In his heart of hearts, the campaign that began at Kyle's barbecue was Project Swelk. Not only, he liked to think, would his friend have approved, the private name also befit the plan having three stages. The plan's final part, however, was something best unarticulated . . . at least for now. His reticence left unchallenged Ryan Bauer's proposed code name: Project Clear Skies.
Today was a big day in the execution of Phase One.
Kyle sensed the weight of the mountain, deep within whose bowels the command center was burrowed. It wasn't claustrophobia, which had never afflicted him. No, his awareness of the vast bulk of Cheyenne Mountain manifested itself in feelings of safety. Easily a billion tons of rock separated him from the masersats—reassuring despite his conviction that today's activities could draw no hostile attention here. The imagery he so eagerly awaited was being collected by passive sensors scattered around the globe. Much of the comm link from each telescope and instrument to these underground warrens traversed buried, military-use-only—which was to say, supposedly untrackable and unhackable—optical fibers.
If you're so confident, Kyle, why is that gigaton of shielding overhead so comforting?
He was in a VIP viewing area, whose glass front formed the top half of the rear wall of the space control center. Fingering his tie nervously—he was in a suit; his three companions were Air Force officers, and in uniform—Kyle scanned the tiers of workstations below, and the men and women laboring intently at their terminals. An enormous, flat-screen display dominated the front of the control center. The screen showed a world map, overlaid with the ground tracks of orbits of interest. Bright spots on the ground tracks marked the current positions of specific satellites. All but one orbit shown was for alien weapons platforms. The side walls held lesser, but still impressively large, displays. Those were currently blank.
Space Control, one of six major operations in the NORAD complex, kept tabs on everything in near-Earth space. Satellites operational and otherwise, spent upper stages of rockets that had launched those satellites—and debris from rockets that had exploded in the attempt, tools dropped on manned orbital missions . . . all in all, there were thousands of objects to be watched. NORAD did not reveal just how small an item it could detect, but they did, from time to time, warn NASA and commercial satellite owners to tweak a mission's orbit because a bit of space junk would otherwise pose a hazard.
There was an intercom button in the frame retaining the wall of glass. Bethany Johnson, the brigadier general commanding the 21st Space Wing, with responsibilities including Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, pressed it. "Five minutes. Look sharp, people." She was a wiry black woman of average height, with wide-set eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. Johnson had none of Bauer's ex-pilot, good-ole-boy swagger; she'd risen through Air Force ranks on the unglamorous logistical side until Space Command began offering operational opportunities to women. Her demeanor conveyed endless determination. Releasing the button, she turned to Kyle and Ryan Bauer, her guests. "Any requests for the auxiliary screens?"
"Can you project our wayward satellite and the target?" Kyle asked.
"Absolutely, optically and in pseudocolored IR view. No radar, of course . . . by your rules. We wouldn't want to risk your AIs, should they be real, knowing we're watching." This particular masersat was visible to radar, although it hadn't been before the Twenty-Minute War. That this bird appeared on radar was one more reason to believe it was out of commission. Johnson nodded to her aide, who whispered urgently into his headset mike.
The side screens came alive. On Kyle's right appeared an unmanned spacecraft of obvious human design: gold-foil-covered (except for its solar-cell wing) and boxy, with nozzles and instruments and antennas jutting in all directions. The telescopic image was blurry, details lost to atmospheric shimmer. A picture-in-picture shot rendered the same satellite as imaged by infrared sensors. The computer-generated colors were indicative of incident sunlight absorbed by the satellite and reradiated, and of heat generated and emitted by internal operations. The satellite jittered and tumbled, the flames from random firings of attitude jets unmistakable in the IR view. Only in close-up were the tumbling and corkscrewing motions visible; at the coarse resolution of the front screen, the satellite's blue track was arrow-straight.
"Thanks," said Kyle. The left screen showed another spacecraft, whose flowing curves screamed of an alien origin. The hull had paired bulbous sections, suggesting the segmented body of an insect. The sections struck him as subtly mismatched, as though dissimilar machines had been fused. Whether that perception had any validity, he couldn't begin to guess. But forget guessing—the operation culminating today was part of a systematic process. In due course, if all went according to plan, an artifact like this would become available for dissection.
And Captain Grelben's plans? If Kyle had miscalculated, today's actions would trigger dormant Krulchukor AIs. The Atlantis fireball came unbidden to his mind's eye. Packed jumbo jets were as vulnerable to masers. Was it wiser to let sleeping weapons of mass destruction lie?
The Krulchukor satellite also tumbled slowly. Its wings, presumed power-generating solar panels, met the hull at quite different angles. "The masersats don't all look bent, do they?"
"Only a few are asymmetric; the irregularities that do occur all differ," said Ryan. "Best guess is it's battle damage. The laser probably wasn't on one spot long enough to sever a strut, just to soften it. And check out the IR view, how the bent wing's surface radiates heat so unevenly. I'm guessing our Russian buddies melted some solar cells."
That would be before another alien satellite slagged the Russian ground-based ABM laser. They were rehashing familiar facts, running out the clock. Kyle's stomach churned. His head swiveled from image to image: target and probe.
"Colonel," said Johnson to her aide. "Three minutes to closest approach. Would you do a synopsis for our guests?"
"Yes, sir!" Arnold Kim, a Korean-American with close-cropped gray hair, towered over his commanding officer. "General Bauer, Dr. Gustafson, we'll start on the main screen. You see seven parallel tracks, running pole to pole." On the display, those tracks tipped about twelve degrees to the north-south axis—the effect on the ground track of Earth's rotation. "Each orbit has three enemy satellites, equally spaced, appearing on their track as colored dots. The orbits are also evenly separated; that's one every fifty-one and change degrees of longitude. All twenty-one satellites circle at the same altitude, about twenty-three hundred miles. Every spot on Earth is in sight of several weapon platforms at all times."
The scenario was familiar: VIPs visit from Washington, and the attention-starved assistant belabors the obvious. Killing time was one thing; missing the action—even though everything was being captured for replay—was another. The translucent timer superimposed over Antarctica decremented below two minutes. "I've got it, Colonel. Green dots for satellites believed to be disabled, like that one." Kyle pointed. "Red dots for enemy satellites thought still to be dangerous." As the next encounter will be . . . if we get that far. "Yellow for the birds we're unsure of. That includes the three that have never been seen to fire, presumed defective."
"Yes, sir." The tone conveyed disappointment at thunder stolen.
Ryan Bauer glowered disapprovingly at Kyle. Too brusque, interpreted Kyle. By way of amends, he tossed out a question for which he needed no answer—and for which the reply should be brief. "But the blue track, Colonel, on the intersecting path across the alien orbits?"
"Our innocent, helpless visitor, sir."
"Sixty seconds." The advisory came over the intercom, presumably from someone in the control room beneath.
Kim whispered again into his mike. Sensors monitoring the satellites panned back; the spacecraft now appeared together in the side displays. Both spacecraft tumbled, the boxy one also jittering about seemingly at random. It defied mere human abilities to extrapolate whether a collision would occur—although, on the world map, the blue and green dots had merged. A text window popped up in a corner of the close-up, the value thus revealed dancing up and down without leaving the vicinity of ninety percent. The inset infrared view of the alien craft stayed cool—there was no sign of masers preparing to fire.
"Thirty seconds." The numbers continued to bounce, but the trend toward 1.000—certain collision—was unmistakable. "Twenty seconds . . . fifteen . . . ten."
The human satellite zigged once more, impelled by yet another seemingly random firing of an attitude jet. The spacecraft suddenly diverged; the numbers dropped in a blur towards zero. To whistles and claps and cheers of approval, in the viewing gallery above and the control room below, blue and green dots on the big screen separated.
Kyle extended a hand in congratulations to their relieved-looking host. "Well done, General."
How many alien weapons still functioned? Were those that had survived potentially hostile? What might induce an attack? Without answers, it was impossible to know whether the Krulirim were, from beyond the grave, still capable of trapping mankind on Earth. Space missions that had come to seem routine could now provoke truly frightening retribution. From the Atlantis explosion to the destruction of underground missile silos, the dangers of a space-based siege were all too apparent.
Today's maneuver had probed one of the masersats whose behavior had changed since the Twenty-Minute War. It tumbled along its path, where before it had maintained an orientation toward Earth. Its looping course was slowly deviating from the orbit it had once precisely shared with two other alien satellites—unlike those neighbors, it no longer performed the occasional maneuvers that would compensate for the perturbations from solar wind, lunar drag, and slight irregularities in the Earth's mass distribution. Its presumed solar wings no longer pivoted to track the sun, sharply diminishing the amount of solar power it could be accumulating. Observed by ground-based infrared sensors, it exhibited far less variability in heat distribution than most other alien satellites. And it had lost its one-time invisibility to radar.
If this satellite was, in fact, irreparably damaged, it ought not to respond to a flyby. With luck, none of the undamaged masersats would notice a flyby of this derelict, or if they did notice, consider the close encounter reason to react. The challenge, when the stimulus most likely to provoke an automated attack was a missile launch, was to somehow approach their prey.
Kyle's insight had been that launch would be avoided, if (and it was a big if) an already on-station spacecraft could be repurposed. With Ryan Bauer's ungentle prodding, Space Command offered a spysat. It was higher than most surveillance platforms, put there to test technology for observations from heights unreachable by the primitive missiles of rogue states.
The earthly concern that had motivated the expensive orbiting test bed now seemed quaint.
The spysat had been launched scant months before the arrival of the Consensus, with fuel for a five-year mission. It was owned by the National Reconnaissance Office, the supersecret agency whose very existence remained classified throughout the Cold War. No doubt not having paid for the satellite made it easier for Space Command to offer it up.
Kyle's scheme involved far more maneuvering than the NRO's mission planners had had in mind—but he didn't object to spending onboard fuel profligately. What mattered was that the spysat's orbit was about right, that its instrument suite included an IR sensor, and that the manufacturer had a good simulation program for modeling the satellite's response to engine burns.
The wide separation between masersats gave ample opportunities to send signals, without fear of detection, to human-built satellites. Soon after Kyle's barbecue, a new navigation program was beamed to the spysat. Two days later, the satellite's attitude jets began firing erratically. Fuel sufficient for eighteen months' normal orbit-tweaking was burnt in seconds, sending the spacecraft tumbling wildly and slightly raising the apogee of its orbit. From time to time, its onboard controls seemed to have some success in regaining stability, in reorienting the solar panel so that the batteries could be recharged—and then the sporadic engine firings would resume.
The episodic engine burns, however unconventional, were not random—but, it was hoped, observant AIs would infer equipment failure from the satellite's haphazard course. Eighty-six and a fraction orbits later, the wobbling satellite, its fuel half gone, had barely missed a Krulchukor satellite showing every appearance of inoperability.
"Phil Davis here is the wizard who coded the navigation program." The gangly lieutenant was one of the officers General Johnson invited to the viewing gallery after the rendezvous had passed safely. His blue eyes, beneath a single caterpillar-like brow, darted about the room.
"Excellent job, Lieutenant." Kyle gestured at the side display still showing the initial target. The human spysat had receded from this view. "Brilliant programming." Praise only made the young man's nervous ocular motions increase. Kyle sighed inwardly: his words were sincere. "Did you have any questions, Lieutenant?"
Davis glanced at his feet. His scuffed shoes, however unmilitary, evidently instilled confidence. "Yes, Dr. Gustafson. I was given a navigation problem to solve, under rather odd constraints. What, exactly, were we hoping to accomplish?"
Short, and to the point. "We were gathering data. Your calculations"— Kyle had in mind the probability estimate that had briefly overlaid the scene—"showed a very high likelihood our wobbly bird would impact the alien craft. If a functional AI were watching, don't you think it would've gotten the masersat out of the way before our last-moment zig?"
Cocking his head, Davis considered the alien craft. "A working AI and control of its own propulsion. It's much the worse for wear."
"I concede that ambiguity, but the larger conclusion is unchanged. In the Twenty-Minute War, we clobbered this thing enough that it can't defend itself. That raises my confidence about other masersats we thought disabled."
There was a soft knock, a pause, and the door swung partway open. A steward backed in, tugging a squeaky-wheeled cart laden with soda cans, bottled water, an ice bucket, and a cookie platter. He left as unceremoniously as he'd entered.
"Healthier than my usual celebratory libations. Thanks, I guess." Bauer grabbed a Coke. "So, Lieutenant. Will the next bit go as smoothly?"
The attention of two generals and a presidential advisor, plus, for all the junior officer knew, the fate of human civilization on his narrow shoulders . . . Davis broke into a sweat. A quaver in his voice, he pointed at the main screen. The timer still floating over Antarctica decremented toward the next mission milestone. "Thirty minutes, sir, and we'll know."
The commandeered NRO satellite continued its seemingly random attitude-jet firings. Pitch, yaw, and roll slowed dramatically, without altogether stopping. With no obvious indication of being under control, it reduced its tumbling enough for onboard sensors to reestablish with precision its orientation and position. Every few seconds it took a fresh IR reading of a remote patch of the southern Pacific.
The satellite likewise gave no overt indication when the message for which it waited was received. It was scanning for a large fire, unmistakable to its infrared sensor. The nonexistence of that oil-slick blaze was unambiguous—and an absence could not be correlated by a hostile AI with subsequent events. The nonrecall authorized the spysat to execute the next routine in its uploaded navigational program: rendezvous with a second orbiting alien artifact.
The new target was armed and presumed extremely dangerous.
Through the fiber-linked, surreptitious eye of a telescope far from Cheyenne Mountain, the hurtling spysat was seen to perform a series of brief attitude-jet firings. Pitch, yaw, and roll largely damped out. The men and woman in the VIP viewing room, all spectators at this point, stared at the wavy, grainy image. The main parabolic antenna on the spacecraft spun three times around its mounting post.
Three rotations meant "target acquired."
"Well done, again, Lieutenant." Bauer slapped the embarrassed young man on the back.
"Now it gets interesting." Kyle studied a side screen. This masersat's wings looked identical; both were tipped to catch the maximum sunlight. In the infrared view, stripes on the spacecraft rippled and flowed, like a beast languorously flexing its muscles.
The spysat on his left had resumed its manic tumbling. Infrared revealed more seemingly ineffectual engine firings. Sensors caught a flurry of heat bursts, longer at first, and then trailing off to sputtering. In the end, the solar panel pointed straight down to Earth, twenty-three hundred miles below. It sure looked, thought Kyle, as though the probe halted its spin with the dregs of its fuel. Here's hoping any AI on the target agrees. In truth, the tanks remained one-third full.
The countdown timer on the map display forecast rendezvous in six minutes.
"What's next, Lieutenant?" Bauer perched on the edge of the viewing room's oak table.
Davis gulped. "More waiting."
A red spot bloomed on the masersat's IR image, and the estimated collision probability plummeted. "That hot spot's no maser," said Bauer. "What happened?"
"It's moving," answered Kyle. "Now to answer the big question: was it sidestepping a suspect visitor? Or was it a coincidence, an ordinary orbit-maintenance maneuver?"
The spysat they did not dare to radio so near to its target obeyed its programming—and the absence of an at-sea fiery abort signal. Its engines sputtered anew, and its path changed. The collision probability climbed. The two craft came close enough to be viewed on the same screen.
On the spysat, fuel pumps toiled. Safety interlocks in the original software had been overwritten from the ground, allowing pressure to mount behind closed fuel-line valves. Other unorthodox reprogramming had retracted the heat-dumping radiator panels. Streaming sunlight, unfiltered by atmosphere, drove heat into the seemingly crippled satellite. Heat seeping into the fuel tanks raised the temperature of the contents, and the pressure of the vapors within.
The masersat pivoted toward the approaching spacecraft. Reddening of the IR image revealed waste heat from torrents of power being routed. "Weapon charging." Kyle spoke more to unclench his teeth than in expectations of conveying information. "Something on board learns fast . . . maneuvering once didn't help, so it's preparing more active measures."
"Funny thing." Ryan's eyes gleamed. "We can learn, too."
The spysat's earthward-hanging solar panel served as an impromptu anchor, the gravity gradient holding steady the satellite's orientation. Solar heat continued to flood in. When fuel-tank pressures exceeded a preset level, the onboard computer opened the valves.
Overpressurized fuels gushed into the attitude jets' combustion chambers. No spark was needed—monomethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide ignite on contact. In such over-spec quantities, that ignition was spectacular indeed. A fireball erupted, its IR image painfully bright. (This bang is our doing! thought Kyle. See how you like it.) The explosion turned the NRO's expensive satellite into tons of shrapnel.
IR sensors flared. Fragments blazed as they were blasted by the maser. But too many pieces were headed toward the masersat, from too close . . .
The Krulchukor satellite twitched as the wave of debris struck. Holes gaped in the solar panels and hull. The IR view flashed and sparkled, as metallic shards shorted out circuitry. Then the whole room flashed crimson—the catastrophic discharge inside the masersat of stored energy meant to be pumped out through the masers.
When tearing eyes could again focus, no satellites were on-screen.
Kyle steadied himself against a wall. His heart pounded. The only change to the situational map was two dots removed. No alarms meant no retaliatory strikes. "The bad news is, we've confirmed the masersats have the capacity to act independently."
"The good news is, we can still, at least sometimes, out-think them."
Eighty-seven days later, a barrage of reprogrammed ballistic missiles, launched in a synchronized attack from safely submerged American boomers, overwhelmed the eleven Krulchukor satellites thought most likely still to be functional. The other ten remained gratifyingly inert.
In condemnation of American unilateralism, sixteen nations and the European Union recalled their ambassadors to Washington. Overseas corporations, bowing to public outrage, cancelled high-profile orders for American passenger jets, oil platforms and pipelines, pharmaceuticals, and supercomputers. The immediate human toll: another eighty thousand badly needed jobs.
As a longer-term consequence of the Second Twenty-Minute War, the space control center at Cheyenne Mountain started tracking thousands more bits of orbiting space junk.