There was no separate cockpit. The pilot sat behind the narrow curving windscreen, dressed in the same kind of ship-suit as Greg, except his was silvery grey. He didn’t even have a flight console, no controls of any kind. Sitting with arms neatly folded across his lap, eyes half-closed in some zen-like contemplation. Multicoloured geometric spiderwebs rolled across the windscreen itself. Greg guessed the pilot must use a processor node to interface with the spaceplane’s flight ‘ware.
He didn’t enjoy the idea. When he was in the army he used to fly parafoils and microlites; direct physical control, you shifted your weight and the wing banked in response. It was something you could feel, solid and dependable. Real flying.
Surely the spaceplane must have some kind of manual fallback? The pilot would probably laugh if he asked. He looked young, mid-twenties; a generation that wasn’t so much ‘ware literate as ‘ware addicted.
The crash team were choosing their seats noisily, like a small-town rugby club on their way to a match, all jokes and laughs. Two stewards helped to stow their flight bags in the lockers under the seats.
Suzi was sitting in one of the seats behind the pilot. Greg claimed the one next to her, where he could see out of the graphic-etched windscreen. He touched the activation stud on his armrest, and the seat cushioning slid round his legs, gripping gently.
Charlotte and Melvyn Ambler were sitting across the aisle from them, Rick in the row behind. The security captain leaned forward. “That’s everyone,” he told the pilot.
“OK. Flight time will be about three and a half hours, we should rendezvous with New London somewhere over South America.” The airlock hatch closed, cutting off the thrum of the platform’s thermal generators.
Greg heard the compressors wind up. There was a tremble of motion, and the corner of the thermal generator building was dropping out of sight through the windscreen.
“You told Eleanor where we were going?” Suzi asked.
“Yeah. She’ll worry about it, but she’d worry more if she found out and I hadn’t told her. I said the crash team was providing hardline cover now. That ought to help.”
“Mean she’ll be happier that you’re not dependent on me no more.”
Anastasia shifted to horizontal flight mode, deck tilted at fifteen degrees as it climbed, pushing eastwards, aiming for the Bay of Biscay. Greg sniffed at the air; the pervasive sulphur smell of the thermal generator vent pipes was missing, filtered out by the life-support system. The spaceplane’s purified air was curiously empty, an absence of scent more than anything.
“Why do all the women in my life give me such a hard time?” he complained.
Suzi laughed. “Eleanor’s not a problem. You two, fucking lucky, you are.”
“I don’t know what you’re moaning about. Andria seemed like a nice girl.”
Suzi glanced over at Charlotte and Melvyn Ambler, her voice dropped. “The greatest, Greg. No shit. Me and her, it’s happening. Funny, I mean, what I am, who’d want me? But she does.”
He didn’t need his gland to see how earnest she was. Suzi taking life that seriously would take some getting used to. “You’ll have to bring her out to the farm some time.”
“She’s pregnant.”
“So’s Eleanor. They’ll get on all right.”
“Right.” She whistled through her teeth. “Greg? I’m gonna get out after this. For the kid, you know? So, like, if you hear of anything coming up on the market, pub or something, let me know.”
“Sure.” He ought to have a word with Julia, see if she could find a likely club, sell it to Suzi through a front. He settled back into the seat. Attention to detail, that’s what it was all about. He’d put a note in his cybofax, later, when Suzi couldn’t see.
Anastasia switched to her induction rams three hundred kilometres south-west of the Scully Isles. Greg heard a crackling roar build until it was loud enough to block ordinary talking. He was pressed down in the seat, estimating the Gforce at about one and three-quarters. There was a disorientating sensation as the deck began to level out once they reached thirty-five kilometres altitude, yet at the same time the growing acceleration effect made it seem like the angle was increasing. Perhaps he should have taken that infusion after all.
The pale azure sky began to darken beyond the windscreen.
It took seven minutes after the induction rams came on to reach their orbital transfer trajectory, slicing cleanly through the mesosphere and into the rarefied lower chemosphere where the power-to-thrust ratio decayed drastically. The induction rams cut off over Egypt. Anastasia was doing Mach twenty-nine, coasting gently upwards.
The stars had come out, burning steadily in the night sky. Earth was a fringe of blue-white light along the bottom of the windscreen.
Greg let out an alarmingly damp burp as the nearly forgotten sensation of freefall buoyed his stomach up towards his sternum.
“We’ll be performing our New London flight trajectory burn in eighty seconds-mark,” the pilot said.
The silence Greg had been expecting was punctuated by sharp snapping sounds of the induction rant linings contracting as they shed their thermal load. Electrohydrostatic actuators whined on the threshold of hearing.
Suzi pulled a sour face. “Bollocks, three more hours of this.”
“Isn’t the infusion working?” Greg asked.
“Yeah. But that only holds your gut together, it doesn’t stop this whole scene from being a major downer. Floating about like this ain’t right, Greg. I’m not a fucking fish.”
A small portion of his mind was secretly glad there was something he could handle better than her. Of course, he’d done a lot of flying in his Army days, burning the nausea out.
“It took me a day to get up to New London last time,” Charlotte said. “I went up on a transfer liner.”
“I was in one of the low Earth orbit stations for a week,” Rick said. “Checking out a radio telescope before it was boosted out to EU Two behind the moon. It beats the hell out of dieting, I must have lost a couple of kilos.”
“How about you, Melvyn?” Greg asked. “You ever been up here before?”
“Sure. Victor Tyo likes us to familiarize ourselves with every possible environment we’re likely to operate in. I get rotated up to New London for a month every two years.”
“That sounds like Victor,” Greg said.
Anastasia’s reaction-control thrusters fired suddenly, a rapid burst of pistol shots. Greg saw the Earth’s coronal haze slide off the bottom of the windscreen.
“Stand by,” the pilot called out.
Greg tried to make some sense out of the graphics scrawling across the windscreen, flexible holographic wormholes of blue and green, red cubes rotating, yellow lines in wavering grid patterns. Nothing was bloody labelled.
The auxiliary reaction drive came on. A pair of bell-shaped nozzles in Anastasia’s tail. Water was pumped into their vaporization chambers where it was energized directly from the giga-conductor cells. It emerged from the nozzles as a brilliant flame of ions.
Greg was pushed back into his seat again. Anastasia appeared to be standing vertically. The G-force was much lower this time, about a third.
New London followed a slightly elliptical orbit high above the Earth, with an apogee of forty-five thousand kilometres and a perigee of forty-two thousand kilometres. Anastasia rose out towards it in a long flat arc.
New London was visible from Earth even during the day, a fuzzy oval patch of light, far brighter than the Moon. During most of the approach it was a sharp-edged nebula, building in size and magnitude.
Greg spent the last hour in his seat, watching the rock and its attendant archipelago resolve. The angle of their approach, virtually straight up, meant that the archipelago grew longer the whole time, stretching out along the rock’s orbital track. At first it looked like the rock was the head of a strangely stable comet, one possessing a solid diamanté tail; then he began to make out the individual orbs.