The Kremlin Strike

Twenty-One

Colonel Vadim Strelkov saw the earth below them emerge from darkness as Mars One crossed the terminator line and came back into daylight. Swirls of brilliant white cloud covered much of the North Atlantic. Just ahead lay the rugged mass of Portugal and Spain, an undulating mix of arid brown mountains and plateaus and green, wooded ridges and valleys.

“Our solar arrays are back online at maximum efficiency,” Pyotr Romanenko reported from his post in another compartment near the aft end of the command module. “And our backup batteries are recharging at the expected rate.”

Strelkov felt some of his tension ease slightly. “Very good, Major,” he said over the intercom. “Cut power to all nonessential systems. I want electricity available to recharge the Thunderbolt rail gun and our lasers if necessary.”

“Yes, sir,” Romanenko said. “Cutting power now.”

In response, lights dimmed across the command compartment. The constant background noise of their air-recirculation fans faded. Indicators on various consoles went yellow as whole subsystems — oxygen generators, water recovery, waste management, and others — were put on standby.

Satisfied that his orders were being obeyed, Strelkov turned his attention back to the distant American spaceplane. Up to now, it had been visible only as a blotchy, glowing heat signature. But as it crossed the terminator, still behind them though slowly catching up, the black-winged S-19 took on shape and definition in Mars One’s powerful telescopes.

He frowned. The spaceplane’s nose was aimed straight at them. “Are the Americans closing on us, Georgy?” he demanded.

From his sensor console, Konnikov replied: “No, sir. Their spacecraft is continuing on the same slightly lower orbit, offset from ours by one hundred and sixty kilometers.” He leaned closer to his display. “They’ve probably rotated toward us to increase the efficiency of their onboard radar.”

“Has it locked on to us?”

Konnikov turned his helmeted head. Since they were still on station air, his visor was up. “No, Colonel.” He shrugged. “The S-19’s radar is far too weak to penetrate our stealth coating.” He turned back at his screen. “One thing is odd, though,” he commented. “The spaceplane’s payload bay doors appear to be open.”

Strelkov felt colder suddenly. What were the Americans up to?

From the forward weapons module, Leonid Revin suggested, “Maybe they need to radiate heat generated by their life-support system, like NASA’s old space shuttle orbiters?”

“I do not think so, Captain,” Strelkov said slowly. While training for duty aboard Mars One, he had studied every piece of information gained by observing Sky Masters spaceplanes during their flights to and from America’s Armstrong military space station and the International Space Station. Everything indicated they usually opened their cargo doors only after they were docked… not during flight.

Gryzlov broke in abruptly over their link to Moscow. “Those open doors could be proof the Americans are planning to attack you!” he growled. “What if they brought missiles with them into orbit, hidden inside that cargo bay?”

Strelkov felt his pulse speed up. My God, he realized, the president might be right. Frantically, he pulled up what was known about the S-19’s payload capacity on his command console. Current intelligence suggested it was a little under three thousand kilograms. At first, that didn’t seem like much… not until he had the computer run that figure against different U.S. missile types.

His eyes widened. The American AIM-120D advanced medium-range air-to-air missile was the most likely match. The AMRAAM’s solid-fuel rocket motor meant it could be fired in space. With a maximum range of more than one hundred and eighty kilometers, attack speed of nearly five thousand kilometers per hour, and twenty-three kilogram high-explosive blast-fragmentation warhead, a salvo of AIM-120s might pose a serious threat to the Mars One station. And that Sky Masters S-19 out there could be carrying up to sixteen such missiles in its bay…

Hunter “Boomer” Noble kept his eyes fixed on the brightly lit dot that was Mars One. They were almost level with it now, though still at a lower altitude. Even from one hundred miles away, that Russian space station gave him the creeps. Something about it made him imagine a huge shark silently gliding through the ocean depths in search of smaller prey.

“Getting anything yet?” he asked.

“Well, nothing obviously bad. At least not so far,” Brad told him. He had his eyes fixed on his display while he scrolled through the thermal and visual imagery collected by nanosatellites as they flew closer to Mars One. “But our birds are still a little too far out to pick up much detail. Our guys on the ground ought to be able to get a lot more with computer-assisted image enhancement, though.”

Boomer nodded. Every piece of data obtained by their constellation of spy satellites was being relayed to Battle Mountain in real time. The Scion and Sky Masters intelligence analysts stationed there should be having a field day sorting through all the information they were gathering.

Through the S-19’s cockpit canopy, the glittering point of light that was the Russian space station slid slowly to the left. They were passing Mars One now. Thrusters fired, yawing the spaceplane to keep its nose centered on target.

Boomer frowned. “You know, those bastards over there are being awfully quiet.”

“You think they’re all asleep?” Brad suggested with a lopsided grin.

“Fuck no,” Boomer grunted. “The Russians must have spotted us almost as soon as we boosted. On any half-decent IR sensor, we’d have stood out like a sore thumb.”

He chewed that over for a few seconds. From an astronautical point of view, their S-19 and the space station were practically within spitting distance. So why the prolonged silence? At a minimum, Mars One should be querying them about their intentions and warning them to keep a safe distance.

Boomer came to a decision. If that big-ass space station out there was armed, he sure as hell did not want the cosmonauts on board it going off half-cocked. It was time to establish contact and ease the tension. He punched in a new radio frequency—143.625 MHz FM, one of the two commonly used by manned Russian spacecraft for voice communications. “Dobroye utro, Mars Odin! Good morning, Mars One! This is Midnight Zero-One. Sorry to pop up on you unannounced like this, but we just thought we’d swing by to pay our respects and welcome you folks to orbit.”

Half listening while Boomer talked, Brad stiffened suddenly. What the hell? He tapped his display. It froze on one of the pictures transmitted by their recon satellites. This was a close-up of a station module, one of those that formed the vertical “bars” of what sort of looked like a sideways capital letter I.

His eyes narrowed as he studied the image closely. Now that the nanosats had a good angle on Mars One in full sunlight, their cameras were spotting odd discontinuities in its surface structures. What first appeared to be ordinary cabling and conduits girding a section of hull plating looked wrong somehow. He zoomed in on a narrow section of the image. There were definitely places where those cables and conduits didn’t connect up the way they should — not if they were supposed to serve any useful purpose. Yeah, he thought coldly, that’s not my imagination. They were fakes. Window dressing. But why would the Russians build a space station hull and then layer it with phony conduits?

Struck by what at first seemed a pretty wild theory, Brad pulled up more data from another of their nanosatellites. Sierra Two was one of those equipped with a sensitive thermographic camera. The images it had captured showed Mars One as a riot of psychedelic colors, revealing even tiny differences in the station’s surface temperatures. In some ways, that wasn’t surprising. Depending on whether a given section of hull was in sunlight or shadow, you could expect its temperature to range anywhere from plus 250 degrees to minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit. But even allowing for highly efficient insulation, some of the readings he saw were significantly outside the predicted norms.

And that matched up with his suspicions.

Excitedly, he turned toward Boomer. “Holy shit! Parts of that space station’s hull are definitely fake!”

“Fake? Fake, how?”

Swiftly, Brad highlighted sections on several of the pictures sent back by their tiny satellites and copied them to Boomer’s display. “See? These are supposedly solid sections of hull. But that’s bullshit. They’re actually camouflaged hatches or ports!”

Slowly, Boomer nodded. “Yeah, I think you’re right.” His mouth tightened. “Okay, let’s do our damnedest not to find out what’s behind those hidden doors the hard way.”

“…thought we’d swing by to pay our respects and welcome you folks to orbit.”

Strelkov was caught off guard by the American spaceplane pilot’s cheerful, friendly-sounding greeting. Why this sudden radio transmission from the spaceplane that had been trailing them in silence for more than half an hour?

Konnikov glanced over at him from his sensor console. “Should I reply, Colonel?”

Strelkov nodded tightly. “Be polite, Georgy. But instruct them to keep their distance.”

“Yes, sir.” Konnikov keyed his own mike. “Midnight Zero-One, this is Mars One. Thank you for the kind sentiments. However, for flight safety reasons, we must insist that you approach no closer.”

Long seconds passed before Strelkov heard the American’s elaborately casual reply crackle through his headset. “Copy that, Mars One. Don’t sweat it. We’ll be sure not to crowd you. The sky up here is plenty big for both of us.”

Perplexed, Strelkov turned back to the com screens showing Gryzlov and Colonel General Leonov listening in from Moscow. “What kind of game are these people playing?” he wondered. “First, they creep up on us in the dark… and now they pretend we’re all friends together?”

Gryzlov scowled abruptly. “They’re distracting you, Colonel,” he snapped. “Like a sleight-of-hand conjurer gesturing broadly with one hand while he palms a card with the other!”

Dismayed, Strelkov stared at the president’s furious image. “Distracting us from what?” he asked. “We have not detected any overt hostile activity from the American spaceplane since we made visual contact.”

“Don’t be an idiot!” Gryzlov snarled. “Remember those open cargo doors? They could have launched their weapons much earlier, while you were both orbiting through darkness!”

Strelkov saw Leonov frown.

“Using some kind of new stealth missile?” the colonel general asked dubiously. “A missile we’ve never heard of before? That seems highly unlikely—”

With an imperious gesture, Gryzlov cut him off. “Strelkov!” he demanded. “Is your L-band radar active?”

Despite the hydrostatic effects of zero-G, Strelkov felt the blood drain from his face. Mars One’s long-wavelength L-band radar was the best choice to detect stealth targets. Without it, they were effectively blind to any attack by weapons purposely shaped to reduce their radar cross section.

But Moscow’s earlier orders had been clear. To preserve the fiction that Mars One was a civilian space platform, they had been directed to avoid using either of their military-grade radars if at all possible. Unfortunately, caught up in the press of events since that American spaceplane appeared seemingly out of nowhere, he had neglected to request a change in those instructions. And equally unfortunately, the station’s L-band radar, with its substantial electricity requirements, was one of the systems he’d deliberately ordered kept off-line to free up power in case it was needed to recharge their directed-energy weapons.

He stabbed down at the intercom button. “Major Romanenko! Restore power to our radar systems! Right away!” Then, without waiting for a reply, he swiveled toward Konnikov — holding tight to his console to avoid spinning off helplessly across the compartment. “Georgy! Bring your L-band and X-radars online! And for Christ’s sake, hurry! We may already be under missile attack!”