Perigee by Patrick Chiles

Author:Patrick Chiles [Chiles, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, Suspense
ISBN: 9781469957135
Google: MnuHtgAACAAJ
Amazon: 1469957132
Publisher: Createspace
Published: 2012-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Will Gardner remained aboard the Block II Clipper, still in his pressure suit. He’d allowed the life-support techs to take his helmet and gloves, but insisted that power be kept on the spaceplane. Changing back to street clothes could wait.

He wiped his brow with a towel they’d given him. The suit was still connected to an air exchanger, so his body was perfectly cool. But brushes with death, he found, tended to make one overheat.

Frank and Penny—she especially—had remained uncannily composed. But then again that was the very quality that had brought them all back in one piece. It hadn’t been their first rodeo, he thought, but there hadn’t been much time to talk about it.

For him, on the other hand, it had been quite a roller-coaster ride. Blacking out despite the g-suit had been embarrassing enough. Coming to during the middle of re-entry had been quite another sensation entirely. Already disoriented, he awoke to a swirl of confusion in a cockpit filled with an unearthly glow.

“Am I dead?” he’d asked groggily.

“If you are, then we’re all screwed,” Penny had said. “Because that doesn’t look like any vision of Heaven I’ve ever imagined.” Their windshield was filled with a hypersonic stream of fiery plasma.

“Good point,” he’d mumbled, and heard Frank laugh through his helmet radio.

While the two pilots might have been used to that kind of emergency, Will was not. Flight testing had its moments, as each new model had to be wrung out through some often wild maneuvers. One could never be entirely certain how a plane would respond, which was the whole point. He’d never been truly out of control before, much less headed for orbit that way.

And he was mad.

There hadn’t been any time to dig into it up there, but his gut told him something was really screwy inside the control software. He’d fortunately held on to the update discs he’d brought for the flight computers, and had just run another validation check. It was a painfully long process as the test program had to compare every single byte of navigation data before he could dig into the actual control logic.

But now he could go through it, line by line, and he’d had a pretty good hunch where to start. The new code scrolled past on one screen, with the old on an adjacent screen.

There it was…RCS control. Primary routines matched up, at least superficially, so he dug deeper. Lines of code went by in a blur as he searched for anything out of the ordinary. He was hoping for something obvious, otherwise he’d have to go back and compare it character by character.

It didn’t take long. A new subroutine stood out like a sore thumb. It was there for a specific task that didn’t exist in the original software load, but written like any one of the thousands of other subroutines. So it would have passed the usual validation and function checks.

A lot of things could’ve gotten past the usual checks, he realized. They’d been in a hurry, which is not something that normally happened in flight test.

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