Vengeance 10

Wernher von Braun watched the clock hand begin its final sweep. The babble in the command centre had risen to its highest level, as always in these final seconds — the result both of excitement and a last torrent of reports. He saw several lights change from green to red indicating problems and just as quickly switch back again. Bethwig was overriding them as they occurred, and he closed his eyes a moment in fear. One light had remained red for several seconds now. It flamed beneath the gauge indicating that pressure in the oxidiser system had failed. The flight control officer was calling over and over into the microphone, trying to bring that fault to his attention, but either Bethwig was ignoring him or the communications link had failed. Then he realised that Bethwig could not have missed the indicator on his own board. He was simply overriding the system to stop the FOC from calling a launch hold.

Von Braun pressed the transmit bar on his microphone and broke into the FCO’s increasingly frantic calls. He struggled to keep his own voice under control.

‘Franz, can you hear me?’ He paused a moment, hoping that Bethwig would respond to his voice. The sweep-second touched the numeral twenty.

‘We have a light on the board indicating a LOX turbine pump failure. Do you have the same?’

He released the transmit button and held his breath.

‘Yes. I think it’s nothing more than a short in the sensor.’ Bethwig’s voice seemed crisp enough.

‘It should be checked. It might be a true report.’

‘It might,’ Bethwig agreed, ‘but it would take three days to stand down and restart. We could all be dead by then.’

The second hand was passing forty. ‘You could be dead in seconds if the pump has failed.’

‘Maybe. But the amount of vibration here suggests both turbines are working properly. We’ll soon find out in any …’

A thunderous roar began to grow as the second hand touched sixty, and white light from twenty-one screaming rocket engines flooded the command centre.

* * *

The explosion deafened him, and the monstrous rocket shook him like a mouse in the teeth of a cat. Lights blinked on the board, green to red and red to green again, and he closed his eyes, waiting for extinction. The shaking grew as the bellowing was transmitted through the rocket’s fabric until it had become physical pain. He was being crushed; he could not breathe, and he opened his mouth to scream and realised in that instant that the pressure was gravity crushing him as acceleration mounted. He was blind and deaf, wrapped in a cocoon of his own terror, unintelligible voices in his earphones screaming in defiance of the roaring that was filling his head with pain as he lapsed into unconsciousness.

* * *

The noise was greater than anything Memling had ever dreamed possible. He pressed his hands to his ears and bowed forward, mouth open in a soundless scream to ease the pain. The rocket engines roared and bellowed and thundered and screamed in every conceivable register, and slowly, gently, the squat tower began to rise on a white column of flame brighter than a welder’s torch. For an instant he had an impression — one that would remain with him for the rest of his life — of the V-10 balancing on a column of pure flame, screaming like all the banshees of hell, rotating slowly about its axis so that one delta-shaped wing appeared from the darkness, shuddered for the merest instant, and was gone. He blinked at the after-image and tilted his head back, but the rocket was already a point of flame in the night sky fleeing through the cloud rack. He lay back flat on the ground then and stared hungrily as the flame grew longer and longer, tipped towards the south-west, and continued to lengthen, flaring into a widening cone that surprised him until he remembered that the gases would expand as the air thinned.

Memling watched the point of flame until it vanished in the thickening cloud and his own tears.

* * *

The silence was blessed. As was the absence of vibration and the sensation of motion. Bethwig lay in the couch, mind drifting aimlessly, body exhausted to the point of collapse. His eyes drifted to the chronometer hand, and he groaned as he saw it sweep inexorably to the point marking second-stage ignition. He tensed as the hand passed across the point, and deep in the bowels of the rocket the vibration began again, sound and fury exploding to press him deep against the couch with a huge, padded, smothering hand. The raving went on and on, but the vibration and the screaming were less severe this time and the acceleration was bearable. As he waited for the trial to end he turned his head with difficulty to the tiny view port.

At first he saw nothing but the window itself, and then a brilliant diamond drifted into view. It was a moment before his mind grasped the implication. He was the first human to see a star without the interfering blanket of earth’s atmosphere.