Brown, Dale - Independent 01

by Silver Tower (v1. 1)

  Ann felt her body strain against the clips holding her to a mounting bracket on Silver Tower’s keel as the PAM booster fired. She could feel an intense vibration ripple through the keel; then the booster abruptly cut off, but the spinning went on.

  “Why did it stop?” she asked. “Is there—”

  She didn’t have a chance to finish the question as Saint-Michael’s PAM booster fired in sequence. It was followed by another longer burst of thrust from her PAM booster, followed again by a shorter pulse from the opposite booster. The effect was to move the station and its tethered crewmembers upward toward outer space at a rate of ten miles per hour. For Ann and the others it was like being dragged along by a slow-moving car. America seemed to slide forward and sideways, then tip on edge. Even the scattering of debris seemed to swirl and drop away like a cloud bank being pushed back out to sea by a fresh breeze.

  Following guidance commands from the ground tracking stations, the two PAM boosters alternated each of their pulses of thrust until, after several minutes, the station’s wild multiaxis spinning slowed nearly to a stop. As the rotation decreased, the booster thrusts became longer as the station fought for altitude. A couple of minutes later the roar of the engines was constant. Earth was now firmly beneath them, slowly but surely dropping away. Ann was no longer pinned to the keel, but found instead that she could move freely.

  Saint-Michael spoke first. “Jon, how do you copy?”

  “Loud and clear, General,” Hampton said. “Ken’s got the station emitting a tracking beacon now. America is back on digital autopilot. I’ll bring her back beside the cargo bay so we can start refueling the energy cells.”

  “Horvath here. I’ve got auxiliary power on in the command module. It’s depressurized. I don’t think we can fix it: it’s got two or three monster holes in it—”

  “How about environmental and SBR controls?”

  “I think I can reset the environmental controls, sir. I have no idea if that SBR stuff is operational, but there’s backup power going to every console.”

  More than they’d hoped for, Ann thought. Silver Tower was alive. Now if the Russians would just give them the time they needed....

  TYURATAM, USSR

  Marshal Govorov came into the Space Defense Command control center, joined up with Colonel Gulaev, then kept stride with his subordinate as both hurried to the main tracking computer monitor to scan the information that was scrolling across the screen.

  “We didn’t notice the change until the station was at two hundred fifteen kilometers....” Gulaev said. “We thought it was an error, an anomaly—”

  “It’s impossible,” Govorov said, realizing as he said it how much that sounded like the Kremlin bureaucrats he’d gone up against all these years. He’d deceived himself. Well, let’s go from there.... But wasn’t more time needed to boost the station into higher orbit?

  “Sir, shall I alert the—”

  “Alert no one. I want this tracking confirmed”

  Gulaev took off for the communication center to call Sary Shagan for a confirmation. The answer did not take long. The young officer returned to the control console only sixty seconds later to find the Space Defense commander alone at the console—no one else wanted any part of him—including himself.

  “Sir, the Shirov-25 space surveillance site at Sary Shagan has just issued an advisory to Space Defense Command headquarters. The tracking is... confirmed. Armstrong appears to be under power and being directed to a standard circular orbit, inclined less than five degrees from the equator.... Is it possible that the Americans could reestablish surveillance over the Persian Gulf or Arabian Sea...?” Govorov came close to giving him a murder-the-messenger look, then shook his head, trying his best to control himself. “The station’s pressurized modules are uninhabitable. Our Scimitar missile had to penetrate the radar array and solar cells. It would take a full work- crew months to bring Armstrong back on line.” Or at least it should. ... He clapped his hands together, as though to jog himself out of his unaccustomed funk. “All right, I want a secure videophone connection established among Rhomerdunov, Khromeyev and myself, the conference to be set up in tactical situation briefing room three. And I want General Kulovsky of intelligence on hand. Get him here.”

  Gulaev hurried off to give the orders, relieved that Govorov seemed his old self, back in control, in command, at least a step ahead of the Americans....

  But why did it feel like they were one step behind?

  The videophone terminal had been set up on a pedestal at the front of the large conference room near Govorov’s office at the Glowing Star Manned Launch Facility. Govorov and General Kulovsky, the Space Defense Command’s chief of intelligence, stood in front of the terminal waiting for the two senior Stavka members to make contact.

  They did not have to wait long. The videophone buzzed once, long and insisting, and the screen suddenly flared to life, revealing Deputy Minister of Defense Khromeyev and Commander in Chief of Aerospace Forces Rhomerdunov seated at the main battle staff conference table at Supreme Headquarters in Moscow.

  Khromeyev spoke first. “We already know about the American space station, Govorov. I assume you have an explanation....”

  Govorov did not feel better, hearing he’d apparently been scooped by the space warning and tracking facility at Sary Shagan. Make the best of it, he told himself, and try to tell it as you see it.... “Comrade Deputy Minister, it’s not as we hoped, and believed. True. But I believe it likely that the station has been destroyed beyond the point of near-term usefulness—”

  “Then how is it being moved at all?” Rhomerdunov interrupted.

  “I believe the Americans may have brought aloft the rocket boosters needed to send the station to higher orbit—”

  “Isn’t it more likely,” Khromeyev put it, “that you overestimated the damage done to the station?”

  “Yes, sir, that’s possible, but I point out that America's cargo bay, from what we’ve learned of it, is more than large enough to carry a fuel tank and several small rocket boosters to attach to the station’s central keel.”

  Govorov hit a button on a small wireless control unit, and the pedestal that the videophone monitor was mounted on swiveled up so that the camera faced a large plastic and balsa wood model of Armstrong hanging from the ceiling. The model, carefully constructed and precise in every detail, had been just as precisely broken in several places.

  “The model you’re looking at, sir, represents the last full image of the station as seen through my Elektron spaceplane’s Scimitar missile laser designator.” With a long pointer he then motioned to each of the station’s damaged systems.

  “Yes, yes, General. And your opinion, Colonel Kulovsky?”

  “That the station does not have the capacity to counter earth’s gravity,” Kulovsky said. “Even with full-thruster capacity, the station can’t change altitude more than a hundred kilometers without a refueling. So, as Govorov says, the spaceplane must have brought rocket thrusters to move the station.”

  “The most important target for myself and Colonel Voloshin,” Govorov said, “was the station’s space-based radar array attach points. As you can see”—he used the pointer for emphasis—“three of the four attach-points have been hit and two destroyed.”

  “So that leaves two SBR arrays,” Khromeyev said.

  “Yes, though not enough to let the Americans duplicate the extent of earlier surveillance, sir,” Kulovsky said.

  “The other strikes against the station,” Govorov said, “took out or damaged the solar arrays, which are necessary to recharge the station batteries and convert water to fuel... the fuel-storage vessels on the keel... and the pressurized modules themselves. It’s possible these punctures in the modules are repairable in orbit, but they will leak so badly that the modules can’t be safely inhabited unless the crew wear space suits the whole time. However, sir, I grant that the seemingly impossible may be possible. We are not infallible, and I do not underestimate the American
s. I have warned against that myself over the years, and I don’t intend to change now. And so....”

  “And so... ?” Rhomerdunov said. “Finish the thought, General.”

  Govorov took the leap, the one he’d been moving toward, if in a roundabout fashion, since this little lecture had begun. “And so, sir, I believe we should not take the chance, however remote, that Armstrong will not regain its surveillance capabilities and be a substantial threat. I recommend that I attempt another attack against the space station.”

  Khromeyev clearly wasn’t so sure. “The first attack on the space station was easily justified,” he said. “The Americans moved their station directly over the Soviet Union and used it to direct an attack against our defensive forces. But if we mount another offensive against a crippled station, one that is not, at least at the moment, orbiting over Soviet territory, world opinion may very well turn against us. We have already received much criticism for the deaths aboard the American rescue craft; if we attack America’s only hypersonic spaceplane, one ostensibly launched to retrieve the bodies of the other crewmembers that died in Govorov’s first attack, we could be subject to the kind of international condemnation that could expand the conflict beyond the present boundaries—something we must avoid.”

  “I agree, sir.”

  Khromeyev and Rhomerdunov conferred briefly; then Khromeyev turned to the camera:

  “Marshal Govorov, continue to monitor the space station Armstrong’s orbit and advise us immediately if there are any significant changes, or if any other spacecraft dock with the station. The responsibility for determining whether or not the station becomes a threat to Operation Feather is, of course, yours.”

  It was not what Govorov wanted to hear, though he wasn’t surprised. It seemed he’d done too good a job of making a “balanced” presentation. But if he knew the Americans, and he was beginning to know them too well, they would soon give him a good reason to resume the attack he believed necessary....

  CHAPTER 11

  October 1992

  ARMSTRONG SPACE STATION, TWO DAYS LATER

  It certainly wasn’t pretty.

  The command module, connecting tunnel, engineering and Skybolt control module all leaked like wet paper bags. Environmental alarms went off constantly, sending the already exhausted and nervous crew scrambling for POS masks. But to Jason Saint-Michael it marked a major step in the reactivation of Armstrong Space Station, and as such he had to admit that, all things considered, it looked beautiful. Not pretty, but beautiful.

  Saint-Michael had volunteered to be the first to take watch while the rest of the crew stayed aboard the spaceplane and got their first sleep in forty-eight hours. He didn’t completely trust the “bubble-gum and baling wire” repair jobs they’d made on the modules, so he’d ordered everyone except one person to sleep in America. The space- plane was now docked with the station, using yet another jury-rigged device made from the undamaged parts of the docking module so the crew could transfer between America and the station without prebreathing or wearing a spacesuit.

  The general was keeping himself awake with shots of pure oxygen from his POS mask and by checking and rechecking the systems, all in various states of repair, in the command module. He took pride in the patch job they’d done. Luckily they had the supplies on board to fix pressurized module penetrations. Those supplies and a generous amount of elbow grease had gotten the job done so far.

  Fixing the modules to allow for working without spacesuits was minor compared to repowering and repositioning the station itself. It had taken Marty Schultz three hours of exhausting hard work to refuel the two undamaged fuel cells from the large fuel tank they had brought from earth. But it had paid off: direct system power had been applied an hour later, and enough systems were restored to allow the station’s built-in self-test equipment to analyze and point out other malfunctions and damage. Once the equipment began looking after itself and telling its human keepers what was wrong, things began to ease up a little.

  Now they had to try to position the station in a usable orbit. One main attitude thruster and both main station thruster fuel tanks had been destroyed in the Soviet spaceplane attack. After refueling the fuel cells to provide electrical power Marty had attached the fuel tank, still with three-quarters of the fuel left, into the station’s attitude and positioning thruster system. By the end of the first twenty-four hours they had restored enough inertial navigation systems and satellite tracking and positioning data links to activate the station thrusters, and with far more human intervention than normal they managed to kick Silver Tower into a low equatorial orbit. Now at two hundred miles altitude, orbiting almost directly over the equator, Silver Tower passed appproximately six hundred miles south of the Nimitz carrier group in the Arabian Sea. At seventeen thousand miles per hour they could theoretically scan the fleet for twenty minutes on every orbit, or twenty minutes out of every ninety—almost one-fourth of the time. Providing they could get the space-based radar system working. They hadn’t brought along an SBR engineer on the flight, but as long as the master system processor was working it could direct the SBR operator to system faults—the system would fix itself.

  They had been following the SBR computer’s direction for nearly twenty hours when Saint-Michael called a halt. Now he was there alone, monitoring the systems and watching in case the Russians staged another attack—although if they did there was no way he could detect it beforehand and not a damn thing he could do even if he did know they were coming. Silver Tower wasn’t yet ready to fight. Not yet.

  He looked over to the master SBR console. The huge master SBR monitor wasn’t broken, as far as anyone could tell, but for some reason it wasn’t coming on. After taking it down off its mounting spot on the bulkhead to try to fix it someone had used a couple strips of tape to secure the huge screen back to the wall. He went over to the console and checked the two screens, one of them cannibalized from a TV set found in the recreation area in the Skylab module. If the SBR screen had been working properly a political map of the earth would be scrolling across the screen with the SBR’s scan pattern superimposed on it. Without the mapping display the only readout of where they were was a series of complicated digits zipping across the TV set, representing azimuth, declination, latitude, longitude, inertial velocity and planetary motion corrections of the station relative to earth. It might as well have been written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

  He went back to what was left of his seat (one of the Russian missiles had blown off the backrest), strapped himself in, thinking that in the days before the attack he would have automatically picked up his earset and electret microphone and set it in place. Not so now. There wasn’t any point—even though the station’s tracking beacon had been activated, the tracking and data relay satellite system was smashed to hell. They could only talk with someone on the ground using the ultrahigh frequency radios that were limited to line-of-sight. With TDRS you could talk or exchange data with someone on the other side of the planet—with UHF, if you could cut through the static, if you talked at night, you might be able to talk to an earth station you could see out the window. Maybe.

  He wished he could have the same problem seeing or thinking about Enterprise.. ..

  The thought of the wrecked shuttle and her dead crew back in the docking module suddenly deflated him, left him with a deep sense of frustration and anger. Nothing he or anyone else did would make a difference as far as they were concerned. And by forcing this mission to reactivate the station he’d exposed other crewmen... including Ann ... to the same risk.... But no, he had to remember this mission was about much more than revenge. It was about saving lives. American lives out there in the Persian Gulf.. ..

  That was what he’d told the Joint Chiefs and the president when he’d met with them to argue the case. He’d had a tough time at first.. . . Stuart had done a good job convincing people that Armstrong’s station commander was a casualty who, for his own good and the country’s, ought to be put out to
pasture. What he was after would needlessly provoke the Russians. Saint-Michael had countered with the very likely scenario if they didn't reactivate the station, and when he’d finished even Secretary of Defense Linus Edwards seemed to comprehend the seriousness of the situation. Saint-Michael had gotten authorization only just in time, though, to put a hold on the launch so he could arrange a cargo switch....

  Alone now in the command module, he was not so all-fired sure he was right. And with that thought came another: that he’d better be, or the folks back home just might invent a Yankee Siberia for him if his plan backfired.

  THE USS NIMITZ, IN THE ARABIAN SEA

  “The most sophisticated radar ships in the world,” Admiral Clancy grumbled, “and I still feel naked as a jaybird out here.”

  The commander of Nimitz carrier fleet was talking to Captain Edge- water, captain of the Nimitz, in the carrier’s combat information center. He was talking about the USS Ticonderoga, Shiloh, Valley Forge and Hue City, the Aegis battle management cruisers operating alongside Nimitz as the battle group steamed slowly eastward in the Arabian Sea.

  Ticonderoga and her sisters, although over a decade old, were indeed some of the most sophisticated vessels in the world. Their four large phased-array radar antennas could scan the skies for hundreds of miles in all directions, electronically link dozens of ships together and direct gun, aircraft or missile attacks against hundreds of targets all at once. They carried nearly a half-billion dollars worth of nuclear-hardened twenty-first-century equipment. Yet here in the middle of the Arabian Sea they were made virtually impotent by the sophistication of weaponry and the preponderance of enemy forces surrounding them.

  Clancy pointed to a five-foot-by-five-foot liquid-crystal display in the center of Nimitz’s CIC. “I need more eyes up there, Captain,” Clancy was saying, jabbing his finger toward the center of the Arabian Sea. “Ticonderoga’s detection range for high-flying aircraft is only about three hundred miles; for surface vessels and low-flying aircraft it’s about two hundred miles, and for fast-moving, sea-skimming missiles or aircraft the detection range could be as little as eighty miles.” Edge water agreed with the commander of the Persian Gulf flotilla. Clancy continued: “It’s just not enough. With Soviet cruise missiles having Mach five speed and supersonic bombers that could carry fifty-thousand-pound payloads at Mach two and fifty feet above the water, Ticonderoga can barely keep up. An AS-6 cruise missile diving down on us at nearly Mach speed would only give our escorts five minutes to destroy the missile. A Soviet Blackjack or Backfire bomber at extreme low altitude, detected at maximum range, would be right on top of us in seconds, giving us barely enough time to react.”