Voyage by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page A

Lake, half a mile above sea level. Everywhere the dried-up salt lakes glistened likeglass, speckled with gray-green sagebrush and the twisted forms of Joshua trees. It was a flat, desolate, forbidding place. But every summer the desert sun baked the damp lake beds to a flat and smooth surface. The whole place was like one huge runway, and you could land anywhere in reasonable safety.
    It was a little after ten thirty in the morning.
    Stone pushed the button to ignite the X-15’s rocket engine.
    He was kicked in the back, hard. The plane’s nose was tipped up into the sky as ammonia and oxygen burned behind him, and he rode higher into the deepening blue. He could hear his own breathing inside his helmet; otherwise, there was barely a sound – he was outpacing the noise and exhaust plumes behind him.
    Far ahead he saw a speck of light, like a low star. It was a high chase plane. It grew out of nowhere in a flash, and plummeted backwards past Stone, as if it was standing still.
    At forty thousand feet he reached point nine Mach, and he could feel a bumping, like a light airplane flying in turbulence. He was moving so quickly now that the air molecules couldn’t get out of the way of his craft in time.
    The turbulence smoothed out as he went supersonic.
    Eighty thousand feet.
    He moved the rocket’s throttle to maximum thrust, and he was pushed back into his seat by four and a half G. X-15–1 climbed almost vertically. The sky turned from pearl blue to a rich navy. He was already so high he could see stars ahead of him, in the middle of the day; so high there were only a few wisps of atmosphere, barely sufficient for his plane’s aerodynamic control surfaces to grip.
    The sensations of power, of speed, of control, were exhilarating.
    Ninety thousand feet; thirty two hundred feet per second. The Mojave spread out beneath him, over two thousand feet above sea level, was like the dried-out roof of the world.
    Less than a minute into the flight, the problems started.
    He got a message from the ground. It sounded like they were losing telemetry from the bird. The trouble was, the voice link had suddenly got so bad that he couldn’t tell for sure
what
they were saying.
    A warning light showed up on his panel. Another glitch. For some reason his automatic reaction control rockets had deactivated. It wasn’t too serious for now; he was still deep enough in the atmosphere that he was able to maintain control with the aerodynamics.
    The X-15 flew like an airplane in the lower atmosphere. It had conventional aerodynamic surfaces – a rudder and tail planes – which Stone could work electronically, or with his pitch control stick and rudder pedals. But above the atmosphere X-15 was a spacecraft. The automatic RCS (reaction control system) – little rocket nozzles, like a spaceship’s – was controlled by an electronic system called the MH96. And there was a separate manual RCS system Stone could control with a left-hand stick.
    Quickly he was able to trace through the fault The automatic RCS had shut itself off because the gains of his MH96, his control system, had fallen to less than fifty per cent. The gains were supposed to drop when the plane was in dense air; then the MH96 was designed to shut itself off, to conserve hydrogen peroxide rocket fuel. But this time the gains had dropped because the hydraulics which controlled his aerodynamic surfaces were stuttering. So the automatic control system couldn’t rely on the data it was getting, and it had shut down the automatic RCS.
    It looked as if the electrical disturbance that had started with the radio was spreading.
Looks as if we might be snake-bit, old buddy
.
    Well, he was close to the exhaustion of his rocket fuel anyhow. He pressed a switch, and the engine shut down with a bang.
    He was thrust forward against his straps, and then floated back.
    He had gone ballistic, like a hurled stone; now X-15–1 would coast to the roof of its trajectory, unpowered. He lost all