Semper Mars(103)
The others chuckled.
“You could write it up there,” he said, nodding at the cat’s comm center. “I can encode it, slip it in with some housekeeping traffic using the Phobos relay, and drop it in my daughter’s e-mail box back on Earth. If you include instructions for where you’d like to see it published, she can take care of that.”
“It might work,” Alexander said, nodding. “Lots of scientific papers are published over the net these days. Most of ’em, in fact. Used to be you needed to present it in a scholarly journal for peer review.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Garroway said. “Us shaggy-headed electronics types publish on the net all the time.”
“So, what’s your take on this, Major?” Alexander wanted to know. “Why are you in such a hurry to see us publish?”
Garroway pursed his lips. “I don’t know. The fact that the UN wanted to suppress your discovery, for whatever reason, seems good enough reason to me to see it shouted from the housetops. Don’t you think?”
Alexander nodded slowly. “You know, I think you’re right.”
2130 HOURS GMT
Tanegashima Space Center,
Osaki Launch Site
0630 hours Tokyo time
“…roku…go…yon…san…ni…ichi…ima!”
Acceleration crushed down on Yukio’s chest, pressing him hard against his couch as the powerful Ikaduti booster ignited, hauling the sleek Inaduma space fighter aloft from Pad Nine. His heart was pounding, and only partly from the building Gs of lift off. He was on his way to space. On his way to space at last…
Ikaduti and Inaduma. Thunder and lightning. Booster and spaceplane were well matched, the pinnacle of a long line of Japanese successes in spacecraft design and engineering. The thunder built steadily, though the actual sound seemed to be dropping away behind as the spacecraft climbed into the clear azure sky.
The Inaduma space fighter could carry a crew of four, though on this run there were only three aboard. Sho-sa Kurosawa was mission commander, Tai-i Iijima was pilot, and Chu-i Yukio Ishiwara was aboard as computer technician and radar operator, a position roughly analogous to the Radar Intercept Officers used aboard some American dual-seat military aircraft. Conditions in the Inaduma’s cockpit were cramped; Yukio’s acceleration couch was jammed in immediately behind and slightly below the tandem couches of commander and pilot, while the fourth seat had been removed to accommodate an additional bank of electronic sensory equipment.
The roar of the main engines continued to fade, but the crushing sensation of weight on his chest and stomach actually increased. As the mighty Ikaduti booster burned up more and more of its fuel, the rocket’s mass dwindled, increasing acceleration.
Yukio studied the radar intercept console beside his couch, struggling to focus on the main screen. Yes…the second fighter was there, rising from Pad Twelve thirty seconds behind them. Taka Flight—the word was Nihongo for Hawk—consisted of two spaceplanes, Yukio’s Taka One, and Sho-sa Ozawa’s Taka Two.
The Inaduma was small as manned spacecraft went, barely twelve meters long and shaped like a blunt, round-nosed arrowhead. The tips of the delta wings were set in a gentle curve, like a smile when seen from head-on, and the cockpit clung to the ship’s back like a dark, glassy droplet of oil. Launched vertically, strapped to the side of the Thunder booster, it could easily reach LEO in a single-stage-to-orbit launch, carry out a variety of missions, and reenter like the old shuttle orbiters, bellying down on a meteoric blaze of incandescent reentry gases.
The sky ahead, just visible from Yukio’s aft position between the heads of the commander and pilot, was swiftly deepening from cloudless, early-morning blue to deepest ultramarine. The spaceplane was angling over now, hurtling downrange across the Pacific into the sunrise, speed still building as it hurtled toward the tiny window of opportunity that would give them one shot, and one only, at the target.
Major Kurosawa was giving the countdown to booster separation now, his voice straining a bit beneath the pressure of almost five Gs of acceleration. “Go…yon…san…ni…ichi…ima!”
With a savage thump, the Ikaduti booster separated, dropping away from the Inaduma’s belly like an oversize bomb. For a blissful moment, all was silence and falling, and then the spaceplane’s twin Mitsubishi engines cut in, hammering the stubby craft into space.
Yukio found himself unexpectedly amused by one aspect of the countdown. Japan took an exceptional pride in her space program, adopting all of the trappings of the Russian and Western programs with relish…right down to the countdown which, as he understood it, had first been added for dramatic impact to a 1929 German science-fiction film, Die Frau im Mond. Japan’s national love affair with space stemmed at least partially from her justifiable pride in her technological accomplishments. Rising from the utter devastation at the end of the War almost a century ago to a spacefaring Great Power, this was Japan’s destiny and her heritage, and she’d been pursuing it relentlessly into the twenty-first century, through her participation in the ISS, through her first manned shuttle in 2010, to her position now as one of the two major spacefaring powers in the United Nations.