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.
