Moon Dreams

by M.A. Harris

Death and Enigmas from the Sky

  Two hundred nautical miles away and five hours earlier, the Captain of the MV Constance had walked out onto the bridge wing and lighted his pipe as he looked out at the sea. Glad to see the green waters of the relative shallows transitioning to the blue of the deeps. Much of the ocean around here was very deep but strings of atolls made it a maze of shallows, one of the reasons the shipping lane they were following was not heavily used.

  He dragged in a lungful of smoke from his pipe and leaned on the railing, looking forward so could see the ground crew working on the number two helicopter. The Captain, an aging Filipino with a long and successful career behind him, grinned around the pipe’s stem. He’d had adventures before, but he’d never figured he’d get to command an aircraft carrier. The whole idea had given him a kick from the day he was first approached by an old friend.

  The company of marine fabricators in Chile had done a good job; they’d taken a lot of old cargo containers and disassembled them into panels, then used those panels to cover a steel framed structure built to hold the two helicopters. The assembled unit and a helo pad had been fastened down to a layer of standard containers and the whole thing painted to look like containers.

  The only bad thing was that he had had to fill the ballast tanks and one of the fuel bunkers with water to get the ship down to a believable load line. Otherwise, he’d have raised the eyebrows of any Coast Guard, Navy or Customs sailors who even glanced at his ship. As it was he had to avoid going anywhere he’d be likely to get a hostile inspection since the hangar and landing deck were easy enough to spot once you were on board.

  The HFF had friends around the world and there were local ports he could sail into without questions being raised but he knew the ruse wouldn’t last forever. It might not even be the Palalo Sadong Navy; the Australians, the Americans and the Philippines all kept an eye on these waters and once a question was raised it was likely a naval craft would stop by.

  He kept an eye on the nearest Aussie and US Navy ships, if the visit was by the Palalo Sadong Navy he would call for help. The PSN was a professional force, with several meticulously maintained corvettes and missile patrol boats, but they had a reputation for ruthless action.

  The Captain looked around as the door from the bridge opened, the tall Englishman in charge of the flight operations came out, “Hey Philippe.” He looked tense.

  The Captain smiled, “Problem Spense?”

  “Julia’s chopper hasn’t reported in.”

  “Emcon.” The old sea hand replied, meaning emission control, radio silence.

  “We had a pre arranged signal, it’s overdue.” He took a deeper breath, “The Solarsaur’s gone off the air as well, a few minutes ago.”

  The Captain felt a chill, went to a microphone, “Watch, any sign of PSN?”

  “Nada Cap.”

  The captain hesitated, and then realized he had a very bad feeling, he looked at Spenser Featherstone. His face grim he put the mic to his mouth, “Helm, make for the Ginda Gap and the open sea, turns for full speed.”

  Spense almost protested then turned with a jerk, looking out over the sea, his eyes unseeing as he tried to decide how things could be going so badly wrong.

  -o-

  The threat the Constance’s Captain and Spenser Featherstone should have feared was far away in an unexpected direction. A prismatic shape fell across the vacuum of near earth space. The platform was black with four identical triangular faces, no photovoltaic arrays, no high gain antennas, not even a rocket motor bell marred its geometric perfection. The shape had been in orbit for almost six months, high above the normal orbital altitudes, shifting its orbital plane almost constantly to keep from over-flying any of the known space observation posts spotted around the world.

  Occasionally it had opened a port and a massive telescope had peered down at the world below, and it had sent the information it collected back to its masters over a laser link. Over that same link had come the orders it was now executing.

  The platform had cut its orbital velocity and now it was diving earthward, its vector pointed at a stretch of deep water a hundred miles off Palalo Sadong. The platform received a last update, made a slight change in trajectory, and then a door in one side popped open. Then, instead of ejecting the weapons hidden in the bay, the platform let them go and maneuvered away.

  Then the platform fell up and away, lost in an instant against the black of space. The weapons were oddly prosaic shapes, from a distance they looked like golf tees. Each one had a simple terminal guidance radar built into the wide band at the ‘cup’ end. Lethal chip brains in each weapon selected slightly different aim points to make sure they didn’t all miss if something went wrong.

  Cruising at a steady speed on a steady course the Constance was a trivial target, big, slow, a collection of metallic reflectors on a flat plate, meat on a platter.

  The impactors fell steeply earthward. Moving four times faster than a rifle bullet to start with they were pulled down ever faster by gravity. In the last instants of the fall thickening atmosphere started to compress and air trapped at their surfaces heated, the aerobodies’ skins glowed and started to burn away. The air slowed the weapons but their elongated shapes were designed to maintain maximum velocity. Nearing the sea they were still moving at many times the speed of sound, darts of fire, falling ahead of the sound of their approach.

  Both the Captain and Featherstone were looking astern and to port, towards Palalo Sadong as the death requested as a ‘token of respect’ fell towards them. It would have made no difference if they had seen the first spark high in the sky. As it was, the first intimation the Captain had of something wrong was the Englishman suddenly stiffening, and saying, “What the hell?” It was then that Captain saw the reflection of a flare, or flares, frowning he turned to look but never completed the movement.

  A ton of carefully shaped reinforced concrete slammed into the stern house of the MV Constance at something over ten thousand feet per second. The shape was heavy and strong enough to survive atmospheric reentry, but not impact with a structure. It disintegrated into a shower of white hot gravel as it passed through the top deck, dissolving into an expanding fist of destruction punching down through the ship’s guts.

  The Captain and Featherstone were standing only a few feet away from that path of destruction. The shockwave and searing cloud of gasified debris splashing away from the impact erased them both. Then the weapon passed through the center of the ship’s passenger and crew cabins. Almost fifty men, women and children died without ever knowing they were doomed. The white hot fist blew through the ship’s bottom and inflated a vast, momentary cavity in the sea below.

  The second hit was almost in the center of the landing deck, the initial entry was only a few feet across, the fireball blew a hole almost fifty feet in diameter through the bottom of the hull. Shockwaves from the impact spread outward from the cone of obliteration, blasting cargo containers apart and rupturing the hull structure. The third passed through the hangar, annihilating aircraft and crew before carving a savage wound channel through the ship.

  The sound of destruction was titanic, a boom, a roar that was beyond sound, over in seconds but seeming to last forever. By the time the sounds faded towards the horizon the MV Constance had vanished, the few survivors of the initial impact dragged to their doom by the gutted ruin’s collapse into the deeps.

  A few items bobbed on the heaving surface of the disrupted sea. Little that could be tied directly to the Constance. The cataclysmic thunder of her death hammered out across the ocean, somewhat smeared by surrounding shallows. The oceans heaving surface quickly healed itself and in a few minutes only memories remained.

  -US Navy Task Force 10, Southern Pacific-

  Four hundred miles to the west an E2-M Hawkeye Millennium flew in slow circles between Palalo Sadong City and the USS Ronald Reagan’s Battle Group. The Hawkeye’s omnidirectional radar, mounted in a
massive flying saucer above the fuselage, was scanning vast reaches of the region, tracking friend and potential foe, from slow moving vessels on the sea to supersonic fighters in the rarefied air of the upper stratosphere.

  While there were crewmen aboard the Hawkeye they were focused on controlling the Raygun’s fighters and helicopters, which were involved in a complex mock battle. The aircraft’s radar data was linked back to aircraft carrier’s combat information center where spurious data received a lot more attention.

  Deep in the Ronald Reagan’s bowels Lieutenant Chester Plimson watched with wide eyes as his three-dimensional display showed a bar of light strike down through the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere to vanish below the horizon. He didn’t know the precise details of what he had just seen but he knew that the radar beam was reflecting off the ionized trail of something punching down through the Earth’s atmosphere at far too high a velocity.

  A tone and light attracted his attention to the subsidiary screen, he read it ‘high Mach number ballistic reentry, probable weapon impact, target unknown, anomalous track, no launch point solution, impact point solution only.’ A series of numbers followed, identifying a rough impact point. Chet looked at his map, whatever it had been, it had come down in the open sea.

  Chet dithered for hardly a second before tapping the button that connected his mic to the officer of the watch, “Ah, Commander Atkins? This is the airborne radar monitor station, Lieutenant Plimson, could you come over here, right now Ma’am.”

  The commanders bob of graying black hair appeared in his view in a few seconds, “What is it Chet?”

  He tapped up the rewind, showing the weapon fall, “Way down range, it fell in the middle of the sea ma’am but it had to be a ballistic missile. Too slow for a meteorite, too slow and too steep for stuff falling out of orbit, too fast and too steep for anything else.”

  “Shit,” The commander swore under her breath when she saw the track report. She tapped a button on her wrist pad, “Senso, we have a radar anomaly, I want to see if the hydrophones pick up anything...ah.” She glanced at the time stamp and obviously did a mental calculation, “About twenty minutes or so, link over to the pickets, tell them to make sure they’re recording their take,” she listened for a moment, nodding to herself, then, “….yeah. Then get up to the Hawkeye check station as soon as you can.” She stepped away and turned her back to Chet as she tapped up another line.

  Lieutenant Commander Bill Davis, the sensor officer, was at Chet’s other shoulder in what seemed like a very short time and the lieutenant mutely replayed the Hawkeye’s track. Davis whistled softly, “Something big…tried any enhancements yet Lieutenant?”

  Chet shook his head, “Ah…no sir.” He felt his ears heat up at the oversight.

  “Try the standard filters on the data.”

  “Aye sir,” Chet selected the track and pointed the computer at it, calling up the routines that would parse the data in various abstruse ways. Over the next minutes a series of oddly distorted images appeared on the secondary screen. One stood out, showing the stroke falling down, but the head of the line was faintly elongated and the track it left behind was lacy with three fairly distinct threads. Chet hissed, “Three of them coming down together, and they didn’t deviate a milirad the whole way, they had to be under control!”

  “No way would anything natural have behaved that way, that’s for sure.” The voice was deeper and from Chet’s other shoulder, making the junior lieutenant want to jump to attention. Admiral Foote had a tendency to elicit that response from just about everyone, including the occasional congressman or woman.

  “Crap, what the hell is going on Clancy? First that damned laser shoot down in the ‘Stan last evening, now this.” That gravelly voice made Chet want to cower; Captain Randolph Welch, the Ronald Reagan’s skipper, hardly ever sounded happy, right now he sounded ready to chew rocks - or junior officers.

  Commander Davis patted Chet on the shoulder as he spoke to the growing cluster of senior officers, “I can link this track into the conference room, maybe we can chew things over there, we have some time till we hear something.”

  Chet watched the senior officers move off. He watched his screen for a few minutes then he tapped his comm pad, “Hey Alicia, you on the acoustics?”

  “Yes Chet, you the reason for the sudden excitement?” She sounded ticked; he could imagine her pushing her anachronistic dark rimmed glasses back up her blade slim nose as she spoke down it to him. He had a thing for the slender, fair-haired subsurface warfare officer, but he hadn’t yet figured out how to say anything about it to her face.

  “Yeah, somebody dropped three guided warheads out of orbit into the middle of the ocean a few minutes ago. No flash bang of a nuke, no obvious targets, might have been a ship out there but I don’t have access to SEA TRACK.”

  She sighed, “There’s something there all right, twin slow turning screws, a big freighter of some kind. Lieutenant Commander Richards just about went ballistic a couple of minutes ago and lit out for the conference room like his ass was on fire. Looks like whatever it is, it’s been doing a long circuit track off the east coast for the last week or so and nobody noticed.”

  “OK, well let me know if anything interesting turns up?”

  “Unless I’m told not to, you’ll be the first to hear Chet.” Her line closed with a chirp.

  He leaned back watching his screen. Listening to the mutter of orders and messages passing around the big command space, he could sense the sudden surge of intensity. Of course he could see it as well on his screen, aircraft pulling away from their war games and forming up into protective arrays, the choppers were dispersing back to their ships. Three fighters with a tanker in pursuit were racing to the east, directly towards the site of the weapon impacts. He felt the shiver running through the ship as the big electromagnetic catapults that had replaced the original steam system during the last refit hurled aircraft off the flight deck.

  Chet almost lost track of time, then there was chirp in his earphone, “Chet you there?” Alicia sounded tired.

  “Yes?”

  “Listen to this,” her voice was short, angry. It was followed by a thunderclap of sound that made Chet flinch, that initial assault was followed by string of terrible, deep metallic tearing screams and thumps that faded rapidly into the background cacophony of the ocean.

  Alicia’s voice returned, tired again, “That was our two anomalies meeting each other Chet. My bet is, a bunch of people just died,” a sigh, “talk to you later.” Her line chirped closed.

  -o-

  It was now early night, the sea around the Reagan dark. Deep in the carrier’s interior, Lieutenant Chester Plimson was again surrounded by a group of very senior officers as they all watched another anomaly with growing disbelief. Whatever it was had been acting like some kind of large, stealthy helicopter for about fifteen minutes. He’d vectored a flight of Lightning II’s in to take a closer look and the thing had decided to act like a rocket ship! It was climbing vertically, accelerating vertically, it had also suddenly become a much smaller target, he would have suspected a launch by some kind of mother ship but there was no secondary target.

  Commander Davis spoke quietly, “Damn it, the Ocean Hawks are both over on the other coast, what I’d give for a good optical look at whatever the hell that is!” He hesitated, then tapped his comm pad, “Green Flight Lead have you spotted the bogey yet? It’s angels seventy and climbing off your nose.”

  “Nothing Senso,” the pilot sounded frustrated.

  “Green Flight Lead, activate your sensor net node.”

  “Active Senso,” The Reagan battle groups sensor net locked up with the fighter, making it far less stealthy but also allowing the Wildcat’s computer to point its sensors at the target before it could see it. The pilots voice was satisfied, “Got it.”

  “Pull up and see if you can get a look with your electro-optic system.”

  “Roger
that, executing.” There was a long pause then in one of the screens above Chet’s workstation an image appeared. An enigmatic black diamond shape, next to the optical image was an infrared image of a yellow rimmed green diamond with a faint blue trail, all set against the royal blue black of space.

  “What the hell?” Commander Davis swore his voice suddenly rough.

  “What? What do you see Commander?” The captain barked.

  “Where’s the exhaust plume for Christ’s sake, why didn’t I see that before? The damn thing’s climbing like a bat out of hell but what’s propelling it? There isn’t even much of a wake?”

  Chet had kept his focus on his job better this time around; he’d been running analysis almost from the second he first spotted the oddly glinting black spot flying along the Palalo Sadong coastline. “Uh, sir we have an issue.”

  “What the hell else?” The Captain snarled.

  “Sir, my extrapolation is that, if it continues to accelerate at its current rate on its current course, well, whatever it is, it’ll pass directly over central LA in a couple of hours.”

  “Oh, goddamned wonderful.” Someone said sotto voce.

  The Admiral had been a quiet spectator to this point, “Get me a line to WestCom and NorthCom. We may have a missile intercept to set up.”

  Commander Davis spoke quietly. “Have to be one of the cruisers at San Diego; this thing will be coming from too far south for the Alaskan sites coverage. One of our CG’s could take it down right now sir; it’s not accelerating very fast. It’ll be a tail chase but I bet we’ve got a window for some time yet.”

  “My thoughts exactly Commander. But I can’t shoot without at least giving someone else a chance to comment.” The admiral glanced around at his chief of staff, “Call the California Mike, tell the captain to set up a couple of anti-missile shots.”

  The Admiral and Captain moved a few paces away.

  Chet leaned forward, tapped an icon, “Sir, the bogey is changing course sir, and increasing acceleration.

  Davis leaned over Chet’s shoulder, “Wonder what he’s doing?”

  “Might be pulling up to do a loop over and land back at the airport he took off from?” Chet suggested.

  “Maybe, but he’s going to have to do a more radical change than that to accomplish it.”

  The Admiral had been speaking quietly with someone far away; now he moved up, “Change in the situation?”

  “He’s no longer on a course that’ll take him over the ConUS sir. But I’m not sure what he is doing. He may be trying to break our track…Yeah if he didn’t know precisely where we were he’d do that. He knows we’re north of the island, thinks he’ll wipe off our trail by crossing back over the island.”

  “And he will won’t he?” The Admiral pointed out.

  “Yeah, no doubt about it.”

  “Admiral!” a call from across the floor of the combat information center.

  The admiral turned, “Yes?”

  “The Space Track Overhead Radar’s picking up targets sir. In near earth orbit sir! Three small bogeys in formation, maneuvering, decelerating for an intercept of bogey one.” There was disbelief in the other lieutenant’s voice.

  “Oh for crying out loud! What the hell is going on?” the Captain nearly screamed.