Brown, Dale - Independent 01

by Silver Tower (v1. 1)

  As she pulled on a fresh, powder-blue flight suit and set off for the station’s galley, she mentally reviewed what else she’d learned about Saint-Michael in the short time she’d been here. Most of her information had come from the talkative engineering chief, Wayne Marks. The way Marks told it, Saint-Michael was a legend in Space Command—what some called a “fast burner.” After graduating at the top of his pilot class he’d made captain easily and become an Air Training Command instructor pilot. From ATC it was on to Air Command and Staff college at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, where he wrote a paper laying out fundamentals of what would later be called the United States Space Command, an organization that would control America’s space-based defensive armaments.

  Saint-Michael’s paper somehow found its way to the desk of the president, who liked what he read, and Saint-Michael, at age forty, found himself with a general’s star and stewardship of the nascent Space Command—an organization that at the time existed only on paper. How Saint-Michael was able to build up Space Command to its present level was never precisely clear to anyone outside the inner circle of power, but it was said that the general, by sheer charismatic force, had eventually been able to make converts out of his strongest adversaries. It seemed he had that sort of effect on people.

  At least that was Marks’s version. For her part Ann, feeling a bit let down, she admitted, by her nonreception, had failed to discern any special magnetism, animal or otherwise, in the man. He was efficient, no question, in complete command of the myriad operations aboard Silver Tower. But there was also a remoteness about him, a detached air edging on imperiousness that tended to leave her cold. If indeed he was a fast burner, he hadn’t turned any of his heat her way....

  She moved through the cargo docking area and across to the connecting tunnel leading to the primary docking module. As usual she stopped and admired the spectacular view of Silver Tower orbiting above planet earth. The most eerie sight was space itself—a deep, pure, haunting blackness that was remarkable for its uniformity, its lack of gradation. As a child growing up in Massachusetts she had always felt insignificant somehow, watching an approaching thunderstorm darken the landscape. During the summers she had often camped in the Maine woods, where it had been so dark she literally hadn’t been able to see her hand in front of her face. But space was a a million times more so. The darkness was total, absolute, shrinking, swallowing everything in it. Space somehow seemed like a living thing, like two giant hands cupped together around the tiny station, cutting out all air and light....

  It took less than a minute for Ann to reach the galley and begin the delicate task of making coffee: put “coffee bag” into an insulated drinking cup, snap lid on, watch as hot water is injected in cup. By the numbers, like so much else around here.

  “One for me, too, please,” a deep voice called out behind her. She turned and saw Jason Saint-Michael floating through the hatch.

  “Good morning, General,” Ann said. As she placed a coffee bag into another cup, she watched the powerfully built officer plant his feet on a Velcro pad six feet away and stand with arms crossed.

  “I take mine black,” he said.

  She nodded and reached for the first cup of coffee, which had just finished. She tossed the cup over to Saint-Michael, noticing with satisfaction that it sailed directly into his hand. “You’re really becoming a pro at this.”

  “Fixing coffee isn’t exactly high-tech, General.”

  “How’s the space-sickness?”

  She looked at him. Why the sudden interest in her? “All right. I still feel the ‘leans’ when I move upside-down but the nausea is going away.”

  “It takes some people longer to adapt.” He seemed to study her for a long moment, then asked: “And how’s life on the station going?”

  “Life? As opposed to work?”

  “I guess that’s what I mean. I know there have been some problems getting the laser ready for the first beam test, but maybe you’re worrying too much. You stay off by yourself when you’re not working on Skybolt....”

  “Does that worry you?”

  “It does, frankly. You don’t have to be a shrink to realize that someone who stays by herself so much may be having trouble coping. Problems like that get exaggerated in space. Up here we’re all our brother’s keeper ”

  Ann took a sip of coffee (actually “sipping” with a strawlike drink tube on the cup was very difficult) and squinted as the liquid stung her throat. “I’m sure you’re right but I don’t think I’m a candidate for special treatment—”

  “Anyone hassling you, bothering you in any way?” he persisted. “I know being the only female on the station can be a little awkward—”

  “You know what it’s like?” She smiled when she said it.

  “Well, I’m guessing it’s a little like being the only general officer on this station.” He didn’t return the smile. The lady seemed pretty damn defensive.... “I can’t exactly be ‘one of the boys’ around here, but I can’t afford to alienate anyone, either. I walk a tightrope, which I imagine you have to do, too.... Look, I’m just trying to help. Sorry if I’m out of line.” He watched her for a moment. “You don’t much like it up here, do you?”

  “What I like doesn’t matter. I also don’t want any special treatment, okay, General? I have a job to do—and that’s what matters ”

  An awkward silence, then: “You’re really very attractive, you know.”

  She just looked at him, started to say something, then set down her coffee cup on the Velcro counter. “General, if you really knew what it’s like to be the only female on this station, you wouldn’t have just said that.” She pushed off the floor, floated past him out through the galley hatch.

  He watched her receding form, shook his head. Way to go, Jason. You really can be an ass.

  “Attention on the station, two minutes... mark. Report by station when secure for test.”

  Ann took one last sip of water from the squeeze bottle, then stuck it on a Velcro strip on the ceiling. On earth she might have squirted the rest of the water down her shirt to help battle the heat and perspiration, but in space such a luxury was impossible. The Skybolt control module was oppressively warm, stifling; the equipment air conditioning and cooling fans may have been keeping her instruments comfortable, but the module’s lone occupant felt as though she was in a sauna.

  She sat at her tiny control station completely surrounded by equipment. The only illumination came from the twelve-inch computer monitor in front of her. A narrow corridor, too narrow for two people to pass by each other, led from her station to the sealed module hatch and connecting tunnel. The air had the faint smell of ozone, electrified air and sweat.

  But soon after beginning work on Silver Tower, Ann had learned to ignore such things. She had no room to work in because she had four times more equipment than any other scientist or any other project ever had before. Today all the hard work and sacrifice... if that’s what it had been... was about to pay off. Or so she hoped....

  “Skybolt is ready, Control,” she reported. “System is on full automatic.”

  “Copy, Skybolt,” Saint-Michael said over interphone. “Good luck.”

  “Thank you, sir. Thirty seconds.”

  She made one last systems check. Her master computer would make a three-second self-test of the superconducting circuits, microprocessors and relays under its control. The results of the self-test flashed on her screen: all systems go.

  It was working, Ann thought. It was working perfectly.

  “It’s not working.”

  Chief Master Sergeant Jake Jefferson pointed to his large two-foot by three-foot rectangular display screen, representing the one-thousand-mile scan range of Silver Tower’s huge space-based, phased- array radar. He had electronically squelched out all objects detected by the SBR that were less than five hundred pounds, all ground returns and all previously identified objects; even so, the screen was filled with blips. Each blip had a code assigned to it by Silve
r Tower’s surveillance computer. On the margins of the rectangular screen, data on the object’s flight path and orbit were displayed. Any object within fifty miles of Silver Tower’s orbit was highlighted. The tech pointed to the nearest such object on the screen.

  “There it is, Skipper.” Saint-Michael maneuvered himself around to the screen and anchored himself on the Velcro carpeting.

  It was an Agena-Three cargo spacecraft, one of the small fleet of unmanned modules used to resupply the American and European space platforms. This one had been fitted with detection-and-analysis equipment as well as sensors to record laser hits made against it. The Skybolt computer had already been programmed to consider this Agena “hostile.” For the next three hours the Agena would follow a track similar to the track a Soviet ICBM would follow from launch to impact in the United States.

  “Altitude?”

  “Five hundred on the nose.” Jefferson pointed to the object’s flight data readout, which had just appeared.“We should be picking up its identification beacon any sec—” An extra three lines of data printed themselves just under the flight data block, identifying the newcomer as an Agena-Three unmanned spacecraft launched from Vandenburg and belonging to the United States Space Command. The information remained on the screen for three seconds, then disappeared as the computer squelched off the identified.

  “Bring it back,” Saint-Michael said. Jefferson punched two buttons on his keyboard, rolled a cursor over to the spot where the blip had been and pushed a button. The Agena’s blip and data block returned.

  “Skybolt hasn’t keyed on it yet?” Saint-Michael asked.

  “Negative.”

  “Maybe it squelched it out.”

  “Skybolt doesn’t squelch out any targets,” Colonel Walker reminded Saint-Michael. “It’s supposed to track and evaluate everything detected by the SBR. If it’s considered hostile, it’s supposed to act.”

  “Maybe Skybolt wasn’t reprogrammed to consider it a hostile,” a technician, Sean Kelly, said.

  “Or maybe Skybolt is screwing up,” Saint-Michael said. Jefferson nodded in agreement, then keyed his interphone mike.

  “Skybolt, this is Control. .

  Saint-Michael grasped his shoulder. “Don’t, Jake. Let’s see what Skybolt does.”

  “Go ahead, Control,” Ann replied.

  Jefferson looked at Saint-Michael, then at Walker. Walker shrugged, silently deferring to his commanding officer. “Disregard,” Jefferson said, and clicked off his mike.

  The group watched as the Agena spacecraft marched across the screen. The SBR tracked it easily.

  “Still nothing?” Saint-Michael asked.

  “Not yet,” Jefferson said. “Target on course. Thirty seconds to midcourse transition....”

  Suddenly the station’s warning horn blared, crowed three times; then a high-pitched computer-synthesized voice announced: “Attention on the station. Tracking hostile contact. Tracking hostile contact.”

  “About thirty seconds late, but it finally found it,” Walker said.

  “Skybolt transmitting warning message to Falcon Space Command headquarters, sir,” the communications officer reported. A pause, then: “Falcon acknowledges.”

  “So we have a machine fighting our battles for us,” Saint-Michael muttered. “Damn thing even makes radio calls.”

  “Attention on the station”—the computerized voice. “Impact prediction on hostile contact. Impact prediction on hostile contact.”

  “It’s finally figured out what’s going on,” Saint-Michael said. “Well, let’s see how well it reacts.”

  “Coming up on midcourse transition,” Jefferson reported. “Thirty seconds to simulated warhead-bus separation.”

  The Agena would not actually release any warheads, but the spacecraft’s orbit had been sequenced like a real ICBM to monitor Sky- bolt’s performance. The goal was to destroy the ICBM as early as possible, either in its very vulnerable boost phase or at the latest at the apogee—the ICBM bus’s highest altitude in its ballistic flight path. Once past apogee the target would become increasingly difficult to hit.

  “Skybolt had better damn hurry,” Walker said. “The thing will MIRV any second....”

  Abruptly every light aboard Silver Tower dimmed. The station’s backup power systems snapped on. Warning horns blared.

  “MHD reactor activated,” someone in the command module called out.

  “Skybolt’s not tracking the Agena,” Jefferson reported. He checked his instruments, squinting in the sudden gloom of the command module. “Still not tracking....”

  The rest of his sentence was lost in a deafening blast. It was as if a huge bolt of lightning had just burst directly beneath them. The entire command module felt warm, and flesh crawled.

  “Laser firingJefferson shouted. “Firing ... again ... again ... still firing... !”

  Walker grasped a handhold—although the station did not move, the sudden burst of energy surging through the station made it feel as if the whole five-hundred-ton facility was cartwheeling. “Skybolt’s still not tracking the target,” he shouted. “It’s firing, but not at the Agena.”

  Saint-Michael swung around to another technician near the connecting hatch to the research module. “Any hits, Bayles?”

  The tech shook his head. “Clean misses. Sensors not recording any energy levels at all.”

  “Damn. Discharge inhibit,” Saint-Michael ordered. Immediately, the crackle of electricity and the sound of lightning ceased. Slowly the cabin lights returned to normal.

  Saint-Michael put a finger on his mike button, expecting the next call....

  “Control, this is Skybolt,” Ann said over the interphone. “The laser’s being inhibited in your section. Check your controls.”

  “I ordered the stop,” Saint-Michael said.

  “Why?”

  “Because it wasn’t hitting anything.”

  Silence. Saint-Michael watched his crewmen slowly relaxing from the tumult of Skybolt’s first bursts and the multiple alarms it had set off. “Station check,” he said, forcibly trying to control his own accelerated breathing.

  “Skybolt is ready for another series,” Ann reported.

  “Agena target is well past MIRV transition,” technician Kelly said. “It’ll go out of range in sixty seconds.”

  “Let’s wait until the second orbit, Ann,” Saint-Michael said. The techs in the command module showed they agreed with the decision by wiping sweat from foreheads and reaching for water bottles.

  “But, sir—”

  “The target is almost out of SBR range. You’ll get another chance soon.”

  A long pause, then: “I’m clearing off, Control.” Walker looked over at his commander and smiled.

  “She didn’t sound happy,” Walker said.

  “I’m not celebrating, either. God, I didn’t know that thing made so much racket. Did we sustain any damage from the power drop?” Walker checked with the four techs in the command module. “No damage, sir. I didn’t expect that drop either, but it makes sense. The MHD reactor needs a big jolt to get started.”

  “But not from the main station batteries,” Wayne Marks put in. “Skybolt’s battery is charged from the solar arrays, but it’s supposed to cut off before MHD ignition.”

  “Can the voltage spike suppressors handle it?”

  “I don’t see why not. I’ll check everything out before the next test series.”

  Saint-Michael nodded and maneuvered over to the Agena-monitor- ing panel. “I really would’ve been happier if the laser had hit its target ”

  At which point Ann entered the command center and without a word to either Saint-Michael or Walker, reached across Jefferson’s shoulder and punched up the target-sensor summary on his console.

  “Where’s the hit summary?” She scrolled through the timed readouts, then turned on Jefferson. “I said, where are the hit records?”

  “That’s it, Ann,” Saint-Michael said. “Skybolt didn’t hit the target.”

&nbs
p; “What the hell do you mean?”

  “I mean, it didn’t hit. Skybolt never even tracked the target. It spotted it thirty seconds after it appeared on the SBR, but it never locked on.”

  “But it fired. Thirty pulses, seventy-five millisecond bursts, one hundred kilowatts on the dot”

  “Ann....”

  “Skybolt can’t fire unless it’s tracking a target. It announced detection. It projected the flight path. It computed the track and fired....”

  “But it never locked on,” Walker insisted. “The skipper inhibited discharge when he was told Skybolt wasn’t tracking and that no hits were detected. That’s a proper precaution, you’ve got to admit.”

  Ann punched a few more pages on the computer screen, finally convinced herself they were right. “I don’t understand. Everything checked out. The laser worked perfectly....” She turned to Saint-Michael. “Well, we’ll try it again in forty minutes. We’ll nail it for sure this time.”

  Saint-Michael nodded. “But I’ll keep the beam inhibit on until we see that Skybolt has locked onto the target.”

  “That’s really not necessary, sir.”

  “Ann, I can’t allow that laser to fire into space indiscriminately. I don’t know where it went. It could be a hazard—”

  “A seventy-five-millisecond burst of only one hundred kilowatts is no hazard.”

  “At close range it could be. There’s obviously a glitch somewhere. Skybolt is getting an erroneous tracking signal and firing when it shouldn’t. For all we know we may have hit someone’s satellite.”

  Ann looked deflated, said nothing.

  “And that power surge was completely unexpected,” Saint-Michael added.