America One - The Launch

by T I WADE

  “Just keep firing, Mr. Noble, Mr. Jones. You are through the worst part.” Ryan was calmly encouraging his men although his hands, and knuckles were totally white as he gripped the arms of his captain’s chair.

  “You’re right!” Jonesy exclaimed. “They are decreasing in numbers. Wow! Here comes a big one. Giving it a full seven second burst…… Gee, that was close. A rock the size of SB III whizzed past less than a hundred feet away. I have no more power for a few seconds. Oh Crap! Here comes another…..Come on laser, power up…. OK, I’ve got a two-second burst…I hope that it’s enough; it’s coming straight for us…. Got it; it’s veering off slightly…Wow!... It passed by our port side at less than fifty feet…these rocks are really moving, and we are doing half their speed. I can see them for about two seconds before they whizz past. Here comes a smaller one…got it……..OK……Where have they all gone?”

  A thousand miles closer to the blast, one of the last rocks, a big one the size of a small car hit the new Chinese space station dead on at 25,000 miles an hour and the brand new space platform splintered into a million pieces adding astronauts, space suits, supplies, and parts of the station to the debris flying in all directions.

  On Earth the meteor shower still lit up the sky. The lower space orbital area looked a mess, with thousands of shards of debris flying in all directions, most of them burning up in Earth’s atmosphere.

  The ISS, in a reasonably safe position behind earth had one close shave as a small rock the size of a fist took out one of their solar wings; it snapped it clean off and it just spun off into space disappearing a few seconds later.

  The ISS crew could do nothing. The Earth-Exit freighter was less than three miles away when a huge fireball erupted from it, and the valuable freighter and all the supplies blew into the vacuum of space in billions of pieces and droplets of water and gas, disappearing quickly.

  The mid layer, an area over a hundred times bigger than lower space orbit, fared no better. Satellite after satellite disintegrated from direct hits from rocks; no country’s space hardware was spared. Within minutes nearly 50 percent of all the military satellites had already disintegrated, with more to die over the next several weeks.

  Down on earth several military operations screens went blank, including the entire drone system operating out of Creech Air Force Base, the new early warning system above the U.S., and limited GPS systems with feeds to many airborne craft below them.

  Hundreds of personnel were scrambling to keep the vital GPS system alive; they needed three satellites per area to keep going.

  The upper area fared better. Several television, Internet and cell phone relay satellites disappeared. Two of the three major television channels and one of the larger dish companies lost their feeds to billions of people and televisions automatically searched for new channels. Many irate viewers watched as their soap operas disappeared.

  The communications satellite behind which America One and Ivan had been hiding disintegrated as it took a direct hit from a rock VIN turned away from the ship a couple of minutes later.

  “Jonesy, I need you up here! Can you help?” shouted VIN. I have them all over the place…Here come three in a row……….Got them…. Crap……..Five heading my way…Got one…two…three….four…darn! The fifth took out another piece of cylinder. We are running out of cylinders up here…Another one… this one is big….full seven second blast… diverted it away from the middle of the craft but it took out two cylinders on my starboard side and it seems to have satellite pieces around it. I’m sure I saw a piece of gold metal fly past. OK, it seems to be dying down…….I have suddenly nothing to shoot at. Damage reports from all areas of America One. I think I’ve hit a lull. Over 70 “enemy” destroyed and I saw four cylinders get beaten up so far. Ground control, all gauges and computers reading normal atmospheric conditions inside the cubes. Ivan looks OK; so do the three spacecraft. Suggest that they begin to slow us down. I’m not ready to visit the sun just yet, and we are heading straight for it at 9,700 knots.”

  “Affirmative, the asteroid blasts are past. Mr. Noble, your next worry is debris from below. Continue to arm your laser; your crew can bring you reports. Spacecraft around America One, no more hydrogen thrusts until further notice. You must be short of fuel. Out.”

  Ryan then turned to the solemn looking group all facing him. “Igor, we still have those ten extra aluminum cylinders down here as reserves. We will have to get four of them up there, plus an inner cargo which will need to be liquid hydrogen fuel cylinders,” said Ryan. “When do you think we can get SB III down, and send SB II back up there?”

  “I believe the longer we wait the better,” replied Igor with Bill Withers nodding his agreement. “I would say that Mr. Jones must stay in an upper orbit until pieces of debris reach him from below.

  “Gee! Look at that meteor! Or whatever it is to the south of us!” observed one man. They all rushed to the window just in time to see a large fireball head west over Las Vegas and fizzle out in the direction of Los Angeles.

  “That was going the opposite way to the blast,” stated Ryan.

  “Incoming junk, could be part of the Chinese space station, it disappeared from view a few minutes ago,” Bill stated.

  For another minute many of the team went outside, it was about 30 minutes before dusk and the sky was alive with hundreds of lights in the atmosphere above, different pieces of objects burned up as they descended.

  “I guess that the eyes of the military have been really hurt today,” suggested Bill looking up.’

  “And the communication channels,” stated Igor. Another channel went off the air just as we ran out of Hangar One.”

  “I agree the Chinese space station took a hit,” commented another. “It seemed to just disappear off the screen several minutes ago.”

  “Yes, I saw that,” added Igor. “The ISS seems to still be up there though. They must have missed a lot of the blast being in the right place at the right time.”

  “I’m sure the Chinese aren’t going to be too happy with the U.S. military right now,” Bill Withers added.

  “The guy who ordered up those last pair of nukes, hitting the asteroids so low, is the direct cause of all this.”

  “Imagine Europe, Russia, and all the other countries with destroyed satellite communications,” added Ryan looking up and seeing several separate pieces of fire coming into the atmosphere and burning up one after the other. “I bet that was something, like a low orbit satellite’s pieces all coming in together.”

  “If it goes on like this, one guy making the wrong command has virtually wiped every piece of space machinery up there in LSO off the radar screens.” As he said that far off to the eastern horizon, a large fireball entered the atmosphere and looked exactly like the destruction of the NASA space shuttle a decade earlier, as pieces flew off the fireball and disintegrated.

  “I wonder what happened to the rocks that hit the Pacific,” Ryan asked. And they all went back inside to see the footage being broadcast from a helicopter showing several hundred yards of San Diego beach front destroyed and several limp bodies scattered along the beach where the bike/skating path had once been.

  The radio chat from craft in space was quiet; both Jonesy and VIN reported that all was quiet. VIN’s team in the spacecraft was told to begin slowing their hunk of metal still heading towards the sun, and to begin working the craft to curve around and return to its original position above the communications satellite they wouldn’t find.

  For the next three hours the team in Hangar One watched as night settled onto the West Coast. Nothing could be seen except the lights of thousands of emergency vehicle along the coast line helping people get to safety as far north as the helicopter’s camera could film.

  Only one channel, CBS, still worked and by nine that night the first reports of devastation began to be aired. Tallies of deaths in San Diego mounted to over the 500 mark, Los Angeles already reported over 100, and other small towns, like Dana Point, had over 1
50 deaths and their entire marinas had been destroyed with hundreds of large boats left everywhere, even on the road going through town. Hundreds more people were missing, and search crews with thousands of flashlights were combing beaches and piles of rubble as far as north as San Francisco.

  Apart from several houseboats in Seattle knocked away from their moorings, San Francisco was the last place to be hit, suffering slight damage to its low areas. Several small buildings had been destroyed with no loss of life.

  Hawaii had seen a one foot wave, but it had caused minimal damage with little beach erosion.

  The cameras in several areas of Southern California had reporters giving non-stop commentary on the destruction in their areas. Ryan picked up his cell phone to find it dead. He then picked up his land line; it still worked. He phoned the former president.

  “Yes, Ryan” stated his friend once the line was connected. It had taken a whole minute before the phone on the other end began to ring. “Thanks to those early warnings we got out, I believe thousands of people were saved from the tsunami. Did you see the roads before the first wave hit?”

  “No I was too busy getting my space crews organized. We didn’t lose any craft, although we sustained some damage; but nothing that can’t be fixed.”

  “Well, all the roads heading away from the coast were packed solid with vehicles before the president gave out his warning. Without your information, there could have been a massive loss of life. It looks like the southern disaster areas are as bad as New Jersey and Staten Island were after Hurricane Sandy two years ago.”

  “Yes, it was a lucky call and thank you for getting the word out,” Ryan replied.

  “Don’t thank me, Ryan, thank the head of the FBI on the West Coast, Joe Everson. He is a good friend of mine and one call from me had him alerting every office of every emergency system along the entire coast. With their earthquake readiness on that side of the country, many departments are well prepared for disseminating rapid information to evacuate. There could have been hundreds of thousands of deaths in southern California, instead of the 700 now estimated by CBS. Ryan, what has happened in space?”

  For half an hour Ryan told his friend all he knew. First, that the new Chinese space station had disappeared off screen, the ISS still had a light beeping, and Ryan’s team were trying to talk to them. His guys were OK, but he guessed that space was again pretty empty of man-made objects.

  Ryan suggested that somehow his company would be blamed for this fiasco. He told his friend so, and he suggested that his FBI friend might send a few troops to make sure his base was safe from other government organizations. It was the least his country could do.

  Both men were extremely happy not to be in Washington right now. Unknown to them the president was already covering his tracks and the tracks of all the president’s men. Dozens of NASA department heads and high ranking officers would bear the brunt of the angry Executive branch, who blamed everybody but itself.

  Chapter 21

  Peace in Nevada

  For the next seventy-two hours nothing changed in space. Maggie had to use the thrusters a dozen times to bypass, or get out of the way of much slower traveling pieces of junk heading towards their orbit. Jonesy vaporized three small pieces of metal and several pieces of what looked like parts of the asteroids moving in all directions. He managed to get into radio communications with the team aboard the ISS.

  He learned and relayed the messages that they were OK, and had enough provisions and supplies for at least a month; part of their solar power was down but the space station was safe. Their incoming supply freighter had blown up a few miles from them, and a spacewalk had revealed that 50 percent of one of their main solar units had disappeared.

  Jonesy tried to get in touch with the Chinese space station to no avail.

  VIN hadn’t left the laser for less than ten of the seventy-two hours, often sleeping in the Bridge while Fritz took his place. Ryan allowed no one to spacewalk for the first seventy-two hours and America One was currently 1,000 miles from her original position, where she would be repositioned until Jonesy surveyed the lower orbits. SB III was still 600 miles above Earth, and she would need to return there pretty soon. The two crew aboard only had stores for another week at the most, plus their hydrogen fuel supply was low and the shuttle was using much of her remaining fuel to dodge slow moving bullets.

  Down on Earth it was a different matter. Half of the military’s communications were down, and every several hours, it got weaker as another satellite was hit, or knocked out of its orbit. At the same time the world’s Internet and cell phone connections got slower and slower. The Pentagon panicked, putting the whole country on high alert, having every available soldier in the country guarding something important, as if they were about to be invaded.

  Most of the West Coast cities had evening curfews, the few remaining channels broadcasting the latest news. Police, National Guard and army units searched the destroyed area around the coast for bodies.

  Three days after the destruction, the death toll rose to over a thousand; few could use communication devices, except for land lines, and the president spoke to the media for the first time on the less than a dozen remaining television channels that were still operating across the entire United States.

  For twenty minutes the country watched as the president, while sadly recounting the deaths, promoted himself as having saved many lives by warning the public to evacuate. Then came the finger pointing. He identified several people, unknown to the public, who would be called to Capitol Hill to testify about their failure to provide accurate information to Washington regarding the catastrophic outcome of the meteors that crashed into Earth. The CIA was trying to determine why the FBI had been warned before the rest of the country. The Administrator of NASA had been cleared of any wrong doing, but most of his management were about to be called to hearings to state their cases. And, the NSA was elected to be the head monitor of West Coast security since the CIA and FBI were at loggerheads.

  The president continuously commended Washington and his own quick reactions and lastly suggested that internal U.S. companies were suspected of having had a hand in the catastrophe; a federal investigation would be led by Congressman Dickens to look at possible asteroid intervention by U.S. companies. He did not take any questions and left the room looking mean and threatening.

  What he didn’t tell the people was that China was already accusing the U.S. of destroying its new space station and entire satellite communications system, which they considered an act of war.

  Now that their security satellites were virtually useless the Russians were wary, as were most of Europe, Australia, and several dozen other countries whose communications systems were disabled. The world was blaming the United States and retaliating with threats of armed conflict around the world; they did not fail to mention that nuclear missiles were active and ready.

  With Israel’s security satellites and GPS compromised, Iran was joining forces with the Syrians, Palestinians and other Arab countries to finally rid the middle east of the thorn in its foot; hundreds of tanks were rumbling into Iraq.

  Pakistan was sending thousands of troops towards its border with India, in case of an attack and India was doing the same. North Korea sent several missiles into outlying areas of South Korea and all the nuclear missiles around the world were ready for Armageddon.

  On the third day after the event Ryan received his first visitor to the airfield, the head of West Coast operations for the FBI. He had never met the man before but Joe Everson was a good friend of Bill Withers and the former president.

  His helicopter was allowed in once Ryan had the airport’s Choking Device deactivated. Three men got out, all FBI agents, and were introduced to Ryan by Bill Withers.

  “Joe and I played football together at high school,” Bill stated. “That’s how far we go back, but we haven’t spoken since before I left NASA. Joe is totally trustworthy, Ryan; he reported directly to the president until the elect
ion when he was replaced and transferred to Los Angeles.”

  “Is your boss trustworthy?” Ryan asked Joe Everson, as he showed him into Hangar One.

  The athletically built, six feet, six inch tall, grey-haired African American, replied, “I don’t trust anybody any more, Mr. Richmond. This country is a mess right now. I’ve just been called to Washington to testify about why I initiated the first warnings, which saved thousands of lives, and where I got the information. My hearing is in three days. Want to come with me, since you were the source of that information through our mutual friend?”

  “I think going to Capitol Hill to open the lines of communications could be a good move; I can show them where the early information came from. I do happen to have a complete space system in orbit,” replied Ryan. “You can use me as the tipoff person.”

  “Great. I think it would be beneficial to keep the former president out of this for a few weeks. The truth can’t hurt either of us, and Congress needs to learn the truth, that the current president and his cronies refused to heed warnings from outside experts. Our friend tells me that you attempted to warn several people, including the president himself, and the head of NASA?”

  “Yes, ask Martin Brusk. He was on Air Force One when it arrived here that very morning; and, since his freighter supplying the ISS was destroyed, I don’t believe he is a very happy person. He listened to the president threaten me with wearing an orange jumpsuit and with Guantanamo filling up with America citizens as prisoners, and his team throwing away the key. I think that shocked him into realizing that this president is a despot.”

  “The King and all the King’s men,” smiled Joe, “but not while this country still has a Constitution and two Houses. Most of our Washington politicians would love to hear the real truth. I have listened to a couple of the recordings you sent our friend, and he and several people are waiting for this panic to die down before we begin picking up the pieces. Ryan, believe me, there is still a majority of sane Americans out there and in Washington. Once we know how far the ‘King’s Men’ reach into the more powerful institutions of our country, then we can act. I believe that the our friend has enough to impeach the current president, Dickens Mullins and several others in Congress as well as about two dozen high ranking military officials.”