Death Orbit (34 page)

The
Marconi
came upon the trio of rear-flanking ships next, the
Ishima,
the
Lareedai,
and the fearsome
Taishima.
More cannon fire, another Harpoon launched, two more antennas, and a radar dish destroyed. The
Marconi
was up to 50 knots now, traveling between the two rather elderly middle-flank ships, navigating a space not 30 feet wide. This put them right on the tail of the two largest ships in the squadron, the massive
Yumitta
and its sister vessel, the
Binashi.
Two more Harpoons were launched, both clipping the rear steering gears of the big ships, damaging them moderately. The
Marconi
was now passing out of the formation, firing its cannons at the portside pocket battleship
Linomee
and sending its last Harpoon at the bridge of the flagship, the impressively arrayed
Sudai.

The air was filled with five-inch shellfire from the battleships by now—but it was too little too late. The
Marconi
was already speeding away to the south, its helmsman turning the ship this way and that, not allowing the sighters on any of the Cult ships to get a good register on it. Laying out another cloud of steam cover, they disappeared over the horizon just two minutes later.

In all, their attack had lasted less than five minutes, and the damage they’d inflicted, while bravely executed, was not enough to force the battleships to turn around or call off their impending attack. But that had not been the purpose of the
Marconi’s
brazen escapade.

Rather, the ship had just performed its usual mission: to spy. By getting in close to the battleships, they were able to see exactly how the vessels were riding in the water, how they turned, and how many people appeared on deck once they’d begun shooting.

Their conclusion: the battleships were definitely on their way to the KSC. However, they were riding relatively high in the water, suggesting their holds were probably not filled with specialty soldiers, waiting to try another landing. Instead, the ships were probably heading toward the battered UA base with the intention of simply bombarding it with their huge guns.

In the crazy state of affairs surrounding the beleaguered space center these days, that was actually
good
news.

The first barrage of 16-inch shells hit the KSC at exactly 0800 hours.

Six of them came down in all, their one-ton warheads slamming into the already useless shuttle runway, leaving a nearly perfect row of 6 craters, 45 feet wide and 25 feet deep.

Another barrage arrived at 0801, exactly one minute after the first. They, too, came down on the perforated five-mile airstrip, leaving six gigantic holes and sending tons of dust and debris into the air. No sooner was this cleared by the morning winds than another half dozen shells came down, almost in the same place.

It went on for an hour. Barrages of 16-inch shells streaking over the beaches, over the VAB, over most of the indispensible space center support buildings and landing on the long, battered, and completely deserted airstrip. At the end of just a few minutes, the runway looked like a moonscape. At the end of an hour, it resembled a small piece of the Grand Canyon.

For the hour of total bombardment, it was a matter of all the defenders keeping their heads down and their ears plugged. Just the volume at which the shells screeched over was enough to puncture an eardrum or cause an ear to bleed. The sonic waves resulting from the shells’ impact could do even worse damage.
Stay low and cover up
was the order for all UA personnel manning the trenches and defensive systems positions.
This might get worse…

But that was the strange thing: the huge shells were not hitting any areas where UA troopers were gathered. They were not hitting the beach, or the string of Patriots sites, or any of the command buildings within the space complex itself. The battleships’ barrage, while frightfully impressive, proved to be actually harmless. A study in pinpoint shooting from more than two dozen miles away, the hour-long barrage amounted to little more than lobbing one 1-ton shell after another, hitting the same target over and over again, a target that had been destroyed long ago.

This kind of action smacked of two things—and both were very evident to General Dave Jones and his staff, still holed up inside the command bunker below the VAB, still somehow managing the defense of the undermanned, underequipped UAAF outpost.

Between the incredible vibrations caused by the shells landing about three miles away and the subsequent storm of dust and plaster which rained down on them after every hit, Jones and his men were trying their best to monitor the situation via closed-circuit TV, and speculating on exactly what the Cult ships were up to.

“It’s a bag job, it has to be,” said Colonel Catfish Johnson, commanding officer of the 1st Airborne Division. “Those ships were paid to destroy the airstrip, and that’s what they’re doing. Apparently they weren’t paid to do anything else—so they’re not.”

It was a theory that few around the table could argue with. The battleships could have reduced the entire complex to rubble a long time ago and didn’t. The Beagles could have bombed all of the critical launch support buildings during the battle the day before, but they didn’t. The Sparvee fast-attack boats could have leveled the VAB with their Styx missiles, but
they
didn’t.

It all led to the validation of what the UAAF command staff had suspected all along: the combined Nazi-Cult attack force didn’t want to destroy the KSC as much as they wanted to capture it. And the only reason they would do that was to use it to launch their own payloads into outer space. With the intelligence collected during the JAWS raid down in Cuba, there really was no doubt as to what the UA’s enemies wanted to launch into orbit: the hodge-podge collection of nuclear warheads waiting inside the stockyard at the mysterious, fog-enshrouded Double-Trouble base.

“If they’re able to get all those warheads in orbit,” Johnson continued, coming back to the discussion that had been ongoing inside the command bunker for nearly 72 hours, “they will quite literally be able to control the entire planet. Wherever someone didn’t do their bidding, they could simply find a means of sending one, two, or more of those warheads back down, and if they survived reentry, they would wipe said place off the map.

“It’s crude and it’s not pretty, but it would be an effective way of gaining total power. And we’d be hard pressed to stop them. Especially when one of these things could just come falling out of the sky on top of us at any moment.”

That, more or less, put it all in a nutshell. The enemy had the weapons, they had the means to put those weapons in space. All they needed was a launch facility to close the deal. The KSC was really the only working spaceport left on earth.

So now the UAAF command staff faced a very unusual situation. They were up against an enemy many times more powerful and many times more ruthless, yet one that had found itself limited by what it could do in the field of battle. Apparently there were no specialty troops left after the battle the day before, and no sizable mercenary army in the area who would want to take on a landing at KSC. To get such a landing force—whether to move a substantial force of Cult troops halfway around the world or pay an exorbitant fee to hire someone more local—would take time.

This left the unseemly alliance with the only option of lobbing their huge shells onto noncritical areas of the KSC until some other strategy could be divined. It was a situation that could persist for a long, long time.

If the eardrums of every one in the UA defense forces could last that long.

Skyfire, Cape Cod

I
T WAS NOW MORNING
, but it was darker than ever.

The swirl of the hurricane high above the farmhouse had not moved, and if anything, the storm had gained in strength again.

Out on the ledge of the highest peak of Nauset Heights, Dominique was standing, braving the wind and the rain, looking out onto the raging, violent sea.

There were no dramatics going on. No theatrics. No arms raised. No chanting.

She was simply standing there, the wind blowing her hair, the rain glistening off her face. She stared off into the distance.

She’d been like this for hours.

Inside the farmhouse, Kurjan had changed his position and was now watching out the back window, keeping Dominique in view at all times. Frost was at the back door, peeking out the crack. The four girls were gathered at the living room window. They were watching Dominique, too.

As for Chloe, she was snuggled up beside Kurjan, her chin pressed up against the windowsill, watching and waiting, like everyone else.

It didn’t take them long to realize that getting a message out of the Cape any time soon would be impossible. The separate journeys of both Chloe and Kurjan confirmed that. The surreal weather, the conditions of the roadways, and even the conditions of the normal communications themselves—radios, faxes, shortwave—were intolerable.

So after much hushed discussion, Dominique, Chloe, and Kurjan had decided to try it this way. Maybe they could contact Hunter through unconventional means. Maybe they could contact him psychically.

This
was how desperate things had become.

Though Kurjan knew it was an outlandish idea, he also knew that strange things did happen in the world—and more so these past few days. He himself had been on the receiving end of some rather incredible experiences; he was, after all, the guy who supposedly had nine lives. Or more accurately, the one with the ability to rise from the dead over and over again.

Still, that didn’t mean he believed in all this psychic stuff. But under the circumstances, he was willing to give anything a try.

There was never any discussion about who should be the transmitter of this message to outer space. Of anyone in the world, Dominique was closest to Hawk Hunter. They knew each other intimately—how else could they have stayed together while spending so much time apart?

Many times, over the years, Dominique had felt that she’d communicated telepathically with Hunter. But now, this would be a test of that very nebulous connection, one that no one inside the farmhouse really believed would work.

Kurjan’s eyes, though tired and bleary, nevertheless stayed on Dominique the whole time. Whatever the hell was going to happen, he wanted to see it, for himself, up close and personal. The others did, too.

But it was not to be—and the storm would be to blame.

It had grown very dark, even though Kurjan estimated that it was approaching mid-morning. Though there was really no way to tell for sure, the sky was so black with storm clouds, it still seemed as if night had been hovering over the small farmhouse for the past four days.

Suddenly there was a crash of thunder and severe lightning; it was so loud and so violent, the entire house once again shook to its foundations. The glare from the lightning blinded Kurjan; it actually knocked him from his perch. An instant later, the window he’d been sitting at exploded in a cloud of glass and wood. Kurjan grabbed Chloe and hung on. Frost did likewise, throwing his emaciated body across the four young girls and shielding them from any harm.

The wind was suddenly blowing through the tiny living room at gale force. Pictures began disappearing from the walls; the candles all went out. The sweep of rain alone was enough to douse the blaze in the fireplace. In a matter of seconds, it was as wet and cold and windswept inside the house as it was outside.

Three more tremendous cracks of thunder followed, along with many explosions of lightning, some yellow, some white, some tinged with blue. By the time Kurjan was able to regain himself and get back to the window to cover it up, he and everyone else inside was soaked.

Somehow, though, he got the window covered and blocked off most of the storm—only three panes of the sixteen had been blown out. Now wiping the glass frantically with his sleeve, he sought to regain sight of Dominique. But when he was finally able to actually see out to the ledge about 40 feet from the house, she was no longer there.

Kurjan was out the door in a second, Frost and Chloe close behind. They battled the fierce wind and rain and somehow made their way through the blowing hay to the ledge.

They found Dominique lying on the wet grass, her hair hardly mussed, her hands resting on her midsection. She looked like she was asleep. Her face was radiant—glowing, even. At first Kurjan thought she might have been struck by lightning, and this had created the aura around her. Maybe she was only knocked out.

Kurjan reached down and put his fingers to her lips and felt no breath. He pressed his fingers to her wrist and felt no pulse. He laid his hand on her heart and felt no beat.

Chloe broke out in tears; somewhere above, the skies rumbled once more.

The glow around Dominique’s face faded away.

She was dead.

In Orbit

I
T WAS CALLED THE
Fifth Law of Repellent Charges.

It had to do with how many electrons in a certain charge were positive and how many were negative. If there were more positive electrons than negative ones and the massive positive charge somehow came in contact with a lesser negative one, the positive charge would cancel out the negative charge, short-circuit it, no matter if it was in a tiny light bulb, a bolt of lightning, or two great spacecraft chasing each other in orbit.

There was a problem, though. Sometimes it was hard to determine whether something was carrying a negative charge or a positive one. This had to do with the difference between alternating currents and direct currents, plus volts, amps, watts, and a hundred other things. Even after studying all that, there really was no sure way to determine the true nature of a charge without putting it in contact with something you believed was the opposite charge.

Hawk Hunter was 99.9 percent sure that the Zon carried what would be considered an overwhelmingly positive charge. Though the electrical wiring throughout the spacecraft could only be kindly described as “ambitious,” he was certain that the electrical supply was running on a true direct current, and this was a clue that it was a true positive charge.