"Yes, yes, General. And your opinion, Colonel Kulovsky?"
"That the station does not have the capacity to counter earth's gravity," Kulovsky said. "Even with full-thruster capacity, the station can't change altitude more than a hundred kilometers without a refueling. So, as Govorov says, the spaceplane must have brought rocket thrusters to move the station."
"The most important target for myself and Colonel Voloshin," Govorov said, "was the station's space-based, radar array attach points. As you can see — he used the pointer for emphasis — three of the four attach-points have been hit and two destroyed."
"So that leaves two SBR arrays," Khromeyev said.
"Yes, though not enough to let the Americans duplicate the extent of earlier surveillance, sir," Kulovsky said.
"The other strikes against the station," Govorov said, "took out or damaged the solar arrays, which are necessary to recharge the station batteries and convert water to fuel… the fuel-storage vessels on the keel… and the pressurized modules themselves. It's possible these punctures in the modules are repairable in orbit, but they will leak so badly that the modules can't be safely inhabited unless the crew wear space suits the whole time. However, sir, I grant that the seemingly impossible may be possible. We are not infallible, and I do not underestimate the Americans. I have warned against that myself over the years, and I don't intend to change now. And so…"
"And so…?" Rhomerdunov said. "Finish the thought, General."
Govorov took the leap, the one he'd been moving toward, if in a roundabout fashion, since this little lecture had begun. "And so, sir, I believe we should not take the chance, however remote, that Armstrong will not regain its surveillance capabilities and be a substantial threat. I recommend that I attempt another attack against the space station…"
Khromeyev clearly wasn't so sure. "The first attack on the space station was easily justified," he said. "The Americans moved their station directly over the Soviet Union and used it to direct an attack against our defensive forces. But if we mount another offensive against a crippled station, one that is not, at least at the moment, orbiting over Soviet territory, world opinion may very well turn against us. We have already received much criticism for the deaths aboard the American rescue-craft; if we attack America's only hypersonic spaceplane, one ostensibly launched to retrieve the bodies of the other crewmembers that died in Govorov's first attack, we could be subject to the kind of international condemnation that could expand the conflict beyond the present boundaries — something we must avoid."
"I agree, Sir."
Khromeyev and Rhomerdunov conferred briefly; then Khromeyev turned to the camera: "Marshal Govorov, continue to monitor the space station Armstrong's orbit and advise us immediately if there are any significant changes, or if any other spacecraft dock with the station. The responsibility for determining whether or not the station becomes a threat to Operation Feather is, of course, yours."
It was not what Govorov wanted to hear, though he wasn't surprised. It seemed he'd done too good a job of making a "balanced" presentation. But if he knew the Americans, and he was beginning to know them too well, they would soon give him a good reason to resume the attack he believed necessary…
CHAPTER 34
It certainly wasn't pretty.
The command module, connecting tunnel, engineering and Skybolt control module all leaked like wet paper bags. Environmental alarms went off constantly, sending the already exhausted and nervous crew scrambling for POS masks. But to Jason Saint-Michael it marked a major step in the reactivation of Armstrong Space Station, and as such he had to admit that, all things considered, it looked beautiful. Not pretty, but beautiful.
Saint-Michael had volunteered to be the first to take watch while the rest of the crew stayed aboard the spaceplane and got their first sleep in forty-eight hours. He didn't completely trust the "bubble-gum and baling wire" repair jobs they'd made on the modules, so he'd ordered everyone except one person to sleep in America. The spaceplane was now docked with the station, using yet another jury-rigged device made from the undamaged parts of the docking module so the crew could transfer between America and the station without prebreathing or wearing a spacesuit.
The general was keeping himself awake with shots of pure oxygen from his POS mask and by checking and rechecking the systems, all in various states of repair, in the command module. He took pride in the patch job they'd done. Luckily they had the supplies on board to fix pressurized module penetrations. Those supplies and a generous amount of elbow grease had gotten the job done so far.
Fixing the modules to allow for working without spacesuits was minor compared to repowering and repositioning the station itself. It had taken Marty Schultz three hours of exhausting hard work to refuel the two undamaged fuel cells from the large fuel tank they had brought from earth. But it had paid off. Direct system power had been applied an hour later, and enough systems were restored to allow the station's built-in self-test equipment to analyze and point out other malfunctions and damage. Once the equipment began looking after itself and telling its human keepers what was wrong, things began to ease up a little.
Now they had to try to position the station in a usable orbit. One main attitude thruster and both main station thruster fuel tanks had been destroyed in the Soviet spaceplane attack. After refueling the fuel cells to provide electrical power Marty had attached the fuel tank, still with three-quarters of the fuel left, into the station's attitude and positioning thruster system. By the end of the first twenty-four hours they had restored enough inertial navigation systems and satellite tracking and positioning data links to activate the station thrusters, and with far more human intervention than normal they managed to kick Silver Tower into a low equatorial orbit. Now at two hundred miles altitude, orbiting almost directly over the equator, Silver Tower passed appproximately six hundred miles south of the Nimitz carrier group in the Arabian Sea. At seventeen thousand miles per hour they could theoretically scan the fleet for twenty minutes on every orbit, or twenty minutes out of every ninety — almost one-fourth of the time. Providing they could get the space-based radar system working. They hadn't brought along an SBR engineer on the flight, but as long as the master system processor was working it could direct the SBR operator to system faults — the system would fix itself.
They had been following the SBR computer's direction for nearly twenty hours when Saint-Michael called a halt. Now he was there alone, monitoring the systems and watching in case the Russians staged another attack — although if they did there was no way he could detect it beforehand and not a damn thing he could do even if he did know they were coming. Silver Tower wasn't yet ready to fight. Not yet.
He looked over to the master SBR console. The huge master SBR monitor wasn't broken, as far as anyone could tell, but for some reason it wasn't coming on. After taking it down off its mounting spot on the bulkhead to try to fix it someone had used a couple strips of tape to secure the huge screen back to the wall. He went over to the console and checked the two screens, one of them cannibalized from a TV set found in the recreation area in the Skylab module. If the SBR screen had been working properly a political map of the earth would be scrolling across the screen with the SBR's scan pattern superimposed on it. Without the mapping display the only readout of where they were was a series of complicated digits zipping across the TV set, representing azimuth, declination, latitude, longitude, inertial velocity and planetary motion corrections of the station relative to earth. It might as well have been written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.