The launch pad’s dockmaster spent the afternoon supervising the final deliveries, trucks coming and going, freight loading up and down the retractable cargo scaffolds and into the ship’s holds. It was finally quiet now, and Oleg sat in his office in a mobile trailer next to the pad, looking forward to going home. He was just waiting on his assistant Yuri to arrive, to take the night shift and babysit the loaded ship until its crew boarded before dawn the next morning.
A spoiled kid, he thought of young Yuri. Not even three years out of university and already griping about his working hours, griping about taxes and money. Oleg shook his head thinking about the state of Russian culture, though it was usually just his wife who endured his opinions about it. So old these days, he’d tell her, the young think they’re entitled to whatever they want just for the asking. He often talked about the hardships he dealt with when he was around Yuri’s age, in the years after Putin when the motherland all but fell to pieces, and wondered if Yuri’s generation even deserved to call themselves Russians.
Oleg noticed the truck coming down the road, half a kilometer away and approaching the access gate to the spaceport’s launching section. He squinted past the glare of the headlights. It appeared to be a container truck of some kind. And it was manned, which usually meant a hazmat delivery. Liquid helium, perhaps? He glanced at his computer screens. The Kostroma was definitely full. There weren’t supposed to be any more deliveries. The truck drove past the inner gate and on towards his trailer next to the launch pad.
He stepped outside as the truck approached, holding up his hand to keep the headlights out of his eyes. The driver parked and opened the door to step out of the truck, and for a second Oleg could see the passenger pointing an unfamiliar electronic device out his open window. He didn’t realize it was pointed in the direction of one of the pad’s lighting towers, which held the lone security camera fixed on that spot.
“Excuse me,” Oleg called out to the driver. “Is your–”
The driver drew a sidearm and shot the dockmaster twice in the chest, dropping him to the ground.
Oleg lay on the cold pavement and gasped for air through the blood in his lungs, a piercing pain radiating from his chest. As he looked up, Oleg saw the man who shot him spin around and tap the truck’s container twice with the butt of his weapon. The back end of the container detached from the rest of the tank and swung upwards on a hinge, and out of the tank came more men, at least a dozen of them. They sprinted towards the cargo lift on Kostroma’s support scaffold. They wore black body armor and tactical gear, from boots up to helmets, and they were armed. The dockmaster struggled to crawl toward his trailer, wanting to call the launch operations watch, but the man who shot him was walking toward him. As the man pointed the gun towards his heart, Oleg only managed a weak “Nyet…!”
* **
Colonel Terzi smiled as he and his men entered the lift. There were no problems with either of the spaceport access gates, and the evening dockmaster was alone at the launch pad as expected. Sergeant Sahin shot the man before he could sound an alarm, then threw the body into the back of the tanker truck and closed its hatch again. Within seconds Sahin was driving the truck again, heading the three kilometers towards the south gate and out of the spaceport. Sergeant Uysal in the cab neutralized the security camera, and now Lieutenant Erkan took over that duty as Uysal prepared to drive the dockmaster’s car out of the spaceport. Uysal first emptied a canteen of water to dilute the small splash of blood on the pavement. The little patch of red would be scorched away when the spacecraft launched before dawn the next morning.
The rest of Terzi’s men, along with Dr. Demirci, hurried away from the security camera’s sight and were now ready to enter the ship. Lieutenant Erkan switched off his electronic dampening device as he joined the other twelve men in the cargo lift. There would only be sixty seconds of a frozen camera image for the Russians to analyze, and if all went well they wouldn’t think to do that until at least two days later, after the Kostroma reached its destination. By then it would be much too late. All Terzi needed now was young Yuri to arrive, to begin his night shift on time.
* **
Down the road, as Sergeant Sahin drove out past the inner access gate in the tanker truck, Yuri approached in his own vehicle.
He parked next to Oleg’s car by the trailer and looked over at the man sitting behind the wheel. Yuri motioned to him, and the two men stepped out of their cars.
“That’s foolish. You’re supposed to be impersonating Oleg Ivanovich? With the gray wig and clothes you sort of look like him, but he doesn’t drive off as soon as I park. We turn over our watch inside the trailer.”
“Yes, I know,” Sergeant Uysal replied. “Besides that camera on the tower, are there any security systems inside? Anything that someone else in the complex could see my face with?”
“Not unless someone calls and I answer while you’re standing in front of the screen. Come inside, please. It’s freezing out here.”
The two men entered the dockmaster trailer, and the young Russian spoke first.
“Yuri Alexeyivich Vedenin,” he said, smiling wide and shaking Uysal’s hand. “It’s a pleasure doing business with you.”
“You’ve already received the money, then?”
“Yes, I have. I saw the transfer to my new account a few minutes ago. I must say I was pretty nervous up until then.”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Vedenin. Your involvement in all this will be well concealed. My colleagues will be on their way with the ship tomorrow, and Oleg Kozlov will disappear. Any suspicions anyone might have about the ship will fall on him. It is good doing business with you as well.”
“Here’s his keycard, to start his car,” Yuri said, taking it off the desk. “What did you do with the old crank, if I may ask?”
“You may not. Have a good shift, Yuri. And try not to quit your job too soon. You must maintain appearances.”
With that, Sergeant Uysal shut the trailer door behind him and drove off in Oleg Kozlov’s car. Yuri watched him drive past the inner gate and out of sight, and then he accessed the cargo lift controls on the trailer’s computer. He sent the lift up the scaffold to the outer access hatch on Kostroma’s cargo hold number six. Section four of that hold was in fact empty, but Yuri had already seen to it that the manifest showed it full of foodstuffs. As the lift reached the hold he opened the access hatch, making sure the indicator alarm was deactivated so the watchstanders at the spaceport’s launch operations center would not pick up the disturbance.
The cargo lift lights were off, but on his screens in the haze of moonlight he could see the silhouettes of men entering the ship, ten of them at least, maybe twelve or more. There were enough to pack themselves tight inside the lone empty section of the cargo hold. He didn’t care if it was a dozen or a hundred. Yuri sealed the access hatch, and his displays showed no change to the spacecraft. He returned the cargo lift to ground level.
Then he sat back and laughed. Unrolling his tablet, he again stared at the account balance. Fortune without fame had landed in his lap, and that miserable old shit Kozlov was even gone as a bonus. Yuri had a suspicion that he wouldn’t feel any guilt about it, and he was right. Maybe, he wondered, guilt would set in after some time passes? Maybe, but for now, all he would have to do in a day or two is tell the police looking for Oleg that he turned over his shift with him on time and said good-night. The cameras recording Kozlov’s car leaving the spaceport would cover the next few minutes. It was all too easy.
* **
By 6:00 a.m. the Kostroma’s six-person flight crew were aboard their vessel. They spent the next ninety minutes reviewing the final pre-flight checklist. The cargo lifts retracted away from the ship and Yuri moved the dockmaster trailer from the area, clearing the launch pad for liftoff.
At 7:43 a.m. the detachable booster engine beneath Kostroma came to life and let loose a torrent of fire underneath the thrusters, and the ship rose into the sky. The acceleration wasn’t as fast as the o
ld rockets launched by Roscosmos’s predecessors at Baikonur, but the magnetized target fusion engine meant that liftoff did not need to be so stressful on the ship. Only three hundred tons of fuel was burned by the detachable booster, and it thrust plenty of weight up with it, nice and slow. The crew only needed to deal with up to two g, double Earth’s gravity. Elevators in tall buildings produced one-point-two. Cosmonauts in the old days felt three g during liftoff, and up to five during a typical re-entry.
The booster detached fifteen minutes later, once Kostroma was out of the atmosphere. The ship soon rendezvoused with an orbiting supply probe carrying the Rydberg exotic matter pellets it would need during its voyage. It was always a delicate maneuver to retrieve them, but necessary since their contents were not allowed on Earth. Once the fusion engines had their key fuel ingredient, the ship’s fore and aft grav plates would sync their power output to the engines and create a “gravity bubble” to counter the g-forces inside the ship. Kostroma would then spend the next sixteen hours accelerating to fifty-six hundred kilometers per second, nearly two percent of light speed. After it passed its closest approach to the Sun, the ship would spin around and adjust course for an equally long deceleration.
At the end of its transit was the Paul A. M. Dirac Quantum Chemistry Research and Development Facility. Dirac Station was the Democratic Alliance’s premier physics laboratory and the source of the exomatter fuel pellets used by interplanetary ships like the Kostroma and by the DA’s small fleet of warships. It was also the only facility allowed to legally manufacture antimatter and the more dangerous forms of exotic matter in quantity. That was thanks to its location: Dirac Station was at the L3 Lagrange point on the far side of the Sun, holding position in an orbit exactly opposite from Earth.
Yuri Vedenin didn’t stay to watch the launch. Before the Kostroma even lifted off, he ended his shift and headed for downtown. It was a long night of waiting, but he decided that he was now too rich to bother going to sleep. He reserved a luxury suite at the Mirazh Hotel, and as his car sped across Saratov Bridge he browsed the websites of the city’s escort agencies, looking for the best two girls available to meet him there.
CHAPTER 2
USS Abraham Lincoln
0906Z, 23 December 2065
Jaana Pierce sat forward in her captain’s chair, assessing the sight unfolding in front of her. Yellow lights pulsed from the ceiling as a flurry of crewmembers rushed past each other on the way to their battlestations while Pierce studied the main screen in front of everyone. The Sun was almost directly behind the warship, providing a brilliant daytime view of the Earth. Their altitude was twenty-six thousand kilometers above the surface and closing quickly. In anticipation of an increased defense condition, the USS Abraham Lincoln left its geosynchronous orbit for a holding position sixteen hundred kilometers above the Red Sea. Three other warships were inbound to their holding positions as well. This was the overture.
Lincoln was one of only five ships of the expanding U.S. Space Command, a fleet which made up half of the Democratic Alliance’s orbital warships. At nine thousand tons, the ship was the size of a traditional naval cruiser but with a fraction of the crew, much of its mass taken up by the twin engines running parallel along the aft sides of the otherwise cylindrical ship. The dozen retractable arms which projected the ship’s sensors, antennae, and weapons away from the central hull meant the ship rarely looked cylindrical at all.
The tactical action officer, or TAO, sitting next to Pierce was Lieutenant Commander Beth Yamada, the new head of the ship’s operations department. Fresh from completing her graduate program at the Celestial War College at Base Patrick in Florida, the Lincoln was her first line duty assignment in space. She was also the most recent of the ship’s four department heads to qualify at the TAO position, so as usual she was in the hotseat.
“Captain, all spaces have reported battlestations ready,” Yamada said, turning on the ship’s intercom. “Onboard Lincoln, this is the TAO. We’ve received a report of sudden and widespread activity at Hrąs al-M’umnyn air and space defense tracking sites. The alliance’s Military Committee has upgraded our alert status to Defense Condition Four, and we are en route to control point two, standing by to receive strike package orders.”
Calm and succinct so far, Pierce thought. A big improvement since the epic freakout the first time she ever addressed the crew during general quarters. Yamada’s nerves have come a long way in only four months. The captain thought back fourteen years to her own first days as a TAO and wondered if she had been much better.
Yamada focused on the control screens in front of her as she spoke. “Captain, we’re now arriving at our forward control point, and I’m transferring maneuvering control to the ship’s AI to counter our orbit and keep us on station. Vanguard, Berlin, and Theodore Roosevelt are arriving at their control points, and Command Station Kenya has assumed direct control over all warships and military satellites between low and geosynchronous orbit. Request permission to upgrade Lincoln’s weapons status from safe to tight.”
“Granted, but keep fire control locked to your console and not with the AI. We don’t want our weapons to start discharging automatically unless we hit DEFCON One.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she replied, flipping a switch to speak to the ship’s AI. “Abe, commence initial charging of all four direct-energy cannons. Extend all mount arms, weapons status tight. Release authority will remain with me unless you receive overriding orders from above.”
“Aye, ma’am,” replied Abe. “I have control of all maneuvering functions. Control of tracking, sensors, fire control, and main power functions remain with the crew.”
Abe had no sooner finished speaking when one of the room’s screens lit up in a glaring white haze, illuminating everyone’s faces. It was the telescopic camera fixed on Command Station-Kenya, in geosynchronous orbit thirty-six thousand kilometers above east Africa and the immediate superior in charge of all Democratic Alliance warships in Earth’s orbit.
“TAO, Tracking!” yelled Lieutenant Meyer over his headset, loud enough to make Captain Pierce adjust her earpiece. “All comms and datalinks from CS-Kenya have gone down!”
Abe announced what had happened. A Hras-al-M’umnyn nuclear rocket, disguised as a signals intercept satellite, had lay in wait in the geosynchronous orbit ring not far from CS-Kenya. That missile was now the first strike of a long-anticipated war.
Yamada inset the optical view of the station on the main viewscreen. The nuclear detonation occurred within a kilometer of CS-Kenya. Even without a shock wave in the vacuum of space, the immense surge of heat and radiation was more than enough to destroy it. Secondary explosions rocked the station, and what remained of CS-Kenya’s core structure cartwheeled away from its orbital point. The spiraling station spewed out balls of blue oxygen flames which expanded into space, and they floated amongst the debris and bodies. CS-Kenya had a crew of over two hundred, and from the look of it there were no survivors.
“Abe, target the HM orbital command center in Jeddah!” Yamada told the AI. “Charge all cannons and return fire on my command.”
“Don’t get too far ahead of things,” Pierce said quietly, leaning over to her. “We may receive orders any second. Roosevelt is now next in our chain of command and they can give us instructions to retaliate or to strike some other target. Remember our standing orders: we stay on weapons-tight unless we receive incoming fire.”
“Aye, ma’am, standing by. Roosevelt has acknowledged its command transfer.”
Pierce knew how Yamada felt. After an attack like that, holding fast and waiting for new orders makes us feel like a sitting duck. But it’s not our place to create our own strategies.
“TAO, Comms,” came Lieutenant Crawford’s voice over the battlenet. “We’re receiving flash emergency war orders from MILCOM. Encryption verified. We have a strike package, ma’am.”
Abe downloaded the orders and took them as its new course of action, and the pulsing yellow lights above the crew
’s heads changed to solid red. A large button labelled “Command Acknowledge” was displayed on screens in front of both Yamada and Pierce, which the TAO touched without a thought. Abe put a tactical display on the main viewscreen, including a summary of Lincoln’s orders:
A-Hour, the start of the counterattack, was to begin immediately. DEFCON One was now in effect for all Democratic Alliance commands.
The DA’s strike units were issued limited attack option 6-1 from the Combined Operations Plan, or COPLAN-LAO 6-1. All available military units in orbit received sections of a target list that focused on the Hrąs al-M’umnyn’s anti-space capabilities. LAO 6-1 only included strikes from directed energy weapons, known as DEWs or softshots. These meant laser cannons and, in the case of USS Theodore Roosevelt, neutral particle beams. No kinetic energy projectiles –KEPs, aka hardshots– were allowed. Enemy fatalities from LAO 6-1 were expected to be fewer than one thousand people, nearly all military personnel.
USS Abraham Lincoln received forty-four targets from the master list, all inside the central United Caliphate. All tracking stations, DEW systems, anti-satellite missile batteries, and other targets on the target list were required to be destroyed before Lincoln would receive follow-on orders.
The ship’s main generator surged while Pierce and her crew were still reading the orders, and on the infrared display screens they could already see the streams from Lincoln’s four DEW cannons firing down to the Earth’s surface as Abe spoke.
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