Chapter 14.

Hyperliner. Harlington's Flight.

22.oct.2119.

South America - KANAR. Capital.

 A landing system, or, in other words, a ramp, was approaching the carrier. Unlike regular airliners, the carrier could not stop at the passenger terminal.

 Johnson, the first pilot, reached for the panel and remotely opened the unlocked entrance door, one of two in the tiny passenger cabin. In the window arranged above his head, an annoyingly orange light was blinking - the light from some technical beacon was reflected from the carrier's belly, which, in fact, was the only thing visible in the window.

 The ramp disappeared from the onboard video system, but after a couple of minutes, a fuss could be heard in the cabin. The door leading there from the cockpit was now open. Johnson stood up and moved toward the passenger compartment. Two female technical staff entered the cabin and began to shove drinks into the mini-bars located next to each seat.

 "I'm glad they can't smoke on board, at least," Johnson said.

 "Don't say that, sir," replied one of the "stewardesses," who, like the second, was to remain on the ground.

 Johnson looked up - there were a couple of windows in the cabin, just like in the cockpit. Here, too, the belly of the carrier flashed by with a removable crossmember, on which, in fact, the "Concorde" was attached.

 The second stewardess, who had managed to "load" the mini-bars faster than the first, began to vacuum the seats. Surprisingly, the cabin seemed to have been tidied up even before both pilots boarded. Everything was first class.

 Johnson turned around and headed for the cockpit.

Fifteen minutes after the ramp docked with the Concorde, an airport bus appeared on the screen that showed the image from the outside camera. Despite their importance, the passengers were unable to board from the regular passenger terminal and were forced to travel in this archaic way. However, it was unlikely that anyone seriously cared.

 Now Senator Harlington and his group had to fly a seventeen thousand kilometer route and they had to do it in just a couple of hours. This, however, does not count the docking with the landing carrier and its, the carrier's, landing - this is another plus half an hour.

 Johnson and Trezier, the second pilot, headed to the cabin to greet the passengers of sky-high importance - Harlington was the most likely candidate for the post of the 68th President of the United States. His visit to the distant Siberian Superfederant had been talked about for the second week already. Despite the fact that the Concorde was capable of covering the distance from Buenos Aires to the SSSF in a couple of hours, the flight had been prepared for more than a day. Among other things, it was necessary to send a landing carrier to the SSSF, to which the Concorde would dock.

 It was also necessary to deliver the Concorde to the launch site from Nevada. All hyperliners were currently in a partially mothballed state there.

 In general, before the War, only ten machines were in operation around the world, one of which was a kind of emergency board for the US President, which really justified itself in full in the confusion of the first days of the War. Then the 66th President of the United States managed to maintain secrecy and inaccessibility of his movements from continent to continent.

 Two more machines were in the AEX reserve, although it was unknown how often the top brass of the constellation used this hypersonic transport. The remaining seven Concordes performed intercontinental flights before the War, and very infrequently, being more of an advertisement than a source of serious income. Already in the Pre-War years, the number of such flights had dropped to about one per week.

 Harlington, the first to enter the cabin, as usual gave the impression of a sociable and open person, although he did not say anything special - here is the manner of movement and facial expressions and everything else - he could do it no worse than a Hollywood actor.

 - Perhaps, - thought Johnson, - We should vote for him.

The matter here was, of course, not in some kind of charm of the senator, but in the very subject of his tour. Johnson shared the idea that the rear areas in all the territories of the Bloc had long ago been brought, if not under one leadership, then at least to stop the mess that was happening in a number of boring places - this was the SSSF and Ireland and the states of the East Coast.

 As for Siberia, despite its ambiguous background, like the equally ambiguous history of Russia as a whole, it was, after all, a white region.

 Both the SSSF and the entire country. For Johnson, this was a significant factor. It is quite possible that in a year, if nothing radically changes, Johnson will vote for Harlington. If the tour brings a certain result, then even more so.

 When all the passengers were seated, Johnson headed for the front door. First, the sleeve of the landing gear came off. Then Trezier, the second pilot, who was in the cockpit at that time, activated the electric drive, closing the front door with a characteristic robotic sound.

 In addition to electromechanics, the door was blocked by a device that had to be activated manually, which Johnson did. Still, this entrance hatch was a much more important unit than the door of an airbus - the Concorde was closer to a spaceship than to an airliner.

 It took Johnson less than a minute to lock the door. The passenger cabin, through which he was now making his way to the cockpit, was just a tiny section with two rows of seats for a total of fifteen passengers. This section was modestly located behind a huge fuel tank, which in fact was the entire front part of the angular, half-liner, half-shuttle, carved out of metal.

 Johnson closed the door separating the cabin from the cabin with a deliberately smooth movement and headed to his seat.

 The Concorde's cockpit was designed as a typical "glass" one - in front of each crew member there was a flat panel that not only displayed instrument information but also served as a virtual windshield. There were also two small panels on the sides of each seat - they imitated side windows, as if there was glazing on both sides, and each pilot had one.

 Of all the real glazing, there were only those small windows in the upper part, through which the lower surface of the carrier was now visible. These upper windows did not contribute to the flight in any way, and they only allowed the passengers to see how the color of the sky changed - from day to black and vice versa. Now, however, it was completely night.

 In addition to the two pilots on board, there was an AI, quite capable of conducting the entire flight cycle and even handling an emergency landing. An emergency landing was one in which, for some reason, the landing carrier could not capture the Concorde and the ship would have to independently land on the airfield using its two "rudimentary" turbojet engines and the appropriate fuel supply.

 Despite the perfect AI, the status of the passengers, and the suborbital flight as such, provided for control by as many as two pilots. Five minutes after the door was locked, the carrier moved off and headed for the runway. It was a regular twin-fuselage SAF-740, one of those that were used en masse to launch hypersonic drones, essentially smaller versions of the concept on which the Concorde was built. The carrier could lift up to four of those bombers at a time.

 In the case of the Concorde, a special docking and launch device was used, which both released the ship into flight and was able to receive the device arriving from the mesosphere with a special conductor - something between a crane and a mechanical arm. The second carrier, equipped with the same mechanics, was sent to Superfederant a couple of days before the Concorde's departure.

 Johnson could only guess to what extent this flight was determined by tactical and other security considerations, and to what extent by PR considerations. One way or another, it was possible to lay out a safe route for an ordinary airliner. And the senator would calmly spend a couple of dozen hours in complete comfort.

 The carrier taxied to the takeoff position. By that time, the Concorde's AI had completed all pre-takeoff checks and started the turbo unit of the onboard power plant - although the hyperliner's electrical system was now fully supplied by the carrier, this generator had been started in advance, on the ground.

The tank in the front wedge-shaped part of the hypersonic device held fifty tons of heavy hydrocarbon fuel. A liter of this fuel cost as much as a liter of good whiskey. There were also five tons of oxidizer - liquefied oxygen in a cryotank - it was located right in front of the cabin. The oxidizer was necessary for the operation of two wedge-shaped rocket engines. If you think about it, the super-prestigious hypersonic "Concorde" was filled to the brim with pretty dangerous things. True, billionaires once flew on rockets. Unlike them, Harlington is not now acting as someone who wanted to have an extreme vacation - the flight was part of his quite risky and possibly historic undertaking. Everything is like with outstanding people of the past - someone personally participated in laying the Atlantic cable, someone himself lifted into the air an airplane of his own design. This is America. Johnson saw this entire pretentious flight exactly like this. He glanced at the corner of the screen where he had brought up the image from the passenger compartment - here, in this hyperliner, such visual contact was commonplace.

 The runway moved and ran - the image from the onboard cameras was processed in such a way that the night landscape was converted to video in blue-lilac tones. Some old night vision devices produced an image in black-green-light green, like the picture on a dollar bill. Here it was all the same, only instead of green there was lilac. When the illumination became slightly higher, the computer began to paint the image in natural colors. Now it was a dark tropical night with a cloudless and moonless sky.

 Having gained altitude, the carrier headed northeast. Somewhere there, more than sixteen thousand kilometers away, if you fly straight, was this Siberian Superfederant.

 On the screen, in one of the lines of system parameters, the onboard AI started the countdown, starting from the one hundred and twentieth second. Johnson glanced at the picture from the passenger compartment and began the pre-launch address.

 When the countdown reached thirty, the carrier pilot wished him a good journey and released the Concorde. The craft began to fall downwards. Although fully fueled, it still had some volatility even with such flight parameters - four hundred knots at thirty thousand feet. Nevertheless, the fall was quite noticeable. This was not the strongest of the sensations that the passengers were about to experience.

When the Concorde fell by one hundred and fifty feet, AI launched the aerospike rocket engines. In general, all space and suborbital aviation measured the parameters of their flights in meters and kilometers per hour, but Johnson often mentally converted metric values into familiar ones.

 Concorde began to accelerate with an acceleration of one and a half units - in total, two rocket engines had to push the craft weighing seventy-five tons with a force of one and a half of its weight. This is minus the losses. Taking into account the resistance and the angle of inclination, the actual thrust was somewhat higher. Judging by the appearance of the air-wedge blocks, these nondescript units, which did not even have the usual large-sized nozzles, it was hard to imagine that they were capable of such a thing.

 The angle of climb began to increase and soon reached twenty degrees. Once upon a time, man's first attempts to go beyond the atmosphere were carried out on rocket planes - they jumped out to altitudes of more than a hundred kilometers, and they were also launched from carriers, which were bombers.

 The high trajectory of those rocket planes did not suit the Concorde - it needed to gain a speed of at least five, and generally seven machs, and reach an altitude of fifty kilometers, after which the Skramjet cruise engines came into operation - they had to spend tens of tons of the main fuel supply.

 The SCRAMJet engines gained another twenty percent of speed, bringing it to nine machs. In principle, rocket engines would have done it faster, but SCRAMJet had one undeniable advantage. Being hypersonic air-breathing engines, they got oxygen from thin air, so they did not need an oxidizer from a cryotank. With the same supply of consumable fuel and oxidizer components, SCRAMJet could deliver the vehicle significantly further than a rocket engine without a combination with SCRAMJet. Therefore, when it, SCRAMJet, could be used, that is, already at these seven machs, it should be used.

 When the Concorde reached its cruising speed of nine Machs, a light strip began to appear clearly on the eastern horizon - the airliner was rushing towards the approaching morning. At a speed of nine Machs, having some kind of scales on board, one could clearly observe the decrease in weight - the device was going around the globe and the centripetal acceleration was clearly evident.

 The geographic map in its real version was rushing below. This process was three times slower than it moved from the point of view of the orbital pilot, but still many times faster than what was available to the fighter.

 A small air route Africa-South America with a string of civilian aircraft, transports and air defense aircraft passed below. Of course, all this was visible only on the interlink screen. On board there was a full-fledged version of this system, designed primarily to warn of a possible entry into a radar irradiation zone and other dangerous approaches, for example, with enemy aircraft. In this case, dangerous proximity was considered to be a distance of two thousand kilometers, no less.

 Ten minutes after passing over the highway, Gibraltar appeared. The sight was mesmerizing, even though it was only a picture on the side panel. In the upper glazing there was only solid blackness and slowly floating constellations - due to the rapidly changing geographic coordinates of the ship, their movement was noticeable to the eye.

 It was morning over Europe. A thunderstorm was raging over the Mediterranean. Western European territories gave way to the Baltic region - this was one of the calm rear sectors, it was safer only over the Arctic.

 Here, over the Baltic, on the one hand a safe sector, and on the other hand close to the continent and infrastructure, strategic headquarters often circled, especially when they needed to receive mooring aircraft with fuel modules. When there were just over three thousand kilometers left to the destination, or rather, the docking point with the landing vehicle, the SCRAMJet's engine thrust began to decrease. This procedure, like everything else, was also performed by the computer. Among other things, the AI ​​adjusted the pre-calculated route, taking into account such factors as the weather in the area of ​​the landing procedures.

 At the moment the engine thrust began to decrease, the Concorde was flying over the Russian capital, from where representatives of the central Russian Administration were supposed to fly to Superfederant.

 When the Concorde was flying over the Ural Mountains, the speed decreased to six and a half Machs, which was one and a half Machs higher than the lower limit of the speed that ensured the operation of the SCRAMJet.

 When there were five hundred kilometers left to the docking point, the speed reached the lower limit of five Machs and the SCRAMJet turned off. Concorde began gliding from an altitude of sixty kilometers - on the final leg of the flight, the hyperliner, having spent a significant part of its fuel and become lighter, with the SCRAMJet still working, was gaining altitude a little - this was optimal. After some time, not immediately, the color of the sky in the upper windows began to brighten.

 Vast territories of Russia floated below - here, in Siberia, there was a yellowed plain with scattered, almost round lakes. The scattering of human settlements and infrastructure from an altitude of tens of kilometers was presented quite clearly, especially in comparison with Europe, which had passed below an hour ago.

 When there were just over a hundred kilometers left to the docking point, the flight speed became subsonic. The altitude was eighteen thousand meters. It was time for the turbojet engines, the air intakes of which began to extend above the upper part of the fuselage.

 Not having good aerodynamics in the subsonic range, the hyperliner now spent the energy of the gliding flight rather quickly and wastefully. The two engines of the Concorde were not capable of lifting the fueled craft into the air, nor even of ensuring horizontal flight. Now the weight of the hyperliner had decreased by over fifty tons, and two rudimentary turbojet engines could easily drag it a distance of half a thousand kilometers, which would be enough not only for docking, but also for an independent landing with several approaches

 The engines began to start - for the Concorde, this was no less a responsible matter than everything that was connected with the chassis during landing. Before the War, there seemed to be a project for a special large-sized drone, which, unlike the SAF-740 carrier, was a relatively light and maneuverable aircraft, and was capable of picking up the Concorde, which was descending even with the engines turned off. However, the project was not implemented.

 In the current conditions, a route was simply chosen so that the airfield was located as precisely as possible along the trajectory of the hyperliner's descent. Once upon a time, in the century before last, the relative positions of the glide paths and landing strips for the first shuttles that landed without engines were chosen in approximately the same way.

 At an altitude of fifteen thousand meters, the engines gained full thrust - everything was going well. Ahead on course, seventy kilometers away, at an altitude of five thousand, the carrier was flying, ready.

The engines, which initially developed full power, reduced thrust, and the speed settled at about seven hundred kilometers per hour. The carrier's position was displayed both on the interlink and on its own navigation system, which was tied, however, to the same thing as the interlink.

 Soon, the inversion trail from the SAF-740 flying ahead became visible. AI quite deftly brought the Concorde to it, reducing speed in the last kilometers. Now it was time to dock - even without AI, this was somewhat simpler than the classic refueling of fighters - the Concorde only needed to go straight - the rest was done from the carrier. The main action was to capture the conductor. When the mechanical paw was fixed on the device, the Concorde ceased independent flight, and its crew became a kind of passengers of the carrier.

 Johnson began to announce the upcoming docking. In the upper window, a giant with a raised paw of the conductor appeared. The hyperliner began to carefully gain altitude, approaching the colossus hanging overhead. Finally, a series of light jolts ran through the ship - the docking took place. The engines began to drop thrust.

 Right above the window, a transition device was dark - in an emergency, it would lower, and the hatch in which the window was built would fold back into the cabin. And the passengers, these important bigwigs, would have to climb the metal ladder provided, squeezing their asses into the tight hole. Twenty minutes after docking, the carrier with the Concorde, which was cooling down after its hypersonic flight, landed on the runway at the Siberian "Kepler-West" Rocket site.