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

by FX Holden

  She was inside the car.

  Another five minutes of contortions she never knew she was capable of and she was sitting hunched over in the passenger seat, breathing like she’d just run a marathon and trying not to cough a lung up.

  The next part was no easier. Reaching out of the car and down, she had to manhandle Soshane up, losing her a couple of times before she managed to get a sort of cradle rigged around her using the jacket she’d dragged out with her and pulling her up into the car with her. As carefully as she could, Ambre transferred her to the driver’s seat, the roof pushed so far down on that side of the car that there was no question of Ambre being able to fit there. It was nearly down as far as the steering wheel, but the wheel was still free.

  This is totally going to work. Or not. She looked around the car again. Water. There was a half bottle of water in the driver’s door. She knew she had a muesli bar in her handbag, maybe even two. Always carried a snack in case Soshane got hungry. OK, she had food and water. They could stay here for hours, maybe a day. And use the car siren to signal for help. It was a plan.

  She decided to test it, reached forward for the button that Russell had asked Soshane to press. Taking a small breath and preparing herself even through her deafness for the loud sound of the siren in the claustrophobic space of the collapsed parking bay, she held it down.

  Nothing.

  Of course. The car had been turned off by Grahkovsky. It needed to be woken up.

  She reached past Soshane and felt for the car starter button.

  It was a keyless model that started if the keys were somewhere inside the car. Russell had them in his pocket when he got out and confronted the Russian, she was sure of that. But Russell was dead. Where had Grahkovsky put him? He’d gassed him, grabbed him … oh shit. Ambre turned slowly and looked into the caged-off rear compartment of the patrol car. The unmoving body of the dead Defender was curled onto the back seat with his back to her. Oh hell. Russell.

  That decided it. Soshane wakes up and she’s back in the patrol car at the end of the world with Russell dead in the back? She’d have nightmares the rest of her days.

  Ambre reached around the steering column and held down the patrol car’s starter button until the lights on the dashboard lit up. She kept her finger on the button.

  Welcome to drive settings. Please choose drive mode. Do you want manual drive, or autopilot? An annoyingly calm, sexy voice filled the car.

  There was no way she could set the car to auto-drive and expect to get anywhere while it was buried in rubble. It would simply refuse to move. Ambre tried to speak, and broke out in a fit of coughing. She took a mouthful of water.

  Please repeat. Do you want manual drive, or autopilot?

  “Manual,” Ambre croaked.

  Manual drive selected.

  “Safety settings,” she said next. “Disable collision avoidance. Disable air bags.”

  Warning, disabling collision avoidance and air bags may void your auto insurance. Do you wish to proceed?

  “Yes.”

  Passengers detected in two seats. Please put on your seatbelts. A small dinging bell sounded inside the car.

  “Seriously?” she muttered. She reached across and fastened the driver’s belt around Soshane and then pulled her own belt on. Luckily it didn’t jam.

  Head craned awkwardly to look behind her, she maneuvered her left leg into the driver’s pedal compartment and lightly put a foot on the accelerator pedal. She patted her sleeping girl on her thigh. “OK, baby, this is it. Let’s hope momma isn’t crazy.” She put one hand on the gear shift and moved it to reverse, and then jammed her foot down on the pedal.

  The 200-kilowatt, 260 horsepower electric engine in the patrol car whined in protest as the car shoved against the fallen steel and rubble and sheet metal behind it. Ambre pushed her foot toward the floor, determined to either burn out or break through. The all-wheel drive spun the shredded tires and added their acrid smoke to the choking dust inside the collapsed garage. Ambre could hear the protesting engine and screaming tires even through the ringing of her near deaf ears and gritted her teeth.

  Oh please, God, she said to herself, reaching out to The Man for the first time in the whole ordeal. I’ve been saving this until I really needed it. And I need it now!

  A heavy section of roof slammed down into the hood of the car in front of the shattered windscreen, causing her to jump and jam her foot down even harder.

  The car shuddered and shook and then juddered a foot backward. Like ketchup out of a glass bottle, it seemed like it was going nowhere, and then suddenly, it was accelerating. It hit something lying on the ground behind it, humped over it with a clattering, grinding sound, broke through a wall of debris, and then slammed into a still burning 10,000-gallon oil tank that had somehow flown through the air and landed on its side in the middle of the road outside the Old Fire Station. Crawling out the car window, heaving Soshane out with her, she fell to her knees and crawled away from the burning fuel tank.

  She was out.

  She stopped, and looked slowly around herself.

  Oh. My. God. No.

  Anastasia Grahkovsky listened for one minute more to the frantic voice of the news reporter, the background wail of sirens, the beat of helicopter rotors, the blaring horns of the traffic across the water.

  He had cheated her. She had ordered Khan to conduct a full payload strike on Kennedy-Canaveral, but what she had just heard reported could have been no more than five or six warheads. Cape Canaveral was burning, and the reporters were saying alarms had been triggered just before the meteor strike, but Kennedy was unscathed.

  So either Khan had not executed her orders to the letter, or … yes, it was just possible the Americans had intercepted her Groza. An anti-satellite missile? Another X-37 sacrificed? Or perhaps the British had interfered again. She would know soon enough.

  Alarms triggered. Sergei had done his job, then. He’d kept the personnel inside their vulnerable office buildings and labs and workshops. There had been no evacuation. Poor, beautiful, loyal Sergei. Had he survived, she wondered?

  She hoped not. The TV footage cut to a helicopter or drone view of flame and boiling smoke. A fire boat on the Banana River, hosing a burning building ashore. Then a shot of a launch complex, fuel and gas pipelines spouting fire, a launch gantry lying bent and broken on the concrete launch pad.

  She could only imagine the scenes at Titov, or within the walls of the Kremlin.

  She knew they would all come after her now. Probably the GRU first, and if she evaded them, then the Americans, or the British. Damn them all.

  But she had succeeded, at least partly. She had protected her babies.

  Her mother country could not be trusted as sole steward of the weapon she had created. She had seen that already when it had been used against a petty, small-minded target like Abqaiq. Then Korla? Russia could not be trusted to protect and defend it either, when such crude and unsophisticated attacks as those launched by the British and Americans could so easily succeed. She had tried to buy her progeny some time, but she had only been partially successful. No matter, she had bigger plans.

  If it was to reach its true potential, Groza needed to serve more than one master. So she’d arranged for a hire car to be delivered to the hotel that evening and she would take it tonight to meet with the foreign agents with whom she had made anonymous contact before leaving Moscow.

  From the 3rd department of the Strategic Support Force of the People’s Liberation Army of China.

  Fan Bo had been poring over the data from his aborted Mao Bei swarm attack on the Groza when word had started coming over international news services of a ‘meteorite’ strike on Cape Canaveral. At first he had thought it must be a hoax, but the vision shot from viewing platforms that were usually used to record rocket launches showed toppled gantries and smoking ruins, shocked civilians stumbling along a causeway covered in white chalky dust, and bodies being pulled out of the Banana River … this could not be fa
ked.

  Now he understood why the Groza had suddenly deviated from its predicted orbit. He had been worried that it may have detected his ambush and repositioned to avoid it, but it was more likely it had simply been retasked for this strike.

  Twenty years of service in the PLA had taught Bo not to second guess the actions of his leaders, either in the armed forces or in politics. But he had also learned it was unwise to appear unprepared when his military masters called him to action. He would order his unit to prepare attack plans for all of the Groza units flagged to China by US Space Force.

  Watching the smoke boil over Cape Canaveral, he had little doubt he was about to become very, very busy.

  Since leaving their control center Bunny O’Hare had been very, very busy. She and the others had run from the Morrell Operations Center to the base Security Office, to find the duty commander, an officer called Verge, standing at a makeshift desk outside the damaged building, yelling into a radio and directing his Defenders to where they were needed. They didn’t have to offer their help twice. He’d sent O’Hare out with a two-way radio to round up civilians and take them out to the evacuation point set up on the Industrial Road causeway. Or call for medical help if they couldn’t walk out.

  She’d led two groups of civilians out by the time she’d worked her way up toward the sewage treatment plant and found the woman and child crouched in the middle of the road by a smoldering fuel tank and smashed patrol car.

  “Hey there, are you alright?” O’Hare asked her as she approached. The woman was crouched in the middle of the road, a little girl clutched to her chest, the girl’s head buried in her shoulder. Around them, the Cape Canaveral Industrial Area was burning. Thick, choking smoke rolled across the road. The woman turned toward O’Hare’s voice.

  “Hi mate,” O’Hare repeated. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” the woman managed. But she was looking at O’Hare with unfocused eyes and a flat expression on her face. Shock. She was in shock. O’Hare had seen it often enough to guess that much. She reached out a hand and stroked the little girl’s hair, looking in her sleeping face. “This your daughter? She hurt?”

  “Yes,” the woman said. “No. I don’t know.”

  “What’s your name?” O’Hare asked gently.

  The woman frowned. “Ambre.”

  “Surname, ma’am?”

  “Uhm … Duchamp?”

  “And the girl?”

  “Soshane Duchamp.”

  O’Hare reached for her two-way radio and lifted it to her mouth. “Base? Captain O’Hare,” she said. “I’m up by the Old Fire Station on Scrub Jay. I have two civilians, one adult, possibly concussed, another unconscious, a little girl. Names Ambre and Soshane Duchamp. I need a paramedic.” She put the unit to her ear, listening. “No, the girl is breathing normally, no obvious injuries. OK, yeah, I think I can get them there. O’Hare out.” She reached out and put a hand on Ambre’s shoulder. “Ma’am, are you able to walk, do you think?” she asked.

  Ambre didn’t answer. She pointed at the smashed patrol car. “Russell,” she said.

  O’Hare looked where she was pointing. “The patrol car?”

  “He’s in there.”

  “There’s someone in the patrol car?” O’Hare asked.

  Ambre just nodded, and held Soshane tighter.

  O’Hare got up and jogged over to the patrol car. Its roof was flattened at the back but there was enough space at the front for her to stick her head in and look inside. Uh oh. There was someone curled up on the back seat. In a Defender’s uniform. And he wasn’t moving.

  Looking around herself she saw a piece of iron fence railing that had been blasted onto the road and jammed it into a gap between the car body and the car door frame. After putting her weight on it a few times, it suddenly flew open. She reached in and put her hand on the man’s arm.

  He was already cold. Whatever had killed him, it had happened a fair while earlier.

  This was ten separate degrees of messed up.

  About a block away, there was a massive explosion as another fuel tank went up. Bunny ducked reflexively, but Ambre didn’t even react. She was just crouched on the road, rocking her daughter back and forth.

  Trying not to look at him, O’Hare felt the Defender’s body for an ID or badge or something and came up with a tag and a small leather wallet. She put them in one of the pockets of her flight suit and jogged back to Ambre.

  “OK, ma’am, let’s get you up,” she said, helping Ambre to her feet. “You okay with your daughter there, or you want me to carry her?”

  Ambre pulled away from O’Hare. “No. I’ve got her.”

  “Good, that’s good,” O’Hare said and pointed back down the road through the smoke. “We’re going back down there. It’s a little crazy right now with all the smoke, but you just stick with me. There’s an aid station set up out on the causeway. They can have a look at your daughter and you. Alright?”

  Ambre bit her lip, but she nodded. Then as O’Hare was about to start walking she grabbed her arm. “What about Russell?” she asked. “We need to bring him too.”

  O’Hare took her by the shoulders. “Don’t worry. We’ll get you and Soshane out first, and I’ll come back for Russell, I promise.”

  O’Hare had a million questions she wanted to ask the woman with the sleeping child she’d found by the smashed patrol car and the dead Defender, but they’d have to wait for a better day.

  Take-down

  Presidential Telepresence Center, White House, Washington, DC

  A day later, Chinese Premier Chen Minhao and US President Stuart Fenner sat face to virtual face. The off-the-books videoconference had been requested by Fenner, who was about to take some very important decisions, and while he didn’t need or expect China to support them, he needed to know that the Chinese Premier would not publicly oppose them.

  As Commander in Chief, Fenner had been sorely tested since coming to office in 2028, and many had doubted his military credentials having served only as a platoon leader for the 3rd US Infantry Regiment, guarding Arlington National Cemetery in Northern Virginia. But he had demonstrated a cool temperament in the Turkey-Syria conflict, cutting loose the Emirates as allies when they refused to allow him to base US aircraft there. He had shown resolve when facing off against Russia in a dispute over the Bering Strait in which Russia tried to occupy the US island of Savoonga, and prescience in pulling US troops out of Asia and the Middle East and repositioning them in Europe to face an anarchic Russia. That decision had emboldened China to support Japan to try to push the US out of its last Okinawa base, but Fenner had kept his nerve, and the US alliance with Japan had in fact been strengthened following that dispute.

  It was safe to say the recent conflict over Okinawa had done nothing for US-China relations, and both parties to the videoconference still described each other as ‘the main enemy.’ So it had surprised Fenner when Chinese defense ministry officials had approached the Pentagon to support a joint US-Chinese operation to degrade the new Russian Groza satellite network. Surprised him until his own head of national intelligence had informed him that China itself had been the victim of a Groza strike.

  The enemy of mine enemy is my friend … it was a principle as old as time and Fenner planned to make use of it now. In fact, they were already benefiting; since the attack on Florida, the Chinese had covertly disabled at least four more Grozas according to US Space Command.

  Fenner gave a tight smile at the video camera as the Chinese Premier came on line. “Premier Minhao, thank you for agreeing to meet on such short notice,” he said, a bot translating his words simultaneously as he spoke. He had asked for the meeting to take place without any other officials or advisors present and had instructed his Chief of Staff no recording should be made and no notes should be taken. He had met Minhao twice on the sidelines of Asia Pacific Economic forum meetings, and once during a much-publicized meeting following the ceremony to celebrate the declaration of the United Republic of Korea.


  “Mister President, my sincere condolences for the victims of the attack in Florida. If there is anything we can do, either now or to assist with your efforts later to rebuild, I trust you will let me know personally,” Minhao said. He had only recently taken the helm of the world’s most populous nation after the former Premier Xi Ping had stepped aside following a controversial third term, relinquishing the premiership to his chosen successor, Minhao, but staying on as head of the Chinese Communist Party where he could wield power behind the scenes. Fenner also had his people working a backchannel to communicate the same thing to Xi Ping as he was about to discuss with Minhao.

  “Thank you, Premier; obviously that is what I want to discuss today,” Fenner said. “Premier, I think we must face the reality that in Russia, we are now dealing with a State that has gone well and truly rogue. The proxy war on Turkey, the military action to take control of the Bering Strait, the coup that followed it, and now these attacks on Saudi Arabia, China and the USA…” He looked down at a report on a tablet which had just been sent through to him. “For which the latest death toll is approaching six hundred, with several hundred more injured.”

  The Korla attack was still not public, but Fenner noted that the Chinese Premier did not attempt to deny it. “Our losses were of a similar magnitude, Mr. President. I have seen you have publicly laid the blame for this attack clearly at the feet of Russia. And I agree, since the transition from Vladimir Putin, Russian behavior outside its borders has seemed less … orderly.” The Chinese Premier was choosing his words very carefully.

  “Your actions against the Russian Groza system are proving very effective, Premier. Can we presume you will continue to prosecute your attacks on the Russian satellite system?”