“No field of human endeavor is evolving more rapidly than the profession of arms. We may rest assured that the potential foes that we are confronting today, and the tools we are confronting them with, will be radically different in a mere decade’s time.
However, for you, the warfighter, there will always be the three eternal constants: life, death and responsibility.”
—Secretary of Defense Amanda Lee Garrett
The two journeys began almost at the same moment, but almost half a world apart.
As the People Mover started its silent electric glide into the cliff side, Major Judith Anne
MacIntyre glanced up at the reenforcing arch over the Alpha Entrance. As she had done for the previous two hundred mornings of her two hundred duty watches, she read the bold bronze lettering sealed to the concrete.
The secondary notices glowed inside the first set of retracted blast doors.
A military police warbot sat parked on either side of the People Mover track, turrets extended and ready to enforce the edict.
It was still short of the ten hundred hour’s shift change and Major MacIntyre was alone in the car. As she progressed deeper into the half mile of tunnel, she was able to remove her gloves and flip the hood of her dark blue uniform greatcoat off her neat brunette chignon.
It was a Colorado January morning topside, with two feet of snow on the ground. But a warm, dry, almost summery breeze always blew from the heart of Cheyenne Mountain. Lightly tinted with a thunderstorm’s ozone, it’s the waste heat exhalation of a billion active computer circuits.
The night was naturally warm as Muhammad Sadakan lifted the Dassault Voyageur suborbital off the isolated private airstrip south of Ipoh, Malaysia. Sadakan was both a senior pilot for the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s national airline and a reserve captain in the Republics air force. In fact, he was so many things he no longer cared particularly what he was. He would fly for anyone, just as long as they had deep pockets and a generous hand.
Theoretically, Sadakan was on a vacation from his airline at the moment, and there was some truth to this, for flying this potent little bird was a pleasure. A descendant of Burt Rutan’s Spaceship One, the Voyageur was France’s latest entry into the suborbital transport market. The stumpy, delta-winged aerospacecraft was designed for use by the space tourism industry and as the first stage of a microsatellite launch stack.
Tonight it was being used for neither but that was not Sadakan’s concern. He merely had to fly the flight profile he had been given as precisely as humanly and cybernetically possible.
Glancing at the time hack in the corner of his nav screen, he observed he had gone wheels up at the exact moment required on his flight plan. A good omen. He turned the Voyageur to the northeast, pushing the afterburning SENECMA turbofan of the jet drive to full mode four power.
“Good morning, Ralph,” Judith caroled to Major Ralph Pederson as she sauntered up to the duty officer’s work station at the center of the Sweat Pit.
Major Ralph Pederson, the current duty officer of the watch, swiveled the command chair around, surprised. “Morning, Judy, you’re twenty minutes early and did they sell out?”
“Yes, they sold out,” she replied patiently, shedding her coat, “and yes, there will be local television coverage. As for what I’m doing here early, I’m playing good fairy and granting your wish.
You’ve been mullygutsing all week about wanting to get home in time for the kickoff.” She tapped him on the forehead with her light pen. “And so you shall. Go park yourself in front of your boob tube. I’ll take it early today.”
“Judy, I love you and I want you to have my children. Or at least I would if my wife wouldn’t bitch.”
“Forget it, Ralph. You covered for me when I had that flat tire last month.” She squeezed in behind the semi circular watch officer’s console. “Now what’s the dope?”
Around them in the screen-lit dimness of the big hexagon-shaped room, the business of national and global defense went on to the soft click of computer keys and the low murmur of voices. On five of the six inwardly sloping walls were the main displays, six- by three-meter plasma imaging screens each showing some facet of affairs in Earth orbit.
Ranked inward from the big screens were the SO’s stations where two dozen meticulously selected junior officers and senior noncoms went hands-on with the Strategic Space Commands more-than-global array of assets.
There were the satellite flights: recon, distant early warning, intelligence-gathering, weather, communica tions and attack, both the overt systems and the black covert ones, cruising in an interweaving sphere of traffic patterns around the planet. There were the ground bases: the launch facilities, the ground tracking stations, the scepter pads and the hypersonic glider squadrons. And there were the units hovering between, the prowling battlestrats above the United States proper and the tactical laser planes forward deployed around the potential global hot spots. With a sweep of her eyes Judith could take in the status of them all and, if need be, bend them to her will.
Everything else launched by everyone else was being tracked as well. Commercial military and research satellites in their hundreds, the manned spacecraft and space stations, and the “orbit lice,” the spaceborn junk heap of inert debris left over from a near century of space flight. The whole incredible, interweaving, ever changing tapestry of the Earth orbits.
Everything between the Earth and Moon was the business of the Strategic Space Command, its grim justification written into its Defense Department Charter.
“The Nation that controls near-Earth space controls the planet Earth, politically, economically and militarily”
That was why the SSC existed and why its central control node beneath Cheyenne Mountain was called the Sweat Pit.
“You should have a pretty quiet watch coming up,” Pederson commented, dialing an activity schedule onto a workstation screen. “Three up, one down. Arianspace is launching an Arian 7 out of French Guiana, a cargo transfer vehicle to the EU space station. Milk run. The Japanese Space Agency is also putting up their new Mercury lander. A sea-base launch south of Okinawa, weather permitting.”
“Maybe the third time will be the charm,” Judith mused, glancing down at the screen.
“Maybe, but I ha’ ma doots. And the University of Stockholm is putting an auroral research microsat into polar orbit. An air launch over the Baltic.”
“And the down?”
“Comsul Brazil has given up on that wonky telecom platform they bought from the South Africans. They’re bringing it in over the South Atlantic and I think they’re hoping the wreckage will land on Pretoria.”
“Any suborbital flights on the board?”
“Both Vegas and Palmdale are down with weather. Virgin Space has an Australian tourist jump scheduled. The usual turnaround on the Southern Cross run, Perth to Brisbane and back.”
“Right, anything else I should know about?”
“A T alert from National Security.”
Judith frowned. “We haven’t had one of those for a while I’m pleased to say.”
The decades-long Global War on Terrorism was winding down, not with a bang but a whimper.
The new and more sophisticated generation of Islamic youth was no longer impressed with the rantings of the mullahs and the last of the oil sheiks had better things to do with their dwindling petrodollar reserves than support radicalism. But there were still a few greybeards in the Mideast with enough hate and money to make trouble. As a point of greater concern, as the supply of suicide bombers had dried up, the radicals had turned to techno-mercenaries and their more sophisticated brand of death for hire.
“Anything specific for us?” she inquired.
“No specifics at all,” Pederson replied with a shake of his head. “Just the usual ‘spike in terrorist commo, possibly a precursor to some act or actions.’ You know the drill. Keep your eyes open.”
“Got it.” Judith came to parade rest and spoke the formalism. “Major Pederson, I stand ready to relieve the duty officer.”
Pederson stood and returned the salute with equal formality. “Major MacIntyre, I stand relieved.” He lifted his voice. “All stations, be advised Major MacIntyre now has the duty. Carry on!”
Pederson snatched up his laptop case and was out through the light-and-sound lock a few moments later. Judith settled herself in the duty officer’s chair, still warm from Pederson’s body, and logged the watch change, verifying herself in with a pass of her palm over the hand print ID plate.
No matter how often she performed this act she still felt a shiver. There simply was no more critical post for a comparatively junior officer to hold in the structure of the U.S. Defense Force. This had been a point of some concern when the operational format of the Sweat Pit had been developed.
But for routine watch operations, no rank higher than major was required. And in the first few minutes of a crisis, rank wouldn’t be a factor, actions would.
Sadakan felt his pressure suit constrict around him as the suborbital stood on its tail and screamed toward the Southern Cross. The Voyageur had been totally gutted, the passenger seats, sound insulation, even the life support and internal pressurization systems gone, so that every ounce could be put into the payload. He didn’t even have landing fuel aboard; he’d have to glide in with a dead engine. But that only made things more interesting.
He was dead-on in the groove, climbing through fifteen thousand meters in full afterburner and at twice the speed of sound. The gridwork street blaze of Kota Baharu was off his port wing and the glittering line of demarcation between the Malaysian coastal villages and the darkness of the South China Sea was passing beneath the Voyageur’s belly. He knew he was plainly visible on the local defense nets but certain people had been influenced to not see his passage.
The fuel display bars on the methane tanks dipped toward zero and the booming thunder of the afterburner cut out as he passed through twenty thousand meters. The stars weren’t twinkling anymore.
They were running out of burnable atmosphere. It was almost time for full conversion.
Flame out. The jet engine stalled and went silent. The ballistics computer mulled course and trajectory and for the first time Sadakan heard the steering thrusters thump, supplementing the enfeebled effect of the control surfaces. The Voyageur continued to coast upward, losing velocity to gravity.
Then WHAM!
Hydrogen peroxide and hydrazine met in the gut of the rocket drive and Sadakan was smashed back into the pilot’s seat by the g-load hammer blow.
A twentieth century military tradition that lingered on into the twenty-first was the large chrome coffee urn on the table beside the operation room’s entryway. Judith was just stirring a French vanilla creamer into her first cup of the watch when she received a quiet hail on her command headset. “Major, you might want to have a look at this. We’ve just acquired an uncoordinated target.”
Master Sergeant Nick Valdez was the senior NCO of the oh four to oh ten hundred watch and he held the seat of honor in the pit, the outer-ranked workstation immediately before the Alpha display.
Valdez had been at this job since Cheyenne Mountain had been concerned about airplanes. He was the wise old dog who was used to break in the new duty officers and that had included Judy Maclntyre. She slipped her coffee into the cup holder on her chair arm and dropped down from the central station, coming to stand behind Valdez.
“Call the target, Sergeant.”
“A High Sentry contact over the South China Sea, just east of Malaysia,” the senior systems operator replied. “Thermal flare assessed as a rocket exhaust plume on a ballistic trajectory, bearing oh six one five and climbing through angels eighty, just going hypersonic now.”
Looking up, Judith studied the red target box blinking amid the computer graphics’ continent outlines and the interweaving web of orbital tracks.
At one time such a fire plume could only have meant one thing. Now, fortunately or unfortunately, there could be a number of possibilities.
“Do we have a launch point?”
“Negative, ma’am. It was a midair ignition, either an air-launched booster or a suborbital. But there’s nothing on the boards for that sector. No microsat launches, no research flights. No tourist jumps.”
“Any chance at all it could be that Virgin Space out of Australia?” Judith knew the answer to that already but it was the easiest remote possibility to eliminate.
“No way, Major. Way too far north and way off sched.”
Which might not necessarily mean anything. Even with the latest of twenty-first century telecommunications at their disposal, there was still the phenomenon of the one dumb son of a bitch not getting the word.
This could be a suborbital operator making a test flight. Or a honeymooning couple with a spontaneous desire to see the sun rise from the edge of space or even a rich hobbyist trying for a new altitude record with his latest home-built.
But the South China Sea in the wee smalls of the local morning was a damn peculiar time for any of those things.
“How are we tracking this?” she inquired.
“High Sentry thermographics only, ma’am.”
“Let’s drop down to a Low Sentry and get a closer look at this guy.”
“Can’t do it, ma’am. We got a dead zone. We won’t have Low Sentry coverage over that area for another…three and a half minutes.”
That snapped Judith’s head up. The High Sentries were the big Distant Early Warning birds hovering in geosynchronous orbit twenty-four thousand miles out. They held the entire Earth’s surface under continuous 24/7 coverage. But they were limited to detecting major energy events like rocket plumes or large fires or explosions. For more precise intelligence, the Low Sentry reconsats, just skimming the Earth’s atmosphere in polar orbit, were required. But even the U.S. defense budget couldn’t provide for enough Low Sentries to cover every square inch of the planet up close and personally for every moment of the day.
Biting her lower lip, Judith studied the Alpha display. When one spent enough hours in the Pit, one developed an eye for the orbit flow. Without having to call up the available assets overlay, she could “see” this event was taking place at a moment when the United States had a hole in its overt surveillance of the Pacific Rim.
Judith became aware of voices behind her, the first members of the new duty watch were starting to file through the light and sound lock. That finished the equation. An uncoordinated target appearing at a time of minimal coverage and just at the turbulence of a shift change. If she hadn’t come in those few minutes early…Words taken from an old thriller novel put a chill down her spine. Once is happenstance. Twice is circumstance. Three times is enemy action.
“All hands! Stay on your stations! Do not, I repeat, do not change the watch! Go to War Mode One. Advise the National Command Center we are declaring a possible inbound hostile!”
At mach six and soaring through ninety thousand meters, the Voyageur’s rocket engine went silent.
Sadakan relished the ecstatic moment. He was in free fall now, well short of orbital velocity but approaching true space at the apex of his ballistic leap. The curvature of the Earth was readily apparent, and the atmosphere glowed silver along the eastern horizon, a harbinger of the dawn that was still far away for the surface dwellers below.
But he had little time to sightsee, no matter how inspiring the vista. He must stay precisely on the timeline. Reaching forward with a pressure-stiffened glove, he keyed the sequence initiator into the onboard computer. Aft of the cockpit he felt the soundless vibration of the cargo bay doors powering open along the spine of the suborbital. Clamps released and thrusters fired, shoving the Voyageur out from under its payload.
Tilting his helmet back, Sadakan could see the package driving away above the canopy in the starlight, a blunt-nosed cylinder with an exhaust bell at its rear. It was fully autonomous now and Sadakan could see it bobbling slowly, hunting on its gyros for its firing angle and finding it.
The Voyageur shuddered, buffeted by the gas burst as a broad bell of flame spewed from the package’s solid fuel booster. It flashed away, dwindling to the glowing dot of its engine throat in seconds, a moving star amid the fixed.
The on-board computer cleared. Its preset program had run its course. Now it was all back in Sadakan’s hands and he could see his destination rolling toward him from the east, the islands of the Philippine Archipelago, outlined like black velvet cutouts on the pewter sheen of the sea.
“We have a staging event!” Valdez reported. “We have a positive track on a second exhaust plume. Definite emissions variance over the first!”
Damn it! She had to see! “Do we have any additional imaging assets yet?”
Valdezlooked over his shoulder at his duty officer. “We now have a Black Eye with angle, ma’am,” he said cautiously. “Delta Spade Zero Niner has just come over the local horizon.”
Judy understood the loaded question in his voice. If she committed a Black Eye, she would be sticking her foot deep into major international mojo.
The Strategic Space Command’s stealth satellite fleet was a diplomatic sticking point for the United States, the cause for many a protracted screaming match on the floor of the UN. Many nations, primarily those who lacked stealth satellite technology, vehemently protested their use as an unwarranted threat to other nation’s space travelers.
The United States continued to launch the stealth birds while stolidly refusing to confirm or deny their deployment. But the SSC duty officer who “opened” a Black Eye without a valid justification would be falling on his or her professional sword.
But this was just the scenario the Black Eyes were intended for, to trap an enemy who thought he had a clean sky overhead. And there was something else, something her father had told her upon her graduation from what had then been the Air Force Academy. He had been old fashioned wet navy but he had known war, the genuine article. “Honey, you are in this job either to protect your country or to protect your ass. Decide now!”
“Stealth Control, go active on Delta Spade Zero Niner.”
Some two hundred miles above the Central Pacific, a black spindle-shaped object the size of a large SUV blossomed like a flower. Segments of its RAM composite shell peeled back revealing the concealed antenna arrays and lens clusters. Sensor booms and communications antennas swung outboard and locked and Delta Spade Zero Niner pivoted swiftly around its gyro table, aiming downward.
They could see them now, as visual images windowed up in the corners of the Alpha screen, the smaller projectile being pushed by a half dome of fire, the larger, sleeker vehicle dropping in a controlled fall back toward the Pacific.
“We have a manned suborbital starting an unpowered decent from the staging coordinates.”
Valdez reported. “Designating target as Manned Zero One. It looks like one of those new French boats.”
“Why am I not surprised? Get a lock on him!” Judith yelled across the Pit to the secondary tracking console without resorting to her command headset. “Stay on that guy! Get me his landing point!”
“Primary package continuing to climb under power along a ballistic trajectory,” an intelligence SO interjected. “It’s a solid fuel booster… data annex assessing target ID now. Exhaust spectrograph indicates a ninety percent probability it’s an Egyptian National Aerospace Hotep B upper stage. A commercial booster. Acceleration indicates a payload in the half-ton range.”
“Is this an orbital or ballistic event?”
“Can’t call it yet, ma’am. It depends on if they’ve got a third stage. It’ll be close either way.
Climbing through two hundred miles and still accelerating.”
“If this is a terr strike it could be they’re throwing a gravel bucket, ma’am.” Valdez commented.
A gravel bucket was a crude antisatellite weapon, an aeroshell loaded with ball bearings or buckshot or, literally, pea gravel fired into a crowded orbit to cripple or destroy commercial and research satellites. It had been a tactic terrorists had tried unsuccessfully a time or two before.
“Let’s view that as our best-case scenario,” Judith shot back. “Project the impact point of a ballistic trajectory given he doesn’t quite have the steam to make orbit.”
“Projecting…” Valdez’s voice lifted an octave. “Impact point somewhere in the United States.”
“That’s our worst case! All stations! Go to War Mode Three! Bring up all defense layers! Stand by to engage incoming!”
On an isolated spot on the western coast, within sight of the breaking waves of the Pacific, a great slab of concrete lay warming in the morning sun. Pockmarked with small hexagonal steel panels and surrounded by a ten-foot-high chain link fence, it appeared totally bland. Totally innocuous.
But, suddenly, dazzling red strobe lights began to pulse atop each of the fence posts and a piercing hi toned warning siren reverberated off the surrounding golden-grassed hills. Should any of the Vandenberg Defense Base garrison be in the vicinity of the slab, they would know to get the hell away with all possible speed.
In the still, crystal-thin air sixty thousand feet above the forests of Southwestern Oregon, a titanic shark-shape cruised slowly, driven by the huge contrarotating propellers at its tail. Well above even the wispy mare’s-tail clouds and the turbulence generated by the Siskiyou Mountains, the laser defense stratellite circled on its robotic sentry-go.
It was an unmanned robotic dirigible; fully three times the length of a football field… it had been hovering on-station for over a month with more than a month before its next recall and servicing.
Under standing operating conditions, it drew its power from the layer of flexible solar cells covering the broad back of its gas envelope by day and from the silicon accumulators built into its composite framework by night. Its mission, like that of the other battlestrats on the western point defense line, was to hold and wait for a call to arms.
Now that call had come and the perfect mirror in the airship’s dorsal turret glinted like a glaring eye, the exotic compounds fueling its single, huge, chemical oxygen-iodine laser stirring in their cells.
The object centered in the screen window was now above the Black Eye sat imaging it. The glowing exhaust bell behind it flickered and died, leaving it a tiny glinting cylinder against the stars.
“We have confirmed booster burnout… Target is no longer under power… Johnston Island and Hawaii both have positive surface tracks now….”
“Do we have orbital velocity?” Judith demanded.
“Assessing… altitude now two hundred and fifty miles… We are not seeing a third stage plume… Target is reaching apogee…Target is descending! It hasn’t made orbit. We have a ballistic event!”
“Code target Ballistic One! Do we have an impact point?”
On the lower half of the Alpha display the western third of the continental United States glowed pale pink. “Impact potential anywhere in the Western U.S.”
“Do we have a mechanism assessment? Is that a bomb or a slug?”
“Inadequate data to assess,” Valdez replied. “Could be either one, ma’am. Do you wish to advise Homeland Security?”
“Make it happen. Commence continuous data feed.”
That was one decision she wouldn’t be burdened with, the call on informing the populace. The grim truth was that an attack from space simply came in too fast. By the time you could tell the public where to run from and where to run to, it was too late to run at all. And a general continental alarm could trigger a panic reaction with a potentially greater and more widespread loss of life than the simple eating of the strike. But then Judith’s duty lay in stopping the strike in the first place.
“Commence scepter firing track! Is the senior control officer available yet?”
“He’s in Denver at the Bowl, ma’am. Not currently a factor.”
“Then it’s us. Advise the National Command Center that we are engaging the incoming. Go to real time on all data feeds! Scepter boards, when the Vandenberg arrays acquire, you may commence firing!”
The sun exploded over the horizon, the package and the dawn racing toward each other. The western coast of the United Slates edged over the horizon, defining itself through the atmosphere haze. The projectile continued its arcing kill toward the coast, accelerating once more, now under the insistent pull of gravity.
But with the opening of line of sight came the opening of line of fire and the intent focused search of millimeter wave radars.
“Major, we have target acquisition out of Vandenberg! Scepter flight one is up! Scepters two and three on Flash Green standby!”
“Very well. Kill the incoming!”
At the Vandenberg scepter pad, the chirping alarm tone became a solid five-second scream of final warning. Then a silo hatch blew away and a slender pencil shape lanced upward, thrown into the air by the compressed gasses of the Cold Fire launching system. A hundred feet over the pad, metastate propellants ignited with a crashing crackle and a fantail of shimmering white flame. At a thousand feet up came the thunderclap of a sonic boom as the interceptor rocket sliced through the sound barrier at twenty Gs, the shock waves blasting a scattering of unlucky sea birds out of the sky.
Two additional missiles followed at four-second intervals on the kill-me-three-times principle.
In a literal heartbeat they were out of sight over the western horizon, leaving three die-straight contrails behind to distort gradually in the ocean breeze.
The Alpha screen had gone to the western approaches tactical display with all position hacks eliminated save for the incoming hostile and the three scepters climbing to meet it.
“Impact point revision! Northern tier states and California coastal targets eliminated! Impact point somewhere in the Rocky Mountain States or Western plains area!”
“How many battlestrats can get a firing angle?”
“Oregon Bravo and Cali Alpha and Bravo.”
“Uncork ‘em and set a point defense track. Valdez, do we have any idea about what that damn thing is yet?”
“Negative. If it’s a kinetic slug or a metastate warhead, it’s pretty big. If it’s an atomic weapon, it’s pretty damn big! We can’t get a mass deceleration analysis until it hits atmo.”
“Let’s hope we won’t have to bother. Scepter impact in five… four… three… two…”
Aboard the plummeting projectile, a guidance computer made the final time and distance calculations of its short, active existence, unaware that it was doomed to destruction in a matter of seconds. A final command series was issued. A gas charge blew away the shroud panels covering the three primary projectiles. A second burst of CO2 kicked the three identical sisters out of their cradles within the warhead bus to go their independently guided ways. Also released were several chaff pads intended to confuse the antiballistic missiles the package’s creators had known would be aimed at them.
However, the sensor/guidance matrixes of the first flight of homing missiles proved to be too effective for all involved. They held a dead lock on their initially designated target, totally ignoring the chaff clouds, dispersing package debris and the primary projectiles. The scepter flight struck and annihilated, but nothing was destroyed beyond a burned-out rocket motor and an empty vehicle frame.
“Shit!” Valdez swore savagely. “She MIRVed! She MIRVed just before she took the hit! We got a warhead swarm up there! I got three good-sized projectiles holding the original trajectory. Designating targets, Ballistic Two, Three, and Four. Projectile size, roughly one meter in length. They could be slugs or kiloton-range mininukes.”
For Judith there was not even one fragment of a second available for frustration or despair.
“Do we have dispersal?”
“Negative! We got a tight package! I’d say they’re shotgunning a single target!”
“We’ve got time enough for one more try with the scepters. Ready flights two and three. Reset two rounds on each target! Fire on reprogramming! Targeting projection! Do you have a refined impact point?”
“Somewhere in the state of Colorado! Christ, Major, they could be targeting us!”
“I hope they are!” Judith snapped back. “We can take it! Close all blast doors! Seal the mountain! Sound shock warning alarms!”
The three deadly sisters swept on toward their objective. Each was elegant in its sophisticated simplicity. Each a slender wasp-waisted dart designed to pierce the Earth’s atmosphere like a needle through gelatin without bleeding velocity. Each weighed only about one hundred pounds, but striking at over twenty thousand miles per hour, every pound of that mass would carry the equivalent kinetic energy of twenty pounds of TNT, the force equivalency of one ton of high explosives released by instantaneous thermic conversion.
But each kinetic kill weapon held a second deadly secret at its core. Its outer skin was of a tough, heat-resistant industrial ceramic while the bulk of the projectile was of machined stainless steel.
But in its heart was a rod of inert uranium, the same ultra-massy material used as the penetrator rod for armor-piercing shells and as a protective mesh layered inside Chobham tank armor.
Essentially benign in its natural state, inert uranium changed radically when involved in a major kinetic event. Superheated into a molten vapor it would explode and burn furiously like magnesium or white phosphorous. And like iron or steel, if struck hard enough, it would produce sparks. But the sparks produced would be hard neutrons, a searing radiation pulse that would lethally flash any living thing in its immediate vicinity. In effect, it would act as a small, solid-state neutron bomb.
In a heatproof aeroshell in the tail of the dart, a miniature guidance system purred, cross-referencing positional readings from the Global Positioning Satellite system with a ring-laser inertial tracker. During the last seconds of the projectiles plunge through atmosphere the guidance package would steer the precision-guided weapon on target by extruding drag-inducing “hyper-bumps” into the surrounding airflow.
It was a back-room laboratory rig, producing a circular area of impact probability roughly a hundred meters across. A true weapons-grade guidance package could produce a much higher degree of accuracy, but for the makers of the three sisters, the radius of a football field would do nicely.
But the defender rockets screaming up from the California coast had to be vastly more accurate.
They were endeavoring to take, head-on, a target six inches across at a combined closing velocity of mach forty. Comparatively speaking, hitting a bullet with a bullet was child’s play.
But it could be done. Given computer systems powerful to make not merely millions but hundreds of millions of calculations per second, computers that were almost precognitive in their capacity, it could be done.
Some of the time.
Two of the sisters died, taken by the scepter flights fixed on them. There were no “explosions”
in the conventional sense of the term. The interceptors mounted no warheads. At the meeting velocities involved, high explosives would have been a triviality. There was just a flash and the interceptor and intercepted vanished in a dissipating cloud of metallic vapor.
The third sister plunged on. The guidance systems of the two missiles aimed at it had not quite been able to make that last microsecond’s calculation required for a hit.
The tip of the kill dart’s nose began to warm as it whispered into the outer fringe of the atmosphere.
“Missed the bastardo!” Valdez smashed his fists on his chair arms. “One of ‘em got through, Major! Scepters are offline! Vandenberg no longer has angle of engagement.”
“Designate target Ballistic Five for laser point defense engagement!” Judith fought to keep the scream out of her voice.
“Impact point now projected as the Denver urban area!” The tracking board SO yelled.
And Judith Maclntyre knew. Without the faintest shadow of a doubt she knew. It was the Superbowl stadium. The ultimate, perfect, soft target. A hundred thousand helpless people jammed in shoulder to shoulder, celebrities, officials, families. It was the big game, a symbol of Americana. And the whole world’s media would be present to bear witness to the devastation. What could be a better target for those who fought no longer to win but only to wreak a spiteful, savage vengeance?
“Laser point defenses ready to fire” the laser board called. “Valid battlestrats tracking. Sequential or convergent fire pattern?”
The last human decision to be made. Sequential or convergent? Sequential would give each laser platform its own independent shot. Convergence would complicate and slow the engagement equation by trying to bring all three beams in on the target at the precise same instant. Sequential fire would improve the hit probability while convergence would maximize energy on target and improve the kill potential. There would be time for one or the other. The battlestrats would not be able to recycle their lasers last enough for a second shot.
What was up there? What was that damn thing? Bombs were more disruptable, more easily destroyed or damaged. A solid slug was more resistant and required more killing.
Sweat Pit indeed. Judith’s hair and her clothing were drenched in icy perspiration. The incontrollable trembling was only instants away.
“We have an ionization trail! Target Ballistic Five entering the atmosphere! Major, we gotta call the shot!”
“Convergent fire! Burn him!”
Aboard each of the widely dispersed battlestrat platforms, exotic fuel compounds intermixed and consumed each other in incandescent fury, pumping the High Energy Lasing tube that ran from the keel to the spine of each airship. Unhampered by atmospheric thermal blossom at this high altitude, the mirror turrets caught the appropriately named HEL beams and flashed them across hundreds of miles of sky, aiming at one, precise, distant point.
The third sister burned dazzlingly bright. Pushing a plasma shock wave the temperature of the suns surface ahead of it, it drilled its hole through the atmosphere, homing on its target. And then, for a split second, it burned brighter yet, caught in the nexus of three focused gigawatts of projected energy.
And then it streaked on.
“Jesus madre Maria! It’s through! It’s gonna hit!”
In its last seconds of flight, a few grams of the third sister’s ceramic coating, superheated beyond incandescent tolerance by the laser strike, bled away unevenly from the outer shell. Drag unbalanced, the kinetic kill projectile started to roll off target. The guidance system failed to counter, its cooked microchips pushed beyond their thermal operating limits as well.
The lines of shivering football fans pushing their way into the huge, enclosed stadium saw a thin needle of bright light streak across the sky. A moment later the thunderous boom of the shock wave followed, rolled across the sky and shattered a quarter of a million dollars worth of glass across the Denver metroplex.
Some fans looked up fearfully at the faintly glowing streak against the vivid blue of the winter sky and wondered. The majority shrugged and went back to debating the odds of Denver over Memphis.
The last sister impacted in open farm country south of the Denver suburb of Aurora. Converted into a jet of plasma and molten metal, it drilled a hundred and fifty feet into the earth before spraying off bedrock, leaving a trail of fused glass behind, the heavy prairie soil absorbing its radiation pulse.
Mr. and Mrs. Roger Hablton, driving home from a church service in Aurora, had their Ford Bioboss pickup truck blown off the adjacent county road by the concussion. After receiving treatment for minor cuts and bruises they would be released from the hospital later that day.
The Alpha screen held an image being downloaded from another Low Sentry reconsat. It showed a snow-covered field with a circular, bare-earth crater punched in it, a dissipating cloud of steam and a silver pickup truck lying on its side in a ditch.
Judith Maclntyre didn’t try to restrain her trembling now, she just hugged herself against it, locking her jaw against the chattering of her teeth.
No one in the Sweat Pit was cheering. Maybe that would come later.
Sergeant Valdez took a deep breath. “We have an open ground impact. No explosive or nuclear event. No detectable surface radiation. No appreciable casualties or material damage.”
Judith lifted her head. “Verify the impact point with Homeland Security,” she was pleased with the sound of her voice, almost steady. “Advise National Command Center we are showing no further incoming on our boards.”
She forced her arms down from her self-embrace, making each finger straighten. “Tracking, do we still have a positive fix on the manned launch vehicle?”
Gliding a high performance delta without engine power was a major challenge, but Muhammad Sadakan had managed it brilliantly, at least in his own opinion. He came in over his recovery island, velocity and altitude fat, popping his flaperons to lose speed and hasten his descent.
He circled twice, then caught sight of the double row of chemical light sticks that had been set out to mark the runway. Swinging wide with the last of his reserve energy, he lined up for the landing.
The runway itself was another challenge. A military field dating back to the Second World War, it had served as a support facility for a copper mine for a number of decades. But the mine had closed and the Philippine jungles had reclaimed both the mine and the airstrip.
Its isolation had made it perfect for Sadakan’s employers. They had brought in the native work crews to reclear and patch the runway and the foreign specialists to refuel and rearm the Voyageur.
With his night vision visor flipped down, Sadakan floated the suborbital over the tree-fringed end of the strip, keeping the nose high with the canards. The wheels touched and he popped the drogue chute, pumping the brakes hard.
There was some vibration and a heavy pothole jolt or two but the Voyageur rolled to a stop well short of the runways far end. Men started to run toward him from the edge of the jungle and the trucks followed, the fuel tankers, the crane lorry and the transporter carrying the package for the return flight.
This time round he’d be dropping his load on the big Israeli nuclear power plant south of Tel Aviv.
Sadakan popped the canopy and flipped open his suit visor, taking a deep breath of the humid night air. There was no fear in the night. They’d be in and out long before the Philippine authorities would be able to react. His employers had purchased a generous quantity of slow on the local market.
The imaging on the Alpha screen had shifted, real-timed in from the Low Sentry that had just arrived in the sky above the Philippine archipelago. The hole over the Pacific was closing and they had full coverage back.
“The watch officer at the National Command Authority on the Gold Line for you, ma’am. And the complex commander. We’re still sealed and he’s stuck outside the Alpha gate.”
“Tell them we have an incident under way and to stand by.”
The reconsat was scanning in the thermal range. Its cameras showed a runway inset in the jungle with a group of men and vehicles clustering around a small delta-winged suborbital that glowed white with residual reentry heat.
“Sergeant, are there any occupied structures in the immediate vicinity of that airstrip?”
The image windowed back to a wider coverage.
“Nothing within at least ten ks, ma’am. They picked themselves one very lonely place.”
“That was very convenient of them,” Judy said mostly to herself.
“Major,” the voice from the communications station was insistent. “We got the White House Situation Room on now!”
“Tell them to stand by!”
Once she answered the outside world, her role in this crisis would irreversibly change. She would be just another link in a chain of command. The responsibility and the decision-making would pass on to the generals and the statesmen. But for now, for this moment, Judith Anne MacIntyre was still the person at the bottom of the Sweat Pit. She was the one who carried both the shield and the sword. The defender and the nemesis.
“Sergeant Valdez, do we have any attack sats in position?”
“Yes, ma’am, we do. Black KAT Able Spade Two-Five.”
Kinetic Attack Satellite Able Spade Two-five blew away its stealth shroud, its metastate sprint engine hurling it toward the dark surface of the Earth below and toward an isolated island in the western Pacific. The tightly packed swarm of kill darts it released were kin to the three sisters that had targeted the Superbowl. Only these weapons were no garage-made patch-togethers. These were the genuine article, swifter, more sophisticated and vastly more accurate.
They were also smaller, each dart weighing only ten pounds.
But there were two hundred of them.
The patch of jungle boiled and flamed in the satellite imaging. There was no longer an airstrip there. There was no longer anything there.
“Stand down from War Mode Three and unseal the mountain. All stations, well done. Resume the shift change. However, ladies and gentlemen, I suggest you all hang around. We’ve all got a lot of debriefing to do. Communications, open the channel to the White House Situation Room.”
Major Judith Anne MacIntyre glanced down at the cup of coffee in the cup holder of the command chair, the one she had drawn for herself several lifetimes ago.
She touched it. It was still warm.