The temperature inside was a constant 5 degrees Celsius, kept just above freezing to extend the life of the sensitive electronic gear in the next three bays. The high-voltage sodium lamps along the sides of the fuselage now switched on automatically as the door swung inward. He fleetingly thought about turning them off, then realized they weren't manually operated.
Through the clouds of his condensing breath he could see that the interior of the entry bay was a pale, military green. The color definitely seemed appropriate, given what he now knew about this vehicle.
He quickly turned and, after making sure the outer door could be reopened from the inside, closed it behind him. When it clicked secure, the sodium lights automatically shut off with a faint hum.
Just like a damned refrigerator, he thought.
But the dark was what he wanted. He withdrew a small penlight from his pocket and scanned the three bulkhead hatches leading to the forward bays. The portside bay, on the left, contained electronics for the multimode phased array radar scanner in the nose, radar processors, radar power supply, radar transmitters and receivers, Doppler processor, shrouded scanner tracking mechanism, and an RF oscillator. He knew; he'd checked the engineering diagrams.
He also knew the starboard equipment bay, the one on the right, contained signal processors for the inertial navigation system (INS), the instrument landing system (ILS), the foreplane hydraulic actuator, the structural mode control system (SMCS), station controller, and the pilot's liquid-oxygen tanks and evaporator.
The third forward bay, located beneath the other two and down a set of steel stairs, was the one he needed to penetrate. It contained all the computer gear: flight control, navigation, and most importantly, the artificial intelligence (AI) system for pilot interface and backup.
He suddenly found himself thinking a strange thought. Since no air-breathing vehicle had ever flown hypersonic, every component in this plane was, in a sense, untested. To his mind, though, that was merely one more argument for shutting down the damned AI system's override functions before he went hypersonic. If something did go wrong, he wanted this baby on manual. He only needed the computer to alert him to potential problems. The solutions he'd have to work out with his own brain. And balls. After all, that's why he was there.
As he walked down the steel steps, he thumbed through the magnetic cards, praying he had the one needed to open the lower bay and access the computers. Then he began inserting them one by one into the green metallic slot, trying to keep his hand steady in the freezing cold.
Finally one worked. The three encoded diodes blinked, and a hydraulic arm automatically slid the port open. Next the interior lights came on, an orange high-voltage sodium glow illuminating the gray walls.