Death Orbit (15 page)

Even stranger, it looked like none of the mysterious attackers had survived. As UA security troops surveyed the battle area within the four defense lines, several patrols of Football City Special Forces troops went through the thick marsh and into the swampland using motorboats and rubber rafts. With helicopter gunships providing cover, the FBSF troopers searched every piece of dry land inside the heavily layered thick-treed swamp. They found some evidence of the attackers’ forward assembly area—empty ammunition boxes and the like—and clues that the attackers had moved into the swampland only recently.

But they found no survivors. Even at the half dozen artillery emplacements, set up on nipples of high ground beyond the treeline, there was nothing but dead bodies. Apparently sensing defeat of their massive attack, the artillerymen either had killed each other or had killed themselves. At each of the six gun sites, the FBSF troopers found only corpses, many with bullets in their heads or swords in their chests.

But the dead left some clues, and when they were combined with their actions of the night before, a frightening if familiar profile of the attackers emerged. The horde had used brute force and not any kind of stealth or tactics in trying to reach their objective. They’d advanced under an artillery barrage that was laid down with absolutely no regard for their own safety—indeed, the attackers’ shellfire had killed nearly 20 percent of their own men. And when it appeared that the battle had been lost, many of the attackers had taken their own lives in lieu of retreat or surrender.

When all this was taken into consideration, the conclusion was that these mysterious attackers were not so mysterious at all. The entire East Coast of the American continent had been terrorized by them just two short years before. They were Norsemen, modern-day Vikings from lawless, war-ravaged northern Europe who’d sailed to the American shores in slapdash troop-carrying submarines and quite nearly come close to establishing a foothold on America, just as their ancestors had done centuries earlier, before being destroyed by the combined United American armies.

Somehow, a division of these fierce fighters had infiltrated the swamplands north of the Kennedy complex and launched the murderous attack on the space center. Only the delaying tactics of the defense forces and the massive firepower brought to bear by the Galaxy gunships and the other aircraft had prevented a disaster of catastrophic proportions.

As it was, more than 120 UA soldiers had been killed, including the eight Football City Special Forces troopers who’d died in that first rocket attack. More than 85 were still missing and almost 300 wounded. The battlefield, nearly two miles long and about a quarter mile deep, held the remains of most of the attackers. They would be burned and their ashes covered with lime later in the day.

Then, only two baffling questions would remain: how had so many Norsemen been able to get so close the space complex in the first place, especially since it was thought their armies had been wiped out in America a long time before?

But second and more important, under whose direction had these fierce warriors launched their attack?

In Orbit

F
RANK GERACI WAS ALONE
in the Zon’s crew compartment when the radio began beeping this time.

The NJ104 officer-turned-astronaut was not sleeping. Rather, he was doing his hourly check of the Zon’s chaotic internal systems diagnostics. While the Russian-built spacecraft bore a striking resemblance on the outside to the U.S. space shuttle, it was nothing like the American version on the inside.

Where the old NASA designers and engineers had used the latest in microtechnology to construct and power the shuttles, the ham-handed Zon designers had used everything from standard-gauge fray-happy electrical wire to antique vacuum tubes to get their baby into space. Where the Americans had built in a microprocessor-based triple-plus redundancy system to make sure the shuttle was as fail-safe as could be, the Zon’s builders had simply double-wired everything and let it go at that. Even such things as quadruple-layered pressurization seals—needed to keep all the valuable oxygen in—had been glossed over. Whenever they came to a particularly irregular or hard-to-access construction point, the Zon builders had simply
painted
the oxygen seal on, using a highly reflective polymer-based goop that was full of trapped oxygen bubbles, and therefore porous and dangerously brittle.

A testament to bravery or stupidity or both, the Zon was amazing in that it was so obviously thrown together by unenlightened or unconcerned engineers, yet it was still able to fly in space.

Keeping
it together was Geraci’s job. He was, after all, the engineer of the UA crew. But he felt more like a train engineer than someone who was responsible for keeping the spacecraft intact as it sped along at seven miles a second. A seam could bust at any moment, and Geraci would have little else but a roll of duct tape and a bucket of the Russian goop to make the patch. Should any of the electrical systems go, he would have exactly six replacement parts to work with.

And if something cropped up with the main engines? Well, it would be a long, cold night, because there was nothing on board with which he could repair them.

Geraci was in the midst of soldering a particularly scary-looking wire bus—it contained many yellow, green, red, and blue leads, all of which seemed to be going everywhere and nowhere at the same time—when he heard the radio softly beeping.

The sound startled him at first. He knew well the intense restrictions on communications between the Zon and Earth. Security being what it was, contact was supposed to be nonexistent. He hadn’t even heard the radio call signal before this.

So why was it beeping now?

Geraci glided over to the radio set and contemplated it for a moment. The laminated list of code-phrases was floating nearby. If Geraci understood the procedure correctly, to answer the radio call, he would have to push in the receive panel, activate the scramble mode, push the power button twice, and then wait. But should he do it? Cook had told him something about hearing a strange transmission on the radio earlier—it was unclear exactly what happened as the Zon had been dodging space mines virtually nonstop ever since.

Maybe this was another one of those crazy calls…

Or maybe it was an actual radio transmission from Cape Canaveral.

Geraci finally pushed the receive panel, simultaneously punching the scramble button. The speaker exploded in a storm of static. He quickly hit the power button once. Twice. Then he released the receive switch and waited.

At first the voice sounded very strange. Distorted. Eerie. But then Geraci pushed a couple of filter buttons on and the words cleared up immediately.

“A low front expected tonight along the eastern seaboard,” the voice intoned in obvious code. “Tides will be running much higher than expected.”

It was the Cape!

Geraci quickly retrieved the floating code-phrase card and ran his finger down the list. He was startled by what he found. “Low-front” was code for a major military action was in the offing. Any indication of “high tides” meant the situation was extremely serious and ongoing.

“Damn,” Geraci breathed. Something big must be happening below.

At that moment, JT floated down into the crew compartment. He looked worn-out and tense after manning the co-pilot’s seat for the past two days straight. Still, Geraci was relieved to see him.

“We’ve got a problem,” he told JT, indicating the flashing radio light.

JT was beside him in a second. He, too, was amazed that the radio had suddenly come alive.

“Shit,
” JT cursed. “This is going to be bad. I can just
feel
it.”

He finally pushed in the scramble panel and kept it in. A moment later they were talking to Yaz, duly scrambled and unfettered. All radio protocol was quickly dismissed with.

“We’ve got to make this brief,” Yaz began.

“What’s the occasion?” JT asked his friend. “Something big?”

“Would you believe World War Four, maybe?” was Yaz’s reply.

For the next ten minutes, using a calm if deadly serious tone, Yaz recounted the specifics of how the world had suddenly gone crazy—or better put,
crazier
—since the Zon had left. Reports were flowing in from all over, telling of major wars erupting, old conflicts flaring up, and nasty sneak attacks and counterattacks. Yaz gave a soberingly detailed account of the firebombing of Key West, the results of Crunch’s Cuba overflight, and the recent attack on the Kennedy Space Center.

“And you’re sure those guys were Norsemen?” was the first question JT asked him. “I thought we greased all those A-holes a long time ago.”

“I saw the helmets and swords myself,” Yaz replied. “They were the genuine item. How so many of them got there, no one knows. Maybe they all swam over from Norway or wherever the hell they came from. I mean, it’s as crazy as all the other shit that’s going on.”

“And is everyone really sure those were Fourth Reich flyboys who took out Key West? And that the Cult is involved?”

“Sure as the swastikas on their little bitty heads,” Yaz answered. “As for the Cult—who else would be able to float around in so many battleships? It’s the fact that these guys have access to so many nukes that scares the shit out of me.”

“Jeezus,” JT breathed into the microphone, “what next? Mid-Aks?”

“It’s as if everyone has suddenly flipped out,” Yaz concluded. “Bottom line, Jonesie thought we should call because we don’t know what will be happening by the time you guys get back.”

“If
we get back,” JT told him.

Now it was his turn. He quickly detailed the ordeal the Zon had been going through with the space mines, and the wear and tear in both spacecraft and crew as a result of trying to avoid the deadly orbital bombs.

“We’re like a B-17 on our way to Stuttgart,” JT told Yaz. “We’re full of holes, and the next one could be the last. But we’re getting closer to the target…”

A burst of static interrupted Yaz’s next transmission briefly.

“Well, whatever you find up there, I’ll bet it has something to do with what’s going on down here…”

“Just keep it together,” JT told him. “You never know what’s going to happen…”

“Exactly,” Yaz concluded. “That’s the problem.”

With that, he broke off the transmission.

JT and Geraci just stared at each other as the radio died again. Both were weary, stressed out, and now, extremely concerned.

“I know it sounds crazy, but I think the wildest thing is this attack on the Cape,” Geraci said finally. “I mean, the Cult battleships are in the area. Apparently, so are some high-tech Fourth Reich aircraft. And if they’re working together, then they have access to a pile of nukes. Why, then, would they send in a very low-tech army to destroy the space center?”

JT just shook his head.

“Maybe because they weren’t looking to destroy it,” he replied. “Not completely, anyway.”

“You mean, they sent in the goons to
capture
it?” Geraci asked. “That’s not really their style, is it? I mean, those Norse guys are pretty low on the food chain. They fight for booze to get drunk and ammo so they can fight again. I think that’s about as elaborate as their military strategy goes.”

“True,” JT conceded. “But maybe they were sent in just to fuck us up a little. Like throwing in the fodder first. Bump our defenses before the real attack. I mean, let’s face it: one or two battleships could stand twenty-four miles offshore and with a five-minute barrage wreck everything at KSC. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.”

“So if they don’t want to destroy it… what
do
they want?” Geraci asked.

“Maybe they want to use it,” JT said with a zero-g shrug.

“You mean, to launch something?” Geraci gasped. “Something of their own?”

JT just shook his head.

“Well,” he said, “that would be a party, wouldn’t it?”

A minute later, Geraci and JT had floated back up to the flight deck.

As usual, it was dark and tense there. At last count, they had encountered 16 space mines, the latest just an hour before. This one was probably the most powerful yet; its explosion had been incredibly bright and the resulting shock waves so violent they’d sent the Zon up on its tail even before Hunter had had a chance to steer the spacecraft completely out of the way. The close call only added to the frayed nerves aboard the increasingly dented and battered Zon.

But as before, each explosion also put them closer to the source of the space mines. Ben Wa had been manning the navigation computer when the latest one had gone off. Despite the jarring that resulted in the space bomb’s wake, he’d been able to get a good retrotrack on its position prior to its detonation. By triangulating backward, Ben determined that whoever was leaving the trail of space mines was now just 35 to 40 miles ahead and maybe a couple of miles above them.

JT now steered himself over to the space next to the command pilot’s seat and knocked twice on Hunter’s helmet.

“Can you talk for a moment?” he asked the Wingman.

Hunter flipped up his visor and took a deep breath of the stale cabin air. He was tired, hungry, and more than a little stressed out—three things that rarely entered his personal repertoire, and never all at once. Something was definitely wrong here. He’d faced larger challenges than this. In the past, he’d gone days without sleep, days without food and hadn’t felt this miserable. He’d fought air battles with the odds a hundred to one against him and still had not felt this uptight.

What was it, then? He’d thought flying in space was going to be the gas of his life, the realization of his long-held dream. But since they’d begun encountering the space mines, it had been one long, harrowing, uncomfortable, and nerve-frazzling ordeal. He’d always wanted to go into space—and now he was here, and for the most part, the trip had sucked so far.

Maybe there was something in that old saying: be careful what you wish for, it might come true someday…

Hunter took in another deep breath, then turned to JT.