Moonstruck. Part 26

happens when a billion overseas consumers boycott American corn and fast food and computers and

movies?"

Kyle's other guests crossed a glade halfway down the hill. Whatever he'd done wrong, he had to make amends. Quickly. He did a mental rewind. "A moon program isn't affordable?"

"Not politically. Not economically." Kneeling, Britt began to collect bits of gla.s.s. "I apologize for my

outburst.""It's all right." But it wasn't. How dire were circ.u.mstances? Take something when you can't have everything. The advice that popped into his head could have come from Britt's years of mentoring, or Dar's more recent influence. It wasn't his normal approach to problems.

"Britt, excuse me. Forget I mentioned the moon, and we'll get back to certainties. The aliens eavesdropped on us by satellite. Their software translated and interpreted what they overheard. And our most optimistic projections say we disabled fewer than half the masersats."

Erin, Ryan, and Darlene made known their imminent return in an outburst of laughter. Erin Fitzhugh roared the loudest, no doubt relis.h.i.+ng her own raunchy joke. A grinning Ryan Bauer followed her from the woods, waggling the beer emptied during the brief hike. Darlene appeared last, looking sheepish.

"Enjoy your meals, folks." Britt straightened, a cupped hand holding a carefully arranged mound of gla.s.s shards. His confident manner belied his earlier, unwonted anger. "It looks like we have work yet ahead of us."

* * * Darlene blushed at another peal of laughter, as Britt, Ryan, and Erin made their ways to their cars. She made a production of dumping paper plates and plastic utensils into the trash-it kept her back to the hall from which Kyle, having escorted the others, would reappear. As she dawdled, crunching gravel marked the departure of vehicles.

"Thanks again for the help." Kyle had stopped in the doorway. "For the side dishes and getting me time alone with Britt."d.a.m.n that Erin Fitzhugh. Darlene began sc.r.a.ping serving bowls. "My pleasure."

"Leave those. That's above and beyond the call of duty. You've got a long drive, too."

She puttered a little longer at the sink, until she felt her face was no longer red. Frantic scratching at the patio door gave her a good excuse to turn. She'd brought the kittens for the day. "Mind if I let in Blackie?" Stripes was already ramming around inside.

"Sure." Pregnant pause. "On the back forty before dinner . . . why all the cackling?"

She was a trained diplomat, and she could surely spin, digress, or weasel her way out of any admission.

But this wasn't work; maybe she'd play it straight. Wiping damp hands on her jeans, she swiveled to face

him. "How shall I put this? Erin speculated somewhat colorfully about the . . . closeness . . . of our friends.h.i.+p."

"I can imagine how delicately she made the suggestion." Kyle grimaced. "If you don't mind my asking,

Dar, what was your response?"

She hadn't dignified Fitzhugh's gibe with an answer. Darlene crouched to scratch Blackie between the

ears. The kitten was a gangly teenager now. Swelk loved the cats-and she'd never see them grow up.

Darlene fought back tears.

Life was too short to always play it safe. They kept skirting the edge of a deeper relations.h.i.+p, and then shying away. As Erin would have said, screw this. "I defended your virtue."

"Ouch! You sure know how to hurt a guy."

Saying nothing is an old ploy for making the other person say more. She said nothing for a long time.

The moon peeked over the ridge, cool silver light streaming through the patio doors.

"And you said nothing I didn't deserve." He crossed the room and kissed her. "The moon is beautiful

tonight. Let's sit outside for a while."

CHAPTER 32.

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-rea.s.suring despite his conviction that today's activities could draw no hostile attention here.

The imagery he so eagerly awaited was being collected by pa.s.sive 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 s.h.i.+elding overhead so comforting?

He was in a VIP viewing area, whose gla.s.s front formed the top half of the rear wall of the s.p.a.ce 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.

s.p.a.ce Control, one of six major operations in the NORAD complex, kept tabs on everything in near-Earth s.p.a.ce. 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...o...b..t because a bit of s.p.a.ce junk would otherwise pose a hazard.

There was an intercom b.u.t.ton in the frame retaining the wall of gla.s.s. Bethany Johnson, the brigadier general commanding the 21st s.p.a.ce 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 gla.s.ses. 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 s.p.a.ce Command began offering operational opportunities to women. Her demeanor conveyed endless determination. Releasing the b.u.t.ton, 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 s.p.a.cecraft 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 s.h.i.+mmer. 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 att.i.tude jets unmistakable in the IR view. Only in close-up were the tumbling and corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g motions visible; at the coa.r.s.e resolution of the front screen, the satellite's blue track was arrow-straight.

"Thanks," said Kyle. The left screen showed another s.p.a.cecraft, 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 ma.s.s 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 rehas.h.i.+ng 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 s.p.a.ced, 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 alt.i.tude, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, and the attention-starved a.s.sistant 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 s.p.a.cecraft now appeared together in the side displays. Both s.p.a.cecraft 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 att.i.tude jet. The s.p.a.cecraft 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. s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce-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 ma.s.s distribution. Its presumed solar wings no longer pivoted to track the sun, sharply diminis.h.i.+ng the amount of solar power it could be acc.u.mulating. 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 s.p.a.cecraft could be repurposed. With Ryan Bauer's ungentle prodding, s.p.a.ce 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 cla.s.sified throughout the Cold War. No doubt not having paid for the satellite made it easier for s.p.a.ce 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...o...b..t 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 att.i.tude jets began firing erratically. Fuel sufficient for eighteen months' normal orbit-tweaking was burnt in seconds, sending the s.p.a.cecraft tumbling wildly and slightly raising the apogee of its...o...b..t. From time to time, its...o...b..ard 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 pa.s.sed 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?"

c.o.c.king 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