“Were you serious about the smartskin issue?”

“Needs work, but I think so.”

“You know,” Toby said, “mathematically speaking L1 is a turning point—a point where a curve changes direction, from downhill to up. That’s why it’s a point of equilibrium.”

“I know that—ah. You think we’ve gone through a turning point on the project today?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you should leave the headlines to the journalists. Okay. What’s next?”

23: Heathrow

In March 2040—with another dismal Christmas come and gone, and just a little over two years left before sunstorm day—Miriam Grec decided to visit the shield construction site in person. And that meant flying into space, for the first time in her life.

As she was driven away from the Euro-needle that day she felt guilty but excited, like a child playing hooky from school. But she needed a holiday; her friends and enemies alike would agree on that, she thought wryly.

London’s Heathrow had been an airport for a century, and now it was a spaceport too. And, sitting on a long, hardened runway in the watery sunlight, the spaceplane looked quite remarkably beautiful, Miriam thought.

The Boudicca was a slim needle some sixty meters long. It had alarmingly small vanes at its nose and tail, and even its main wings were just stubby swept-back deltas. Mounted on the wingtips were fat, asymmetrical nacelles that contained the principal rocket motors—or rather they would work as rockets in the vacuum of space, but in Earth’s atmosphere they breathed air like jet engines. The plane’s upper surface was a dull white ceramic shell, but its underside was coated with a gleaming black plate, a heat shield for reentry, made of a substance that was a remote descendant of the thermal tiling that had given the venerable space shuttle so much trouble.

Despite the ground support vehicles that clustered around it and the clouds of vapor steaming from its tanks of cryogenic fuel, the plane really did look as if it belonged to another order of creation entirely, and had only diffidently set down here on Earth. But it was a working ship—indeed, a veteran of space. That gleaming outer hull was punctured with the nozzles of attitude control rockets around which the surface was scarred and blistered, and repeated reentries had splashed scorch marks over its underside.

And the plane was proudly British. While the tailplane bore on one side the starry circle of the Eurasian Union, on the other side waved an animated Union flag, and on the spaceplane’s wings and flank were painted the famous roundels of the Royal Air Force, a reminder that this soaring bird of space could be called on to serve military duties.

The design had an ancestry dating back to pioneering studies in the 1980s by firms like British Aerospace and Rolls-Royce, paper birds with names like Hotol and Skylon. But those studies had languished until the 2020s, when a new breed of materials technologies and engine designs, and the new push into space, had suddenly made a fleet of fully reusable spaceplanes a commercial proposition. And when the planes actually flew, of course, the British were quite unreasonably proud of their beautiful new toys.

The choice of a female name was obviously right, Miriam thought: surely this spaceplane was the most beautiful piece of British aeronautical engineering since the Spitfire. But the name of the Celtic queen who had once defied the Romans, selected by a popular vote, seemed a rather tactless moniker in these days of pan-Eurasian harmony—though Miriam wondered if the second choice would have been any more acceptable: Margaret Thatcher …

Still, even in these days of a united Eurasia you had to respect lingering national sentiments, as long as they played themselves out in a constructive way. And besides, as Nicolaus never ceased to remind her, this year, 2040, was an election year. So Miriam allowed herself to be photographed before the shining hull, a smile fixed to her face.

*********

______

She rode a small escalator, and entered the plane through a hatch cut in the curving fuselage.

She found herself in a poky little compartment. If she had expected an elegance inside the plane to match its beautiful exterior, she was immediately disappointed. There were a dozen seats set in unimaginative rows, rather like first-class seats on a long-haul flight—but no better than that. There weren’t even windows in the walls.

She was greeted by a tall, very upright man in a Eurasian Airways uniform and a peaked cap. His hair was silver-white, and he must have been in his late seventies; but he had sharp, good-looking features, his blue eyes were clear, and when he spoke his accent was a reassuring upper crust. “Madam Prime Minister, I’m delighted to welcome you aboard. I’m Captain John Purcell, and it’s my pleasant duty to make sure you enjoy your flight up to the shield. Please take a seat; the flight is yours today, and you can take your pick …”

Miriam and Nicolaus sat one row apart, so they had the luxury of more room. Purcell helped them strap into intimidatingly robust harnesses, then offered them drinks. Miriam accepted a Bucks Fizz. What the hell, she thought.

Nicolaus declined a drink, a bit testily. It struck Miriam that he had seemed edgy for some time. She supposed that anybody had a right to be nervous about being hurled into space, even nowadays. But perhaps there was more to it than that. She remembered her resolve to try to get him to open up a bit more.

Now Nicolaus called over his shoulder, “You know, this reminds me of the Concorde. The same mix of a high-tech exterior, but a poky little passenger cabin.”

Purcell perked up. “Did you ever fly the old plane, sir?”

“No, no,” Nicolaus said. “I just crawled around a retired model in a museum a few years ago.”

“Was that the one at RAF Duxford? … As it happens, I used to fly the Concorde, before she was retired at the turn of the century. I was a pilot for the old British Airways.” He grinned at Miriam, almost flirtatiously, and smoothed back his silver hair. “I’m sure you can tell I’m old enough. But the spaceplane is a different bird altogether. It is human-rated, of course, but it was primarily designed as a cargo carrier. Actually it’s almost all propellant.”

Miriam said, a bit nervously, “It is?”

“Oh, yes. Of three hundred tonnes all-up weight, only twenty tonnes is payload. And we’ll use up almost all of that fuel getting away from the Earth.” He eyed her cautiously. “Madam, I’m sure you were sent a briefing pack. You do understand that we will glide home from space, without powered engines? Returning to Earth is a question of shedding energy, not spending it …”

She’d had no time to touch the glossy briefing pack, of course, but she did know that much.

“So we’re just a flying bomb,” Nicolaus said.

Even allowing for his nervousness Miriam was surprised he would say such a thing.

Purcell’s eyes narrowed a bit. “I like to think we’re a bit smarter than that, sir. Now if I may I will take you through our emergency procedures …”

These turned out to be rather alarming too. One option, in the event of decompression, involved being zipped up into a pressurized bag, as helpless as a hamster in a plastic globe. The idea was that astronauts in spacesuits would manhandle you inside your sphere across to a rescue ship.

Captain Purcell smiled, competent, reassuring. “Madam Prime Minister, we no longer treat our passengers as children. Everything has been done to ensure your safety, of course. I could talk you through the flight profile, and describe to you how our engineers have labored to close what they unromantically call ‘windows of nonsurvivability.’ But this spaceplane is still a young technology. One has to simply ‘buy the risk,’ as we used to say in my day—and sit back and enjoy the ride.”