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
“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.
“
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
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
