by Ian Douglas
“We won’t know that, Mr. President, until our people have a chance to excavate the site a bit farther,” Harrel said. “But it does appear that the UN forces on Mars launched this adventure because they wanted to shut us down there.”
“Shut us down?” Gray said, thoughtful. “They could have done that as soon as their troops reached Mars, seven months ago. I think our people might have found something specific, something the UN didn’t want broadcast. Otherwise, why wait until now?”
“They might’ve just been waiting until they were ready,” Harrel suggested.
“Maybe, but the attack seemed rushed. As though it was being hurried along by events elsewhere. Mr. President, I think we have to assume that our most important battle right now is the one on Mars.”
Markham gave a wan smile. “The one we can’t do anything about.”
“Well, sir, we can start by getting the ISS back. If the Marines win on Mars, we need a working spaceport on this end to pick them up when they return. The ISS is also the center of Spacenet, which handles all communications off of Earth. We’ll need to secure that if we’re to have a hope of finding out what’s going on up there.”
“Hence, Operation Freedom,” the president mused. “The problem is, gentlemen, that even if we get the space station back, it’ll be months before our people on Mars can return on the cycler, right? In the meantime, what am I supposed to tell the American people? That we’re sitting through this bombardment so our people on Mars can dig up rusty alien spaceships?”
“That’s why we’re emphasizing the propaganda value of the ISS op, sir,” Gray said. “You could think of it like the Doolittle bombing raid against Japan, a century ago. It won’t hurt the enemy materially that much, but it sure as hell will hurt his pride.”
“Mmm. That sort of gesture can only sustain us so far. We’ve got to hit the bastards back here on Earth, hit ’em hard, or else throw a big enough scare into them that they back off and leave us alone.”
“The Tenth Infantry Division has deployed from Fort Drum,” Gray pointed out, “and has been engaging the Quebeckers outside Plattsburgh Aerospace Force Base. We stand a good chance of winning that one, especially since the 380th Bomb Wing out of Plattsburgh has started hammering Montreal. We’re also holding the Mexicans and the Colombians at San Diego. Our reserves and the National Guard are almost at full mobilization. Once the enemy attacks run out of steam, we should be able to go over to the offensive, both in Quebec and in northern Mexico. We’ll also be able to start coordinating things with our allies. The Russians seem to be doing okay against the Manchurians. England is taking heavy cruise missile attacks from across the Channel, but they’re holding. We actually stand a very good chance of holding them at our borders, and once—”
“That’s just the problem, Admiral,” Markham interrupted. “We’ve got to do more than just hold them. We’ve got to hit back. Hard. Before they decide to escalate to something nastier.”
“It’s possible, Mr. President,” Harrel said softly, “that our hitting back harder would precipitate an escalation.”
“I know. So the secretary of state told me.” The president paused. “John Matloff offered me his resignation this morning. Did you know?”
“No, sir,” Gray and Harrel said, almost in unison. Gray was surprised. Matloff hadn’t struck him as the sort to make dramatic gestures, especially where his career was concerned.
“I refused it,” Markham said. “Told him I wasn’t going to let him start a stampede. The government has to be together on this. Present a united front. For the people. And for the rest of the world. Am I right?”
“Yes, Mr. President.” Again, they spoke almost as one.
“I’ve authorized Operation Freedom, Admiral Gray. I’m not sure how much help it’s going to be to us in the short term, but it’s a good long-term gamble, and you’re right about it being a symbol. We win a victory up there, in orbit, and we’re letting the world know we still have the high-tech know-how to command space. But…” He stopped suddenly, one finger raised for emphasis. “But. If Operation Freedom doesn’t come off as advertised, we are going to be in an extraordinarily vulnerable position. The people will see us throwing away lives and equipment in space when enemy forces are marching through our backyards and giving us one god awful shellacking. They might not sit still for that. I may be forced to sue for peace, while I still have the option. So I want you gentlemen to make this thing work. Clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Keep working at ways of intercepting those missiles. The people won’t support a government that can’t protect them.”
“Overall popular response has been good, Mr. President,” Harrel said. “Surprisingly good, under the circumstances. The bombardment seems to have united most of them.”
“I would remind the president,” Gray said, “that an outside attack like this usually doesn’t have the effect on the morale of the target population that the attackers hope. The Germans learned that when they tried to bomb England during the Blitz. We learned the same thing in Vietnam a generation later.”
“Agreed. But it’s been a long time since Americans have been involved directly in a war like this, gentlemen. Unless you count a few shells from U-boats and Japanese subs in World War II, we’ve never suffered a bombardment…and the last time enemy troops were on our soil was the War of 1812. These attacks on our government buildings and institutions are designed for three things, as I see it. They want to demonstrate they can hit us, and keep hitting us as long as they need to. They want to break our morale. And they want to drive a wedge into our people, between the Nationalists and the Internationalists. The Internationalist Party, you know, has already come out in favor of a negotiated truce and immediate incorporation into the UN World Government. They could gain a lot of converts if this bombardment goes on. If we can’t show the people a damned positive turn in the battle, and fast, well…” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“Operation Freedom is the way to go, sir,” Gray said quietly. “Once we have control of Earth orbit, we’ve got the high ground, as it were. The Hecate laser aboard Shepard Station proved its effectiveness this morning. We’ll be able to turn it against enemy launch sites…maybe hit those European arsenal ships that have been tossing cruise missiles at us from the North Atlantic. We might even consider laser attacks against their capitals…or against the UN building in Geneva.”
“Who’s on the Freedom op?”
“The Marine commandant himself is running the show, Mr. President. He’s already left for Cheyenne Mountain. The unit tagged for the mission is First Platoon, Alfa Company, First Marine Strike Battalion.”
“They’re good?”
“The best. They’re the unit that brought our people out of Mexico City. They’re at Vandenberg, where they’ve been training for orbital combat operations.”
“Who’s in command?”
“A Lieutenant Fuentes, sir. CO of the rescue team at the embassy.”
“Well, I hope to hell he can pull it off.”
“Fuentes will do it if anyone can, Mr. President.” Gray decided not to tell Markham that Carmen Fuentes was a woman. Sex had stopped being an issue in the American military decades ago, but even now there was the unspoken but very evident assumption in government and in the chain of command that a man was needed for a man’s work. So far as Gray was concerned, Fuentes had proved herself and then some at the US Embassy in Mexico City. Warhurst trusted her…and, more to the point, the men and women in her platoon trusted her. He wasn’t going to risk interfering with that.
He just hoped she had what it took to pull off her mission. Right now, it looked as though the very existence of the United States of America was hanging by a thread.
NINETEEN
TUESDAY, 12 JUNE: 1412 HOURS GMT
Star Eagle transport Michael
E. Thornton
LEO
0712 hours PDT
The Star Eagle Michael E. Thornton, a single-stage-to-orbit
SCRAMjet transport, had cleared the lower reaches of Earth’s atmosphere and was accelerating now on her rockets, thundering through the fast-thinning traces of air toward the sunrise. Lieutenant Carmen Fuentes, encased in Class-One/Special armor and riding in what by now was effectively vacuum, couldn’t hear the rockets so much as feel them. The passenger module was a quick design that Marines jokingly referred to as “economy class,” with thin padding over hard steel skeletons of chairs.
It was not the most comfortable way to ride to orbit.
The last whispering rumble of the rocket engines died away, leaving Lieutenant Carmen Fuentes and the twenty-two men and women with her in the Star Eagle’s passenger compartment in the free-falling light-headedness of microgravity. The green light at the head of the compartment winked on, indicating that it was safe to move about. Fuentes unsnapped her harness, grabbed a handhold on the overhead, and pulled herself around to face her people.
“Listen up, everyone,” she said over the platoon channel. “I want all of you to stay strapped in. There’s nothing to see in this tin can, so you might as well stay buckled. You’ve all got your TD-patches, so you shouldn’t be spacesick. Any of you do feel sick, use your barf bags. Just remember, it’ll be a long time yet before we can unsuit.”
The passenger compartment for this flight of the Thornton was deliberately unpressurized, which meant the Marines had to stay sealed in their armor all the way up.
“I got the word a few minutes ago,” she continued, using the general talk frequency. “The McCutcheon’s lifted off from Florida and is on her way. We’ll have our backup at the target.”
She could almost sense the relief among the armored forms facing her. The Keith B. McCutcheon was another Star Eagle, identical to the Thornton, but she was coming to orbit with only a few Marines and technicians on board, riding in a pressurized passenger compartment. There would be doctors on board, and a small, microgravity surgery; most important, it would provide the Marine assault team with a place to go, shuck their suits, and stand down for a while. The op at the ISS was expected to take a long time, longer than their suits could carry them.
Fuentes resumed her seat. There were no windows, no display screens, and nothing to see but the cargo bay interior. From time to time, Thornton’s captain called back from the Star Eagle’s cockpit, updating her on their status.
“Lieutenant?” the ship’s captain said eventually. He was a Navy commander named Bryan Mason. “We’re coming up on the target. I’m cracking your overhead now. Make sure everybody’s tied down back there, and watch the light.”
“That’s a roger. We’re all secure here.”
“Copy. Opening up.”
Like the old shuttles, the Star Eagle possessed long, twin doors above the cargo area, and those were slowly opening now, the movement completely silent in the vacuum, though Fuentes could feel the vibration through the hull when she touched it with her glove. She looked up and watched the dark gray hatch panels sliding apart, revealing the inexpressibly lovely, deep blue of the Earth hanging above their heads. She glanced back down at her platoon, watching for the signs she’d been warned about…thrashing about, shaking, any of the possible physical reactions indicating that someone might be going into panic.
There were none. The platoon had been well briefed and well trained.
As the doors swung aside now, sunlight blasted into the interior, darkening the polarized visors of every Marine in the bay. Earth was impossibly blue, impossibly brilliant, a swirl of azure ocean, white dapplings and currents and sweeps of clouds, and a tawny patch of desert. Fuentes had thought she knew her geography well, but she found she couldn’t recognize any part of the planet suspended above her head.
“Range to target,” Commander Mason’s voice said in her headphones, “one hundred meters. We have hostiles in sight.”
“Roger that. Thanks for the ride.”
“Any time, Lieutenant. Fly Navy.”
“My Ass Rides In Navy Equipment, Sir,” she replied jauntily, using the old MARINES acronym. She switched to the platoon frequency. “Platoon! Unhook and disembark! By the numbers! First rank…go! Second rank…go! Third rank…”
Line by line, the Marines floated out of their seats, leaving belts and gleaming belt buckles magically adrift in zero G. Fuentes reached across with her right hand, touched the thrust control on her left arm, and felt the slight, upward nudge of her MMU’s high-pressure nitrogen jets.
Class-One/Special armor, as the designation suggested, was a special adaptation of standard full armor. The suit part was basically unchanged, hard-shelled and coated in active camouflage surfacing, with helmets made insectlike by the lenses of cameras and headlights arrayed just above the dark-tinted visors. The principal change was in the life-support backpack that each Marine wore like half of a mattress strapped to the armor’s back. Derived from the Manned Maneuvering Units of the early days of the Space Shuttle, these MMUs served as miniature, one-man spacecraft, providing power, life support, and maneuverability for up to twelve hours at a time.
As Fuentes cleared the passenger module, she touched another thrust control, canceling her upward momentum. She was hanging now twenty feet above the gaping cargo bay of the Star Eagle. Above and around her were the other twenty-two men and women of her platoon. Directly ahead was the International Space Station, a glittering structure of interconnected cylinders, cans, and spheres, stretched along spidery struts between the gorgeous black-purple spread of its winglike solar panel arrays.
Mason was right. She could see armored figures, dwarfed to near insignificance by the size of the ISS structure, moving along the struts. It looked like the UN troops—some of them, at any rate—had come out to play.
She saw a twinkling of tiny lights in the shadowed side of the ISS and realized with a curious detachment born of her eerie surroundings that they were firing at her.
“Space Strike One, this is Eagle,” Mason’s voice said. “We are taking projectile fire from the target. Be advised that Hellfire is in position to deliver covering fire.”
“Platoon!” she rasped out. “Watch your vision! Okay, Eagle. Let’s have that cover fire!”
Hellfire was Shepard Station, nudged from its lower, faster orbit to a position in the same orbit as the ISS, trailing it by about twenty kilometers. A moment later, a portion of the space station’s hull grew briefly, intolerably bright.
The ISS battle represented an odd balancing of forces and tactics. The station itself was unarmed, so the only way the defenders could hold off the Marines was to send armored troops outside and engage the attackers one-on-one. The Marines, in turn, were hampered by the fact that they couldn’t just find an airlock and smash their way in. It took time to cycle through a lock, and by the time a handful of Marines could squeeze into an airlock and match pressures with the station interior, they would find a large number of UN troops on the other side, waiting for them to crack in the inner hatch and start moving through one at a time.
Neither could the Marines simply find a spot on the side of the station, blow a hole through, and storm inside. There were at least eight hostages aboard, including five Americans. Fuentes’s orders stated bluntly that her first priority was to secure the station, but indiscriminately slaughtering hostages and enemy troops alike was not going to help the US cause much, any more than it would advance her own career.
The plan that they’d arrived at was a compromise at best, but one that offered a fair chance of success if they could clear the ISS framework of enemy troops. Unlike Shepard Station, the International Space Station was not powered by a nuclear reactor. All power came from the solar array, which converted sunlight directly to electricity and channeled it through a series of heavily shielded cables to the battery compartment at the station’s midships area. Fully charged, those batteries could keep the ISS powered for an estimated forty-eight hours, a time period that could be extended somewhat by shutting down nonessential systems.
The Marine plan depended on b
eing able to clear the enemy from the station’s struts and rigging in order to gain unrestricted access to the power conduits from the solar panels. Cut those cables, and the station would be helpless, forced to draw on battery power for temperature control, communications, oxygen recycling, and scrubbing excess CO2 from the air. The problem, then, would be waiting them out. The UN troops could afford to sit tight knowing the Marines couldn’t storm inside and root them out; if the UN could get reinforcements to the station, the Marines would have to withdraw and the siege could be lifted.
And that, of course, was where Shepard and its laser came into the picture. Without reinforcements, sooner or later the ISS would have to surrender. And no reinforcements could approach the ISS so long as Shepard remained intact, with the Hecate HEL. In addition, Shepard could give the Marines a much-appreciated hand by sweeping snipers from the station’s struts and rigging. By timing the HEL pulses to a fraction of a second, the laser wouldn’t damage the station, but any enemy troops who happened to be looking in Shepard’s direction would be blinded.
“Forward, Marines!” Fuentes cried, touching her forward thrust control and holding it, letting her velocity build. There was no sensation of motion save for the slow growth of the ISS in her field of vision, and the steadily dwindling green numbers flickering on her visor HUD at the edge of her field of vision, counting down the meters as measured by her helmet’s laser ranger. Carefully, she unstrapped her ATAR, moving slowly to avoid going into a spin, and planted the rifle’s butt plate squarely in the slot built into the armor just about over her navel. She touched a button on the rifle’s side; a yellow crosshair appeared on the inside of her visor, together with a tiny, inset video image on her HUD’s lower left field.
What she was about to do ought to work, but it had never been tried before…at least, not outside of the microgravity combat training simulators at Vandenberg. She selected a target, a blue-helmeted soldier clinging to an antenna guy, and moved her rifle until the crosshair was centered on his chest.