Skyfall

“You are GO, Prometheus,” Launch Control said, the words tinny in Patrick's ear. The G forces pressed on his eyes, bringing about the condition of tunnel vision; he could only see directly in front of him. Turning his head was an effort,

but he had to do it to read all the instruments.

“All in the green.”

“Stand by for staging at oh-one-thirty. We are turning you over now to Mission Control.”

“Roger.”

The Gs stood on their chests as the GET digits clicked over. Although the vibration and the pressure seemed to go on forever, the first-stage blasting took just a minute and a half. At the instant the GET read 00:01:30 the engines cut off and they were weightless. Patrick switched his microphone to intercom.

“That's the first stage shutting down. We'll be in free fall for a few minutes now so it is a good chance for your stomachs to get used to the sensation. I'll warn you before the second stage fires. Right now the boosters are pumping their reserves of fuel and oxygen into the core vehicle below us. Then they'll release…” A quick shudder passed through the ship. “There they go. I'll see if I can get a picture for you. The TV is for Mission Control but I'll be able to relay it to your screens.”

There were TV cameras set into the hull, protected and obscured up until now by the bulk of the boosters. Patrick located the activating switches, three among the hundreds he had to operate, and flicked them on. At first there was just darkness — then a sudden flame. He angled the camera towards it and focused on one of the small engines that was pushing the booster away from them. As it grew smaller the surface of the Earth appeared behind it.

“It is Russia — there is Lake Baikal!” Nadya called out.

“And a second booster there,” Patrick said. “I'm switching to camera two and panning. We should see all five of them. Are you receiving, Mission Control?”

“Six by six, Prometheus, a great picture.”

One by one the boosters swam into view, dark cylinders against the hazy blue of the world below, dwindling as they dropped behind. Each of them was monitored from Ground Control in Baikonur so that the individual orbits could be controlled separately, for the success of the Prometheus Project depended upon bringing down the boosters intact. They were stable both nose up, as they had been when they left the Earth, and engines down as they returned. The plug nozzle of the rocket engine acted as an ablative shield to slow the booster and keep it pointed in the right direction. As the machine approached the Earth the engine would be fired, fuel had been left for this, to bring the booster in for a soft landing on the Russian steppe. One by one the boosters would come down to be picked up and brought back to Baikonur for the next step in the sequence. Prometheus Two. One by one the cargo to build and expand the solar generators would be lifted up until the great task was completed with Prometheus Fifty. But the project would be in operation long before that, sending electricity back to a world starved for power.

They hoped. They were still far from their final orbit of 22,300 miles above the surface. At this point in the takeoff, although they were far above the Earth and in free fall, they were still bound to it by the invisible ties of gravity. Prometheus was like an artillery shell fired high into the sky, to arch up and up to the summit of its climb. Then to drop back to Earth. The multiple boosters had lifted them high and fast — but not to escape velocity, the speed of a body sent off the Earth that would permit it to leave the gravitational pull never to return.

“Shroud jettisoned and ready for core burn,” Patrick said, his eyes on the GET numbers. “It will be about a two-and-a-half-minute burn to get us into a higher orbit. Here it comes…”

The core vehicle had one-sixth of the original thrust on lift-off, but it was still immensely powerful. The Gs built up more slowly, but build they did until once more 5Gs pushed hard upon them. Then, for the first time, the controlled progression of events changed. A sudden shuddering gripped the ship, building up, shaking everything hard — then stopped.

“I have pogoing,” Patrick said, sharply.

“Under control, pogo pressurization restored.”

As quickly as it had come the shaking ended, and did not return. All of them aboard the ship relaxed for they knew that the very worst was behind them. The three of them who were new to space were veterans now. They had survived takeoff, the moment of ignition when they had thought the unthinkable, riding in a cabin on top of the greatest chemical bomb ever constructed by mankind. The energy locked there had been expended to take them into space. It could have exploded instead. With this behind them they relaxed unknowingly. Coretta and the flight surgeons on Earth noted it in their readouts of pulse and blood pressure and were aware of what had happened. Even though they were hard at work in Mission