Brown, Dale - Independent 01

by Silver Tower (v1. 1)

  Saint-Michael had been expecting a briefing from her before she began her EVA, so she waited now until he turned from the computer terminal.

  “Ready to detach?” he asked. She nodded glumly. “Okay, one thing. We save Skybolt only if there’s time. If Govorov’s spaceplanes launched within minutes of that laser firing we may not have time to load the module into Enterprise. You’ll have to move fast....”

  She got the message—no time for any last nostalgic tours of the module. She detached herself from the strip of Velcro she’d anchored herself to, moved up to the control board mounted on the ceiling and—

  Suddenly she found herself propelled to the far end of the command module as a terrific explosion rocked the station.

  “What the hell was that?” She pushed herself away from the bulkhead, reattached her sneakers to the Velcro deck, wiped a trickle of blood from her nose.

  Saint-Michael had no time to answer as another explosion tore through Silver Tower, and a warning light illuminated over the hatch leading to the connecting tunnel.

  “Low pressure in the connecting tunnel,” Saint-Michael read out.

  The station now seemed to be sliding sideways, skidding like a truck out of control on an icy highway. Fighting acute vertigo, he made his way to his communications console, attached his microphone to the clip inside his POS mask, pulled the facemask over his head and keyed the intercom button:

  “All personnel. Evacuate the station. Now.” He unplugged his POS walk-around pack from the station’s oxygen supply. “Ann, let’s go...

  Another explosion—it felt as though it was right over their heads —sent both of them to the deck.

  She maneuvered her way back toward the main hatch, passed the ceiling-mounted module jettison control, reached up and closed and locked its safety cover, then hurried through the hatch and into the connecting tunnel.

  Saint Michael saw her go through the hatch and keyed his microphone. “America. Jon. Ann’s coming through. Help her ”

  A fourth sharp explosion sounded through the station, followed by the screech of tearing and twisting metal. Now both pressurization and fire-warning lights were blinking in the connecting tunnel. Saint- Michael was thrown head-over-heels half the length of the command module, finally entangled on some jury-rigged consoles and bundles of wiring that had broken free of their temporary mountings. He managed to pull himself upright and start for the hatch when he glanced out through the observation port midway along the outward-facing side of the command module.

  What he saw made his heart sink.

  America was drifting aimlessly hundreds of yards from the station, its fuselage ripped open as if a huge scaling knife had sliced into it. Waves of fire gushed out of the gaping wound as the spaceplane’s hydrogen and oxygen fuels ignited and hungrily fed on each other.

  “Oh, God....” Saint-Michael was less awed by the fire and demise of the spaceplane then the thought that there were people inside, including Ann, if she’d made it to the plane before it separated from the docking adapter. ...

  Then he heard it, the sound of her voice coming over the microphone: “Jason . . . you okay?”

  “Where are you?” he managed to get out.

  “In Skybolt. You seen Marty?”

  “No.” Over interphone: “Marty, come in. . ..”

  No reply.

  “He was in Enterprise. ...”

  Saint-Michael switched to the air-to-air UHF frequency. “Marty, this is Jason. Report. Report, damn it....”

  But when he looked out the observation port again he saw where Marty had disappeared to. The shuttle Enterprise was speeding away from Silver Tower, and Saint-Michael just caught a glimpse of it before it disappeared.

  “Marty, on board Enterprise... come in_______ ”

  SPACE SHUTTLE ENTERPRISE

  Marty Schultz was sitting in the left-hand commander’s seat on Enterprise's flight deck, nudging her thrusters forward in an attempt to fly the shuttle away from the space station and the attackers bearing down on it. He’d already made up his mind. He wasn’t going to be the hunted; he was going to be the hunter. Not to be vainglorious, but, well, better to go doing some good in the space shuttle that had been his inspiration than wait around for the Russians to shred the patchwork shuttle with their missiles.

  He keyed the microphone button on the control stick. “Sorry to be late reporting, General. As I guess you’ve noticed, I’ve been sort of busy here on Enterprise—”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Where do you think you’re going?”

  “One at a time, General. What I was doing was getting ready to load Skybolt... saw the Russian plane’s missiles hit America... Hamptom and Horvath bought it.... Where I’m going is away from Silver Tower. Figure those planes will be on my tail pretty quick now. Well, I’ve always wanted to see what this baby can do. Now I’m going to find out....”

  Saint-Michael wanted to kill him.... He was so upset the irony of that thought went right by him.... First it had been Jerrod Will. Now it was Marty Schultz. What was it with these shuttle jocks? Did they all have to be heroes ... ?

  “Marty, listen...”

  But Marty wasn’t listening. Leaving Enterprise's thrusters on full power he unstrapped himself from the commander’s seat and moved across the flight deck to the payload specialist’s station. The cargo bay doors were open and he could see out through the twin aft-facing observation windows into the cargo bay and behind Enterprise.

  He activated the reaction-control-system thruster controls at the payload station, checked them, then unstowed the manipulator arm.

  Swinging the arm out of the cargo bay he pointed the TV camera aft, set it to wide-angle view and swept it behind the shuttle.

  Almost instantly he had a picture-perfect view of two Soviet Elektron spaceplanes giving chase.

  “I got two Elektrons on my tail,” he radioed back to the station. “These gumballs are in for a surprise...

  ELEKTRON ONE SPACEPLANE

  “Damn it,” Govorov said over the command radio, “don’t let that shuttle get away....”

  Kozhedub and Litvyak had fired two Bavinash missiles each at Armstrong, when Govorov saw the shuttle suddenly bolt from the vicinity of the lower pressurized modules. He had no way of knowing if it was a bluff or not, but the shuttle did seem to be piloted by a space-suited astronaut, so he ordered both his wingmen to give chase.

  For a moment he hoped Litvyak would leave the job to Kozhedub because, from his vantage point about a kilometer behind and above his wingmen, Govorov had seen Litvyak’s second Scimitar missile, a single missile, obliterate the spaceplane America docked at the station, creating an instant ball of flames. Flames in outer space were a rare sight. The blast must have had the force of at least a kiloton of TNT.

  Deciding it was not necessary to wait for his wingmen to return, Govorov pressed a switch on a newly installed panel near his right knee. Behind him, a hydraulically powered pallet lifted the space- reactive bomb out of Elektron One’s cargo bay. The side of the weapon opposite the pallet was uncovered, revealing a series of mechanical grapples all along the outer surface of the bomb.

  He was going to maneuver Elektron One underneath the station’s central keel, as close as possible to the pressurized modules without running the risk of hitting an antenna or a piece of the debris that seemed to cluster everywhere around the crippled station. When he was positioned properly he would gently nudge the bomb up onto the central open-lattice keel until the grapples caught, then release the bomb and pallet from his cargo bay. Once away from the station— five to ten kilometers was safe in this case—he would detonate the bomb. It would be fast and sure. No more mistakes....

  He began his slow, careful approach to the station, maneuvering well above the central pressurized modules to begin a visual scan of the station. Not the time to charge ahead blindly. Logic said the station’s crew should have abandoned the station in the shuttle or space- plane, but it was such an incorrect assumpti
on that got Voloshin killed on the first mission. There was time. He would wait and watch the explosion, watch as the huge American space station folded and tore apart. As for the men who might still crew the station, well, he would try not to feel for them. At least they would die quickly....

  He nudged his control stick forward and watched as his laser range finder counted down the distance to the station: three thousand meters, twenty-eight hundred, twenty-six....

  SPACE SHUTTLE ENTERPRISE

  They were close enough now....

  From the magnification setting on the arm camera Marty Schultz estimated that the two Elektron spaceplanes chasing him were no more than four or five miles behind. Enterprise, powered by its two monomethyl-hydrazine engines, had accelerated another thousand miles an hour since the chase had begun, but the Russians were slowly but surely catching up.

  Just as he wanted.

  He shut down the engines and using only the aft thrusters spun Enterprise head-over-tail until she had turned a full hundred eighty degrees back toward her pursuers. He then grasped the arm controls and studying the TV monitor that gave the best view of the cargo bay and the manipulator’s claw, reached into the cargo bay with the arm and extracted a large cylindrical drum device from an attach-point in the center of the bay.

  He had conceived his plan shortly after making Enterprise flyable. Realizing that a Soviet spaceplane attack might come with very little warning, making it impossible for them to abandon the station, he’d suggested loading up Enterprise's cargo bay with Thor interceptor missiles and launching them by shuttle-directed remote-control.

  In spite of the disaster after the first time they’d tried to launch Thor missiles for station defense, Saint-Michael had agreed to the plan, at least the idea, and told Marty and Hampton to load the missiles. But by the time the Soviets had announced their assault by firing their chemical laser, he’d changed his mind. Enterprise would only be used to carry the Skybolt laser module to a high-storage orbit.

  That had been it—until Marty had gotten back aboard Enterprise to get ready to accept the Skybolt laser module Ann would be detaching. From his docking point beneath the central keel near the Skybolt module, the eight remaining Thor missiles he’d taken off the shuttle only hours before had been well within reach of his remote manipulator arm. When the Soviet spaceplane attack had begun it had not been difficult to detach two missiles, activate the mechanical ejector-arming mechanism, stow the missiles in Enterprise's cargo bay, and jet away from the station. He had deliberately circled Armstrong once to get the Russian’s attention, then flown away with as much speed as possible....

  It took thirty seconds for Marty to extract the two missiles from the cargo bay, then clicked on the air-to-air comm channel. “Armstrong, this is Enterprise. Come in.”

  “Marty.” Saint-Michael’s voice again. “Where are you?”

  “Where I should be, General. Listen, you have to launch-commit the Thor missiles now.”

  “You got some of the Thors on board?” Saint-Michael didn’t wait for a reply, instead immediately threw himself toward the far side of the master SBR control console hunting for the Thor missile controls. Almost every control panel had been moved or replaced, and during the first spaceplane attack the impact explosions had thrown any unsecured panels all across the module. But after a few frenetic moments of searching he found the Thor arming controls and ordered an automatic launch-commit on all Thor missiles.

  The six missiles under the central keel were not affected by the command; only the two missiles that Marty had manually armed responded. The Elektron spaceplanes were less than three miles away when the Thor missile’s rocket engines ignited. Marty stayed long enough to watch both Thors shoot into space toward the Russian spaceplanes, then made his way back to the cockpit and strapped into the commander’s seat.

  Time to take off, babe. He reactivated the digital autopilot and RCS thruster controls. If those missiles didn’t hit their targets, he knew there were two Russians who were going to come at him with everything they had.

  They had indeed agreed between themselves who would take the first shot on the American shuttle Enterprise: Colonel Kozhedub in Elektron Two had the honors. Colonel Litvyak, who had put the Scimitar missile into America's fuel tanks, kept his laser seeker- range finder activated but caged it to scan directly ahead of Elektron Three. If he had illuminated Enterprise with his laser, Kozhedub’s missile might try to slide across to the second beam and miss the target, or the two lasers could interphase and cancel each other out.

  “It’s moving away,” Kozhedub called out as the shuttle slowly rotated on its longitudinal axis and sped away at right angles to the Elektron’s line of flight.

  “Can you follow him?” Litvyak said. “I can—”

  Kozhedub told him no thanks, he could get this one just fine.

  Litvyak started to say something but a glance at his front instrument panel stopped the words in his throat. Directly centered in his laser spotting-scope screen was a Thor missile unfurling its steel mesh snare!

  “Watch out. The shuttle has just launched missiles... Litvyak yanked on his control column, trying to translate directly to the right and dodge the missile. It tracked toward him. He switched thrusters again and moved downward at full power, changing directions so hard that his helmet cracked against the cockpit canopy. No change. The Thor missile was still following him, looming larger and larger....

  The missile was less than a mile away when Litvyak, in the last- ditch effort, fired three Scimitar missiles at the large cylindrical interceptor. The first two missiles exploded harmlessly on the mesh, but the third impacted directly on the sensor nose of the missile and detonated the Thor’s high-explosive warhead.

  No sound, but the wall of heat and energy that washed over Elektron Three pounded on the small spacecraft. It went out of control, and Litvyak had no choice but to release his thruster controls and ride out the turbulence, hoping it didn’t tear his ship apart. It took a few minutes, but soon the awful vibration and pounding on his spacecraft’s hull began to subside.

  Kozhedub was not so fortunate. With his laser designator locked onto the Enterprise and watching as intently as he was for the perfect firing aspect, he never saw the second Thor missile. Just as Litvyak shouted out his warning the missile hit Elektron Two’s right wingtip and detonated right on top of the canopy. Kozhedub died instantly, and a moment later his Elektron exploded, spinning off into earth’s atmosphere.

  Litvyak, hearing his comrade’s dying noises echo in his helmet, knew he could plunge into earth’s atmosphere as well if he failed to bring his spaceplane under control. Using short thruster bursts and concentrating on the gyroscopic inertial horizon, he finally managed to reduce the violent multiaxis spin down to one recognizable spin axis, then gradually applied more powerful bursts until his plane was under control.

  He scanned the dark gray skies around him until he spotted the shuttle beginning to accelerate back in the direction of the space station. Stabbing the thruster controls, he applied full power and took up the chase, this time drawn by a need for revenge-----------

  USS NIMITZ

  “Jason, this is Clancy. Come in. We’ve lost the SBR signals.”

  No reply.

  “Get them back, Sparks,” Clancy said to the communications officer. “Whatever it takes.”

  The CPO tried hard but there was no change. “It’s dead silent, sir. No carrier, no data, nothing. It’s as if they—”

  Clancy looked at the CPO. “Don’t say it, Sparks. Don’t even think it.”

  But the unthinkable was unavoidable, for the admiral as well as the chief petty officer: another disaster had just happened on Silver Tower.

  ARMSTRONG SPACE STATION

  “Ann? How’s it—?”

  “It’s ready, Jason. Ready to switch SBR to Skybolt control....” Saint-Michael took a deep breath, put a finger on the SBR switchover controls. He pressed the button.

  The SBR immediately issued a so
lid TRACK indication on Ann’s console. “SBR is tracking targets,” Ann announced. “Now showing two hostiles. Friendly identification complete... .Target discrimination in progress.... Neutral particle-beam laser projector showing faulted.” The neutral particle beam used to discriminate between decoys and real targets had been shot off long ago. “Override.”

  He searched the SBR command menu, found the command and entered it. “Done.”

  “Override accepted.”

  Now what?

  SPACE SHUTTLE ENTERPRISE

  Marty Schultz could feel the presence of an enemy behind him even before he visually confirmed it.

  “One got away,” he said out loud, to himself, to his shuttle. “We’re in deep shit now, babe.” Think multidimensional, he told himself, then selected ROTATE and PULSE on the digital autopilot and jammed the control stick forward. Without the forward RCS pod the motion was a tail-over-heels flip, done by the aft RCS thruster so that the cargo bay was now facing in the direction of flight. He ignited the engines once again, which put Enterprise in a dive straight for earth....

  At that instant a flash of glaring light washed out his vision. The control stick felt warm, then hot, then rubbery in his hand, even through the thick nylon gloves. Warning tones, like confused cries for help from Enterprise beeped over his headset.

  ELEKTRON THREE SPACEPLANE

  Colonel Litvyak aboard Elektron Three felt the blast of heat as well, but for him it was not just a slight glare—it was a throbbing, blinding sheet of light that seemed to illuminate each crevice of his space- plane’s cockpit. His eyelids, then his solar visor when he could finally command his muscles to lower it, had no effect.

  When his eyes cleared a few moments later he stopped all thrusters and did a quick systems check. A few minor ones had faulted but they all reset. His lips were dry as sand, as though he hadn’t taken a drink in days. The skin on his face seemed dry and cracked as if from a bad windbum. No use flying around half-blind.... He used a few short bursts of power to stop his forward momentum and keyed his microphone.