They had trained for this type of mission before, but in training it always involved deploying their Vatozi submersible from a submarine. No submarine was being used for this mission, however. They were not told why. The commanding officer who was piloting the Vatozi had his own guess: this mission was to be as covert as possible. Submarines were much easier for the DA to track, or at least their presence or absence from port was rather easy for their analysts to figure out. But their Vatozi had left straight from the Turkish coast under a covered hall, and had been underwater since the sea depth was only five meters. The caution was meant to avoid the prying eyes of DA imagery satellites. The commander also guessed that something big must be happening soon for his team to bother cutting this line, since the DA would send a ship out to fix their cable soon enough. In fact, his team’s orders had come straight from General Candemir himself, the commander of Turkey’s special forces.
There was forty meters of water beneath them and decreasing. The Vatozi pilot tracked the faint burial scar on the ocean floor over the cable with his laser sidescan system, waiting until the water depth was shallow enough for the divers to drop down. He raised his craft to skim just below the water’s surface.
Twenty meters water depth. The Vatozi stopped, and the pilot surfaced the craft for a quick look to see if anything was around. It was all clear, and they were close enough to shore for him to make out Chania, the seaside resort town on the northwest of the island. It looked like a vibrant place, like he had always heard. Sordid western decadence. He dove the submersible again, and his two divers descended to the bottom. One carried a shovel, the other one a bomb.
Fifteen minutes of patience later, the divers returned to the Vatozi. They had uncovered the cable from the seafloor and attached a twenty-kilogram high explosive device to it. The bomb was set to detonate barely an hour later. Now it was time to begin the long trip back to Turkey. At least the seas were gentle, with no storms expected.
Cigli Military Air & Space Facility
West of Izmir, Turkey
12:20 p.m. (0920Z), 23 December 2065
Dr. Ozker Ozcan poured a fresh cup of tea as he watched the launch countdown on his wall display. His third story office in the Space Operations Center had a view of the launch pad over a kilometer away, but it wasn’t time to bother looking through the windows yet. There were still three minutes to go.
His friend fidgeted with his hand as the two watched countdown together. “Would you care to place a bet, professor? I’ll give you good odds.”
“A bet on what?”
“On whether that rocket malfunctions when it ignites and blows us all to oblivion. How about twenty-to-one?”
Kadri blanched. “Oz, are you sure your office is safe?”
“From that thing?” Oz chuckled. “Hazim, if containment fails then most of western Turkey wouldn’t be safe. You understand how antimatter works, right? We’d be dead in, how soon do you suppose? Point-two nanoseconds?”
“No, I mean is your office safe from surveillance? You’ve checked it for bugs?”
“Yes, thoroughly,” Oz replied, pulling out a pen-sized device from his desk drawer. “This was a gift from my contact in the MGT, an electromagnetic microscanner. It’ll detect any nearby electronics down to eight micrometers and highlight their locations on the display in my contact lens. I use it every morning when I get here. I also have four microdot cameras hidden around the office, running twenty-four hours a day. Everyone who’s walked in and out of here over the last few months has been recorded, and I’ve seen them all. So, feel free to speak your mind. Ankara isn’t listening.”
“Always the latest gadgets from your friends, Oz. Do you have any doubts about the launch?”
“No, not really. The engineering specs your American friends gave us for the third stage were superb, and I trust the engineers here to have gotten the first two stages right. We’ll probably live through the next few minutes,” he said, smiling.
Kadri looked out the window towards the launch pad. “I’m getting my family into hiding this evening. The arrangements are made.”
“It’s not too late to change your mind and leave the country with me tomorrow. My contact is flexible enough to allow a few others. He likes the money.”
“No, I’m taking Candemir’s option and staying in the country. You go with Demirci’s wife and your own family. If all goes well, we’ll both be back in a few days. Maybe a few weeks.”
“Thirty seconds,” Oz said, standing to join his friend at the window. “But Hazim, suppose I’m captured? You’ll have missed out on an easy payout by not taking this bet.”
Kadri smirked. “Alright then, Oz. Let’s make it even odds though. If it launches right, I’ll buy lunch for us both. But if it explodes and there is a God, I’m going to explain to him myself what a useless engineer you are.”
The launch countdown reached zero, and the Isyan rocket lifted off from the north pad on schedule. Stage one of the flight went perfectly, and the Isyan accelerated away from Izmir spaceport and out of the atmosphere. The two men watched through the window for over a minute until the fiery exhaust was no longer in view.
Turning to Ozcan’s desk monitor, they saw what the men in the mission control room two stories below were seeing. Altitude two hundred kilometers and rising, sixteen minutes until stage two begins. After that, the satellite would have a nice long burn and a transit to a forty-million km polar orbit of the Sun, programmed to stay in that orbit and transmit solar radiation data for the next twelve years.
“Sorry, Hazim, you’ll have to gripe to God about me some other time.” He offered his friend a cup of black Rize tea and raised his own. “To Aydin Demirci.”
“To Aydin.”
The two finished their tea and walked out of the office together. “You’ll like the cafeteria here,” Oz said. “They’ve got the best alinazik I’ve ever tasted.”
“That sounds good,” Kadri said, nodding. “Just mind your words down there. Nobody else in this building knows what we know about that rocket.”
CHAPTER 3
USS Abraham Lincoln
1055Z, 23 December 2065
“Onboard Lincoln… All-hands call will be held in the crew mess deck at eleven-hundred. All hands to the mess deck by eleven-hundred hours.”
The short-notice announcement sent crewmen through the crowded passageways from workspaces and berthing compartments all over the ship. Not unlike a submarine or even a surface warship, most of the spaces and passageways on the spacecraft were compact, with trifling levels of room allotted for head and shoulder space. The mess deck, which doubled as a cargo bay when needed, was the only place where the entire crew could meet at once.
Commander Yates and the department heads made themselves busy by getting a muster of the crew. The mess deck soon filled with a crowd of charcoal-gray uniforms. Right on time, Yates confirmed the count: all fifty-six crewmembers were present.
“Attention on deck!” shouted Yates. The XO still carried himself like the Ole Miss linebacker he once was, and his voice was strong enough to wake the dead.
The crew snapped to attention, standing sharp and upright as their commanding officer entered the space. “Captain, all crew present and accounted for,” said Yates.
“Very well,” Pierce replied. “At ease, everyone.” The crew shifted to a stance with their legs apart, their hands clasped behind their lower backs.
The captain stood on a chair so all those in the crowded space could see her. When standing next to Yates, the visual sometimes drew a brief –but quickly stifled– smirk from new crewmembers. Captain Jaana Pierce stood only four-foot-ten. The callsign bestowed on her during her academy days was Pixie. It started off as a good-natured nickname by her hockey teammates, but she knew it was a label which could’ve spread beyond her looks into her reputation. She had devoted the last twenty-eight years of her career to making sure Pixie Pierce didn’t follow her from the academy.
“In case some of you haven’t
heard the news, I’ll fill you in on what’s been happening downtown,” she began, using Space Command’s moniker for Earth. “At 1030Z hours this morning, the Democratic Alliance’s comms network in Europe lost direct contact with its stations on Crete. The communications cable linking the military facilities on the island with mainland Greece stopped functioning, meaning it was probably severed. This has happened before in other places, and the cause always turned out to be either severe weather breaking a shore connection or damage from a careless fishing trawler or a dragging anchor cutting below the seafloor to the cables. However, exactly ten minutes after the Crete cable went down, another military cable went down, the link which connected the DA’s facilities on Rhodes. Given that the weather around the eastern Med is calm right now, the Military Committee decided these two cable breaks were not a coincidence. As of 1045Z hours, fifteen minutes ago, they ordered all DA commands to set Defense Condition Four.”
Captain Pierce paused and let the crew take in the news. Minor alerts happened all the time, and as first-strike units the celestial warships reacted to them more than any other commands in the DA. Still, the whole alliance hadn’t dropped below DEFCON Five since the Golan Crisis three years ago, and that was a regional mess of Israel’s making, no mystery involved.
“The details on the cable breaks are still classified Secret for the time being, by the way, but the DA ordering DEFCON Four is not,” Pierce continued. “In fact, it’s the big story in the media right now, though all they know is that it was raised because of ‘suspicious HM activity’. All DEFCON Four means for the military is tighter security and an increased intelligence focus. However, I just heard from Admiral McKenna that all of Space Command is about to be placed on Readiness Condition Three. What REDCON Three means for us is that we have to make ourselves able to get underway from dock on fifteen minutes notice. I want those preparations to be done as soon as possible, because if we hit DEFCON Three or higher, we’ll have to be underway, whether our cannons are ready or not. Now, here’s a downside. Putting the ship on ready-fifteen means that we’ll have to detach all but one of our docking connections, and the exterior overhauls will scale back to one cannon at a time rather than all four. I’ve already instructed the technicians to start their preps. So, we may be in the yards a little longer.”
A smattering of quiet groans and whispered curses emanated from the crowd. I sure don’t blame them, the captain thought. When this meeting’s over I’ll talk to Admiral McKenna and see exactly how much wiggle room we have with these orders.
Pierce put a hand up. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. We could shift back to DEFCON Five at any time. If any more information comes in on the situation downtown, you’ll be informed through your chains of command. For now, let’s make ourselves ready to respond to orders. Any questions?”
Chief Maria Sandoval, one of the electronics techs and the ship’s acting master-at-arms, smiled and raised her hand. “Captain, does this mean tomorrow’s white elephant Christmas gift exchange will be canceled?”
A chorus of chuckles arose from the crew, Pierce included. “Watch crews will stay on station, but all others will be welcome. If orders come through I’m sure everyone can get to their battlestations as quickly from in here as from anywhere else.”
Sandoval kept her hand raised.
“Yes, Chief?”
“And the holiday dinner, ma’am?”
The snickering continued. “Chief Sandoval, I know you’re eager to show off your pollo pozole verde. So it’s safe to say that the dinner will happen as planned.”
“Aye, ma’am!” Sandoval said, still smiling. Most of the crew were grinning as well, though Pierce caught Robert Yates’s stern face and knew it bespoke a different philosophy towards crew morale.
Sandoval’s sort of personality is a good asset to have onboard, Pierce thought. Tension is easier to deal with when she’s around. Too bad Robert still doesn’t get the value of that.
“All joking aside, these are orders. I called this meeting instead of putting the news out over the 1MC because I want to emphasize to everyone the importance of what that word means. What’s happening downtown could turn out to be the start of a real conflict. And if that happens, Space Command is the first to fight. Our reliability and our speed in responding to orders can make the difference between success and failure. I’m mentioning this because of a few moments I’ve noticed during our drills. In combat, seconds count, and second-guessing can be detrimental. Once orders come down, there can be no time for questioning them, no hesitation at all. Not from the Military Committee to CS-Kenya, not from CS-Kenya to this ship, and not from me to any of you. We don’t second-guess commands for even a moment. We carry them out. And right now, our orders are to stand-to.” Pierce nodded at Commander Yates.
“Department heads, make readiness reports to me as soon as possible,” Yates said. “Crew dismissed!”
Pierce left as the crew filed out of the mess deck. Before walking out, she asked Yates to see her in her cabin in fifteen minutes.
‘All joking aside’, Pierce thought as she walked, two tactically important cables going down at once? It’s definitely intentional, but why? Either someone is messing with us to see how we react, or this is the first step in a much larger strategy.
Pierce sat at the desk in her cabin. Photos of her husband and daughter beckoned for her attention. I’ll call later when they’re awake, she told herself. It was barely five in the morning at home in Omaha. Stay focused. Duty first. On her screens she reviewed SPACECOM’s opintel feed before she sorted through recent message traffic.
All HM satellites operating within normal orbits. No notable malfunctions with any DA satellites. USS Thomas Jefferson will transfer to CS-Kenya’s command from CS-Borneo this afternoon due to the DEFCON bump. A solar research probe launched from Izmir Spaceport at 0920Z. Transport ship Hartford preparing to depart Arcadia Base for Earth. Russian supply craft Kostroma en route to Dirac Station. Mining drone Daylight was temporarily adrift after liftoff from Ceres due to engineering casualty. Proportional standup of HM air and space forces in response to the DA’s alert level, minimal changes to ground and naval forces. A small pro-HM insurgent attack was made on a police station in Kazakhstan. The French parliament ratified their Naturalization Act. The Russian Black Sea Fleet continued its snap exercise off Crimea.
On and on it went, always a deluge of information, little with any obvious importance. And nothing new on the two broken cables other than estimates of their repair times.
The intelligence community must have analysts working on it. Come on, guys. Figure this out before the other shoe drops.
There was a knock outside the open door to her cabin. “Captain, you wanted to see me?” asked Commander Yates.
“Come on in, XO. And please get the door behind you.” Pierce straightened her posture, bracing for another conversation she didn’t want to have with Robert.
Yates took a seat and motioned to Pierce’s desk screens. “Anything new there on what’s happening downtown?”
“No, and there doesn’t seem to be much else out of the ordinary. We’ll know more when we know it. I wanted to talk to you about command philosophy again. This morning’s drill made clear to me that we’ve got to get ourselves on the same page.”
Yates grit his teeth and refrained from rolling his eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”
Mirazh Hotel
Saratov, Russia
4:00 p.m. (1200Z), 23 December 2065
Half an hour after the first officers arrived, the detective walked into the crime scene. That’s what headquarters told him it might be, anyway. He’d have to decide for himself. The detective walked inside the hotel, past the handful of officers and reporters gathered in the lobby, then rode an elevator to a suite on the top floor.
He entered the room to find a few officers milling about, some with the forensics team holding sensor equipment as they walked around the suite. On the bed, a fresh-looking corpse lay naked on top of
the sheets.
“What do we have?” he asked the officer in charge.
“The man on the bed here is Yuri Alexeyevich Vedenin, age twenty-five. Rigor mortis isn’t even set in. The hazmat team got in here first, around three-thirty. Nobody might have found him until late tomorrow morning after his reservation expired, but an elderly couple staying in a room down the hall reported walking past the door to this room when they suddenly felt lightheaded. The old woman vomited in the elevator before they even reached the lobby.”
The detective wandered around the suite. There was a near-empty vodka bottle on the nightstand, used condoms thrown on the floor, hints of perfume on his body, and Do Not Disturb still displayed on the small screen above the doorknob in the hall. But nobody else was in the suite. The detective scrolled through the data that headquarters had sent to his tablet.
“This guy was a cargo supervisor over at Engels Spaceport?”
“Assistant dockmaster, yes sir.”
“And he lives only a few minutes away. A modest apartment and a modest salary. So what’s he doing in a suite like this? I couldn’t afford a night here on a week’s salary.”
“I can’t say about the suite, but we have a good idea what he was doing a few hours ago. During the security sweep, Officer Sidorov checked the video recordings from the lobby. Vedenin met two young women downstairs at eight this morning, just before he checked in. They were dressed like pros. The girls walked out before noon, though.”
“If I’m reading this right, this guy works night shifts. So, he came here to party after work? On a Wednesday morning?”
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