Voyage by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page B

sensation of speed, of motion. He was weightless inside the cabin, and he felt as if his gut was climbing up out of his neck.
    He tried to put the problems aside. He was still flying, still in shape. And, no matter what was happening to the MH96, he had a program to work through, a whole series of experiments for NASA and the USAF.
    One minute forty-one.
    He activated the solar spectrum measurement gadget, and the micrometeorite collector in his left wing pod.
    Suddenly, the MH96 control system’s gains shot up to ninety per cent, for no apparent reason, and the automatic RCS cut back in.
    He checked his instruments. Like most experimental aircraft, the X-15’s cockpit had a primitive, handmade feel, with rivets and wires showing. Well, it seemed he had full control ability for the first time since entering his ballistic flight path. He welcomed the return, but he was unnerved, all over again. What next?
    He had very little confidence left in this battered old bird.
Maybeshe knows it’s her last flight; maybe she’d prefer a blaze of glory to a few decades rusting in some museum
.
    He would soon be going over the top, the peak of his trajectory, at two hundred sixty thousand feet.
    It was time to begin the precision attitude tracking work required for the solar spectrum measurement. He needed a nose down pitch, and a yaw to the left. He was already flying at almost a zero degree angle of attack, but was yawing a little to the right, and rolling off to the right as well. So he fired his wing-mounted roll control thruster for two seconds to bring his wings level, and his yaw control thruster to bring the X-15’s nose around to the left. The X-15 was like a gimbaled platform, hanging in the air, twisting this way and that in response to his commands. To stop the left roll he fired another rocket –
    He was still rolling, too far to the left.
Christ. What now?
    The MH96 had failed again, and had cut out the automatic RCS, just as he was completing his maneuver.
    He continued to rotate. To compensate he held his right roll control for eight more seconds. But the air was so thin up here that his aerodynamic controls were degraded, and the response was sluggish. He fired his manual RCS yaw rockets.
    He could feel sweat pooling under his eyes; one problem after another was hitting him,
blam blam blam
.
    Suddenly the MH96 cut back in with its automatic RCS. That stopped his yaw, short of the correct heading. Stone fired his manual yaw again; this time as he approached the reference heading the yaw was countered by the automatics, apparently correctly – but now the damn thing cut
out
again, and he yawed past the reference.
    And now, on top of that, his roll attitude indicator ball was rotating. He had started rolling to the left again. He tried to wrestle that back with three short pulses on the manual roll RCS, but he overshot, and started a roll to the right …
    Fifty miles high
. The sky outside his tiny cabin was a deep blue-black, and the control lights gleamed brightly, like something off a Christmas tree. At the horizon’s rim he saw the thick layer of air out of which he’d climbed. He could see the western seaboard of the USA, all the way from San Francisco to Mexico; the air was clear, and it was all laid out under him like a relief map.
    Three minutes twenty-three seconds
. His yaw deviation was increasing, five or six degrees a second. And his heading had deviated from the B-52’s, maybe as much as fifty degrees. His angle was becoming extreme, and the air started to pluck at his aircraft,rolling it over to the right. He was in danger of rolling off completely. He might even reenter at the wrong attitude.
    And if
that
happened, he’d finish up spread over the welcoming desert in a smoking ellipse one mile wide and ten miles long.
    To stop the roll he applied left roll RCS, full left rudder and full left aileron. Everything he had. But the roll seemed to be accelerating. And now the nose was starting to pitch