Cauldron

packs, just as you ordered.”

“Very well, Captain. We’ll launch on schedule.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Ward stood up slowly, leaning heavily on his chair for support at first. It took him a while to climb one level to the bridge and step out onto the bridge wing, but he wanted to be there when the cruiser showed these French and German bastards her teeth.

The fresh air on the bridge wing woke him up. Their own course and speed turned a cool breeze into a chilling gale. It was already slackening as Leyte Gulf slowed and turned. Even though the wind was within tolerances, Ward didn’t want anything risked. Not for this.

Deep inside the ship’s superstructure, Gunston issued the final orders.

An amplified voice declared, “Now hear this. All hands on the weather decks, remain clear of the fantail.” It was the third, and last, warning — really only a formality. Ward heard a shrill beep, beep over the speakers before all sounds merged in a single, deafening roll of thunder.

It was different, being outside when a missile was fired.

Leyte Gulf’s launchers had roared last night, but, with the ship at general quarters, the CIC had been tightly sealed. And Ward had been too busy thinking about other things to pay much attention to the noise. Things like fending off the sudden, surprise attacks that seemed to come from every compass point. Like the men who had been dying. The men he’d hoped to keep safe.

Now he had time to watch. Every ten seconds, a twenty-one-foot-long, finned gray shape thundered into the clear blue sky above the Aegis cruiser’s fantail, riding high on a pillar of fire before turning and heading south. Twenty Tomahawk missiles, his entire load, were carrying the fight to EurCon’s north German airfields. It would exact a small measure of vengeance for his murdered men and lost ships.

The last Tomahawk roared off, skimming southward past a long thick pall of white exhaust smoke curling behind Leyte Gulf.

Ward stepped back inside. His body cried out for sleep, but he had work to do and priority signals to send. The paybacks had just started.

U.S. SPACE DEFENSE OPERATIONS CENTER

Brigadier General Howard Noonan, USAF, occupied the watch officer’s desk — overlooking a room filled with row after row of consoles crowded with control keyboards, communications gear, and display screens. Soft, subdued lighting and the quiet, ever-present hum of air-conditioning created the illusion of a calm, restful working environment. Space ops center duty officers and noncoms sat in comfortable chairs behind each console, monitoring space surveillance data flowing in from radar and optical telescope networks scattered around the globe, in low earth orbit, and in geosynchronous orbit.

All duty stations faced an enormous, wall-sized computer-generated display showing the world and man- made objects in orbit around it. Although the men and women working in the operations center routinely tracked nearly six thousand objects, right now the main screen showed only a few specific satellites that were of extraordinary interest. Bright lines showed the predicted orbital path for each satellite, and small vector arrows showed their current, plotted positions.

Noonan, a trim, dapper man, nodded gravely to himself — satisfied by what he could see. As a young man he’d been fascinated by outer space and the possibility of space travel. As a young officer he’d narrowly missed qualifying for astronaut training. He’d taken the setback in stride and buckled down to do his best for the country. Now, at forty-five, he commanded the world’s most advanced space defense force.

After years spent in research and development and after bitter congressional funding battles, the first elements of the G-PALS system were in orbit and operational. G-PALS stood for “Global Protection Against Limited Strikes.”

One of the red phone symbols on his computer monitor flashed. He had an incoming call — direct from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Finally.

Noonan tapped the appropriate key on his board, noted the lights verifying that he was receiving scrambled audio and video communication, and punched the receive control on his console.

A familiar face appeared on his monitor. General Galloway, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, looked tired. He’d been locked up in a nonstop National Security Council meeting since the first reports of EurCon attacks on U.S. and British shipping began pouring in.

“Yes, sir?”

“I’ll make this short and sweet, Howard. The President has approved your plan. ‘Blackout’ is a go. When can you initiate?”

“Right away, sir. My people finished rewriting and testing the necessary sections of battle management code about an hour ago.”

Reid nodded, pleased. Then he turned deadly serious. “Take ’em out for us, Howard. We’re going to need every edge we can get.”

“Yes sir. You can count on it.” Noonan had seen the navy’s preliminary casualty estimates. The French and Germans had pretty clearly won the war’s opening round. He planned to help them lose the second.

Five minutes later, Noonan sat with his headset on, ready and alert. A blank inset box on the main display screen suddenly filled with a jumbled string of numbers and letters. They were receiving a system release authorization code from the President. Almost as soon as the code appeared, it vanished — replaced by a blinking notification in large, bold letters: LAUNCH ENABLED.

Noonan switched to the G-PALS command circuit. “You ready, Zack?”

The colonel manning the space defense system duty station answered immediately. “Yes, sir. My boards confirm selective release authorization.”

“Good.” Noonan swept his eyes over his own monitor and the main display one last time for a final check on weapons status and target positions. Everything looked set. He sat up straighter. “Okay, Colonel, let’s do it. Commence firing.”

G-PALS CONSTELLATION BRAVO ONE, IN ORBIT

Four hundred miles above the blue-green, white-flecked earth, a cloud of fifty tiny bullet-shaped interceptors orbited together — circling the globe at seventeen thousand miles an hour.

Each “Brilliant Pebble” was barely three feet long, a foot in diameter, and weighed just a little more than one hundred pounds. Inside the casing, advanced microminiaturization techniques packed enormous computing power into a few tiny silicon chips. Each fist-sized supercomputer drew its tracking data from a nose-mounted, miniaturized television camera equipped with a wide-angle, fish-eye lens. Maneuvering rockets and their propellant filled the rest of the remaining space.

The order relayed through the G-PALS command net activated five of the interceptors, triggering a new engagement program uploaded less than sixty minutes before. Minute clouds of vapor puffed into space as maneuvering thrusters fired in a preset sequence. Slowly, inexorably, the five Brilliant Pebbles drifted out of the main cloud — moving into a new orbit. Seeker heads that had been focused on the earth below were now locked on an empty point several hundred miles above the surface.

A tiny shape appeared there, rising quite suddenly above the earth’s curvature and closing rapidly. Sunlight sparkled off solar panels deployed on either side of a two-ton, box-shaped satellite. HELIOS was a French military reconnaissance platform. Its sophisticated cameras could take detailed pictures of objects smaller than a baseball bat — even from orbit.

It was dawn over Eastern Europe, and the low sun would make the long shadows so loved by photo interpreters.

With their prey in sight, the tracking and guidance systems aboard each Brilliant Pebble went into high gear. On-board supercomputers took the images supplied by their TV cameras, matched them against an approved target set, and cycled into attack mode.

More vapor puffed into space as each Brilliant Pebble’s main motor fired. All five darted forward, racing toward the oncoming photo recon satellite. They covered the distance in sixty-eight seconds.

The HELIOS satellite vanished in a single, blinding flash — hit head-on by an interceptor at a relative speed of more than thirty thousand miles an hour. Millions of metal fragments spread over dozens of square miles. Two Brilliant Pebbles a microsecond behind the first plunged right into the heart of the expanding debris cloud and disintegrated. The last two missed by somewhat wider margins and plunged toward the atmosphere, where they