Fatal Orbit

by Tom Grace

  Two loud pops interrupted Unger’s idle chat with one of the deckhands.

  “What the fuck was that?” the deckhand asked, trying to identify the source of the noise.

  Unger unholstered his pistol and fired point-blank into the back of the crewman’s head. A gory spray of bone and brain erupted from the man’s face, his left cheek and eye destroyed by the exiting projectile. Propelled by the force of the blow, the man toppled forward and crumpled face-first onto the deck.

  “That was the sound of your ship being seized,” Unger replied.

  Following Unger’s lead, his men drew out their weapons and took control of the stern deck. Two shots silenced the remaining deckhand before he could sound a warning. Unger holstered his pistol and signaled to the man in the launch. The man handed up six Uzi SMGs, then joined his comrades on deck. Unger left two men to guard the stern deck and motioned for the other three to follow him forward.

  Room by room, they collected the researchers and crew and escorted them to a hold in the bowels of the ship. Tao and Frores were kept under guard in the electronics suite, both seated and bound. It took less than five minutes for Unger and his men to take control of Sea Lion.

  “That one’s Tao,” Unger reported as he led Moug into the electronics suite.

  Moug studied Tao for a moment and found her much more attractive in the flesh than the photographs he’d seen of her. His attention was repaid with an icy stare. Frores’s anger was far less restrained, her face flushed and tense.

  Moug then walked over to the console where the two women had been monitoring Kilkenny’s dive. On the main screen, he saw a video image shot over the left shoulder of the HS5000. A bright spot of light slowly traveled over a curved sheet of badly damaged metal. He thumbed through the binder on the desktop and confirmed what they were after.

  “When I came aboard, I noticed this ship was flying a Diver Down flag,” Moug said calmly, again watching the video display. “Since we haven’t located your associate, I think I can guess where he is. Unfortunately for him, that’s where he’s going to stay.”

  “You animal!” Frores exploded. “You can’t leave the man down there. He’ll die.”

  “That’s the point.”

  “Got to be here somewhere,” Kilkenny muttered, his eyes darting over the blackened aluminum skin. “Bingo.”

  The second hole was a mirror image of the first and Kilkenny would have bet that the two lined up perfectly, with laser-like precision.

  “Sea Lion, I’ve found the second hole!”

  Nothing.

  “Sea Lion, do you copy? Over.”

  Again, no response.

  Kilkenny checked his computer—it was still receiving data from the ship and the signal was strong. Looking for a simple cause for the problem, he checked his headset and found the jack was firmly connected.

  “Sea Lion, do you copy? Over.”

  “This is Sea Lion,” Moug replied. “We hear you loud and clear.”

  “Who the hell is this?” Kilkenny asked, not recognizing the voice.

  “Not important. Have you found what you’re looking for down there?”

  “Where’s Roxanne?”

  “She’s here.”

  “Don’t tell him anything!” Tao shouted.

  Unger backhanded her across the face, splitting her lip. A trickle of blood ran down her chin. Frores lunged headlong into Unger, driving him back into the wall. Pinned, Unger grabbed two handfuls of Frores’s curly salt-and-pepper mane and drove his knee up into her face. Dazed, she staggered back. Unger drew his pistol and placed two bullets into the top of her head.

  “Roxanne!” Kilkenny shouted.

  “No,” Moug replied icily. “At least not yet, anyway.”

  “They killed Joan,” Tao said, her words slurred by a badly swollen lip.

  “You son of a bitch,” Kilkenny cursed.

  “When I need to be. Good-bye, Kilkenny.”

  Moug yanked out the power cables feeding the HS5000’s electronics gear; the readouts and displays went blank.

  Static.

  Not wanting whoever had taken Sea Lion to know what he was doing, Kilkenny switched off the video and digital uplink. Then he doused the suit’s external lights and switched back to AD mode. Against the gray haze of the surface, he saw two tiny black silhouettes—Sea Lion and her attackers. He tilted the left foot control and began his ascent.

  Kilkenny had to treat both ships as hostile and had no idea what he was going to do once he got there. For the moment, he was stealthy and bulletproof and had a mile to come up with some kind of plan.

  “Mayday, Mayday,” Moug called out over the ship’s radio. “This is the research vessel Sea Lion. We are in need of emergency assistance. Does any one copy? Over.”

  “Sea Lion, this is the freighter Soga Maru. What is your position? Over.”

  “This is Sea Lion. We are at zero-three-three-point-two south latitude, seven-eight-point-six west longitude,” Moug lied. “We’ve suffered an explosion and are taking on water. Many injuries. Can you assist, Soga Maru?”

  “We are moving to your position, Sea Lion. We are four hours out at best speed. We will relay your distress call to Chilean authorities.”

  “Thank you, Soga Maru. Please hurry.”

  Moug switched off the radio.

  “Scuttling charges are set and the men are assembled on the stern deck,” Unger reported

  “Then it’s time to leave.”

  At twelve hundred feet, the dark shapes on the surface had grown more distinct but were still a long way off. Unlike the AD system he and Grin were testing on the Virginia, the one he was using now didn’t have a zoom capability.

  A small black shape broke off from one of the larger ones and headed toward the other. It sped quickly across the surface, a vee-shaped wake expanding behind it. The small boat pulled alongside the second ship, then the two silhouettes merged, and Kilkenny lost sight of it.

  The second vessel pulled away, leaving the other behind, motionless in the water. Kilkenny felt an anxious knot tightening in his gut.

  The silhouette of the stationary ship fractured into a thousand tiny black triangles. The broken bits furiously repositioned themselves as the AD system struggled to reassemble the image. When the acoustic disruption cleared, Kilkenny realized that in place of the gray keel, he now saw the entire ship.

  Sea Lion had slipped beneath the surface and was picking up speed as she headed toward the bottom. Inside, her crew was either dead or dying, the last trapped pockets of air escaping in a stream of turbulent bubbles. She was falling at a sharp angle, bow first.”

  “Damn bastards!” Kilkenny railed. “You murdering sons of bitches!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Halting his ascent at two hundred feet, Kilkenny watched Sea Lion slip downward, unable to turn his eyes away. His thoughts were of Roxanne Tao, trapped with the men and women of the research vessel, entombed at the bottom of the Pacific.

  He struggled with a tremendous sense of loss. Tao was in many ways more than a friend to him. Where Kelsey was his complement, Tao was more a kindred spirit—a partner of the mind rather than the heart. Theirs was an intimacy of dark secrets, of incidents that few people would ever know, but ones from which they bore the scars.

  Wall it off, he could hear Tao saying. You’ll have time to mourn later.

  The attacker’s ship was barely visible in the gray noise of the ocean’s surface. The HS5000 was equipped with a radio beacon and a Xenon strobe—all designed to get someone’s attention should he need to surface in an emergency. At the moment, the only attention he’d draw on the surface was decidedly the kind he did not want.

  “They left me for dead. The least I can do is return the favor,” Kilkenny vowed.

  He knew that reaching land was his only shot at survival, and the closest landfall, Isla Robinson Crusoe, was just under thirty miles south of his current position. While not equipped with a GPS, the Hardsuit did possess an AD system and a compas
s. As a master diver, Kilkenny was very comfortable navigating underwater. He checked his current location against the known GPS coordinates for the Mir wreckage and Cumberland Bay, then set his course and hit the thrusters.

  To successfully reach the island, he needed two things—breathable air and power. He checked the life support display. Cabin pressure was good. Temperature a bit chilly but survivable. O2 and CO2 levels were both in the nominal range, which meant the scrubber was still functioning, keeping the air around him healthy. The port and starboard oxygen bottles were both in good shape.

  Well, at least I won’t suffocate, he thought, for a while.

  The HS5000 was designed for a normal dive time of eight to ten hours, of which Kilkenny had already spent nearly four. In an emergency, he knew the suit had enough oxygen to last forty-eight hours, but that estimate was based on the assumption that the ADS had lost power and the diver was running life support manually while awaiting rescue. Kilkenny’s situation was entirely different.

  He switched the display to the power system. This latest evolution of the Hardsuit design replaced the umbilical power feed with an internal fuel cell, which generated electricity through a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen. The suit’s ability to generate power was limited to its supply of the two gaseous fuels.

  At the time of launch, the power system had a full supply of hydrogen and oxygen. The readouts now showed two-tenths depleted from each of the tanks.

  At the present rate of consumption, I can go another twelve hours before I run out of power. And if the island is thirty miles away, and, against the current, I’m doing about one knot, Kilkenny calculated, I won’t make it unless I cut back.

  To extend his power supply, Kilkenny shut down everything he didn’t absolutely need to survive. He put all the onboard computers into an energy-saving sleep mode, so he could call them up quickly if needed. With the communications system, video, and external lights already shut down, the only power draw remaining other than the thrusters was life support.

  Kilkenny switched off the recirculation fan that pumped air inside the suit through the CO2 scrubber—in this situation it had become a luxury. In place of the fan, he slipped the emergency breathing mask over his mouth and nose so that his own lungs would force used air through the scrubber.

  Except for the Traser lights illuminating the features of his dive watch, Kilkenny stood in complete darkness. He folded his arms across his chest and focused on the rhythm of his breathing.

  It would be a long, slow trek back to the island.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII

  AUGUST 18

  Since Kilkenny’s departure, Grin had basically taken up residence in their office at the naval base, emerging only when his food deliveries arrived at the main gate. Work on the acoustic daylighting system for the navy had stalled, with Grin’s energies focused solely on locating a weapon in space.

  Over the past four days, he had painstakingly documented every rocket launch conducted during the past decade, versed himself in launch sites, payloads, and the minutiae of shroudology. So intense was this course of self-education that he could now, with a casual glance, tell the difference between a French Ariane and a Russian Proton M.

  His first pass through all the data had yielded nothing. Based on the information provided—some from sources Barnett had assured him he didn’t want to know—Grin had accounted for every rocket launched and every payload put into orbit. But he knew the answer was in the data somewhere, and the fact he hadn’t found it yet was really starting to piss him off.

  Grin poured a fresh cup of coffee and cued up Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets on his iPod. As he became more frustrated, his musical needs turned to instrumental jazz and classical—he could not stand the distraction of a human voice in the room. Drink in hand, he returned to his workstation and stared at the multiple screens arrayed there.

  I’m the only guy in the world who’ll come back from Hawaii paler than he arrived, Grin thought.

  He looked at the sleek Cinema Display and the anodized aluminum alloy case of the Power Mac G5, then compared it to the beige and black PCs. The machines provided by the navy for the acoustic daylighting project were cutting edge—one of the PCs was a custom-built computational hot rod. But for years, it seemed, Apple’s product designs had oozed a sexy cool that the PC makers could not touch.

  The reason, Grin mused, following the tangent of his thoughts, was that Apple controlled its products from soup to nuts. They could produce cases shaped like cubes or hemispheres because they designed everything that went inside. PC makers were little more than assemblers of parts built by other companies. In most cases, either type of machine could do the job, but with a Mac you did it in style.

  Soup to nuts, Grin thought, returning to satellites and launchers. If you’re going to put a weapon in space, and you don’t want anyone to know about it, you have to control everything from soup to nuts.

  Grin brought up the Enth data mining engine and defined a search to locate any soup to nuts satellite launches that had occurred before the Mir deorbit—ones in which a single company controlled everything. Then he sat back and let Enth go to work. He didn’t wait long, and the list was a short one.

  DATE: 1-10-2001

  COMPANY: SKYE AEROSPACE

  LAUNCHER: SKYE-4GR

  PAYLOAD: TEST SATELLITE

  SITE: AEQUATUS

  “Test satellite?” Grin mused.

  He brought up the payload details for the launch and learned the payload was a five-ton dummy satellite—an object with just enough equipment aboard for ground controllers to move it around and communicate with it. Puzzled, Grin checked the records for all the Aequatus launches and learned that this was the first one.

  As a player in the commercial satellite industry, Skye Aerospace stood out from the competition because of its launch site—it was the only one sending up rockets from the middle of the ocean. Grin discovered that Skye Aerospace had launched a dummy satellite to prove to its potential customers that Skye could put a heavy payload into orbit.

  “So, what became of the dummy?” Grin asked himself.

  According to company press releases, the dummy satellite was temporarily placed in geosynchronous orbit, then moved into a parking orbit and shut down. Grin tapped into the terabytes of orbital data provided by U.S. Space Command and, in the hologram chamber, displayed a three-dimensional model of the Earth and all the objects in orbit around it on the day of the test launch.

  Eliminating everything but the dummy satellite, he reconstructed the Aequatus launch—which had been captured by the western edge of the Fence—and followed the satellite through the various stages of its ascent into high orbit. Speeding quickly through several weeks of data, he finally saw the satellite move into its final, useless orbit.

  During one of the laps, Grin caught a flicker in the projected image. He stopped the simulation and rewound it slowly. The tiny yellow dot flew backward, orbiting the Earth east to west. Then he saw it. He froze the image and enlarged it. The flicker was two yellow dots so close together that the computer had trouble discriminating between them.

  Thinking it was a glitch, he rechecked the data and discovered that Space Command had indeed spotted two objects in such close proximity. Based on Space Command’s consecutive numbering, Grin knew the second object had been detected in orbit after the Aequatus test launch.

  He reset the simulation to display both objects, starting the day before the dummy satellite was placed in orbit. At first, the space above the Earth was empty. Then the dummy satellite lifted off and began orbiting the Earth. There was no sign of the other object.

  Grin kept an eye on the time index and slowed the animation as it neared the date when he first saw the second object. The dummy satellite slowly continued lapping the Earth, and then there were two objects. He enlarged the image, centering it on the orbiting pair—the fragment of the Earth still visible in the chamber spun
below. The second object was much smaller than the first. The second object then moved away from the dummy satellite and descended into a lower orbit, where it finally disappeared.

  Grin couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He reset the animation to display a projected orbit for the second object based on its trajectory. An arc drawn in a solid yellow line defining the object’s known orbit stretched over the Earth. The line became dashed red at the point where it disappeared and continued around the globe, extrapolating where the object should have been, but apparently wasn’t. And the elliptical orbit was too high for the object to have simply fallen to Earth.

  Grin combed through the raw data from Space Command and found that this was the only instance of this object in their records. Its purposeful movement in orbit precluded it from being a meteorite or a piece of space debris, but there was no record of where it came from or, after its brief appearance, where it went.

  “It’s as if the dummy satellite birthed the thing in space,” Grin mused aloud, “which might explain how it got there.”

  On a hunch, Grin redefined the animation to show any objects with short durations in orbit, and to display them in order of appearance. The first was the object he was looking at. Others appeared at odd intervals, usually with a few months between them.

  Starting with Mir, he then compared the anomalous appearances with the presumed attacks in space. In each case, Space Command not only detected a new object in orbit, but at the time of the attack, the new object had a clear line of sight with the damaged satellite. The pattern held not only for Oculus and Liberty, but for Shenzhou-7 as well.

  Grin then checked the projected orbits for each of the anomalous objects. All were following a highly elliptical path over the Earth’s poles. It was the type of orbit favored by spy satellites because it allowed them to pass over every part of the globe twice each day.