by Evan Currie
White House Situation Room, DC
“You all heard the man,” Strand said, looking around at the Joint Chiefs. “Anyone want to voice objections to informing China of what we know?”
Strand was mildly surprised that no one spoke up, while the US was hardly at war with China… in fact, the two nations were arguably closer than ever due to increased trade reliance, low level tensions were the norm between them.
Particularly the two Navies, which occasionally had minor stand offs over Taiwan.
“Alright,” He glanced to his secretary, “See who you can get on the line in Beijing.”
“Sir, shouldn’t we contact the local embassy?” The young man asked, rather bravely considering he was by far the most junior and youngest person in the room.
“No,” Strand shook his head, “Go as high up the chain you can, right to Beijing.”
“Yes sir.”
While he was off doing that, Strand looked back at the military men in the room.
“What about the Middle East?”
The USSOCOM Commander, Army Lt General Voit, let out an aggravated breath.
“Mr. President, that whole region is a mess and a half. Even if we bothered to inform them, there’s no one in the area that can respond to something like this… excepting, maybe, the Israelis I suppose,” Voit said grimly. “Inform them, inform the rest if you want, but frankly it’ll be better to handle it ourselves, we have a Carrier group in the Med, and Air Force units stationed within striking distance, I believe?”
Voit and the President turned to the Admiral and Air Force General standing across the table, both of whom nodded.
“Alright, scramble everything,” Strand said, “I’m willing to bet that the various terror groups in the region will turn this into a sign from Allah that more attacks are in order, so we better put everyone on alert.”
Admiral Parsons, the US Navy Chief, hesitantly lifted a hand and cleared his throat.
“Not to put too fine a point on things, Mr. President,” He said, frowning in thought, “But what are our orders? Is this a ballistic attack? Do we monitor, or attempt intercept?”
Strand grimaced, uncertain for a brief second. Whatever the objects were, they were on a powered approach. That opened the possibility that they were manned, though he couldn’t imagine how anyone could have managed to launch a manned mission of that size without the United States knowing about it.
Unfortunately, he just didn’t have the time to make a considered decision on the subject. They had only minutes before the objects would strike the ground, and if they were nuclear warheads… well, Strand couldn’t take that chance.
“Shoot them down,” He said finally. “Shoot them all down.”
*****
Chapter 3
USS Philippine Sea, Mayport Florida
The claxon wailed as men flooded the decks of the Philippine Sea, readying the warship for battle, though she had not yet even loosed her moorings.
The Sea was ostensibly undergoing a refit when the orders came through, though the entire process was behind schedule by over a week and the refit teams hadn’t even come on board yet. Her Captain had spent days cursing their names right down to the lowest, yet now as he swung over a knee knocker and bolted for the Bridge he found himself thanking whatever fate it was that had kept them from dismantling key parts of his ship.
“Captain on deck!”
He ignored the call, moving to the signals station first, and coming to a stop behind the Lieutenant manning the radio.
“Give me confirmation,” Captain Ted Barrowitz said in clipped tones, not interested in anything else.
“Confirmed.” Lieutenant Smythe told him, eyes a little wild, as she deliberately repeated herself. “Confirmed, Captain. Inbound ballistic threats, coming our way.”
“Shit,” Barrowitz swore, turning away from the Lieutenant and crossing to the weapons station. “Ensign, good news if you please.”
“Both mark forty ones are hot and green, Captain. We’re prioritizing RIM-161Cs now, and have a live coordinate feed from NASA, if you can believe it.”
Barrowitz looked over his shoulder, “Status on the SPY.”
“Winding up, Captain. We’ll be live and in charge in thirty-five seconds,” Lieutenant Commander Stephanie Yu answered without looking in his direction.
He turned back to Ensign Greenfield, “How soon can we splash the target?”
“We have hot targeting data already, Sir, and our designated target is descending past twenty kilometers, losing speed fast. We can launch on your orders, Captain.”
The Captain looked up and out over the deck of his ship, and then beyond to the port and city that surrounded them.
“Going to be one hell of a show,” He said, patting the Ensign on the shoulder. “Make em Hot, Ensign, and then send them on their way.”
“Aye skipper.”
“SPY up!” The Lt Commander called out.
“Paint it,” Barrowitz ordered without hesitation, straightening and turning to the RADAR station.
*****
The Aegis AN/SPY 1 RADAR system was a six megawatt phased array radar, capable of painting and tracking as many as eight hundred simultaneous targets, so when its entire focus was narrowed down to one… the action was noticeable, by anyone’s standard.
*****
A breaker junction blew, showering the interior of the pod with sparks and eliciting a long string of vile oaths that Ben had learned through his career in the Marines. He didn’t know what had caused it, but the breaker had blown to save his instrumentation from an overload, and that was both a good thing and a major problem.
The good thing was that he, of course, still had his screens intact. The bad thing was that the breaker in question had led directly to his pod’s primary scanner array, which meant that he was now half blind.
What the hell was that? Ben thought, flipping the scanners over to the secondary scanners, trying to determine what had just happened.
Luckily the secondary systems were pretty low fidelity which, while that might have been entirely due to the lack of space in the pod for proper backup systems, saved him from blowing a second breaker when the sheer energy levels registered.
First worlds, Ben swore mentally, staring at the readings for a few seconds.
Something down there was pouring several megawatts of pure power right up his… unmentionables. It was no wonder that the Pod’s primary array had blown a breaker.
Hell, without the basic shielding needed to deal with cosmic radiation and the like, that level of power would have fried most of his control and computational systems. Of course, the pod was shielded against that level of power and several magnitudes more. The only part of it that was vulnerable was the primary scanner array, which had to be exposed for rather obvious reasons.
After all, shutting your eyes certainly did protect you against a lot… but it made seeing what the hell was going on around you a fair sight more difficult too.
All holy hell, he blinked in shock as he examined the scanner readings, That’s a lot of power for a pre-space scanner.
Hell, it was a lot of power for a space faring scanner, in reality. Not in total units, but in how much they were dedicating just to tracking his sorry ass. In fact, it was bordering on being classified as an energy weapon unless he missed his guess. Just needed a tighter focus and it would have fried his computer, and maybe him, despite the pod’s shielding.
Ben briefly wished that he’d spent a little more time studying this particular era of pre-contact and pre-space Earth. Whatever was targeting him was serious about it, that much was about the only certain thing he could say.
So it was that when the alarms went off announcing a weapons launch, Ben wasn’t surprised in the slightest.
*****
USS Philippine Sea
The Mark 41 Vertical Launch System on the Ticonderoga class Cruisers, such as the Philippine Sea, was capable of delivering anything from cruise missiles to anti-satellite munitions
from preloaded canisters and packed the power to take out targets on land and sea, in the air, and even right up to the edge of space.
It was a rare sight for civilians to actually see a Ticonderoga Class cruiser flush one of its canisters, firing off eight rockets in the span of just seconds and generally making every eyeball for a mile around turn to watch as the missiles stood on columns of smoke and noise and reached for the sky.
Captain Barrowitz tried hard to not think about how many regulations he’d just shattered, firing off SM3s while still moored in the harbor, and focused instead on the birds in flight.
Everything read out as straight, hot, and normal as the SM3 missiles stabilized in flight and began tracking. They were still running off the patch from NASA, but the Philippine Sea’s AEGIS RADAR was already picking up the slack and providing faster data than the slightly delayed feed from Houston.
“Target is still decelerating, now on course for… us, Sir.” Greenfield blurted.
Barrowitz looked over, sharply, “What do you mean us, Ensign?”
Greenfield shrugged a little helplessly, “Right now… coastal Florida, Sir. Leaning south, but we’re inside the drop zone for sure, Sir.”
“Tighten up that drop zone, Ensign,” Barrowitz ordered, “I want to know where they’re coming down to the square foot.”
“Working on it, Captain.”
“You think it will matter, Skipper?” Yu asked quietly as she stepped up to his side.
“I don’t know, but that’s the problem,” He confessed, “There’s too damn much about this that I don’t know. That is not a ballistic warhead, it’s tracking. Active maneuvering. I’ve never seen anything like this, you?”
The Lieutenant Commander shook her head. “Not outside of DARPA, sir. And certainly not in active use by any military on the planet, we would know.”
He nodded tensely, agreeing with her.
Ballistic missiles generally didn’t maneuver much once they went terminal after re-entry. The reasons for that were manifold, but most boiled down to two facts. First, fuel was expensive to lift, so the less of it you needed the better… and, second, an orbital ballistic target was, or had been, next to impossible to intercept due to the sheer speed it moved at.
That, of course, had changed officially in 2013 when the first SM3 test had successfully blown an intermediate range ballistic target out of the air. That was a game changer capability, but he was well aware that when you change the game other players will adapt.
Still, adapting takes time… and we should know if anyone is playing the new game at this level. What the hell is going on here?
*****
“Well, friendly bunch, aren’t they?” Ben grumbled as his reduced scanners picked out eight missiles tracking onto his trajectory.
He was starting to think that decelerating so early on was a bad idea. For the life of him, Ben couldn’t remember if Earth had the capacity to intercept orbital ballistic targets, but he was pretty certain they could pick off a slower object with few problems.
“Great,” He mumbled, checking and cinching his restraints again as he watched the altitude fall and the missiles climb. “I hate it when it gets rough… wish I’d been able to find a pilot before I blew the pod.”
He flicked a secure switch up to activate countermeasures, and then forced himself to wait as he watched the missiles close on him. The computer was getting more insistent in its warnings, alarms growing louder and more frequent as the cluster of missiles continued to accelerate.
By the time the missiles broke hypersonic, Ben and his pod were dropping under fifteen kilometers and beginning to get buffeted by the thickening atmosphere. Pods didn’t have inertial sumps, which left him getting bruised and slammed against both the hard seat and the straps that held him in it.
The computer was tracking the incoming missiles, but Ben ignored it. Pod computers were notorious for being just a few points off from reality, and a few points was the difference between life and fiery shards raining down across Florida.
Instead he did the math in his head as the range closed, thumb resting against the countermeasure’s firing stud. If he had to choose between taking his life in his own hands, or trusting the computer of an escape pod, there was no question which he would go with.
With less than a kilometer between him and the missiles, a distance measured in seconds or less at the converging speeds, Ben snapped his thumb down and held on as the Pod bucked like a living thing around him.
*****
USS Philippine Sea
“Holy shit!”
Barrowitz didn’t bother telling the anonymous voice to watch his language, possibly because he wasn’t certain it wasn’t his voice that had spoken up.
“Active countermeasures in the air, Captain!” Ensign Greenfield announced. “Squealers are jamming RADAR like nothing I’ve ever seen!”
The Captain could see that all screens were showing nothing but snow. Literally uncountable ghost targets had filled the displays until there was no room for anything else.
“I’ve got Angel Wings in the sky, Skipper!” Yu announced, pointing from the side door where she was looking up through powerful glasses. “Negative contact, I think we missed!”
Angel Wings were the result of hot burning thermal decoys being thrown out and behind the object as it descended, leaving smoke trails that expanded to look like nothing more than the white whispy wings of a guardian angel. They wouldn’t do much against the Philippine Sea’s RADAR guided missiles, but with the jammers scrambling RADAR guidance they would prevent secondary lock with passive LWIR thermal tracking.
“Lieutenant, you still have that line to NASA open?” Barrowitz asked, snapping around.
“Sir, yes sir,” Smythe answered.
“On the horn,” He ordered, grabbing the wired handset from beside him.
“You got it.”
“This is Captain Barrowitz, USS Philippine Sea,” He said tersely.
“Captain, Gary Mitchel, NASA,” The voice came back on the other side.
“How sure are you this isn’t one of yours, or some other space agency?” Barrowitz demanded.
“Pretty damn certain, Captain. Why?”
“Because the damn thing just engaged countermeasures! No one puts squealers, chaff, and flares on ballistic missiles, Mr. Mitchel!”
“Hang on, what?” Mitchell sounded confused, “We don’t have video of object one anymore, the U2 couldn’t keep up. It’s using countermeasures?”
“Yes, for the last time, yes!” Barrowitz grumbled. “That thing is either manned, or running a pretty sophisticated computer setup too, because it timed the execution down to the last second. We had eight birds tracking clean, and every one of them missed. Our AEGIS RADAR is scrambled to hell by squealers. Now, I don’t know how long this thing can keep up the jammers, but it doesn’t need much longer to be under our engagement ceiling.”
“Get us what information you can, Captain.” Mitchell said. “I’m conferencing with POTUS as we speak, he’s listening in.”
Ah shit, Barrowitz clenched his eyes shut for a second, trying to think of whether he’d just said anything he’d rather not have in front of the Commander in Chief before speaking through clenched teeth, “I would have preferred to be informed about that at the start of the conversation, Mr. Mitchell. Mr. President, I apologize for my language if I got out of line.”
“Captain,” The familiar voice of the President came through after a brief delay, “I’ve heard worse in official briefings. What I need to know right now is simple; can you continue to engage the target?”
Barrowitz glanced over at the screens, then shook his head, “No Sir. We are down to visual tracking only, and the target is outside our engagement range for that. If it gets close enough for Sea Wiz we could try, but it looks like it’s tracking south of us according to our last trajectory analysis. I think it’s going down in the keys, Sir.”
“Alright. You’ll be getting orders down the chain momentaril
y, Captain.” The President informed him, “but I can tell you that you’re going to put to sea in short order. Start leaning in that direction, if you will.”
“Yes sir, we’ll be under way the instant the orders come through,” Barrowitz said.
“Good, now if you’ll excuse us, Captain… there’s a lot more work to be done.”
*****
Chapter 4
White House Situation Room
Strand looked slumped a little in his chair. “Tell me we have units scrambling over Florida.”
“AFB Canaveral has a squadron of F-35s in the air already, sir,” Air Force General Michael Gant nodded.
“And we have squadrons scrambling from Pensacola and Key West,” Admiral Parsons added. “We have the state covered, Sir.”
“Tell me we have it covered when we’re not tracking a half dozen orbital entries into our airspace across the nation,” Strand growled, “Then I might believe you.”
The President wiped his forehead, taking a couple breaths. “Ok, we’ve got the one over Florida covered for now. At least it’s not looking to make a crater when it touches down.”
“Should we change orders for the rest?” Parson asked, thinking about the countermeasures that had allowed the first to evade missiles from the Philippine Sea.
“Hell no,” Strand snapped, “As long as they’re on ballistic paths toward anything we’ve got the slightest right to protect, tell everything we’ve got to lock and load. No firing a burst and waiting to see if we hit it. Just keep firing until they’re destroyed or we’re out of ammo… and God help you if it’s the second one.”
*****
USS Bunker Hill, Off the Coast of California
“This is Bunker Hill, Bunker Hill Actual speaking,” Captain Riggs spoke into the handset beside his station. “We’re up and targeting. Link in as you can.”
“Mobile Bay, linked.”
“This is Lake Champlain, we’re in.”
“This is Cape St George, we’re linked.”
Riggs nodded to his second, Commander Burke. “Alright, that’s the lot. Every Tico on the west coast is linked into this. Make sure the targets are evenly spread out, everyone has a primary and a secondary just in case we get lucky.”
