Eagle Station

Eight

Eagle Station slid silently through space high above the North Atlantic, heading toward Africa’s western coast at close to seventeen thousand miles per hour. Behind it, a curving line of darkness, the solar terminator, obscured South America. Patches of bright yellowish light dotted the blackened landmass, each marking the presence of a major city still waiting for the oncoming dawn.

The large space station was made up of four, linked 115-foot-long cylinders. Three — two dedicated weapons and sensor modules with a command node connecting them — formed a vertical shape that looked very much like a capital I turned on its side. Like their Russian predecessors, its U.S. Space Force crew often compared this basic silhouette to that of a TIE fighter from Star Wars. The fourth section, containing the station’s fusion power generator, extended horizontally off the central command module.

Antennas of various sizes and shapes studded Eagle’s radar-absorbent outer skin. Two long clear tubes — Sky Masters — designed combat-grade lasers replacing lower-powered Russian systems destroyed when the station was captured — were fixed in swivel mounts at the bottom of the two weapons modules. The mount for the orbital platform’s primary armament, its Thunderbolt plasma rail gun, rose above the command node. It was an odd-looking device, with a stubby rod at its center surrounded by an array of electronic components in a six-armed starfish pattern.

Inside the cylindrical command node, Colonel Keith “Mal” Reynolds glided down a narrow, dimly lit corridor lined with storage cabinets and conduits and on though an open hatch. He came out into a somewhat larger compartment crammed full of computer consoles and high-resolution displays. Moving with practiced ease, he grabbed a handhold and arrested his momentum. One more gentle fingertip push off the nearest wall sent him floating over to the nearest console. He hooked his feet beneath it to hold himself in place and plugged his headset into the panel.

The Space Force officer on sensor watch, Captain Allison Stewart, glanced away from her displays. “Good morning, sir.”

“Morning, Allie,” Reynolds said. It was one of those rare moments when station time coincided — however briefly — with the visual cue of the sun rising above the curve of the earth ahead of them. At this altitude, four hundred miles above the planet, they experienced fourteen or fifteen dawns and sunsets during any given twenty-four-hour period. “Anything to report?”

“No, sir. It’s been pretty quiet so far this shift.”

“Alert. SBIRS sensors have picked up a major heat bloom over the Aegean Sea,” Eagle’s threat-warning computer suddenly intoned calmly.

“Is that a missile?” Reynolds snapped.

“No, sir,” Stewart told him. “This looks like a nonballistic trajectory. My computer evaluates it as a spacecraft headed into orbit.”

Reynolds frowned. There were a couple of private U.S. space companies with air-launched rockets in their inventory. But why light one off just south of Greece?

“New data, sir,” Stewart said rapidly. “I evaluate that thermal signature as an S-29B Shadow spaceplane. SBIRS detected the Shadow when its engines transitioned to rocket mode and initiated an orbital burn.” She passed her revised data to his screen. “The S-29 is currently at an altitude of two hundred miles. It’s in a retrograde orbit inclined at 128.4 degrees.”

“So it’s headed our way,” Reynolds said. Eagle Station’s orbit took it from west to east around the world, with an inclination or tilt of 51.6 degrees. That Shadow was circling the earth from east to west along the opposite track.

She nodded. “Yes, sir. And fast. On its current orbital track, that spaceplane will cross two hundred miles directly below us — with a combined closing speed of more than thirty-four thousand miles per hour.”

The colonel raised an eyebrow. He was starting to get an itchy feeling on the back of his neck. It looked a whole lot like the Space Force’s new senior officers were running a snap readiness exercise to test Eagle Station’s commander and crew. He tapped an icon on his own console. Instantly, alarms blared in every compartment in all four connected modules. “Action stations,” he announced over the intercom. “All personnel report to their action stations. This is a drill. Repeat, this is a drill.”

Reynolds heard voices echoing through other open hatches as those crewmen who’d been off duty scrambled out of tiny sleeping cabins and skimmed through corridors to their assigned places.

One by one, readiness reports flowed through his headset. The station’s fusion power plant, environmental controls, and life-support systems were all functioning within their expected parameters.

“Lasers are fully charged. Firing status is green. Simulated controls operational. Primary control systems are temporarily locked down,” he heard from the forward weapons module. Good, he thought. Nobody wanted real weapons firing accidentally during a training exercise.

From the aft weapons module, Major Ike Ozawa, the officer in charge of Eagle’s Thunderbolt plasma rail gun, announced, “Thunderbolt’s supercapacitors are charged. I’m ready to fire. Awaiting handoff of radar tracking data.”

Reynolds glanced toward Stewart. The young captain was busy with her equipment.

“Our X-band radar is online,” she told him a moment later. She looked back over her shoulder with a hint of barely suppressed amusement. “Oh, how I love the smell of burnt plasma in the morning. It smells like—”

“An easy kill.” The colonel nodded. The plasma rail gun was Eagle Station’s main weapons system. Using energy stored in its starfish-shaped supercapacitor array, Thunderbolt created a ring of extremely dense plasma, essentially a form of ball lightning, and then accelerated it with a powerful magnetic pulse. Those glowing, meter-wide toroids of plasma flew through outer space at more than six thousand miles per second — destroying targets by a combination of kinetic impact, heat, powerful electromagnetic pulse effects, and high-energy X-rays.

“New radar contact,” the station computer announced abruptly. “Bearing zero-five-one degrees. Altitude two hundred miles. Range three thousand, five hundred miles. Closing velocity nine point five miles per second. Contact is friendly. Repeat, friendly. Positive IFF.” The S-29 had just crossed their radar horizon.

And then a familiar-sounding voice crackled over through Reynolds’s headset. “Eagle Station, this is Shadow Bravo One. Do you copy?”

A grin creased his face. “Five by five, Bravo One. Welcome to outer space, Dusty,” he radioed.

“Thank you kindly, Eagle,” Colonel Scott “Dusty” Miller replied. He was the Space Force’s first S-29B-qualified command pilot. “Say, Mal, are your boys and girls ready to dance?”

“We may be a little out of your league, Bravo One,” Reynolds said, still smiling to himself. “That peashooter two-megawatt laser you’re carrying won’t be in range for a while yet… and our rail gun can zap you the moment you cross our visual horizon.” He glanced down at his display. “Which is in just about fifteen seconds from now.”

Miller’s reply sounded equally amused. “Well, that’s mighty bold talk for a man strapped into a fat, floating tin can, Mal. Fight’s on!”

“Roger that, Bravo One. Fight’s on,” Reynolds acknowledged. He cued the intercom again. “All personnel, stand by to engage that S-29 spaceplane in simulated combat.” He looked across the compartment toward Allison Stewart. “Anytime you’re ready, Captain.”

She nodded. “The target is in visual line of sight. Our radar is locked on. Handing off tracking data to—” She broke off and muttered, “Well, crap.”

“Clarify that!” Reynolds demanded.

“Sorry, sir,” Stewart said, turning faintly red with embarrassment. “The radar can’t develop an acceptable fire control solution. The S-29 is maneuvering erratically, using its thrusters — not its main engines.”

Reynolds stared down at his own display in surprise. The icon representing Dusty Miller’s spaceplane jittered wildly, yawing, rolling, and pitching through all three dimensions as its thrusters fired in short pulses. And try as it might, Eagle Station’s powerful X-band fire control radar was having real trouble figuring out exactly where the S-29B would be when the Thunderbolt rail gun’s plasma shot arrived.

“Damn, that’s clever,” he muttered.

Once it was fired, the weapon’s plasma toroids could not turn or change course. They streaked along a straight, undeviating path until they lost coherence roughly one second, and six thousand miles, later. If the target wasn’t where the computer said it would be along that path, the shot would miss. As the range dropped and the time of flight for the plasma projectiles diminished, the job of making that calculation should get easier. If nothing else, once flight times dropped to just fractions of a second, the S-29’s thrusters might not be able to move the spacecraft out of the way in time.

He looked back at Stewart. “How long before that spaceplane gets within striking range of this station?”

“A little under five minutes, Colonel.”

He nodded. “Okay. Can you run a pattern analysis on the S-29’s observed evasive maneuvers? See if you can crack whatever program they’re running, so our computer can predict its next moves?”

She chewed her lower lip, deep in thought. “I can try, sir.”

Left unspoken was the probability that whatever automated maneuver program Dusty Miller and his Shadow crew had running was using randomly generated numbers to select which particular thrusters fired and for how long. If it was using the more typical pseudo-random number generators common to many computer programs, the algorithm and seed used might be discoverable… in time. If it was using a so-called true random number generator and extracting randomness from physical phenomena — radioactive source decay, for example — there was probably no way to crack it.

Thinking it through, Reynolds was willing to bet there were hard limits coded into the S-29’s evasion program. You couldn’t leave everything to pure random chance — not on a working spacecraft with set reserves of hydrazine thruster fuel. There were also definite limits to the amount of torque and tumbling you could inflict on a spaceplane without harming the crew or risking its structural integrity.

He opened a circuit to Major Ozawa in the aft weapons module. “Ike, I want you to take every possible shot at these guys, understand? Even if you can’t get a solid fire control solution, take the shot.”

Ozawa whistled softly. “Pretty long odds against scoring a hit that way, Colonel. Not at anything over a few hundred miles, anyway.”

“Maybe so,” Reynolds agreed. “But long odds are better than no odds.”

“Yes, sir,” Ozawa said.

Reynolds closed out that circuit and opened a new one, this time to the laser weapons officer in Eagle Station’s forward module. “This may get to close quarters, Bill. If it does, I’m counting on you to nail that S-29 fast. Once they’re within range of your lasers, you’re only going to have a minute to finish this fight. Right?”

“Yes, sir,” Captain William Carranza acknowledged. “One thing to consider, Colonel. If we can’t hit them, they may have trouble holding their own laser on target long enough to inflict serious damage on us.”

Reynolds nodded. “Yeah, which could make this a mutually assured destruction scenario. If possible, that’s not a game I want to play. This station is worth a lot more than one spaceplane.”

“Understood,” Carranza said.

Reynolds frowned deeply. Was there anything else he could do? There were just minutes before Eagle Station and Dusty Miller’s spaceplane passed each other within two hundred miles. Weird as it seemed, that was practically knife-fighting range for weapons that hit at light speed and considerable fractions of light speed. Then he shrugged. When all was said and done, this simulated space battle was going to come down to a completely unpredictable interaction between the laws of physics, probability, and Lady Luck.

“Eagle Station is below our visual horizon. No other immediate threat detected,” a calm, female voice announced.

“Copy that. Discontinue evasion program,” Colonel Scott “Dusty” Miller ordered through gritted teeth as another sharp jolt, this time from the spaceplane’s aft thrusters, shoved him hard against his seat straps.

“Order confirmed. Evasive flight program discontinued,” the S-29’s flight control computer said.

The difference was immediately apparent. Instead of bucking around like a wild-eyed bronco on LSD, their winged spacecraft glided smoothly along its prescribed orbital track. They were still pitched nose down, which offered a spectacular view of the cloud-laced Atlantic through the forward cockpit canopy.

“Well, that was one hell of a ride,” Miller muttered, fighting down a wave of nausea. Short and stocky, and built like a wrestler, the command pilot had years of experience flying B-2 Spirit stealth bombers before transitioning to the U.S. Space Force. But not even the worst air turbulence really compared to what he’d just endured — ten solid minutes of wholly unpredictable motion, where his body and, more important, his inner ear hadn’t known from one fraction of a second to the next in which direction their spacecraft was going to pitch, veer, roll, or yaw.

Breathing out slowly, he glanced across the cockpit at his copilot. “You okay, Major?”

Major Hannah “Rocky” Craig had been a test pilot for the F-35 fighter program before qualifying as a NASA astronaut and then transferring to the newly formed Space Force. Despite her years of intensive acrobatic flight training, even she still looked faintly green around the gills. She forced a sickly grin. “I’m fine, Dusty.” She winced. “Jeez. That was like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride dialed up to eleven.”

He nodded carefully and then keyed the intercom to the S-29’s aft cabin. “Everyone still breathing back there?”

There was a long pause and then a pinched, oddly nasal voice answered. “Mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“Well, Jensen puked about halfway through… so we’re kind of being careful about the whole breathing thing,” the voice, which he now recognized as belonging to the spaceplane’s data-link specialist, replied.

Miller winced. Part of their Sky Masters training for space operations had involved multiple flights in an aircraft aptly nicknamed the Vomit Comet. Repeated high-angle parabolic maneuvers created short periods of weightlessness… and all too often induced air-sickness. So he didn’t need an overly active imagination to visualize what it was like being trapped in a tight compartment with globules of vomit floating everywhere.

Beside him, he heard Hannah Craig stifle a laugh. He shook his head. “Show a little sympathy, Major.”

His dark-haired copilot donned an appropriately contrite look. “Sorry, Dusty.” Then her natural mirth bubbled up again. “It’s just that I’m really glad we’re riding at the front of this bus… and not in back with Jensen and his miraculously reincarnated breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

Miller snorted, fighting hard against his own urge to burst out laughing. “Amen to that, I guess.” His gaze sharpened. “So, how does the all-seeing, all-knowing computer say we did?”

Her fingers rattled across the largest of her multifunction displays, interrogating the S-29’s attack and threat-warning computers. In response, text boxes and schematics flashed across her screen — graphically illustrating the results of their simulated battle against Eagle Station. Her mouth turned down slightly at the corners. “It’s kind of a coin toss.”

“As in?” he asked.

“The computer figures we got nailed at least twice. Both times when we were within just a couple of hundred miles of the station.”

He nodded. No real surprise there. The Thunderbolt rail gun’s plasma projectiles flashed across that distance in just over three one-hundredths of a second. Barring luck, that was much too short an interval for any random thruster pulse to kick their S-29 safely out of harm’s way. “And on the plus side?”

Craig gave him a thumbs-up. “We scored at least three solid hits on Eagle before we got killed. So, if this had been a real fight, Colonel Reynolds and his crew would have been learning how to breathe space dust right about now.”

“Not bad for a first whack at this whole space combat deal, I guess,” Miller decided.

She shrugged against her harness. “I guess not.”

“But?”

“Ties don’t count for shit,” Craig said simply. “It’s not really a win unless you zoom off in one piece, leaving the other guy drifting downwind under his parachute and wondering what just happened.”

Miller nodded seriously. “Yeah. I see your point.” He checked his own displays. “But since that one pass just burned over seventy percent of our hydrazine, we’re done for today. Let’s get this crate configured for powered reentry on the next orbit. Then we’ll head back to base, rethink our tactics, and try again tomorrow.”

“Sounds like a plan,” she said. Her smile returned. “You know, Colonel Reynolds is really going to get tired of seeing us pop up on his radar.”

Miller shrugged. “Probably so. Still, Mal shouldn’t gripe too much about sharpening up his team in mock battles against us — not when the alternative is tangling with the Russians or the Chinese for real.”

Craig looked seriously at him. “You think that’s likely?”

“Oh hell, yes,” he said. “Those guys aren’t going to sit dirtside forever. Sooner or later, they’ll come boiling back up out of the atmosphere, spoiling for a fight. And when they do, that’ll be a very interesting day, Major.”