"Watch this."
Colt closed his gloved left hand around the tiny sidestick controller and worked the thruster button with his thumb. The spaceplane dipped obediently down toward the Earth, while a background mutter of voices in his earphones told him that the communicator and mission controller back at Van- denberg were arguing over whether they should transmit a recall order or not. If they did, and Colt failed to heed it, whatever happened afterward was on Colt's record, not theirs.
The plane's nose was visibly heating, turning a dull red. 294
Colt thought he could hear air whistling past the cockpit, even through the insulation of his helmet, but he knew that it was his imagination.
"You are hereby ordered to discontinue your orbital plane-change maneuver," the controller's voice said, heavily, officially, "and position your vehicle for re-entry and return to base."
"Roger," said Colt. "Discontinue and attain re-entry heading."
But the plane plunged deeper into the atmosphere as Colt grinned happily to himself. With pressures on the controller as delicate as a lover's caress, he rolled the spaceplane and made it turn, feeling the weight of accelera- tion as the silvery aerospace craft bit into the thin air of the high atmosphere. He pulled the stick back ever so slightly and the plane's nose reared upward. Colt felt himself pushed back into his seat. His eyes flicked across the instrument panel. The computer screen showed a glowing white dot pulsing along a gracefully curved line.
"Right on the money," Colt muttered to himself.
The spaceplane was trading kinetic energy for altitude now. Colt took his hand off the control stick, felt his arms hang weightlessly.
"That's a helluva re-entry attitude, Colt!" the mission controller's voice snapped.
"Just savin' fuel, Mary," he replied, almost jovially.
The radar screen showed a fat blip gliding from one edge toward its center. Colt touched another button and the screen displayed a telescopic optical view of the satellite, with range data and a targeting reticle superimposed.
"There she is," Colt said calmly into his microphone, "Real one this time. Big mother, too."
In his earphones he heard a muffled, grudging, "The sonofabitch can fly, I'll give him that much."
The satellite was dead black, but studded with glassy protuberances that made Colt think it might be an x-ray laser. He glanced down at his data recorder and saw that it was taping everything his sensors picked up. X-ray lasers were powered by small nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons in orbit were illegal, outlawed by the Space Treaty of 1967. The tapes ought to provide some ammunition for the diplomats wran- gling in Geneva, Colt thought. 295
His fuel was too low for him to try an actual rendezvous with the Soviet satellite. He would have a chance for one shot at it, and that would be all.
Is there a nuke on board, and is it salvage-fused? Colt thought briefly about whether it would be better to be blown away by a nuclear fireball or fried by a blast of x-rays. He smiled grimly and toggled the ARMED switch of his missile control panel. Its tiny light glowed a baleful red.
As the course of his spaceplane carried it through the plane of the Soviet satellite's orbit, Colt touched the AUTOFIRE stud on the missile control panel. He felt a quiver shake the cockpit as the missile launched itself. On the display screen he saw a tiny flash on the side of the satellite. No explosion. No x-rays.
He blew out a breath that he had not realized he had been holding in. Punching an extreme closeup of the satellite he saw that several of the lenses were shattered and there was a ragged hole where the missile's solid head had hit it.
"Scratch one," he sang out.
