“Yes, sir,” Christine said.
Things were quiet for about sixty seconds; then: “Sir, detecting S-500S target-tracking radar, appears to be locked on to us,” Christine said. “Azimuth, elevation, and range only—no uplink signals.” It was precisely what she had been concerned about: if the S-500S battery detected that they were being tracked on radar from Armstrong, they might think they were under attack and could retaliate.
“Designate target and send to Combat, Christine,” Kai ordered. “Continue scanning.”
There was a bit of confusion in Christine’s voice: this was certainly no big deal, not worth a target ID badge. “Uh . . . designate target Golf-one, sir,” she replied after entering commands into the attack computer. “Target locked into attack computer.”
“Command, this is Operations,” Valerie reported. “Verifying that target Golf-one is locked into Combat. Two Hammers ready from Kingfisher-09, one remaining, forty-five seconds until out of engagement envelope.”
“Verified,” Kai said. “Christine, warn me if the target’s designation changes.”
“Wilco, sir,” Christine said. Her palms started to get a bit sweaty: this was starting to look like a prelude to—
Suddenly the signal identification changed from TARGET TRACK to MISSILE TRACK. The shift was instantaneous, and it didn’t stay on the board for more than one or two seconds, but it was long enough for Christine to call out, “Command, I have a missile tr—”
“Combat, Command, batteries released on Golf-one,” Kai ordered. “Repeat, batteries released.”
“Batteries released, Roger,” Valerie said. “Combat, target Golf-one, engage!”
A Kingfisher weapon garage almost four thousand miles away from Armstrong—although Armstrong Space Station was much closer to the target, the missiles needed time and distance to reenter Earth’s atmosphere, so a Kingfisher weapon garage farther away got the tasking—maneuvered itself to a computer-derived course, and two Orbital Maneuvering Vehicles were ejected from the weapon garage thirty seconds apart. The OMVs flipped themselves over until they were flying tail first, and their reentry rockets fired. The burns did not last too long, decelerating the spacecraft by just a few hundred miles an hour, but it was enough to change their trajectory from Earth orbit to the atmosphere, and the OMVs flipped back over so their heat-protective shields were exposed to the onrushing atmosphere.
As the spacecraft entered the upper atmosphere, the glow from friction burning the air changed colors until it became white-hot, and streams of superheated plasma trailed behind each vehicle. Tiny hydraulically controlled vanes and maneuvering thrusters on the tail of the OMV’s body helped the spacecraft make S-turns through the sky, which helped not only to increase the time they had to slow down through the sky but also to confuse any space tracking radars on their intended target. One of the steering vanes on the second OMV malfunctioned, sending it spinning wildly out of control, mostly burning up in the atmosphere, and what was left went crashing into the Siberian wilderness.
At a hundred thousand feet altitude, the protective shrouds around the OMVs broke free, exposing a two-hundred-pound tungsten-carbide projectile with a millimeter-wave radar and imaging-infrared-seeker head in the nose. It followed steering signals from its weapon garage until the radar locked on to its target, then refined its aiming, comparing what it saw with its sensors with the target images stored in memory. It took only a fraction of a second, but the images matched and the warhead locked on to its target—the transporter-erector-launcher vehicle of an S-500S surface-to-air missile system. It struck the target, traveling almost ten thousand miles an hour. The warhead didn’t need an explosive warhead—hitting at that speed was akin to being armed with two thousand pounds of TNT, completely obliterating the launcher and everything else in a five-hundred-foot radius.
“Target Golf-one destroyed, sir,” Christine reported moments later, her voice muted and hoarse—that was the first time she had destroyed anything in her entire life, let alone a fellow human being.
“Good job,” Kai said stonily. “Trev, I want a two-person team to suit up and begin prebreathing, going on six-hour emergency standby duty. The rest of the off-duty crew can stand down from combat stations. Eyes and ears open, everybody—I think we’ll be busy. What’s the status of Starfire? How much longer?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Casey Huggins responded from the Skybolt module. “Maybe an hour, maybe two. I’m sorry, sir, but I just don’t know.”
“As quickly as you can, Miss Huggins,” Kai said. He hit a button on his communications console. “General Sandstein, urgent.”
THE KREMLIN
MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
A SHORT TIME LATER