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

by FX Holden

  “I’m sure there was, as you say, just cause,” Paddington said. “No. It’s more about your next step Flight Lieutenant.” He gestured at the walls around him, adorned with charts, maps and occupational health and safety notices. “I find myself here, at the sunset of a satisfying, some would say trailblazing career…” He shot a glance at Meany to see if the man might scoff at that, but to his credit, Meany kept a completely straight face. “… the Squadron Leader of a squadron with a single craft.”

  “Six crews, sir,” Meany interjected. “Ground support personnel, administrative personnel, intelligence officers, meteorologists and engineers…”

  “Yes, yes, not my point,” Paddington continued. “The sunset, as I was saying. And I must give some thought to my successor. Now, 11 Group higher ups could of course parachute someone into my chair, but I have enough conceit to think that if I named a worthy successor from within our own ranks, that person might have a damn good shot at the job.”

  “You’re thinking Joffrey sir?” Meany asked, missing the point entirely. Caroline Joffrey was one of Meany’s fellow pilots, and certainly fancied herself as CO material. “She’d be my pick too,” Meany continued. “Smart as a whip, steady hand under pressure. That landing last year when she had the flame-out in the port engine ten miles high? Damn impressive.”

  “Joffrey, yes, would be a person one could choose,” Bear nodded. “But this is an unorthodox command, as I’ve tried to impress on the Air Vice Marshall. And it may benefit from an … unorthodox … leader.”

  “Not Bargini sir, please,” Meany said, looking pained. “The man is a complete tosser. My old grandad once told me there is a fine line between being funny, and being a clown, and Flight Lieutenant Bargini is living proof of that, sir.”

  Now it was Bear who had to try to keep a straight face. “A tosser, yes, quite. So, to the matter at hand. What do you see as your next step, Meany?”

  “Look, sir,” Meany said, gesturing at his exoskeleton. “I realize I’m not exactly the belle of the ball. And I know I lost my head during that contact with the Russian satellite. My instinct was to blow the thing out of orbit and you were completely right to countermand my order…” He stuck his chin out. “But I love piloting the Skylon sir, I love being a part of Space Command and I would be deeply disappointed if a momentary lapse in judgement saw me transferred to another unit. Respectfully. Sir.”

  Paddington sighed. “Dammit man, I am asking you whether you could see yourself assuming command of this squadron when I move on! With a little mentoring, in the fulness of time etcetera etcetera…”

  Meany blinked a couple of times. “Sorry sir, for a moment there I thought you were suggesting you would consider putting my name forward for Squadron Leader.”

  “And if I was?”

  “Well, if you was, were, to do that…” Meany said carefully. “I would, again respectfully, decline.”

  “Good, wonderful … sorry, what?” Paddington stuttered, his ears finally catching up with his mouth. “You would decline?”

  “In a heartbeat sir,” Meany said. “Unless of course the alternative was to serve under that twat Bargini.”

  Paddington frowned. Not exactly the turn of conversation he had planned.

  Meany could see the consternation in his face apparently. “Sir, these tin legs can’t put me back into the cockpit of a fighter jet, but they’ve done one better and put me into the cockpit of a spacecraft. Virtually, at least. It’s my dream job and I wouldn’t trade it for yours in a month of Sundays.” He shifted uncomfortably in his frame. “Though … of course … I am sure you find it … you are extremely capable at it, sir, but it takes a certain mentality I don’t have. Is what I mean.”

  “I see,” Paddington said, although he didn’t, really. “These opportunities don’t come along every day you know Meany,” he said. “And you may not get Bargini, or Joffrey, but some other officer instead who you also consider a ‘tosser’ or a ‘twat’ and where would you be then?”

  “Working in the private sector, I suspect sir?” Meany shrugged. “But still in a cockpit. I get calls at least once a month from Boeing, SpaceX or Reaction Engines asking if I’d like to jump ship when I hit my next discharge date.”

  “Right then,” Paddington said. “Good for you, and all that. Glad we cleared that up.”

  Meany levered himself upright and stood at ease with his hands behind his back. “But you have my sincere thanks for even considering me sir,” he said. “And please take a long hard look at Flight Lieutenant Joffrey. I suspect that one day, perhaps soon, we will be going to war up there, and she’s the one I’d want calling the shots if it isn’t you.”

  Roberta D’Antonia’s apartment in Moscow was a modest two-bedroom split-level that fronted Sokolniki Park on the edge of the Meshchansky District, where the Energy Ministry offices were located. On the money Lapikov was paying her, she could have afforded a much more upmarket neighborhood, but after the walled expat compounds of Riyadh, she enjoyed the ordinariness of Sokolniki with its tree-lined streets, local markets and squares full of grandmothers and grandchildren.

  She’d briefed Lapikov on her meeting with Grahkovsky on her way home. “Surveillance system?” he had muttered on the telephone. “They expect me to discount everything I have heard about Groza and believe it is just some sort of glorified space surveillance system? That Abqaiq was a freak accident?” He suddenly sounded worried. “If that briefing was a sham, engineered by the Defense Minister in the hope I will take the information and use it to make a fool of myself, it shows the President is deliberately keeping me at arm’s length on this. Why?”

  D’Antonia had got where she had in her working life by speaking truth to power, and she had continued the policy with Lapikov. “It is simple. Either he is protecting you, Minister, or he does not trust you.”

  “I need you to help me get ahead of this, D’Antonia. I have heard that fool Kelnikov is lobbying for further Groza strikes against targets in the Gulf, in support of our Iranian allies. If their aim was to shore up oil prices, they’ve done that. Anything more will tip the world into economic anarchy. I need to know what Kelnikov and the President are planning!”

  Now it was Saturday morning, and Lapikov’s political concerns were just one of her worries. Fourteen hours had passed since she had sent her report to AISE. To facilitate this, the Italian intelligence service had provided her with a rather unique electronic ‘dead letter box’ for filing her reports. She was too valuable to risk face-to-face contact with an AISE handler. And she was too highly placed to expect that she was not under some sort of electronic surveillance, either through listening devices in her home, surveillance of her phones and internet accounts, or old-fashioned physical surveillance.

  In a bygone era, D’Antonia would have been equipped with a miniature digital radio transmitter capable of sending and receiving encrypted burst transmissions, but even something as easily concealed as that could give her away if the local intelligence services filtered out the blip of energy from her signal from all the background noise of her block of apartments. So instead, AISE had given her a refrigerator.

  A connected refrigerator that automatically monitored how much milk, eggs, juice, bread and mineral water she had at home and ordered more from a local supermarket when she was running low. She could also call up a list of frequently bought items and add them to her order before it was sent. Penne pasta was C32, tinned pomodori F14, plain flour C40, vanilla yogurt Y1, peach yogurt Y4 … A typical shopping list looked like this:

  C32 x 1

  C40 x 1

  F14 x 6

  Y1 x 2

  The shopping list doubled as code and was intercepted by the local AISE listening station. It was quite ingenious, except it meant she had a cupboard full of pasta, unopened cans of tinned tomatoes and dried fruit. But if she was raided by the Russian security services, all they could conclude was that she was a hoarder.

  She had marked her message Urgenza Estrema – Extre
me Urgency – to ensure it would not languish in a digital inbox somewhere.

  A new but highly placed source inside the 15th Aerospace Army (reliability unknown, information unverified) has stated that Russian authorities expect there will be a new meteorite strike in the next 24–36 hours, which will hit an area within 50 square miles of Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. NOTE: The Cooper Nuclear Power Plant lies within this footprint.

  The source further stated the strike was detected by the new Russian Groza system, which is the final iteration of a program for the detection of near-earth objects previously designated ‘Opekun’ or Guardian, and not a weapons platform. The system was developed in response to the Chelyabinsk incident in 2013. It comprises a network of 16 satellites and is intended to detect near-earth asteroids/meteors and predict their impact points if they enter the earth’s atmosphere. The source said Groza is also being used for military purposes (hence the secrecy around it) to create a real-time map of all objects in orbit around the earth and to provide targeting data to Russian anti-satellite and anti-missile systems. When challenged, the source was emphatic that the threat from the unmapped asteroid field claimed by Russian authorities is real and the next strike will be in the vicinity of Lincoln, Nebraska. AGENT COMMENT: I do not know the source well enough to assess the veracity of this information.

  She looked at her watch. If Grahkovsky had told the truth, the strike was less than 24 hours away now. It also meant that if AISE had acted quickly to inform the CIA (say two hours), and the CIA had acted quickly to inform authorities in Nebraska (say three hours), then in Nebraska, authorities had been sitting on the information about a possible meteor strike on their Cooper nuclear plant for nearly nine hours.

  Most Saturday mornings, she pulled on her running gear and put her swimsuit in a bag with a towel, before jogging through the park to the Basseyn swimming center inside the park. After ten brisk laps of the pool, she would jog back to her apartment, throw down another espresso and a bowl of yogurt and muesli before showering and dressing, then go to the Sokolniki markets where one of the old men who virtually lived in the square would usually accommodate her with a game of chess or backgammon. They loved trying to teach her Russian, teased her with gap-toothed smiles and traded shots of vodka with her as they won or lost. She had become almost as fond of them as they were of her.

  Such a creature of habit. Habit and discipline. They were necessary to lull any watchers, but she knew that today she would have trouble concentrating on her chess game.

  She would be checking her cell phone every five minutes for the news bot she had set up to warn her as soon as headlines broke about US authorities reacting to any sort of emergency in Nebraska. She’d decided if there was the slightest chance her cover had been blown, she was not going to wait around to be arrested.

  She had money, passports and weapons in a bag in a locker in a nearby gym, a second apartment rented through a cut-out, and a car parked in an easy to reach storage facility. She had multiple escape routes scoped, but the best would be a straight 700-mile drive to Warsaw, via Belarus. It went through one rather sleepy border post on the way out of Russia. If the alert came through now, she could be in Warsaw by late tonight and then on a plane to Sweden, where she had options even AISE didn’t know about.

  She poured herself a fresh juice and then rolled out her yoga mat in the sunshine near her window. She could feel her pulse racing as her flight instincts started kicking in. She needed to calm down. Stretch. Breathe. Get a little perspective. Her cell phone buzzed and she grabbed it off a nearby chair, nearly dropping it as she thumbed it on. A message from her hairdresser reminding her she had an appointment.

  Calm down? Magari!

  Yevgeny Bondarev was also having trouble staying calm. Why was it his mother country seemed intent on stumbling from one glorious national calamity to another? Forget Tsarism, Communism, World Wars One and Two, the Cold War and Putin, even in his time in the Russian Aerospace Forces, Bondarev had been involved in three. The Turkey-Syria war in which Russia joined enthusiastically, expecting a short sharp victory, only to find itself wading in blood for three long years before calling defeat a victory and bringing its forces home. The battle for Bering Strait, an ill-advised military misadventure during which a group of disaffected politicians and generals attempted a coup against the then President, which had nearly resulted in an all-out nuclear war with the USA. And now … this. Whatever ‘this’ was. Not a war. Not even a battle. Economic sabotage by force of arms, that was the closest he could come to giving it a name.

  Sitting in his office and waiting for his Ops Intelligence Chief to join him, he drummed his fingers on his desktop. Russia had known for fifty or more years that its economy was overly dependent on oil and gas exports. Bondarev had seen government after government roll out plan after plan for the diversification of the economy. The ‘Great Pivot East!’ That had been one. Opening up the Russian Far East with Chinese Belt and Roads funding that had turned the Russian state into a debt slave as it struggled to repay the Chinese loans and saw its state enterprises gobbled up by voracious Chinese companies trading debt for control of the rich resources of Siberia and Sakhalin.

  Instead of diversifying, it had become more and more dependent on digging up coal and pumping oil and gas out of the ground and selling it at an ever-lower cost to China and Europe.

  On the day he had packed his bags to leave for the flight academy of the then Voyenno-Vozdushnye Sily Rossii, the Military Air Forces of Russia, his grandfather – General of the Air Force Victor Bondarev – had taken him aside with mock solemnity, and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Young man, you are about to begin your service to the greatest nation on earth,” he intoned. “That service may one day lead you into war. If that happens, I want you to remember one thing I have learned through many wars.”

  “Yes, Dedushka,” Bondarev had replied, frowning.

  The square-jawed, gray-haired man had patted his shoulder, smiling. “Russia may not win, but it can never lose.” And he had laughed, pushing Yevgeny out the door.

  He shook his head now, the feeling that his nation’s misguided optimism and faith in its own God-given destiny was once again leading it to overreach itself.

  “What are you looking so thoughtful about?” a voice said from the doorway.

  Bondarev looked up and saw Colonel Tomas Arsharvin of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU), Aerospace Intelligence, standing inside the open door, a wide grin on his face.

  “What are you looking so thoughtful about, General,” Bondarev grumbled. “I trust you finally have my target list ready?”

  “Yes, General!” Arsharvin said, clicking his heels together mockingly. The two had served together since Syria, Bondarev always a promotion or two ahead of his comrade in arms and happy to have him ride his coattails, since he was probably the best-connected spook in the Russian military. He walked over and pointed at Bondarev’s wall screen. “In your inbox. Operation Lapshoy.”

  “Lapshoy?” Bondarev asked, clicking on the icon on the tablet on his desk and bringing the folder up on his main screen. “Noodle? That your idea of a joke?”

  “Not me, I swear,” Arsharvin said, straight-faced. “We use random code name generators, you know that. Just a coincidence.”

  Bondarev clicked again and a large satellite map appeared on the screen. Arsharvin walked over to it. He was tall, lithe and lightweight for forty-eight, with a scar down one cheek that ran from the corner of his eye to just below his ear. Bondarev knew he’d received it in a fencing bout, but he liked to claim he was cut in a knife fight with a jealous husband.

  “Korla compressor plant,” Arsharvin was saying, pointing at a small town on the satellite image. “Your primary target. But you wanted to spread the strike, divert attention away from the hit on the plant. So we propose you also drop your hammer here…” His finger landed on a river that flowed diagonally across the map. “Bridges over t
he Kongque River. Cut one or both of these and road traffic to Urumqi will have to go hundreds of miles west.”

  “China can build a city of a million people inside a year. If we knock out this compressor plant, how long before they repair it and get the gas flowing again?”

  “The compressors are based on aerojet engines, supplied by Rolls Royce and General Electric,” Arsharvin replied. “Before US sanctions were imposed, preventing all dual-purpose technologies from being exported to China. They might be able to source engines domestically, but it would be an engineering nightmare and it’s not an expertise they currently possess. My people figure a minimum of six months, perhaps as long as two years before they can cobble the necessary technology together.”

  Bondarev got up and walked over to the screen. “What is this beside the southern bridge? An urban development?”

  “Sayibage residential district,” Arsharvin nodded. He turned to Bondarev with a serious expression. “High rise apartments, big shopping mall, several banks, big traffic intersection…”

  “Hospitals, schools?” Bondarev asked tersely.

  “None. You said you wanted to avoid…”

  “Yes.” Bondarev turned and sat again, indicating the chair in front of his desk.

  Arsharvin sat. “Look, if you want to minimize civilian casualties, Yevgeny, just drop the northern bridge. It’s the main east–west highway, six lanes, double span. It will take months to rebuild and right below it is a dam that controls the flow of the Kongque River through Korla. Take down the bridge, my people reckon the dam will go too. You’ll flood the whole downtown commercial area, yes, but not catastrophically. We’re not talking the Yangtze River here.”

  “Population of Korla?” Bondarev asked.

  “Half a million.”

  “You have a casualty estimate?”

  “Based on targeting the compressor plant and both bridges, yes,” Arsharvin said. “Do you want to hear it?”