later they burst in an explosion I could watch but not hear.
“Pulse weapons check,” Lobo said. “I’m good to go.” The gunnery displays winked out. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I stood and headed for my bunk. “I’m going to rest. Take us to the jump
station, jump at least five times, and file different destination papers each time.”
“Where do you want to go?” Lobo asked.
“Your choice,” I said, “as long as you take us somewhere where we’ve never seen the stars.”
THE FIRST CUP OF COFFEE WAR
“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
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
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
“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.
“
That was why the SSC existed and why its central control node beneath Cheyenne Mountain was called the
