by David Poyer
A subdued bong sounded as she hung up. “ALIS has lock-on,” Terranova announced. She never sounded upset, stressed, or even all that interested. Cheryl wished she had the petty officer’s sangfroid.
The screen jerked. The “gate,” the automatically generated hook of ALIS’s acquisition function, was represented by a pair of rapidly occulting bright green brackets. It darted in, circling a blurry contact. Slid past it, corrected, and locked on.
“We have track,” Terranova announced.
Mills said, “Very well. Manually engage.”
Cheryl sat forward, intent. The green brackets vibrated around the white dot. “Profile plot, Meteor Alfa,” Terranova announced. “ID as hostile. No IPP or intercept angle yet.”
“Good solid lock-on,” Mills murmured. “But Jesus, look at that speed.”
The callout wasn’t just incredibly high, fifteen thousand miles an hour; it also didn’t vary much from second to second. Its velocity would remain constant until it hit the atmosphere. Then it would start to burn, growing an ionization trail as its sheathing ablated. The electrically charged plume would present a huge radar blip.
But if this was an advanced weapon, a DF-41, and she was pretty sure now it was, the payload would be accompanied by decoys. She’d have to decide which to engage, based on the threat and the probability of kill, and gauge the intercept point. Once ALIS had those instructions, it could launch.
“Clear the forward deck,” she murmured. “Launch warning bell.”
Unlike earlier versions, which carried explosives and were limited to low-altitude interceptions, the wartime-developed SM-X had a steerable kinetic warhead and was designed for midphase intercept. Boosted to near space by two solid-fuel stages, its three-band infrared seeker could steer to intercept an evasively maneuvering warhead. Instead of explosives, a head-on collision added the velocity of the kill vehicle to the momentum of the incoming warhead, using the target’s own kinetic energy to blast it apart.
Unfortunately, neither the SM-X nor ALIS had been designed to counter ICBMs. The intermediate-range weapons the system was optimized against flew lower profiles at lower speeds. Intercontinental missiles flew higher, and far faster, tearing down through the atmosphere at almost five miles a second.
She tapped her fingers, evaluating the decision. Where to intercept? Midphase, or terminal? If she waited until reentry, the targets would glow more brightly, present bigger radar returns. It would be easier to sort decoys from live warheads. But that gave up her chance to refire, in case of a miss.
On the other hand, if she launched early, that would allow her Standards to climb for an exoatmospheric intercept. But in the cold of space, the incoming warheads would be harder for them to lock on to. And her interceptors would be at the outer envelope of their design parameters, nearly out of fuel, with more stringent demands on the maneuvering thrusters.
The documentation didn’t offer much guidance as to which choice was better. Savo had fired earlier mods of her antimissile weapons several times, but there were significant differences with the SM-X. In fact, though their kill probabilities were decent against slower missiles, as far as she knew no SM-X had ever been tested against an ICBM.
All this raced through her brain as she reviewed the checklist in the notebook. She needed to isolate any variables that might affect interception of a higher-velocity, higher-altitude target. “Donnie,” she muttered, “I’m thinking, hold fire until we see reentry heating.”
“Concur, Skipper. Gives us an extra thirty seconds to sort things out.”
“Um, yes. What’ve we got on this? There’s still only one, right?”
The chief said, “Yes, ma’am. Still only one. But … this is the big-league bad boy. Like the old Peacekeeper we used to deploy in silos. Eighty tons at launch. Three solid-fuel stages. Can carry eight to ten independently targeted MIRVs. And probably steerable decoys too.”
She sat back, scratching her head instead of her fingers now. These were the weapons Zhang had been threatening the U.S. with since the beginning of the war. Built secretly, and emplaced deep in the mountains of Northern China. The Dong Feng (“East Wind”)-41 was both heavier and longer-ranged than anything in the current U.S. arsenal. She told Mills to toggle back to the picture from Kyushu. But it came up still showing no callouts for follow-on launches.
“He’s firing one missile?” she murmured to Mills.
“Well, makes sense, sort of.”
“How so?”
The TAO shrugged. “Another warning. If he figures we’re going to hit the mainland again, or maybe invade Taiwan?”
“But a thermonuclear, on U.S. soil? That’s a major escalation.”
“If he figures we won’t hit back, sure. And we haven’t yet. So … why not?”
She huffed, and twisted in her chair. Think all that out later. Right now Death was bearing down on her, and a hell of a lot of other people, at five miles a second. “Terror, got an IPP yet? I need one. Yesterday, if possible.” They wouldn’t get an intercept angle until they had the impact point prediction, but she was hoping for no more than 5 degrees. That would make the “basket”—the imaginary circle in space their interceptor had to go through to hit its target—as wide as possible. “And a regional view too. We can’t see shit in ALIS mode.”
Hawaii bloomed on the left screen. A fourteen-hundred-mile scimitar, sweeping up in a counterclockwise arc from the Big Island to Kauai. Beyond that, the emptiness of the central Pacific stretched away toward Asia. “Matt, where are we pulling that picture from? It isn’t Japan.”
“It’s a fusion. From the Army radar site up in the hills, the AN/TPY-2 at Hickam, and whatever MOUSE satellite’s in range,” he muttered. “Not gonna be great detail. But it should pop a flare on anything else major going on out there. Like an invasion, or an air strike.”
She sighed. Doubtful that the enemy had enough remaining long-range forces for invasion. What worried her most was those “eight to ten” maneuverable warheads the thing was supposed to carry. If all ten were thermonuclear, cloned from the U.S. W87 … the plans for which the Chinese had stolen from Los Alamos … then each would be about half a megaton.
She flipped through a reference notebook and interpolated. Ships were designed to accept a certain level of blast overpressure, but not an infinite amount. The table said a half-megaton air burst would wreck any ship within two kilometers of ground zero.
So where were they targeted? “I need intercept angles and IPP, Terror!” she said, more urgently. Once she flipped that Launch Enable switch, the weapons would run through a built-in system test, match parameters with the computer, and fire at the optimal moment.
From there on, it was out of her hands.
“Intercept angle, four point two degrees,” Terranova murmured, at the same time Wenck said, “Captain, look.”
She blinked at the screen. The single blip on the center display had separated into two, one larger, the other smaller. As she frowned, another smaller contact separated from the main body.
The chief called, “That’s the post-boost vehicle system. The ‘bus,’ they call it. It’s dropping off the reentry vehicles.”
“Can you distinguish decoys from warheads?”
“Can try … stand by.” Seconds dragged, during which yet a third contact fissioned off the bus. The chief lifted his voice again. “No … I can’t really tell. Thought if there was a weight difference, we could identify the lighter vehicles by the velocity differential as they hit atmosphere. But they’re all flying pretty much the same profile. If we could do some kind of neutron emission test…”
“But we can’t,” Mills said tightly, and Cheryl glanced at him, surprised. This was the first time she’d seen any sign of stress from the blond TAO.
Terror said, “No, sir.”
“We’ve only got six rounds. If they throw ten targets at us—”
“Gonna miss some. Yep.” Wenck nodded vigorously. “But we could get lucky. Pick the ones that’re live.”<
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Cheryl thought the odds were against it, but no point in saying so. Instead, she keyed the 1MC. “All nonessential hands to citadel. I say again, all nonessential hands to the citadel, on the double,” echoed in the passageway.
“That doesn’t mean us,” she added, to their inquiring looks. “We’ll fire, then duck and cover. Donnie, I need to know what these vehicles are doing.”
Wenck tapped keys, and the rightmost display, from Savo’s own radar, changed. Now a whole small constellation of contacts was burning down through the high thin air of the troposphere, each growing a cometlike ball of ionized air. “I’m seeing six contacts now. That pulsation on the bus means it’s rotating. Dispensing one vehicle with each revolution. That imparts an outward velocity vector. I’m not seeing independent maneuvering from the smaller contacts.”
Cheryl forced herself to concentrate, though her nails itched to dig holes in the desk. A seventh contact separated from the slowly revolving main body. Now she could make out a horizontal spread, left to right, with the bus in the center. “Anyone else see a pattern here?” she breathed.
Mills said, “I’m gonna guess the first ones it shits out are the decoys. That way we waste our rounds on them, and the real warheads get through.”
“Those are the ones it dispensed to the left of the main body. Donnie, Terror, what’s your take?”
Wenck toggled the screen to show the IPPs ALIS was calculating. They overlay Oahu from north to south, with two centered on Pearl Harbor.
Cheryl frowned. “Why are there six IPPs, when we have seven radar contacts?”
Mills said, “The bus will break up as it hits atmosphere. They wouldn’t leave a live warhead in it. Those have to be oriented base down to reenter.”
That made sense. “Okay, so we’re dealing with six reentry bodies. We can’t tell which are decoys and which aren’t. We have six Standard Xs. How do we allocate?”
“There’s another,” Terranova said in a quiet voice. “Number eight separating, to the right … and something just flew off the bus.… It’s decaying.”
On the rightmost screen, the nimbus of the largest contact seethed and boiled. Bits tumbled off, and the corona pulsated more and more swiftly.
It suddenly disintegrated into hundreds of small glowing bits of debris, artificial meteors, incandescing and then flashing into plasma as they hit atmosphere. Leaving only the seven smaller contacts, more compact, glowing more and more fiercely as they burned downward through the steadily thickening air.
Mills said, “I’m seeing something out to the west. Not sure what it is yet.”
Cheryl squinted up at the left-hand screen, the one with the fused display. Two hundred miles out. Small contacts. “What are they?”
“Not sure yet. Speed’s fifty knots. Too fast for surface ships. But too slow for aircraft.”
“IFF?”
“No identification, and EW reports no emissions.”
Cheryl dismissed them for the moment, reconcentrating on the AOUs. The predicted impact areas were ovals half a mile across. She scratched viciously between her fingers, ignoring the bloody furrows her nails left. Seven incomers. But only six missiles to take them with.
Seven quivering ovals. Two were centered more or less on the naval base, and two more over Hickam Field, the Air Force installation south of where Savo lay pierside. The Air Force had pulled most of its bombers out months ago. She hoped any personnel who remained had shelters. Another oval vibrated to the north, over Kunia, up in the hills. Probably earmarked for the tracking radar that was giving her the wide-angle view to the west.
But it was the last two, aimed some distance east of the harbor, that made her blood run cold.
Those IPPs vibrated above Honolulu, spaced three miles apart down the coast. Assuming they were thermonuclear, the blast areas would cover most of the city.
She swallowed, disbelieving once more. Could the Chinese really intend this as a countervalue strike? To wipe out tens of thousands, no, hundreds of thousands, of civilian noncombatants?
Unless, of course, the reentry bodies aimed at the city were the decoys, and the ones targeted against military installations the live warheads.
Should she assume they were? And take under fire only the five aimed at the harbor and the bases?
She froze in her seat, still as stone. Unable to breathe. Or speak.
Yet she had to decide.
She had to decide now.
But even as she reached for the switch, she knew what her decision had to be.
She’d studied under the best. Under Daniel V. Lenson. And he’d taught her two things. Two, above all.
A commander in battle always worked with inadequate information. Clues, fragmentary reports, undependable intel, guesses as to enemy vulnerabilities and intent. The CO’s duty was to make the best estimate possible, as coolly and rationally as possible … then act, boldly and without hesitation.
And second, when you faced that ultimate decision, you put yourself aside. Not just your own ego, or sense of fitness. Not even just your own career.
In the military, you had to substitute other priorities: the mission. Your crew.
Just as he had, over and over. Charging forward in the Taiwan Strait. Retiring in the face of torpedo attack, when it might be taken for cowardice. Protecting the carrier, when he’d directed her to emulate it, attracting the weapons that had wrecked their ship.
“The contacts to the west,” Mills reported. “Ten of ’em now. EW identifies as Zubr-class hovercraft. They have air cover. Probably UAVs they launched themselves.”
Cheryl frowned. Hovercraft? She studied the leftmost screen, then called up a tool. The system-generated track led to the Pearl Harbor entrance.
“An invasion force?” Mills said.
“Pfft. With ten units? More likely a raid. What do those things carry?”
The keyboard rattled. “Four tanks. Up to a dozen AFVs. Plus up to four hundred troops each. I’m passing that to Hickam now.”
She was impressed despite her fear. Before the war, the Chinese had invested heavily in hovercraft, surface effect ships. But usually these were short-ranged, due to high fuel consumption. Somehow Admiral Lianfeng had managed either to extend their range, or to refuel them en route. From submarines, perhaps.
No matter how, it was an amazing achievement. A rabbit punch back at America, for the Allied raids on the Chinese homeland. Unfortunately for those aboard the craft, it was also a major overreach. She said slowly, “So it’s not just a one-missile strike. But they’re going to lose those troops.”
The TAO said, “Probably. Yeah. Tactically, a long shot. Maybe he figured, use ’em or lose ’em. But if they can get ashore, four thousand troops with light armor could do a lot of damage. Like I said, I passed them to the Air Force. But I can take with our SM-2s, antisurface mode, when they get in range?”
“Okay, but first things first.” The ALIS feed was flicking from contact to contact, switching among the incoming reentry bodies. The system could track and execute, but it couldn’t make the ultimate decisions. She muttered to Mills, “TAO, your opinion?”
“Doctrine says self-defense comes first. Second, we defend military assets. Third, populated areas.”
She felt as if they were onstage, in a play, and nearing the dramatic climax. But these were probably the last few seconds any of them would live. “So?”
“As far as self-defense … Once we fire, we’re off the board no matter what happens. And Pearl, the air base…”
“They’re military assets,” she reminded him gently.
“Yeah, but.” He swallowed, not meeting her eyes. “TAO recommends … we take out the ones aimed at the city. Two-round salvo each.”
“That leaves one round each on the two aimed for us.” But she nodded nonetheless. Doctrine, versus letting a hundred thousand civilians die? No contest. She glanced at the operators. “Terror, Donnie. Concur?”
“Shoo-eh, whatever,” Terranova said softly, as if it didn�
��t really matter to her.
“Same here, Skip,” Wenck said.
Back to the screen. The jellyfish ovals were contracting to points. The last few items on the checklist, then. “Wind direction, speed, five knots from the southwest.”
The memory of a sea breeze thrashing the nodding palms. Creamy sand crunching between her bare toes.
“Check.”
“Close vent dampers. Pass Circle William throughout the ship. Launch warning bell forward … roll FIS to green.”
A thousand drills, and then a world war.
Eddie’s arms around her. For the last time.
She fitted the key and twisted it. “You have permission to engage. Shift fire gate selection. Launchers into operate mode. Set up to take Meteor Delta, two-round salvo. Next salvo, Meteor Echo, two-round salvo. Meteor Bravo, one-round salvo. Meteor Charlie, one-round salvo. Total six rounds. Then fire out all the SM-2s on the Zubrs. Empty the magazines.”
“Warning alarm forward. Deselect safeties and interlocks. Stand by to fire. On CO’s command.”
On CO’s command.
She. Cheryl. The last commanding officer of USS Savo Island.
She flicked up the red metal cover over the Fire Auth switch. Deep in its integrated circuits, the ship’s artificial mind was running ranges, speeds, probabilities, recalculating everything ten times a second. When she removed the last logic barrier, the computers would fire at the instant P-sub-K peaked.
“Released,” she muttered, and flicked the switch over. And looked up to face the others, staring at her.
“Now get the hell out of here,” she barked.
* * *
THEY’D barely reached the mess decks when the bellow of departing boosters shook the ship. She didn’t pause, just kept running. Reaching a ladder, she vaulted down it after Wenck, braking with her hands on the rails, slamming her boots into steel grating at the bottom. Terranova was right behind her, Mills bringing up the rear. A second roar and rattle, more distant, with thick steel between them and the igniting booster.
She wished there was a lot more of it. Metal would boil away like water in the unimaginable heat of a nuclear detonation.