—The diary of Fabio Bianco, CEO, Trikon International
Hugh O’Donnell felt his teeth loosening, his spine coming apart, the breath leaving his chest in a rush of involuntary grunts. God, don’t let me piss myself. Don’t let me . . .
The thunder of Constellation’s lift-off obliterated his thoughts. He fought to raise his eyes toward the digital clock on the bulkhead above the middeck storage lockers. His neck slapped back against the headrest after a single, stroboscopic glance. Mission time was T plus forty seconds. Eight minutes of this. That was what the instructor had said. Eight minutes of sheer hell before serenity.
The thunder suddenly stopped. Shit goddammit engine failure. We’re falling I’m gonna die. Still he felt as if a gang of giants were pressing down on him. He wrenched his head to the right. Next to him, Lance Muncie still bucked crazily in his seat, hands plastered to the armrests, his face twisted as if he were peering into the mouth of hell. O’Donnell managed another glance at the clock. T plus fifty seconds. That’s right. That’s why the silence. The shuttle had gone past Mach 1.
“Main engines at sixty-five percent.” The voice of Commander Williams crackled over the loudspeaker as flat and calm as a scorekeeper’s at a tennis match. O’Donnell and the other eleven passengers bound for posts on Trikon Station were stacked in the middeck of the converted old NASA orbiter. Constellation had completed more than thirty missions before being purchased by Trikon International in 1994. It was an ungainly-looking vehicle compared to the Europeans’ spiffy little Hermes, or the six sleek aerospace planes developed jointly by NASA, Rockwell, and Boeing. But the space shuttle could haul more payload than the space plane, and Hermes was just beginning its flight test program. Reliable old Constellation’s generous cargo capacity was essential to the maintenance of Trikon Station.
“Roger,” said the ground. By popular vote, the passengers had requested a feed of the voice transmission between the flight deck and mission control.
Calmer now, O’Donnell imagined a picture he had seen countless times on television screens: Constellation arcing over the Atlantic Ocean in its “heads down” altitude, the burns of the two SRBs and the three SSMEs spewing out a combined pillar of fire, shrinking to a dollop of orange, and finally disappearing in the darkening blue of the sky. He was on top of that flame, his hands gripping armrests and a three-hundred-pound cinder block pressing squarely on his chest and those giants still shaking and pummeling him.
He turned his head enough to see the portside monitor. The shuttle was some thirty miles above the Atlantic. The bright Florida sky had deepened to a fuzzy blue-black.
Looks like I’m going to Trikon Station, O’Donnell thought optimistically. From sunny Cal to a metal booby hatch in low Earth orbit. He trembled inwardly, whether from anxiety or anticipation he could not tell.
The g-forces abated appreciably. Williams spoke directly to the passengers on the middeck: “We are now in a low elliptical orbit. In approximately thirty-three minutes, we will have a second OMS burn to boost us into the same orbit as Trikon Station.”
“Whoooweee!” Freddy Aviles howled.
O’Donnell realized that his hands were floating free. He forced them back to his lap and curled his fingers under the strap of his safety harness. His head felt funny, stuffed, as if his sinuses were jammed full of cotton wadding.
“Hey, Lance, this is something, ain’t it?” called Freddy. He sat immediately to O’Donnell’s left, but his voice sounded muffled through the congestion in O’Donnell’s head.
Muncie groaned in response.
“He doesn’t look so good,” said O’Donnell.
“Lance? Nah. He the only one didn’ get sick on the Vomit Comet,” Freddy said. Nearly everybody had upchucked during the long series of parabolic maneuvers aboard the KC-135. The plane would dive and then nose up, giving the collection of fledgling space workers a few gut-wrenching moments of weightlessness before it dove again toward the lush green mat of central Florida.
Freddy craned his neck to take a look at Muncie. “Hey, man, you okay?”
“No. Terrible.”
“Tha’s crazy, man. You got the strongest stomach I know, except for my cousin Felix. And tha’s because his wife can’t cook.”