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.
“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
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
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
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
