Brown, Dale - Independent 01 by Silver Tower (v1.1) Page B

maneuvered himself around and floated out of sight down the
ladder to the middeck level of the crew compartment.
                “Now to get
those cargo bay doors,” Schultz said. With Ann floating beside him, he made his
way to the aft flight deck instrument panel. Ann looked out the windows facing
into the cargo bay but it was too dark to make out any detail.
                “Panel R13
has the door controls,” Schultz was saying. Over interphone he said, “Check
power levels for cargo bay doors, Colonel Sontag.”
                Sontag
checked the power distribution panel near his right elbow. “Switches set.” Next
he checked a bank of three ammeters, switching the monitor controls through
each of the fuel cells to check their output. “Power’s on-line, Marty.”
                “Rog.” To
Ann, Schultz said, “Okay. Electrical power runs the hydraulic motors that
operate the doors. There are also electrical backups, plus the doors can be
opened and closed by the remote manipulator arms and even with an emergency
space walk if necessary. The radiators deploy after the doors are fully open.”
Then over interphone Schultz reported: “Doors coming open.”
                “Clear to
open,” Colonel Will said.
                Schultz
activated the controls. Instantly the payload bay was bathed in a brilliant
blue-white light that reflected off the aluminum insulation covering the
Skybolt laser module. The space shuttle Enterprise was flying upside down in relation to
the earth’s surface, so Enterprise ’s sky was the earth—and Ann was seeing this “sky” for the first
time. “My God....”
                The Enterprise was
just crossing the dawn-line between Hawaii and Australia .
It looked like a relief map being lighted from the side— each island in Micronesia ,
it seemed, was visible in stark detail. They could recognize the Solomons, the Samoas ,
even the New Hebrides Islands .
There were a few puffs of clouds but otherwise it was like looking at a
meticulously rendered painting of the whole South Pacific.
                “Ann?”
                “It’s ...
beautiful... so immaculate ....” She
said quietly. Schultz nodded. “I never stop being awed by it myself. If that
sight doesn’t move you, you belong in a rubber room.” He turned to the
interphone. “Bay doors open. Radiators deployed. No damage so far as I can see
on the radiators.”
                “Copy,”
Sontag said. Will double-checked his readouts with Mission Control through a
direct UHF radio and data-link originating in a station antenna farm at Yarra
Yarra in western Australia .
                “Mission
Control confirms clear for orbit and rendezvous with Armstrong.”
                It was some
two hours later when Ann peered out the forward windscreens into the gray-black
void, but all she could see were a few stars too bright to be obscured by the
brilliance of earth. “Colonel Sontag, you must have X-ray vision if you can see
that station out there.”
                “It’s still
very faint,” he said, “but it’s there. Mostly it looks like another star.”
                She shook
her head. “I’m going back to the aft console.” The pilots nodded and continued
scanning their instruments.
                Marty
Schultz had deployed the shuttle’s remote manipulator arm and had scanned space
for a few minutes with the arm’s closed-circuit camera at high magnification,
but it wasn’t until Enterprise was ten miles away from the station that he spotted it.
                “It looks
like a toy, like a Tinker Toy, from here,” Ann said.
                “When they
first launched it they treated it like one,” Schultz told her. “People, some
people, called it a boondoggle, big waste of money that could better be spent
carpeting the Pentagon hallways. A