Stormhaven Rising (Atlas and the Winds Book 1) (36 page)

He stood on the hilltop staring into the distance. The crowd of spectators was thinning, but he wondered if they were going to be gone soon enough to avoid having to use force. It didn’t look like it, but he hoped that there’d only be a few die-hards left when he had to give the order to seal the area.

The media was going to be another matter.

“Sir, you’ve got a call from Colton Taylor.” One of the technicians said, running up behind him with a headset.

“Hello Mr. Taylor, what can I do for you?” he said.

“You could let us move the
Dancing Star
around to the shop. We need to make repairs.” Taylor’s voice sounded off. Tired, but not quite.

“I’m afraid I have no influence over the Air Force pilots,” he lied. Every facet of the operation was under his control. “They’ve been instructed to shoot anything that attempts to fly.”

“That’s a bit extreme, don’t you think?” Cole said.

“Right,” Shapiro snorted. “You blew right past us, and now you expect us to just roll over and let you do it again?”

“We had no choice,” Cole said. “You made your intent clear when you fired on the mini.”

“You weren’t going to back down,” Shapiro said, turning to walk back to his office. “After the carnival you threw for the media, there was no way this was going to end without something extreme.”

“If you weren’t pretending to talk, we’d have been willing to cooperate.” Cole sighed, sounding frustrated. “Nothing we did was comparable to what you did. You have to know it cost you dearly in public opinion.”

“Yeah, it got a bit ugly, but the furor will die down and then it’s just going to be us across the table from each other. With no witnesses.” Shapiro sat down at his desk and opened his note file.

“I hope so, because until you approach this like you mean it, we’re going to be forced into these outrageous actions. Do you understand what I mean, Agent Shapiro?” Delivering what could only be construed as a threat, there was more than a fair amount of edge in his voice.

“Any further attempts to undermine the security of this country will be dealt with severely Mr. Taylor,” Shapiro said. “Make no mistake about it. We do have the means to shut you down.”

“Just so you remember, you’re not the only one with that capability,” Cole said. “I hope it doesn’t come down to that.” His words echoed in Doug’s mind after the line went dead.

He stared at the phone for several seconds wondering if he wasn’t starting to see the new face of Stormhaven: The ruthless one.

***

Stormhaven:

“That went about like I expected,” Cole said, shaking his head. He’d called this meeting to make a decision about what to do next. At this moment, their options seemed pretty limited.

“I guess that’s the end of that,” Dave said.

“No.” Tom looked at the pilot, grinning a fair imitation of Cole’s usual expression. “We’ve just got to get further outside the box.”

“How much further can we go?” Viki said. “We launched a flipping space ship right in front of their faces. If that didn’t bend their reality, I don’t know what would.”

“You know, we might need to start designing some of those passive weapons systems we’d talked about.” Sophie offered. “I know we’ve been trying to avoid that, but maybe we need to rethink that position.” The rumble of a Lightning patrolling overhead punctuated her comment.

“Weapons aren’t outside the box,” Tom said. “And they’re not something I think we should be considering.”

“You don’t think they’re talking about how they can blow our asses out of the water over there?” Dave said, pointing in the general direction of the Observation Camp. “They’ve already pulled out the guns, and we’re worrying about whether they’re going to be offended?"

“I don’t think we’re worrying about offending them, so much as having this keep spinning in an uncontrolled way,” Tom said.

“I’m totally against escalating this situation,” Viki said, looking up at the ceiling in the direction of another jet.

“So am I,” Cole echoed. “At least in a conventional sense.”

“Look,” Dave interjected. “I’m still new here, so maybe my opinion doesn’t count, but just because you have guns, doesn’t mean you’re going to use them. I don’t know about the rest of you, but the idea that they almost shot the shit out of us, maybe requires we rethink our position a bit.”

“I can’t argue with that.” Glen nodded. “If they’d managed to get a few more rounds into the hull, we’d not be here debating this.”

“Point taken,” Cole said. He paced across the end of the room, staring out the window for long stretches. “As long as we don’t draw first they’ll never know.”

“Excuse me? Exactly what kind of weaponry are you talking about?” Viki’s skepticism leaked through her tone like an acid rainfall.

“I’ve got an idea on armor,” Daryl said. “I was close to creating a material that would have made the
Dancing Star
bulletproof.”

“Bulletproof would be good,” Dave said, nodding.

“Are you talking about that monomolecular carbon you’ve been tinkering with?” Cole asked.

“That’s the one,” Daryl said. “I know we agreed not to take on any new development projects until this whole thing was over, but I’m almost there. If it performs like I think it will, there isn’t anything short of a nuclear reaction that’d crack this stuff."

“What’s monomolecular carbon?” Dave asked.

“A planar matrix of carbon atoms,” Daryl said. “Like the tubular carbon filament they invented a while back, but as a flat film.”

“A sheet of carbon that’s one continuous molecule?” Viki asked.

“Exactly,” Daryl said. “The only way to punch a hole in it would be to break the atomic structure at a quantum level. In a large scale it would be thousands of times stronger than diamond.”

“So you’ve made some of this stuff?” Danielle asked.

“Only in very small pieces,” Daryl admitted. “The largest one’s been less than a square millimeter, so I’ve still got a way to go."

“I like that,” Viki said. “At least it doesn’t sound like a weapon."

“We’d also talked about the possibility of adapting the Mark-VIII engine to work as a gravity laser,” Sophie suggested, punching in a file to open a display on the wall behind her.

“A what?” Dave asked.

“Gravity laser,” she said. “You could call it a tractor beam, but that’s not precisely right. It works by creating a graviton flow effect...” She stopped herself and looked at Cole to back her up.

“Ok, Gravity Physics 101,” Cole offered. “The engines work on inertial principles that are roughly analogous to electro-magnetics. Everything we can do in the E/M spectrum we can approximate in gravity and inertia. The differences are in the control systems and the propagation rate of the gravity particle. Ergo, if we can build a photon laser, in theory we can build one that projects gravitons.”

“The Mark-VII engine in the
Dancing Star
works by creating an inertial charge point and then pushing against it,” Sophie said. “This charge is like the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field.”

“If you’re controlling inertia, why’d we still feel the acceleration?” Dave asked.

“It has to do with asymmetric distribution of inertial energy in a given region of space,” Cole answered.

“Right,” Tom said. “If you say so."

“The Mark-VIII was supposed to be a field-damping engine,” Sophie explained, “but instead of creating a stable region where inertia was canceled, it projected a shock wave of gravitational force from the ends."

“You’re saying that you can project this laser at a distance and push things away?” Danielle asked. She was studying the diagrams.

“Or pull them towards us,” she said. “In theory we could hold something in place by oscillating the field polarity at high frequency, or by focusing two divergent gravity beams at a distance.”

“What about a force field too?” Dave asked. “Might as well go all the way since we’re what-if-n’.”

Sophie stopped and looked at him, her mental wheels spinning furiously. “I suppose we could adjust the collimation of the drive field and create a diffuse inertial damping effect. It wouldn’t be a force field per se, but it might work to deflect incoming objects in a wider area."

“So you’re saying we could just stop them from being able to shoot at us? Without killing?” Viki asked.

“Exactly,” Sophie said. “Though I’m sure we could figure out how to use it as an offensive weapon if we wanted.”

“Let’s not go there right now,” Cole said, shaking his head to cut her off. “How long do you think it’ll take to set one up?”

“We’ve got four prototypes in the lab collecting dust. We’d have to figure out how to mount them, and do some testing to make sure there weren’t collateral effects. Maybe a few days.”

“Then if nobody objects,” Cole said, glancing around the table. “I think we need to get on it. Now.”

***

Cape Canaveral, Florida:

There was blood on the gauze that held the unconscious astronaut in place. The reentry had gone as smoothly as could be expected, but the G-forces had been enough to finish the job Zehvi had started. Commander Andrews glared at the Israeli astronaut.

Finishing the roll out, Mike had passed the post-flight duties to his co-pilot, Bill Conner, so he could scramble down to the mid-deck and check on the injured crewman. He could hear the distant sounds of the support vehicles through the walls of the shuttle.

“Hurry up,” he whispered to no one in particular, holding the unconscious astronaut’s head in his arms.

The floor of the shuttle lurched sideways and he could tell they were rolling again. “What the hell’s going on out there?” he hollered up to the flight deck. “Where’s the medical crew?"

The usual procedure was to clear the air around the shuttle with the blowers and then deplane while sitting on the runway. They never taxied a shuttle away first.

“They’re moving us off the runway so they can get the
Enterprise
up immediately,” Conner said through the intercom.

“They told me they’d have him out of here and on his way to a hospital as soon as we stopped rolling” Mike said.

“Change of plans, I guess,” his copilot said.

“Screw that,” he said, grabbing Elizabeth Atwood’s arm and pulling her over to hold Alex’s head. It wasn’t that he needed the support, he was still taped into the seat, Mike just wanted him to know someone was with him.

Climbing through the hatch onto the flight deck, he grabbed his headset. “What the hell are you doing out there?”

“
Liberty
this is
Enterprise
Prime,” Warren McDermott said, sounding calm and collected. “Hang on a minute. They’ve had us pumped and holding for about three hours. We’ll be cleared out in under seven minutes. They’re rolling you to a safe distance.”

“You’re launching while we’re still on the apron? What the hell are they smoking Warren?” He leaned against the back of his chair watching the ground moving by.

“They’re moving you six hundred feet off the tarmac and then we’ll hit the juice and be out of your way.”

“What about Alex? You guys can wait until we get him out of here. He needs medical attention NOW,” Mike snarled in frustration.

“No. He doesn’t,” the other astronaut said.

“Why the hell not?” Mike said.

“Because he didn’t make it,” Warren said gently.

“Yeah, the eye looks bad, like maybe it tore the rest of the way,” Mike said. “But he’s medicated and unconscious.”

“No,” Warren said. “His telemetry went flat-line about twenty minutes ago. He died just after you hit entry interface.”

***

Space Command, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado:

“We’ve got an unannounced target outbound from Jiuquan.” The tracking officer interrupted the General as he was heading toward the door. Today alone had been a long week.

“What?” he barked across the room without bothering to patch into the com system.

“Yes sir. We’ve got a Chang Zheng Six or Seven heading for a high energy orbit,” the ensign replied, pointing to the main display where the missile’s trajectory was showing as a red line. “The timing is off for it to be a cargo delivery to their platform."

“All their heavy lifting is done from Wenchang,” Marquez said, walking up to the console behind the officer. “If it’s a C-Z Six-Seven from Jiuquan it’s going to be a Shenzhou capsule on its way to Chang Er.”

Marquez watched a second line flash into existence. Much shorter than the first, but parallel and only separated by the distance to one of the other pads at the launch facility.

“Here they go,” he muttered.

Grabbing a spare headset off the cradle between two workstations, he patched into the com system. “This is Marquez. Get Secretary Reynolds on the line."

Before the call connected to the Secretary, a third launch followed, separated by no more than a minute.