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Laser Pulse Detonation Rocket System engines, sir,” Boomer explained.
    â€œYour invention, I believe?”
    â€œI was the lead engineer for a very large team of Air Force engineers and scientists,” Boomer said. “We were like little kids in a candy store, I swear to God, even when the shit hit the fan—we treated a huge ‘leopards’ explosion as if we tossed a firecracker into the girls’ lav in high school. But yes, my team developed the ‘leopards.’ One engine, three different jobs. You’ll see.”
    Boomer slowed the Midnight spaceplane down to midsubsonic speed and turned south over Nevada a short time later, and Jessica Faulkner came back to help the passenger into the mission commander’s seat on the right side of the cockpit, get strapped in, and plug her suit’s umbilical cord into a receptacle, and then she unfolded a small seat between the two cockpit seats and secured herself. “How do you hear me, sir?” Faulkner asked.
    â€œLoud and clear, Jessica,” the passenger replied.
    â€œSo that was the ‘first stage’ of our three-stage push into orbit, sir,” Boomer explained over the intercom. “We’re at thirty-five thousand feet, in the troposphere. Eighty percent of Earth’s atmosphere is below us, which makes it easier to accelerate when it’s time to go into orbit. But our tanker has regular air-breathing turbofan engines, and he’s pretty heavy with all our fuel and oxidizer, so we have to stay fairly low. We’ll rendezvous in about fifteen minutes.”
    As promised, the modified Boeing 767 airliner emblazoned with the words SKY MASTERS AEROSPACE INC on the sides came into view, and Boomer maneuvered the Midnight spaceplane in position behind the tail and flipped a switch to open the slipway doors overhead. “Masters Seven-Six, Midnight Zero-One, precontact position, ready, ‘bomb’ first, please,” Boomer announced on the tactical frequency.
    â€œRoger, Midnight, Seven-Six has you stabilized precontact, we’re ready with ‘bomb,’ cleared into contact position, Seven-Six ready,” a computerized female voice replied.
    â€œRemarkable—two airplanes traveling over three hundred miles an hour, flying just a few feet away from one another,” the passenger in the mission commander’s seat remarked.
    â€œWanna know what’s even more remarkable, sir?” Boomer asked. “That tanker is unmanned.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œSky Masters provides various contract services for the armed forces all over the world, and the vast majority of their aircraft, vehicles, and vessels are unmanned or optionally manned,” Boomer explained. “There’s a human pilot and boom operator in a room back at Battle Mountain, watching us via satellite video and audio feeds, but even they don’t do anything unless they have to—computers do all the work, and the humans just monitor. The tanker itself isn’t flown by anybody but a computer—they load a flight plan into the computer, and it flies it from start-taxi to final parking without any human pilots, like a Global Hawk reconnaissance plane. The flight plan can be changed if necessary, and it has lots of fail-safe systems in case of multiple malfunctions, but the computer flies the thing all the way from start-taxi to engine shutdown back at home base.”
    â€œAmazing,” the passenger said. “Afraid your job will be given to a computer someday, Dr. Noble?”
    â€œHey, I’d help them design the thing, sir,” Boomer said. “Actually, the Russians have been sending Soyuz and unmanned Progress cargo vessels up to the International Space Station for years, and they even had a copy of the space shuttle called Buran that did an entire space mission unmanned. I think I’d rather have a flight crew if I was flying into orbit on a Russian spacecraft, but in a few years