Moonstruck. Part 27

squeaky-wheeled cart laden with soda cans, bottled water, an ice bucket, and a cookie platter. He left as

unceremoniously as he'd entered.

"Healthier than my usual celebratory libations. Thanks, I guess." Bauer grabbed a c.o.ke. "So, Lieutenant.

Will the next bit go as smoothly?"

The attention of two generals and a presidential advisor, plus, for all the junior officer knew, the fate of human civilization on his narrow shoulders . . . Davis broke into a sweat. A quaver in his voice, he pointed at the main screen. The timer still floating over Antarctica decremented toward the next mission milestone. "Thirty minutes, sir, and we'll know."

* * * The commandeered NRO satellite continued its seemingly random att.i.tude-jet firings. Pitch, yaw, and roll slowed dramatically, without altogether stopping. With no obvious indication of being under control, it reduced its tumbling enough for onboard sensors to reestablish with precision its orientation and position. Every few seconds it took a fresh IR reading of a remote patch of the southern Pacific.

The satellite likewise gave no overt indication when the message for which it waited was received. It was scanning for a large fire, unmistakable to its infrared sensor. The nonexistence of that oil-slick blaze was unambiguous-and an absence could not be correlated by a hostile AI with subsequent events. The nonrecall authorized the spysat to execute the next routine in its uploaded navigational program: rendezvous with a second orbiting alien artifact.

The new target was armed and presumed extremely dangerous. * * * Through the fiber-linked, surrept.i.tious eye of a telescope far from Cheyenne Mountain, the hurtling spysat was seen to perform a series of brief att.i.tude-jet firings. Pitch, yaw, and roll largely damped out.

The men and woman in the VIP viewing room, all spectators at this point, stared at the wavy, grainy image. The main parabolic antenna on the s.p.a.cecraft spun three times around its mounting post.

Three rotations meant "target acquired."

"Well done, again, Lieutenant." Bauer slapped the embarra.s.sed young man on the back.

* * * "Now it gets interesting." Kyle studied a side screen. This masersat's wings looked identical; both were tipped to catch the maximum sunlight. In the infrared view, stripes on the s.p.a.cecraft rippled and flowed, like a beast languorously flexing its muscles.

The spysat on his left had resumed its manic tumbling. Infrared revealed more seemingly ineffectual engine firings. Sensors caught a flurry of heat bursts, longer at first, and then trailing off to sputtering. In the end, the solar panel pointed straight down to Earth, twenty-three hundred miles below. It sure looked, thought Kyle, as though the probe halted its spin with the dregs of its fuel. Here's hoping any AI on the target agrees. In truth, the tanks remained one-third full.

The countdown timer on the map display forecast rendezvous in six minutes.

"What's next, Lieutenant?" Bauer perched on the edge of the viewing room's oak table.

Davis gulped. "More waiting."

A red spot bloomed on the masersat's IR image, and the estimated collision probability plummeted.

"That hot spot's no maser," said Bauer. "What happened?"

"It's moving," answered Kyle. "Now to answer the big question: was it sidestepping a suspect visitor? Or was it a coincidence, an ordinary orbit-maintenance maneuver?"

The spysat they did not dare to radio so near to its target obeyed its programming-and the absence of

an at-sea fiery abort signal. Its engines sputtered anew, and its path changed. The collision probability

climbed. The two craft came close enough to be viewed on the same screen.

On the spysat, fuel pumps toiled. Safety interlocks in the original software had been overwritten from the ground, allowing pressure to mount behind closed fuel-line valves. Other unorthodox reprogramming had retracted the heat-dumping radiator panels. Streaming sunlight, unfiltered by atmosphere, drove heat into the seemingly crippled satellite. Heat seeping into the fuel tanks raised the temperature of the contents, and the pressure of the vapors within.

The masersat pivoted toward the approaching s.p.a.cecraft. Reddening of the IR image revealed waste heat from torrents of power being routed. "Weapon charging." Kyle spoke more to unclench his teeth than in expectations of conveying information. "Something on board learns fast . . . maneuvering once didn't help, so it's preparing more active measures."

"Funny thing." Ryan's eyes gleamed. "We can learn, too."

The spysat's earthward-hanging solar panel served as an impromptu anchor, the gravity gradient holding

steady the satellite's orientation. Solar heat continued to flood in. When fuel-tank pressures exceeded a preset level, the onboard computer opened the valves.

Overpressurized fuels gushed into the att.i.tude jets' combustion chambers. No spark was

needed-monomethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide ignite on contact. In such over-spec quant.i.ties, that ignition was spectacular indeed. A fireball erupted, its IR image painfully bright. (This bang is our doing! thought Kyle. See how you like it.) The explosion turned the NRO's expensive satellite into tons of shrapnel.

IR sensors flared. Fragments blazed as they were blasted by the maser. But too many pieces were headed

toward the masersat, from too close . . .

The Krulchukor satellite twitched as the wave of debris struck. Holes gaped in the solar panels and hull.

The IR view flashed and sparkled, as metallic shards shorted out circuitry. Then the whole room flashed crimson-the catastrophic discharge inside the masersat of stored energy meant to be pumped out through the masers.

When tearing eyes could again focus, no satellites were on-screen.Kyle steadied himself against a wall. His heart pounded. The only change to the situational map was two dots removed. No alarms meant no retaliatory strikes. "The bad news is, we've confirmed the masersats have the capacity to act independently."

"The good news is, we can still, at least sometimes, out-think them."

Eighty-seven days later, a barrage of reprogrammed ballistic missiles, launched in a synchronized attack from safely submerged American boomers, overwhelmed the eleven Krulchukor satellites thought most

likely still to be functional. The other ten remained gratifyingly inert.

In condemnation of American unilateralism, sixteen nations and the European Union recalled their amba.s.sadors to Washington. Overseas corporations, bowing to public outrage, cancelled high-profile

orders for American pa.s.senger jets, oil platforms and pipelines, pharmaceuticals, and supercomputers.

The immediate human toll: another eighty thousand badly needed jobs.

As a longer-term consequence of the Second Twenty-Minute War, the s.p.a.ce control center at Cheyenne

Mountain started tracking thousands more bits of orbiting s.p.a.ce junk.

CHAPTER 33.

The helicopter thp-thp-thpped its way across the Los Padres National Forest. The heavily wooded park was lush and green, the jagged gash of the San Andreas fault unmistakable as the chopper raced over it. Spectacular scenery and engine roar alike conspired to preempt conversation. The burly, ruddy-faced pilot, in any case, wasn't terribly talkative.

Kyle peered past his reflection at the countryside sliding by beneath. The trip from Los Angeles to Vandenberg Air Force Base was, as the crow rolled the flat tire, roughly 150 miles. The view from the aptly designated scenic highway would have been superb. In a simpler world, he would have loved to have driven, Dar beside him, sharing breathtaking vistas of coastal mountains and rocky sh.o.r.e.

Of course, in a simpler world, a mission this dangerous would never have been conceived. While he yearned for the impossible, he could hope that the roads to VAFB not be clogged by misinformed protesters, nor half the world's weather disrupted by El Nino. The same climatological phenomenon that kept this forest so verdant had his wife leading a State Department delegation from Indonesian drought zones to Peruvian flood plains. The squall line barely visible to the west, far out over the Pacific, might or might not be another manifestation of El Nino. Would weather delay today's launch? Obstruction by natural causes seemed so unfair. Wasn't it enough to face the technological superiority of the Krulirim? The taciturn Air Force captain flying Kyle over the protesters pointed at something to the south. One of the Channel Islands? A ship? A noncommittal answering grunt seemed to satisfy her. It was just as well Kyle wasn't driving; the scenery had already lost his attention. He could not keep his mind off his problems.

The world's problems, Dar would have insisted, not his. The point of semantics made not a whit of difference. For five years, Kyle's had been a lonely voice, often the only voice, championing today's mission. For five years, he'd kept all doubts to himself-there were enough advocates for inaction. For five years, he'd awakened each day wondering if this were the day a growing deficit, or international hostility, or political expediency finally overwhelmed his tenacity.

And for five years after the fiery destruction of the Consensus, the flotilla of alien satellites circled overhead. Had they been a part of Clean Slate? In theory they had been neutralized . . . As the helicopter began its final descent to the VAFB airfield, Kyle again rephrased his thoughts. After five years of preparations, he was about to test theory with six people's lives.

* * * Tantalizingly just beyond humanity's reach circled three failed-in-orbit masersats. These inert satellites had gone untargeted in both Twenty-Minute Wars. The first time, that omission had reflected expediency-more obviously dangerous targets had drawn Earth's fire. By the second conflict, leaving alone these three satellites was a matter of strategic calculation.

Phase Two of Clear Skies aimed to retrieve one of those nearly intact artifacts. A s.p.a.ce shuttle could take a masersat on board- if it could climb far above its four-hundred-mile alt.i.tude limit, and if it could achieve polar orbit. Two extraordinarily big ifs. Raising the shuttle's alt.i.tude meant refueling it in orbit. Refueling meant somehow lofting large amounts of fuel into s.p.a.ce in a vessel with which the shuttle could mate. Flight-testing a large-capacity s.p.a.ce tanker could hardly be

done in secret.

Nor could the preparations be hidden for a new shuttle launch site. Populated regions north and south of Florida precluded initiating polar missions from Cape Canaveral. Another coastal location was required.

Somewhere, should the worst again happen, with ample empty ocean to its south. Someplace like Point Arguella, California-which, not coincidentally, lay within the borders of Vandenberg AFB.

All this activity by a reinvigorated American s.p.a.ce program-and involving a launch site within a military base-was anathema to the international community. In a world that believed-or, as in Russia's case, where realpolitik favored pretending to believe-that benevolent aliens had left behind orbiting guardians, renewed astronautical ambitions by the slayers of those masersats were intolerable.

But protests, worldwide boycotts, and the grinding recession notwithstanding, after five arduous years of preparation, it was finally time to execute Phase Two.

* * * When, finally, the weather held and the Navy drove a flotilla of seagoing protesters from the restricted seas off Point Arguella, when at last the first manned mission ever to launch from Vandenberg AFB rose on a bone-jarring, ear-shattering, column of fire . . . it was tremendously, awe-inspiringly, and blessedly anticlimactic. Kyle exited the ma.s.sively blast-proofed Launch Control Center as soon as it was safe, gazing southward until the last faint speck of a spark disappeared. The contrail twisted and tore as the winds along its length a.s.sailed it.

"Way to go, Endeavor!" Ryan Bauer gave Kyle a congratulatory slug in the shoulder. The general had become a fixture at s.p.a.ce Launch Complex Six (SLC-6, "Slick Six" to the locals). "I can't tell you how good that feels."

Kyle couldn't argue. But still . . . "That was the easy part."

"What is it Britt says about you? Every silver lining has a cloud."

"I should have been on board! I could have been. Plenty of payload specialists have been shuttle-trained

in two months-I could have afforded that." But the President had nixed it, for "national security" reasons. d.a.m.n it.

"What payload would you have overseen, besides a stomach full of b.u.t.terflies?"

"A head full of insight about Krulirim." A seagull fluttered to a landing by Kyle's feet. "How many of the crew have that background?"

"None-which is why you're here. Should this mission fail, we'll need more than ever what's in your head." Bauer grabbed Kyle's arm, turning him until their eyes met. "Leading isn't always done from the front. Trust me: I know what it's like to order others into battle."

"Hopefully, it won't come to battle." Kyle swallowed hard. "But there's plenty of risk even if the masersats stay dormant."

* * * The cabin cruiser bounced and shuddered, bludgeoning a path through high seas. Darlene for the umpteenth time patted her sleeve. The Dramamine patch was still on her arm, and still unequal to the task. With each wave crested, the boat and her stomach fell out from under her, to return an instant later with a bone-jarring impact. The worst of the storm, supposedly, was now pummeling Mexico.

"I said," yelled Roone Astley, the amba.s.sador to Costa Rica, "the weather is much better." It was his boat, and he stood with maddening a.s.surance on what Darlene considered a bucking deck. He motioned

to starboard. "The sky is getting lighter."

Another lurch of the boat sent her reeling. Astley caught her before she fell. The bite of breakfast she'd foolishly taken rose threateningly in her gorge. Yes, the sky was brighter, which only made more horrifying the view of the sh.o.r.eline they were paralleling. The tropical downpour whose trailing edge continued to lash the boat had stalled for three days over the narrow Pacific coastal strip. The rain- saturated mountainside had come rumbling down in two.

They were nearing one more village washed away by mudslide. Except for the occasional stone chimney, nothing but snapped tree trunks at odd angles emerged from the muck. Pounding waves had churned the encroaching mud into an enormous stain stretching hundreds of yards into the ocean.