by Dale Brown
Seeing it coming, Nadia unbuckled her seat belt and stood up—balancing gracefully on the twin tips of her black carbon-fiber running blades. Nearly two years before, she’d been severely wounded in a battle against Russian assassins sent to murder the man who was now America’s president. To save her life, trauma surgeons had been forced to amputate both legs below the knee. Months of painful rehabilitation and exhausting physical training had taught her to master these agile, incredibly flexible running blades, along with other, more conventional prosthetic limbs. But in the end, despite all her hard work, it had become clear that she would never be able to stay on active duty in Poland’s Special Forces. So, at Brad’s urging, she’d transferred to a joint Scion–Sky Masters private space enterprise based here in Nevada. Learning to fly the incredible S-series spaceplanes and work in outer space had been like a dream come true. In zero-G, her missing legs were no handicap at all . . . a fact she had proved beyond a doubt during Scion’s desperate assault on Russia’s Mars One orbital platform.
Brad offered her his arm as they waited for the aircraft’s lone steward to unlatch and open the door. Nadia took it gladly, not because she needed any physical support, but simply because she delighted in his touch and presence. Her first fears that a lingering sense of guilt about the injuries she’d suffered would drive him away had long since disappeared.
The door swung open in a blast of cold air, revealing Hunter “Boomer” Noble already ambling up the ramp to greet them. Wearing a huge, welcoming grin, he shook Brad’s hand and gave Nadia a quick hug. “Welcome back to the ass end of nowhere,” he declaimed. “Otherwise known as Battle Mountain—home of the sweetest flying machines known to mankind . . . and not much else.”
That was a typically Boomer-grade wild exaggeration, Brad thought with amusement. Since Sky Masters Aerospace moved its operations from Las Vegas, both the company and the surrounding area had blossomed—high-tech companies from all over the world moving here had turned the sleepy little mining town into a bustling, modern city.
When he wasn’t flying special missions for Scion, the tall, lanky Boomer Noble—so nicknamed because his early engine designs had a bad habit of unexpectedly and spectacularly exploding—was the chief of aerospace engineering for Sky Masters. He also ran the company’s advanced aircraft and spaceplane training programs. Not many other people could have managed what were essentially three-plus full-time jobs. But “work hard, play hard” had been Boomer’s motto for most of his life.
“Nice to see you, too,” Brad said, matching his friend’s grin.
“Say, where’s Vasey?” Boomer asked, peering inside the jet’s empty passenger cabin curiously. “You guys get tired of that hoity-toity British accent of his and dump him out somewhere over the Pacific?”
Brad laughed. “Nope.” He donned an innocent look. “And there’s no way you can prove anything, even if we did.”
“Constable decided to take some long-overdue R&R,” Nadia explained patiently. “He said something about visiting relatives in Australia and New Zealand.”
“Relatives,” Boomer snorted cynically. “I bet. More likely that Brit has a cunning plan involving a couple of curvy female flight attendants and a few cases of champagne.”
Smiling, Nadia shook her head in mock dismay. “Oh, Boomer, you really should not assume everyone shares your devious and debauched nature.”
“Moi? Debauched? Perish the thought,” the other man said, dramatically putting his hand over his heart. “I’m a reformed character these days. Drinking, dames, and dice are strictly a faint echo of my long-vanished past.”
Brad and Nadia exchanged a quick, meaningful look. They’d heard the gossip about Boomer and his copilot, Liz Gallagher. The two of them were supposed to be seeing a lot of each other outside of working hours. A lot. Maybe the rumors were accurate for once. If so, the petite redhead would certainly be a huge step up from the ditzy casino cocktail waitresses he usually chased. In fact, she was just the kind of levelheaded, highly intelligent woman who might finally be able to successfully corral the hard-driving, hard-living Hunter Noble.
“Speaking of R&R, though,” Boomer continued. “What do you guys have planned for yourselves? A couple of weeks in the Caribbean? A jaunt to Paris or Rome? Tell me all, so I can grit my teeth and bitch and moan about my hard luck being stuck here with a couple of hundred wannabe space cadets to train.”
“Well, we might—” Brad started to say.
Shaking her head sadly, Nadia cut him off. “Alas, we are not going anywhere. We have too much work to do.”
“We do?”
She nodded firmly. “Yes, we most certainly do, Brad McLanahan. As you should remember.” She started ticking items off on her fingertips. “There are guest lists to finalize. Invitations to write out and send. Thank-you notes for engagement presents to compose. Bridesmaid and groomsmen’s gifts to select—”
Brad turned pale. “Ack.” He looked at Boomer and mouthed, “Help.”
“Not me, brother,” the other man said with heartfelt sincerity. If anything, his smile grew even wider. “I’m not dumb enough to get between Major Rozek here and anything she’s got her mind firmly set on.”
“Thank you, Boomer,” Nadia said, matching his tone perfectly. “I always knew you were a wise man.”
“Gee, thanks.”
But now her own smile carried a hint of wicked glee. “No matter what everyone else has always said.”
Seven
The White House, Washington, D.C.
The Next Day
President John Dalton Farrell looked up at the sharp rap on his open door. “Yes?”
A short, pert woman with shoulder-length, silver-blond hair poked her head inside the Oval Office. “Well, J.D., those fellas you’ve been waitin’ on finally drifted in,” she said brusquely, with more than a hint of a West Texas twang. “That old hipster fart and the spaceman, I mean. You want to see ’em now?”
Farrell hid a grin. In her own words, Maisie Harrigan had been his “personal go-fer, bottle washer, and all-around ass-kicker” for decades—going back to a time when his entire oil and gas business consisted of one leased drilling rig and a couple of broken-down pickup trucks. Now, as executive assistant to the president, she ran Oval Office operations with an iron fist. It was also no secret that she saw one of her main jobs as making sure her boss and those around him didn’t get too big for their britches. “Sure thing, Maisie. Show them in, please.”
He worked even harder to keep the smile off his face when she ushered his two visitors in, lectured them not to “waste too much of J.D.’s time, you hear?,” and then departed with an audible sniff.
Kevin Martindale looked after her with a hint of awe. “My God, but that woman scares me, Mr. President,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve got ex–Navy SEAL bodyguards I wouldn’t bet a dime on if they went up against her.”
“She is a force of nature,” Farrell agreed.
Martindale’s long gray hair, neatly trimmed beard, and fondness for very expensive, open-necked suits did make him look a bit like some aging and dissolute playboy, Farrell decided. But that was only if you ignored his shrewd, penetrating gaze . . . and didn’t know that he’d occupied this same office as president of the United States.
Since leaving the White House, the other man had thrown his energies into Scion, the private military and intelligence company he’d created. For the past several years, Martindale had recruited, organized, and equipped the ultra high-tech air and ground units and covert operatives who had helped defend Poland and its smaller Eastern European allies against Russian aggression. Now, working mostly behind the scenes, Scion was coaching America’s regular armed forces in the advanced equipment and new war-fighting techniques it had so successfully pioneered.
Farrell’s other visitor, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Patrick McLanahan, had played his own vital part in Scion’s successes—both on and off the battlefield. Unfortunately, the terrible price he had paid for tho
se victories was immediately apparent. Years ago, he’d been critically injured on a mission over the People’s Republic of China. He was alive now only thanks to a remarkably advanced piece of medical hardware, the LEAF, or Life Enhancing Assistive Facility. Without its carbon-fiber-and-metal exoskeleton, life-support backpack, and clear, spacesuit-like helmet, he would die within hours—killed by wounds that were far beyond the ability of modern medicine to heal.
“Maybe we’d better move on expeditiously through our business today, Mr. President,” Patrick suggested, with a crooked smile visible through his helmet. “Yon dragon lady out there is right about the value of your time . . . and I’d sure hate to piss her off. For one thing, there’s no way I can outrun her in this Mechanical Man rig.” Servo motors whined softly when he shrugged his shoulders.
Farrell laughed. “It does make you wonder who’s running this outfit, doesn’t it? Me or Maisie?”
“Well, ‘you’ve gotta dance with those that brung ya,’” Martindale quoted Ronald Reagan with a thin smile of his own.
Farrell nodded. Of course, the classic reminder to stay loyal to your supporters applied just as much to the two men seated before him as it did to Maisie Harrigan. Together with the general’s son Brad, Nadia Rozek, and a handful of others, they’d risked their lives to save his miserable hide. Now they were among his most trusted national security and intelligence policy advisers—a fact that he knew irritated many in Washington, D.C.’s status-conscious establishment. The fact that neither man held an official position in his administration made their obvious preeminence even more galling to some in the Pentagon and at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters.
Which said more about their critics than anything else, he decided. Washington was full of “experts” who’d failed upward, attaining higher and higher government positions despite repeated mistakes and blunders. To people like that, Kevin Martindale and Patrick McLanahan—and Farrell himself, he knew—were a threat, because they cared more about results than prestige.
He waved the two men into chairs and then leaned back against the corner of his desk. “Okay, shoot. What’s first on the agenda?”
“The Paracel Island freedom-of-navigation exercise,” Martindale told him.
Farrell snorted. “More like the Paracel Island turkey shoot, at least from what I’ve read.”
“Not the most diplomatic way of putting it,” Patrick said with a quick laugh. “But accurate nonetheless. We pulled in a treasure trove of intel on some of the PRC’s most advanced ballistic missiles—”
“And gave Comrade Li Jun a well-deserved black eye,” Martindale finished, with intense satisfaction. “With luck, our little show of nonlethal force should discourage Beijing from further escalating tensions in the South China Sea for some time to come.”
Farrell nodded somberly. “Amen to that.” China’s expansionist and aggressive moves among the reefs and islands that dotted the South China Sea had already sparked a number of international crises and even open naval and air clashes with its neighbors and the United States. Puncturing Beijing’s confidence that its armed forces could take on America’s military and win had been one of the primary objectives of last week’s combined Navy and Scion operation.
And the very fact that it had been a successful combined operation should achieve another of his objectives—demonstrating the value of using Sky Masters and Scion weapons, aircraft, and electronic warfare systems as a force multiplier for America’s regular armed forces. Like most bureaucracies, the Defense Department had a serious case of “not invented here” syndrome. For too many generals and admirals, weapons, equipment, and software that didn’t emerge from the Pentagon’s labyrinthine procurement processes were automatically suspect. But after they studied the awestruck after-action reports from McCampbell’s captain and her officers, Farrell was willing to bet that a lot of folks in both the Navy and the Air Force would be desperate to get their hands on ALQ-293 SPEAR systems of their own and the Sky Masters–designed MQ-77 Ghost Wolf unmanned attack aircraft.
The same thing went for the S-29B Shadow . . . but he’d already allocated control over all armed spaceplanes to the newly formed U.S. Space Force. After last year’s battles with the Russians in low Earth orbit, his push to create a sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces had sailed through Congress. Fully uniting the separate space-related programs and commands previously split between the Air Force, Navy, and even the Army was a long-overdue reform.
Right now, standing up the Space Force as a fully functioning outfit was still very much a work in progress. The other services weren’t happy about losing big chunks of budgetary authority and seeing many of their best young space-minded officers and enlisted personnel reassigned . . . and they were dragging their feet wherever possible. Fortunately for Farrell, Martindale and Patrick McLanahan were both old hands at circumventing bureaucratic resistance to new ideas. Their advice made it easy for him to distinguish between reasonable objections to his directives and purely parochial, empire-building bullshit.
“We’re not quite where we need to be yet,” Patrick told him bluntly when Farrell asked how things were going. “At least when it comes to getting the Space Force full control over its own procurement and logistics. That’s where the dead-enders in the various services are putting up a real bitch of a fight.”
Farrell nodded. Although procurement and supply functions weren’t seen as especially glamorous, they always absorbed a huge fraction of the budget in any big organization. They also tended to attract men and women who were very good at operating within clearly defined limits . . . but who were often leery of the whole idea of change. “What about the operations side of the Space Force?”
“That’s running considerably more smoothly,” Martindale replied. “For example, Eagle Station is now fully crewed by active-duty Space Force personnel. I just got the word from orbit on the way over here. Our Scion team finished its formal handover of all systems about half an hour ago.”
“Now that is some seriously good news,” Farrell said enthusiastically. They’d needed Scion technicians and mission specialists to run Eagle Station’s sensors, weapons, and fusion power generator after its capture from the Russians. But there was no denying that the company’s continued control over the space station had been a huge public relations headache. Typically over-the-top Russian propaganda blamed Scion’s “homicidal space pirates” for the deaths of Gryzlov and hundreds of others when the center of the Kremlin got blown to smithereens. Nobody who counted bought that line of bull, although it had been judged expedient to disarm the remaining Rapira missiles aboard the station as part of the ensuing cease-fire agreement with Moscow. What mattered more were those in Congress and in the media who hadn’t been happy about a for-profit private corporation running a strategic military asset like the armed orbital station. He made a mental note to have his press secretary make an announcement, preferably with a live television feed from Colonel Reynolds, Eagle’s new commander.
“The first active-duty spaceplane squadron is working up pretty fast, too,” Patrick reported. “We’ve been running likely candidates through intensive training out at Battle Mountain, using the simulators there. As you’d expect, the washout rate is pretty high, but Hunter Noble and his instructor team have already certified a full crew as flight-ready. In fact, they’re taking the new S-29B Sky Masters just delivered into orbit tomorrow for its final test flight and systems checks.”
“One rookie crew and one spaceplane fresh off the factory floor doesn’t exactly add up to much of a squadron,” Martindale commented dryly.
“Maybe not yet,” Patrick allowed. “But there are two more Shadows nearing completion. By the time Sky Masters rolls them out, we’ll have enough trained pilots and crew specialists to fly and fight them.”
Farrell considered that. While the S-29B was only an armed version of the original S-29 spaceplane, intended to carry passengers and cargo into orbit, it was still a remarkably complex and expensive machine.
Plus, the design had already proved itself in action, both inside the atmosphere and in orbit. So watching the United States put three fully operational Shadows out on the flight line in less than a year should definitely send a chill up certain spines in Moscow and Beijing—and firmly signal America’s resolve to maintain its current edge in space combat capability. He looked at both men. “Basically, cutting to the chase, it sounds like y’all agree that we’re in pretty good shape militarily.”
Martindale glanced quickly at Patrick and then back at the president. “In general, I guess that’s a fair assessment,” he said. “The lack of real-time satellite intelligence is still a problem, but that should diminish as we launch new recon birds into Earth orbit. Plus, as we move additional S-29s to operational status, we can use them for directed space reconnaissance against high-value targets.”
Farrell eyed him closely. “Seems to me I’m hearing a mighty big unspoken ‘yes, but’ hanging out there, Kevin.”
“True,” Martindale said with a rueful smile. “Based on what we know, our current strategic situation seems mostly satisfactory.” He hesitated. “It’s what we don’t know that I find worrying.”
Farrell frowned. “Anything in particular?”
Patrick leaned forward. “What neither Kevin nor I can forget is how completely the Russians blindsided us last year.” Through his clear helmet, his lined face now looked grim. “We never expected Moscow to beat us to the punch with the world’s first long-range energy weapon and with its first honest-to-God compact nuclear fusion generator.”
“Both of which were based on original research they stole from American labs,” Farrell reminded him.
“Sure, but what matters is that the Russians took concepts our government stuck in a drawer and forgot about—or never adequately funded—and they made them damn well work,” the other man said stubbornly. “Plus, those bastards did it without letting us get so much as a whiff of what they were planning until it was almost too late.”
