The chain stayed at the rim of the coin but started making a slow crawl following the rim.
"They're moving Home," Heather stated the obvious, "but turning us too."
April went back to her com and clicked just a few keys. "I asked him why."
"Ahhh, makes sense," she said shortly. "They are slowing spin and putting us right in front of the Rock, long axis on the orbital path. If anyone shoots at us in a catch up orbit, the easiest shot to plot, it will be in the way."
"You'd think they would tell folks," Heather said, a little miffed.
"I'm sure they told Traffic Control and all the people in suits and scooters," Happy said. "I've had them adjust orbit when I was outside working and they usually give you an hour notice and advice you not to be in the middle of something like aligning a big beam. It's Mitsubishi's habitat. They can move it around if they want to."
"Why reduce spin?" Gunny asked. "You're just as big a target spinning or not."
"If we slow it down then there is less internal stress on everything. Less chance it'll break up if a major spoke is busted or a bearing damaged," Happy explained. "They won't stop it entirely. You would have problems with things like water that's not in sealed vessels. There are lots of folks who have no experience with zero G and would totally freak out. I can just see everything in bins and closets floating free."
Everybody in the room looked to their pad as they all dinged as well as the desk com.
Emergency Notice: Mitsubishi Administration. As a safety precaution maintenance has been instructed to temporarily reduce spin to moderate structural issues if M3 experiences hostile action. We do not anticipate this being a long term change. There should be no need to arrange heavier sleeping accommodations for minors for just a few days time. Spin will be reduced, not eliminated, so no changes in stowage or fluid storage should be needed. Your perceived weight will be reduced by a factor of about half over the next three hours. We encourage you to be cautious moving about if you are not used to dealing with other levels on a regular basis. When spin is restored it will be just as gradually so you need not anticipate any sudden increase.
If it has been some time since your annual inspection we suggest you make sure your place of work or residence has sufficient emergency pressure suits for the number of people present. Distributing them to be near each work station or sleeping area can save valuable time in the event they are needed. If you move about well away from your emergency suit for your work or commercial activity, it would be wise to take your emergency suit with you. The carrier for the suits have a handle and loops on which a shoulder strap can be attached.
Notice will be given when we start the process to bring spin back to normal.
Thank You, M3 Physical Structure Management
"Local calls Earth Control when we move a ship out of the control area. I wonder if they call when they move the entire habitat?" April wondered.
"It's only a couple kilometers. I doubt if they say anything. They are after all moving the entire control area," her grandpa allowed. "To announce it might be seen as provocative."
"Everything is provocative to these creeps," Jeff complained. "But they can do piracy and murder and it's supposed to be 'sophisticated' to expect sovereign states to act that way."
"I'm on your side," Happy reminded him. "Mitsubishi may not want to provoke them, but I have no problem with you dropping the hammer on the bastards."
"The armed merchant Silly Willy informs me to my private com that there is a shuttle reentry visible below them crossing Greece that looks to be on a vector for the Jiuquan facility," Louis told them. "They estimate a twenty to twenty-five minute touch down."
"We owe them big and I won't forget," Jeff said furiously typing commands. "I want to see them actually roll this shuttle into the security perimeter before I believe it has the Rascal aboard. If we hit the wrong one and they land the real one on some expedient military air base we may never know. I'm stacking everything up to go or no go in forty minutes. If I can't tell by then it will be another forty minutes to target them with a smaller group of weapons. I really don't want to do that."
"That's cutting it fine. Why didn't you leave yourself another ten minutes. They can't transfer the Rascal or refuel the shuttle to lift again in a day, much less ten minutes," Louis asked.
"Yes, but if they have cut some of the compensators loose they could pull a couple jets up and stuff them in those planes and disperse them to open and study at their leisure. How far can a fast plane climb out and go in twenty minutes?" Jeff asked.
"Probably too far," Louis admitted. They waited tense with anticipation.
"Look at this." He expanded the screen to a view about forty miles across and then zoomed in and circled a tiny white dart just on the edge. "They are on faster approach than normal. That shuttle is heavy. It's on a glide path like a brick. They are going to touch down at eighteen minutes, not twenty-five. That gives you a few minutes."
The watched the shuttle a couple minutes and then Louis zoomed back to the end of the runway and the security area. There was a bustle of activity, some of the light armor driving out to the end of the runway and taking up station by the taxi-way. Two tow tractors took up position each on a taxiway entry a couple kilometers from the runway end.
The shuttle landed long. They didn't see a puff of tire smoke until it was well into the area of black tire streaks. The chute popped quickly and the far tow tractor turned onto the edge of the runway and accelerated. The shuttle had almost caught up to the tractor when it dropped the chute and coasted. The tractor matched speed and slid in from the side. They hooked the front landing gear on the roll and took control of the spacecraft without a hitch, slick as snatching a tossed beer. They swung left, taking the shuttle gear on that side near the edge of the pavement and did a wide arching turn into a taxiway connector to their right.
The four armored vehicles waiting on the dirt kept their distance, but pulled away and paced the shuttle onto the tarmac. They couldn't see the hanger door from their angle but the tug barely slowed at all as it approach the secure hanger and was still slowing when the tail of the shuttle disappeared from their view under the roof. The armor peeled off and took up station again.
"My goodness, I never saw a tug rush into a shelter that fast. I bet it was a close thing getting it stopped before the shuttle squashed them against the far wall," Happy said.
"Eighteen minutes to touch down and another seven minutes to get hooked and towed out of sight. They certainly are eager to hide that one, Anybody see anything, anything at all, that would make you doubt the Rascal is in her hold?" Jeff asked.
"No way," Louis objected. "They don't have the assets to load a shuttle up with dead weight and go through this elaborate of a theatre to deceive us."
"Nines to four places that is it," Happy agreed. "They were lucky to even have another vessel of this class after they lost one to the Happy Lewis last year, another to the USNA near M3 and the crew of the Rascal managed to shoot the crap out of the one that snatched them. I can't believe they had an extra hanging around in orbit not just as a back-up but to play shell games for us."
"We are golden then," Jeff said frowning. He extended a hand and hesitating, took a deep breath and let it out. The single tap of the key seemed anticlimactic.
Chapter 13
In LEO a group of forty mini-rods spread out and braked. They were each about a quarter of the mass of the rods the militia used to defend April in Hawaii. They were however cheaper and they made just as menacing a target plunging through the atmosphere toward you at twenty-seven thousand kilometers per hour. They cost the ballistic defense just as expensive a missile to intercept, but they cost a third to make.
They had a much smaller radius of effective destruction, but they were intended to draw fire more than damage targets. They were allowed to select their own targets within the rough circle of the base. Their target imaging was fairly crude. A few picked actual antiballistic batteries, some just
large buildings. A couple saw the outline of an aircraft and one lucky rod picked the actual golf-ball shape of a radome. Three failed to lock on a high value target far enough out and defaulted to the runway itself. None happened to aim within a hundred meters of the hanger.
The base defense hit a few of them out at almost a hundred kilometers. 'Hitting' a solid iron bar coming on endwise with the cross section of an orange and going over 7 kilometers a second doesn't mean much. In the target rich environment of the base they were as likely to deflect a rod into a more important target as they were to save another.
The base battle management software tried to see a pattern to the attack but there wasn't one. The targeting was near random given the crude software and limited cameras on the rods. What did matter was almost every launcher on the base ended up releasing a missile by the time the first wave impacted.
The second wave had eighty mini-rods and they were not allowed to pick their own targets. They were programmed in flight to hit the radar and anti-missile launch sites observed and did so with the added detail of being commanded to criss cross each other in a snarled mass of terminal maneuvers that served no purpose but to be confusing. The descending column of glowing heat shields spiraling and weaving back and forth and trailing ablated material as they came down looked like some bizarre braid of fire. Two actually veered into each other against all odds.
All eighty hit within a tenth of a second of each other and put as much energy on the ground as a small tactical nuke. Everything not bolted down bounced off the ground or floor. Each one delivered the energy of a World War Two Blockbuster and they clustered on the base perimeter where the defenses were located.
Six launchers remained active, but just behind the second group of rods a cluster of three recently prepared weapons were two seconds behind. They had Singh accumulators packed behind a large canister of metallic calcium. Cesium or sodium would have been better but calcium was the only metal being separated from the Rock in sufficient quantity that so far had no significant market so it was cheap. There was talk of using it for structural elements and electrical wiring, but it had no real engineering data or history since it was useless in an Earth atmosphere. They fail safe detonated when the few remaining interceptors released approached them just inside eighteen kilometers altitude. The charges were respectable, ten kilotons each. But at that altitude they wouldn't do any damage on the ground.
What they did do was blast a sheet of vaporized metal across the sky that retained much of its downward motion in its expansion. The ionized mass blocked both radar and infrared and didn't start dissipating much until it was below ten kilometers.
The critical weapon, his lone reentry sled with the Singh fusion warhead, did not come through this ceiling shielding it to show on targeting radar until it was eight kilometers high. It had twenty decoy rods to provide alternate targets slightly ahead of it, but it was falling behind as it had more aerodynamic drag and a slightly different thermal signature. The lack of sophisticated decoys didn't matter by then.
It would have impacted the ground from when it became visible on radar in slightly more than a second, but it was fused to detonate at a kilometer if not intercepted. Since it was aimed at the center of the base the two launchers that managed to get a lock and compute a shot at it had to shoot almost horizontally from the base perimeter.
That was not how the system was designed to operate. They launched at a high angle turned and tried to beat the target to an interception point high enough to mitigate damage from their own detonation. It was too late. The weapon made it all the way to target and detonated 973 meters up and offset about sixty meters from the targeted hanger.
The fireball would have completely vaporized the Rascal and its secrets if it had yielded ten percent of its estimated energy. The crater would have been perhaps fifty meters deep and a couple hundred meters across depending on the bedrock.
Instead the fireball blacked the screen out completely and Louis zoomed the camera back to try to see the scale of it from a higher apparent vantage point. He kept expanding the view until at a height equivalent of a two hundred kilometers he finally had the glowing fireball centered in a screen that could handle the illumination. The fireball itself was huge and well off the ground by then. It was impossible to gauge what had happened underneath it.
The ground wave was a visible ripple in the land rolling away from the base as a ring of dust and soil thrown into the air. They barely backed up the view enough in time to see it roll through Jiuquan. A city of a million and a half people vanished in half a second. The ripple in the earth lifted buildings, shattering their foundations and they crumpled from their weight as they dropped back. The air wave was slower, but lifted so much debris the land was obscured underneath. There was little undamaged for it to push over as it caught up to the prompt effects.
When the rising fireball hit the cold rarified air of the upper atmosphere it spread out in a classic mushroom cloud cutting off their view.
"Oops." Jeff said in a small voice.
Everyone else sat in stunned silence. Finally April's com dinged and she answered it. "Yeah, Jeff did hit the launch center. We have video of it I'll show you. I don't think he expected quite that much yield. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure they will, at least we don't have to call them and tell them about it do we? Yeah I'll tell him," she promised.
"Jon points out the ground wave from that is going to rattle Beijing pretty hard in about ten minutes. He says the guys on the Rock got a good look at it with millimeter radar before it dropped across the far horizon and the crater is about six kilometers across and most of a kilometer deep from ground level, maybe a little deeper from the ridge thrown up."
"Got any idea what kind of yield it would need to do that?" Happy asked.
"Roughly, between two hundred and three hundred megaton I'd say. I guess the fusion went well into heavier elements. My mum thought that might happen." He got a faraway look and started nodding to himself. "I can see now how you could make it more efficient with less fuel and if you added a sort of layered tube mirror arrangement beside the fuel," he said forming it in the air with his hands, "I can see being able to focus a tremendously powerful x-ray beam for ship to ship engagements without having a laser media."
Gunny looked at him. "I know you can't put the genie back in the bottle, but when you start talking like that I get the strongest urge to smother you before you invent something else. I think that was quite efficient enough. You scare me, can you understand that?"
"And yet," Happy said raising an index finger to draw Gunny's attention, "it really doesn't matter if he scared you." He hoped Gunny hadn't seen April straighten her leg and clear her left arm from being in the way of drawing her pistol. They were both very fast but he wasn't sure who was faster. He did know she'd never let Jeff be harmed. Neither would he, if he could do anything about it. "What matters is if the Chinese are smart enough to be scared."
"Do you really think they will take a chance on having another of those dropped on them?"
"You can rarely go wrong betting on human stupidity," Happy said.
"Well if they are stupid enough to risk eating another one of those, then to hell with them. They deserve it if they haven't learned to leave Home and the Singhs alone," Gunny said.
Happy relaxed marginally. He was pretty sure Gunny didn't intend any harm to Jeff. The more he thought about the sort of man Gunny was, if he had meant any harm he'd have never said anything, he'd have just acted.
Jeff looked at them, just as thoroughly horrified as they were, but he turned and started putting instructions into the computer.
"What are you doing Jeff? Do you need me to do something?" Louis asked.
"I'm hoping Happy is wrong, but I am betting on human stupidity. I have enough assets in orbit for one more strike against a defended land target. I'm stacking the rods and a big weapon up to overwhelm a defended target again. I'm not a monster, I honestly hope I don't need to, but nothing has changed. If they
don't yield and leave us alone I'm going to hit them again harder. I have to or they are going to keep coming at us."
"Let's try to find out if they'll back off before you drop this second group," Happy counseled. "The Rascal is gone. You achieved your primary objective. You still have your secrets and if anybody wanted vengeance for our crew I think the books are more than balanced on that score. You have the com code for their army traffic control. Use that and ask to be kicked up the line to their national command level authorities."
"I'll do that, but I'm putting it on a dead man switch," he said, typing in commands. "If I don't tell it to hold every ten minutes it activates. April, will you call Jon again. He's as close to a spokesman for Home as any of the Earthies would recognize. He's been spox for the Assembly before. See if he has any contacts down there to talk to the Chinese and persuade them to stand down. Tell him what the situation is here with a fail-safe launch set up and whatever else you think it's important for him to know. I'm going to contact that army control center again and see if I can talk any sense to them. Heather will you try to find out just how big a wheel that fellow we talked to is in their hierarchy? I want to know if he can really speak for the nation."
Jeff tried to call the address the com had retained for the Army traffic control center. It refused a connection for his address. He called the CAAC again and was politely told there was nothing else they could do and it was not their direct concern if their military declined a connection. He did the only thing that came to mind and expressed his intent to them framed as a traffic warning. He took a long deep breath and tried to detach himself, speaking carefully trying for as neutral an expression and voice as he could under the circumstances.
"I had a problem with some behavior from your military about private property that I was unable to resolve. I realize that is not your concern or anything requiring your judgment as air traffic controllers. That is however the reason the Jiuquan launch facility was converted to a large smoking crater. I'm sure you must be aware the space facility is – gone?"
April 3: The Middle of Nowhere Page 14