Orbital: This is the Future of War (Future War Book 3)

by FX Holden

  Bondarev digested what she had just said. He did not respond, but merely raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips to indicate he was unsure how this information was relevant to him. But she waited him out, the uncomfortable silence forcing him to speak, despite himself. “I wonder exactly how the Minister could have ‘prepared’ for something as random as a meteor strike?” he asked.

  “Hmm. I mention it, General, only to better explain why I am here,” she continued. “My job is partly to ensure my Minister is never blindsided. That he is prepared for any and every eventuality so as to be able to respond to it quickly. Abqaiq took him by surprise and that will not happen again while I am on his staff.”

  Bondarev arched his fingers under his chin and nodded. “I sympathize, but what may or may not embarrass the Minister of Energy is of no consequence to me, Ms. D’Antonia. I report to the Colonel-General of Aerospace Forces, who in turn reports to the President of the Russian Federation and his delegate, the Minister of Defense. I do not report to the Minister of Energy.”

  “No, of course, of course,” the woman said. “But who is to say the Minister of Defense today will be the Minister of Defense tomorrow? I am going to be very blunt, General, and tell you it may be very much in your interest, in the not too distant future, for Denis Lapikov to owe you his gratitude. Advance warning of any future Groza strike would earn that gratitude.”

  Bondarev felt a tightness in his chest. He was no stranger to the poisonous politics of the Kremlin and as a rule did all in his power to stay clear of them. He had agreed to meet with Lapikov’s advisor only because he had entertained a hope she might add to his understanding of the current geopolitical landscape by telegraphing a little about how Russia planned to capitalize economically on the Groza strike. But she hadn’t done so – all she had done was try to inveigle him into the type of politics he despised.

  He stood and walked to the door of his office with an almost imperceptible limp, opened it, and indicated to her that her allocated time was up. “I will bear that in mind,” he said, with deliberate neutrality. “Now if you would excuse me, I have a hundred more spreadsheets to wade through.”

  D’Antonia took the cue and rose, buttoning her jacket as she walked, but as she reached the door, she paused. Bondarev had expected to be hit with a wave of perfume as she stopped beside him, but instead, he was met only with her penetrating gaze. “You are a military man, General, not a politician; I can see that. But what strengthens the Russian economy strengthens our military, and nothing is more important to our economy than energy. Please consider that.” She took his hand and shook it firmly. “Thank you for your time.”

  Cazzo! D’Antonia swore under her breath as she handed in her visitor badge at the downstairs reception and waited outside the Titov administration building for her car. It was getting dark now, which suited her mood perfectly. You dumb, lame-ass fool, Roberta.

  She had studied Bondarev’s files – both the one he referred to, provided to her by an aide to the Minister, and the one sent to her by the Italian secret service, which contained rather more personality detail. It had described him as a soldier’s soldier, loved by his officers and personnel. A commander who led from the front, flying combat missions alongside his pilots. Twice wounded in the conflict with the USA over the Bering Strait and decorated for it – one of the only military commanders who came out of that fiasco with a reputation stronger than when he went in.

  The posting to head up Russia’s satellite operations and research facilities had not made sense to her, which was why she had started out by querying him about it. It seemed as far from a front-line posting as he could possibly have got. When he had made the wisecrack about spreadsheets, she had sensed frustration and pounced on it, trying to tempt him by showing him Lapikov might be able to offer him a shortcut, a quicker way out of Titov if he would only play ball.

  Her indelicate approach had only angered him.

  And he had given her nothing about Groza – not a single detail – which was the primary subject her AISE handlers were interested in. It was, in fact, the entire reason for her concocted visit and she had learned precisely nothing! Did Groza even exist? Bondarev doubted it. The attack on Abqaiq? Was it not just an unfortunate meteor strike? His face had remained perfectly impassive, no matter how she approached the subject.

  The brisk wind was cold, even though it was June, and she pulled her jacket tighter around herself. When she had said yes to Lapikov, she had not even considered how much she might suffer under the overcast, cold gray skies of Moscow, after so many years under the searing sun of Riyadh. When it was cloudy, the sky seemed lower here, pressing down on her like the weight of expectations she felt from Rome. They had been angry at her impulsiveness in changing horses from Al-Malki to Lapikov, but they hadn’t been in the room with her, watching the Prince go down in flames. Perhaps they already had enough sources inside the Kremlin and didn’t need one more, no matter how highly placed. They certainly tried to give her that impression, but she doubted it. Italy with a higher-placed source in the Russian cabinet than principal advisor to the Minister of Energy? Not possible. Of course, they had relented and given her new tasking.

  Groza.

  They wanted her to confirm the intelligence that the Americans were insisting they possessed. Get more details of the weapons system somehow. Try to learn how Russia planned to use it and, most importantly, where. Italy had traditionally been a close ally of Russia in Europe due to a succession of left-leaning governments, but it could not afford to remain so closely aligned with a rogue State that showed itself willing to deploy a weapon of mass destruction against civilian targets.

  Porca miseria! She had jumped through all kinds of hoops to set up a meeting with Bondarev and then she’d really screwed it up. She knew she was right about one thing, though. Yevgeny Bondarev was not a paper-shuffling technocrat. Russia would not have wasted him on a dead-end posting in a backwoods town outside Moscow, keeping satellites in orbit. She had spent only thirty minutes with him, but she had already developed the impression that if Russia needed someone to head up the development and deployment of some new superweapon, Yevgeny Bondarev was the sort of no BS fighting General they would turn to.

  She looked up at the dark sky, which for once was clear, and saw a bright star. But was it a star? Or a killer satellite? She shuddered.

  Bondarev was Groza, she knew it. But he had shown he would not spill its secrets easily, even to a Kremlin ‘insider.’ The situation in the Middle East was on a knife-edge, and so were her AISE handlers. She needed to find a different way in.

  Anastasia Grahkovsky had found her way into the ground control station for Groza at Baikonur Cosmodrome, but she had not made it much further. Unlike the last time she had been there, for the strike on Abqaiq, where she had been escorted in together with General Bondarev and his retinue, this time she had arrived unannounced and was facing down a nonplussed security manager who didn’t know where to look – into the scarred and frightening visage of the blind woman leaning over his desk, or at the sheaf of papers she was thrusting under his nose.

  “This man,” she was saying. She put the papers down on his desk, which featured a bolded name on a page. “I need to talk with him. Find him and take me to him.”

  The man stammered, “I … you can’t just…” He picked up the identity card she had thrown at him. “… Uh, Chief Scientist Grahkovsky. I need to get instructions.”

  She sighed. “Yes, you get instructions. Good idea. Or I tell you what, you could just call the Commander of 15th Aerospace Forces Army, Major-General Bondarev, since I report to him. And then you can get me Corporal Maqsud Khan.”

  The man paled, but luckily for him his superior officer walked out from the guard room at that point, chewing on a toothpick. He also got a very quick lesson in the force of nature that was Chief Scientist Anastasia Grahkovsky and within twenty minutes she was sitting in a bare, windowless office on a steel chair, at a steel table, with two glasses and
a beaker of water in front of her, tapping her foot impatiently. She felt for the empty chair beside her, placing it so she could reach it easily.

  She heard the door to the room open, and whoever was there paused on the threshold. Grahkovsky waited, as usual, as whoever it was adjusted to the reality of her appearance. To his credit, he did so rather quickly, stepping inside with a greeting that was also a question. “Chief Scientist Grahkovsky?”

  “And I’m guessing you are Corporal Khan,” she said, kicking out the chair beside her so it scraped over the concrete floor. “So now we have the small talk out of the way. Sit.”

  As he sat down, she reached down inside the leather folio at her feet and pulled out a set of printouts tabbed with braille place holders. She handed them to Khan. “Now, tell me. What in the gibbering name of Jesus did you do with my weapon, you podonok?”

  The printouts showed a map of the Abqaiq plant, overlaid with a stippled oval shadow that covered nearly two-thirds of the plant and bled out into the desert east of the plant. On its western side, it touched the outer streets of the neighboring township of Buqayq. Flushing at her verbal assault, Maqsud cast his eyes over the photographs and then looked up.

  “What are these?” the man demanded.

  Anastasia leaned back in her chair with her hands folded in her lap. “Those are from the damage assessment of the Groza strike on Abqaiq. The map shows the area of the processing plant and the town to the west. The shaded area shows the impact footprint of the Groza missiles.” She knew this from her own examination of the post-strike assessment data delivered to her by Bondarev’s intelligence staff. She had a text-to-braille converter that translated all the written intelligence for her and had questioned the intelligence analysts closely about the imagery. She had affixed braille ‘subtext’ to each photograph that told her what the photo showed.

  He looked at them again, and she thought she heard him squirm uncomfortably on his chair, but nothing more. “And so?” he asked.

  “You were responsible for target acquisition.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were supposed to lay two full salvos, forty warheads, more than 2,000 missiles, inside a two-mile by two-mile splash zone.”

  “Which I did. The facility was completely destroyed,” he said defensively.

  “Yes, but strangely, Corporal Khan, what that analysis shows is that the geometric center of that footprint – let us call it the epicenter – lies at the eastern edge of the facility, and not smack bang in the middle of it where one would expect. Can you explain that for me, please?”

  He put the printouts down on the table in front of him and leaned back in his chair too. “I saw you on the viewing platform on the day of the strike,” he said.

  “I was there, yes.”

  “I asked who you were, and Sergeant Karas told me you were the architect of Groza.”

  She smiled a thin smile. “I prefer ‘mother’, but architect is acceptable.”

  “Then you need to go back to your drawing board, Chief Scientist,” he said carefully. “Abqaiq processing plant was contained in an almost perfectly square network of roads. I placed that strike right in the middle of that square. You can check the GPS coordinates from the operations log. If the actual strike was off by, what, a half-mile? If it was that far off, then the fault is in your re-entry calculations, not in my target acquisition skills.”

  She sat quietly for a full minute, looking at him with disconcertingly milky eyes. Finally, she spoke. “You think me a fool.”

  “No. I…”

  “I checked your operations log. Yes, it does show you placed the strike in the center of the plant.”

  He sounded relieved. “As I said. There could be any number of reasons the strike was off by that distance. Slight errors in launch spool rotation velocity, the tiniest deviation in separation trajectory, atmospheric disturbances, heat anomalies, lanyard deployment delay or failure…”

  “I read your file. You’ve been on the program all through the live-fire testing,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “The factors you just listed off were all issues during early testing of the weapon and were resolved, one by one, before deployment. The proven accuracy of the last four tests of Groza was what, Corporal Khan?” she asked.

  He folded his arms. “I don’t recall.”

  “Let me remind you, then,” she said quickly. “It was between 200 and 300 yards, Corporal. Not cruise missile accuracy, granted, but it should not have missed by a half bloody mile!”

  “And as you point out, Groza is not a precision weapon. It is a bunch of damn rocks, flung through the atmosphere at the mercy of gravity, wind, temperature, humidity, air pressure and I don’t know what else.”

  “Don’t patronize me,” she hissed. “That bunch of damn rocks is guided by the same sophisticated systems that guide our nuclear missiles. Before release, that mathematics is calibrated with the latest atmospheric and weather data relevant to the re-entry trajectory. I don’t know how you did it, or why you did it, but you aimed my weapon a half-mile east of the target epicenter that you were assigned, you covered that fact up, and now I am having to explain to everyone from my own program director to the Commander of the 15th Aerospace Forces Army why the hell it missed by so much.”

  “What do you care?” he said in a tight voice. “The target was destroyed. Hundreds died, hundreds more were injured. Aren’t you satisfied?”

  Her eyes darkened and she reached forward, fumbling at the printouts on the table before snatching them up. “Ah, yes. Of course.” She laid one of them out in front of her … a zoomed-out map showing both the processing plant and the town of Buqayq beside it. The virtually untouched town of Buqayq. Running a finger along the braille legend she had affixed to the bottom of the photograph, she read quickly, then sat back again. “Buqayq General Hospital. Buqayq Community College. Buqayq souk. Did I miss anything? A kindergarten, perhaps?”

  He glared back at her. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  She picked up the printout and ran her fingers over it again. “And let me see … one … two … five mosques.” She fixed the date in her mind and worked backward to arrive at the day of the strike. “It was a Friday, wasn’t it? Mosques full of your people, mumbling their prayers, markets full of people shopping.”

  His anger was palpable. “My people?” He composed himself before continuing. “Do you no longer consider yourself a member of the human race, Chief Scientist?”

  She took his insult with a slight smile. She’d had worse. Monster was the usual one. Baba Yaga. Witch. She gathered up the printouts and turned them upside down. She’d heard what she’d needed to hear. Groza hadn’t failed; neither math nor engineering was at fault. This fool, this humanist, had deliberately shifted the target epicenter so as to limit civilian casualties. She put the printouts into her folio and felt him waiting for her expectantly.

  “What?” she asked him.

  “Your amazing weapon did not perform as expected and you are looking for a scapegoat,” he suggested. “I suspect you will demand I be transferred. Maybe even face a court-martial?”

  She put the folio in her lap and regarded him with her head tilted to one side, as a sighted child might look at a bug in a jar. Given she was blind, the effect was doubly disconcerting. “Ah. You would like that, wouldn’t you, Corporal? Perhaps a transfer back to the missile service, where you can serve out the rest of your enlistment asleep in the bottom of a nice quiet silo.” He didn’t deny it. “Yes, I scanned your file into my reader on the way here. When I got that data, I first had to try to understand what had happened. That led me to how; how had this happened? I quickly ruled out technical error, which left only human error. So then I had to find out who might have been behind it. That led me to you. And having spoken with you, I now have the last piece of the puzzle – the why.” She did up the clasps on the leather portfolio and snapped them into place. “I think the best thing I can possibly do is leave you exactl
y where you are.”

  He remained silent.

  She stood. “You look at me and you see something hideous, don’t you, Corporal?”

  He shook his head slowly. “I do not judge a person by their appearance, but by the content of their character.”

  “What is that? A quote from the Koran?” she asked.

  “Martin Luther King, actually,” he said.

  “My goodness, Corporal Khan is well read,” she remarked. “I guess you had a lot of downtime at the bottom of your missile silo.”

  “Quite a lot, yes.”

  She came around the table and put a hand on his shoulder. “You and I aren’t that different, Maqsud Khan. You thought you were saving a hospital, a community college and five mosques. Which is admirable. You may have saved a few hundred lives. I, on the other hand, have harnessed the power of gravity and made nuclear weapons obsolete. I suspect I have saved billions of lives.” She heard him give a small derisive laugh. “What? Do I sound like a lunatic to you? Groza can destroy whole cities, but without turning the earth they are built on into radioactive glowing glass.” She squeezed his shoulder and moved to the door, hesitating with her hand on the handle. “You keep tweaking those target coordinates, Corporal. Meanwhile, I will be saving the entire human race from nuclear extinction.”

  Maqsud Khan watched the woman leave the room, his last sight of her the back of her shaven head, patterned with fine white scars, her touch on his shoulder still palpable, as though the ghost of her was still standing over him.

  She was insane.