Orbital: This is the Future of War (Future War Book 3)

by FX Holden

  And Paddington had been very wrong on another important point because despite all his years in RAF Space Command, at that moment, he was thinking like the fighter pilot he was trained to be. It was true that the Russian 30mm autocannon had a range of only one mile, on earth. But in space, it could fire 1,500 rounds a minute at a speed of 2,000 feet per second and its projectiles would continue at that velocity forever. At a distance of ten miles, it would take the 30mm rounds from the Groza’s autocannons just seventeen seconds to reach the RAF Skylon.

  And hovering right at the edge of its authorized engagement range, Meany’s Skylon was giving the silicon brain of the Groza a very large headache. It was outside the Groza’s engagement envelope on two parameters; the first was range, and the second was vector. To meet its engagement rules, it needed the Skylon to close range to within ten miles, and be moving directly toward it. But it was ready, in case it did.

  “Close to five miles and complete a 360 orbit of the thing,” Paddington ordered. “I want to be able to build a virtual model out of it we can share with our cousins. See if they can tell us what the dickens it is.”

  “Yes, sir. Angus, close to five miles and obtain a full photographic texture map of the target object,” Meany told the AI.

  Closing for texture mapping, the AI confirmed. The screen shivered as the Skylon accelerated. Then it began to spin crazily.

  Warning. Incoming fire. Target maneuvering. Evading, the AI’s voice said, suddenly loud in the small trailer. Permission to return fire?

  “Yes!” Meany yelled, grabbing at his own throttle and side-stick, but knowing he could never react with the speed Angus had just displayed. “Engage.”

  “No! Countermanded,” Paddington yelled over the top of him. “Evade and withdraw.”

  Evading and withdrawing, Angus responded. Withdrawing to twenty miles separation, confirm?

  “Confirmed,” Paddington said.

  The images on the screens in front of Meany, which had been locked on the Russian satellite, began whirling like a carousel as the Skylon spun away from the spitting stream of lead from the Russian autocannon and accelerated. Even though they were fired at 2,000 feet a second, and the autocannon tracked the Skylon closely through its escape, with seventeen seconds warning, the trajectory of the heavy 30mm shells was easy enough for the quantum-computing-powered Angus to predict and evade. The Skylon was not space junk. As the RAF Skylon exited the ten-mile contact bubble around the Groza, the autocannon stopped firing, though it didn’t stop tracking.

  There was a terse silence in the trailer as the images from the Skylon’s external cameras and infrared cameras stabilized.

  Twenty miles separation, Angus finally announced. Holding and awaiting orders.

  Meany realized he was still leaning forward in his exoskeleton, gripping his side-stick with white knuckles. He released his grip and took the breath he’d been holding for the last thirty seconds.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he started. “I just heard ‘incoming fire’ and I…”

  Paddington put a hand on Meany’s shoulder. “I would have done the same, Flight Lieutenant, if I were you,” he said. “And your job is to protect the integrity of that spacecraft within the boundaries of your mission objectives. My job is to think about what might come after.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Angus?” Paddington said, raising his voice.

  Yes, Squadron Leader Bear?

  “Is the target defensive system still tracking our vessel?” he asked.

  Reviewing data. No, sir, the AI replied. The autocannon stopped firing at ten miles range, and stopped actively tracking at a distance of approximately fifteen miles.

  “Good. Angus, can you please conduct a texture mapping of the target object from a distance of no closer than fifteen miles?”

  Yes, Squadron Leader Bear. Commencing texture mapping. The screen shuddered and the vision of the Russian satellite began a slow change of aspect as the Skylon rotated around it, photographing. The distance would mean an inevitable loss of detail, but at least not the loss of their precious Skylon.

  “They say combat is hours of tedium followed by moments of sheer terror,” Paddington said, clapping Meany on the shoulder again. “We certainly proved them right, didn’t we, Flight Lieutenant?”

  Meany wiped a hand over his scalp. “That we did, sir.”

  Paddington stretched, scratched his ginger moustache thoughtfully, and then buttoned his olive drab jacket with fingers Meany noticed were shaking perceptibly. “Run a full integrity check to make sure we didn’t take any damage. And write up the engagement immediately your recon is complete, Flight Lieutenant,” Paddington said. “Mark it for Five Eyes attention. We gained some critical intelligence today.”

  “Yes, sir,” Meany said, pulling his keyboard toward him and grabbing his mouse so he could replay the mission video logs and capture in words every second of the brief engagement.

  “Right then,” Paddington said. “I rather think a cup of tea is in order, don’t you?”

  “Just pull back on that, will you?” Sergeant Karas said to Maqsud Khan, leaning over his shoulder and peering at the vision from the collision avoidance system on Groza 10. The shift before Maqsud had come on duty had been a routine one, with the only incident a collision avoidance report that the previous shift had logged and filed, without reviewing the optical targeting imagery themselves. Collision alerts weren’t so routine that they happened every shift, but even though they sometimes involved the Groza firing its close-in defense weapons, they weren’t that exciting either. The only reason Maqsud had pulled up the vision was boredom. He had a little game he played with himself, a little like a wine connoisseur blind tasting wine. Whenever there was a collision alert, he pulled up the vision and tried to identify what particular type of space junk had triggered the alert. If he could, he’d try and guess what vintage and what country, even what agency had launched it. Often there were only seconds of vision to draw on before it was blown away by the Groza’s autocannon. When he’d pulled up the vision from Groza 10, he’d just about dropped the coffee he was holding.

  What?

  RAF Skylon. It had to be! That jet-black needle-nosed cylindrical shape, nose canards, mid-section mounted thrusters. Maqsud knew the shapes and sizes of every single category of man-made object that had been sent into space for the last thirty years – no, make that fifty years. His Groza had engaged the bloody Skylon.

  That was when he’d called Sergeant Karas. The man had been intrigued at first. “That’s the Skylon, you say?” he asked.

  “I called it straight away,” Maqsud said. “And the AI has confirmed it.” He zoomed the image. “Nose, canards, engine mounts … see?”

  Karas very quickly transitioned from intrigued to annoyed. “So, the Brits got nosy,” Karas said. “Brits, Americans, Chinese … had to happen sooner or later. Lucky for them, the RAF didn’t get their billion-pound spacecraft shot to shit. Write it up and get back to work. You want a bloody medal or something?”

  “Sir, the British spacecraft at the very least got intel on the Groza’s configuration, its defensive systems, maybe signals intelligence on its comms frequencies?” Maqsud continued, not giving up. “There is also the possibility that it was damaged in the engagement … if we even chipped a heat tile, there’s a chance the British spacecraft won’t be able to re-enter the atmosphere without burning up. We should task ground surveillance to…”

  Karas clapped Maqsud’s shoulder condescendingly. “Somewhere in the Russian Aerospace Forces, there is probably some poor swine whose sole job is to try to keep track of that British spacecraft. He will no doubt be reporting this engagement in mind-numbing detail. And whoever that poor fool is, I hope I never meet him at a party, because his life story must be even more boring than yours, Corporal.”

  “But…”

  “Drop it. You have your tasking for the day. Six targeting exercises and every one better be right on spec. Focus on that, Corporal, and don’t b
other me again with your stupid UFO sightings … now, I’ll be going back to my coffee.”

  As they closed on the frigate Sahand, Amir Alakeel’s attack element could not see the smokeless HARM missiles of their air suppression colleagues streak overhead, but in any case gave them only the briefest of thoughts as their eyes were glued to the line on their helmet-mounted displays that marked their own release point.

  When they were first developed in the late 1980s, the HARM missiles were regarded as both fast and deadly. The crude radar defense systems of the time were soon updated so that they could hop frequencies in an attempt to defeat anti-radar missiles, were made multiply redundant so that the loss of one transmitter did not degrade the entire network, or were modified to be able to decoy an attack away with a dummy emitter. As quantum computers allowed better detection algorithms and provided close-in weapons systems with more precise guidance, even missiles traveling at twice the speed of sound – nearly 1,500 miles an hour – became possible to intercept.

  Iran had recently upgraded the Sahand with a British-made AWS-9 search and track radar system, purchased from Brunei. Capable of tracking up to a hundred airborne threats simultaneously and feeding data to its anti-air and close-in weapons systems, it had no trouble picking up and targeting the incoming HARM missiles. Unlike the ships of more capable navies, though, the Sahand was not able to share its targeting data either with the less well-equipped destroyers escorting it or with the Russian Mig-41 aircraft on patrol overhead.

  All it could do was to alert them verbally to the threat. “Vampires inbound!” the Sahand’s anti-air commander shouted on the inter-service radio channel. “Eight missiles, bearing 109, range 25 miles.” As one, the three ships heeled over to port, trying to present their sterns to the threat and make the smallest possible target of themselves.

  As they began to turn, the Saudi ground attack element hit its ‘attack point beta.’ Without pause, their own weapons bay doors opened and from each Lightning, the six-foot-long spear-shaped drones dropped free. Small wings and tail fins extending, they fell toward the sea and used the fighter’s momentum to propel themselves forward in a several hundred miles an hour glide. Each had been programmed with the optical and electronic profile of its target, the Iranian frigate. Each downloaded data on the position of the target at the moment of launch from its mother aircraft so that it could guide itself autonomously toward the Sahand and then attack it.

  When the Saudi HARM missiles got to within two miles of the Sahand, with a sound like the sky itself was tearing in two, the 30mm rotary cannons of its Kamand close-in weapons system started firing, at 5,000 rounds a minute. The barrels jerked up and down as they hosed the sky in the direction of the incoming anti-radar missiles. One down. They jerked right, then left, as more targets were allocated. Two down. Three. Range, one mile. Now the guns on the other two ships opened up as their radars finally picked up the incoming missiles. Four down … five.

  Three of the Saudi missiles struck home. Two hit the Khalije Fars-class destroyer Persian Gulf immediately below its radar transmitter, detonating their 145 lb. blast fragmentation warheads right over the heads of the officers on the ship’s bridge and killing every one of them. The third struck its sister ship, the Red Sea, which was heeling hard to port, in the exhaust stack immediately behind the radar dish. Both strikes put the destroyers’ radars off the air, but neither hit fatally wounded them. No HARM missiles hit the Sahand.

  They were not expected to. They were intended to decoy and distract.

  The swarm of ALFA-S drones launched by Alakeel’s now departing ground attack F-35s had slowed down as they approached the Sahand undetected at wavetop level. As the HARM missiles were being engaged, fifteen of the drones swung left, fifteen swung right, then at a hundred miles an hour, they closed on their target.

  They swarmed over its decks like pirates boarding a fat merchant vessel. As each of them reached the Sahand’s centerline, they detonated, sending hundreds of depleted uranium slugs through the 1/10th inch decks of the frigate into the crew compartments, electronics racks, lockers, storage rooms, ammunition stores and living bodies of the Sahand’s crew standing in the line of fire.

  In seconds the Sahand was transformed from the pride of the Iranian fleet to a torn and bloodied hulk.

  The espresso sitting on the coffee table in front of Roberta D’Antonia had been served in a nineteenth-century Lomonosov porcelain cup that was probably worth more than she made in a month. And it was getting cold. D’Antonia flinched as she absorbed the misdirected tirade being sent her way by the Russian Energy Minister.

  “Who the hell does that pompous mudak think he is?” Lapikov asked. “Man has a few medals, he thinks he can tell me to mind my own business?” He slammed his fist on the desk he was sitting behind and leaned forward. “Read the Defense briefings?! Pah, the next time the generals decide to use their new superweapon, I might as well read about it in the newspaper, for all the warning their so-called ‘briefings’ give me. How am I supposed to run the energy portfolio with those osly blowing away refineries all over the globe?”

  D’Antonia started. She’d assumed the Abqaiq strike was a ‘one and done.’ Surely Russia wasn’t stupid enough to think the world would buy the idea that another meteor strike had somehow randomly struck another oil processing plant?

  “Minister…” she asked carefully. “Do we have reason to believe there will be a second strike? If so, we should prepare contingency plans. Such a strike could lead to both threats and opportunities…” And World War Three, she thought to herself.

  Lapikov stood, stretching his long frame backward with a weary groan. “Reason? It seems reason has gone out the window, Ms. D’Antonia. Have you seen what is happening in the Middle East now? The Persian Gulf is in lockdown as Saudi Arabia and Iran face off across 37 miles of water, ready to tear out each other’s throats.” He locked his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. “Oil prices are up another ten dollars a barrel today, but are we satisfied? No! The generals have convinced President Avramenko their shiny new toy is the ultimate weapon of statecraft – a hammer that can strike a blow anywhere in the world, that for now is completely deniable. Cyberwarfare Unit 26165 floods the internet with fake news about the threat from a new and previously undetected meteor cloud that is intersecting earth’s orbit, with predictions there will be more such disasters as the one that struck Abqaiq. It is not a matter of whether the idiots will use it again, but where, and when.”

  “But the world will eventually see what Russia is doing,” D’Antonia pointed out. “The Americans already claim to have evidence. Groza must be a treaty breaker, there will be consequences…”

  Lapikov laughed. “You refer to the Outer Space Treaty, perhaps? That prevents us from putting nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction in space or on the moon. It does not prevent ‘conventional’ weapons like Groza.”

  “A weapon that can destroy ten city blocks is not a weapon of mass destruction?” she asked.

  “An interesting question, yes? It is not nuclear, radiological, chemical, or biological, so no,” he said. “I imagine the Security Council will eventually tie itself in knots for months over that one.”

  D’Antonia finally reached forward and picked up her cold coffee, draining it with one gulp. “If what you say is true, we need to get to work planning for the next strike. We may not know where, but if it is intended to strengthen further our economic position, there are only so many targets that make sense. I will consult with experts in the energy sector to identify the most vulnerable infrastructure, the most appealing targets if the aim is to force energy prices higher…”

  Lapikov sat down again. “Do that but be discreet. There must be no suspicion that Groza…”

  “I’ll call it a terrorism planning exercise,” D’Antonia said. “Pull together a team of experts and tell them to assume a major terrorist organization is planning an attack on global energy infrastructure outside Russia.”

 
; “Terrorists, yes,” Lapikov laughed drily. “You have a way with irony, Ms. D’Antonia.”

  “So, let us discuss the next target in support of the repositioning of the Russian economy,” Colonel-General Oleg Popovkin, commander of the 15th Aerospace Forces Army, said to Major-General Yevgeny Bondarev. Bondarev took the tablet the man was holding out to him and scrutinized the image on the screen. It showed a series of lines running across a map that he was now familiar with. “Before you start putting assets in place, I want to hear your thoughts,” Popovkin said.

  Bondarev hesitated, putting the tablet under his arm. Bondarev knew the man opposite had achieved his position through a combination of luck, and loyalty. He did not often question the directives of his military or political superiors and did not like officers who questioned his. But Bondarev had not achieved his own position by keeping his thoughts to himself.

  “My primary thought, Comrade General, is whether there are other means than another orbital bombardment by which we could achieve our economic aims.”

  “You have … operational concerns?” Popovkin asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “And political,” Bondarev explained. “Operationally, I have little doubt the military objectives are achievable, though I am certain the target of the attack will respond to it and that response could vary from outrage, to an outright declaration of war.” Before Popovkin could respond, Bondarev continued. “Politically, I wonder whether our new government has learned anything from the misadventures of the last? In my own time as an officer we have tried twice, and failed twice, to influence the course of history through force of arms and it seems to me we have learned nothing.”

  Popovkin glowered. “If I have learned anything Bondarev, it is that soldiers should devote their intellects to the problems of warcraft, not statecraft. So perhaps we should do that?” He nodded to an aide who took the tablet from Bondarev and flicked the map up onto a wall screen.