CHAPTER 53

I, for one, support all government space programs. They give us some truly stupendous vehicles to hijack.
-- Brad Linaweaver

20 August

Colonel Vladimir Tuchapski shook his head in wonderment and disbelief. While he struggled to evade KGB, and the military GRU, a gang of American capitalists, black marketeers, and school children soared into Space. It sickened the heart.

He hid such emotions from his cohorts, however, for to weaken now would prove the undoing of all his efforts. And to fail meant death. His government could never allow him to live after what he had done. Space presented his only escape route, Mir his only sanctuary. If he could reach it, he thought, all sins might be forgiven. If not, he would be beyond the reach of their vengeance.

The fat grain elevator in which crouched the bundle of rockets shimmered with summer heat. Inside, the stifling temperatures made work difficult and laborious, but still his men labored like Stakhanovites.

For Tuchapski, it did not matter whether they launched this week, next week, or next year. There would be a Russian presence in Space once more. Then -- finally -- the race would be on for the ultimate prize: Mars!

Mars, Ares, Red Planet; the names evoked images from his childhood. Americans could have Earth and Luna. Mars -- the planet red as blood, the planet of the god of all warriors would be Russia's. Mars would be his.

***

Montgomery Barron monitored the events of the past three days from his small office in Project Stark Fist's hangar at Washington Naval Air Station. He had not heard word one from Milton or anyone else in that time. The college kids went up and came down, thus setting an example of success that others would surely imitate. That was bad enough, and Freespace's nearly flawless flight -- if it ended in a safe landing at Vandenberg -- set a regrettable precedent for coercing government cooperation in the future. Poubelle, though, thumbed his nose openly at NASA and the military, yet garnered an incomprehensible level of popular support and ad hoc defense.

Worst of all was the threat posed by Marcus Grant. A counter-economic space station, however primitive, presaged a danger to world economic and political dynamics that ought to be evident even to those rank fools warming seats on the Hill.

Yet no one sought to activate Stark Fist and unleash Huntress. Bureaucracies seldom handled radical change with ease. The Soviet collapse several years back paralyzed the West with indecision: support the old regime to maintain the intelligence community's beloved "stability"? Or make new alliances and risk stumbling into the unknown? Barron suspected that his superiors sat equally stunned by this new set of affairs. Stop Grant? Support him clandestinely? Or sit on hands with a wait-and-see attitude?

He had to act alone. On his own authority. The prospect thrilled and terrified him simultaneously. In order to protect and sustain his government, he would have to defy its rules. Not just its veneer of public laws, which the NSA violated routinely and with impunity, but its deeper, vehemently enforced code of obedience to the hierarchy.

If he presented them with a fait accompli, on the other hand, and gave them the results they desired along with tons of more-than-plausible deniability, he would be tacitly rewarded.

He gazed out the small office window at the sleek killing machine in the hangar. The fingers of his right hand drummed a light tattoo on the desktop. At the moment, the raptor sat clawless: the LEAP's with which it was to be armed foundered in the development phase, constantly falling in and out of congressional favor. Barron foresaw such a foulup; the interior weapons bay could also hold and launch two ASAT's. The hangar stored four prototypes from the defunct ASAT program.

He calmly picked up the phone and punched in the intercom number for the floor manager. "Joel," he said. "Load two ASAT's onboard Huntress and have her prepped for flight. We are go for operations."

His heart raced as sudden indecision gripped him. What if he misconstrued Grant's threat to the interests of the United States? What if Grant served some secret purpose of NSA to subvert UNITO? The Puzzle Palace, and certainly its rival, the CIA, constantly funded all manner of groups with seemingly contradictory aims, mostly as a way to monitor and control them. The old joke -- that any subversive group with less than 50% CIA/NSA membership was not seriously subversive -- held more than a grain of truth.

What if, by destroying the nascent space station, Barron destroyed a grand plan of one of his superiors?

The intelligence community, caught up for decades in spy-counterspy games, had evolved its own peculiar form of paranoia. Barron rose from his desk, refusing to surrender to such urges. Ultimately, an operative relied upon instinct, hunch, and a firm faith in the long-proven adaptability of the power élite. After centuries of turning every contingency into an opportunity to increase their power, even a screwup on Barron's part could be of some use somehow.

Barron, however, did not consider his action incorrect.

Bending over the console, he transferred information from Space Command and the Kettering Space Observatory Group concerning the orbit of Space Station Volnos into Huntress's computer. Its equatorial orbital inclination meant that the planar window at Washington's nearly 39° latitude would be almost vanishingly short for an eastward launch. He would have to fly south first, chasing Volnos's phase window, which was also quite narrow, but which he would have the computer calculate during the flight, then achieve orbit using the maximum amount of yaw steering designed into Huntress in order to realize a rendezvous. If he failed to enter at the proper phase point, he had the ability to wait in orbit for days if necessary to creep up on the target. The faster the better, though, as for any stalking assassin.

With a grunt, he straightened up, sucked in his gut, and strode purposefully to the locker near the office door. Like a matador dressing for a bullfight, he stripped his earthly clothes from his body and donned the heavy Kevlar-and-ceramic-armored pressure suit tailored to his frame and manufactured off-budget. No one knew; no one would know until he marched out onto the hangar floor.

He slid down the heavy helmet with the grey-green glass covering the eyes. It looked insectoid and utterly inscrutable. The helmet-mounted display provided all necessary information during air and space flight. In fact, the HMD replaced the actual view out of the cockpit with a high-quality computer simulation, yet relied only upon the spacecraft's own computers and information from Milstar and TDRS satellites, freeing Barron of any dependency on a ground-based guidance system.

He locked the helmet in place and breathed through the outside vents; the ship would provide him with its own oxygen once inside the cockpit.

Quickly he strode out the door and across the hangar floor toward the sleek, delta-winged ærospacecraft. White and menacing as death itself, it stood amid a swirling cloud of cryogenic mist from the fuels. Three men gripped the tow bar in front, ready to haul the killer spaceship onto the taxiway.

Charles Stansfield pounded over to him and hissed in a low tone, "What the hell are you doing?"

"Time to test her out," Barron replied in a voice muffled by the helmet. "See if she likes eating subnationals."

"Do we have authorization?" Stansfield sounded more than nervous.

"Chuck! Would I do anything without authorization?"

"Well... yes!"

Barron slapped Stansfield's behind and said, "Then you can have the joy of denouncing me to our superiors and moving up a pay level. See you in a day or two!"

The stout agent ascended the ladder with uncommon agility to lower his body into the narrow, lightly padded seat. Plugging in the fiber optic data lines to his helmet, he powered up the flight computer and watched as his dim view of the world around him vanished, replaced by a sharp, bright, 3-D simulation of the cockpit and surrounding hangar. Dozens of microcams provided the views, which the powerful, massively parallel neural net computer blended into the image. He grasped the controls and smiled.

He held the future in his hands.

Carefully rolled out onto the taxiway of Washington NAS, Huntress powered up her twin Pratt & Whitney jet engines. The startup team withdrew as the titanium virago rolled forward, its mission clear.

***

The tower controller gazed at the blip on his ground-traffic radar, then reached for his binoculars to identify the unknown aircraft. What he saw caused his eyes to widen.

"What in God's name is that?"

A kid more pimple than Lieutenant JG peered through his own pair of binocs and whistled. "Some sort of delta-winged hypersonic plane. With a scramjet on its belly and six rocket nozzles up its ass!" He turned his head toward his superior. "It's like a miniature version of the old NASP!"

"The old what?" The controller reached for his microphone.

"The National Aerospace Plane. The runway-to-orbit spaceship that NASA would never admit was too big to fly. Someone's built it at its optimum size."

"Tower to unidentified aircraft taxiing toward runway, hold your position!"

A voice rasped over the radio speaker. "Oh, don't worry. I'm just taking her up to wring her out a bit."

The controller turned to the JG. "Get security on the ramp and stop him!" Then, into his mic: "Aircraft, you do not have clearance. Repeat, you are not cleared for takeoff."

The snowy spaceplane continued onward, the pilot unperturbed. "Roger that," Barron radioed back. "Cleared for takeoff."

"Negative, you son of a" -- his eyes widened and his voice rose in alarm -- "Plane on the runway! All aircraft abort landing and remain in pattern at eight hundred!"

The lieutenant JG grinned in delight to watch the bird fire up its mighty engines and roar down the runway. At the three-quarter point, it rolled, bit air, and jumped upward with an amazing agility. Afterburners ablaze, the anonymous flying wonder climbed away from the air station at a fifty degree angle with a rate of climb that would have made an F-111 pilot blink.

"Mach One," the kid said seconds later, viewing the event through his binoculars. At the moment the aircraft broke the sound barrier, a white, doughnut-shaped shock wave cloud appeared around the aircraft, courtesy of the humidity at the low altitude; the jet rammed right through it like William Tell's arrow.

The wide glass panels of the air station's tower (and every window for miles around) rattled suddenly as the sonic boom hit ground level.

Montgomery Barron blazed upward, bound for Space and ready for battle. He blacked out when the scramjets kicked in at Mach 4, throwing him back with nearly three gravities of acceleration. The onboard computer obligingly guided the spaceplane to fifty miles altitude and Mach 15, where the rocket engines took over from the scramjet to insert Huntress into her predetermined orbit.

Barron regained consciousness to see the Earth hanging above his head -- the computer-generated version, complete with national boundaries and names -- and rendezvous information ticking off distances and times. As he performed the operations learned by rote in the simulator, his mind raced jubilantly.

The game's afoot!


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