Brown, Dale - Independent 01

by Silver Tower (v1. 1)

  “Elektron One, this is Three. Do you copy?”

  ELEKTRON ONE SPACEPLANE

  Govorov was only a few hundred meters away from the Skybolt module when his skin seemed to crawl and feel dusty. He did not feel any of the searing heat felt by the other two spacecraft near the path of the free-electron laser beam, but the side lobes of energy that coiled out of the muzzle of the nuclear-powered laser stream did seem to turn his Elektron One into a huge transistor. The pulse of energy coursing through his body made stars appear before his eyes, and his fingertips tingled and burned as if about to catch fire.

  As the unearthly sensation subsided and he began to think more clearly, he realized what had happened. Someone aboard the station had just fired a powerful laser. Armstrong hadn't been abandoned after all....

  “Elektron One. Come in.”

  Govorov keyed his microphone. “Litvyak? Where are you?”

  “In pursuit of the American shuttle... .There was some sort of energy burst. I’m checking for damage.”

  “Disregard the shuttle. The space station is still manned and they’ve got some sort of laser. I want you maneuvering as backup while I plant the space-reactive bomb.”

  “But Andrei was killed by a missile from that shuttle—”

  “Do as I say. There’ll be plenty of time to chase down the shuttle later.”

  Govorov stopped suddenly and stared at the command module, the center-pressurized module facing him. He was now less than fifty meters from the station, close enough to see the patches over the holes his missiles had made, close enough to see the data-transmission cables....

  And, as he moved closer he could see a figure peering out through the observation port in the command module. He applied gentle reverse thrust and maneuvered a few meters away.

  Yes, it was the General Saint-Michael he’d heard and read so much about, whose picture he’d seen. A shock to see him now, like this. He had always wondered what it would be like to face his enemy. He had thought he would prefer it... fight man to man without the influence of a technology that made killing impersonal. Now he was not so sure—

  “Moving out to a five kilometer orbit, Elektron One.”

  Litvyak’s words brought him back. “Cruise further out, Three. I’m going in to plant the bomb now.”

  Govorov selected minus-Y translation and moved away from the station. “Good-bye, General,” he said, nodding toward the command module’s observation port. Strangely he felt no elation. Indeed, more a sadness....

  ARMSTRONG SPACE STATION

  The laser burst had not dimmed the lights in the command module, as it had the other times it had fired. Even so, Saint-Michael could not see if it had hit anything.

  “Ann, what happened?”

  “I can’t tell anything. I’m resetting the SBR relay circuit—it overloaded. The laser fired but I can’t tell if it—”

  “Armstrong, this is Enterprise. Come in.”

  Saint-Michael almost jumped at the communications controls. “Marty, we thought—”

  “General, there’s a plane right by the command module. Look out.”

  And then Saint-Michael saw it. The Elektron spaceplane, an engineering thing of beauty with its flowing lines, compact and trim, was also a deadly creature. The general took it in, but his eyes were drawn to the sleek cockpit windows. He couldn’t clearly see the face behind the space helmet, but he had a very strong feeling—a premonition almost—that he was looking at Alesander Govorov.

  The sight momentarily rooted Saint-Michael to the spot, but then just as quickly as the spaceplane appeared, it dropped out of sight. He couldn’t help but be impressed by the audacity of the pilot, maneuvering so close to the module. It had to be Govorov....

  “He’s moving away,” Marty reported excitedly. “He didn’t shoot anything; he’s moving down to the keel—hey, his cargo bay is open...

  “Ann . .. any other planes nearby?”

  “Yes. There’s a fast-moving one three miles out and pulling away.... Yes, he’s definitely moving away. I’m picking up Enterprise.. . too. He’s less than a mile. Two spaceplanes—must mean Skybolt missed....”

  “General” Marty’s voice boomed over the air-to-air channel. “That Russian spaceplane by the keel... he’s attaching something to it, right beside Skybolt.... Oh, God... looks like a bomb, a big one.... He’s attached a bomb to the space station....”

  Saint-Michael watched, frozen, as the spaceplane accelerated back and away from the station. That was why the second spaceplane was retreating so fast....

  “Marty, stay clear. Get away from the station—”

  “I can reach it, General; I can reach it. Stand by______ ”

  “Negative. There may not be time. Get away from here.”

  Marty, ignoring him, selected autopilot controls and jetted toward the station. He unstrapped from the commander’s seat and moved back to the payload specialist’s console. Schultz, he told himself, you’d better pray this doesn’t take too long. Pray anyway

  Saint-Michael watched as Govorov’s spaceplane became small, then smaller, then a tiny speck—and then he unfroze.... “Ann, target the closer plane, the one that just moved away from the station.” Govorov’s....

  “But Skybolt’s not locking on—”

  “Fire anyway. Widest possible pattern. Maybe we can get him before he sets off the bomb by remote control.”

  The wait was excruciatingly long. Govorov had all but disappeared, intermingling with the stars and the bluish haze surrounding earth. By now he had to be far enough away to detonate his bomb....

  ELEKTRON ONE SPACEPLANE

  Govorov, his laser range finder locked onto Armstrong, decided to wait until ten kilometers before detonating the bomb. If the laser was operating, the resulting secondary explosion of the laser module might be far more violent than a mere hydrogen-oxygen explosion.

  He let the laser range finder click up to ten kilometers, then moved his finger across the special-weapon control panel near his right knee, and pressed....

  The first free-electron laser pulse had missed Govorov by over a hundred feet, but even at that distance the two-megawatt burst of nuclear-fired energy was still hot enough to melt steel. In a fraction of a second Govorov’s heat-resistant quartz glass windscreen, which could easily withstand reentry temperatures of three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, softened, melted, vaporized. The pressure of the atmosphere in the cockpit blew the liquid glass out into space, creating a huge glass bubble just moments before bursting and flying off in all directions. Alesander Govorov was cremated in the atomic heat of the beam.

  A second laser burst from Skybolt knifed through the spaceplane itself, creating another huge bubble—this time of titanium, not glass. The heat was so intense that the plane’s fuel had no time to detonate. In the blink of an eye—both pulses had lasted less than one-tenth of a second—the spaceplane Elektron One and the commander of the Soviet Space Defense Command had simply vanished in a puff of plasma.

  ELEKTRON THREE SPACEPLANE

  “Elektron One. Do you read? Over.”

  Litvyak got no reply. Ever since the last energy surge—the laser, Govorov had said?—the tactical air-to-air frequency had been silent. Lost communications procedures for this mission were different than for other space flights with more than one manned spacecraft. The standard procedure was to proceed immediately to the nearest hundredth altitude—one hundred kilometers, two hundred, three hundred—establish a circular orbit and await reentry or station-docking instructions. For this mission the instructions were simpler:

  If weapons are aboard, continue the attack on the space station Armstrong. The space-based radar, rescue spacecraft, pressurized modules and fuel cells have priority. Withdraw only if all weapons are expended.

  Litvyak turned his Elektron around, guided it a few kilometers closer to the station and locked his laser range finder on Armstrong’s starboard space-based radar array. He fired one of his five remaining Scimitar missiles at the station. The
missile running hot and true, slammed into the face of the upper starboard array. The explosion from its warhead blew a ten-meter-diameter hole in the antenna, which wobbled and weaved for a moment, then wrenched itself in two and toppled over, slamming into the keel.

  ARMSTRONG SPACE STATION

  “The bomb didn’t go off,” Saint-Michael called out. “Ann, you did it. Skybolt worked—”

  His congratulations were sharply interrupted by a loud bang and rumbling vibration that shook the command module. The one usable attitude-adjustment thruster could be heard trying to move the station upright again, but the station began to tip slowly backward. Streams of SBR fault messages raced across Saint-Michael’s monitors, but he didn’t need to read the screen to know that there was at least one more Russian plane out there.

  “Jason, reset the SBR. Fast.”

  He moved back to the SBR control terminal, entered the command to reset the radar’s circuitry. But the computer refused the input.

  “It won’t take.”

  “You have to find out what component is out and power it down,” Ann told him, “or else the SBR will keep short-circuiting.”

  Saint-Michael scrolled through the error messages that had zipped across the screen. It seemed every single part of the SBR had been hit by a Russian missile. He switched his comm link to A/A.

  “Marty, can you see the station? What did he hit?”

  “Stand by.” Marty, who had stopped trying to detach the Russian bomb when the laser fired, boosted himself away from the keel, flipped upside down to get a better view and maneuvered over the station.

  “Try the number one SBR array.”

  Saint-Michael erased the error log and had just entered the code to deactivate the damaged SBR array when a thunderous explosion rocked the command module.

  “Fire on the keel,” Marty shouted over the air-to-air frequency. “The master fuel cell’s been hit.”

  Fire-warning lights blinked on all the surviving panels. Saint-Michael ignored them. “SBR’s reset, Ann. Hurry up, we’re going to run out of power any—”

  As he said those words the main lights in the command module flickered out. A few battery-powered emergency lights snapped on, but they lit a corpse. Silver Tower was dead once again.

  ELEKTRON THREE SPACEPLANE

  Litvyak’s second Scimitar missile hit finally produced a spectacular result, even better than the collapsed radar antenna. The secondary explosions, fire and sparking on the keel from the missile hit on the fuel cell created a multicolored fireworks display for dozens of meters from the impact point, then began to creep along the keel toward the pressurized modules. The explosions fizzled out just a few meters away from the double column of modules in the center of the keel, but the end result was still satisfying to Colonel Litvyak: the few visible lights remaining on the station had all gone out. That last hit had finally killed the station.

  It was dead, but not destroyed. Govorov had ordered the station destroyed. The Americans had already reactivated a “dead” hulk once; they might do it again. Litvyak swept his laser range-finder designator around the station and finally rested the red beam on the best and most obvious target of them all: Govorov’s unexploded bomb.

  It was all about to end, right now. Litvyak selected his three remaining Bavinash missiles, locked the laser designator on the bomb. He squeezed the trigger. The three missiles fired straight and true with a solid lock-on—

  And all three were caught in the intense free-electron laser beam that shot from the station. Skybolt had needed only a millisecond of the station’s waning power to energize the laser’s ignition circuitry, and once delivered—Skybolt’s internal battery did the rest. Skybolt’s beam vaporized the Scimitar missiles, and three one-millionths of a second later the beam traveled the remaining five miles to Elektron Three and turned the two-hundred-fifty-thousand-pound spacecraft and its pilot into a few milligrams of cosmic dust.

  As Saint-Michael and Ann Page struggled into space suits, the first of the Soviet GL-25 cruise missiles were just a few dozen miles from the sea. Running undetected, they had navigated through the western rim of the Selseleh Ye Safid Mountains in western Afghanistan, down into the Margow Desert valley and along the Chagal Hills down the border between Iran and Pakistan. Now they were well within the Central Makran Range in southwest Pakistan, only minutes from the Gulf of Oman. Their inertially guided course had been well chosen by Soviet army planners to conceal the missiles in the most rugged terrain available and to keep them away from known surveillance sites or large population centers.

  Each of the fifty GL-25 missiles had expended three-quarters of its fuel on only two-thirds of its journey, but the easier part of the flight was ahead of them. Once over the ocean the missiles would gradually step-climb to twenty thousand feet, where their ramjet engines would be more efficient. They would cruise at high altitude until within three hundred miles of the outermost escort ship of the Nimitz, then gradually descend back to fifty feet above the water. At approximately one hundred miles from the last known position of the Nimitz, their homing radars would activate....

  And the devastation of the American fleet would begin....

  CHAPTER 13

  October 1992

  ARMSTRONG SPACE STATION

  Without power, Silver Tower was little more than a fifty-billion-dollar orbiting mausoleum. Air could not circulate, module pressurization could not be maintained because of the leaks in the hull. Electronic carbon dioxide scrubbers were inoperable, and old-style lithium hydroxide carbon dioxide scrubber canisters were much less effective without air being circulated through them. The attitude thrusters that kept the station on a proper orbit were useless without computer control.

  The station was suddenly deaf, dumb and blind.

  But days before, right after arriving back on Armstrong, Saint-Michael and his crew had prepared for another attack, and safeguarding backup power sources had been their first priority. They’d labeled their makeshift control panel the “planter box” because it had been constructed using one of the command module’s green plant boxes— Saint-Michael didn’t know whatever happened to the dirt. Even now it resembled a planter box, sprouting a dozen thick bundles of wires, some ending in round twist-lock junction caps or ribbon-cable snap connectors, and others looping back around through the box and out along cable conduits to other parts of the command module.

  This was no computer terminal or sophisticated electronic relay center; the circuits were the wire bundles themselves. As for the switches, if a wire junction was plugged into another, the switch was “on.” If it was unplugged, it was “off.” They had labeled each wire bundle with descriptions of where the wires led and what they did. Saint-Michael anchored himself now to the Velcro deck and began unplugging, watching for the last connector to snap into place and the lights to flicker on in the command module.

  He reached down to his spacesuit control panel and clicked on the station wide interphone. “Ann, how do you copy?”

  “I can hear you, Jason.”

  “Switch to air-to-air with me.” He switched to A/A on the comm control. “Marty? How do you read?”

  “Loud and clear, General. You missed a Fourth of July barnburner out here. Those Russian spaceplanes sparkle when you hit ’em with the laser. You all done with your fireworks? Can I come back in to pick up my fares?”

  “You can come back in but we’re not leaving. It may be crazy, but we’re going to try to reactivate the station again.”

  “One problem, General. That last Russian missile took out your master fuel cell. Where are you going to get the power? I’m pretty good but I can’t figure out how to jump-start Silver Tower from Enterprise. ”

  “What about the solar arrays? Can you see them out there? What’s their status?”

  “Stand by.” A few moments later Marty came back on channel. “Looks bad, General. I can’t even find half of the arrays. Three and four are still attached but they’re collapsed against the keel. It would t
ake an army of techs and a shuttle a week to repair them—if it’s possible.”

  Silence, then Ann clicked on channel. “Jason, I might have an answer.... We still have a power source on this station bigger than all the fuel cells and solar arrays put together. I’m talking about the MHD reactor.”

  “You mean you can hook the reactor into the station power circuits?”

  “Why not? Until Kevin Baker and I fixed it that’s what it was doing all by itself. I can undo some of the fixes we did, reverse the power relays and send MHD power from Skybolt back through the ignition circuits to the station batteries. The battery transformers and overload protectors should be able to protect the batteries from overvoltage damage. All you have to do is route battery power from the emergency bus to the station main bus and we should be able to use the MHD reactor to charge the batteries.”

  “Sounds too simple,” Saint-Michael said, his irony lost on Ann for the moment. “Well, let’s do it.”

  Marty said, “And I can tether Enterprise to the keel and transfer to—”

  “Negative,” Saint-Michael said as he began to pull apart consoles in the command module. “I want you to get in contact with someone on earth, tell them our situation and request a rescue sortie soon as possible.”

  “That’ll be a trick,” Marty said. “I never did fix Enterprise's TDRS.”

  “So use UHF standby radio. The Dakar-Ascension earth stations will be your best chance, or Yarra Yarra in Australia. Keep trying. I don’t know how much longer our air is going to last... . You copy that, Marty?”