The Kremlin Strike

Forty-Six

Nadia Rozek shifted her point of view from her own Wolf Two COMS to Cub Two, one of her remotely piloted robots. They were within eighteen miles of the Russian space station, flying through the darkness of Earth’s shadow at high speed. The images coming through Cub Two’s light intensifiers were still fuzzy but sharpening up fast as the robot’s computer enhanced them using information gathered during Brad and Boomer’s first flyby and by ground telescopes in the following days.

Bright targeting reticles highlighted Mars One’s known weapons — the two lasers, one each on the two vertically mounted station modules, and the starfish shape of its plasma rail gun on the connecting module. She shifted the aiming point for Cub Two’s electromagnetic rail gun toward one of the lasers… and then stopped.

Some new device had popped up through a hatch in the Russian space station’s central module, something they hadn’t seen before. Since the computer didn’t have any stored images to use for enhancement, its precise shape and function were still difficult to make out. It was bulky, though, with what could be a group of cannisters set around a central core.

Nadia reacted fast, trusting to instincts honed by hard-earned combat experience. Encountering something “new” in a battle situation was never good. And everything about that device screamed “missile launcher” to her. Through her neural link, she selected that section of Mars One as her active target. The instant the robot’s rail gun centered on the newly deployed Russian weapon, she squeezed the trigger.

In a brief, blinding flash, a small super-dense metal projectile streaked toward the distant space station at nearly four thousand miles per hour.

Instantly, Nadia “felt” Cub Two start to tumble as it was shoved backward and slowed by the intense recoil generated by her shot. Knocked out of control, the spheroid-shaped robot whirled end over end through space — dropping into a new elliptical orbit that would eventually intersect with the earth’s atmosphere… with fatal consequences. “Power and thruster status?” she queried the computer.

“Insufficient battery and fuel-cell power for another rail-gun shot,” it replied. “Insufficient thruster fuel remaining to achieve rendezvous with enemy station at survivable relative velocity.”

Nadia sighed. Based on the attack profile they’d been forced to fly, their rail guns were essentially one-shot weapons. Since most of the COMS’ battery and fuel-cell energy was needed to cool its electronics and other systems in the harsh environment of outer space, there was too little surplus power to charge an electromagnetic rail gun more than once. And the robot’s maneuvering thrusters had either enough fuel to decelerate safely before slamming into Mars One, or to compensate for the gun’s recoil… but not both. There was nothing more she could do. Cub Two was doomed to spin down out of orbit and burn up on reentry.

“Launch detection,” the robot’s computer reported calmly.

Through its sensors, she saw a cylindrical shape ejected from one of the cannisters spaced around the Russian launcher. A bright glow lit the aft end of the enemy missile as it sped across the intervening miles at astonishing speed.

“Target?” Nadia asked sharply.

In reply, Cub Two’s computer flashed a trajectory across her display.

Without hesitating, Nadia cut her data link to the remotely piloted robot and came back to full awareness inside her own COMS… just in time to see the Russian missile slam straight into Cub Two with enormous force. The impact vaporized both, leaving only a swirling fog of thousands of glowing fragments.

In that same moment, the Russian launcher disintegrated — ripped to pieces by the rail-gun round she’d fired seventeen seconds before. Jagged shards of metal and carbon-fiber composites spun away and tore through the large rectangular solar panels extended off Mars One’s modules.

A second later, rail-gun rounds smashed both Hobnail lasers into splinters. Two more COMS robots, Brad’s remotely piloted Cub One and Vasey’s Cub Four, spiraled downward, knocked out of orbit by the recoil from their own fire.

“Wolf Two to all Wolves,” Nadia said, elated. “The enemy’s outer defenses are down! Let’s go pay the Russians a very close and personal visit.”

“Roger that, Wolf Two,” Brad replied, echoed a moment later by Vasey. “Range to Mars One is now sixteen miles. Stand by to initiate braking maneuver in sixty seconds.”

“Warning, warning, X-band fire-control radar lock-on,” Nadia’s COMS computer said abruptly. “New radar is at five o’clock low. Evaluated as N036 Byelka — equivalent active electronically scanned array system.”

Startled, she focused her robot’s rear-facing visual sensors along that bearing. There, sixty miles away, was the distinctive winged shape of a Russian Elektron spaceplane. It was closing on them fast, with its laser up and locked in attack position.

“Hell,” Nadia said quietly. Caught without the long-range rail guns they’d just expended against Mars One, they had no way to fight back.

Lieutenant Colonel Ilya Alferov checked his radar display with a fierce, satisfied smile. He had a solid lock on one of the four small, odd-looking American spacecraft still aimed at Mars One. Two others were no longer a threat, based on their current trajectories.

Very soon, he thought coldly, all of the attackers would be dead… but at his hands, rather than those of Strelkov and his so-called wonder weapons. Maybe now Colonel General Leonov would realize the mistake he’d made in abandoning further development of Russia’s own spaceplanes in favor of that orbiting monstrosity. Speed and flexibility were the keys to space warfare. The American general Patton had been right when he’d said that fixed fortifications were a monument to man’s stupidity. Cramming weapons into a platform like Mars One that was forced to follow a predictable orbit only made the enemy’s job easier.

Alferov entered commands into his autopilot and waited while it took control over the Elektron — firing attitude thrusters to center the Hobnail laser precisely on his chosen target. His spaceplane rotated slightly and then stabilized. The laser targeting reticle on his display went solid green.

He reached out to activate the laser and then stopped. His smile disappeared. The reticle was blinking again. His Elektron had drifted off target for some reason. More thrusters popped, rotating the spaceplane back into position… and kept firing in an effort to keep the laser centered.

Alferov frowned. What the devil was going on? It was as though his Elektron was being pushed aside by some strange force.

And then a glistening blob of molten metal drifted past his helmet and splashed against the right side of the cockpit. Horrified, he turned his head to look left — just as the high-powered laser beam that had been focused on his spaceplane for the past several seconds finished cutting through its hull, sliced through the fabric of his suit, ignited his oxygen, and ripped him in half.

One hundred and fifty miles below the Elektron, Hunter Noble saw a sudden flare of light as the S-29B’s two-megawatt laser pierced the Russian spaceplane’s fuselage. It veered off its previous trajectory, pitching and yawing while its attitude thrusters fired randomly for a few seconds and then went dead.

“Enemy X-band fire-control radar is off-line,” the computer reported.

For “off-line,” read “fried to hell,” Boomer thought grimly, along with the pilot.

“Good kill… Anderson,” he forced out against the G-forces squeezing him back into his seat. They were still boosting to orbit, having opted for a near-vertical ascent that took them up out of the atmosphere in less than a minute — long before any warning from Russia’s EKS satellites could be relayed from Moscow to the Elektron they’d just wrecked. “Nice shooting… for… a squid.”

“Thanks… Boomer.” Jill Anderson was the S-29B’s offensive weapons officer. Before joining Scion, the former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander had worked in the navy’s ship-mounted HELIOS combat laser program. Getting the chance to fire a weapon with twenty times more power was a dream come true for her.

Boomer craned his head sideways a little to look over at Liz Gallagher. His copilot was busy monitoring their engine displays and navigation programs. “Ready to go looking… for more trouble?”

“You ask… a girl… the nicest questions,” she replied with a tight smile. “Oh, yeah, let’s go get ’em.” Straining, she reached up and tapped one of her multifunction displays. “Nav Program Two is laid in and running.”

Boomer saw the steering cues on his heads-up display shift and he followed them, nudging the sidestick controller slightly to the left. The nozzles of the S-29B’s five LPDRS engines gimbaled in response, and the spaceplane curved away from the still-distant Mars One — climbing toward an orbit that would converge with the second Russian Elektron and the fusion reactor module it was guarding.

“You know this approach is going to… run our fuel tanks… pretty dry,” Gallagher said, as conversationally as possible while feeling like an anvil four times her own weight was pressing down on her chest.

“Yep,” Boomer agreed. “If we win this fight… we’re gonna have to glide down the old-fashioned way, nose first.”

“And if we lose?”

He fought the Gs to give her a wry grin. “The thought never crossed… my mind, Liz. See, I’ve already bailed out from… orbit… once. I don’t plan… to make it… a habit.”

Leonov stared at his screen with a sense of eerie detachment. First, the EKS satellite warning of yet another American spaceplane launch had hit him like a bolt out of the blue. And then, only seconds later, the telemetry from Alferov’s Elektron One winked out — signaling its sudden destruction by a laser weapon with frightening power and precision.

The battle in space was not turning in Russia’s favor, he realized. While it was still possible that Strelkov and his men could defeat what now appeared to be an American attempt to board and capture Mars One, that was no longer certain. And based on the ease with which it had killed Alferov, the new S-29 Shadow already closing on the reactor module and its second Elektron escort was a deadly foe.

Slowly, Leonov reached out for his keyboard. He was running out of time to act. The inset message in one corner of his screen still read: RAPIRA SEVEN ON STANDBY. READY FOR TARGET SELECTION.

Carefully, he entered a new series of commands into the open fail-safe program, again routing them through one of Mars One’s secondary communications antennas. Seconds later, the message on his screen changed: TARGET ACCEPTED. RAPIRA SEVEN LAUNCHING. WILL AWAIT FINAL ATTACK CONFIRMATION IN ORBIT.

Six hundred and sixty kilometers above the earth, an armored hatch on the underside of Mars One’s central command module opened. A Rapira warhead with its attached rocket motor slid out into space with small puffs of gas from its thrusters. It separated from the station at ten meters per second and then accelerated away with a short burn from its motor — altering its orbital inclination by a couple of degrees to the north.

Once it was in position, the Rapira’s thrusters fired again, flipping the weapon over so that its rocket motor was pointed against the direction of orbit. One small antenna faced the earth, waiting for the final order from Moscow that would trigger its programmed deorbit burn and attack.