by FX Holden
What? “Repeat that.”
Certainly. Cooper Nuclear Station is a boiling water reactor type nuclear power plant…
“Stop.” Oh, shit. She pulled a tablet from a seat pocket, called up a map of the area around Lincoln and drew a line on the map between Lincoln and Cooper. The red pin marking the nuclear reactor was 59 miles from the center of Lincoln, as the crow flew. Which put it bang in the middle of the strike zone Grahkovsky had warned her about.
Cows and farmhouses, the scientist had scoffed. Sure. Cows, farmhouses and a goddamn nuclear reactor.
The destruction of a nuclear power station in the USA? To what end? To disrupt power supplies in Nebraska? To distract the USA with a nuclear emergency in its heartland? If so, again, why? The strike on Abqaiq she could understand, because the impact on world energy prices had been immediate. But a strike on a US nuclear plant in Nebraska? It simply made no sense. Unless it really was, as Grahkovsky claimed, a random event caused by an unmapped asteroid field.
She tapped her phone on her thigh, watching stalled traffic rush past as her car moved smoothly along the highway in the VIP lane. She had to report this to AISE. Whether she trusted Grahkovsky or not, it wasn’t up to her to decide whether the Americans should be alerted to a possible strike on their nuclear facility or not. That was above her pay grade. She had to report it to AISE, and they would no doubt urgently alert US Homeland Security.
And then what, Roberta? she asked herself. Given it was just a single source report from the Italian security services, Homeland Security might ignore it. Or perhaps take some minor precautions; put the management of the nuclear plant on alert and raise the readiness levels of some local first responders. Meteor strike on Cooper Power Plant? Yeah, right. Those Italians have been smoking the oregano again.
Unless they were as concerned about Groza as her own service, were already tracking its satellites and concluded there was a real risk. In which case, a full-scale pre-emptive evacuation might be triggered.
Which would totally, and completely, blow her cover since the information could only have come from her briefing by Grahkovsky.
Oh, you suini. She smiled. She was starting to take a shine to the enigmatic Yevgeny Bondarev. Her first encounter, he’d given her a very cold shoulder. Second encounter, he’d set her a test. It was the sort of elegant misdirection she often indulged in herself. She was damned if she reported it to AISE and damned if she didn’t.
She dropped the tablet down on the seat beside her.
A nuclear reactor accident?! She had no choice. First, she would call Lapikov and brief him on the meeting. Then, when she got home, she would code and send an urgent report to AISE.
And then? Well, if the Americans reacted to her report, she would probably get a knock on her door from a couple of men in black leather jackets inviting her to come and talk with them. In Moscow’s Lefortovo prison.
Oh well, Roberta, she told herself. It’s been a ride. If you have to go down, you might as well go down because you tried to save a quarter-million people from meteoric fire and nuclear radiation.
In her own way, Bunny O’Hare was also having a moment of self-reflection. O’Hare wasn’t usually one to doubt her abilities, but the conversation with Zeezee had chipped her paint.
When she walked into a room full of pilots, she knew there would be people in the room with better reaction times, better technical skills, more experience and without a shred of doubt, more balanced temperaments. But there weren’t any that were better combat pilots. Or none that she’d met.
With the Royal Australian Air Force over Syria, before she’d been transferred to ‘non-combat duties’, she had brought down two Russian-piloted Su-57s. Yes, she’d written off an F-35 herself after it took a punch in the guts and she’d had to land without wheels, but she’d made it home and so had the other aircraft in her flight, at least one of which would not have been alive but for her. In the Bering Sea conflict, her swarm of X-47 unmanned combat aircraft had claimed five Russian aircraft on the ground and nine, including a nuclear armed strategic bomber, in air-to-air combat.
On the deck of a Zumwalt destroyer off Okinawa, leading the hunt for her own rogue submersible Orca drone, she’d been able to read its silicon mind and persuade the Zumwalt’s XO to ride out an EMP torpedo attack: allowing the Zumwalt to stay alive, kill the Orca and engage a Japanese destroyer force which could have turned the tide of battle ashore. That kind of cool counted for something, right?
Sure, she was a recent convert to space operations, and she’d never gone up against a Russian killer satellite before. But combat wasn’t about the machines or the mechanics or the electronics, it was about the person behind the stick, right? Until the day when an AI was also calling the shots, in war you needed someone with the instincts and courage to do what was needed to fight and win. Forget politics, forget interpersonal relations, forget little expediencies like ‘stability’.
Or was she missing something?
Nah.
Economic repositioning
Low earth orbit, 900 miles over Nova Scotia, Canada
The 250-kilowatt high energy laser, or HEL, on B for Bertha, was not an elegant weapon. It was stowed in the payload bay during launch and landing, and to be deployed under combat conditions, the payload bay doors were opened and the laser system elevated to allow the lens array a 360-degree field of fire. Deploying the weapon took an excruciating thirteen minutes. The US Army version was truck-mounted and relied on an auxiliary generator for power. In space, a compact hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell provided the needed power, but it could only be refueled on the ground, which meant the laser had a limited burn life. Every ten seconds of laser operation depleted the fuel source by three percent, giving the laser just five and a half minutes of firing time. The weapons officer on the X-37 crew could adjust the laser’s ‘pulse’ rate from 0.1 second pulses to ‘full beam’ to extend the firing time, but a pulsed beam created less damage.
In the earth’s atmosphere, the destructive power of laser weapons was degraded by atmospheric conditions, dust and airborne objects. In space, none of these applied, but the tendency of the excited light particles to interact with each other meant the focused laser beam would disperse with distance. In space, Bertha’s 250-kilowatt laser could burn straight through quarter-inch steel plate at the range of a mile, through a fifth of an inch of aluminum at two miles, and over several minutes would melt metal at distances out to five miles.
No one expected it to be able to do so at a range of ten miles out from the Groza satellite currently winging through space over Canada, but the tense group of officers inside O’Hare’s command center hoped it would not need to. The stolen Groza data had indicated it used a hydrogen peroxide propellant for station keeping and attitude adjustment, which had a flashpoint of 302 degrees. At ten miles, it was hoped Bertha’s laser could heat the skin of the Groza’s main body to 500 degrees, allowing the gaseous hydrogen peroxide to mix with the silver catalyst inside the body of the small rocket engines and either cause it to catastrophically decompose, blowing the satellite open from the inside, or cause the thrusters to fire spasmodically so that the satellite began to spin out of control. Sometimes even just dramatically heating a single surface on an object in space released enough energy to ‘nudge’ it out of orbit. Any of these results should ensure the satellite’s destruction.
It would not exactly be a covert attack as far as Russia was concerned – they could easily identify the source of the attack as being a Space Force X-37. But it would be essentially invisible to the rest of the world.
“Holding at 15 point zero five miles,” O’Hare announced. “Weapons?”
Albers ran the fingers of his left hand over a keyboard as he made minute adjustments to a toggle with his right. “HEL deployed and at full power. Set to quarter-second burst mode. Target acquired.” They had spent the last hour completing a 360-degree orbit of the Russian satellite, photographing every visible surface. A quick review of the image
ry by Zeezee’s intel team had concluded it appeared to be a similar design to the one encountered by the RAF Skylon – and it fielded the same 30mm autocannon defensive system.
“Bertha, systems status?”
All systems nominal, Captain, the spacecraft’s AI replied.
O’Hare looked over her shoulder at her mission commander, Rodriguez, who, together with Severin, made up the only audience in the cramped 615th Squadron command center at Morrell. She had no doubt the engagement was being followed closely inside a Pentagon situation room as well, but that didn’t faze her. She had a job to do and just wanted to get about doing it.
“Permission to engage, ma’am?” O’Hare asked.
“Granted,” Rodriguez said tersely.
“Shoot, shoot, shoot,” O’Hare ordered Albers, who with a thumb atop his targeting toggle made one last check that his optical sights were centered on the large white dome over the cylinder of warheads and then fired.
The pulsing beam of the laser was almost invisible on the screens inside the command center – just the faintest glowing finger of light could be seen flickering between the X-37 and its target. But Albers had a thermal readout on a screen in front of him that was taking a reading from the metal skin of the satellite under his crosshairs and he started calling it. “120 degrees, 180, 230, 310, 355…”
O’Hare ran her eyes across her instruments and tightened her hand on her flight controls. She had an evasive sequence programmed that would send Bertha scooting backward at any sign of explosive decompression and approaching debris. And another if the satellite’s conventionally armed autocannon gave off any tell-tale heat signature indicating it was being fired. She also kept her eye on the HEL’s fuel status, watching it count down in decimal points as it burned precious hydrogen and oxygen to power the laser.
“Five hundred degrees, ma’am?” O’Hare asked. The globe of the earth spun dizzyingly below the satellite, a white expanse of cloud over Canada masking the ground below.
“Or thereabouts, Captain,” Rodriguez replied. “The specs show radiation shielding between the outer skin and the fuel storage cells. That will probably absorb some heat.”
“Four ten,” Albers said, continuing his thermal countdown. “Four twenty. Four twenty-five. Captain, we seem to be plateauing. Recommend increasing pulse length to a half-second.”
O’Hare ran her eye over the HEL fuel status again and grunted. “Pulse to zero point five, aye,” she said. And under her breath, she muttered, “Come on you hunk of junk, burn.”
“Heat anomaly on Groza 9,” a flight engineer called suddenly, breaking the pre-dawn lull inside the darkened Groza control center at Baikonur and waking Maqsud Khan from a pretty enjoyable semi-sleeping state. “Fuel temperature critical!”
Maqsud knocked his coffee over in his haste to pull up the system status screen for Groza 9. The man was right. The satellite’s fuel system status screen showed the temperature of the hydrogen peroxide inside the satellite’s tanks had risen dramatically. He graphed the data with a click of his mouse … what? In the space of less than a minute? Four hundred degrees? Hydrogen peroxide wasn’t flammable, but it could vaporize at high temperatures. He was no aerospace engineer, but he was pretty sure that would Not Be A Good Thing.
System engineering was not his team’s responsibility. He watched as the engineering team huddled over their monitors and began shouting at each other. With nothing better to do, he ran his eyes across the other environmental indicators on the satellite’s systems and saw no other signs of malfunction. They’d never experienced a sudden jump in fuel temperatures before. It could be a faulty instrument reading?
“Four-thirty degrees and holding,” the man up front called out above the babble of voices.
“Instrument check,” the corporal in charge of the engineering squad called out, echoing the thought in Maqsud’s mind. “And get the duty sergeant down here.”
Sergeant Karas was a rare sight in the control center unless there was an officer present. Maqsud knew he’d be in the mess, drinking coffee with some of the other NCOs, or just sitting in an office somewhere on the base with his feet up and his eyes closed.
Lazy swine. The encounter with what Maqsud was sure was an RAF Skylon was still etched into his mind, even if Sergeant Karas had told him to ignore it. Leaning forward to his keyboard, Maqsud pulled up the targeting system for Groza 9. Its cameras and synthetic aperture radar were currently locked on a pre-programmed static target on the ground in Canada, and Maqsud did a quick lookup. Yeah, Royal Canadian Air Force Base Shearwater. It was scheduled to hold that target until it swung further southeast and locked instead on Hancock Field, home to the F-47 drones of the US Air National Guard 174th Attack Wing.
OK, autocannon vision … Maqsud tapped a key. The screen in front of him flickered, then showed the view from the electro-optical infrared targeting camera mounted on the Groza’s defensive 30mm cannons.
What the hell? Automatically defaulting to infrared mode, the camera showed the autocannon was locked on a bright white flare that filled nearly two-thirds of the screen. Quickly changing the filter setting, Maqsud canceled the infrared view and pulled up a simple optical view. It showed nothing but the darkness and flickering points of fuzzy light that was the normal backdrop of space. He checked the autocannon targeting system log … target lock. The autocannon was tracking something, but it must be outside engagement range. He punched in maximum zoom on the targeting camera and … oh, you dvornyag.
As calmly as he could, Maqsud keyed the mike at this throat. “Targeting to engineering, I have an unidentified spacecraft on optical at ten miles. Lens flare indicates it has deployed an energy weapon. Designating target UI 1. Sending position. Recommend evasive maneuvers.”
“Temperature rising again,” the man up front called, a note of panic in his voice. “Four eighty!”
The five men in Maqsud’s squad looked over at him in alarm as he stood and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Propulsion: evasive maneuvers. Weapons: give me manual targeting override on the autocannons. Now, dammit!”
The corporal in charge of the weapons squad stammered at him, “But … but Khan, the Sergeant has to…”
“The Sergeant is not here,” Maqsud spat. “Do it!”
“Four ninety degrees,” Albers said, a note of satisfaction in his voice. “The half-second pulses did it. We should break through five hundred any second and…”
Two things happened. On the targeting screen in front of O’Hare, the Groza satellite suddenly skittered sideways. “I’ve lost target lock,” Albers said, frantically swiveling the crosshairs of the HEL and trying to keep the satellite centered. A tone in O’Hare’s ears told her the laser had stopped firing as soon as it lost the target.
A second tone told her that Bertha was now under fire instead. Her AI routine kicked in immediately, firing the X-37’s forward and bow thrusters, sending it skating diagonally backward away from the Russian spacecraft.
“Enemy counter-fire,” she said calmly. “Evading.”
Bertha’s combat AI had no trouble seeing the heavy 30mm slugs that were flying through space toward her at around three thousand feet a second. On a tactical monitor on the wall in front of her, the AI projected the trajectory of the Russian shells. Oh, you’re good, O’Hare thought to herself. Whether AI or human, whoever was behind those guns knew their business. As Bertha maneuvered, the gun adjusted its aim to lead the 30mm slugs into her anticipated position. A battle of algorithms was playing out, as Bertha jinked and rolled, while the Russian gunners continuously adjusted their aim and kept a stream of metal flying at the X-37.
O’Hare didn’t panic. At ten miles distant the first slugs from the Russian cannon were still five seconds out and were flying wide. Those fired at her current position were still fifteen seconds out. If Bertha sat still, or if she just kept following the same vector, they might catch and shred her.
But O’Hare had no intention of sitting still.
She reached
for her throttle and stick. “Taking manual control. Reversing 140 and bugging out.”
“Retracting HEL,” Albers said. “Powering down and safing.” A moment later, he grunted, “Pilot, you have full propulsion authority.”
With a flick of a switch on the throttle, she seized manual control of the X-37 and hauled back on the flight stick. It might have been her imagination, but even though her command inputs were being sent up to the orbiting spacecraft at near the speed of light, she nearly exploded in frustration as precious milliseconds passed before she saw the spacecraft respond on her heads up display, and flip on its axis so that it was pointing away from the Russian satellite. She pushed the throttle forward, engaging the X-37’s powerful rear thrusters so that it quickly accelerated at a tangent away from the incoming fire.
“Separation?” she asked after a long minute.
“Eighteen miles four hundred feet,” Albers said. “Still showing incoming fire.”
Oh give it up will ya, O’Hare urged the Russian gunner, human or AI or whatever. I’m wasting valuable fuel here and you aren’t going to hit shit.
“Twenty-three miles,” Albers said a moment later. “Target has stopped firing.”
O’Hare flicked a look over her shoulder at Rodriguez. “I’ll take Bertha out to fifty miles, ma’am. Pretty sure they’ll still be able to see us, but they must know they can’t expect to hit us that far out with that kind of projectile velocity.”
Rodriguez’s voice sounded a little shaky. “Make it a hundred miles, Captain. We need to review the data from that engagement and adapt our strategy. Taking those birds out with an anti-satellite missile from the ground may be the only way after all. We nearly got our asses handed to us.”
“Why so pessimistic, ma’am?” O’Hare shook her head and turned back to her controls, plugging in a new position. “They never got close. I’m guessing they got a little hot under the collar, an alarm went off somewhere and a human jumped behind those guns. But I admit that Ivan knows we’re out here now and we mean them harm.”