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systems by November.'
'Do you want me to start tomorrow?'
'No. You are to start now please.'
Lesseps spent the rest of the afternoon picking up the
threads of the sick man's work. None of the photographs
had been converted to CD-ROM images because their
quality wasn't up to standard. He decided to see what the
problem was at first hand and took a golf cart to
construction Shed A. He was a familiar sight on the shop
floor, therefore no one took much notice of him.
005 was back in a stripped-down state, having been temporarily
assembled for the roll-out. Work was badly behind.
He walked under the port wing and wheeled steps in position
so that he could take a good look at the complex mass
of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen pipes that fueled the
engines when they were in rocket mode. The problem with
the photographs was immediately self-evident: the bright
lights set flush into the shed's concrete floor to provide good
illumination for the men and women working on the
spaceplane were not well placed to secure clear prints for
conversion to illustrations, and the portable lights lacked the
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power to kill unwanted shadows. A special shoot would be
needed - maybe at night when the main lights wouldn't be
required.
As he studied the problem, he found himself looking for a
likely site to plant a bomb. There was nowhere. The huge
fuel tanks were part of the wing's weight-saving monocoque
construction - they were not separate tanks with plenty of
dark spaces between them where a device could be hidden.
Also the pipework was well spread out to provide good
thermal isolation. Everything was made deliberately accessible
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for fast turn-round servicing. It was not only good
design philosophy, but also ensured that anything there that
shouldn't be there would be immediately apparent.
He dismounted from the steps and made his way towards
the wing-tip where two fitters were busy positioning the
power jacks that operated the ingenious wing-warping flight
control system. No likely place there ... or anywhere.
Compared with aircraft he had been used to working on,
Lesseps was always amazed at how uncomplicated the
spaceplane appeared to be. It was misleading, of course.
Much of the apparent simplification was due to the scrapping
of the old system of massive harnesses carrying
thousands of separate wires. Multiplexed light signals
flowing along one optical fibre could replace a thousand
individual conductors. It was the CSF-Thomson 'flight-by
light' system and matched the Sabre engines for sheer design
brilliance and was an approach that the Americans hadn't
even considered with their ill-fated SOFT project.
He made his way back towards the wing root and studied
the exposed Sabre engines. There were many likely-looking
sites in the huge, now open air-intake ducts that fed the
mighty engines. But Lesseps knew the engines were subjected
to continuous computer monitoring when in use. The
slightest obstruction would be detected by the many sensors
and reported. A bomb in an engine? No - even if there were
room, there was the likelihood of the explosion being premature
due to the intense heat. The thought of the Sabre
crashing on take-off with all the evidence of a bomb there to
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be found was too horrifying to contemplate.
He returned his attention to the rocket fuel systems.
Liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen ... A lethal, volatile
cocktail which was why it was used. But the technology of
liquid fuel rocket engines had been perfected over a period
of seventy-five years - a lifetime - and they now enjoyed a
remarkable safety record.
On the other hand, it wouldn't have to be a very big
explosion here to produce a cataclysmic knock-on effect. . .
An explosion in space just before orbital injection velocity
was reached was the answer. Joe was right: the wreckage
would burn up on re-entry into the atmosphere. There
wouldn't be a shred of evidence left, apart from the so-called
'black box' flight recorder. The bright orange egg-shaped
housing which protected the recorder had been designed to
withstand re-entry. But the information it stored would only
point to what everyone would know anyway - that there
had been an explosion. Nothing would point to him.
But how? How? How?
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He ran his hand along a liquid oxygen pipe until it
encountered one of the big motorised fuel regulators manufactured
by Plessey. The entire regulator was enclosed in a
machined aluminium body. This part of the fuel control system
regulated the regenerative cooling of the rocket's main
bell. Fuel pumped around the steel jacket before being fed to
the engine enabled the steel jacket to contain the awesome
plasma without melting, in much the same way that water
in a kettle prevented it from melting when placed on a gas
ring.
If that cooling effect were suddenly lost. . .
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