by Evan Currie
“I’ve got the targets handed out already, Sir,” Burke said, checking something. “Second contingent out of Pearl is putting to sea now, anything that slips by us has to run that gauntlet too.”
“Good. Make sure our contingent prioritizes objects due to impact US Mainland as much as we can,” Riggs said. “Anything that gets by both of us… well, the JDF and what we’ve got in the South China Sea will have to handle it.”
Burke nodded, agreeing.
Aside from a couple NATO host nations, only US Navy ships and Japanese Defense Force vessels loaded SM3 missiles. The weapons were relatively new, extremely expensive, and only nations that felt themselves under dire risk of ballistic missile attack felt much need for them.
Riggs never thought in his life that he’d be grateful to the North Koreans, but at least they gave the Japanese reason to pack heavy.
It might just save some lives.
“Captain…” Burke trailed off, eyes climbing up to the dark shadow of the mountains in the distance, just barely visible against a lightening sky. “One of them is coming down on the other side of the mountains, we’ve got nothing that can reach it.”
“I know. Ignore it,” Riggs said.
“Captain…”
“I said ignore it,” Riggs ordered, glaring. “You said it yourself, nothing we’ve got can touch those things before they cross the Mountains. Those things come down East of the Rockies, nothing we can do about it. Don’t waste computer cycles on them, we might need every cycle we’ve got just to keep up with what’s left. Ballistic targets move too fast to leave anything to chance, we won’t get multiple cracks at this.”
Burke nodded jerkily, “Yes sir.”
Riggs turned his focus back to the skies, letting out a deep breath as he looked up and spotted one star, bright and moving against the background of the others.
“Well, at least we don’t have long to wait.” He said into the red glow of the Bridge lights.
“Light em up!”
*****
Four Ticonderoga Class cruisers lit off their AEGIS RADAR in unison, pouring eighteen megawatts of power into the Eastern skies and painting the night with invisible light.
Four targets showed up immediately, tracking high over the mountains, just barely having entered the atmosphere. Another was down lower, burning brightly but on a trajectory to come down short of the Rockies.
“Where’s the last one,” Riggs asked. “NASA was tracking seven, counting the first object, right?”
“It was,” Burke confirmed, “We’re trying to cross reference with NASA on the fly, but our systems aren’t exactly cross talk compatible on this level. We can take a feed from them, but we can’t compare it to our own.”
“Just find me that missing target,” Riggs ordered, eyes on the tracking data coming in.
He was looking at four objects passing over the mountains and dropping altitude fast. They were not actively maneuvering, unlike the first object, and seemed to be on genuine ballistic course trajectories.
The good news was an unpowered object on a ballistic trajectory was easy to track and predict. It was basic physics, and he had plenty of people standing around him that could do those equations in their heads if needs be.
The bad news, well the bad news was that there was a big difference between knowing where something was going to be and actually hitting it in the fraction of a second that the speeds they were dealing with would allow.
“Jesus, they’re coming in hot…” The Ensign at the tracking station said softly.
Riggs didn’t say anything, but he noted the speeds himself and cringed.
“Can we even hit something moving a hundred thousand miles an hour?” He asked Commander Burke softly.
Burke slowly shook his head, “I have no idea, Sir. We don’t have anything rated that high… not even close.”
“I was afraid of that,” Riggs said. “They’re slowing in the atmosphere, though… I need options! How fast will they be moving at optimum engagement range, versus how fast they’ll be moving if we wait until the last possible second! Get on it!”
While his team started cranking intercept equations, Riggs examined the trajectories themselves and took a stylus from beside his post and crossed out one of the targets.
“Sir? What are you doing?” Burke asked.
“Saving our missiles for another target,” He said. “That one is coming down between here and Hawaii. Even if it’s a nuke, I don’t care. If we get lucky with the rest, the Ticos out of Pearl can splash that one for us.”
“At that speed, it may throw up a tsunami when it hits,” Burke warned him.
“Signal warnings then,” Riggs said. “Get people to high ground. I’m more concerned with this one right here…”
He pointed to the closest target, an object just crossing into their maximum range of engagement.
“That sucker is coming down way too close to San Fran. I want every spare missile we’ve got tracking to kill that thing as high up as we can. Maybe the debris will burn up before it hits the ground.”
“Numbers up, Captain.”
“Show me.” Riggs walked over to the Lieutenant who had called out.
She still had equations crunching on her computer but had scribbled out a bunch of numbers right on the station with a marker. He glanced at it, one eyebrow raised as he looked between the scribbles and her.
“Sorry, Sir,” Lieutenant Jane Mica flushed, “I work faster with a pen.”
He ignored the apology. “What’s your verdict?”
“Wait until they cross the mountains fully, and drop below seventy kilometers,” She answered. “Then hammer them, Sir.”
Riggs nodded, eyes lifting to look out at the three stars now visible in the ever - lightening sky to the East.
“Anyone have better?” He asked, looking around.
No one spoke up.
“Plug those numbers in,” Riggs ordered. “Let’s do our jobs.”
He nodded to the Lieutenant and walked back to the command station, snorted softly as he approached Commander Burke.
“Get the lady a pack of dry erase markers, will you?”
“I’ll make a note of it,” Burke said, not smiling. “Cleaning those are going to be a bitch.”
“Clean them?” Riggs asked. “If they’re on the money, I’m having that section of her station clear coated to preserve them. I just don’t want the entire bridge to look like a graffiti artist has been through.”
“Numbers inserted! All canisters now on automatic fire!”
Riggs looked up, “Well… it’s out of our hands now.”
Before he finished the sentence the first launch from the Mk41 flashed, destroying his night vision as the missiles stood on fire and brimstone, climbing into the black sky.
*****
Four Ticonderoga Class cruisers unloading every canister of SM3 missiles at their disposal lit up the coast from San Diego to San Francisco Harbor, putting sixty four missiles into the air aimed primarily at only two targets, made for one hell of a show for anyone lucky enough to see it.
The smoke that normally marked the passage of the SM3 missiles dissipated invisibly in the dark of night, their passing marked instead by a streak of light that went faster and faster as they accelerated on target.
The distant fireballs they were tracking toward grew in size and brightness with alarming speed, the closing rate between missiles and targets approaching a hundred and ten thousand miles per hour at one point.
The first missile reached its target in less than a minute of launch, overshooting by a few hundred feet, and continuing on into the darkness.
The second glanced off its target, breaking the missile into shards as the kinetic warhead deflected away with depressingly little effect.
By the time the third missile arrived on target, the results had been dialed in and it hammered dead on. The contact caused the LEAP kinetic kill warhead to vaporize in a brilliant explosion of energy just as the remaining six
ty - one missiles slammed in.
The night sky erupted in fire and thunder, explosive shockwaves shattering glass all up and down the coast of California as shocked residents were rudely awakened from their sleep. Some unfortunate souls who were, for varying reasons, already awake had the misfortune of seeing lights flash in the sky and walking over to their windows just in time for the shockwaves to blow shards of shattered glass in their faces.
ER rooms across the state would see a very busy morning. Some… wouldn’t be so lucky.
For the crews of the Ticonderoga cruisers who had initiated the engagement, however, the explosive fireworks display was both a sign of a job done well… and a moment of tension as they waited for the interference of the energy release to clear so that their AEGIS RADAR could determine if they’d done their jobs.
As it turned out, they didn’t even have to wait that long.
*****
“Captain! I’ve got one on visual, still on target for a hit near San Francisco!”
Riggs swore, the Bunker Hill was off the coast of Santa Barbara, near the Channel Islands, which was why she was coordinating the strike force. San Francisco was far enough away that they weren’t in any direct threat, but he rushed outside just the same.
He could see the fireball in the distance as it lanced down below the hills that were between him and the city. For a moment there was silence, and then a flash of light lit up the horizon.
“Oh… hell.”
“Sir,” Burke said, stepping out onto the observer deck, “We just lost the Lake Champlain.”
“Please,” Riggs said as he lowered his eyes from the light on the horizon and stared down into the black sea, “Please, tell me she wasn’t in the bay.”
“Sorry Sir.”
“Fuck.”
*****
Chapter 5
White House Situation Room
The President stared at the news running on a side screen, unable to take his eyes off the fires and destruction running with the twisted remnants of the Golden Gate in the background.
“How… How many?” He croaked out through a suddenly parched mouth.
“No way to know, Mr. President,” His press secretary said, shaking her head. “It’ll be days before… before…”
She closed her eyes. “Too many, Sir. Too damn many.”
Silence reigned for a moment before the Secretary of the Navy spoke up. “The Bunker Hill reported direct hits on the object. We hit it, it barely flinched.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” Parsons said, “The first one actively evaded… this didn’t even… I…”
He fell silent, at a loss for words as his eyes too were drawn to the broadcast news coming over the side screen.
“Obviously, we’re not dealing with identical objects,” Mitchell from NASA spoke over the conference line. “The first one had countermeasures, and used them, which implies that its cargo is more fragile. If it’s manned, we need to find out by who. That might answer a lot of questions, Mr. President.”
Strand pulled himself from the crisis on the screen and forced a nod as he visibly wrenched his mind back to the task at hand.
“Do we have a location on the object in Florida?”
“Yes sir,” The Air Force Chief of Staff nodded. “It just went down in the Glades. We have choppers and response teams on the move.”
“Good,” Strand said through clenched teeth, “I want to know who did this. If it isn’t some bizarre act of God, and when we find out who… I want them dead.”
An uncomfortable silence descended for a moment, but the Air Force General nodded.
“I believe we’re on the same page, Mr. President.”
Before he could say anything more, Mitchell’s voice excitedly broke into the conversation again.
“We just located the missing object! It pulled a high Gee maneuver that we couldn’t follow, took us this long to spot it again.”
“Where is it?” The President demanded.
“It’s coming down over Florida, Sir… and accelerating.”
*****
Everglades
Sandra Locke grunted as she pulled in the line on an illegal poacher’s pot, pausing only to wipe her brow briefly before heaving one last time to pull the offending mesh of wire and tube steel into her airboat.
With that done, the muscular redhead stood up in the flat bottom boat and took her wide brimmed hat off briefly to run her fingers through her hair and finish pushing the perspiration back as far as she could before she replaced the hat and reached for a pair on sunglasses she’d set on the pilot’s seat.
The sun had only been up a couple hours or so and it was already turning into a scorcher of a day, so she decided to get her morning wrapped up. With a little work and a touch of luck, Sandra figured she could be in the shade and holding a cold drink before the noon sun beat down.
As long as I don’t run across anymore of these damn poacher’s pots, she scowled in annoyance at the offending piece of trash resting in her boat.
Sandra was working on her doctorate at the University of Miami, but it seemed she spent more time hauling up illegal traps, pots, and other poaching paraphernalia than she did pulling the data from the wide sensor array she’d planted around the Glades. It was bad enough that the increasing salinity levels of the low - lying areas due to rising sea levels were driving the extinction of several endangered native species, but the poachers added another level of insult to injury in her mind.
Oh well, just a few more samples to grab and that’ll be a day.
She climbed up into the seat of the airboat, only to start and twist around violently as a booming sound seemed to explode all around her.
“What?” She blurted, until she finally looked up.
A trail of smoke or vapor, like something left behind from the passage of a rocket… only going the wrong direction, traced a line across the sky to a gleaming object that was spinning and glittering in the early morning sun.
“Holy…”
Sandra didn’t have a clue what she was watching, but as she watched the object seemed to break up for a moment, only not exactly. Something blew out the back of the object but jerked to a stop some distance behind and started spinning wildly.
The spinning part seemed to yank hard on the rest, turning the plummeting trajectory into a swinging arc below the spinning part. Sandra rather thought it looked like a helicopter, except that it was still falling far too fast for anything that intended to land in one piece.
As she watched it went down behind a cluster of trees a few kilometers North of her, and a spout of water exploded hundreds of feet into the sky just after she lost sight of it.
She didn’t really think as she kicked over the engine of the airboat and grabbed the throttle in one hand as she held on with the other and twisted. The roar of the big engine and bigger fans eclipsed everything else as she was pushed back in her seat and turned the nose North West, aiming to swing around the copse of trees and get eyes on whatever the hell it was that just landed in her Glades.
*****
Marine Helo Bravo Nine Five, out of Key West flew low in over the Mangrove trees as they headed North West toward the crash site. Captain Kevin Stark had the stick and was wondering if this was some sort of drill, right up to the point where the screaming ball of fire dropped out of the sky and left a line a smoke all the way back to space from what he could tell.
The big CH-53E Super Stallion handled smoothly, if a bit heavy on the stick, leaving him with enough attention to watch as the glittering, gleaming object suddenly deployed some sort of drag and even more rapidly arrested its motion.
“What do you make of that, Beach?” He asked his co-pilot, who was looking through powerful glasses.
Brian ‘Beach’ Sanderson was quiet for a moment before he replied, “Looks like some sort of advanced airbrake, Iron Man. Spinning like rotors, unpowered unless there’s something I’m missing. Cutting speed by a lot, but it’s still going to land hard.”
As they watched the object descended out of their sight, and a moment later a plume of water visible even at their distance exploded into the sky.
“Whoa. I don’t ever want to hit that hard,” Beach said beside him.
Stark winced but nodded in wholehearted agreement. He didn’t know what that airbrake had been intended to accomplish, exactly, but it certainly didn’t make for a soft touchdown.
“At least there isn’t a mushroom cloud,” He said aloud. “That would suck.”
As Beach laughed in agreement, Stark twisted and looked back to where the squad of Marines were waiting on news and orders.
“We’re five to seven minutes out,” He told them. “Whatever the hell that was has slammed down in the glades, so we’re far enough from any major populations. Game faces, Marines.”
“Ooh Rah, Iron Man!” The whole bunch responded.
Stark closed his eyes briefly as he settled back in the seat, sighing but otherwise only replied, “Ooh Rah, Marines.”
*****
The roar of the airboat fan wound down as Sandra turned the rudder and brought it to a rocking stop a few dozen meters from the smoke burnt object that had buried itself halfway down in the shallow water and deep mud of the Glades.
Whatever it was, it didn’t look Military.
The object was some sort of gleaming white material that had been smoke and carbon scored, like it had been through a furnace. The water was steaming around it in fact, leaving a light rolling mist flowing out around blowing in the morning breeze.
She edged her boat closer, looking for markings so she could tell someone just what the hell she’d found. Sandra glanced toward her radio, but other than to report what she was sure hundreds, if not thousands, of others had already called in she just didn’t have anything to say.
There were markings there, she noticed. They were all but unreadable under all the carbon scoring, but she could make out a symbol that meant nothing to her. It looked like several stars, maybe against a black background, but honestly it was hard to tell.
