Adrift on the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales

Author:Ian Sales [Sales, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780957188396
Google: PIj_rQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 13611151
Publisher: Whippleshield Books
Published: 2012-04-08T12:00:00+00:00

Peterson hung beneath the belly of a North American B-70 Valkyrie, strapped into the cockpit of his Lockheed Martin SR-91 Aurora, five minutes away from being launched on a high-speed high-altitude reconnaissance flight over the USSR. According to his instruments, the B-70 was flying at Mach 2.5 at 60,000 feet but the SR-91’s mission would take Peterson and his reconnaissance systems operator to hypersonic speeds and three times that altitude, far out of range of Soviet interceptors like the MiG-25 Foxbat. This was Peterson’s first flight in the SR-91 but he’d spent hundreds of hours in the simulator and he knew his way round this cramped cockpit with a familiarity that made him long for the simplicity of his F-108D Rapier—or even the Habu, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, he’d been flying until last year. If it wasn’t for the buffeting, this could be another simulator run, another chance for him to out-think the guys running the computers, as if there weren’t enough opportunities for something to go wrong anyway with an aircraft like this, which flew so high and so fast. Nor were the Soviets going to sit and watch him as he flew over them at Mach 6, they were going to try and bring him down, send up interceptors, though they had nothing capable of speeds greater than Mach 3.6, at least both NATO and the Pentagon thought so, but there was always the chance they’d rolled out some super-black interceptor in the last few months. The USSR had nothing like the SR-91, that much was certain—the details of the Aurora’s Pulse Detonation Wave Engine were so secret not even Peterson knew how it worked, although the first time he’d seen the aircraft’s distinctive “doughnuts on a rope” jet exhaust it had come as a shock since it resembled nothing he’d ever seen before, and he could almost believe the lame-ass disinformation USAF had put out about flying saucers and aircraft reverse-engineered from UFOs which had crashed at Roswell back in 1947. There was not much Peterson could see from the SR-91’s office, as his only view of outside was provided by a television screen on his instrument panel, and the small periscope he’d use for landing this bird. Since he’d climbed into the SR-91 back on the ground back at Groom Lake, he’d been going through one checklist after another, keeping himself busy as the aircraft was carried up into the air and north to the pole and his launch point, which had just been reached according to the B-70’s commander, who told him to prep for release. So Peterson put one hand to his stick and the other to the throttle, and stared so hard at the TV screen his vision blurred until he was looking at an impressionist landscape of clouds lit by a pointillist sun. His reconnaissance systems operator, “rizzo”, seated behind him in a sealed compartment of his own, began counting down the moment until separation and, as the moment grew closer, it

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