Project Daedalus

  Chapter Twenty

  Friday 9:31 a.m.

  "One small step for man."

  Vance felt his lungs curve around his backbone, his face melt into his skull. He didn't know how many G's of acceleration they were experiencing, but it felt like a shuttle launch. He gripped the straps of the G-seat and watched the video feed from the landing-gear cameras, which showed the tarmac flashing by in a stream of gray. The screen above him had clicked up to 200 knots, and in what seemed only a second the Daedalus was a full kilometer down the runway. Then the monitors confirmed they were rotating to takeoff attitude, seven degrees.

  They were airborne.

  Next the screens reported a hard right-hand bank, five G's. The altimeter had become a whirling blur as attitude increased to twenty degrees, held just below stall-out by Petra's augmented control system.

  When the airspeed captured 400 knots, the landing gear cameras showed the wheels begin to fold forward, then rotate to lie flat in the fuselage. Next the doors snapped closed behind them, swallowing them in the underbelly and leaving the nose cameras as their only visual link to the outside. The screens displayed nothing but gray storm clouds.

  Landing gear up and locked, came Petra's disembodied voice.

  "Acknowledge gear secure," Androv said, quieting a flashing message on one of the screens.

  No abort so far, Vance thought. Maybe we're about to get away with this.

  The airspeed had already passed 600 knots, accelerating a tenth of a Mach number, about 60 knots, every five seconds.

  That's when he noticed they were still receiving wideband video transmissions from the Flight Center. The screen showing Tanzan Mino remained clear and crisp. Surely not for much longer, but now at least the uplink was intact. And the CEO was returning the favor, monitoring their lift-off via a screen of his own. Vance watched as he turned to some of the Soviet brass standing next to him and barked orders. What was that about?

  For now though the bigger question was, What do we do?

  Androv was still busy talking to Petra, issuing commands. Vance realized they were assuming a vector north by northeast, out over the ocean. They also were probably going to stay on the deck to avoid radar tracking, with only passive systems so that no EM emissions would betray their heading.

  He glanced up at the screens and realized he was half right. They were over the ocean now, at a breathtaking altitude of only five hundred meters, but Androv had just switched the phased-array radar altimeter over to start hopping frequencies, using "squirt" emissions. Pure Stealth technology. No conventional radar lock could track it.

  "Dr. Vance, I am giving you one more opportunity to reconsider." Tanzan Mino's voice sounded through the headphones. He was still standing at the main Flight Control console, though his image was finally starting to roll and break up. "You must return to base. The consequences of this folly could well be incalculable."

  "Why don't you take that up with the pilot?" Vance answered into his helmet mike.

  "His receiver has been turned off. It's impossible to communicate with him. He's clearly gone mad. I will give you another sixty seconds before I order the on-board guidance computer switched over to the AI mode. Flight Control here will override the on-board systems and just bring the vehicle back and land it."

  Again Vance wondered if he really could.

  Then a screen flashed, an emergency strobe, and Petra was speaking. The Russian was simple enough he could decipher it.

  Systems advisory. You are too low. Pull up. Acknowledge. Pull up.

  Androv tapped the sidestick lightly and boosted their altitude a hundred meters.

  "Michael," the voice was Eva's coming through his headphones. "She-it-whoever, said-"

  "I figured it out. But did you hear the other news? Mino-san just advised he's going to override Petra. We're about to find out who's really flying this baby."

  "No." Androv was raising his flight helmet and gesturing, his wounded arm urging at something in his right pocket. "Please take. Do it quickly. And then . . ."

  Vance unstrapped his G-seat harness, rose, and moved over to the central console. Androv had raised his hydraulic helmet all the way up now and was trying to unzip the right side of his flight suit. Vance reached down and helped him, not sure exactly what he needed.

  "There." Yuri was trying to point. "The radio. Please, you must . . ." The English began to fail him again.

  "What's this?" Vance took out the transmitter, the size and shape of a small calculator.

  The answer was in Russian, complex and garbled. Something about computer.

  "He's wired something into the on-board computer, Michael," Eva began translating. "The radio will perform brain surgery on Petra, disabling her AI functions. It's supposed to prevent Flight Control from overriding . . . I didn't quite get it. But he wants you to help."

  Vance glanced up at the line of video screens. Daedalus was now skimming rapidly over the straits, banking in the direction of the archipelago known as the Kurile Islands, and the image of Tanzan Mino was breaking up, almost gone. Had he heard? Maybe it didn't matter. The allotted sixty seconds was ticking away and he could just make out the image of Tanzan Mino, holding a microphone, preparing to give orders.

  By the clock on the screens he saw that forty-one seconds had already passed.

  "Dr. Vance, we are preparing to initiate total systems override." The CEO's voice sounded through his headphones. "You have fifteen seconds remaining to acknowledge."

  "The code," Androv was saying. "It is one-nine-nine-nine."

  Vance stared at the small device in his flight glove. It had a number keypad and a liquid crystal display.

  "You have ten seconds," Tanzan Mino said. The image was ghostly, but the voice still rang loud and clear.

  He began fumbling with the device, but the numbers kept eluding him, slipping around the thick fingers of his gloves. Finally he caught the 1. Above him the screens were still scrolling. Eight seconds.

  Suddenly the cockpit seemed to sway, an air pocket that

  even the Daedalus' advanced structural mode control system couldn't damp out entirely. Now Androv was talking to Petra, going for a sliver more altitude. Seven seconds.

  "Michael." Eva was watching, her face still drawn from the acceleration. "Is it-?"

  "It's the gloves. The damned gloves. I'm . . ." Then he punched in the first 9.

  In the back of his mind he noted that the cockpit was adjusting as Daedalus rotated, increasing attitude . . .

  He got another 9. But his grip on the "calculator" was slipping, pressing toward the floor as the G-forces of acceleration weighed against him. He checked the screens again and saw that three seconds remained.

  Now Androv was grappling to keep control of the throttle, while issuing instructions to Petra.

  Am I about to disable her? he wondered. If I do, can he manage this nightmare manually? What if Mino was only bluffing?

  Two seconds.

  A final, bright green 9 appeared on the liquid crystal readout.

  "Alert. AI system malfunction." It was the toneless voice of Petra. She sounded vaguely annoyed.

  Something had happened. Two of the screens on the wall above had just gone blank, but Daedalus continued to climb.

  "Dr. Vance, we are now going to recall the plane. We have ordered a wing of fighter-interceptors scrambled from the Dolinsk airbase on Sakhalin. They will escort you back."

  Whoops. So that was what he was telling the Soviet brass to do. Get up some hardware fast. This could well be the shortest flight since the Wright brothers'.

  Then he heard Androv's helmet mike click on.

  "This is Daedalus I. Do you copy me?"

  "Major, you-" Mino began.

  "Copy this, you bastard. Fuck you. Repeat. Fuck you. I've disabled your fucking AI module."

  "You disabled it?"

  "That's a roger. Do you read me, you murdering son-of-a-bitch? FUCK YOU!" He clicked off his mike

  Vance was moving slowl
y across the cockpit, headed back to his own G-seat. As he settled himself and reached for the straps, he glanced up at the screens to check their flight data-altitude, speed, vector, G-force, fuel consumption. They were still on the deck, with an airspeed just under a thousand knots, about eleven hundred miles per hour. Not quite Mach 2, but already it was risky. And their vector was 085, with coordinates of 46 degrees latitude, 143 degrees longitude.

  What now? Daedalus had all the active radar systems known to modern avionics. Looking at the screens he saw forward-looking radar, sideways-looking radar, a four-beam multimode pulse-Doppler look-down radar, terrain-following radar, radar altimeter, mapping and navigational radar, and a host of high-powered ECM jammers. The problem was, they all emitted EM, electromagnetic radiation. Switch on any of those and they'd become a flying radio beacon, broadcasting their position.

  The next row of screens, however, provided readouts of their passive, non-emitting receivers and analyzers. That clearly was what they would have to use to monitor the threat from Sakhalin, scooping up any EM for lightning-fast computer processing. Surely Petra could spit out a fingerprint of everything in the skies. To begin with, there were the basic Radar Warning Receivers (RWRs) located aft, on the tailplanes, as well as infrared warning receivers (IRWRs) positioned high on the outboard stabilizers. The screens showed she could analyze basic frequency, operating mode, pulse repetition frequency, amplitude of pulse, time of arrival, direction of arrival-the full menu.

  "If it's true they've scrambled the base at Dolinsk, it probably means the new MiG 31s." Androv was now busy switching on all the passive systems, just the way Vance figured he would. "We have to decide what to do. But first I want to take her up and do a quick recon. Buckle in."

  "The latest Foxhound has a multimode pulse-Doppler look-down, shoot-down capability that's as good as any in the world," Vance heard himself saying. "We're the biggest target in the skies, and we're unarmed. We'd be a sitting duck for one of their AA-9 active homing missiles. They're launch-and-leave."

  "Let's check it out before we get too worried," Androv replied. "But this has to be fast. You're about to see a Mach 3 Immelmann. Don't try this in a 747." He laughed, then began lowering his high-tech helmet. "I hope I can still manage it."

  There was a surge of acceleration as he shoved forward the throttles, then yanked back on the sidestick. The Daedalus seemed to kick straight up. And up. And up. The instruments showed they were traveling skyward in a thin arc, as though sliding up the curve of an archer's bow. Now the altimeter was spinning, and in eighteen seconds they had already reached twenty thousand feet. But still Androv kept the stick in, and during the next five seconds, as Daedalus continued tracing the archer's curve, they almost began to fly upside down.

  At the last moment he performed an aileron half-roll and righted them. The Immelmann had, in effect, taken them straight up and headed their powerful forward-looking IR detectors and radar in the direction of Sakhalin. Vance glanced at the screens and realized they'd climbed thirty thousand feet in twenty-seven seconds. They'd just waxed the standing forty-eight-second time-to-climb record of the USAF F-15 Eagle, and Daedalus wasn't even breathing hard. Even though Androv had now chopped the power, they still were cruising at Mach 2. Effortlessly.

  No wonder he loves this bird.

  The only downside was, the fuel reading showed they'd burned twenty-three thousand pounds of JP-7 during the climb out.

  "Petra," Androv said into his helmet mike, "take VSD to standby and give me infrared laser."

  Petra's interrogation revealed a wing of eight MiG 31 interceptors, flying in formation at twenty-five thousand feet and closing. At Mach 2.4.

  Friday 9:43 a.m.

  "Ya ponemaiyu," Colonel-General Gregori Edmundovich Mochanov said into the secure phone, the pride of Dolinsk's Command Central. "I ordered a wing of the Fifteenth Squadron scrambled at 0938 hours. Fortunately we were planning an exercise this morning."

  He paused for the party at the other end, General Valentin Sokolov on a microwave link from the Hokkaido facility.

  "Da, if Androv maintains his altitude below six hundred meters, then he will probably have to keep her near Mach 2. The vehicle, as I understand it, is not designed for that operating regime. So with the MiG 31s on full afterburner, we can make up the distance. But we need his vector."

  He paused and listened. "Yes, they are fully armed. AA-9s. A kill perimeter of-" He listened again. "Of course, active homing radar and infrared, on the underfuselage-" He was impatiently gripping the receiver. "Da, but I can't work miracles. I must have a vector." He paused again. "Da, but I don't want to accidentally shoot down another KAL 747. I must have a confirmed target. I'm not going to order them to fire without it."

  He listened a second longer, then said, "Good," and slammed down the phone.

  Friday 9:44 a.m.

  Guess we'd better start playing hide-and-seek in earnest," Vance observed.

  "Stealth, my American friend," Androv replied. "The hostile radar signature of this fuselage is almost nothing. And we can defeat their infrared by taking her back on the deck, so the engines are masked from their look-down IR. Back we go. We'll pull out at five hundred meters, but it'll mean about three negative G's-blood to the brain, a redout. Very dangerous. Be ready."

  Then he shoved the sidestick forward and Daedalus plunged into a Mach 3 power dive. The infrared cameras showed the sea plunging toward them. The dive took even less time than the climb, with the altimeter scrolling. Suddenly the voice of Petra sounded.

  "Pull up. Warning. Pull up. Pilot must acknowledge or auto-override will commence."

  A ton of empty space slammed into them as Petra automatically righted the vehicle, pulling out of the dive at an altitude of four hundred meters.

  Vance looked over and saw Yuri Andreevich Androv's bandaged arm lying limp on the sidestick, lightly hemorrhaging. He'd passed out from the upward rush of blood.

  Friday 9:58 a.m.

  "He has disappeared from the Katsura radar again, Mino-sama. I think he has taken the vehicle back on the deck." Ikeda's face was ashen as he typed in the computer AI override command one last time, still hoping. The Flight Control operations screen above him was reading "System Malfunction," while the engineers standing behind were exchanging worried glances. Who was going to be held responsible? The master screen above, the one with the Katsura radar, no longer showed the Daedalus. Androv had taken it to thirty thousand feet, then down again. He was playing games.

  Tanzan Mino was not wasting time marveling at the plane's performance specs. He turned and nodded to General Sokolov, who was holding a red phone in his hand. The MiG 31 wing wasn't flying military power; it was full afterburners, which was pushing them to Mach 2.4. If Daedalus stayed on the deck, they might still intercept.

  "We have no choice," he said in Russian. "Order them to give him a chance to turn back, and tell him if he refuses, they will shoot him down. Maybe the threat will be enough."

  Sokolov nodded gravely. But what if Androv was as insane as every indication suggested he was? What if he disobeyed the commands from the Sakhalin interceptors? What then? Who was going to give the command that unleashed AAMs to bring down the most magnificient airplane-make that spacecraft-the world had ever seen. The MiG 31, with its long-range Acrid AA-9 missiles, had a stand-off kill capability that matched the American F-14 Tomcat and its deadly AIM-54 Phoenix. Since the AA-9 had its own guidance system, the pilot need not even see his target. One of those could easily bring down an unarmed behemoth like the Daedalus as long as it was still in the supersonic mode, which it would have to be at that low altitude.

  A pall of sadness entered his voice as he issued the command. Androv, of all people, knew the look-down shoot-down capabilities of the MiG 31. Maybe there was still a chance to reason with him. The Daedalus had no pilot-ejection capability. His choice was to obey or die.

  Reports from the hangar said he'd taken some automatic-weapons fire from the CEO's bodyguards. How badl
y wounded was he?

  Hard to tell, but he'd got Daedalus off the runway, then done an Immelmann to take her to ten thousand meters, followed by a power dive back to the deck. He was frolicking like a drunken dolphin. Pure Androv. How much longer could he last?

  Sokolov glanced at the screen in front of him. The computer was extrapolating, telling him that a due-east heading by Daedalus would soon take her over international waters. If Androv kept that vector, at least there'd be no messy questions about violating foreign airspace.

  "How long before they can intercept?" Tanzan Mino asked, not taking his eyes from the screens. Now the Soviet interceptors were on the Katsura radar, speeding toward Daedalus' last known vector coordinates. It should only be a matter of time.

  "In five minutes they will be within air-to-air range," Sokolov replied. He paused, then asked the question weighing on his mind. "If he refuses to turn back, do you really want that vehicle blown from the skies?"

  Now Tanzan Mino was thinking about the Stealth capabilities of the Daedalus. Was the design good enough to defeat the MiG-31s' pulse-Doppler radar? He suddenly found himself wishing the plane hadn't been so well designed. The stupid Soviets, of course, had no idea-yet- that it could just disappear.

  "He could be headed for Alaskan air space. That's what the computer is projecting. You understand the ramifications if this vehicle falls into the hands of the Americans."

  The Soviet nodded gravely. That was, of course, unthinkable. There would be no going home again.

  Friday 9:57 a.m.

  "Yuri!" Eva was up like a shot. "Lean back. Breathe." She was pushing the button that raised the huge flight helmet. As she watched, his open eyes gradually resumed their focus. Then he snapped his head and looked around.

  "Shto . . . what happened?"

  "I don't think you can handle heavy G-loads. You're weak from the wound, the tourniquet."

  He straightened up, then glanced again at the altimeter. They were cruising at three hundred meters, smooth as silk. And they were burning six hundred pounds of JP-7 a second.

  "Nothing has gone the way I planned." He rubbed at his temples, trying to clear the blood from his brain. "We're just buying a little breathing space now by staying down here. I think the radar noise of the choppy sea, together with all our Stealth capability, will keep us safe. But at this low altitude we're using fuel almost as though we were dumping it. If we continue to hold on the deck, we've got maybe half an hour's flying time left."

  "If we gained altitude," Vance wondered, "could we stretch it enough to make Alaska?"

  "Probably," Androv replied. "If we took her above fifty thousand feet, we might have a chance."

  "Then we've got no choice. The only solid ground between here and the U.S. is the Kurile Islands, and they're Soviet territory."

  "But if we did reach U.S. airspace, then what?" Eva asked. "We'd have to identify ourselves. Who's going to believe our story? Nobody even knows this monster exists."

  "Right," he laughed. "A top-secret Soviet hypersonic bomber comes cruising across the Bering Strait at sixty thousand feet and into the USAF's airspace. One hint of this thing and they'd roll out the SAMs."

  "Maybe we couid talk our way down."

  "Maybe."

  "There's no other choice."

  "You are getting ahead of things, both of you," Androv interrupted, staring at the screens on the wall. "We still have to handle the interceptors from Dolinsk. If we went for altitude, we'd show enough infrared signature to make us an easy target during ascent. Before we even reached two thousand meters, they'd have a lock on us."

  Vance glanced at the IRWR. Daedalus's infrared laser scanners were still tracking the wing of MiG interceptors, now at twenty-two thousand feet and closing.

  "It doesn't matter," he said. "We've got to get off the deck soon, while we still have fuel. Either that or we'll have to ditch at sea."

  "Comrade Vance, the Daedalus is a marvelous platform, but when we go for altitude, we're going to be vulnerable. There's no getting around it. This vehicle was intended to perform best at the edge of space, not down here."

  "All right," he said slowly. "Then why not take her there? Use the scramjets. We may be running out of JP-7, but we have a load of liquid hydrogen. Maybe this is the moment to finally find out if this thing can burn it."

  "I'm-I'm afraid. After what happened when we pulled out of the power dive, I'm not sure I could handle the G-load necessary to power in the scramjets." Yuri paused. "The tourniquet has almost paralyzed my arm. I don't have the kind of control and timing we'd need. If I thought I could-but no. I hate to say it, even think it, but maybe we have no choice but to give up and turn back."

  "Not yet," Vance said. "Maybe there's one other possibility."

  Friday 10:01 a.m.

  "They still are not acknowledging," Tanzan Mino said grimly. "We don't know their exact vector, but they will have to gain altitude soon. When they do . . ." He turned to General Sokolov. "Radio Dolinsk and confirm the order."

  This was the moment Valentin Sokolov had been dreading. The AA-9 missile, which was carried on the MiG 31's recessed underfuselage stations, came in two versions: the active radar homing model and the heat-seeking infrared design. He suspected that Daedalus had enough Stealth and ECM capabilities to partially defeat radar, but Stealth couldn't mask IR.

  Sooner or later, Androv would have to make his move, come off the deck. And when he did, the MiGs would pick him up and it would be over.

  But that was still preferable to letting Daedalus fall into the hands of the Americans. So if Androv refused to answer his radio and comply with the call-back, there'd be no choice.

  Friday 10:02 a.m.

  "What do you mean?" Androv asked, wiping at his brow.

  Vance took a deep breath. "We've got no choice. You know what I'm thinking."

  "We'll need ten G's of acceleration to power in the scramjets, my friend." He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. His face was now drawn with pain, but the bleeding had stopped. Above them, Petra silently flew the plane and flashed messages on the screens. "I've trained for years," he continued finally. "Even with your inflatable G-suit, you couldn't possibly take the G-loads and stay conscious."

  "What other choice is there? Either I try, or we ditch down there in the Sea of Okhotsk. Personally, I'd rather go out like a shooting star, taking our chances."

  "It's not that simple. The scramjets are designed to be powered in at Mach 4.8. We dare not risk that below at least forty thousand feet. There are aerodynamic reasons. In fact, they're not really intended to be used below sixty thousand."

  "Well," Vance said, "if we started our ascent at max throttle, what kind of airspeed could we capture by forty thousand? Could we achieve Mach 4.8?"

  "Only if we used afterburners. Which means we'd probably have only about ten minutes of JP-7 left for landing later." He laughed sadly. "Assuming there's anywhere we could land."

  "How about Heathrow? I know a Japanese banker who'd probably love to have this vehicle as collateral for a few billion in Eurodollar debentures he's being forced to underwrite. He's a friend of mine and I owe him a favor."

  "You want to turn this plane over to some banker?" He was visibly startled. "We can't ignore the fact that it still belongs, technically, to Mino Industries."

  "My friend's a big boy. He'll work it out, Yakuza-style. Don't worry." He glanced up at the fuel gauges. They now had twenty minutes left. Just enough to get back to the facility and give up? Or go all the way.

  "Eva, what do you say? Want to give it a shot?"

  "I'm game. One thing's for sure; I have no intention of going back to get ourselves murdered by Tanzan Mino. If we can make it to the other side of the world by burning hydrogen, then . . ."

  "Maybe, just maybe Petra could help enough for you to manage it." Androv paused to collect his strength. "I don't know if you can stay conscious through the ten G's of acceleration needed to initiate the scramjets. But I know for sure I can't, not in my
current state. You might as well give it a try." He turned to Eva and continued in Russian. "There's an emergency back-up pressure suit in that locker beneath Petra's main screen. See if you can put it on. You'll still probably pass out, but don't worry, the 'event' is only temporary. After we go through the hypersonic barrier, acceleration will subside. Down to three, maybe four G's."

  "I'll get the suit," she said, starting to unbuckle her straps.

  "Okay, we'd better get started." Vance was crossing the cabin. The nose cameras were showing the spray of white- caps directly below them. If they'd passed any fishing vessels, he mused, there were probably stories of flying saucers already going around. The passive IRWR scanner was still tracking the wing of MiG 31s, now at a hundred and thirty kilometers, approximately eighty miles, and closing. Daedalus was almost within the kill perimeter of the MiG 31s and their AA-9 missiles.

  The radio crackled, something in Russian. Yuri Androv stared at the flight helmet, then looked down at the console and flipped a switch.

  "I copy you, Firefight One," he replied in Russian. "Over."

  "Androv, you idiot. What in hell are you doing? Defecting to the capitalists?" The voice laughed. "We don't know what the devil you're flying, but when you pulled that Immelmann, my IR thought you were an An-124 Condor transport turned into a high-performance Foxbat. One incredible son-of-a-bitch."

  "It's a spaceship, Arkadi. Excuse me, Colonel Arkadi. Congratulations on the promotion."

  "Spacebo," he said, laughing again. Then he sobered. "Yuri, I don't know what this is all about, but I'm instructed by General Sokolov to escort you and that thing you're flying back to Hokkaido. If you're stupid enough to refuse, then I have orders to shoot you down."

  "Is that any way to treat an old friend?"

  "Yuri Andreevich, we go back a long way. To the Ramenskoye Flight Test Center. You were the best we ever had. Don't make me do this."

  "I'm thinking I may spare you the trouble."

  "Thank God."

  "Give me five minutes. If I don't turn back by then, give it your best."

  "Pull up. Show yourself on IR. We have no idea what your vector is."

  "I'll take her to three thousand meters. You'll have a lock on me. But I still want five minutes."

  "That's all I can give you, Yuri. After that . . ." His voice trailed off.

  "I'm going off this frequency. Talk to you in five."

  "Five minutes. Starting now."

  Androv pushed a switch on the console, then said, "Petra, stabilize at three thousand."

  "Three thousand," she repeated. "Confirmed."

  He rose from the pilot's seat, motioning for Vance. There was a surge of acceleration as the vehicle changed pitch, the cockpit rotating to adjust for the G-forces. The weight of two and a half G's weighed against them as the altimeter screen started scrolling upward.

  Vance walked across to the central seat, studying the console. The throttle quadrant and sidestick he understood, but most of the other controls were new to him. Maybe it didn't matter.

  "Does Petra understand English?"

  "Of course," Androv nodded. "Russian, Japanese, and English. Interchangeable. She's programmed such that if you command her in Russian, she replies in Russian. If you use English, that's what you get back."

  "So far, so good." He looked at the large screen at the end of cabin, the one that displayed Petra's mindstate. She was dutifully announcing that she'd just taken the vehicle to three thousand meters. She also was reporting the IR interrogation of a wing of MIG 31s flying at twenty thousand feet, with a closure rate of three hundred knots. When Daedalus made her move, would she be able to outdistance their air-to-air missiles?

  We're about to find out, he thought, in-he glanced at the screens-three and a half minutes. Eva was zipping up her pressure suit now, readying to strap herself back into her seat. The helmet made her look like an ungainly astronaut.

  "Like I said, the scramjets become operable at Mach 4.8," Androv went on. "At forty thousand feet, that's about three thousand miles per hour. I've never taken her past Mach 4.5." He was grasping the side of the console to brace himself. "You probably know that scramjets require a modification in engine geometry. In the turboramjet mode, these engines have a fan that acts as a compressor, just like a conventional jet. However, when we switch them over to scramjet geometry, the turbines are shut down and their blades set to a neutral pitch. Next the aft section of each engine is constricted to form a combustion chamber-the shock wave inside becomes the 'compressor.' " He paused. "The unknown part comes when the fans are cut out and the engine geometry is modified. I've unstarted the fans and reconfigured, but I've never fed in the hydrogen. We simply don't know what will happen. Those damned turbines could just explode."

  "So we take the risk."

  "There's more," he continued. "The frictional heat at hypersonic speeds. Our liquid hydrogen is supposed to act as a heat sink, to dissipate thermal buildup on the leading edges, but who the hell knows if it'll work. We're now flying at about fifteen hundred miles per hour. When you give Petra the go-ahead, we could accelerate to ten, even fifteen thousand miles per hour. God help us, we may just melt."

  "If you were willing to give it a shot, then I am." Vance looked up at the screens. "We're now at ten thousand feet. I kick over to scramjets at forty thousand?"

  "The computer simulations all said that if we go hypersonic below sixty thousand feet, we could seriously overheat. But maybe if we climb out fast enough . . ."

  "We'll have to take our chances. We need to minimize that window of AAM vulnerability."

  "I agree." Androv gestured for him to sit, then glanced up at the screens. "We have two and a half minutes. I've set Petra for full auto. All you have to do is just talk her through the key intervals of the sequence."

  Vance settled in and examined the huge flight helmet looming above him, making him look like an alien insect from science fiction. Now the cabin had taken on an eerie quiet, with nothing but silent screens flashing data. He'd never talked to an airplane before, and the thought gave him some disquiet.

  Two minutes.

  "What do I do first?"

  "You probably should start by attaching that nozzle there on the legs of your G-suit to the pressure hose on the console. When the G-forces go above eight, tubules in the legs automatically inflate using bleed air from the engines. It's going to squeeze hell out of your lower extremities. If you begin to gray-out, try to grunt as hard as you can. The M-l maneuver, I think you Americans call it. If your vision begins to go entirely, just try and talk Petra through."

  "What else?"

  "Once you start pushing through the hypersonic barrier, keep an eye on screens B-5 and B-6, which report engine strut temperature and stress loads. Those are the most important data for the scramjet mode. But first check the C-2 screen. Core rpm has to be zeroed out before the scramjet geometry modification, since the compressors need to be completely shut down. If it's not, then instruct Petra to abort the sequence. It could cause a flameout."

  "And that's when I switch over to liquid hydrogen?"

  "Exactly. Petra will set the new engine geometry, then sample compression and temperature and tell you the precise moment. But the actual switch-over is manual. I insisted on it." He pointed. "It's those blue toggles right behind the throttle quadrant. Just flip them forward."

  "Got it."

  "After you toggle her over, just ease the throttle forward, and pray." He settled himself into the right-hand seat, tugging at the tourniquet. "When we enter the hypersonic regime, I don't know what will happen. Above Mach 6 or Mach 7 we may begin to critically overheat. Or the airframe stresses could just tear this damned samolyot apart. Whatever happens, though, you've got to keep pushing her right on out, to stabilize the shock wave in the scramjets and bring them to full power."

  Vance glanced up at the screen-thirty seconds-and fingered the sidestick and the throttles, trying to get their feel. As he began lowering the massive flight helmet, he not
ed that with the engines on military power they had exactly eighteen minutes of JP-7 left. When he kicked in the afterburners to push them into the hypersonic regime, the fuel readings would start dropping like a stone. But this was their ball of string, their way out of the maze. Would it work?

  "Remember," Androv said with finality, "just talk Petra through any problems you have. And try to capture an attitude of sixty degrees alpha . . ."

  "Yuri, are you ready for us to escort you back?" The radio voice, speaking Russian, sounded through the cabin.

  "I'm still thinking it over," he answered.

  "Don't be a fool. I have orders to down you with AA-9s. My weapons system is already turned on. Warheads are locked. You're as good as dead. If I push the fire button here under my left thumb, you're gone in fifty seconds."

  "You just made up my mind," he said, and nodded toward Vance. "Go."

  "Firing one and two," was the radio response.

  Vance grabbed the throttles. "Petra, do you read me?"

  "Yes," she answered in English.

  "Give me alpha sixty." He rammed the throttles forward, clicking them into the Lock position, igniting the afterburners. Next he yanked the sidestick into position.

  The cockpit rotated upward, automatically shifting to compensate for the changing G-forces. In front of his eyes now was a wide liquid crystal screen that seemed to be in 3-D. The left side resembled the heads-up display, HUD, common to jet Fighters, providing altitude, heading, airspeed, G-forces in a single unified format. The right side showed a voice-activated menu listing all the screens along the wall.

  "Read me fuel," he said, testing it.

  Immediately the numbers appeared, in pounds of JP-7 and in minutes, with and without afterburners. The G-force was now at 3.5 and climbing, while the digital altimeter was spinning.

  "Systems alert," Petra announced suddenly, "hostile radar lock. And hostile IR interrogation. Two bogies, closure rate nine hundred sixty knots."

  They weren't kidding, Vance thought. He glanced at the altitude readout. Daedalus was hurtling through thirty thousand feet, afterburners sizzling. But an AA-9 had a terminal velocity well over Mach 3. Add that to the Foxhound's 2.4 . . .

  "Petra, give me estimated time of impact."

  "Extrapolating closure rate, I estimate impact in forty- three seconds."

  Their acceleration had reached 3.8 G's, but fuel was dwindling rapidly, already down to twelve minutes.

  "Give me RWR and IRWR, screen one," he commanded.

  The liquid crystal panorama inside the helmet immediately flashed, showing the unfriendly radar and infrared interrogations. The two Acrid AA-9s-that's what they had to be-were gaining altitude, tracking them like bloodhounds. One was radar locked, while the other showed active-homing IR guidance. The exhausts of Daedalus's afterburners must look like a fireball in the sky, he thought.

  He scanned the menu for electronic countermeasures (ECM) capabilities.

  "Petra, commence radar jamming."

  "Commenced. Estimated time to impact, thirty-eight seconds."

  The missiles were still closing. Even if the radar-guided AAM could be confused, Daedalus had no way to defeat infrared homing.

  The left-hand display now showed they had accelerated to Mach 4.2. The throttle quadrant was locked into the afterburner mode, but outrunning AAMs was like trying to outspeed a smart bullet.

  He watched the dials. Mach 4.3. Mach 4.4.

  "Estimated time to impact twenty-eight seconds."

  "I'm not sure we're going to make it," he said into his helmet mike. "We may have to try initiating the scramjets early."

  "No, it would be too risky," Androv replied. "The skin temperatures at this altitude. The air is still so dense the thermal stresses . . ."

  Vance checked the screen again. "Altitude is now thirty-eight thousand feet. I'm going to level out some, try and boost our Mach number. One thing's sure, we can't make it if we hold this attitude. Besides, we're burning too much fuel. Either we chance it now, or we get blown to smitherines. We've got no choice." He shoved the sidestick forward. For this he didn't plan to bother with Petra.

  "Time to impact, twenty seconds," she reported tonelessly.

  By trimming pitch, Daedalus started accelerating more rapidly. Airspeed scrolled quickly to Mach 4.6.

  "Time to impact, fifteen seconds."

  Nine and a half minutes of JP-7 remained. Just enough to land, he thought, if we ever get the chance.

  Mach 4.7.

  "Eva, take a deep breath. We're about to try and enter the fourth dimension."

  "I . . . can't . . . talk."

  Then he remembered Androv had said she might pass out. Now he was starting to wonder if he wouldn't lose consciousness too. He was sensing his vision starting to fade to gray, breaking up into dots. The screen noted that their acceleration had reached eight G's and was still climbing. Fighting for consciousness, he reached down and increased his oxygen feed, then contracted every muscle in the lower half of his body, trying to shove the blood upward. The G-indicator on the left-hand screen had scrolled to 9.2.

  "Time to impact, ten seconds."

  Mach 4.8.

  He reached down and manually locked the pitch on the compressor fan blades into a neutral configuration. They immediately stalled out, causing Daedalus to shudder like a wounded animal. Then he heard the voice of Petra, and a new signal flashed on his helmet screen.

  "We have nominal scramjet geometry. Commence ignition sequence."

  She'd reconfigured the turbines, meaning Daedalus was go for hypersonic. He grappled blindly behind the throttle quadrant and flicked the large blue switches that initiated the hydrogen feed. But would the supersonic shock wave inside the engines fire it?

  "Time to impact, six seconds."

  "Let's go." Reaching for the throttle quadrant, he depressed the side button and then shoved the heavy handles forward, sending a burst of hydrogen into the scramjets' combustion chambers. . . .

  Daedalus lurched, then seemed to be tearing apart, literally disintegrating rivet by rivet.

  Friday 9:57 a.m.

  "We have detonation," Colonel Arkadi reported into his helmet mike. His twin-engine Foxhound was already in a steep fifty-degree bank.

  "We copy you," General Sokolov replied. "Can you confirm the kill?"

  "The target is outside my radar and IR," he said, wishing he had some of the new American over-the-horizon electronics he'd heard about. "But both missiles reported impact. I've ordered the wing to chop power and return to base. We're already on auxiliary tanks as it is."

  "Roger," came the voice from Flight Control in Hokkaido.

  "We downed her, Comrade General. Whatever she was, there's no way she could have survived those AA-9s. The target is destroyed."