Death Orbit

by Maloney, Mack;

  When the Marconi finally reached the area where both the Seamaster and Flight 19.5 had made their last reports, it could find no evidence of any of the aircraft—or of the mysterious ship that they both must have seen.

  The spy ship would stay on station for the next two hours. Seven more search and rescue aircraft were dispatched from Banana River, but none found any trace of the Sabres or the huge flying boat.

  Word of the bizarre disappearances swept the KSC very quickly. Shock and dismay followed. All UA military facilities up and down the East Coast were put on alert. The loss of all the pilots, and especially Yaz, was taken very hard at UA joint command. General Jones, in particular, was devastated.

  Only later would he receive a top-secret report generated from the maritime files kept aboard the USS Marconi. Its search computer had finally found a match based on the description of the mysterious ship given in the last reports from the Seamaster.

  The computer identified it as the USS Cyclops, a U.S. Navy collier, a ship designed to carry coal.

  It had left Barbados with a load of manganese ore in March of 1918—and was never seen again.

  Seventeen

  Cape Cod

  THE STORM RAGING OFF Nauset Beach had reached a new level of ferocity by midnight.

  It had been determined by the UAAF weather station up in Boston that the powerful hurricane that had swept the mid-Atlantic had suddenly stopped and was now swirling in place about 150 miles off the coast of southern Massachusetts.

  This lack of movement was called the “Felix Effect,” after a similar hurricane of that name had parked itself off the American East Coast for several days years ago before finally moving off and dissipating. Knowing that opposing high and low pressure fronts were responsible for stalling the storm, the UA weathermen were at a loss as to how long the hurricane would be battering Cape Cod and the nearby islands. In any case, they didn’t expect any significant change in the next 48 to 72 hours.

  The storm had already blacked out most of Cape Cod. The electrical service, never the most stable to begin with, had failed up and down the peninsula a long time before. Now the only lights seen through the wind and rain were those being powered by emergency generators inside the handful of coastal military installations. Everyone else was relying on candlepower or nothing at all.

  It was particularly dark inside Skyfire, the farmhouse atop Nauset Heights.

  The lights had failed completely around dusk after a long windy, rainy day in which the electricity had been blinking on and off intermittently. Frost was sitting on the overstuffed couch in the tiny front room, his knees shaking, his stomach aching from indigestion, dehydration, and stress. He was holding a lit candle, his fingers cupped around it, trying to keep the flame alive in the drafts blowing through the porous farmhouse.

  Outside the wind was howling, the rain fierce. The lightning and thunder had been constant since morning. There were at least five other people in the house, but Frost wasn’t too sure exactly where any of them was. He’d been spooked ever since his ethereal encounter up in Gander, and with the long trip down here and the strange events since—well, he felt lucky just to be sitting here, breathing normally and thinking in a somewhat rational way.

  His knees were shaking, though, and that had never happened to him before. He’d been in air combat many times; he’d faced down some of the most bloodthirsty air pirates during his days as a Sky Marshal; he’d survived the siege and battle at Khe Sanh during the most recent war in Vietnam. During all that and more, his knees had never shaken. Oddly, this bothered him the most.

  He was a professional soldier, and as such, he knew when adversity struck it was always best to consider what the hell was wrong and then lay out contingencies to fix the problem.

  What was wrong?

  He was sitting in a haunted house, that’s what was wrong. Upstairs, in the main bedroom, were four ghosts. Or at least, Frost thought they were ghosts. Actually, they were the four young girls Dominique had first shown him shortly after his arrival. How did they get to Skyfire? They didn’t know. Where did they come from? They weren’t sure of that either. Only the oldest girl had talked, and that was briefly to Dominique, after she’d discovered the four sitting in the bedroom. This girl, who was missing part of her bathing suit at the time, told Dominique that she and her friends had been playing on a beach somewhere when suddenly, they woke up to find themselves inside the bedroom, crying, sunburned, and very lost. They had said nothing ever since.

  And now Frost was sitting here, trying to keep the candle going and think about something other than the thunder and lightning and wind and the girls upstairs and his own frightening experience that had caused him to come here in the first place. He could only wish this was all a dream and that he would soon wake up in his bed up at Gander and he could blame the meal brought to him by the overly helpful enlisted man. But even then, Frost knew he would have a problem. If this was a dream and he was dreaming of the children upstairs, then that meant a maelstrom of bad luck would soon be coming his way. His grandmother had told him years ago that it was bad luck to dream about children, especially young girls. Either way, Frost had decided, he was in for some bad times.

  There was another thing his grandmother had told him, suspicious old windbag that she was. But this one had stuck with Frost, too, mostly because his grandfather, a stately man of regal European stock, had concurred when he’d told him about it. The world will go a little crazy just before it comes to an end, Grandma had said. Things will go just a little off-kilter; Nature will short-circuit a bit before the Final Day. This way, she’d claimed, everyone who’d been good enough to get into heaven could start packing their spiritual bags for the trip. In fact, these good souls would begin disappearing even before Doomsday arrived. Yes, that will be a nightmare for the missing persons bureau! Grandpa had said.

  And what will happen to the rest of the people, Granny? What will happen to the ones who weren’t so good, the ones left behind while all the true believers suddenly started disappearing? Granny had put it this way: where they were going, there would be no need to pack a bag.

  These were the disturbing retrograde thoughts that were flying around in Frost’s head. The candle kept teasing him, seemingly going out, only to flare up briefly just as soon as he’d begin to panic. The wind grew worse, if that was possible, as did the rain. The old house was creaking so much now, Frost’s ears were beginning to sting. Christ, didn’t Hunter do any work on this place while he was here?

  Apparently not.

  There was a crack of lightning followed by a particularly sharp crash of thunder. It sounded like a small nuclear device going off. This time Frost’s candle did go out for good, leaving him alone in the suddenly dark room. Now it was more than his knees that were shaking. From above he heard another crash, as if someone had just fallen. Then, more pounding and tumbling sounds from upstairs.

  Where was Dominique? She’d left the house sometime before—to get candles, he thought. Or was it to take in the hay? Had she returned? Frost wasn’t sure.

  Another crash from upstairs; another bolt of lightning, illuminating everything outside and nothing inside. What was going on upstairs? Were those ghostly kids still up there? Were they in trouble? A shiver the likes of which he’d never felt before went through Frost. He heard a scream—high, short, shrill. It was one of the kids. They were in some kind of trouble. And that meant he would have to go up those stairs and try to help them.

  He stood up, surprised he could, his legs were shaking so much. He had no weapon, no gun or even a knife, to take with him. All those things had been left back in Gander. Whatever he was about to do, he would have to do it unarmed.

  He took a few tentative steps toward the stairway—that’s when heard another scream, followed by some whimpering. Something bad was happening up there, Frost knew. Despite his almost pathetic condition, he knew he had to get up there and see what it was.

  Somehow, he found the gumption to put his f
oot on the first stair and start climbing. It was pitch black at the top of the stairs, and Frost couldn’t get over the dreadful feeling that he was really ascending into some kind of black hole, a void from which nothing could escape, not even light.

  He stopped about halfway up, using the excuse that he should allow his eyes to adapt to the darkness. But in the next short breath he knew this was bullshit: he’d been sitting in the near-dark for hours, and this was as good as his eyes were ever going to get.

  Still, he stayed frozen on the fifth creaky step, wondering just when the hell it was that he lost his manhood. Where did the courage to drive a jet fighter through the sky in pursuit of some dangerous enemy go? What happened to the balls he’d needed to stick it out under the falling shells at Khe Sanh? Now he couldn’t even walk up the stairs in the dark.

  Another tiny scream. And now more crying, somewhat muffled. Frost sucked it up and went up the last five stairs as fast as he could, which was still somewhat slow. Finally he reached the landing and was confronted with the closed door which led into the bedroom where the mysterious children had first appeared.

  Sure, all the goody-two-shoes will start disappearing from the face of the Earth and they will ride up into the clouds—but what the hell had Granny told him about people suddenly disappearing and popping up in other places? Nothing that he could recall. With a shaking hand, Frost reached out and nudged the door open. The whimpering got a little louder.

  The four girls were sitting on the bed in the exact same positions as when he’d last seen them. Only one of them, the oldest, looked up at him. The others seemed to be terrified and mesmerized at the same time, their eyes glued on the closet door, which was just an arm’s reach away from the foot of the old four-poster bed.

  Two of these girls were crying; the third, who was the youngest, was in such a state, she was having a hard time just catching her breath. Frost was beyond trembling at this point. He’d never been so scared in his life. Another bolt of lightning. Another crash of thunder outside. All four girls jumped at the tremendous sound. But this is not what was scaring them.

  Whatever was doing that, was behind the closet door.

  Frost looked at the older girl and she pointed first to the door and then, to the floor at the bottom of it. A puddle of water was forming under the door itself. Something inside the closet was dripping wet.

  Frost took two very small steps into the room and found himself within reach of the door. This was the moment of truth. These kids looked as if the devil was in the closet, and now Frost had taken it upon himself to find out exactly what it was and do battle with it, if necessary.

  Maybe he hadn’t lost all his courage after all, he thought, as his shaking right hand grabbed hold of the doorknob.

  He gave it a twist even as he caught a whiff of seawater in his nose. Then he pulled it open…

  Suddenly he found himself letting out a little yelp. There was a man inside the closet. He was dripping wet. His eyes were closed, yet his mouth was moving. He was dressed in a soaking flight suit and still had a radio wire and an oxygen mask draped across his chest.

  Frost felt his eyes go wide and his jaw drop. He was certain he was inside a nightmare now because he recognized the man in the closet even as he fell forward into his shaking arms.

  It was Yaz.

  Eighteen

  In Orbit

  IT WAS ON THE THIRTEENTH orbit of the fourth day in space when the Zon’s first and second GPC computers finally failed.

  It was not an unexpected event. Just 20 inches long and about 10 inches high and wide, the 60-pound GPCs (general purpose computers) were the brains of the Zon’s operations. They were the reason the spacecraft could launch, get into orbit, stay there, and, if everything was still together, reenter the atmosphere and return to earth. They were, in effect, the remote control unit for the spacecraft, the highly advanced autopilot.

  But the GPCs had been working on overload ever since the flight had begun. With all the violent maneuvering to avoid the space mines, and the constant need to switch back and forth between automatic and manual control, GPC 1 and 2 just couldn’t take the strain. Like endlessly turning a light bulb on and off, the wear and tear finally got the best of them.

  They blinked out just as the Zon had come around from the dark side of the planet on 13-4. A warning buzzer came on momentarily, followed by two flashing panels on the main control board. Geraci was up on the flight deck at the time. He pushed the flashing panels to off and reset the warning buzzer. There were five GPCs on-board the Zon; 3 and 4 were primarys, 5 was the back-up. Theoretically, the spacecraft could run on just one—but that was a situation no one wanted to face.

  Failing computers were not the only problem facing the Zon crew. Two maneuvering jets, both on the right side of the spacecraft, had also failed; either they were clogged with frozen fuel residue, or all the wild maneuvering had killed them, too. Then there were the warning lights that kept popping concerning the integrity of the main engine systems—these were the things of nightmares. Everything else aboard the battered spacecraft could be working perfectly, but if the main engines didn’t fire when they were supposed to, then the Zon and everyone on board would be stuck in space forever.

  Oddly, though, Geraci and the others had come to view these main engine warning lights as glitches—each time one came on, Geraci would run a diagnostic program on the main engines and everything would come back green. The only logical conclusion was that the problem lay inside the warning lights. But no one wanted to go in and start pulling them apart. What would happen if one of them broke? So they lived with nagging blinking lights—and the frightening possibility that at any time the warning light might be true and the heart of the Zon might indeed fail, condemning them all to a slow, gruesome, airless death.

  They had just completed 13-4 and were moving into 14-4 when they finally saw it.

  Elvis was in the jumpseat; Hunter was at the controls. Ben had just completed another in what seemed like a never-ending series of probability/location profiles on the space mines when his navigation computer began blinking. He looked over at JT, who was fretting in the seat next to him, and they in turn looked at Hunter.

  For the first time in a long time, the Wingman had a smile on his face.

  “Son of a bitch,” he was whispering, “There it is…”

  Way off in the distance, almost hidden in the haze of stars about 40 miles ahead and several orbital layers above, was a long, irregular-shaped object that looked like a huge mechanical multilegged spaceborne water-bug. It was much larger than any previous space junk that they’d encountered. It was larger than the haunted Soyuz capsule and even the Zon itself. As soon as they saw it, they all knew exactly what it was.

  It was the Mir space station, the entity they believed housed Viktor and was responsible for sowing all the murderous space mines.

  At last they had found it.

  “God, it’s an ugly-looking thing,” Cook said, straining to get a glimpse of the spacecraft through the front windshield.

  “Yeah, but ugly don’t make a difference up here,” Elvis replied.

  Everyone knew exactly what Elvis meant. On earth, there was an old saying regarding airplanes: if it looks good, it flies good. Of course the kernel of truth in this was that aerodynamic lines usually had a design element to them—sometimes the more dramatic the element, the better.

  But up in space, there was no need for smooth corners and trim edges. There was no air, therefore no resistance and no need to build in any cool curves or swept-back wings. Just as long as the thing could survive the many hazards of space, what it looked like had no bearing on its operation or success as a spacecraft.

  But the Mir looked particularly unattractive, as if some giant hand had simply stuck this here and that there and declared it a spacecraft. Of course, that wasn’t too far from the actual story. The Mir had been cobbled together from separate parts flown up by the Russians in the course of two decades. It was a like a mob
ile home that had sat in the same place for 20 years or more, getting the latest in mobile home technology—awnings, room extensions, bigger windows, a porch—but still basically a trailer.

  “Well, this is what we’ve been waiting for,” Hunter said, powering up the Zon’s remaining maneuver jets. “We’ll only have one chance, so let’s do it by the book…”

  “You mean if there is a book on something like this,” JT replied.

  One hour and twenty minutes later, they had maneuvered the Zon to within a mile of the Mir.

  The space station was much larger than it appeared when they first spotted it. It was apparent that since Viktor had appropriated the place, he and his minions had added some new modules. Now the Mir had so many extensions—at least two dozen solar panels for power, several additional docking rings to accept Soyuz capsules, plus two large cylindrical objects, stuck on the southern portion of the complex—that it looked like something from a Rube Goldberg nightmare. But this wasn’t about being pretty. It was about staying alive in space.

  The space station seemed eerily serene as Hunter closed to within a mile of it. It appeared to be powered up. There were two sets of navigation lights on its most far-flung extensions: a pair of red lights at the end of the foremost solar panel, and a couple of green lights flashing at the end of the cylindrical capsule on its bottom tier. Both sets were blinking rapidly. There were several portholes visible from the Zon’s current angle, and dim, bluish lights could be seen within them.

  Still, they were getting no reaction at all as they slowly moved in. But what did they expect? What does one do if the space station is about to be intruded upon? It’s not like they could just fire a burst from their cannons and then run away or escape into a convenient cloud bank, like during a high-speed dogfight down on earth.

  No—in space, everything was different.