Hampton said again, "it's now or never."
"We're ready," Marty called out. "Ann, Marty, secure yourselves to the keel. Ken, grab hold of something in there. Jon, you'll have to maneuver clear of the station before we set off the boosters."
"Moving away now."
Ann watched with fascination as the huge, dark form of the spaceplane seemed to fall away from her, the tiny maneuvering jets on the broad tail flashing on and off like spotlights. In a few moments America was a hundred feet away from its original position, looking like a large, finely detailed toy hovering against the revolving backdrops of stars and the hazy upper atmosphere of earth.
"Commit both PAM boosters," Saint-Michael ordered.
"PAM boosters armed," Hampton replied. "Ku-band earth station data link good. Data transfer… here it comes…"
Ann felt her body strain against the clips holding her to a mounting bracket on Silver Tower's keel as the PAM booster fired. She could feel an intense vibration ripple through the keel; then the booster abruptly cut off, but the spinning went on. "Why did it stop?" she asked. "Is them—"
She didn't have a chance to finish the question as Saint-Michael's PAM booster fired in sequence. It was followed by another longer burst of thrust from her PAM booster, followed again by a shorter pulse from the opposite booster. The effect was to move the station and its tethered crewmembers upward toward outer space at a rate of ten miles per hour. For Ann and the others it was like being dragged along by a slow-moving car. America seemed to slide forward and sideways, then tip on edge. Even the scattering of debris seemed to swirl and drop away like a cloud bank being pushed back out to sea by a fresh breeze.
Following guidance commands from the ground tracking stations, the two PAM boosters alternated each of their pulses of thrust until, after several minutes, the station's wild multiaxis spinning slowed nearly to a stop. As the rotation decreased, the booster thrusts became longer as the station fought for altitude. A couple of minutes later the roar of the engines was constant. Earth was now firmly beneath them, slowly but surely dropping away. Ann was no longer pinned to the keel, but found instead that she could move freely.
Saint-Michael spoke first. "Jon, how do you copy?"
"Loud and clear, General," Hampton said. "Ken's got the station emitting a tracking beacon now. America is back on digital autopilot. I'll bring her back beside the cargo bay so we can start refueling the energy cells."
"Horvath here. Ne got auxiliary power on in the command module. It's depressurized. I don't think we can fix it: it's got two or three monster holes in it—"
"How about environmental and SBR controls?"
"I think I can reset the environmental controls, sir. I have no idea if that SBR stuff is operational, but there's backup power going to every console.
More than they'd hoped for, Ann thought. Silver Tower was alive. Now if the Russians would just give them the time they needed…
Marshal Govorov came into the Space Defense Command control center, joined up with Colonel Gulaev, then kept stride with his subordinate as both hurried to the main tracking computer monitor to scan the information that was scrolling across the screen. "We didn't notice the change until the station was at two hundred fifteen kilometers…" Gulaev said. "We thought it was an error, an anomaly—"
"It's impossible," Govorov said, realizing as he said it how much that sounded like the Kremlin bureaucrats he'd gone up against all these years. He'd deceived himself. Well, let's go from there… But wasn't more time needed to boost the station into higher orbit?
"Sir, shall I alert the—"
"Alert no one. I want this tracking confirmed."
Gulaev took off for the communication center to call Sary Shagan for a confirmation. The answer did not take long. The young officer returned to the control console only sixty seconds later to find the Space Defense commander alone at the console — no one else wanted any part of him — including himself.
"Sir, the Shirov-25 space surveillance site at Sary Shagan has just issued an advisory to Space Defense Command headquarters. The tracking is… confirmed. Armstrong appears to be under power and being directed to a standard circular orbit, inclined less than five degrees from the equator… Is it possible that the Americans could reestablish surveillance over the Persian Gulf or Arabian Sea…?"
Govorov came close to giving him a murder-the-messenger look, then shook his head, trying his best to control himself. "The station's pressurized modules are uninhabitable. Our Scimitar missile had to penetrate the radar array and solar cells. It would take a full work-crew months to bring Armstrong back on line." Or at least it should… He clapped his hands together, as though to jog himself out of his unaccustomed funk. "All right, I want a secure videophone connection established among Rhomerdunov, Khromeyev and myself, the conference to be, set UP in tactical situation briefing room three. And I want General Kulovsky of intelligence on hand. Get him here."
Gulaev hurried off to give the orders, relieved that Govorov seemed his old self, back in control, in command, at least a step ahead of the Americans…
But why did it feel like they were one step behind?
The videophone terminal had been set up on a pedestal at the front of the large conference room near Govorov's office at the Glowing Star Manned Launch Facility. Govorov and General Kulovsky, the Space Defense Command's chief of intelligence, stood in front of the terminal waiting for the two senior Stavka members to make contact.
They did not have to wait long. The videophone buzzed once, long and insisting, and the screen suddenly flared to life, revealing Deputy Minister of Defense Khromeyev and Commander in Chief of Aerospace Forces Rhomerdunov seated at the main battle staff conference table at Supreme Headquarters in Moscow.
Khromeyev spoke first. "We already know about the American space station, Govorov. I assume you have an explanation…"
Govorov did not feel better, hearing he'd apparently been scooped by the space warning and tracking facility at Sary Shagan. Make the best of it, he told himself, and try to tell it as you see it…
"Comrade Deputy Minister, it's not as we hoped, and believed. True. But I believe it likely that the station has been destroyed beyond the point of near-term usefulness—"
"Then how is it being moved at all?" Rhomerdunov interrupted. "I believe the Americans may have brought aloft the rocket boosters needed to send the station to higher orbit—"
"Isn't it more likely," Khrorneyev put it, "that you overestimated the damage done to the station?"
"Yes, sir, that's possible, but I point out that America's cargo bay, from what we've learned of it, is more than large enough to carry a fuel tank and several small rocket boosters to attach to the station's central keel."
Govorov hit a button on a small wireless control unit, and the pedestal that the videophone monitor was mounted on swiveled up so that the camera faced a large plastic and balsa wood model of Armstrong hanging from the ceiling. The model, carefully constructed and precise in every detail, had been just as precisely broken in several places. "The model you're looking at, sir, represents the last full image of the station as seen through my Elektron spaceplane's Scimitar missile laser designator." With a long pointer he then motioned to each of the station's damaged systems.