Semper Mars: Book One of the Heritage Trilogy

by Ian Douglas

  CARLOTTA BRAUN: Good evening. President Markham today responded forcefully to what he called ‘a blunt ultimatum’ by the UN General Assembly, denouncing that body for its ‘unwarranted intrusion into the internal affairs of the United States’ and its ‘high-handed and hostile actions against American assets in space.’

  VIDIMAGE—PRESIDENT MARKHAM SPEAKING FROM THE WHITE HOUSE BASEMENT OFFICE:

  “At 10:45 Eastern Daylight Time this morning, I asked the Congress of these United States to recognize that a state of war now exists between the United States of America and the governing body of the United Nations.

  “I wish to stress that we have no quarrel with any member nation of that body. This war was forced upon us by the hostile and unreasonable demands made by the UN, by their violations of American sovereignty, and by their takeover of the International Space Station. We call upon men of courage, vision, bravery, and goodwill in all nations to help us now as we face together this corrupt tyranny that claims to be a world government but so far has proven only that it is a world disgrace….”

  VIDIMAGE—A CITY SCENE SHOWING SEVERAL BUILDINGS IN RUINS, THEIR FACADES BLASTED AWAY, A GAPING CRATER IN THE STREET, AN OVERTURNED GROUND CAR. CIVILIANS AND NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS ARE DIGGING THROUGH THE RUBBLE, SEARCHING FOR SURVIVORS. THE SUBTITLE READS “ATLANTA.”

  CARLOTTA BRAUN: “The UN response was immediate and dramatic. By 11:30 Eastern Time, UN cruise missiles launched from Quebec, Cuba, and Mexico were striking deep into the American heartland. An estimated two hundred missiles were fired from various launch points, and while fighters from Aerospace Force, Navy, and Marine units succeeded in downing many of them, an as yet unknown number managed to get through.”

  VIDIMAGE—SEVERAL MORE CITY SHOTS IN RAPID SUCCESSION SHOW THE RESULTS OF MISSILE STRIKES IN OTHER CITIES, CROWDS OF CIVILIANS FLEEING IN THE STREETS, A PALL OF DENSE, BLACK SMOKE ABOVE DOWNTOWN CHICAGO, AND ONE QUICK VIEW OF A WINGED CRUISE MISSILE SWEEPING LOW ABOVE A CITY PARK, CAPTURED IN SHAKY FOOTAGE BY AN AMATEUR VIDCORDER OPERATOR.

  CARLOTTA BRAUN: “Twenty-two major population centers have been hit so far, including Dallas, Chicago, Washington, Boston, Atlanta, and New York City. In addition, there are reports of heavy fighting at the US border, both along the Rio Grande River, in Texas, and north of Plattsburgh, New York, where elements of the Armored Armée québecois are reported to have crossed into the United States in a quick thrust south from Montreal. There are no official reports as yet, but casualties are said to be heavy.

  “Government authorities stress that civilians should remain inside and off the streets. The bombardment thus far has been limited to high-explosive warheads, and authorities insist that, despite rumors to the contrary, there have been no nuclear, chemical, or biological strikes by UN forces. Damage, though widespread, is not considered serious, and there has been no reported disruption of critical services. Civilians are requested—”

  NET NEWS IS EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES.

  PLEASE STAND BY.

  SATURDAY, 9 JUNE

  Shepard Military Orbital

  Platform (MOP)

  1417 hours GMT

  Colonel Peter Dahlgren had been a member of the US Astronaut Corps for nearly fourteen years. Before that, he’d been Aerospace Force, starting off driving F-22s and ending up as an ace test pilot working on some of the most advanced and highly secret flight development programs in the US government’s arsenal. Most of his work in the last five years had been more or less routine—if that word could ever be successfully applied to working in space. He’d served on the ISS three times, once as station commander, and he’d been slated for a US lunar mission until budgetary and political problems had canceled that program.

  Six months earlier, his high security clearance had gotten him a shot at another orbital mission—a tour aboard Shepard MOP, one of the handful of independent US LEO facilities. The tour had lasted six weeks, and upon his return to Vandenberg, he’d thought he was grounded for good.

  Then war clouds had begun gathering, and he found himself assigned once again to Shepard…running the station’s highly classified military payload.

  Shepard Station was little more than a Shuttle II external tank fitted out with living quarters, a lab, and a docking module. It also possessed a 500 KW nuclear reactor, though this was a closely guarded secret. The real secret of Shepard, though, was the Hecate laser that filled most of the main lab compartment.

  Hecate—named for the Greek deity who, among other things, was goddess of the night—was a new weapons system with a software AI developed within the past few years at the Moravec Institute in Pittsburgh. Dahlgren had needed his astronomical security classification just to learn about the new device, a High-Energy Laser, or HEL, which had been put into orbit the previous year. The idea was to deploy a laser powerful enough to knock down missiles or aircraft from orbit, and so far it had worked well in tests against both static and moving targets in the Nevada desert.

  Now, however, the Hecate HEL was about to be used for the first time in combat. According to the coded message beamed to Shepard that morning, cruise missiles were still striking targets across most of the continental US and causing heavy damage. It would be impossible to use one laser in a single fast-moving station in LEO to knock down more than a scant handful of the incoming cruise missiles, but the attempt would demonstrate once and for all the system’s practicality…and the value of an idea that had been argued vehemently over for the past fifty-five years. As Shepard Station drifted southeast across the Gulf of Mexico west of Florida, Dahlgren was floating in the lab, his face pressed against the rubber-hooded repeater screen for the station’s Earth-watch telescope system. The telescope, slaved to Shepard’s powerful look-down radar, was being operated by his companion aboard the station, Major Fred Lance, USAF.

  “I’ve got a target, Colonel,” Lance reported. “Matanzas launch, two minutes, twelve seconds ago. Heading three-five-eight, altitude approximately five meters.”

  “Lock us on, Fred,” Dahlgren replied. The lighted display showed a dizzying sweep of water and cloud as the telescope, a relatively small device mounted on the station’s outer hull, pivoted slightly. Green crosshairs centered a moment later on a white sliver in the center of the display. He pressed a touch screen point, and the image enlarged, giving him a detailed look at the target, which the telescope was now following automatically. The craft was apparently unmarked and painted off-white, a cigar shape with squared-off ends, a tail section like a miniature jet aircraft, and short, skinny wings amidships.

  “You should be centered, Colonel.”

  “I’ve got him. Do we have a shot?”

  “Looks clear to me. On your command….”

  “Fire.”

  A point on the cruise missile, hurtling along at just below the speed of sound two hundred miles below, grew suddenly and intolerably brilliant, a dazzling star so bright that Dahlgren blinked and looked away. When he looked back, the dazzle was still there, but dimmer as the telescope-camera CCD adjusted for the intensity of the light.

  Lance was counting off the seconds. “Two…three…”

  And then the cruise missile was gone, replaced in a literal flash by a tumbling cloud of broken debris that streaked ahead for several seconds more before impacting the surface of the water in a ragged burst of white spray.

  “I have lost target, Colonel,” Lance said. “Hecate at power off.”

  “Target destroyed,” Dahlgren replied. He looked up and met Lance’s eyes across the lab. “Nice shooting!”

  Lance shrugged. “Hell, Colonel. Hecate did it. All I did was push the damned button….”

  And that, of course, was the beauty of the thing. Dahlgren looked up at the porthole in the hull a few meters away, at the drifting glory of sea and cloud. What Hecate had just done was truly remarkable. With little direction from the two human operators aboard Shepard, the sophisticated AI software had run a down-looking radar and, from an altitude of 320 kilometers, separa
ted a speeding cruise missile three meters long and with a wingspan of less than a meter from the return of the water less than five meters below it. It had slaved an optical CCD telescope to the radar image for use as a visual target system and kept the target locked on despite both the target’s flight north at five hundred miles per hour and the space station’s drift southeast at its orbital velocity of nearly 18,000 mph.

  And finally and perhaps most remarkably, it had fired the station’s laser and held the beam dead on its tiny target for the seconds necessary to burn through the missile’s hull and destroy it. Hecate was only a half-megawatt laser, and much of that energy was lost in the turbulence of the Earth’s atmosphere below; the Hecate AI had used backscatter from the laser beam on the target to continually correct the beam’s output and aim, keeping it locked on until the target was destroyed.

  “Looks like we’ve got a winner, Fred,” he said. “Find me another target before we complete this pass.”

  “You got it, sir. I’ve got another launch, same site, at one minute five seconds ago, bearing three-five-two…”

  Dahlgren peered again into the hooded screen, watching as the AI software lined up the next shot. Like shooting fish in a goddamn barrel.

  “Shepard, Shepard, this is Cheyenne Mountain,” a voice called over his jumpsuit’s com speaker.

  “This is Shepard, Colorado,” he replied. “Go.”

  “Shepard, we have an orbit change for you, execution in…seven minutes. Drop what you’re doing and get set for a burn.”

  “Ah…Colorado,” Dahlgren said. “We have a target ready for lock-on—”

  “We copy that, Shepard, but this can’t wait. Secure your gear and stand by to copy the burn parameters. Over.”

  “Roger that.” Damn! What could be so all-fired important? That cruise missile streaking north out of Cuba was going to come down someplace, and people were going to die. Shepard couldn’t intercept all of the missiles, but it could stop a bunch, each time it passed overhead. The idea was to force the bad guys to stagger their launches to times when Shepard was below the horizon, and give the air-defense boys time to regroup.

  But evidently, Cheyenne Mountain had other things in mind.

  Shepard MOP was not exactly a spaceship. It had all of the maneuverability of an elephant in free fall. Still, a rack of strap-on B-30 maneuvering thrusters attached to the external tank’s framework gave them the ability to change orbit within certain fairly narrow parameters, enough to pass over a particular target on the ground at a specified time. If Colorado wanted them to engage in a burn within the next few minutes, it was because they had a particular destination in mind, one with a fairly narrow access window. That argued that they were trying to manage an orbital rendezvous.

  Seven minutes wasn’t much time. The Hecate laser was a delicate piece of equipment, and parts had to be strapped down before any delta-v maneuver.

  “Let’s hump it, Fred,” Dahlgren called. Together, they began securing the laser. Two hundred miles below them, the cruise missile continued streaking north, just a few feet above the Gulf of Mexico.

  EIGHTEEN

  SATURDAY, 9 JUNE: 1929 HOURS GMT

  Office of the President

  White House Basement,

  Washington DC

  1529 hours EDT

  The president looked a lot older now than he had the last time Admiral Gray had seen him, less than twenty-four hours before. The familiar, easy, politician’s grin, the engaging and confident manner, both were gone. Markham was slumped into the big executive’s chair behind the desk, head supported on one hand, eyes bleak as he stared at the muted images flickering across the wall screen to his right. Net News had gotten back on the air again this morning, despite the cruise missile strike that had taken out its broadcast antenna in Silver Springs.

  “So?” Markham’s voice was muffled by his hand. “How are we holding, CJ?”

  “We’re doing better than we expected, Mr. President.” Gray laid a folder on the president’s desk. “Our air-defense forces, air national guard, naval air groups, and other assets, we estimate, have accounted for approximately four hundred cruise missiles, or roughly sixty-five percent of what they’ve thrown at us so far.”

  “You’re saying over two hundred missiles have gotten through.”

  Louis Harrel, standing at Gray’s side, nodded. “Two hundred fourteen, as of the latest count, Mr. President.”

  On the big wall screen, Carlotta Braun’s dark features stared down at the three men, her too-red lips moving soundlessly. Abruptly, the scene shifted to an aerial view of Washington. The Mall was visible, a long green rectangle reaching toward the familiar, white-domed majesty of the Capitol Building. Something—a tiny, white something like a child’s glider—was streaking along the Mall, chasing its own shadow on the ground. In a heartbeat, it streaked past the Air and Space Museum, passed Fourth and Third Streets and the Capital Reflecting Pool, and arrowed squarely into the Capitol’s west side, detonating inside the Rotunda.

  The explosion blew out windows, pieces of stone wall, and several Greek columns. The Capitol steps, mercifully, were empty of people, but the blast flipped several hydrogen-fueled cars parked on the drive below and lashed nearby cherry trees with hurricane winds. For an agonizing several seconds, nothing more happened. Then the huge dome seemed to settle slightly, cracked, then collapsed inward as chunks of white stone crashed down in a billowing avalanche into the gutted center of the building.

  Braun’s face reappeared, lips moving.

  “They’ve been showing that same damned news clip for three hours now,” President Markham said bitterly. “Can’t they find some other piece of death and mayhem to bombard the public with?”

  “This must be playing holy hell with national morale,” Harrel said.

  “It is,” the president agreed. “And the answer is, what? Invoke government censorship?”

  “This is war, Mr. President,” Harrel said.

  “Those days are long over,” the president said. “Even if we could censor the netnews—and I’m not sure we could—the people would just get their news from outside the country, and you know the spin they’re putting on things.” He gestured at the screen. “At least they know they’re getting an honest account here, and we’ll need that when the tide turns.” He looked at Gray.

  “We can expect a turning, can’t we, Admiral? Please tell me there’s a bright side to all of this.”

  “We expect a break in the attack soon, Mr. President,” Gray said. “Our estimates of the number of missiles in their stores suggest they can’t keep up this level of bombardment for much longer. They’ll need time to rearm and reequip. The likeliest scenario has them announcing a dramatic cessation to the bombardment after today or possibly tomorrow, and giving us a chance to think things over. Their ultimatum still stands. They’ll want some kind of a reply to that.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  Gray shrugged. “They’ll continue the bombardment, I suppose, until we comply.”

  “There is a chance, Mr. President,” the national security advisor added, “that they will escalate in the next phase.”

  “Nukes?”

  “It’s a possibility. The DCI says they might try using one or a very few tactical nukes as a demonstration against military bases, or possibly our launch facilities at Canaveral and Vandenberg. It is not likely, at this juncture, that they will resort to chemical or biological weapons.”

  The president grimaced. “‘Not likely.’ But it’ll happen sooner or later, if I don’t back down.”

  Gray found himself holding his breath. The UN ultimatum had been blunt and to the point. The United States was to disarm completely. Its military forces were to stand down, its aircraft to remain grounded, its bases open to UN inspection teams and occupation forces. A United Nations Special Governing Committee was to take charge of the Washington bureaucracy; elected officials would remain in power, but subject to UN directives. It was nothing less than a blueprint
for complete and unconditional surrender.

  And Admiral Gray was afraid that Markham was going to agree to it.

  “What kind of a chance can you give us, Admiral?” Markham wanted to know. “Tell me you have a secret weapon or two squirreled away that I don’t know about.”

  “Well, sir, we don’t have anything like that, but we can buy us some time. Operation Freedom is on track. Launch is scheduled for 0700 Pacific Time Tuesday. We’re in the process of nudging Shepard into a better orbit, so they can provide backup and fire support.”

  “Operation Freedom. That’s the ISS mission?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And how is that going to help us?”

  Gray drew a deep breath. “It’s a symbol, Mr. President.” He nodded toward the screen, where the destruction of the US Capitol Building was being played out again. “Most of their strikes, so far, have been against high-visibility, newsworthy targets. Public buildings. State capitols. Things with propaganda value, that demonstrate that we can’t protect ourselves from this kind of attack.”

  The White House had been badly damaged several hours ago. A near miss had damaged the Washington Monument, too, though it was still standing.

  “Go on.”

  “The International Space Station is also a symbol, Mr. President. A station that passes over our heads every ninety minutes or so and proves that we can’t protect our interests in space…an area where America historically held a strong lead over everyone else.”

  “Hell, we were giving up on space,” Harrel pointed out. “At least until we found that alien shit on Mars.”

  “That ‘alien shit,’ as Mr. Harrel calls it, may well be the key to this whole war,” Gray said. “It’s Ken Morrow’s contention that Mars is the main reason the UN jumped us. Not Aztlan. And not US unwillingness to go along with the UN’s agenda.”

  “I know,” the president replied. “He’s been telling me that every day now for the past week.” He shook his head. “Tell me, gentlemen. Is anything we find on Mars worth that?” He gestured at Braun’s oversize face on the wall screen.