by Dale Brown
“New radar contact,” the station computer announced abruptly. “Bearing zero-five-one degrees. Altitude two hundred miles. Range three thousand, five hundred miles. Closing velocity nine point five miles per second. Contact is friendly. Repeat, friendly. Positive IFF.” The S-29 had just crossed their radar horizon.
And then a familiar-sounding voice crackled over through Reynolds’s headset. “Eagle Station, this is Shadow Bravo One. Do you copy?”
A grin creased his face. “Five by five, Bravo One. Welcome to outer space, Dusty,” he radioed.
“Thank you kindly, Eagle,” Colonel Scott “Dusty” Miller replied. He was the Space Force’s first S-29B-qualified command pilot. “Say, Mal, are your boys and girls ready to dance?”
“We may be a little out of your league, Bravo One,” Reynolds said, still smiling to himself. “That peashooter two-megawatt laser you’re carrying won’t be in range for a while yet . . . and our rail gun can zap you the moment you cross our visual horizon.” He glanced down at his display. “Which is in just about fifteen seconds from now.”
Miller’s reply sounded equally amused. “Well, that’s mighty bold talk for a man strapped into a fat, floating tin can, Mal. Fight’s on!”
“Roger that, Bravo One. Fight’s on,” Reynolds acknowledged. He cued the intercom again. “All personnel, stand by to engage that S-29 spaceplane in simulated combat.” He looked across the compartment toward Allison Stewart. “Anytime you’re ready, Captain.”
She nodded. “The target is in visual line of sight. Our radar is locked on. Handing off tracking data to—” She broke off and muttered, “Well, crap.”
“Clarify that!” Reynolds demanded.
“Sorry, sir,” Stewart said, turning faintly red with embarrassment. “The radar can’t develop an acceptable fire control solution. The S-29 is maneuvering erratically, using its thrusters—not its main engines.”
Reynolds stared down at his own display in surprise. The icon representing Dusty Miller’s spaceplane jittered wildly, yawing, rolling, and pitching through all three dimensions as its thrusters fired in short pulses. And try as it might, Eagle Station’s powerful X-band fire control radar was having real trouble figuring out exactly where the S-29B would be when the Thunderbolt rail gun’s plasma shot arrived.
“Damn, that’s clever,” he muttered.
Once it was fired, the weapon’s plasma toroids could not turn or change course. They streaked along a straight, undeviating path until they lost coherence roughly one second, and six thousand miles, later. If the target wasn’t where the computer said it would be along that path, the shot would miss. As the range dropped and the time of flight for the plasma projectiles diminished, the job of making that calculation should get easier. If nothing else, once flight times dropped to just fractions of a second, the S-29’s thrusters might not be able to move the spacecraft out of the way in time.
He looked back at Stewart. “How long before that spaceplane gets within striking range of this station?”
“A little under five minutes, Colonel.”
He nodded. “Okay. Can you run a pattern analysis on the S-29’s observed evasive maneuvers? See if you can crack whatever program they’re running, so our computer can predict its next moves?”
She chewed her lower lip, deep in thought. “I can try, sir.”
Left unspoken was the probability that whatever automated maneuver program Dusty Miller and his Shadow crew had running was using randomly generated numbers to select which particular thrusters fired and for how long. If it was using the more typical pseudo-random number generators common to many computer programs, the algorithm and seed used might be discoverable . . . in time. If it was using a so-called true random number generator and extracting randomness from physical phenomena—radioactive source decay, for example—there was probably no way to crack it.
Thinking it through, Reynolds was willing to bet there were hard limits coded into the S-29’s evasion program. You couldn’t leave everything to pure random chance—not on a working spacecraft with set reserves of hydrazine thruster fuel. There were also definite limits to the amount of torque and tumbling you could inflict on a spaceplane without harming the crew or risking its structural integrity.
He opened a circuit to Major Ozawa in the aft weapons module. “Ike, I want you to take every possible shot at these guys, understand? Even if you can’t get a solid fire control solution, take the shot.”
Ozawa whistled softly. “Pretty long odds against scoring a hit that way, Colonel. Not at anything over a few hundred miles, anyway.”
“Maybe so,” Reynolds agreed. “But long odds are better than no odds.”
“Yes, sir,” Ozawa said.
Reynolds closed out that circuit and opened a new one, this time to the laser weapons officer in Eagle Station’s forward module. “This may get to close quarters, Bill. If it does, I’m counting on you to nail that S-29 fast. Once they’re within range of your lasers, you’re only going to have a minute to finish this fight. Right?”
“Yes, sir,” Captain William Carranza acknowledged. “One thing to consider, Colonel. If we can’t hit them, they may have trouble holding their own laser on target long enough to inflict serious damage on us.”
Reynolds nodded. “Yeah, which could make this a mutually assured destruction scenario. If possible, that’s not a game I want to play. This station is worth a lot more than one spaceplane.”
“Understood,” Carranza said.
Reynolds frowned deeply. Was there anything else he could do? There were just minutes before Eagle Station and Dusty Miller’s spaceplane passed each other within two hundred miles. Weird as it seemed, that was practically knife-fighting range for weapons that hit at light speed and considerable fractions of light speed. Then he shrugged. When all was said and done, this simulated space battle was going to come down to a completely unpredictable interaction between the laws of physics, probability, and Lady Luck.
Shadow Bravo One, over the North Atlantic Ocean
Ten Minutes Later
“Eagle Station is below our visual horizon. No other immediate threat detected,” a calm, female voice announced.
“Copy that. Discontinue evasion program,” Colonel Scott “Dusty” Miller ordered through gritted teeth as another sharp jolt, this time from the spaceplane’s aft thrusters, shoved him hard against his seat straps.
“Order confirmed. Evasive flight program discontinued,” the S-29’s flight control computer said.
The difference was immediately apparent. Instead of bucking around like a wild-eyed bronco on LSD, their winged spacecraft glided smoothly along its prescribed orbital track. They were still pitched nose down, which offered a spectacular view of the cloud-laced Atlantic through the forward cockpit canopy.
“Well, that was one hell of a ride,” Miller muttered, fighting down a wave of nausea. Short and stocky, and built like a wrestler, the command pilot had years of experience flying B-2 Spirit stealth bombers before transitioning to the U.S. Space Force. But not even the worst air turbulence really compared to what he’d just endured—ten solid minutes of wholly unpredictable motion, where his body and, more important, his inner ear hadn’t known from one fraction of a second to the next in which direction their spacecraft was going to pitch, veer, roll, or yaw.
Breathing out slowly, he glanced across the cockpit at his copilot. “You okay, Major?”
Major Hannah “Rocky” Craig had been a test pilot for the F-35 fighter program before qualifying as a NASA astronaut and then transferring to the newly formed Space Force. Despite her years of intensive acrobatic flight training, even she still looked faintly green around the gills. She forced a sickly grin. “I’m fine, Dusty.” She winced. “Jeez. That was like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride dialed up to eleven.”
He nodded carefully and then keyed the intercom to the S-29’s aft cabin. “Everyone still breathing back there?”
There was a long pause and then a pinched, oddly nasal voice answered.
“Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“Well, Jensen puked about halfway through . . . so we’re kind of being careful about the whole breathing thing,” the voice, which he now recognized as belonging to the spaceplane’s data-link specialist, replied.
Miller winced. Part of their Sky Masters training for space operations had involved multiple flights in an aircraft aptly nicknamed the Vomit Comet. Repeated high-angle parabolic maneuvers created short periods of weightlessness . . . and all too often induced air-sickness. So he didn’t need an overly active imagination to visualize what it was like being trapped in a tight compartment with globules of vomit floating everywhere.
Beside him, he heard Hannah Craig stifle a laugh. He shook his head. “Show a little sympathy, Major.”
His dark-haired copilot donned an appropriately contrite look. “Sorry, Dusty.” Then her natural mirth bubbled up again. “It’s just that I’m really glad we’re riding at the front of this bus . . . and not in back with Jensen and his miraculously reincarnated breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
Miller snorted, fighting hard against his own urge to burst out laughing. “Amen to that, I guess.” His gaze sharpened. “So, how does the all-seeing, all-knowing computer say we did?”
Her fingers rattled across the largest of her multifunction displays, interrogating the S-29’s attack and threat-warning computers. In response, text boxes and schematics flashed across her screen—graphically illustrating the results of their simulated battle against Eagle Station. Her mouth turned down slightly at the corners. “It’s kind of a coin toss.”
“As in?” he asked.
“The computer figures we got nailed at least twice. Both times when we were within just a couple of hundred miles of the station.”
He nodded. No real surprise there. The Thunderbolt rail gun’s plasma projectiles flashed across that distance in just over three one-hundredths of a second. Barring luck, that was much too short an interval for any random thruster pulse to kick their S-29 safely out of harm’s way. “And on the plus side?”
Craig gave him a thumbs-up. “We scored at least three solid hits on Eagle before we got killed. So, if this had been a real fight, Colonel Reynolds and his crew would have been learning how to breathe space dust right about now.”
“Not bad for a first whack at this whole space combat deal, I guess,” Miller decided.
She shrugged against her harness. “I guess not.”
“But?”
“Ties don’t count for shit,” Craig said simply. “It’s not really a win unless you zoom off in one piece, leaving the other guy drifting downwind under his parachute and wondering what just happened.”
Miller nodded seriously. “Yeah. I see your point.” He checked his own displays. “But since that one pass just burned over seventy percent of our hydrazine, we’re done for today. Let’s get this crate configured for powered reentry on the next orbit. Then we’ll head back to base, rethink our tactics, and try again tomorrow.”
“Sounds like a plan,” she said. Her smile returned. “You know, Colonel Reynolds is really going to get tired of seeing us pop up on his radar.”
Miller shrugged. “Probably so. Still, Mal shouldn’t gripe too much about sharpening up his team in mock battles against us—not when the alternative is tangling with the Russians or the Chinese for real.”
Craig looked seriously at him. “You think that’s likely?”
“Oh hell, yes,” he said. “Those guys aren’t going to sit dirtside forever. Sooner or later, they’ll come boiling back up out of the atmosphere, spoiling for a fight. And when they do, that’ll be a very interesting day, Major.”
Nine
West Wing, General Staff and Ministries Building, Palace Square, St. Petersburg, Russia
A Few Weeks Later
The enormous neoclassical General Staff building curved around the vast expanse of Palace Square. Two wings, one on the west and one on the east, were joined by a huge triumphal arch commemorating Imperial Russia’s victory over Napoleon. The Winter Palace, once home to the tsars, loomed directly across the square in regal splendor.
Until last year, one wing of the building had been occupied by the headquarters of Russia’s Western Military District. Now, with much of the Kremlin reduced to blackened rubble, its offices were filled by a number of senior government officials and their staffs. What was supposed to have been a temporary emergency relocation to the old imperial capital showed signs of becoming permanent—at least for the ministers and their closest aides. They found the grandeur and luxury of St. Petersburg’s palaces far more appealing than Moscow’s official government buildings, many of them uncomfortable concrete relics of the Stalinist era.
Marshal Mikhail Leonov was an exception to this new rule. By staying in Moscow, he had become the de facto face of authority for the hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats, military officers, and intelligence officials who carried out the real work of government. That was not an accident. Because the other ministers were reluctant to subject themselves to another all-powerful autocrat like Gennadiy Gryzlov, they’d delayed elections for a new president yet again. But what they seemed not to understand, Leonov thought coldly, was that the Russian people instinctively craved strong leadership. And the eyes of the people were already turning toward him.
But even he found it useful to conduct certain meetings—those with his new Chinese allies, in particular—amid St. Petersburg’s imperial pomp and magnificence. The abandoned Kremlin, with its surviving damaged buildings covered in scaffolding, was a stark reminder of weakness and defeat. It was better by far, Leonov knew, to give President Li Jun’s representatives an impression of strength and stability.
With that in mind, he had chosen to hold this conference in an ornate chamber that dwarfed the small number of participants—Leonov himself, his aides, and a handful of senior Chinese generals and staff officers. The room’s high ceilings and walls were covered by elaborate molding and gold leaf. Intricate geometric designs were repeated across its parquet flooring. Nineteenth-century murals depicted Russian military triumphs against the French, the Turks, and savage Asiatic tribesmen. A round conference table and chairs occupied the middle of the enormous room—with a portable, flat-panel LED screen as the sole concession to modernity.
Right now, selected footage from several different U.S. and European news programs flickered across the screen. The American president’s recent declaration that his nation planned to establish a permanent mining colony on the moon within five years had generated a firestorm of commentary. Roughly half of the commentary condemned the idea as lunacy, a sordid bid to funnel tax dollars to favored private contractors. The other half hailed it as a long-overdue bid to rekindle America’s pioneering spirit, a bold move that could lead to the formation of a true space-faring civilization.
When the clips ended and the lights came up, Leonov turned toward General Chen Haifeng, the commander of China’s Strategic Support Force. Early on during his previous visit to Beijing, he’d realized that the balding, middle-aged military officer was one of Li Jun’s most trusted and forward-looking subordinates. The other members of the Chinese delegation were essentially window dressing. Chen was the man he needed to convince. His control over China’s military space, cyberwar, electronic warfare, and psy ops units would put him front and center in any future conflict with the United States or its allies.
“Comments, Comrade General?” Leonov asked politely.
Chen shrugged his shoulders. “As always, I am amused by the ability of so many Western journalists and politicians to speak for so long and so vehemently, while saying so little of any real value.” He smiled thinly. “In my country, we conduct our public business with more decorum.”
Left unspoken was the fact that Chinese reporters who failed to toe the approved Party line tended to disappear or turn up dead. The same went for any government officials foolish enough to disagree with policies approved by their superiors.
“There is
certainly strong American political opposition to Farrell’s plans,” Leonov noted carefully. It was important to draw this other man out, to learn his honest opinions. Chinese negotiators had a well-deserved reputation for masking their true intentions behind a façade of meaningless politeness. They were masters at the diplomatic art of delay. But the American president’s sudden decision to radically accelerate his nation’s space efforts meant neither Russia nor China could afford the luxury of watching events unfold.
He had Li Jun’s promise of an alliance with Russia. Now it was time to find out how much that alliance really meant to the People’s Republic.
Chen waved a dismissive hand at the now-dark LED screen. “Mere noise, signifying nothing.” He shrugged again. “Our political analysts are sure that President Farrell controls more than enough votes in the U.S. Congress to win approval for his lunar mining enterprise.”
Leonov nodded. “My experts say the same.” Farrell had cleverly structured his proposal so that his government’s initial outlays would be relatively minor. Larger costs would come only if the Americans actually succeeded in establishing a working mine on the moon’s surface. It was a far cry from earlier grandiose plans submitted by NASA for various manned missions to the moon and Mars, all with price tags in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
“What really matters,” Chen continued, “is whether or not the proposed American program is technically and economically feasible.”
“And?” Leonov prompted.
Chen looked pained. “Unfortunately, our analysis suggests that it is. Certainly, there are serious scientific and engineering challenges involved. But none of those challenges are insurmountable.” His mouth tightened. “In fact, my country’s space scientists and engineers have been working very hard on plans for similar lunar mining operations.”