Kinsman stood alone in the empty corridor, staring at the flimsy plastic sheet in his hand. Suddenly he was trembling, his entire body shaking while in his mind he saw it all again: the weightless, soundless, slow-motion fight; the cosmonaut's space-suited figure revolving slowly, slowly against the back- drop of solemn staring stars; the face inside the helmet frozen in the sudden terrified realization of death.
They're going to do it, Kinsman's mind screamed at him. They're going to make me kill again.
Wednesday 1 December 1999:
ALL SPACE OPERATIONS worked by Universal Time. Not only those in the lunar community, but all space activities in orbit near the Earth, as well.
Colonel Frank Colt flicked a glance at the fuel gauge readout on the instrument panel in the cockpit of his small, sleek, one-man spaceplane.
"Alpha to Mark One," said a voice in his helmet earphones, gritty with static. "Repeat: We read your fuel reserves approaching redline."
Colt was strapped into the padded contour seat, sealed inside his pressurized suit. The spaceplane looked almost like a fighter aircraft, except that its wings were much too small and its tail surfaces nearly nonexistent. It was long and needle-slim, glittering silvery against the blackness of space.
Colt was a lieutenant colonel, the highest-ranking black man among the Aerospace Force's astronaut corps. He had spent the past several hours in orbit, chasing down "unidenti- fied" satellites. Precisely two hundred and ninety-six kilome- ters to his left stretched the achingly beautiful blue and white Earth, dazzling clouds lacing the South Atlantic, the coast of Africa a thin gray haze on the horizon, approaching fast.
But Colt paid no attention to that. Inside his sealed suit 293 he itched and sweated, and after being weightless for more than an hour his legs were beginning to go to sleep again.
They tingled annoy ingly.
He wiggled his toes furiously, frowning at the radar display on his instrument panel. His radar had acquired four "unidentified" satellites so far on this sortie and they had all turned out to be decoys: nothing but metallized balloons. No markings, but everyone knew that if they were not made in the USA they came from Soviet Russia.
"C'mon, Frank, give it up," said the disembodied voice in his earphones. "You've got to start back now or else the mission controller will be required to ask Command for a standby rescue scramble."
"Stuff it," Colt snapped into his helmet mike. "Where they got decoys they're decoying something. What was the location of that other blip you had?" His tiny oval radar screen showed nothing now but random sparkles.
The communicator's voice in his earphones sighed. "Man, you're more trouble than the rest of this outfit put together."
"You're pickin' on me 'cause I'm black," Colt said, with a deliberate hint of Motown in his voice. "Where's that other blip?"
"It's out of your plane. You can't reach it."
"Gimme the coordinates."
He saw the data transmission light flickering madly on his computer panel, then the display screen showed a graph and a string of numbers. Colt tapped on the computer keyboard with a single gloved finger.
"You can't make that maneuver with the fuel reserve you've got!" the communicator said.
"Wanna put some money on that?" Colt laughed.
