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

by FX Holden

  She had listened in on a debrief of the engagement over the polar skies and had quietly scoffed at General Popovkin’s bravado. “The Americans challenge our mastery of their skies, but they will learn that if they destroy one Groza, we will replace it with two. If they destroy two, we will replace them with four. And they will run out of their precious X-37s before we run out of Grozas.”

  Just as the Navy would not think of sending a new ship to sea without the ability to defend itself, Grahkovsky had argued strongly for fitting her Groza platform with the Shakti kill vehicle. The addition of the offensive weapons system had added nearly a year to the program, and also added an element of risk that some regarded as completely unacceptable. Chaff launchers, flares, these were minor additions. But what value was there in adding a single kill vehicle to their design? And what if the damn thing blew up when it was launched? What if the heat it generated when launching damaged the hub mechanism? There was little point in being able to defend a Groza satellite if the act of defending it crippled it. She had won the argument and redesigned her satellites so that the risk from the Shakti was minimized before she signed off on the new design.

  And it had managed to bring down a US X-37. Hoo-ra Anastasia. It had still been lost to that damned Skylon.

  She had always admired the design and flexibility of the RAF Skylon. It required minimal special infrastructure, just a very long runway. It was suborbital by nature, and couldn’t stay in space for extended periods of time like the X-37, but its high-capacity payload bay made it very flexible, able to field different weapons modules and even carry a large personnel capsule into space if needed. Working together, the Americans and British made a formidable team – the X-37 as nimble as a fighter jet, the Skylon as powerful as a strategic bomber.

  The first US laser attack had worried her, and though they had been driven off, she had assumed it would be just a matter of time before they were back. And this time, in the company of the British, they had succeeded. Like any mother, Grahkovsky was not content to let others take care of her children’s safety. Especially others who had shown they were not capable of doing so.

  She was prepared to act – in fact, had already taken the first steps straight after the US laser attack. She was about to take the next.

  “Corporal Maqsud, thank you so much for coming,” she said. She did not stand but pointed to where she knew there was a chair. “Please, sit. There should be tea and coffee on the side table.”

  “I came because I was ordered, Madam Chief Scientist,” the Corporal said sullenly. She heard him take a cup of tea and sit down. “Can I ask why?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I imagine that on the long flight from Baikonur to Moscow, you had time to speculate on that. Why do you think I asked for you?”

  He sipped his tea before answering. “I think you want to discuss why I compressed the recommended strike footprint for the Korla attack.”

  “Go on.”

  “I will tell you exactly what I told Captain Kozytsin in the debrief you have no doubt read. I had reviewed the engineering intelligence on the Korla bridges the night before the strike. My own calculations convinced me that a more concentrated strike was needed to bring down one or more of the bridges. I was still validating my calculations right up until the moment of launch so there was no time to raise the issue for discussion. I adjusted the targeting parameters according to my calculations and, as events demonstrated, I was right.”

  Grahkovsky coughed, the closest she could come to a chuckle. “Ah, so your back of a cigarette packet ‘calculations’ were right, whereas the output of Titov computing facility’s quantum computing AIs was wrong?”

  “The outcome of the strike was exactly as hoped,” Maqsud said defensively. “You cannot question my judgment.”

  She stood, taking up her cane. She knew this intimidated people, forced them to look at her rather than look away. She had perfected the art of staring straight at them, even though she could not see them, because she knew that unnerved people too. Horrified them, even. Some people, but not all. There were men who found her scarred visage and milky eyes compelling, even beautiful. She wondered which of these Maqsud Khan was.

  “Exactly as hoped, but not exactly as planned, was it, Corporal Khan?” she asked, standing beside him, about two feet away.

  “How do you mean?” he asked. She could tell by his voice he hadn’t turned away, that he was still facing her, looking up at her. Good, not horrified then.

  “The estimated civilian casualty tally for the operation ranged from two to five thousand. But because you compressed the strike footprint, only one thousand three hundred civilians died.”

  “Another success,” he said defiantly. “The military objective was achieved, and civilian casualties were minimized.”

  She stood with the cane between her legs and put her weight on it, leaning forward. “How quickly you adjust your moral pain threshold, Maqsud. In the Abqaiq strike, you were horrified at the idea you might kill a few hundred civilians. Now you consider it a moral victory that you only killed one thousand three hundred?”

  Now he turned away. “I do my duty to the Rodina, in the best way I know. You created a mass murder weapon, who are you to question my morals?”

  He must have known that speaking to her like this could see him court-martialed, imprisoned, or worse. One word to General Bondarev and even his precious Space Exploration medal would not save him; in fact, they might just pin it over his heart to give the firing squad something to aim at.

  But she had not invited him to Titov to bully him or trick him into betraying himself.

  “You misunderstand me, still,” she said. She bent to where she guessed his head would be. She could smell sweat and aftershave, hear him breathing slowly and evenly. “I admire you,” she whispered. “I envy you your morality. I am not a psychopath, Corporal Maqsud; I can see my own flaws, the deficiencies in my character. I serve the god of science.” She walked around behind him, still whispering. “But my god has chosen to blind me, and I need you to be my eyes.”

  She tapped her way back to her desk, imagined him turning his head to follow her as she did so. She found her chair and sat. “I am about to conduct a series of simulations. I want you to run the targeting for these exercises. I have AI routines that can take care of simulating the systems and weapons management, but I need a human – specifically, you – to manage the targeting.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because an AI does not have your moral compass, nor do I. But I am not the monster you think I am, Corporal Maqsud. I too have an interest, admittedly an academic one, in seeing how we can best minimize the casualties caused by Groza in different strike scenarios. I have one of those scenarios queued up and ready to run, and I know with you at the controls, whatever the AIs have projected in terms of casualties, you will find a way to reduce them further, without compromising the objectives of the strike.” She rested her cane against her chair and her hands in her lap. “In the future people like you will be replaced by more reliable AIs. To help us get to that day, I want my AI to learn from you.”

  She heard him relax a little, adjusting his posture, heard the swish of uniformed trouser cloth as he crossed one leg over the other. She estimated he was probably about six feet tall, solidly built but not heavy. She’d asked about him and learned he was a Uyghur. Uyghur males were allowed to wear a neatly trimmed beard in the Russian military, and she knew he had taken advantage of this because she could hear him scratching it now.

  “What is this scenario?” he asked.

  “Good, I have your attention at last,” she said. “The target for this simulation is Cape Canaveral.”

  “You have my attention,” Colonel Tomas Arsharvin said. “But not yet my understanding.” He was sitting in the chair in front of Bondarev’s desk, hands on his knees, leaning forward.

  “You heard me. She is a spy. I want you to arrest her…” Bondarev said. He had just presented Arsharvin with his cas
e against Roberta D’Antonia, his other ‘nagging problem.’ Grahkovsky planting the false information about a strike on Nebraska, the subsequent evacuation of the nuclear facility. “I am dealing with multiple threat vectors already. Having a foreign agent snooping around my facility is one that I do not need,” he said.

  Arsharvin interrupted Bondarev, ignoring for a moment the difference in their ranks. “With respect, Yevgeny, are you crazy? I can’t just whistle up a few plainclothes officers and arrest the Principal Advisor to Energy Minister Denis Lapikov. I’ve heard about her – they even ran a piece about her in a Moscow paper. She was headhunted by Lapikov himself. She would have been looked at by the Security Service in forensic detail, and still she was cleared. Do you know how many toes you are asking me to step on?”

  Bondarev looked annoyed. “Toes? You are worried about the politics? Sorry, I must have mistaken you for a GRU officer.” His tone became conciliatory. “Tomas, I am also under considerable political pressure. The Americans are making daily representations to the Foreign Ministry about Groza…”

  “Well…” Arsharvin interrupted. “You just vaporized a few thousand liters of sea water off the coast of Maine.”

  “They cannot prove that was Groza,” Bondarev pointed out. “Popovkin is also under pressure from that idiot Kelnikov, asking him to prepare another Groza strike against the Saudis after the Iranians’ ballistic missile attack was so easily intercepted. The fool wants to use Groza to attack Saudi Air Force bases! Popovkin is keeping him at arm’s length now, but it is just a matter of time before someone in the Kremlin decides Saudi Arabia should be subject to another tragic meteor strike.”

  “And give the Americans all the proof they need to convince the world Groza exists,” Arsharvin said.

  “Which brings me back to the topic at hand. This Italian woman has no doubt been tasked to get that proof for them. And you are worried about stepping on toes?”

  Arsharvin sighed. “When you put it like that, no.”

  “Then work with me here. Find some way to neutralize her.”

  Arsharvin raised an eyebrow. “Neutralize?”

  Bondarev started. “Not that way. I mean, plant drugs in her apartment, find a problem with her visa, get her deported. Whatever it takes to stop her sniffing around my weapons program.”

  Arsharvin sat back, tilted his head and looked up at the ceiling. “Your whole Nebraska ploy … it is too tenuous. I can’t use any of that as evidence if Lapikov demands to see it, but I may still be able to retrieve the situation. Leave it with me.”

  “Do not leave it long,” Bondarev warned. “I have met this woman twice, and she is tenacious. Every day she spends as a Kremlin insider is a day closer to her blowing the lid off my Groza program.”

  It would not have improved the mood of Yevgeny Bondarev to know that if he was to walk down three flights of stairs, into the west wing basement of the Titov central administration building where its computer center was housed, there he would have found Roberta D’Antonia deep in conversation with his Chief Scientist.

  “Thank you for seeing me again at short notice, Chief Scientist Grahkovsky.” She was standing just inside the doorway. There was nowhere to sit in the small office beside the chair Grahkovsky was already occupying.

  “You are welcome,” Grahkovsky said. She was sitting at a computer terminal, and as D’Antonia had been escorted in by a Titov security officer, she had been running her fingers over a braille printout. It might as well have been Chinese. D’Antonia could only see the small dots and bumps and had no idea if she was reading computer code, a journal publication or a letter from her mother. But then, she did wonder if Grahkovsky had even had a mother. “I assume this is about the Maine event?”

  “Yes, it is. Thank you again for the warning you provided. But I was surprised when the window you provided of 24–36 hours came and went with no news of a meteorite strike, and even more surprised when it finally happened yesterday, off the coast of Maine, and not…”

  “Not Nebraska?” Grahkovsky smiled as though at some internal joke. “Trust me; you were no more surprised than we were. But I told you, our algorithms for estimating the entry and impact point of asteroids from this field are crude and imprecise.”

  “I guess I am hoping, or my Minister is hoping, that in future, any predictions will become a little more … reliable?” Or let me put this another way, D’Antonia thought to herself. Less likely to be fabricated.

  Grahkovsky put her papers down on the desk and straightened them, aligning them with the edge of the desk. D’Antonia had to wonder whether she was completely blind, or whether perhaps she could see a little something, like shapes, or shadows.

  “The Maine incident gave us incredibly valuable data,” Grahkovsky said. “Data with which to refine our calculations, to aid our ‘predictions,’ as you call them. The more of these events that occur, and there will be more, I assure you, the more reliable our calculations become.”

  “Was the Maine event a new, unexpected event, or was it the Nebraska event, just later than projected and … off the expected course?”

  “It was the same event,” Grahkovsky said after a slight pause. “Just later, and with a different entry and impact point than we had calculated. If it had been a new event, I would have advised you, as promised.”

  She did not sound sincere. But still, it was valuable intel. It made her earlier urgent report seem less of a fizzer if she had been right about the impending strike, just wrong in relation to where and when. And with a plausible explanation of why.

  “If that impact point had been Boston, and we had been able to predict it, would we have alerted US authorities?” D’Antonia asked.

  “There you go again, Ms. D’Antonia,” Grahkovsky chided. “Asking me political questions. That is probably a question you should direct to your Minister or one of his colleagues.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry.”

  Grahkovsky picked up her papers again. “Now, if there is nothing else. I must get back to my work.”

  “Certainly,” D’Antonia said. “Look. This is … I was wondering if perhaps you’d like to join me for cocktails one night. I promise I won’t ask you about your work; it would be entirely social.” She took a step closer to the door, not crowding the woman. “It’s just I know so few interesting people in Moscow.”

  Grahkovsky smiled. “Ah. And I am an interesting person?”

  D’Antonia laughed. “Well, yes. Anyway, think about it. You have my office cell number. I promise it won’t be boring.”

  As she closed the door behind her and nodded to the waiting security officer to show her out, D’Antonia felt a little sheepish. Was that dumb? She was about the same age as Grahkovsky, maybe a little younger. Two girls out in Moscow for cocktails, that wasn’t so weird, was it? One a honey-blonde Italian, the other looking like a character from an apocalyptic video game…

  OK, maybe it was dumb.

  A short while later, Grahkovsky called up to Bondarev.

  “Your Italian girlfriend was here earlier, General,” Grahkovsky said. “Is there anything in her file about her being a lesbian?”

  “What? The Minister’s advisor? What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing. She came by unannounced, asked me about the Maine incident, and then asked me out for cocktails.”

  “What? Wait.” She heard Bondarev put his hand over his cell phone and call out to someone. “Get Arsharvin back here! He is still in the Center somewhere.” He lifted his hand off the telephone again. “That woman is starting to annoy me. I would like you to accept that invitation.”

  “I am not having sex with a woman, General, even for my motherland.”

  “No one is asking you to,” Bondarev said, a little flustered. “And I doubt that is what she meant. Italian women only ever go out in pairs or flocks, never alone. Don’t you know that?”

  “I had a sheltered upbringing, General. Can I assume you will at least pay for my drinks?”

  “What? Yes, w
hatever. Please come up to my office. I need you to speak with someone about this.”

  “The GRU?”

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard you mention Colonel Arsharvin. Am I to be arrested?”

  “No, but please come up and speak with the GRU, Chief Scientist. They will want to know about this interaction.”

  “This is quite inconvenient. When should I…”

  “Now, Chief Scientist Grahkovsky.”

  Bunny O’Hare was also feeling greatly inconvenienced. Not only had they been forced to get up at zero dark thirty for the conference call with the RAF Skylon team in Scotland, but she had expected that one unwanted side benefit of having no operational X-37 to fly might mean she could get a little well-earned time off-base. Play a little pool. Drink a little beer. Shoot a little shit. Sleep. A lot.

  They had set up two telepresence rooms on each side of the Atlantic. In one, Rodriguez had gathered ‘Kansas’ Severin, ‘Zeezee’ Halloran, O’Hare and herself. On the other side were Squadron Leader ‘Paddington’ Bear, his intelligence officer and Halloran’s opposite number, a warrant officer called Stan (not his first name) Aston, and finally the RAF pilot with the rather impressive name, Flight Lieutenant Anaximenes ‘Meany’ Papastopoulos.

  The US team was already online and waiting as the RAF team filed into the room. O’Hare watched with a tired disinterest until Meany came into the frame. Whirred into the frame, to be exact. She recognized him from the personnel file mugshots they had been sent when the telecon had been set up. O’Hare watched, her jaw a little unhinged, as the man in the exoskeleton found a place at the teleconference table and locked his powered frame into a balanced seated position as naturally as any of the others who were pulling out chairs.