Brown, Dale - Independent 01

by Silver Tower (v1. 1)

  Saint-Michael received Walker’s acknowledgment, wished the men luck, then lifted a large plastic cover on a yellow-and-black-striped button at his commander’s station. Instantly a series of explosive activators and self-contained hydraulic thrusters pushed the lifeboat free of its moorings and propelled it away from the station. Well, maybe somebody would live to tell what had happened here. And why....

  ELEKTRON ONE SPACEPLANE

  “Lead. Watch out. Below you.”

  This time, Govorov easily spotted the object of Voloshin’s warning. The long, silver, oblong vessel beneath the cargo-docking port jarred loose from its dock and moved quickly away from the station. In a few moments it was lost from view.

  “The rescue craft,” Govorov radioed back to Voloshin. “They’ve abandoned the station. It doesn’t appear to have been jettisoned by accident.”

  “Should we consider boarding Armstrong, Lead?”

  “No, I still think they’ll fire the station’s thrusters by remote control and deorbit the station. Stay in position and continue to pick off their station subsystems. If we have missiles left, we can target the pressurized modules.”

  As he talked Govorov noticed the station start to slowly revolve and he expertly maneuvered his Elektron to keep up with the station’s slow rotation. It was not difficult to do, but the revolutions were a bit erratic—obviously the thrusters were no longer under computer control—and the station was revolving around the central keel, not along the pressurized module’s axis.

  Several pieces of the space-based radar array and other hunks of debris snapped off the keel and were sent crashing into the pressurized modules. It looked as if the station was tearing itself apart. They could save their Scimitar missiles for another sortie, Govorov decided.

  Meanwhile, Voloshin had maintained his position in space and was watching the station revolve under him rather than trying to maintain his position in relation to it. The lowermost sections of the station were beginning to come into view now.... He spotted the strange- looking device at the end of one of the lower pressurized modules— the Skybolt steerable mirror-housing. The mirror itself resembled a hugh shiny bull’s-eye.

  As good a target as any, he thought as he activated his laster target- designator. ...

  ARMSTRONG SPACE STATION

  “That’s the best I can do, Ann,” Saint-Michael said over the intercom.

  Talking was the least difficult thing to do with the POS mask on. The large curved glass faceplate distorted his vision and fogged up when he spoke or breathed hard. The hoses and interphone wires floating around his head obstructed his hands as well as his vision. Trying to accomplish a task as delicate a steering an eight-hundred- ton space station was all but impossible.

  “Can you hit the positive X axis just one shot?”

  “It’ll take me too long to fiddle with these controls,” Saint-Michael told her. “If you can’t do it, say so. We’ll need time to get into spacesuits before the Russians blow this place.”

  He was a prophet. A huge explosion rocked the station, sending him scrambling for another handhold. The impact felt as if it was only a few feet away. The lights flickered, steadied, flickered again, then blinked out. A few undamaged automatic power-failure lights snapped on. The station’s spin seemed to accelerate, like a rollercoaster ride picking up speed at the crest of the incline....

  “Ann....”

  His call was drowned out by another explosion. His grip instinctively tightened on the ceiling handhold. But it was not another explosion on the keel. It was a loud, rhythmic drumming sound, reverberating through the entire station....

  ELEKTRON TWO SPACEPLANE

  The laser designator refused to lock onto the large round bull’s-eye itself—some sort of mirror inside reflected the laser energy away instead of back to the spaceplane—so Voloshin had to target the housing of the bull’s-eye instead. No problem there. The station was revolving at a perfect rate, not too fast, not too slow. In seconds the strange housing would be in range and he would send a Scimitar missile straight through—

  Colonel Ivan Voloshin saw a flash of red light and felt suddenly hot, as though he’d been dunked in a tub of hot water. The feeling was so pleasant that he let the warmth wash over him like a gentle wave. He even had time to worry about something silly: that he had to urinate badly. Was it because his hand felt as if it had been stuck in a bucket of warm water? That was a favorite technique of his mother’s, he remembered: before going to the store with him, she would always ask if he had to go to the bathroom, and he of course would always say no. Then she would tell him to wash his hands and make sure to use hot water, and all of sudden he had to go....

  Colonel Voloshin carried that pleasant childhood memory with him into oblivion as his Elektron spaceplane exploded into uncountable fiery pieces.

  ELEKTRON ONE SPACEPLANE

  “Elektron Two. Report on that flash of light on your side.” Nothing, not even a hiss of static. “Voloshin. Report.” Govorov had to jerk his lateral thrusters quickly to avoid a large piece of debris, probably from the crippled American space station, that had appeared out of nowhere.

  He glanced at his spaceplane’s fuel gauges. His wild escape maneuver and his present station-keeping pulses to maintain his position on the revolving space station were seriously depleting his supply. Wasting more precious fuel searching for Voloshin would probably push him right to the time-line. He no longer had the time to spend locating, identifying, targeting and shooting at individual station subsystems.

  “Voloshin, fuel status.” No reply.

  “Elektron Two, this is Elektron One. If you can hear me, break off your attack and join me one thousand meters above the station axis. Acknowledge.”

  Still no reply. Things had just darkened for Govorov: low on fuel, lost wingman, only five Scimitar missiles remaining and their target not yet destroyed. He discontinued his station-keeping position and circled the wobbling space station. No sign of Voloshin. Instead of expending the energy to station-keep around Armstrong, Voloshin had probably stayed above the wreck and... been struck by a piece of debris.. ..

  Now only a few more minutes until the deorbit time-line limit. Govorov could not spend time targeting the stations’ subsystems. He maneuvered to face the revolving station, activated his laser designator, and took aim on the station’s pressurized modules. .. .

  ARMSTRONG SPACE STATION

  “Ann? Can you hear me?”

  The intercom had gone dead. The lights were completely out now except for one or two remaining emergency lights. He had no way of knowing if the SBR or Skybolt had worked. He didn’t even know if she was still alive.

  Suddenly Saint-Michael’s huge sophisticated space station seemed like an orbiting mausoleum, and all he could think of was finding her and getting out of this dark, entombing crypt.

  Ever since the command-module crewmembers had evacuated the station, Saint-Michael had been wearing the bottoms of his spacesuit. He now made his way over to where the upper half of his suit was floating, slipped into it and joined up the two halves. While breathing oxygen from his POS he connected his gloves, communications headset and helmet in place and activated his life-support backpack. He then moved toward the hatch leading to the connecting tunnel.

  He passed through the connecting tunnel and had just entered the engineering module when the entire ceiling seemed to explode on top of him. He caught a glimpse of a projectile shooting straight through the module and crashing through the deck. The Velcro-covered floor seemed to erupt and buckle like hot tar. Sparks filled the cabin. A PRESS warning horn sounded, followed by a FIRE warning light that flickered on and off. In a few moments the only lights on in the module were the two warning lights, creating an eerie strobe-light effect. Saint-Michael had to overcome the sudden disorientation and will his legs to move. Carefully he climbed through the shards of metal, plastic, wiring and other debris now floating throughout the galley module and made his way to the hatch to the Skybolt module. S
moke began to billow through the galley as he peered through the thick Plexiglas window into the module....

  Ann was suspended about a foot from the ceiling, her arms and legs dangling like a puppet’s, her POS system hovering near her neck; Saint-Michael noted with relief that her mask was on. She was not moving, A few blobs of blood encircled her forehead.

  He opened the hatch, closed it behind him and made sure the Skybolt module began to repressurize itself. When the pressure was nearly normal he slid down the narrow aisle between the massive electronics racks and pulled Ann to him. He quickly checked her POS connections and found them secure. Further examination revealed a large cut and a bump on her left temple.

  He touched his helmet to her POS faceplate. “Ann, can you hear me?”

  After a long, tense wait he noticed her neck and face muscles jerk, and then her eyes opened.

  “You all right?”

  “I... I hit the instrument panel... big explosion....”

  “We’ve got to get out of here. Can you move?” She nodded, reached out with a foot to find the floor was still several feet above the deck. “I can move you, want to get you into a rescue ball.”

  “Skybolt... it works, Jason. I fired... it fired....”

  “Easy. Never mind Skybolt. Those spaceplanes are shooting up the modules. This one could be next.” He unstowed a rescue ball from a yellow-painted container mounted on the module ceiling. “Can you seal yourself up inside?”

  She nodded weakly, her labored breathing fogging the POS face mask.

  Another explosion rocked the station, and with it the station’s spin seemed drastically to change direction. Saint-Michael had to hold himself steady until his body caught up with the new wobble in the station, then he opened the rescue ball.

  “Curl yourself up around the POS pack.” With his help she wrapped her arms and legs around the POS pack and lowered her chin on the top of it.

  “Don’t forget—seal up the ball when I cover you with it, and keep checking the pressure gauges. Keep the ball at seven p.s.i. with your POS if you need to.”

  With Ann in a fetal curl a few feet from the deck, Saint-Michael enclosed her with the rescue ball and zipped it closed around her. He could feel her fumbling with the ziplock-style pressure seal inside as he steered her over to an oxygen panel in the Skybolt module, plugged an oxygen hose into a pressure fitting on the ball and began to inflate the rescue ball. He noted the ball’s small pressure gauge steadily rise, pumped the ball up to one standard station atmosphere and checked the seal again. It looked like a big beach ball.

  Leaving Ann connected to the oxygen fitting, he bypassed the safety interlocks and undogged the hatch leading to the engineering module. The galley had completely lost its pressurization, and judging from the occasional explosions he heard, the rest of the station was probably just as dead. Only one last possibility for survival. He disconnected Ann and her rescue ball from the oxygen supply and carried her through engineering and the connecting tunnel to the docking module—

  Through the wireless intercom came a stronger, firmer voice: “Jason... ?”

  “How you doing?”

  “I see stars every time I blink my eyes, and my head hurts like hell. Where are we going?”

  “Enterprise ”

  “Didn’t the Russians attack it?”

  “Enterprise won’t get us home,” Saint-Michael said, opening the hatch to the docking module at the end of the main connecting tunnel, “but maybe it can save us. My spacesuit has enough air and power for only seven hours. Enterprise even damaged, has enough air and water for thirty days and it still has the thruster power to keep itself in orbit. It’s our chance until—”

  She wondered why Saint-Michael had suddenly stopped in midsentence. Then she understood.... He had carried her into the docking module, where the bumed-up bodies of Bayles and Kelly still lay. She almost imagined that she could see the crewmen trying to crawl back to Silver Tower for safety, chased by the wall of flame from Enterprise's destroyed fuel cells....

  Saint-Michael’s eyes were drawn to the distorted faces, the sightless eye sockets, the scorched Space Command uniforms, the gnarled, bony hands. Gently lifting his precious cargo over the charred remains, he realized that the woman he carried in that plastic and canvas rescue ball could just as easily have been one of those bodies on the deck beneath him.

  As he made his way down the docking tunnel into Enterprise's air locks and into the shuttle itself he saw that the hungry' fire had blackened everything.

  “Are we in Enterprise yet?” Ann asked. He could not answer, and she did not press the question.

  Montgomery, Wallis and Davis were still strapped in place, melted POS masks on their chests. The fuel-cell explosion in the lower deck storage area had tom apart Enterprise's middeck. The air was filled with floating debris that would never settle, never fall.

  “I’m going to leave you on the middeck,” Saint-Michael said. He let her float between the airlock hatch and the ladder leading to the upper deck, plugged the rescue ball into another oxygen supply hose and activated the oxygen supply. Enterprise's oxygen supply, he noted with relief, still seemed operational. “You can recharge your POS pack with the hose inside the ball. I’ve got to... to see if Enterprise is fly able.”

  Ann did not acknowledge. She knew what he really had to do— move the bodies of Will and Sontag out of the charred cockpit.

  ELEKTRON ONE SPACEPLANE

  One missile left.

  General Alesander Govorov took every last second available to him before breaking off his systematic attack on the American space station. He had plunged Scimitar missiles into all but two of the station’s eight pressurized modules, making sure that all within range were at least punctured. The two modules remaining were both on the outside of the revolving station and were therefore moving the fastest and were harder to hit, so he had targeted easier modules, the ones closest to the central keel, with his few remaining missiles.

  Clouds of debris hovered everywhere around the tom-up space station. A sparking relay junction or fuel cell occasionally erupted somewhere on the keel, and pieces of the space-based radar, communications antennas and heat-exchange radiators fluttered in the weightlessness of space as if pushed by some strange, unearthly wind. The station’s rotation was erratic. Originally centered directly along the central keel, now it was a wobbly, off-kilter eccentric spin. The space shuttle was still attached to the docking port, but the cockpit windows were dark and lifeless and the battered, ruptured nose insured that the shuttle was useless.

  Govorov had established contact with Soviet Space Defense Command shipbome tracking stations just after Voloshin had disappeared. The ground-tracking stations were not as sophisticated as the American Tracking and Data Relay Satellite system, TDRS, or WESTAR, so voice and data contact with small, low-powered craft such as the Elektrons was intermittent at best. They could not help with Voloshin’s disappearance. They were also no help with a plan to dock with the Soviet Union’s orbiting module. Besides, Govorov found he did not have the fuel to risk a long, protracted hunt for Mir, so his only option was to deorbit.

  “Elektron One, this is Glowing Star Command Control.”

  “Go ahead, Control.”

  “Elektron One, we are recommending another orbit to align in the slot for deorbit.”

  What? This was crazy… “Control, I don’t have the reserves for another two hours in orbit. I need to deorbit on this turn in the slot. What is your reason for the delay?”

  “We are showing a possible obstruction within ten kilometers of your computed descent path, Elektron One.”

  “An obstruction? Another spacecraft?”

  “Affirmative. We predict that the object could be within five kilometers of you when you begin your deorbit bum. Please state your intentions.”

  Govorov took a firm grip on his control stick. It seemed the fight was not over. “Can you identify the object, Control? Its point of origin?”

  “Negativ
e. It is not a known orbiting spacecraft. It has appeared in your vicinity within the hour, very close to your present flight path.”

  “I want a vector toward the object, Control, immediately.”

  “Say again, Elektron One.”

  “I want a vector toward the object. I intend to engage the... obstruction.”

  “Yes, sir. Stand by.” When Govorov received the range and vector coordinates to the subject, sweat broke out on his forehead. It had indeed moved very close to his flight path—dangerously close. It was less than thirty kilometers away, no more than five thousand meters from his own altitude.

  He activated his laser designator and opened his cargo-weapons bay doors once again. He thought he knew what this oncoming spacecraft was. For several years the Americans had had a fighter-based antisatellite missile in operation. Fired from a high-performance F-15 fighter, the missile could seek out, track and destroy many kinds of Soviet satellites. Enhancements to the American AS AT weapon reportedly included a much higher altitude capability, a larger warhead and a more maneuverable design. It was supposed to be as long as a Thor space-based missile, perhaps ten to twelve meters long, but not as large in diameter and aerodynamically shaped for carriage under an F-15: like a flying torpedo.

  It had to be an American retaliatory response. The Americans were mounting their ASAT attack at the one point in his mission when he was the most vulnerable: just before deorbit. Low on fuel, maneuvering to enter the deorbit slot, busily inattentive to everything else—a perfect time to strike. Well, the Americans were going to get a surprise. He would be the hunter instead of the hunted....

  “Elektron One, spacecraft is at your altitude, inside twenty kilometers, slow moving... now on collision course. Repeat, collision course. You are on an intercept heading, twelve o’clock, now eighteen kilometers.”

  Govorov put his laser viewfinder on widest possible arc.... At the extreme magnification of the laser designator appeared a large, bright object moving across the stars at the very rim of the earth. As it came slowly into range he could make out its smooth, oblong shape and a circular device on one end—an active radar-homing device or infrared seeker? At first he worried that he might be engaging someone’s low-orbiting satellite, or perhaps even a reconnaissance “ferret” satellite, but this thing was unlike any satellite he had ever seen. It was not pointed directly at him, but the laser rangefinder reported it was definitely moving closer. He placed the aiming reticle directly on the nose sensor of the weapon, received a READY beep in his headset, rechecked his weapons panel and at a range of fifteen kilometers fired his last Scimitar missile.