April

by Mackey Chandler

  "These threats to our free travel and trade are unacceptable and constitute an act of war. Contrary to the picture painted by the USNA Secretary of State this morning, our statement of independence was voted on and expresses the will of the people of Home in assembly, with their votes attached herein as a footnote. We doubt the majority of the people of North America, would have voted to declare a state of war with the people of Home. We are sure they will never be given opportunity to vote on the issue. So, if the experience of war is forced upon them by their leaders, we can only hope they express their displeasure, at war being waged in their name by executive decree."

  "We, the people of Home, do declare a state of war exists between the people of North America and the people of Home. We announce a counter declaration. We deny space to the United States of North America. No vessel may lift to orbit freely from the North American Continent. No military base or strategic resource which supports space travel, is exempt from our retribution. No facility for the production of spacecraft, from the firm which makes the smallest bolt, to the final assembly shed is exempt."

  "No vessel may cross the oceans which separate the North American Continent from the civilized world, if we should choose to intercept it. No civilian aircraft of any nation may touch down on the North American continent, without being subject to destruction while there. No military aircraft may leave the Continent, without being subject to destruction in flight. No military base or vessel of North America is free from possible attack from this moment, wherever they are in the world. No governmental office, embassy, consulate, or official agency is exempt."

  "We also follow another old custom. As you intend to harm us economically, we are issuing letters of marque and reprisal, to the merchant vessels which act as our militia, so they may seize prizes and regain some of the loss the blockade causes them."

  "You have chosen war. When you sue for peace, we will tell you our terms."

  "We plead with the other nations of earth not to place their citizens, or their treasure, in harm's way between us in our dispute. Our fight is not with you, unless you seek it as the government of North America has decided to do. If others act as allies against us, we shall expand our formal declaration of war to encompass them."

  * * *

  "I want these vermin wiped from the heavens." President Hadley screamed. "You have missiles. How long will it take to reprogram them for orbital interception? I want them blown from the sky."

  "Peter, get hold of yourself man." The Secretary of Defense yelled at him. "The Japanese have a huge investment in this habitat. The damage using nuclear weapons on a civilian target would do with our own people, is nothing compared to how it would alienate us with our allies. There are very few things you could do which would be political suicide, but this is one of them. The damage a nuclear explosion in near Earth orbit would do on top of our lost satellites would be devastating, even worse if it happened over the territory of another nation. You might as well explode one right on their territory, as overhead for all the damage the EMP would do."

  "They have to be punished," Hadley snarled through clutched teeth.

  "Yes they do," he agreed, reasonably. "But it must be measured."

  * * *

  The Happy Lewis was already departed from Home and they were hurrying to stock the last consumables on board, so the Home Boy could join her soon in a lower orbit. They had targeting lists, if communication broke down with Home. The Singh projectors on Home would fire on Earth targets which were easier to locate and fixed, unless they were needed for defense. The two spaceships would also seek smaller targets, like aircraft and ships which were mobile and had to be identified by sight.

  They assumed different orbital inclinations to sweep different areas. As they made a small adjusting burn to finalize their orbit, there was tension as they approached the start of their first run. No one had ever fired this weapon in anger before and they were going to be the first. No matter if they lost or won, it would be a footnote in the history books. April wondered if the first person to drop a bomb out of an airplane, felt the weight of what he was starting? Easy and April were pilot and copilot again, with one of Dave's men named Edwards. He went by it alone, without using his given name and he and Happy were the alternate crew.

  They knew they would need to trade off shifts, as North America was what is sometimes called a target rich environment. They were crossing the Pacific on a North Easterly angle. There was supposed to be an aircraft carrier group somewhere west of Hawaii. It might not fall within the sweep of their radar or sight this pass. April brought the targeting list up on her computer, with GPS coordinates. The first target if they didn't see the ships, was Kwajalein, with a ballistic missile interception unit and a huge radar to track them. They'd wreck the radar for sure and then pick targets by sight, which might support it.

  As they crossed more mostly empty ocean, belly up, looking down on the Pacific through their forward ports, they used the telescopes to examine some of the ships below. April had never been fascinated with boats and some of what she saw was difficult to understand looking straight down on them. It was a view very different from the close side views shown on the web or books. Even the pics in Jane's were usually from the side. When they were approaching three hundred kilometers out from the island, April instructed the computer to aim at coordinates, the sat photos showed as the radar antenna. The boards in front of them indicated it was radiating a tremendously powerful beam of microwaves. She wondered if they could paint an echo off them at this range, nose on. The theoretical horizon was almost nine hundred kilometers out and depressed close to eight degrees at this altitude, but the view through so much polluted air was so hazy, it was hard to even tell land from water. Not only were details obscured, but at the horizon air and water meet in a steely glare, with no distinct line. The view at three hundred kilometers was still murky, but the antenna was so big it was a slight pimple, right in the cross hairs where it was supposed to be.

  "Do I have your permission to commence fire?" April asked Easy.

  "That's what we're here for. Fire away," he casually ordered, without ceremony.

  April activated the computer. At this range the limits of accuracy in the mounts of the machine and small random motions between corrections of the autopilot, would spread their shots around the target enough. Singh's machine started punching holes through the radar and its supports, at the rate of ten every second. As they got closer and the view got clearer, she shifted the aim point to the base area. After it had absorbed five or six hundred hits, there was an abrupt collapse and one side of the flat array folded in, leaning heavily to the side.

  April took the projector off automatic and manually swung it to the nearest building to the antenna and let the projector punch a few score holes through it. A quick look around saw several huge dark military transport aircraft beside a runway and they were close enough to overhead now she could walk the aim point across them, on a line through the wings. It was awfully silly of them to park them up in a line, so fire could be walked straight across them.

  The second one she was working across, startled her by disappearing in a ball of orange flame. She managed to punch across a third, before the expanding fire and smoke cut off her view. She looked around quickly for something else, as the island rapidly slide away from under them. There was some sort of raised mound with a notch cut in to a doorway and she had only punched two or three holes through it, when it disappeared in a white hot flash and she could see the circle of a shockwave expanding from it carrying debris. There had been a couple more, but the dust and smoke from the first one hid it.

  "I think you found their ammo dump, or the missile storage," Easy guessed.

  "There were several of those mounds with ramps which go down in them, but once the first one blows up you can't see the others," she complained.

  "Next time you have multiple targets, put it on the screen and designate then with your cursor and tell the computer to work throu
gh them by coordinates. Then if they are covered by smoke, it will continue to track the locations you picked and fire on them."

  "It won't just fire at the camera aim point?"

  "No, Heather explained the software to me, although we didn't have time to practice. You pull down the menu and pick coordinates and it translates the screen point to a real location and remembers what you were looking at. Those are called bunkers. If you see any more at the Alaskan radars we're coming up on try it. Tell it to put ten punches in each one I'd say, from how easily the first one blew."

  Waiting for the next target to come up, April was sad thinking about the people she had just fired on and full of anxious questions. Did they know or care what their government was doing to April and her people? Would they stop it if they could, or did they assume whatever their leaders said was right and true? Did they think April's side bloodthirsty monsters, or did they see through the propaganda? How many times would April have to do this, to make them yield? She was at best a reluctant warrior.

  The Alaskan radars were too far out on the horizon on her right as they passed, to see anything as low and small as the bunkers, but there was a group of squat cylinders of some sort. They had to be pretty big. And after the computer had worked on the big radar arrays, she punched a few holes through the cylinders and was rewarded with a smoky fire.

  "Must have been fuel storage," Easy decided. "They still use more petroleum fuel than hydrogen or alcohol for small aircraft and other transport up in the arctic."

  As they were going down across the Atlantic, a satellite on a converging orbit slightly above them was emitting a powerful radar down at the ocean. "Chances are it is a USNA sat. It's not cataloged," Easy said. "Tell the computer to display what is within ten degrees in line behind it and let it rip at it. Who knows but what it can look up as well as down? We might get lucky. Cut it off, if anything starts to line up behind we don't want to shoot."

  The machine worked away aiming bolt after bolt at the satellite. It actually had passed as close as it would get from them, at about six hundred kilometers and was pulling away, when it suddenly went silent. April hoped it was USNA but there was no real way to know. By the time they were back over the Pacific, April and Happy were tired and happy to switch with their relief team. She had never thought combat could be so drawn out and tiresome.

  Easy got them coffee and they stretched and closed their eyes and listened to the chatter of their relief as they made their first run. They mostly aimed at the roofs of hangers and assembly buildings, at Edwards, Vandenberg and Groom Lake and had no idea what they were shooting at, except once Happy took it off computer control and shot down a huge triangular aircraft of some sort, which tried to get away before their pass. It was already at Mach 3 and climbing rapidly when Happy caught it. It didn't blow up or burn at all, but it disintegrated across the desert in black shards when it went down.

  Home informed them their sister ship, had taken out the Seattle Boeing buildings on their first pass and would get Kansas City Boeing on their third pass. They had Cheyenne Mountain Space Command on their next pass, with both projectors on Home aiding them and two passes later they would get Elgin and the Cape. Several times they had a airbase or airport in sight and any plane sitting on the ground was a fair target. Home found the carrier group they had missed on their first pass, but all they could do at their orbital altitude with a plain telescope, was aim at the middle of the big carrier deck and not touch the escorts. They reported the escorts would be easier to find later though, by all the smoke from the carrier.

  The NA base in Qatar had an abundance of aircraft on the ground they left burning and another carrier group in the Indian Ocean received their attention. They were low enough to see the escorts and pounded a couple ships with huge flat sided radar arrays, that Easy was concerned might be able to deploy sat killers. There was a low strange ship unlike any they had seen so far and it was given such a heavy dose of holes it went down as they watched. Heather came back to them on it, next time they came around within sight of Home and informed them she thought it was a submersible aircraft carrier, caught trading aircraft with the conventional carrier.

  If so it was a very valuable target to hit. Jane's thought there were only three of them and not only was Heather on a first name basis with an investigative editor there now, she had also sold the pix to Jane's for a nice price. After all the spacecraft assembly hangers and manufacturers they counted worthy were reduced rubble, they debated hitting the half dozen private space carriers which could lift to orbit. In the end they decided they couldn't carry enough troops or armament to matter, in any military way. It was hard to hit anyone they regarded with an affinity, as a fellow spacer.

  After the known ballistic missile interceptors, they worked on known nuclear weapons assembly and storage sites. The pollution from busting those labs open was going to be rough. There were a few aircraft carriers still missing, but they'd find them in time. It was a big planet, but a carrier was too big to hide. A couple of them might have run to the high latitudes to hide and it would take a polar orbit to find them.

  The submarine bases got some attention, as they were supposed to have anti sat systems on some attack subs. They did a thorough job on several USNA embassies across Europe and the Middle East. Embassies were a priority on Heather's list. She only included the ones she had verified for location, by calling and asking directions to their street address. She was glad she had done so, as the embassy in Pakistan had moved and the online map data was wrong. She would have punched up the wrong building, which was the Australian embassy now.

  A full day into it, both crews were tired and they were down to destroying particular shops which produced important aerospace components. North America could no longer produce laser gyroscopes, or bucky tube filaments. The specialty shop which constructed the exotic tires for space planes no longer existed. It was sometimes as easy as looking up the brag articles up in the aerospace trade journals, punching the address in a street atlas and loading the coordinates in the targeting computer. They agreed the Home Boy would put in for a day's rest and then the Happy Lewis, then they would alternate two days out and two days in. They could not take a chance on both being at Home at the same time, where they might both be destroyed.

  The USNA had demanded help from every defense association to which they belonged. They demanded help from the Israeli's and the English, due to their so called special relationships, although support from the Americans had waned to both countries in recent years. Nobody seemed eager to jump into a fight which was a great unknown. The fact the USNA was yelling for help seemed incredible, but the fact they would not explain exactly how they were being hurt, caused even greater caution. The fact they didn't know themselves what this new weapon was they were facing, made it hard to explain. Almost a full day after the bombardment started, the President still had no clear report. Nobody seemed to be able to agree on a name, or consistently describe a weapon which punched holes through an entire mountain, without a projectile. The experts didn't have a clue and their advice was a confusing mix of conflicting statements.

  The news service pix showing the American embassies in France and Israel, collapsed in a heap without a single brick thrown on the sidewalk out front, just added to the confusion. The North Americans had attempted to launch a sat killer at the Happy Lewis, from a carrier docked at Yokosuka in Japan. They easily accelerated away from the missile, which was designed to bring down spy sats, not a highly maneuverable space craft. Next pass their companion put the carrier on the bottom of the bay and apologized to the Japanese, but pointed out their guest was shooting at them first and they had refrained from hitting it before, because of its location. The carrier not only burned and cooked off munitions as it went down, wrecking the water front, but its shattered reactor core and possibly nuclear weapons mixing with sea water, contaminated the bay and much of the city, to the point it became necessary to evacuate Yokosuka.

  Most carriers were being
hit far out to sea, but the pictures of the Hillary Rodham at Yokosuka, laying rolled on its side, the huge flat flight deck, thrust out of the water as an almost vertical wall, went out around the world, but wasn't carried by USNA news services. It just meant the people saw it online, as their friends mailed it or sent it to their phones, and made the NA government look even sillier in its secrecy. The NA embassy in Tokyo was also destroyed, but being constructed to survive a possible severe earthquake, it was not as spectacular a demolition as the others, even viewed from the street right outside the property.

  Many Japanese had already seen Genji Akira's article about M3 and April. The anti-sat missile climbing from the carrier had alarmed the city and been caught on video and put on the news. So when the strike came back against the carrier, it was not unexpected. The city's citizens were smart enough the trains leaving the city were full, even before the counter strike. There was nationwide outrage the North Americans would bring their war into the home territory, when they had been quietly urged to remove themselves from the harbor.

  All this, worked together with Mitsubishi's interest in M3, to cause the Japanese parliament to recognize Home as a nation the next morning. On top of this insult, they removed permission for any North American warship or military aircraft to enter their territory. The Americans immediately declared a suspension of commercial flights in retaliation. It was a foolish move, which stranded several thousand North Americans in Japan with no direct way home and Japanese citizens in the USNA.

  "Exactly how much do you think they can absorb, before they feel compelled to talk to us?" April wanted to know.

  "The USNA has never had an actual defeat, they acknowledged. There have been some conflicts they walked away from, but never on their own territory. I'm not sure they believe they can be defeated. It may be such a new thing, they'll have a hard time admitting they need to surrender. Maybe they won't," Easy said with a new edge of fear in his voice. "If they're truly crazy, maybe they just won't surrender."