April 3: The Middle of Nowhere (18 page)

There was a funny feeling of motion and Jeff saw his freshly filled coffee cup do something strange. Heather had just refilled it over-full almost spilling it over and as he leaned over to suck a little up without lifting the mug his coffee climbed the last couple millimeters to the edge on  his right and dipped on the left. He just stared at it wondering if it would spill over the edge but it stopped just short of that.

"Did you feel something?" Jeff asked the others.

"I had to take a step because I felt off balance, but I thought it was just me being clumsy," Heather admitted, standing with the coffee pot still in her hand.

Jeff looked around and pointed at the chain April was wearing, the one her brother had left her. "April, let me borrow your neck chain please."

It was an odd request, but April took it off over her head silently. Jeff adjusted one of the small articulated lamps over the desk and tugged down a loop of the wire running up the arm. He undid the lobster clasp on the chain and clipped it on the wire so the other end just missed dragging on the desktop.

He fumbled around in his pocket and got one of the platinum one Solar coins like he's sold April. He positioned that as centrally as he could under the chain. They all were watching it expectantly. Nothing happened for a bit and then the chain slowly swung from the center to near the rim.

"April, you have such a good relationship with Jon. Would you give him a call and ask if Home is experiencing some, uh, acceleration?"

She said nothing, but pulled her pad out and entered a text message. After a very brief pause she laughed and entered more. "He says -  No way could you feel that! – So I told him breakfast slid off the table and the furniture is all against one bulkhead."

The chain stayed at the rim of the coin but started making a slow crawl following the rim.

"They're moving Home," Heather stated the obvious, "but turning us too."

April went back to her com and clicked just a few keys. "I asked him why."

"Ahhh, makes sense," she said shortly. "They are slowing spin and putting us right in front of the Rock, long axis on the orbital path. If anyone shoots at us in a catch up orbit, the easiest shot to plot, it will be in the way."

"You'd think they would tell folks," Heather said, a little miffed.

"I'm sure they told Traffic Control and all the people in suits and scooters," Happy said. "I've had them adjust orbit when I was outside working and they usually give you an hour notice and advice you not to be in the middle of something like aligning a big beam. It's Mitsubishi's habitat. They can move it around if they want to."

"Why reduce spin?" Gunny asked. "You're just as big a target spinning or not."

"If we slow it down then there is less internal stress on everything. Less chance it'll break up if a major spoke is busted or a bearing damaged," Happy explained. "They won't stop it entirely. You would have problems with things like water that's not in sealed vessels. There are lots of folks who have no experience with zero G and would totally freak out. I can just see everything in bins and closets floating free."

Everybody in the room looked to their pad as they all dinged as well as the desk com.

Emergency Notice: Mitsubishi Administration. As a safety precaution maintenance has been instructed to temporarily reduce spin to moderate structural issues if M3 experiences hostile action. We do not anticipate this being a long term change. There should be no need to arrange heavier sleeping accommodations for minors for just a few days time. Spin will be reduced, not eliminated, so no changes in stowage or fluid storage should be needed. Your perceived weight will be reduced by a factor of about half over the next three hours. We encourage you to be cautious moving about if you are not used to dealing with other levels on a regular basis. When spin is restored it will be just as gradually so you need not anticipate any sudden increase.

If it has been some time since your annual inspection we suggest you make sure your place of work or residence has sufficient emergency pressure suits for the number of people present. Distributing them to be near each work station or sleeping area can save valuable time in the event they are needed. If you move about well away from your emergency suit for your work or commercial activity, it would be wise to take your emergency suit with you. The carrier for the suits have a handle and loops on which a shoulder strap can be attached.

Notice will be given when we start the process to bring spin back to normal.

Thank You, M3 Physical Structure Management

"Local calls Earth Control when we move a ship out of the control area. I wonder if they call when they move the entire habitat?" April wondered.

"It's only a couple kilometers. I doubt if they say anything. They are after all moving the entire control area," her grandpa allowed. "To announce it might be seen as provocative."

"Everything is provocative to these creeps," Jeff complained. "But they can do piracy and murder and it's supposed to be 'sophisticated' to expect sovereign states to act that way."

"I'm on your side," Happy reminded him. "Mitsubishi may not want to provoke them, but I have no problem with you dropping the hammer on the bastards."

"The armed merchant
Silly Willy
informs me to my private com that there is a shuttle reentry visible below them crossing Greece that looks to be on a vector for the
Jiuquan facility," Louis told them. "They estimate a twenty to twenty-five minute touch down."

"We owe them big and I won't forget," Jeff said furiously typing commands. "I want to see them actually roll this shuttle into the security perimeter before I believe it has the
Rascal
aboard. If we hit the wrong one and they land the real one on some expedient military air base we may never know. I'm stacking everything up to go or no go in forty minutes. If I can't tell by then it will be another forty minutes to target them with a smaller group of weapons. I really don't want to do that."

"That's cutting it fine. Why didn't you leave yourself another ten minutes. They can't transfer the
Rascal
or refuel the shuttle to lift again in a day, much less ten minutes," Louis asked.

"Yes, but if they have cut some of the compensators loose they could pull a couple jets up and stuff them in those planes and disperse them to open and study at their leisure. How far can a fast plane climb out and go in twenty minutes?" Jeff asked.

"Probably too far," Louis admitted. They waited tense with anticipation.

"Look at this." He expanded the screen to a view about forty miles across and then zoomed in and circled a tiny white dart just on the edge. "They are on faster approach than normal. That shuttle is
heavy
. It's on a glide path like a brick. They are going to touch down at eighteen minutes, not twenty-five. That gives you a few minutes."

The watched the shuttle a couple minutes and then Louis zoomed back to the end of the runway and the security area. There was a bustle of activity, some of the light armor driving out to the end of the runway and taking up station by the taxi-way. Two tow tractors took up position each on a taxiway entry a couple kilometers from the runway end.

The shuttle landed long. They didn't see a puff of tire smoke until it was well into the area of black tire streaks. The chute popped quickly and the far tow tractor turned onto the edge of the runway and accelerated. The shuttle had almost caught up to the tractor when it dropped the chute and coasted. The tractor matched speed and slid in from the side. They hooked the front landing gear on the roll and took control of the spacecraft without a hitch, slick as snatching a tossed beer. They swung left, taking the shuttle gear on that side near the edge of the pavement and did a wide arching turn into a taxiway connector to their right.

The four armored vehicles waiting on the dirt kept their distance, but pulled away and paced the shuttle onto the tarmac. They couldn't see the hanger door from their angle but the tug barely slowed at all as it approach the secure hanger and was still slowing when the tail of the shuttle disappeared from their view under the roof. The armor peeled off and took up station again.

"My goodness, I never saw a tug rush into a shelter that fast. I bet it was a close thing getting it stopped before the shuttle squashed them against the far wall," Happy said.

"Eighteen minutes to touch down and another seven minutes to get hooked and towed out of sight. They certainly are eager to hide that one, Anybody see anything, anything at all, that would make you doubt the
Rascal
is in her hold?" Jeff asked.

"No way," Louis objected. "They don't have the assets to load a shuttle up with dead weight and go through this elaborate of a theatre to deceive us."

"Nines to four places that is it," Happy agreed. "They were lucky to even have another vessel of this class after they lost one to the
Happy Lewis
last year, another to the USNA near M3 and the crew of the
Rascal
managed to shoot the crap out of the one that snatched them. I can't believe they had an extra hanging around in orbit not just as a back-up but to play shell games for us."

"We are golden then," Jeff said frowning. He extended a hand and hesitating, took a deep breath and let it out. The single tap of the key seemed anticlimactic.

Chapter 13

In LEO a group of forty mini-rods spread out and braked. They were each about a quarter of the mass of the rods the militia used to defend April in Hawaii. They were however cheaper and they made just as menacing a target plunging through the atmosphere toward you at twenty-seven thousand kilometers per hour. They cost the ballistic defense just as expensive a missile to intercept, but they cost a third to make.

They had a much smaller radius of effective destruction, but they were intended to draw fire more than damage targets. They were allowed to select their own targets within the rough circle of the base. Their target imaging was fairly crude. A few picked actual antiballistic batteries, some just large buildings. A couple saw the  outline of an aircraft and one lucky rod picked the actual golf-ball shape of a radome.  Three failed to lock on a high value target far enough out and defaulted to the runway itself. None happened to aim within a hundred meters of the hanger.

The base defense hit a few of them out at almost a hundred kilometers. 'Hitting' a solid iron bar coming on endwise with the cross section of an orange and going over 7 kilometers a second doesn't mean much. In the target rich environment of the base they were as likely to deflect a rod into a more important target as they were to save another.

The base battle management software tried to see a pattern to the attack but there wasn't one. The targeting was near random given the crude software and limited cameras on the rods. What did matter was almost every launcher on the base ended up releasing a missile by the time the first wave impacted.

The second wave had eighty mini-rods and they were not allowed to pick their own targets. They were programmed in flight to hit the radar and anti-missile launch sites observed and did so with the added detail of being commanded to criss cross each other in a snarled mass of terminal maneuvers that served no purpose but to be confusing. The descending column of glowing heat shields spiraling and weaving back and forth and trailing ablated material as they came down  looked like some bizarre braid of fire. Two actually veered into each other against all odds.

All eighty hit within a tenth of a second of each other and put as much energy on the ground as a small tactical nuke. Everything not bolted down bounced off the ground or floor. Each one delivered the energy of a World War Two Blockbuster and they clustered on the base perimeter where the defenses were located.

Six launchers remained active, but just behind the second group of rods a cluster of three  recently prepared weapons were two seconds behind. They had Singh accumulators packed behind a large canister of metallic calcium. Cesium or sodium would have been better but calcium was the only metal being separated from the Rock in sufficient quantity that so far had no significant market so it was cheap. There was talk of using it for structural elements and electrical wiring, but it had no real engineering data or history since it was useless in an Earth atmosphere. They fail safe detonated when the few remaining interceptors released approached them just inside eighteen kilometers altitude. The charges were respectable, ten kilotons each. But at that altitude they wouldn't do any damage on the ground.

What they did do was blast a sheet of vaporized metal across the sky that retained much of its downward motion in its expansion. The ionized mass blocked both radar and infrared and didn't start dissipating much until it was below ten kilometers.

The critical weapon, his lone reentry sled with the Singh fusion warhead, did not come through this ceiling shielding it to show on targeting radar until it was eight kilometers high. It had twenty decoy rods to provide alternate targets slightly ahead of it, but it was falling behind as it had more aerodynamic drag and a slightly different thermal signature. The lack of sophisticated decoys didn't matter by then.

It would have impacted the ground from when it became visible on radar in slightly more than a second, but it was fused to detonate at a kilometer if not intercepted. Since it was aimed at the center of the base the two launchers that managed to get a lock and compute a shot at it had to shoot almost horizontally from the base perimeter.

That was not how the system was designed to operate. They launched at a high angle turned and tried to beat the target to an interception point high enough to mitigate damage from their own detonation. It was too late. The weapon made it all the way to target and detonated 973 meters up and offset about sixty meters from the targeted hanger.

The fireball would have completely vaporized the
Rascal
and its secrets if it had yielded ten percent of its estimated energy. The crater would have been perhaps fifty meters deep and a couple hundred meters across depending on the bedrock.