While the Soviet military was secretly drooling to get its hands on this new bomber, sending the cream of Soviet propulsion engineers here to make sure it worked, they already had been outflanked. Typical idiocy. What they'd overlooked was that these two planes still belonged to Mino Industries, and only Mino Industries had access to the high- temperature ceramics and titanium composites required to build more. Tanzan Mino held all the cards. He surely knew the capabilities of this plane. Everything was already in place. Mino Industries now owned the ultimate weapon: they had built or subcontracted every component. Was Lemontov such a dumb party hack he couldn't see that?
All the more reason to get the cards on the table. And soon.
So far the plan was on track. He had demanded that the schedule be moved up, and Ikeda had reluctantly agreed. In four days Yuri Androv would take _Daedalus _into the region of near space using liquid hydrogen, the first full hypersonic test flight. And that's when he intended to blow everybody's neat scenario wide open.
He felt the fuselage shudder as the trucks disengaged from the eyelets on the landing gear. Then the radio crackled.
"This is control, _Daedalus I_. Do you read?"
"Verified. Engine oil now heated to thirty degrees Celsius. Begin ignition sequence."
"Check. _Daedalus I _starting engines." He scanned through the instrument readings on his helmet screens, then slipped his hand down the throttle quadrant and pushed the button on the left. He could almost feel the special low-flashpoint JP-7--originally developed for the high-altitude American SR-71 Blackbird--begin to flow from the wing tanks into the twelve turboramjets, priming them. Then the ground crew engaged the engines with their huge trolley-mounted starters. As the rpm began to surge, he reminded himself he was carrying only 2,100,000 pounds of fuel and it would burn fast.
He switched his helmet screens to the priority-one display and scanned the master instrument panel: white bars showing engine rpm, fuel flow, turbine inlet temperature, exhaust temperature, oil pressure, hydraulics. Then he cut back to the infrared cameras and glanced over the tarmac stretching out in front of him. Since the American KH-12 satellite had passed twenty minutes earlier, flight conditions should now be totally secure.