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

by FX Holden

  With a potential source as valuable as Titov’s enigmatic Chief Scientist, she was going to play a long game.

  When she got to Noori at 9 p.m., it was only half full. The place didn’t start jumping until 10 or 11, so they would have at least an hour to settle in, chat, have a few laughs, and put a couple of drinks away. Maybe two hours here and she’d suggest another place, more chill, where they could talk more easily.

  As she walked in and checked her coat, she surveyed the bar and saw Grahkovsky across the room, already seated in a booth, with a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket beside her. Wow. Across the somewhat smoky room, in the sultry lights of the nightclub, the bald-headed woman looked strikingly beautiful. She wasn’t wearing a lab coat; she was wearing a black short-sleeved, high-necked top, pearl necklace and earrings, knee-length pearl-colored skirt and black stilettos. D’Antonia smiled as she watched a man approach the booth, and then veer away at the last minute, no doubt as he got a closeup look at the crisscrossed scars on her face and bare arms. As D’Antonia approached, she noticed Grahkovsky had even swapped out her utilitarian wooden cane for a bronze one, topped with a silver handle in the shape of an eagle’s head.

  “Hello there!” D’Antonia called out before sliding into the booth. There was a spare glass waiting for her, and she clinked it against the neck of the champagne bottle. “You started without me.”

  “Yes, I’m a little nervous,” the woman admitted. “Help yourself to a glass.”

  “Not your usual kind of place, Chief Scientist?” D’Antonia guessed, pouring herself some champagne and topping up Grahkovsky’s glass.

  “Something like that,” the woman said. “And please, call me Anastasia.”

  D’Antonia held up her glass. “Let us drink it like friends, the Italian way.” She wanted to get the party started. She reached for Grahkovsky’s hand and saw for the first time that the pattern of tiny white scars spread over the woman’s hands and forearms too. Grahkovsky’s hand was cool and she half expected the woman to decline, but she didn’t pull away. “See, we link arms, and both drink together – the whole glass,” D’Antonia laughed, winding their arms around each other. She brought her head up next to Grahkovsky’s, and they drank, cheek to cheek. “Salute!” D’Antonia said, wiping her mouth and putting down her glass. She sat back in the booth again. “Anastasia … that’s a lovely name. Much nicer than Roberta. How did your parents decide on Anastasia?” she asked.

  Grahkovsky had turned her face toward the sound of D’Antonia’s voice and had a curious half-smile on her lips. She didn’t answer immediately, but it was noisy in the club, and Roberta was about to repeat herself when Grahkovsky answered, “Oh, I don’t think we need to worry with the social chit chat yet, Roberta.” She lifted her cane and pointed discreetly toward a nearby table. “Do you see a group of men over there? Three, in dark suits? Take a sip of champagne while you are looking around, so they don’t see you looking.”

  Roberta lifted her glass to her face and sipped. She saw the group Grahkovsky was talking about. They were young, fit and rich by the look of it. There was vodka in an ice bucket by their table. Two were talking, but one was looking straight at her. She made sure not to make eye contact and put her glass down, turning back to Grahkovsky. “Wow, you don’t waste any time, ragazza. You would like me to invite them over or something?”

  Grahkovsky picked up her champagne and sipped, then put it down again slowly. “No. I’ve already met them. They are GRU. They’re here to arrest you.”

  D’Antonia’s world tilted. No night out on the town, then. She looked quickly for exits.

  Grahkovsky placed the tip of her cane across D’Antonia’s feet. “Don’t panic. They will only arrest you if you try to flee. They have men on every door.” She lifted the cane away. “And I am told they know about your safe house and your second car, so if you tried to use those, you would end up in their clutches anyway.”

  “Sorry,” D’Antonia said, stalling for time, thinking a mile a minute. “I don’t understand. GRU? Intelligence service? But I have been vetted by the FSB, the Federal Security Service. This is some kind of misunderstanding.”

  “Apparently not,” Grahkovsky said. “They are quite serious. They put poison in our champagne.”

  D’Antonia felt her skin chill and looked down at her half empty glass, then at Grahkovsky’s, which was also half empty.

  The woman had apparently anticipated her reaction. “It is quite slow-acting, but also quite deadly, I am told,” the scientist said. “I was already given an antidote, but I do wonder if I will feel any effects. I am told the men over there have an antidote for you too. But it depends on your reaction to this conversation.”

  “This is crazy,” D’Antonia insisted, keeping up a pretense of innocence. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “No. You will look directly at the men at the table now, please.”

  D’Antonia did so and saw that all three were looking straight at them. One lifted his jacket aside to show a handgun and lowered it again.

  “I admit nothing because I have nothing to admit,” D’Antonia said. “But I accept you are serious. What do you want?”

  “I want nothing,” Grahkovsky said lightly. She even took another sip of champagne. “You can’t even taste it. I thought you would be able to taste it.”

  “Please, don’t play games,” D’Antonia said.

  “I didn’t realize I was, sorry,” the woman said. “I want nothing, but they, the GRU, want you to work for them. They will create a natural-looking opportunity for you to meet with them, to tell them truthfully who you work for, what secrets you have stolen in your time in the service of Minister Lapikov and, if you agree to cooperate with them, I am told you can continue on exactly as you are. Go home to your flat tonight to sleep, go to work tomorrow with Minister Lapikov, keep serving whoever your foreign master is.”

  “If they think I am some kind of spy, that sounds highly unlikely,” D’Antonia said.

  “I agree,” Grahkovsky said. “I told them you would doubt the truth of such an offer. And between you and me, I suspect there is much more to it than that. The whole ‘cooperation’ part, for example. They didn’t share that with me, but I suspect that ‘cooperating’ with the GRU…” she tipped her glass at D’Antonia, “… might save your life, but cost you your soul.” She drained her champagne and leaned her head back, frowning. “No, nothing. I am a little disappointed. Though it is excellent champagne and I do feel a little light-headed.”

  D’Antonia was considering her options. Her training told her to run. If there were men at the exits, speed and extreme violence might get her through. She didn’t have a gun, but she had a long blade in the leather of her calf-high boots. They may be onto her safe house and reserve vehicle, or that could be a bluff. They clearly didn’t know much about her, if they didn’t brief Grahkovsky to at least make a guess at what service she worked for. She had money and a passport at left-luggage at Moscow Central Station. Run.

  But then what? Die gasping in the back of a taxi as the panic and adrenaline of flight flushed the poison through her system?

  Option 2: see what they had to offer. She might end up dead anyway, but when all roads lead to the grave, you might as well choose the longer one.

  “You’re wondering what you should do,” Grahkovsky guessed. “It’s fascinating to imagine what is going through your head right now. Would you care to share it with me? I might be able to advise you.”

  D’Antonia decided the woman was just a messenger. The worm on a GRU hook, and she had taken it. But they could have just picked her up at her apartment, beaten and drugged her. This rather more subtle approach suggested they were doing exactly what Grahkovsky intimated they were doing, trying to recruit her and turn her.

  “All I am thinking right now,” D’Antonia told her, “is that I do not want to die. And first and foremost, I will do what is necessary to avoid that.”

  “Oh,” Grahkovsky said, sounding disappointed. �
�How banal. Well, then. We can order another drink – I doubt you want more champagne – and then we can call it a night. You could use the opportunity to flee tonight, but I suspect they will be watching you closely, and I am told no foreign service would be able to help you avoid the effects of the poison anyway, so you would surely die. Sometime in the next 24 hours, the GRU will create a natural opportunity to meet with you, something that will not seem suspicious to your foreign employers or to Lapikov, and you can speak with them. If that conversation goes well, you will get your antidote and live. If not, then I suspect I will never see you again.” She raised a hand to attract a server and waited. “But honestly, I do hope you will stay for another drink. We can indulge in a little of that girl talk you mentioned. It might surprise you, but I do not get invited out very often.”

  Maqsud Khan had left his own meeting with Chief Scientist Grahkovsky troubled and confused, as always.

  Troubled by the simulation of a strike on an American mainland target. Of course, he understood that a strike on a target like Kennedy-Canaveral would have dramatic economic consequences for US space capabilities, but it would only make sense as part of a wider offensive, an all-out war against the US – in which case, nukes would be the weapon of choice, not Groza.

  Yes, he was a corporal, but he was a thinking soldier, not a mindless digger of trenches. The only thing he could think of was that perhaps there was actually a shred of humanity beneath the ravaged visage of Anastasia Grahkovsky. Perhaps because both Kennedy and Cape Canaveral space stations were mixed military-civilian facilities, she really did want to find a way to reduce civilian casualties, if it was ever targeted?

  He didn’t raise this question with Grahkovsky because he preferred to minimize his interactions with the woman. She troubled him. Or rather, how he felt in her presence troubled him. There was no other way to describe it; he was simultaneously repelled by and attracted to her. Her moral ambivalence was repugnant. The way she treated him – as though he was an interesting insect in a glass bottle – infuriated him. But at the same time, she seemed to understand him like no other woman he had met. She saw through his actions to the man behind them, and she had been frighteningly accurate in her insights. Then there was … her. The raw physicality of her; if you saw beyond the scars, or between them, she was quite beautiful. He found her milky eyes strangely compelling, and the way she didn’t really look at you, but looked through you. Her voice, when she had whispered in his ear…

  He shook his head, cleared his mind, and focused on the task in front of him. To begin with, she had him running a straight targeting simulation, working with the AI she said would one day make him redundant. Which would be just fine with Maqsud. He had not worked with AIs in his role inside the ICBM silos – they still relied on technologies from the previous century. In the Groza control room in Baikonur, he had a squad of human specialists working under him. But here on Titov, for these simulations, Grahkovsky used a natural language neural network that responded to commands just like one of the specialists in his team in Baikonur. But faster.

  “Bring up Florida, USA, full-screen view,” he said into his headset. “Center on the Kennedy Space Center.”

  On his main screen, the famous launch site sprang into focus. Across the bottom of the screen, a constant stream of data was running, changing every time he touched his mouse and moved his targeting crosshairs, showing latitudes and longitudes, distances from orbit, time from launch to impact, estimated margins of error for the impact epicenter based on upper atmospheric and local weather, and more.

  “Center on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, please,” he said and the map adjusted. With his mouse, he drew a two-mile by two-mile box. A Groza strike did not hit as a perfect circle or square. Depending on where the launch vehicle was, it struck the earth at an angle and ‘splashed,’ so the damage footprint was more like a fan or oval, with more missiles concentrated near the point of impact and fewer further out.

  The Kennedy-Canaveral target was an interesting one. It was not one site, but two. Two administration centers, museums and libraries, two industrial sites, with multiple launch complexes spread over an area that was about fifteen miles from top to bottom and about ten miles wide. Not an issue if you plastered it with a brace of nuclear missiles, but a real challenge if your weapon of choice was Groza.

  As a target, it had already been programmed of course. Reviewing the current targeting data, Maqsud had seen that a single Groza had been allocated to cover both sites. And five main targets had been identified, none of which were predominantly civilian. Those at Kennedy were the NASA Vehicle Assembly Building and Launch Complexes 39A and 39B, from which NASA and Space Force launched the Space Launch System rocket, and SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy. On Cape Canaveral Station, two sites were targeted, the mixed-use ‘Industrial Area’ containing the bases and headquarters for a dozen military units and civilian corporations and Launch Complex 40, the main Space Force heavy-lift launch complex.

  Each of the targets fell neatly within the two-mile by two-mile footprint of a Groza strike. A full twenty-warhead strike had been allocated to the target, but as Maqsud quickly saw, the targeting had not been optimized for effect. Four warheads or 256 missiles had been allocated to each of the five targets, which was simple enough, but showed a lack of thoughtful planning.

  Reviewing data on the buildings and infrastructure under each footprint, he determined that just two warheads or 128 missiles each should be allocated to the launch complexes themselves. While they looked on paper like the most important targets, they comprised either solid concrete infrastructure or easily destroyed but easily replaced light infrastructure like towers, fuel tanks and pipelines. A 128-missile strike on a launch complex would certainly knock it out, but a heavier strike would probably do no greater damage, nor result in a longer rebuild time.

  Where the two sites were most vulnerable was in their ‘beating hearts,’ the two military/industrial headquarters which housed research facilities, assembly buildings, engineering works, computer servers and the personnel who served in them both in uniform and in suits and skirts. Flattening these buildings would set research and production back for months, perhaps years. Killing the people inside them, though, would literally decimate generations of vital US space expertise. To these two building complexes he should allocate sixteen warheads, or 1,024 missiles, to ensure maximum structural and human carnage.

  The thought made him sick to the stomach.

  How many people lay under the footprints he had just painted? Five thousand? Ten? Twenty?

  He had the tools to be able to answer that question. His model had been populated with publicly available data, supplemented with military intelligence estimates of the number of military personnel, staff and visitors that were present at both sites on an average day.

  He placed his mouse cursor carefully and then spoke into the air. “Two-mile by two-mile eight-warhead strike. Cape Canaveral Space Force Station Industrial Area. Casualty estimate in thousands, please.”

  The estimated casualties from a 32-ton payload delivered at these points would be four thousand three hundred injured seriously, six hundred twenty-five dead, the computer voice intoned.

  Grahkovsky had challenged him to try to minimize the loss of human life. But the human capital was the real target at Kennedy-Canaveral, not the launch gantries, fuel tanks or even the rockets sitting there being readied for launch.

  He compressed the strike zones to an unachievable one mile by one mile, spread them more carefully to cover the most valuable engineering, industrial and research facilities. The system wasn’t designed for such a small footprint and reported large margins of error. But doing this avoided some of the corporate headquarters, more likely to be filled with marketers and accountants than engineers and scientists. It would save lives perhaps, but it would be a slightly less effective strike, less likely to set the US space program back.

  “Recalculate casualty estimate, in thousands please,�
�� he said.

  The estimated casualties from a 32-ton payload delivered at these points would be three thousand eight hundred injured seriously, five hundred seventy-five dead, the voice replied.

  Despite the compromise, his tweaking had little effect on the death rate. He cursed and pushed himself away from his console.

  You evil witch! he yelled in his mind. You knew it would be like this. You knew you were setting me an impossible challenge.

  He pulled himself back to his console. He would not let her beat him. There was a way to spread the strike to ensure maximum damage and minimum casualties. He would find it, just to spite her.

  Positioning the pieces

  Sokolniki Park, Meshchansky District, Moscow

  D’Antonia had not slept after leaving Grahkovsky at the nightclub. But she had not run either. What were the chances AISE would be able to find an antidote for whatever the GRU had poisoned her with, before it killed her? She did not like the odds.

  Instead, she had remembered her grandfather’s words, the time she had bent the front wheel on her tricycle.

  “If you break the trunk of your orange tree, graft it to a lemon,” he’d told her – a local dialect equivalent of ‘if life gives you lemons…’ And he had taken her tricycle, returning it two weeks later having used the two small rear wheels to make her a scooter. She’d ridden that scooter everywhere that summer.

  The day after she’d been poisoned, she was called to an urgent meeting with a Mozprom executive that Lapikov told her its CEO had insisted on. He was in a cabinet meeting and asked her to deal with it and only bother him if the matter was urgent. Whether it was her imagination, stress, or the drug, she was starting to feel nauseous as she arrived at the building. The ‘executive,’ as she expected, was a GRU officer. A plain-faced man, in his mid-thirties, completely unremarkable and not particularly bright. He had a list of questions with him and, she assumed, a recording device. He warned her unless she cooperated, she would be arrested, interrogated, and she would not have access to the antidote for the poison Grahkovsky had given her. He told her without the antidote she would die within 48 hours, and it would not be a quick or painless death.