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

by FX Holden

  “Forget your fuel state, Flight Lieutenant,” Squadron Leader Bear’s voice said in his helmet. “Continue the intercept.”

  In the Old Fire Station on Cape Canaveral Station, things were beyond chaos.

  “Where were we?” Grahkovsky was asking. “Oh yes. Your bucket list. If you only had a short time left to live, how would you want to spend it?”

  “I need a drink. Water,” Ambre said, trying to buy some time to think. To avoid playing his stupid game. “My mouth is too dry.”

  He looked at her suspiciously, but then relented, standing and moving behind her. She heard him rummaging in a bag or something and he returned with a half empty bottle of water and held it just out of her reach. Her throat was like sandpaper. “Come now, Amber. It’s a simple question. You answer mine, I’ll answer yours.”

  “All right, dammit!”

  He held the bottle to her lips and she gulped the water desperately. When she’d emptied it he threw it into a corner and sat down again.

  “Your turn,” he said patiently.

  “My bucket list? If I only had a short time, I’d want to spend it with my daughter,” Ambre told him. He’d said the world was going to end? It certainly sounded like it. The Old Fire Station was right at the edge of the Industrial Area of the station. Outside she heard someone far off, yelling directions, heard the klaxons still ringing. In the distance, a police or fire engine siren. “Can I please see her?”

  He shook his head slowly. “So selfish, Amber. I am here too, you know? Should I be alone at the end of things? I hadn’t planned to be. I planned to be in my hire car driving back to Orlando by now. But no, you and your friend the trooper had to ruin that. So instead I am here, and you want to run off and leave me alone. Is that fair?”

  Ambre tried to keep her voice steady. “You said she’s sleeping. Bring her in here. I can hold her and we can talk. I promise, just bring her in here.”

  “Agh!” he yelled and stood. He ran a hand through his black hair and unbuttoned his collar. “This is so damn pointless. Don’t you get it?” He looked at his watch and pointed outside. “Listen to that! In a few minutes, you’re going to be dead. I’m going to be dead. She’s going to be dead.” He paced around the chair. “At least she’s sleeping. She’ll sleep through it. Do you want to wake her up just so she can watch us die? So you can hear her scream? What kind of parent are you?”

  Ambre fixed him with an unwavering stare. “Please. I don’t want to wake her. I just want to hold her.” I want to know she’s alive. “And then we can talk.”

  “This is…” He stopped pacing and waved a finger at her. “Seriously.” Then he stalked off out of sight behind her.

  Ambre stopped breathing. He could be fetching a knife to cut her throat with and be done with her. Or his spray bottle, to knock her out again. He could be leaving them, escaping out a back door to try to make it out of the station in the confusion. In fact, why was he not? If ever there was a time to try to sneak out, it was now. He wouldn’t be able to walk out any of the guarded entries or exits, they’d be locked down, but he could break through the nearest perimeter fence, try to walk out…

  Her mind was racing and she jumped as he reappeared, holding a small bundle in his arms which he placed carefully at her feet, watching in case she tried to kick him. Soshane! Instinctively she reached forward with her arms to grab her, but they were still tied behind her and the rope or plastic or whatever was around her wrists dug cruelly into her flesh. She bit off a gasp, and using her feet, scooped the little girl closer to her, making a kind of nest with her crossed legs. The girl didn’t stir, and in a panic, Ambre leaned forward, trying to hear her breathe.

  “I told you, she’s sleeping off the spray,” Grahkovsky said, watching her with a look of disdain. “My sister told me one spray in the face will knock out a grown adult for up to a half hour, so a small child like her, she’ll be out much longer.”

  She didn’t trust him an inch, but now she could hear Soshane breathing, see the rise and fall of her chest, see the pulse at her neck. She pulled her legs in tighter and pulled the little girl as far up onto her lap as she could.

  “OK, well, I guess you answered my question,” Grahkovsky said, sitting down in the chair again, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands as he watched them. “In your own way. A deal is a deal. Ask me your next question.” He looked at his watch for about the fifth time. “But make it a good one, it will probably be your last.”

  She wasn’t listening. Soshane was alive. Maybe Russell was too. Maybe despite the chaos of the base-wide emergency alarm, someone was still looking for them. Maybe not Special Operations, but Verge and his Defenders at least. Russell was one of theirs – would they just stop trying to find him in the middle of an emergency alert? Not likely. Any minute now, they’d come busting through a door, or a wall…

  He reached out with one of his legs and kicked her foot hard, jerking Soshane’s head in her lap. She looked up sharply. “I can just as easily take her away again,” he said. “If that’s what you want?”

  She pulled her legs tighter. “No! No, I … I was thinking. Uh, I want to know, what’s about to happen?”

  He smiled a beatific smile. “At last. A good question. She couldn’t tell me everything. State secrets, you know.” He looked up at the ceiling like he was wondering where to start. Or perhaps, like he was looking through it, at something else? “She asked me to plant a virus. Some code that would trigger a terrorist lockdown, keep everyone inside. I just had to go into the building where the local servers were housed and find a power point and plug in my phone…” He reached into his pocket, held out a standard consumer foldable and charger that looked like the kind of phone a million people carried. “Smart, huh? The code went from the phone and through the building’s power supply and into the servers to trigger the evacuation alarms.”

  She frowned, asking despite herself, “But why…”

  “Exactly!” he said, slapping a knee. “Exactly what I asked. Why go to all this trouble for a false alarm? Your security people find out it’s a false alarm, after a while they work out how to shut it down and everyone goes back to what they were doing, right?” He sat back again, putting the phone in his jacket pocket. “Except, they don’t.” He crossed his arms. “They don’t, I don’t, you don’t,” he said. He nodded at Soshane. “She doesn’t.” He cocked an ear to the emergency klaxon and spun a finger around in the air. “My sister wanted everyone to stay put. She didn’t say why, but it isn’t hard to guess.”

  Ambre paled at the calmness in his voice, his matter of fact tone. Whatever was coming, he’d resigned himself to it.

  He took one last glance at his watch. “She told me, after I planted the code, before the alarms went off, that I should get out. She said I needed to get at least five miles away.”

  “Some kind of bomb?” Ambre asked at last.

  “More than that,” he said simply. “My sister works on the Space Program. She never said what, but I know her, and I can guess.” He looked up at the ceiling. “The sky is about to rain meteors.”

  Albers was right, dammit, O’Hare could see, with a sinking feeling in her gut, their intercept trajectory was going to take the Skylon right into the path of the Shakti, which was rocketing toward it once again.

  “Laser up?” she asked.

  “G-BAD online. Infrared sensors online. Two minutes to a lock, ma’am,” Albers said.

  “Will we get there in time to save Skylon?”

  Albers checked a readout in his helmet-mounted display. “That’s a maybe.”

  She cursed. She was dealing with enough maybes already. Maybe the Groza wasn’t making an attack run. Maybe it would glitch. Maybe…

  “This is insane!” Severin said, saying out loud what they were all thinking. “Russia goes off reservation, starts bombarding the Saudis and Chinese from space. We attack their satellites, so they nuke the Cape?”

  “No, something is wrong,” O’Hare sa
id, shaking her head, steering the X-37B manually toward the Shakti intercept point painted on the visor of her VR rig. “I’ve been up against them before. This is not the way they work. Everything they do is like a move in a chess game. Feint, bluff, attack, counter-attack. This is something different. This is like a child losing checkers then getting up and knocking the pieces to the floor.”

  Their X-37B was screaming down the East Coast of the USA at about 18,000 miles an hour, tail streaming fire, and it might still not be enough. Albers pointed to the panoramic monitor at a small white dot against space. “There it is,” he said. “The Shakti.”

  Shakti kill vehicle one minute from impact, Angus said. Suggest a minor course correction toward Bertha 2 to improve their probability of an intercept.

  “Approved,” Meany said. “Intercept status on the Groza? Weapons status?” he asked as he checked his fuel state and winced. The problem of how to deorbit the Skylon would be a problem for tomorrow.

  We will be in missile range of the Groza satellite in one minute twenty. Missile launcher deployed and powered up, systems nominal, ready to shoot. But I do not have an optimal firing solution. We will need to fire at maximum viable missile range, but outside targeting sensor range.

  “Fire blind? How soon before the seeker heads on the missiles get a lock?”

  They may not. If the target maneuvers again, they may not get within seeker sensor range.

  “Captain O’Hare?” Meany spoke on the interservice channel. He had patched O’Hare into his comms so that they could listen in on each other in real time. “You want me to take the shot?”

  Meany heard a hurried conversation between O’Hare and Albers in the background, then O’Hare came on the line. “We are seconds from locking up that Shakti on infrared. As soon as you get a viable solution, you shoot, Meany,” O’Hare told him.

  “Yes, ma’am. Spool the launcher up, Angus, fire the second you hit max viable range. Full salvo.”

  Yes, Flight Lieutenant, fire six missiles at range max. Fire on AI authority?

  It was a question that had struck terror into the heart of AI ethicists for decades. Paddington had delegated weapons authority to Meany. Meany was about to delegate it to Angus. But it was a situation in which milliseconds could matter.

  He didn’t hesitate. “Angus has weapons authority.”

  Hub rotating. All systems nominal. Release set to auto … firing in five, four, three…

  Maqsud was stirring sugar into a cup of lukewarm black tea, barely interested in the audio of the AI counting down to the simulated attack. He just wanted to skip forward to the results so that he could get the full cycle of trials done and get back on a plane to Baikonur before Grahkovsky came back from … wherever she had gone. She had made him suffer through a meal with her, which was torture not because she was poor company, but because she was not. She was incredibly well read, had more than a passing understanding of and respect for Islam, shared his taste in American jazz. He had been fascinated watching her moving around her apartment in the light of nothing more than a few candles, making and serving dinner, pouring wine for herself and mineral water for him, and never dropping a fork, never spilling a drop. He shuddered at the memory of how she had made him feel, how he felt even now. Fascinated by her, drawn to her, and repelled by her complete and utter amorality.

  Warhead one released, the AI said. Warhead two spinning up. Would you like real-time imaging of the strike zone?

  What? “Say again,” he commanded.

  Would you like real-time imaging of the strike zone? the AI asked.

  Real-time imaging of a simulated strike? What kind of simulation was this?

  “Yes, bring it up,” he said, leaning forward to peer at his monitor as the AI opened a window that showed an angled zoomed view of what was unmistakably the Kennedy-Canaveral launch complex. For a simulation, it was…

  He saw cars moving down streets on a sunlit afternoon. Saw boats plying the Banana River and sea off Cape Canaveral. Saw people walking between buildings … no, they were running.

  His blood chilled.

  Warhead two released, the AI said. Three spinning up.

  “Abort!” Maqsud yelled. “Abort the attack.”

  Abort command sequence disabled, by authority of Chief Scientist Grahkovsky, the AI replied.

  “Override! Abort!” he yelled, his voice on the edge of hysteria.

  Abort command sequence disabled, by authority of Chief Scientist Grahkovsky, the AI repeated.

  He grabbed his beard and tore at it in mortal pain.

  No! Allah why? Please, no!

  “Russian space to ground weapon launch,” Meany said over comms, his voice half-choking. “Radar is showing a warhead launch…”

  “G-BAD firing, pulse mode,” Albers said. “Hit!” He turned his face to O’Hare. “No effect!”

  “Override safety tolerances,” O’Hare said, thinking furiously. “Go full beam!” One warhead launching from the Groza? It carried twenty.

  “Two Russian warheads launched,” Meany said, the pain in his voice palpable. “It’s approaching the Cape Canaveral coastline, making its bombing run. Impact from the Shakti in … ten seconds.”

  O’Hare didn’t know ‘Lucky’ Severin was a religious man, but heard him mutter behind her, “God help us.”

  She shot a quick look at her instruments. Bertha 2 and the Skylon were nudging 20,780 miles an hour.

  “Laser hit!” Albers cried. “Shakti deviating. Explosive decompression.”

  They heard Angus’ voice over the comms. Ten seconds to Skylon missile release. Nine … eight…

  Inside the Morrell Command Center, all three Space Force officers lifted their eyes from the instruments in front of them and looked up at the ceiling.

  There was no point running. You couldn’t outrun a meteorite.

  Soshane was still sleeping. Ambre wanted to wake her, to talk to her, to tell her she loved her. But wake her to this? The end of the world? As insane as he was, Grahkovsky was right about one thing. If what he was saying was true, it was better Soshane was asleep. He was sitting watching her, and then stood up and took a step toward them, and Ambre reflexively pulled her legs tighter, holding Soshane as close to her as she could.

  Just try and take her, you SOB, she was thinking. I’ll rip my arms out of my sockets to get off this floor and then beat you to death with them.

  Her fears were realized as he reached into the back pocket of his suit pants and pulled out a knife, opening it with a flick of his wrist. She kept one leg wrapped around Soshane and raised the other, ready to kick him if he came anywhere near them.

  “Relax!” he said, holding up a hand. “I’m going around behind you, and I’m going to cut your hands free, alright?”

  “The hell you are,” she said, crabbing around as he moved, but she could only move so far before her left arm strained like it was going to break.

  “OK, look,” he said, closing the knife again. “I’ll drop the knife by your hands, you can cut yourself free.” He showed her the knife and held it out at arm’s length, holding it in two fingers, and reached over her shoulder to drop it so she heard it clatter on the floor. Her fingers scrabbled for it as he took a step back and sat on the chair again. “You have about two minutes to live, Amber. Don’t waste them.”

  She didn’t intend to. Picking the knife up with the tips of her fingers she pulled it into the palm of her right hand and opened it with the left. She kept her eyes on him as she flipped it, so the blade was pointing upward, and began sawing at the ties between her wrists. He sat watching her with a frighteningly detached curiosity.

  She felt the ties break and drop, but she didn’t move straight away. She knew her legs would be cramped, her arms too. She flexed her wrists behind her back, planning her move. But he must have seen something in her eyes, because he stood and lifted the chair, taking a step back and holding it out in front of himself like she was a lioness and he was a tamer. “Easy, momma. Just pick up that girl an
d hug her, alright? That’s all you have time for. Seriously.”

  She glanced quickly over to the patrol car parked about five feet away. Clenched the knife tightly.

  Yeah, you can do this, she told herself. She tensed and released the muscles in her leg, testing. They screamed in protest. She couldn’t. She couldn’t do it. Damn it all.

  She took a big breath, pulled her arms from behind her back, shoulder sockets screaming in protest at having been locked in place so long. She leaned down and wrapped her arms around Soshane and lifted her up, cradling the little girl to her bosom like she was a baby again. She wrapped the jacket around her and held her as tight as she could.

  And then she dived.

  Grahkovsky jumped back, eyes wide, watching from behind his raised chair as Ambre dived forward like a legless swimmer rolling off the starting blocks in a swimming race and rolled across the floor of the garage, pulling her useless numb legs along behind her as she rolled with Soshane clutched to her chest as fast as she could and slammed into the side of the patrol car below the driver’s door. Shoving Soshane wrapped in the jacket as far as she could underneath the patrol car, she crabbed under it herself, scraping the skin off the knuckles of her right hand, the hand holding the knife.

  Grahkovsky looked like he was going to shout something, but she didn’t wait to hear it. She spun around with her legs away from him, arms and head facing him, Soshane between her legs behind her, knife out in front of her. “You stay there, you psycho! You get close to us I swear I’ll…”

  She didn’t get any further.

  The world outside exploded. Something detonated right outside the garage and one of the steel door panels blew in, cutting Grahkovsky clean in two as it careened across the garage floor. Ambre just had time to throw her forearms over her head before a massive sonic boom burst her eardrums and brought the roof of the garage down on top of her.