Chapter 55: Kings of the High Frontier
CHAPTER 55 A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the Body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks. -- Thomas Jefferson 21 August Col. Lundy faced a dilemma. Under orders to launch Atlantis on a rescue mission, he encountered competition from NASA for competent launch crew. President Crane had issued secret orders for the mission -- to capture Space Station Volnos under the guise of saving its inhabitants -- yet had also publicly announced his support for the private spaceship Aurora to land at Kennedy, refuel, and launch its own rescue flight. While he realized that perhaps Crane was playing a shrewd game of politics and public relations, he harbored the gnawing suspicion that the commander-in-chief merely possessed no idea at all of what to do. Not that it mattered one bit. Orders or no, Atlantis headed nowhere fast. He held no doubt that Aurora could relaunch within 72 hours, barring sabotage. Atlantis, on the other hand, sat out on its never-used launch pad awaiting dozens of critical fixes and checks before she could lift off. Worse, in the past few days the steady attrition of technicians and engineers, which continually plagued both NASA and the military, grew to a hemorrhaging torrent as the surviving talent of the space agency and the Air Force headed for what they must have perceived as greener pastures -- or blacker skies. The shuttle was what it was because of a multitude of conflicting inputs. Congress dictated that each piece of it be manufactured in separate congressional districts: they made it a pie from which every congressman cut a slice. The Air Force, told that it would have to abandon expendable boosters and support the Shuttle, had demanded every conceivable bell and whistle, such as cross-range landing capability, which increased the orbiter's weight and decreased its utility. And NASA pursued its own agenda: to employ as many people as possible in order to swell each manager's salary, budget, and prestige. Timely access to Space played little or no part in their plans. Due to decisions made a generation before, decisions based upon politics rather than science, bureaucratic interests rather than common sense, tax-funded profligacy rather than market-driven frugality, Colonel Alan Shepard Lundy gazed out his window at a white-and-rust-red Space Shuttle perched on its billion-dollar launch pad surrounded by a swarm of idle technicians impatiently awaiting parts cannibalized from Discovery and Columbia while an SSTO intended as a tourist vessel stood poised to make monkeys of them all. Lundy smiled. He knew his father would have appreciated the irony. He might even have joined the river of expertise departing the space agency had those decades of short-sighted, treasury-plundering decisions not turned Spaceport, USA, into a funeral pyre for those who burned with a dream. 21 August Barron knew that he could never achieve what would amount to a sneak attack. Though Huntress took advantage of some stealth technology, ærodynamic engineering demanded a sleek shape with few of the sharp edges seen in such aircraft as the F-117. Because of that, Huntress revealed its presence to ultra-wide-band ground radar and most down-looking radar satellites. And everybody was watching the skies these past few days. His flight and ascent into orbit -- public knowledge within seconds of igniting the spaceplane's six rocket engines -- revealed nothing of his intent, however, and that offered him some element of surprise, but only if he acted swiftly and decisively. The fastest approach would be along the path he now flew. The co-elliptic approach had cost him nearly all his fuel, since he had to dogleg and yaw steer in order to achieve the same orbital plane as the flying bracelet called Volnos. Being there, though, simplified the calculations of the relative motions involved. He would approach his targets from below and behind. When they reached a certain elevation above the horizon, they would be within range. His missiles would do the rest. He dared not telegraph his plans by using radar. Optical tracking instruments alone would suffice until the final moments. *** "Yeah, I see it. Not too well, but it's there." Grant peered at the onboard computer, which displayed a faint radar image of the unidentified spacecraft. Two pods over, Reis attempted to gain a visual image on the station's rear-mounted cameras. "I'd wager it's coming for us, and I don't think we have to pose any friend-or-foe questions." Grant nodded. "I wish now that I'd brought up a surplus Hawk missile I bought at a weapons bazaar in South Yemen. I left it behind because of its weight; I didn't want to sacrifice any other necessities." "What else have we got?" Another voice over the intercom said, "I've got a solution. Maybe." The image of Joseph Lester appeared on Grant's screen. He held a dark walnut case in his hands. "At what distance would an anti-satellite missile detonate?" "It depends. Anywhere from a few miles to a thousand yards," Grant said. "Instead of attacking head-on, the way they did with the Bronx kids, this one's making a co-elliptical rendezvous. The weapon won't be moving as fast. That might allow it to get closer." Opening the lid, Lester withdrew one of the Wildey Survivor autopistols -- with its 12-inch barrel attached and surmounted by a wide-aperture Gilmore Red Leader sight -- and let it float in the air before him. "I can bullseye a running coyote on a windy day at two hundred yards with this. The dot on the sight covers four minutes of arc. I don't have to worry about windage in a vacuum and the missile will be heading in on a steady course. The magazines hold six each, forty-five caliber Winchester Magnum rounds, plus one up the throat. Let me open up the airlock and I'll blast away until I hit something." Grant's eyes brightened. "It's an idea, Joe. We've got shotguns, too. Maybe if everyone--" "Shot won't impart enough energy per hit. That might ding it up, but we need a direct hit to cripple it or detonate it prematurely." Tammy interjected, "I think we need all the options we can muster, Joe. Can Hillary broadcast the shootout at the Volnos Corral over GSN?" Lester plucked the pistol from mid-air, spun it around his index finger, and snapped his fingers shut around the grip. "No sweat." Grant nodded decisively. "Let's do it." *** Every pod had two shotguns stowed within reach of its occupants. Intended to repel human boarders rather than missile assaults, the No. 1 size shot in the shells would only disable the missile if several scored direct hits. A quick poll of the crew determined that sixteen members in twelve of the pods could engage in the firefight. They fastened their helmets, checked air packs, and snaked the short distance from their seats to the slender shafts through which they had entered. The tube-like air locks opened full-length inside. When closed and evacuated, the only way out was through the small hatch overhead. Only one crew member could fit in each air lock at a time. That cut the number of artillery by four. They would serve as backup, but all knew that if the first fusillade failed, it would all be over by the time the second rank refilled the lock, climbed inside, evacuated, and eased out the hatch. Tammy plucked a pump-action Mossberg 12 gauge from the arsenal, loaded it, and lanyarded it to her wrist as Lester had urged everyone to do; she picked up a length of safety line and hooked it to her belt with a carabiner. The other end she snapped around a u-bolt recessed in the deck of the shaft. Turning a simple valve, she voided the precious few cubic feet of air from the lock and opened the hatch to naked Space. Edging outward with the Mossberg leading the way, she pulled up to shoulder level and gazed around. Now came the hard part. Since the hatchways faced forward along their orbital trajectory and the attack was approaching slowly from behind, the station defenders each had to make it from bow to midships in order to gain a clear line of fire. Tammy had only done one EVA in her life as an astronaut. She wore a multi-layered NASA spacesuit and was clamped to the orbiter's mechanical arm. Here, she wore the minimum necessary to survive: a Spandex pressure suit that did nothing more than keep her skin from exploding, a helmet with a radio, and a breathing unit. The only thing keeping her from floating into the trackless void was an eighth of an inch thick length of braided aramid cord. She inhaled a deep breath of pure oxygen and stepped out into Space. The equator of her pod lay just thirty feet away from her over the spherical forward half's tight horizon. Every three feet along the inner meridian rose a small loop welded to the surface -- another place to clasp her carabiner. She chose to use them as fingerholds and pulled hand-over-hand across the dull aluminum surface. To her left and right, arching overhead, she saw the others climbing through the doughnut hole toward the interior equator of the toroid. Twenty-three and a half feet to her left, Joseph Lester had lashed himself in a kneeling position, straining against the cord for tensioned steadiness. He yoyoed his pair of Wildeys on their lanyards, then got serious and assumed a hunched-over two-handed stance, alternating his sighting down left and right pistols. To Tammy's right, Pod 16 -- one of the two unmanned modules -- sat with its hatch closed tight. Beyond that, a space-law specialist named Jay Thayerson, whom Chad had insisted on bringing along, stood at the ready in Pod 15. Janet Red Eagle, the hydroponics expert, defended her son Billy, who watched on the viewing screen of Pod 14 with wide, dark eyes. Next to them, Adrienne Oakwood -- a paramedic and their would-be fitness coach -- protested over the intercom that she had no shooting experience but would do what she could. Dentist-vet hyphenate Harry Jakes in Pod Ten swore that he could shoot hard enough to compensate for his wife and child remaining inside Pod 11. Grace and Rex Ivarson, both seasoned sporting clay competitors, did not have to quarrel long over who took the honor of the first shots: Grace thoroughly trumped Rex's assertion that Man lived to defend Woman by calmly asking "Will the one who hasn't had brain surgery please put on her helmet?" Ta'Shawn Wilkes and Dr. McLaughlin defended Pods Six and Five, respectively, while next to the doctor -- in Pod Four -- Chad Haley scanned the sky with binoculars pressed against his face plate, his head straining against the neckpiece to bring an eye close enough to focus. From Pod Three, Paul stared about in childlike wonderment undismayed by the danger they faced. Hillary secured her position at the viewing port in Pod Two, camera in hand. From there she could just barely take side-view images of the shootists on several of the farthest opposite pods. The rear cameras would be responsible for video of the onrushing attacker. Tammy made it to the inner equator of the station. Facing aft, she clipped the carabiner on her front belt loop to the metal ring, and -- belly to the hull -- spread her legs wide, held the weapon with buttstock pressed firmly against her shoulder, sighted along the shotgun's barrel, and waited. "All right, everyone." Tammy spoke slowly and clearly over the encrypted radio intercom. "Orbital motions are counter-intuitive to what we experience on Earth. When you fire at the missile -- or whatever they may throw at us -- you don't have to adjust for windage, but you will be compensating not only for gravity but for the fact that the buckshot will be dropping into a lower, faster orbit. The missile will come at us nearly dead-on, so you won't need to lead your target. Our goal is to put as much debris between it and us to disable or destroy it. Don't fire until told, then keep firing until you run out of ammo or until the missile passes. Do not fire after it passes or you might riddle the other pods with your misses. Stand by." *** Barron saw none of this activity in the surreal image on his HMD. He saw a blown-up display of the sixteen intersecting spheroids painted by the radar that he finally risked using. He locked the missiles on two pods opposite each other, figuring that secondary projectiles created by their destruction would pepper the other enclosures, rendering them useless if not immediately killing all onboard. At six miles distance, closing at 20 feet per second, he activated the rotary missile-bay doors. The ASAT's locked into place, armed and ready to launch. Barron's blood pulsed wildly in his veins. Sweat adhered tightly wherever it broke out on his flesh -- in free fall it could flow nowhere else. His breathing quickened. With a feral grin he thumbed the firing switch and gloried in the hearty vibration of the killer birds' departure. The missiles' exhaust plumes left in their wake a thin mist that glowed briefly in the flames of the solid-fuel motors. *** "Now!" Reis cried, firing the Mossberg at the twin rings of light suddenly flaring toward them. What on Earth would have been a deafening roar was barely audible as a vibration conducted through the shotgun to her bones. Nevertheless, a mule kick slammed Tammy's shoulder backward and the carabiner tugged violently at her belt loop. The others experienced similar reactions, some of them gyrating uncontrollably. Only Lester, kneeling and using his recently uncovered musculature to absorb his pistol's kick, was positioned to deliver shot after shot from his Wildeys. One in either hand and both lanyarded to his belt, he alternated viewing through the pistol scopes, aiming through the right at the starboard missile, squeezing off a round, then -- while his right arm and shoulder absorbed the recoil -- switching his gaze to the left-hand scope to cover the portside missile with the targeting red dot. A shot from the left, then back to the right. The missiles, rising to higher orbits from that of Huntress, slowed perceptibly as orbital mechanics worked its inexorable effect. Lester quickly discovered that he was not hitting either missile. Windage may not have been a problem, but orbitage was. The bullets flew along paths that were not as curved as at the air-resistance-laden Earth's surface, but not quite straight either. They followed the curvature of the Earth in their own orbits. Swiftly, he turned the windage and elevation knobs on the 32mm sights to compensate for his best estimate of how the bullets' trajectories would behave. Then he resumed his two-fisted shooting. The feel of the pistols in free fall astounded him. Their weight meant nothing, yet the muscle power necessary to resist their recoiling momentum after each shot proved formidable. He fought back the fear that he might fail by mentally treating the onrushing missiles as nothing more than metal silhouette targets. Rapidly approaching, murderously deadly targets. Through his right-hand scope he saw an impact on the heat-seeking FLIR sensor in the starboard missile's nose. It may have been one of his shots, or it may have been a piece of buckshot. Whatever the case, he hoped it had some effect. It did. The missile careened off course. He instantly put his efforts toward the other missile. It could not have been more than a mile away. All the shooters turned their attention to the surviving missile. A fusillade of gunfire silently blazed away at the approaching killer. Several shotgunners ran out of shells, leaving no time to reload. Two others suffered breech blasts as lubricants not intended for hard vacuum froze up and jammed the feeders. One of the exploding shotguns sent a blast of lead pellets into Adrienne Oakwood's face, shattering her helmet and voiding her lifeblood into space. Screams died in the vacuum as lungs voided air and breathed nothing; her hands clawed at the polycarbonate shards, cutting open her fingers and only hastening her death. After a few moments of thrashing and kicking like a rag doll on a rubber band, she grew limp. Governed now only by the laws of physics, her body gently expended the last of its kinetic energy in bumping first to one side then the other, pivoting around the carabiner attached to the eyelet. Almost directly across from Oakwood, another disaster struck as Chad's own belt loop tore loose under the repeated stress. He drifted away from the hull, frantic arms stretching mightily toward the cord. Tension recoiled it an inch too far away, and he stared dumbfounded as the hull dropped away from him like a ship departing a desert island. Without him. He watched as the others fought on. Without him. The missile raced within seconds of killing range. Lester, down to one shot in his left pistol, released his right to float on its lanyard. Grasping the other Wildey with both hands, he coolly sighted in until the red dot covered the missile's warhead. He squeezed slowly and deliberately at the trigger. The recoil battered his weary arm muscles one more time, slamming his sore back against the vessel. He lowered his aim to see the missile heading straight for him. It did not explode. Inert, killed by Lester's final blow, slowed by the orbital mechanics of gravity, it sailed on ballistically to rip into the hull a few yards away from where he stood, tearing a hole in the aluminum-lithium alloy tank and venting a cloud of hydrogen gas -- what little remained in the tank -- into the vacuum. With a sudden growl of vengeance, Lester cried, "Here's the one I want!" He ejected from his left pistol the spent magazine -- which sailed away into the void -- rammed another home, released the slide to chamber a round, then retrieved his right-hand pistol to do the same. The white spaceplane -- a nameless, faceless attacker propelled by the inexorable laws of physics -- drew closer to the circle of fusiliers without decelerating. The universe swirled around Lester's consciousness as he gathered every ounce of concentration and channeled it into the hunter's feedback loop that runs from prey to eye to hand to weapon to prey. Then he uttered the prayer most appropriate to the situation. "Eat lead you son of a bitch!" Both pistols fired at once, again and again as swiftly as he could squeeze the triggers. Blood thundered in his ears as the Universe contracted down into nothing other than shooter and target. Spent cartridges ejected outward to tumble away, twinkling in the sunlight like golden beads strung across the heavens. *** Huntress closed in on the catherine wheel of renegades without braking for rendezvous. Barron surveyed the damage on his approach. For all his effort, the missiles only punctured one sphere. Pitiably minor, easily repaired. For an instant he considered ramming them, but he valued his spacecraft -- not to mention his own life -- too much to destroy either in what would be a decidedly Pyrrhic victory. Better to run away to fight again another-- The bright muzzle blasts from the lone standing subnat instantly caught his attention. Huntress possessed little in the way of armor. Low mass and high speed had been his only considerations. Nothing so primitive as guns for ship-to-ship dogfighting had entered his mind during the design phase. The next model -- after a lessons-learned report -- would undoubtedly have them. Montgomery Barron, though, would play no part in the construction of any descendent of Huntress. Project Stark Fist ended with both a bang and a whimper. The bang came from the shattering impact of four copper-jacketed .45 Winchester Magnum slugs from the Wildeys. The cockpit canopy shattered as the nitrogen atmosphere exploded outward, sucking all sound with it. Barron felt, rather than heard, the fifth bullet pierce his shoulder. On Earth, hardly a fatal wound. In Space -- harsher, vaster, and more desolate than any terrestrial wilderness -- the ravenous void sucked at the bullet hole, drawing blood, vaporizing it, liberating gasses, and tugging at the torn flesh. He gazed at the red mist in which he sat. His eyes focused beyond it, at the colossal structure into the center of which he shot like an arrow through a ring. Only as he threaded the eye of the needle in his rush toward death did he realize how Volnos dwarfed his own spacecraft, both in its size and in its purpose. Every instant mattered now. Look up! The Earth hung overhead. Through the ragged frame of the blasted polycarbonate canopy, Barron gazed past the crimson haze of his own boiling lifeblood to see the deep greens and browns of Ecuador amid white swirls of cloud. The Sun glinted off the blue Pacific, then raced across the land, reflecting its image off of lakes, rivers, and irrigation ditches as if the Earth's surface were only a thin veil, behind which hid a dazzling god only occasionally glimpsed. He realized that he would never make it back to Earth, that Project Stark Fist ended with him, and that he would die inside Huntress. Even so, he proved that he could build an SSTO, that it could intercept other spacecraft. Everything else simply constituted a failure of detail. He proved something else, too: to serve those in power required that he defy them. Through his individual force of will did he acquire the strength to overcome the inertia of the collective. He wondered if similar revelations occurred to every dying soul. It no longer mattered. Life flowed out through his shoulder, allowing a numbing cold to spread across his chest. Only one option faced him now: to die in orbit, an eternal reminder of the glory that was Columbia, or to return to Earth in a fireball for all to see. He chose. And as he chose another option appeared. A lone figure in a grey-and-maroon skintight pressure suit drifted a few hundred yards off his left wing. Almost giddy with irony, Barron used his attitude jets to rotate about, then fired them on one side to shift over to the slowly moving figure. The side of the fuselage bumped up against the man, whose hand locked in a deathgrip on the open edge of the cockpit. The engines on Huntress ignited gently under Barron's command, sending the crippled spaceplane back toward the station at a meager four feet per second. The hunter stared at the hunted, no hatred in his eyes. The man hitching a ride said something into his mic, then tensed his muscles and kicked away from Huntress. He scrabbled through the limitless void and his strategy became apparent: he hit one of the pods dead center. He bounced off, but inertia kept him moving aftward. Due to the curvature of the pod, he stayed in contact with the metal, sliding outward from his impact point and using the friction of contact to slow him down. Instead of heading toward the inner or outer part of the lumpy toroid, he managed to roll his slide toward the midline, wedging safely into the welded intersection of two spheres, where he remained awaiting a lifeline. The engines of Huntress ignited once more, this time shoving Barron into his seat. He felt no pain. He existed beyond his body now, all intellect, all thought. He did not bother to rotate the ship around once more to place it in proper attitude for ærobraking. With its windshield shattered, the ship would have incinerated anyway. Instead, he gazed backward at a new constellation rapidly receding from him in the heavens: sixteen points of light that formed a perfect circle. As he deorbited and lost sight of its diminishing circumference over the horizon of Earth's curving limb, Barron realized that his age had ended and a new one had begun. Power would not be the goal of this new breed; the market had won. Slaves would not conquer the stars for their masters; free men would settle there for themselves and their children. The atmosphere of his home planet trembled against the stern, followed by a series of powerful shudders. Montgomery Barron fought to stay conscious, to live to the very end of his body's physical existence. He wanted nothing more now than to die an astronaut's death. Like an honor roll he tried to remember all the names of the fallen: Grissom, Chaffee, White, Komarov, Volkov, Dobrovolsky, Patsayev, Scobee, Resnik, Smith, McNair, Onizuka, Jarvis, McAuliffe, Rader, Heinz, Taga-- Before he could finish naming the crew of Constitution, his thoughts were silenced as Huntress disintegrated into a hypersonic meteor of plasma and flaming debris. In the span of an instant he felt intense pain, then blackness, then nothing. *** To anyone in the Caribbean who happened to look west shortly after noontime, a bright orange-and-greenish-white fireball raced across half the sky. It left a trail that glowed for several seconds, even in the harsh light of day. More than a few awed children -- young and old -- made wishes upon it. For many of them, it was the loveliest light they had ever seen. 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