Maybe Doc himself would have some ideas.
The K-6 killsat gradually came into view through Archimede’s forward windows. Winger had joined Commander DeLong on the flight deck as he maneuvered the spaceplane to begin proximity ops.
When the ship was station-keeping on K-6 at a distance of a hundred meters, DeLong announced, “We’re at station one, Lieutenant. That’s as close as we get to this bugger. She’s all yours now.”
Winger studied the killsat. She looked like a huge bird, with her solar panels spread wide for wings and an elongated hexagonal body in the middle. The business end of the center body was a trio of funnel shaped horns…the particle beam emitters. Tanks were slung along the sides, containing fuel, which was fed into the ionizer chambers, then accelerated through beam guides to the emitter array. K-6 was capable of delivering hundreds of gigajoules of bad news to any selected target on the ground.
“RUFUS One ready?” Winger asked as the first deploy team buttoned up their hypersuits. Taj Singh saluted, then patted the robotic servicer on its sensor-laden head. Sheila Reaves was already in the airlock.
“Quivering with anticipation, Skipper.”
RUFUS looked like a garbage can with a forest of arms, probes and actuators at the top and small propulsors at the bottom.
“Go,” Winger ordered.
Moments later, RUFUS, Reaves and Singh had emerged from Archimede’s forward airlock and began translating on cold-gas thrusters over to K-6. The trip took about ten minutes.
The swap-out of control modules in K-6’s processor core went smoothly enough. The new beam emitter array was next and Winger watched closely through Archimede’s scopes and via closed-circuit vid as Singh executed the removal of one emitter cone and the installation of the new system. RUFUS followed each step and movement closely and was soon able to perfectly mimic Singh’s motions. For good measure, Taj let the robot complete the close-out procedure and RUFUS buttoned up the emitter system with no significant deviations or errors.
Now it was time to deploy the protective ANAD shield. Winger had some last minute warnings for the deploy crew.
“Keep containment at FULL SEAL until the very end, Taj. We don’t have time to do a final config check. Just attach the capsule and set the de-containment timer to one hour. We should be well away from K-6 by then, if you and Sheila don’t dawdle around out there. I’m not quite sure what kind of shield ANAD will replicate when he’s triggered so I want some distance between us when he starts.”
“Aye, sir…” Taj made the capsule fast to the side of the killsat and motored back to Archimede in tandem with RUFUS, both of them right behind Reaves, who was carrying sacks of equipment and parts on her return trip. They made the airlock, cycled through and had their hats off in forty minutes.
Winger called up to the flight deck. “Commander, we’re all squared away down here. Put some distance between us and K-6.”
Up on the flight deck, DeLong had been observing the whole operation, feeling like they had tickled the dragon’s tail long enough. “Gladly, Lieutenant. Thrusting minus X now, one half meter per second. Hold on—“
The spaceplane backed off quickly and K-6 was completely lost to view moments later.
The mission plan for Quantum Sword called for Archimede and her crew to perform the swap-out on killsats K-6 and K-2 before turning all three RUFUS’ loose to finish the job. Once all sats were modified, UNISPACE would run a short test series with the new beam emitters and if everything checked out okay, the killsats would be declared operational and then be set to task, sweeping Red Hammer swarms from the Antarctic, Greenland and other affected areas.
Three days later, all eighteen sats had been successfully modified. Gateway Station ran quick checks of all systems, brushed off a few config anomalies like Lucy Hiroshi had seen and brought to Winger’s attention, and reported to UNISPACE that K-1 through K-18 were ready for business.
For Winger, it all seemed too hurried, too slipshod, as if declaring the killsats operational was more important than whether they worked or not.
It was like the Prussian general and strategist von Clausewitz had said “War was only politics by another name….”
Archimede made plans to return to Kourou base.
“Entry burn in two minutes,” DeLong’s voice crackled over the ship’s 1MC. Winger was up on the flight deck, though Archimede needed no second-in-command, not with ORVILLE and Commander DeLong running the show. Belowdecks, the rest of the detachment was firmly buckled in and ready for the 3-g corkscrewing ride down through the atmosphere that would take them home.
But literally seconds before Archimede’s engines fired to decelerate them out of orbit, a message came through, coded Priority Purple, from UNISPACE Paris. DeLong killed the burn as Winger scanned the message on the screen…
“I’m just reading it as it comes up, Commander…K-6 and K-12, K-13 and K-18 have just suffered Condition One faults…activation sequence scrammed, no sats are responding…may be losing control of the entire fleet…beams firing in uncontrolled bursts… max power…several towns in Greenland destroyed…targeting signals detected by Gateway, evacuations underway Tangier and Lagos…other targets may be at risk…what the hell?”
That’s when Delong received another priority message, on a different channel. “Looks like we’re not going home today, Lieutenant. Archimede’s been diverted…to Gateway Station.”
Winger’s heart sank as he read more of the initial message. “Red Hammer’s seized control of the killsats. It’s got to be that ANAD anomaly Doc detected. I figured it was just a small glitch from the re-gen…but now--?”
At that moment, Archimede was still in orbit, passing over the tawny brown coast of north Africa. Below them, the Sahara looked like a wrinkled and reddish brown quilt draped across the continent.
“Look, that must be Tunis on the coast… see the lights?” It was just dawn as Archimede sped eastward out of the terminator and the shadows of night into the blaze of sunlight.
They were both startled a moment later to see the lights of Tunis, near the ruins of the ancient city of Carthage, flare briefly into brilliance, then just as quickly fade into nothing. Even from orbit, the two of them were fully aware of what they had just witnessed.
Tunis was now a smoking hole in the ground. And somewhere above and ahead of them, killsat K-12 moved on to its next target.
Chapter 4
“Metastasis”
Gateway Station
Earth L2 Point
July 12, 2049
0230 hours U.T.
By the time Archimede had docked at Gateway’s G-5 Node, Doc II had already done a statistical analysis of the firing patterns of the rogue killsats. The Detachment egressed and set to work refitting the ship for her next mission…Reaves and Barnes were already laying bets it wouldn’t be twenty-four hours before they shoved off again.
Winger huddled in the wardroom with station commander Rene Lescaux and a three-way vidcon with Table Top and the Quartier-General at UNIFORCE’s Paris headquarters.
“We’ve essentially lost control of all killsats,” Col. Devon Falkland reported from Paris. Falkland was chief of ops for UNISPACE Guardian Centre, where the sats were managed. “Something’s seized the control systems…K-1 through K-18, none of them are responding to ground command. Intel’s looking into sabotage, multiple redundant system failure modes, signal interference, anything they can think of.”
Kraft had been in touch with Winger during Archimede’s approach to Gateway. “Gentlemen, our own Q2 people think we’ve got an ANAD failure on our hands. Not long after Archimede departed, the RUFUS servicers had just completed modifying K-14 and K-15, the last satellites. SpaceGuard detected faint decoherence wakes surrounding these two satellites. Deco wakes are a known signature of quantum systems and that includes Red Hammer’s new pulser device. They did some backtracking and found that after each visit by a RUFUS servicer, when ANAD was commande
d to deploy and replicate a protective shield, the same deco wake halos appeared. It’s a common signature, something common to all the failures.”
UNSAC was online from his seventieth floor office at the Quartier-General. “So what are you saying, Kraft…is this an ANAD defect common to all installations?”
“Either that, sir, or a quantum signal, possibly a pulser command, has been sent to each killsat that triggered something unexpected in ANAD. We’ve tried sending up a boosted coup-ler signal to regain control of the ANAD systems, but no luck yet. It seems that all our installed ANADs are corrupted beyond repair. They’re not even responding to quantum collapse signals---that’s a suicide command we use only in extreme situations.”
UNSAC said, “I’d call this pretty extreme. So intel says Red Hammer’s taken control of eighteen UNISPACE killsats…why did I even get out of bed this morning? I’m assuming these commands are coming from some place on the ground…Major Kraft, does your Q2 shop have any idea where?”
Here, Kraft went off-screen for a moment, consulting a report on another display in his Table Top office, then came back. “Sir, Lieutenant Winger tells me that his Doc II assistant has done some calculations, based on known deco wake tracks. Winger, what’s the latest?”
Winger had begged station commander Lescaux to allow Doc II full access to Gateway’s wardroom. Now, the Doc II swarm assembled itself next to Winger and Lescaux, pinching off a portion of its main swarm. “Doc II’s done some analysis, Major….I think he’s created this sim of the results….”
The pinched-off portion rapidly formed itself into a 3-d simulated globe of Earth. Winking lights surrounded the globe, showing killsat positions in orbit. Spider webs of lights crisscrossed the globe, symbolizing decoherence wakes. As the sim advanced, the light webs steadily collapsed into a single brighter strand, snaking down from several killsats toward a point on the revolving Earth. When the slightly pixelated, roughly-outlined coast of east Asia rotated into view, the final strand of light touched down, and the point of contact flared and flashed.
“Hong Kong,” said Kraft, proudly. “Our analysis triangulates all the deco wake traffic to a point of emanation at or near Hong Kong. My Q2 people believe it’s probable that the source is Lions Rock itself, a known cartel base of operations in the Pearl River Delta, just above Kowloon and downtown Hong Kong.”
Several whistles could be heard over the vidcon link. UNSAC spoke first.
“Good work, Major. How confident are your people about this? I’m assuming this is not just some AI’s analytical hocus-pocus and handwaving.”
Kraft indicated Winger should answer that.
Winger shook his head. “No, sir. Doc II’s done all the analysis. It’s based on known decoherence wake effects and what we know about quantum signal characteristics. Doc, could you give a confidence level on this?”
The Doc II swarm broke down the sim of Earth and the killsat network and formed itself up into a grainy likeness of Doc Frost’s avuncular head and shoulders. The process took only a minute. The outlines drifted toward the center of the table to be more visible to remote participants.
***My confidence level is ninety-five percent with Fourier and Delacroix techniques. I have embedded all stochastic waveforms in a wake analysis matrix and performed ten thousand iterative cycles of signal analysis, from onset to final state***
Kraft’s eyes rolled, though no one else saw it. Sometimes, Winger and Doc drifted off into outer space with all their explanations. “In plain English, Winger. Doc?”
“He has very high confidence, sir, that the triangulated point of emanation is Hong Kong. In fact, Doc…can you put up the precise coordinates?”
Seconds later, a floating longitude and latitude reading emerged from the side of the Doc outline.
“That has to be Lions Rock,” UNSAC decided. “This is good enough for me. Kraft, I’ll get tasking from the SG. Put together a mission to Hong Kong. Full ANAD ops…whatever you need. If the cartel’s main pulser emitter is there, we have to put it out of commission and fast. We can’t have Red Hammer in control of UNISPACE killsats…nobody will be safe. This is the only realistic way I can see of shutting down the commandeered killsats…or at least, allowing us to regain control.”
Kraft was already pecking away at his deskpad. “At once, sir. Winger, get your team together immediately. Vidcon me when you’re ready. We’ll work out the details.”
Winger signaled for Doc II to come along. He was already headed for the hatch to Gateway’s central gangway. Node G-5 was at the other end. The swarm broke itself apart, seemingly dispersed into invisibility, and tagged along after Winger as he left the wardroom.
Archimede’s crew mess compartment would do nicely for the vidcon with Major Kraft.
Four hours later, the spaceplane had undocked from Gateway Station and was backing off for her de-orbit burn. Archimede’s descent profile would take her blazing like a meteor across central Africa and the Indian Ocean. After a high-g, corkscrewing spiral into the lower atmosphere, the ship would make her final approach maneuvers and put down at nearly two hundred knots onto the runway at Chep Lak Kok Airport, just outside of Hong Kong City.
ANAD Detachment Alpha touched down at the airport just at sundown, after circling the harbor several times to set up a proper approach. The bejeweled panoply of night time Hong Kong lay before them…Victoria Peak lit up like a Christmas tree, the ancient Star Ferry plying the harbor like some glittering sea serpent.
Johnny Winger directed off-loading of their mission gear onto trucks supplied by Quantum Corps' eastern base in Singapore, then the support unit headed out from the airport, eventually winding up in a maze of narrow streets outside the old walled confines of Kowloon City. An Eastern Command lifter shadowed them overhead, providing eyes and top cover in case any nasties showed up. The Detachment would approach the target from the air.
Q2 had done their homework in the preceding hours, using surveillance, signals analysis and paid informants to finally locate the nexus of the pulser signals emanating from the Lions Rock complex on a craggy hilltop overlooking the ancient City.
The final briefing was done on the liftjet's flight up to Shih Ho Mountain. Lions Rock itself was an ancient Han Dynasty castle, a gabled and turreted monstrosity perched on a sheer rock precipice overlooking the walled maze of old Kowloon City. With a swooping roof of glazed tile, the castle perched on its ledge like a bird of prey, built on and into the mountain. Two hundred meters below, the city of walls and dark alleys seethed with noise and life, oblivious to the winged shadows above.
"What about defenses, Lieutenant?" Corporal Colleen Barnes--'Mighty Mite' to the rest of ANAD Detachment--interjected a question. "Scavengers, sentries, lookouts…any current intel on the environment?"
"Intel's sparse," Sheila Reaves admitted. "Defender mechs are circulating throughout the neighborhood--we know that much from their heat signature. Pretty much like the guard dog leukocytes UNIFORCE uses in its biowar nets. Same capabilities…they can grind an intruder to pulp in less than a minute. Beyond that, no specific threats known."
"Which means we keep our eyes and sensors open all the time," Winger said. “I’m sending Doc in since we can’t really trust our embeds in this environment.”
"Piece of cake," said Mighty Mite. The rest of the Detachment chimed in their agreement. They were a tight unit, 1st Nano, and Winger wanted to keep it that way.
"Let's review the basic plan," Winger said. He took a quick peek at the outside video. The lifter had circled north of the harbor and was descending now, lights out, coming about for a covert veetol approach from the mainland. Ahead, Hong Kong harbor shone through light haze like a dazzling necklace of light, draped over the darkened shoulders and humps of the limestone cliffs.
Winger had SOFIE put up a timeline on everybody's crewnet eyepiece. "We'll do an airborne launch, after we sanitize the area, and then put the lifter down on top of t
he mountain."
"Full 'D', Lieutenant?" asked Sheila Reaves.
Winger nodded. "We're at Threat Con Purple now. Full-D is authorized. Superfly, decoys, the works."
"Got it." Reaves made a few notes. Full-D was Detachment slang for maximum countermeasures suite--the whole ballgame: HERF radio-frequency guns, mag weapons, coil-gun bots with full rounds, plus their usual mission gear. Superfly would help too…it was damned hard to do anything now without the micro-entomopters sending back imagery from beyond the front lines. Reaves made a mental note to check out the camou-fog generator. The nanomech dispenser hadn't worked right in the last sim and 1st Nano had taken casualties meeting its objectives. The Lieutenant had taken a sizeable chunk out of her ass for that.
Winger stepped through the mission timeline, moment by moment. "We'll be at the objective at 0100 hours local time. I've already had SOFIE download schematics to the crewnet. You can access any time after the briefing. Reaves, you have the latest on defenses?"
Corporal Reaves pressed a key on her wristpad. Instantly, everyone's eyepiece was filled with details. "This place is a fortress." She called up a layout of the complex and SOFIE ported it to all eyepiece viewers. "Red Hammer's got their own form of Superfly, just hordes of little micro-air vehicles buzzing around the mountain and streets below, sniffing out unwelcome visitors like us. And that's just the first layer. Tactically, as Lieutenant Winger has already indicated, our best approach is from above, down the northeast face of Shih Ho Mountain--" he let SOFIE highlight a path toward the top of the escarpment.
"After Doc's launched, we'll do a minimum rep…just enough to give us some mass. When Mighty Mite has the landing zone cleared, we fastcable down to the top of Shih Ho and secure a perimeter for our little camp there. Taj here will give us directions to the pulser…he’s working the deco wake detectors.”
"Hypersuits?" asked Lucy Hiroshi.