by FX Holden
“Sir, we can still save our satellite,” Karas insisted. “They have only four remaining missiles. You could call for a Nudol strike, or…”
“There is no Nudol unit within range of that Groza, Sergeant. Our naval coverage extends only up to about New York, or I would already have called for help.” There was sudden silence across the control center as every man at every station strained to listen to the conversation. “That Groza is already a write-off. All that remains is the question of whether it takes one or both of its attackers down with it.” He reached for a phone on his desk. “Engage with 30mm. I will call Bondarev in Titov.”
The target satellite has stabilized its roll and is maneuvering, Angus said.
“Angus, lock the target and prepare to volley two more missiles, on my command.” They had lost the targeting data from the X-37, but his own sensor suite was still giving him a solid yellow. The missiles’ active seeker heads would have to do the rest.
Yes, Lieutenant, powering launcher. Tracking…
Squadron Leader Bear was watching a zoomed image of the Groza and saw vectoring jets firing along its length, but there was something…
“Image analysis. Angus, please compare with earlier imagery and estimate damage to the Groza,” he asked the AI.
Yes, Squadron Leader. There was a short pause. I estimate that our missile struck in the center mass of the main body of the satellite, just below one of the 30mm cannons. The dome appears to have been perforated in multiple places and is leaking fuel, but it did not explode. One cannon appears to be out of action, one may still be in operation. Vectoring jets appear to have been impacted. Six of twelve appear operational and … incoming fire.
“What?” Meany asked.
Ballistic projectiles, 30mm. Angus reported. Time to impact, one minute thirty. Shall I evade?
“Launch missiles then retire, Angus,” Meany commanded. “With alacrity, please.”
Warning, Angus said, his voice sounding way too calm for their situation. The incoming projectiles are being sprayed across multiple egress paths. If we hold and launch, there is a 13 percent likelihood we will be…
“Fire missiles, dammit,” Meany ordered. “And then scoot!”
Firing. Missile one away. Missile two away. One and two tracking. Evading incoming fire.
Meany held his breath. Because it wasn’t his life on the line, his full focus was on their outbound missiles. He saw the Groza fire more of the clouds of chaff and flares and try to maneuver, but it wasn’t the controlled evasion he had seen it execute previously. It wobbled erratically and began rotating through space on a diagonal axis. Both of the RAF missiles ignored the floating balls of metallic tape and glowing flares that lay between them and the Groza, and slammed into it at thousands of miles an hour, their high-explosive blast-fragmentation warheads detonating on impact and sending pieces of the satellite flying in a hundred directions while the bulk of it continued through space on its current orbit.
Impact. Target destroyed, Angus confirmed. Moving to evade incoming fire. Risk of damage from incoming fire is now zero point five percent.
Meany realized he was still standing and lowered his exoskeleton to a seating position. Paddington put a hand on his shoulder, and Meany felt it trembling slightly. “Good show, Lieutenant.”
O’Hare knew enough to know she shouldn’t disturb Meany during the engagement, but she broke in on him now. “Skylon. Bertha. Well done, RAF. That’s a kill.”
“Shared kill, I’d say, Captain,” Meany replied.
“Nope, all yours. I like mine clean. I just ran interference, you scored the touchdown, Lieutenant,” she said.
O’Hare noticed something on one of the Skylon’s screens and reached for her throat mike again. “Skylon, can you put a camera on that debris field? It looks like the tungsten projectiles are rapidly deorbiting…”
She was right. The hub carrying the four-ton warheads of tungsten had been hammered by the RAF missiles and separated from the rest of the satellite. They were too heavy for the small warheads on the missiles to have disintegrated them and were struck at an angle that jolted them off their orbital path and on a radical trajectory toward earth.
O’Hare saw them falling slowly away from the Skylon and, with every passing second, closer to the earth’s atmosphere.
“Oh crap,” Albers said, turning to Rodriguez. “I assume someone accounted for this possibility when we were given the intercept point, Colonel?”
“Assume nothing,” Rodriguez said, reaching for a mike on the console in front of her. “Skylon, Bertha. This is Colonel Rodriguez. Can you get a lock on that falling debris and keep it locked as long as possible so we can calculate a re-entry and possible impact point?”
“Yes, Colonel,” Meany replied. “We’ll shadow it as long as possible.”
Rodriguez looked at the feed from the Skylon and saw mountainous peaks flowing past far beneath them, with deep blue water beyond. “Lieutenant Albers, get me a line to NORAD, please.”
Severin’s voice came over the room speakers in the virtual cockpit. “Colonel, we are seeing the same feed. We have already alerted NORAD and they are tracking the debris from the ground.”
“Do they have an impact point yet?” Rodriguez asked.
“Too early, ma’am, but I’m pretty sure they have about a million quantum cores working that problem right now.”
O’Hare was watching the same vision. “I think that’s Newfoundland, ma’am,” she said. “Saint Lawrence Bay, Prince Edward Island, then New Brunswick beyond that.”
“Maine,” Albers said quietly. “I’ve deorbited space junk before, when I used to fly as wizzo on the X-37B.” He pointed a finger at the virtual horizon as the fast receding tungsten warheads dropped toward earth. “Just eyeballing it, I want to say it’s going to sail right over Canada, hit atmo somewhere over Maine.”
“And burn up, right?” O’Hare said.
“It’s not designed to burn up, Captain,” Rodriguez said quietly. “It’s designed to rain metal down on whatever is underneath it.”
Steven Mackay was a true ‘cold water cowboy.’ He’d started fishing as a 14-year-old on his father’s trawler, Midnight Sun. When other kids were sleeping, he’d be getting up at 3 a.m. to bait trawls. While they were at soccer, baseball or basketball, he was out in a skiff with his father, hauling in gill nets, his hands so cold he couldn’t even button his shirt.
Now he was thirty and on his fourth boat. He’d sold one, and lost two at sea. One to a prop fouled by a net, the other was 175 miles offshore when it was hit by a chunk of ice the size of a house, 30-foot swells and hurricane-force winds. But he’d never lost a crewman, and he didn’t plan to.
He’d looked out his kitchen window this morning trying to gauge wind and weather. He’d wanted to get to one of his favorite spots today; 40 miles south, off Newfoundland’s Tors Cove. The forecast had predicted a wind chill of about 8.6 degrees Fahrenheit, minus 13 Celsius. Winds from the northwest 22 knots. The rest of the week offered more of the same. At least the skies were clear.
Newfoundland’s fishermen had their own language and weren’t given to being overly expressive. Down at the wharf in St. John’s, he’d passed a friend of his father’s who was just coming in from a couple of days’ solo fishing.
“Arn?” he’d asked (get any?)
“Narn,” the man had replied (nary a one).
He was still hopeful. His new boat, Blood Moon, was powered by a Norwegian Selfa Arctic electric motor with a fraction of the moving parts of his old diesel-powered boats. It had a smaller backup diesel engine but he’d rarely been out long enough to need to engage it. Blood Moon was equipped with the latest in fish-locating echosounder and sonar; he had net sounders on his trawl to tell him how concentrated the fish were around the net, catch sensors to tell him how quickly his net was filling, tension and symmetry sensors to warn him if his net was getting unbalanced as he hauled it in.
His first mate was a brick outhouse of a man who eve
ryone called by the name Diesel because in former times he smelled like he used it for cologne. Blood Moon might be electric, but Diesel was still called Diesel.
Up in his wheelhouse, checking their course, Mackay heard Diesel shout. Diesel almost never shouted.
“Steven, look up!” Diesel called.
Mackay looked out of his wheelhouse window and saw nothing, so he backed up and stuck his head out to see where Diesel was shouting from. He saw him down at the stern, hands on his hips, head tilted back. A couple of the other men were standing beside him, looking up too.
“Where away?” Mackay called.
Without turning, Diesel raised an arm in the air and pointed almost straight up into the sky.
Mackay leaned back and squinted. The sun was falling out of the damn sky!
That’s what it looked like. A blazing ball of fire was arcing through the sky above them. As they watched, transfigured, it seemed it was accelerating as it fell and flashed overhead.
“It’s gonna hit the water,” one of the men yelled, panic in his face. “Out there!”
“G’wan,” said another, dubiously.
Mackay wasn’t in any doubt. “Mind now!” he called out, and saw the men on the stern spread their legs and grab for the nearest handhold.
As the sea lit up around him from the light of the comet or meteorite or whatever it was, Mackay dived inside the wheelhouse again. Reacting with an instinct born of 15 years on the sea, he pushed the throttle to full power, spun the wheel and turned his boat away from where it looked like the thing was going to meet the sea.
The Blood Moon reacted instantly, another benefit of the electric engine, surging forward and kicking up a massive bow wave as it went from a comfortable straight line ten knots to a skidding, jarring seventeen knots in a matter of seconds. The men on the stern dropped to a crouch to ride the skidding turn, their eyes locked on the fireball overhead.
Mackay had his back to the meteorite when it hit. It felt like it hit right behind them, but there was no sound.
And then a thunderclap like the voice of Thor broke over the boat, a mighty wave lifted it up by the stern and Mackay’s head slammed forward on the Blood Moon’s instrument panel, sending his consciousness spiraling into a red-black void.
The Groza was designed to release its tungsten warheads one at a time, even when launching a full-payload strike, to allow for a broader footprint of destruction. Only one test had been conducted where an entire hub and payload had been deorbited as a single unit. It had broken up during re-entry, but not so much that the 24-ton warheads around the central hub had separated dramatically. They struck the tundra in the equivalent of one 80-ton fireball and exploded.
The effects were less than impressive, from Chief Scientist Grahkovsky’s perspective. Her team had been hoping for a destructive effect similar to a US Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bomb, which had less than a quarter of the Groza’s projectile mass, but which carried 5,300 lb. of explosives. The MOP could break through 200 feet of 500 psi hardened concrete, and Russia currently had nothing like it in its conventional weapons arsenal.
One issue was that deorbiting the entire hub and payload with only crude guidance did not allow the calculation of a precise strike point, so the Groza aerospace engineers aimed it at a large swathe of Siberian wasteland and watched to see what happened.
The fireball buried itself fifty feet into the frozen ground, which unfortunately absorbed most of the explosive force of the blast. It formed a crater two hundred feet in diameter, but impressively turned most of the sandy soil around the crater to glass, creating an almost perfect bowl around the molten metal core at the bottom of the crater.
After the test, Grahkovsky advised her military supervisors that it made no sense to use Groza in this way. Conventional deep penetration munitions were as or more effective and much less expensive, assuming the delivery vehicle could reach the target without being intercepted. Development of Groza as a possible deep penetrator weapon had ceased.
Unfortunately for the crew of the Blood Moon, the eighty tons of superheated tungsten and iron plasma gas that hit the sea just five miles off their stern were not striking Siberian tundra.
They were striking sea water, and the Groza strike instantly vaporized 31,873 cubic feet of water.
Like a rock thrown into a pond, a shock wave radiated outward in a circle from its epicenter, sending thirty-foot-high storm-surge-sized waves out in every direction. That the energy in the waves rapidly dissipated further out from the epicenter was no comfort to Steven Mackay. He was lying unconscious and bleeding inside the wheelhouse of the Blood Moon, with his small trawler flying down the face of the surging wave front at about thirty knots.
Diesel and the other crew members were clinging on for dear life at the stern of the Blood Moon, looking in horror at the approaching surface of the flat sea below them as the trawler speared down the face of the wave.
She was a beautiful boat, the Blood Moon. She only had six feet of freeboard at the stern but had nearly twenty at her big bluff bow. As water crashed over the stern of the boat, its bow slammed into the flat plane of the ocean in front of it and parted it like a slapping hand. Diesel and the other crew members were thrown forward, tumbling down the deck to crash into the rear wall of the crew cabins, but she didn’t go under. She dug her nose in and then stubbornly bobbed up again.
As Diesel lay panting, sure he’d smashed his ribcage in the wild fall, he felt the deck heave and the stern rise again.
Oh me nerves, he thought to himself, clutching for support and feeling his anger rise. Now we’re rotted.
Impact. Fifty miles south-southwest of St. John’s in Newfoundland, Angus announced in Meany’s helmet.
“What’s out there?” Paddington asked.
Nothing but ocean, sir, Angus replied.
“It won’t cause a bloody tsunami, will it?”
No, sir. Any waves generated should subside before reaching nearby shorelines. I predict zero casualties.
Meany blew air out of his cheeks. “That was bloody lucky. That bugger could just as easily have taken out Portland or Boston.”
“Let’s hope we haven’t used all of our luck then, Lieutenant,” Paddington said. “Start running a hull integrity check. We have to hope that our bird got through that firefight with all of its heat tiles intact or the sacrifice of that X-37 will have been for naught.”
Angus had been wrong. There had been several casualties from the Groza strike. Diesel had pierced a lung, and two other crew members had suffered fractured bones in the battering they had received from the surging sea. Luckily there had been no spinal injuries.
There had also been one fatality. Steven Mackay had been airlifted from the deck of Blood Moon by a Canadian Coast Guard quadrotor and flown to St. John’s Mercy Hospital. He never recovered consciousness and died from his head injury as he was being prepped for cranial surgery. He would never know that his last act had saved the lives of all of his crewmen, but if he had lived long enough to be told, he would probably just have shrugged like the Newfie he was and changed the subject.
Yevgeny Bondarev cut the call to Captain Kozytsin and slammed his cell phone down on his desk. Luckily it was rated for hard shocks, just like its owner. He couldn’t blame Kozytsin. The man had done exactly what he would have done, and by all accounts, even that fool Karas and his men had performed well.
He stood and walked to the window of his office, looking out into a dark forest of pines. In shadows, the enemy could hide. Clearly, the US and British felt that they could act with impunity, creeping around in the dark of space, knocking out his Groza units one by one. But he had claimed one of theirs. He remembered his conversation with Arsharvin about the US preparations to put another X-37 in orbit.
“Intel check. Update on planned US Cape Canaveral or Kennedy heavy-lift rocket launches. Timeframe, the next two weeks.”
His telephone chimed as the personal digital assistant on his phone forwarded his inquiry to e
ncrypted GRU servers and returned with a response.
Validating voice print log on … welcome, General Bondarev. There is a SpaceX Falcon Heavy in the final stages of preparation for a launch from Cape Canaveral scheduled in two weeks. Previous intel assessments indicate the launch readiness schedule could be advanced for a launch window as early as four days from now. Do you want more detail?
“Yes. Do we know what the payload is?”
There is no secret intelligence on the payload available. Open-source intelligence indicates the payload as ‘Space Force undisclosed.’ Can I help with…
“No, log me out.”
Thank you for using GRU intellibot. You are logged out, General Bondarev.
‘Intellibot.’ What pimple-faced, sneaker-wearing cyber teen came up with that name? He spun round, picked up the cell phone and dialed.
‘Space Force undisclosed’ payload. If he was the commander of the US X-37 fleet, he’d be moving hell and high water to put another unit into space right now. If the payload of that Falcon Heavy wasn’t an X-37C before, it sure as hell would be now.
Though it would be relatively easy, he knew he wouldn’t be allowed to shoot the Falcon Heavy and its X-37 payload out of the sky with a Nudol missile from his Cuba-based Lider destroyer as long as this new cold war was only taking place in space. He had an idea, though. One that he was sure even Popovkin would approve.
And before that, he had another nagging problem to deal with.
Running scenarios
Titov Space Test Facility, Timonovo, Russia
To Anastasia Grahkovsky, the loss of one of her Grozas was more than just a military problem. It was a personal one. She regarded each of the satellites with the same love and affection a mother would give her children. But of the sixteen launched, two had been used on Abqaiq, two on Korla, and one had been destroyed by the Americans. That left only eleven of her children still in orbit and those dullards Popovkin and Bondarev had shown themselves patently incapable of defending them.