The Best of Bova

by Ben Bova

  “The United States of America wants us to serve in the Peacekeepers,” Hazard insisted.

  Cardillo shook his head again, mournfully. Not a trace of anger. Not even disappointment. As if he had expected this reaction from Hazard. His expression was that of a salesman who could not convince his stubborn customer of the bargain he was offering.

  “Your son doesn’t feel the same way you do,” Cardillo said.

  Hazard immediately clamped down on the rush of emotions that surged through him. Instead of reaching across the table and dragging Cardillo to his feet and punching in his smirking face, Hazard forced a thin smile and kept his fists clenched on his lap.

  “Jon Jr. is a grown man. He has the right to make his own decisions.”

  “He’s serving under me, you know.” Cardillo’s eyes searched Hazard’s face intently, probing for weakness.

  “Yes,” Hazard said tightly. “He told me.”

  Which was an outright lie.

  “Missiles approaching, sir!”

  Stromsen’s tense warning snapped Hazard out of his reverie. He riveted his attention to the main CIC display screen. Six angry red dots were worming their way from the periphery of the screen toward the center, which marked the location of the Hunter.

  “Now we’ll see if the ABM satellites are working or not,” Hazard muttered.

  “Links with the ABM sats are still good, sir,” Yang reported from her station, a shoulder’s width away from Stromsen. “The integral antennas weren’t knocked out when they hit the comm dishes.”

  Hazard gave her a nod of acknowledgment. The two young women could not have looked more different: Yang was small, wiry, dark, her straight black hair cut like a military helmet; Stromsen was willowy yet broad in the beam and deep in the bosom, as blonde as butter.

  “Lasers on 324 and 325 firing,” the Norwegian reported.

  Hazard saw the display lights. On the main screen the six red dots flickered orange momentarily, then winked out altogether.

  Stromsen pecked at her keyboard. Alphanumerics sprang up on a side screen. “Got them all while they were still in first-stage burn. They’ll never reach us.” She smiled with relief. “They’re tumbling into the atmosphere. Burn-up within seven minutes.”

  Hazard allowed himself a small grin. “Don’t break out the champagne yet. That’s just their first salvo. They’re testing to see if we actually have control of the lasers.”

  It’s all a question of time, Hazard knew. But how much time? What are they planning? How long before they start slicing us up with laser beams? We don’t have the shielding to protect against lasers. The stupid politicians wouldn’t allow us to armor these stations. We’re like a sitting duck up here.

  “What are they trying to accomplish, sir?” asked Yang. “Why are they doing this?”

  “They want to take over the whole defense network. They want to seize control of the entire IPF.”

  “That’s impossible!” Stromsen blurted.

  “The Russians won’t allow them to do that,” Yang said. “The Chinese and the other members of the IPF will stop them.”

  “Maybe,” said Hazard. “Maybe.” He felt a slight hint of nausea ripple in his stomach. Reaching up, he touched the slippery plastic of the medicine patch behind his ear.

  “Do you think they could succeed?” Stromsen asked.

  “What’s important is, do they think they can succeed? There are still hundreds of ballistic missiles on Earth. Thousands of hydrogen warheads. Buckbee and his cohorts apparently believe that if they can take control of a portion of the ABM network, they can threaten a nuclear strike against the nations that don’t go along with them.”

  “But the other nations will strike back and order their people in the IPF not to intercept their strikes,” said Yang.

  “It will be nuclear war,” Stromsen said. “Just as if the IPF never existed.”

  “Worse,” Yang pointed out, “because first there’ll be a shoot-out on each one of these battle stations.”

  “That’s madness!” said Stromsen.

  “That’s what we’ve got to prevent,” Hazard said grimly.

  An orange light began to blink on the comm console. Yang snapped her attention to it. “Incoming message from the Graham, sir.”

  Hazard nodded. “Put it on the main screen.”

  Cardillo’s crafty features appeared on the screen. He should have been still on leave back on Earth, but instead he was smiling crookedly at Hazard.

  “Well, Johnny, I guess by now you’ve figured out that we mean business.”

  “And so do we. Give it up, Vince. It’s not going to work.”

  With a small shake of his head Cardillo answered, “It’s already working, Johnny boy. Two of the Russian battle stations are with us. So’s the Wood. The Chinks and Indians are holding out but the European station is going along with us.”

  Hazard said, “So you’ve got six of the nine stations.”

  “So far.”

  “Then you don’t really need Hunter. You can leave us alone.”

  Pursing his lips for a moment, Cardillo replied, “I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way, Johnny. We want Hunter. We can’t afford to have you rolling around like a loose cannon. You’re either with us or against us.”

  “I’m not with you,” Hazard said flatly.

  Cardillo sighed theatrically. “John, there are twenty other officers and crew on your station . . .”

  “Fourteen now,” Hazard corrected.

  “Don’t you think you ought to give them a chance to make a decision about their own lives?”

  Despite himself, Hazard broke into a malicious grin. “Am I hearing you straight, Vince? You’re asking the commander of a vessel to take a vote?”

  Grinning back at him, Cardillo admitted, “I guess that was kind of dumb. But you do have their lives in your hands, Johnny.”

  “We’re not knuckling under, Vince. And you’ve got twenty-some lives aboard the Graham, you know. Including your own. Better think about that.”

  “We already have, Johnny. One of those lives is Jonathan Hazard, Jr. He’s right here on the bridge with me. A fine officer, Johnny. You should be proud of him.”

  A hostage, Hazard realized. They’re using Jon Jr. as a hostage.

  “Do you want to talk with him?” Cardillo asked.

  Hazard nodded.

  Cardillo slid out of view and a younger man’s face appeared on the screen. Jon Jr. looked tense, strained. This isn’t any easier for him than it is for me, Hazard thought. He studied his son’s face. Youthful, clear-eyed, a square-jawed honest face. Hazard was startled to realize that he had seen that face before, in his own Academy graduation photo.

  “How are you, son?”

  “I’m fine, Dad. And you?”

  “Are we really on opposite sides of this?”

  Jon Jr.’s eyes flicked away for a moment, then turned back to look squarely at his father’s. “I’m afraid so, Dad.”

  “But why?” Hazard felt genuinely bewildered that his son did not see things the way he did.

  “The IPF is dangerous,” Jon Jr. said. “It’s the first step toward a world government. The Third World nations want to bleed the industrialized nations dry. They want to grab all our wealth for themselves. The first step is to disarm us, under the pretense of preventing nuclear war. Then, once we’re disarmed, they’re going to take over everything—using the IPF as their armed forces.”

  “That’s what they’ve told you,” Hazard said.

  “That’s what I know, Dad. It’s true. I know it is.”

  “And your answer is to take over the IPF and use it as your armed forces to control the rest of the world, is that it?”

  “Better us than them.”

  Hazard shook his head. “They’re using you, son. Cardillo and Buckbee and the rest of those maniacs; you’re in with a bunch of would-be Napoleons.”

  Jon Jr. smiled pityingly at his father. “I knew you’d say something like that.”

&nbs
p; Hazard put up a beefy hand. “I don’t want to argue with you, son. But I can’t go along with you.”

  “You’re going to force us to attack your station.”

  “I’ll fight back.”

  His son’s smile turned sardonic. “Like you did in Brussels?”

  Hazard felt it like a punch in his gut. He grunted with the pain of it. Wordlessly he reached out and clicked off the comm screen.

  Brussels.

  They had thought it was just another one of those endless Easter Sunday demonstrations. A peace march. The Greens, the Nuclear Winter freaks, the Neutralists, peaceniks of one stripe or another. Swarms of little old ladies in their Easter frocks, limping old war veterans, kids of all ages. Teenagers, lots of them. In blue jeans and denim jackets. Young women in shorts and tight T-shirts.

  The guards in front of NATO’s headquarters complex took no particular note of the older youths and women mixed in with the teens. They failed to detect the hard, calculating eyes and the snubnosed guns and grenades hidden under jackets and sweaters.

  Suddenly the peaceful parade dissolved into a mass of screaming wild people. The guards were cut down mercilessly and the cadre of terrorists fought their way into the main building of NATO headquarters. They forced dozens of peaceful marchers to go in with them, as shields and hostages.

  Captain J. W. Hazard, USN, was not on duty that Sunday, but he was in his office nevertheless, attending to some paperwork that he wanted out of the way before the start of business on Monday morning. Unarmed, he was swiftly captured by the terrorists, beaten bloody for the fun of it, and then locked in a toilet. When the terrorists realized that he was the highest-ranking officer in the building, Hazard was dragged out and commanded to open the security vault where the most sensitive NATO documents were stored.

  Hazard refused. The terrorists began shooting hostages. After the second murder Hazard opened the vault for them. Top-secret battle plans, maps showing locations of nuclear weapons, and hundreds of other documents were taken by the terrorists and never found, even after an American-led strike force retook the building in a bloody battle that killed all but four of the hostages.

  Hazard stood before the blank comm screen for a moment, his softbooted feet not quite touching the deck, his mind racing.

  They’ve even figured that angle, he said to himself. They know I caved in at Brussels and they expect me to cave in here. Some sonofabitch has grabbed my psych records and come to the conclusion that I’ll react the same way now as I did then. Some sonofabitch. And they got my son to stick the knife in me.

  The sound of the hatch clattering open stirred Hazard. Feeney floated through the hatch and grabbed an overhead handgrip.

  “The crew’s at battle stations, sir,” he said, slightly breathless. “Standing by for further orders.”

  It struck Hazard that only a few minutes had passed since he himself had entered the CIC.

  “Very good, Mr. Feeney,” he said. “With the bridge out, we’re going to have to control the station from here. Feeney, take the con. Miss Stromsen, how much time before we can make direct contact with Geneva?”

  “Forty minutes, sir,” she sang out, then corrected, “Actually, thirty-nine fifty.”

  Feeney was worming his softboots against the Velcro strip in front of the propulsion-and-control console.

  “Take her down, Mr. Feeney.”

  The Irishman’s eyes widened with surprise. “Down, sir?”

  Hazard made himself smile. “Down. To the altitude of the ABM satellites. Now.”

  “Yes, sir.” Feeney began carefully pecking out commands on the keyboard before him.

  “I’m not just reacting like an old submariner,” Hazard reassured his young officers. “I want to get us to a lower altitude so we won’t be such a good target for so many of their lasers. Shrink our horizon. We’re a sitting duck up here.”

  Yang grinned back at him. “I didn’t think you expected to outmaneuver a laser beam, sir.”

  “No, but we can take ourselves out of range of most of their satellites.”

  Most, Hazard knew, but not all.

  “Miss Stromsen, will you set up a simulation for me? I want to know how many unfriendly satellites can attack us at various altitudes, and what their positions would be compared to our own. I want a solution that tells me where we’ll be safest.”

  “Right away, sir,” Stromsen said. “What minimum altitude shall I plug in?”

  “Go right down to the deck,” Hazard said. “Low enough to boil the paint off.”

  “The station isn’t built for reentry into the atmosphere, sir!”

  “I know. But see how low we can get.”

  The old submariner’s instinct: run silent, run deep. So the bastards think I’ll fold up, just like I did at Brussels, Hazard fumed inwardly. Two big differences, Cardillo and friends. Two very big differences. In Brussels the hostages were civilians, not military men and women. And in Brussels I didn’t have any weapons to fight back with.

  He knew the micropuffs of thrust from the maneuvering rockets were hardly strong enough to be felt, yet Hazard’s stomach lurched and heaved suddenly.

  “We have retro burn,” Feeney said. “Altitude decreasing.”

  My damned stomach’s more sensitive than his instruments, Hazard grumbled to himself.

  “Incoming message from Graham, sir,” said Yang.

  “Ignore it.”

  “Sir,” Yang said, turning slightly toward him, “I’ve been thinking about the minimum altitude we can achieve. Although the station is not equipped for atmospheric reentry, we do carry the four emergency evacuation spacecraft and they do have heat shields.”

  “Are you suggesting we abandon the station?”

  “Oh, no, sir! But perhaps we could move the spacecraft to a position where they would be between us and the atmosphere. Let their heat shields protect us—sort of like riding a surfboard.”

  Feeney laughed. “Trust a California girl to come up with a solution like that!”

  “It might be a workable idea,” Hazard said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “We’re being illuminated by a laser beam,” Stromsen said tensely. “Low power—so far.”

  “They’re tracking us.”

  Hazard ordered, “Yang, take over the simulation problem. Stromsen, give me a wide radar sweep. I want to see if they’re moving any of their ABM satellites to counter our maneuver.”

  “I have been sweeping, sir. No satellite activity yet.”

  Hazard grunted. Yet. She knows that all they have to do is maneuver a few of their satellites to higher orbits and they’ll have us in their sights.

  To Yang he called, “Any response from the commsats?”

  “No, sir,” she replied immediately. “Either their laser receptors are not functioning or the satellites themselves are inoperative.”

  They couldn’t have knocked out the commsats altogether, Hazard told himself. How would they communicate with one another? Cardillo claims the Wood and two of the Soviet stations are on their side. And the Europeans. He put a finger to his lips unconsciously, trying to remember Cardillo’s exact words. The Europeans are going along with us. That’s what he said. Maybe they’re not actively involved in this. Maybe they’re playing a wait-and-see game.

  Either way, we’re alone. They’ve got four, maybe five, out of the nine battle stations. We can’t contact the Chinese or Indians. We don’t know which Russian satellite hasn’t joined in with them. It’ll be more than a half hour before we can contact Geneva, and even then what the hell can they do?

  Alone. Well, it won’t be for the first time. Submariners are accustomed to being on their own.

  “Sir,” Yang reported, “the Wood is still trying to reach us. Very urgent, they’re saying.”

  “Tell them I’m not available but you will record their message and personally give it to me.” Turning to the Norwegian lieutenant, “Miss Stromsen, I want all crew members in their pressure suits. And levels one and two of the
station are to be abandoned. No one above level three except the damage-control team. We’re going to take some hits and I want everyone protected as much as possible.”

  She nodded and glanced at the others. All three of them looked tense, but not afraid. The fear was there, of course, underneath. But they were in control of themselves. Their eyes were clear, their hands steady.

  “Should I have the air pumped out of levels one and two—after they’re cleared of personnel?”

  “No,” Hazard said. “Let them outgas when they’re hit. Might fool the bastards into thinking they’re doing more damage than they really are.”

  Feeney smiled weakly. “Sounds like the boxer who threatened to bleed all over his opponent.”

  Hazard glared at him. Stromsen took up the headset from her console and began issuing orders into the pin-sized microphone.

  “The computer simulation is finished, sir,” said Yang.

  “Put it on my screen here.”

  He studied the graphics for a moment, sensing Feeney peering over his shoulder. Their safest altitude was the lowest, where only six ABM satellites could “see” them. The fifteen laser-armed satellites under their own control would surround them like a cavalry escort.

  “There it is, Mr. Feeney. Plug that into your navigation program. That’s where we want to be.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The CIC shuddered. The screens dimmed for a moment, then came back to their full brightness.

  “We’ve been hit!” Stromsen called out.

  “Where? How bad?”

  “Just aft of the main power generator. Outer hull ruptured. Storage area eight—medical, dental, and food-supplement supplies.”

  “So they got the Band-Aids and vitamin pills,” Yang joked shakily.

  “But they’re going after the power generator,” said Hazard. “Any casualties?”

  “No, sir,” reported Stromsen. “No personnel stationed there during general quarters.”

  He grasped Feeney’s thin shoulder. “Turn us over, man. Get that generator away from their beams!”

  Feeney nodded hurriedly and flicked his stubby fingers across his keyboard. Hazard knew it was all in his imagination, but his stomach rolled sickeningly as the station rotated.