Death Orbit (33 page)

But the fact that Yaz had gone through this before didn’t lessen Kurjan’s concern very much. Yaz just didn’t look good—and everyone was afraid to touch him, even to remove his wet clothes. And just how he came to be inside the upstairs closet… well, Kurjan decided he would let the weather calm down a bit before he looked any deeper into that one.

He came out of Yaz’s room to find Dominique and Chloe just emerging from smaller bedroom next door. To Kurjan’s great surprise, both women were naked and covered with a glistening powder, possibly some herb dust that Dominique was known to use on occasion.

They looked at Kurjan, who stared back, more embarrassed than they.

“Major, we were just coming to get you,” Dominique said.

Kurjan just stared back at them. “Coming to get me?” he stuttered.

“Yes,” Dominique said, holding out her hand to him. “Please, come with us.”

Now the guy they called Lazarus found he had a little trouble breathing.
Come with us?
What the hell did that mean?

Dominique smiled slightly; her beautiful body jiggled as result. She knew why he seemed paralyzed.

“Please, Major?” she said, walking three steps and taking him by the hand herself. “We have to show you something.”

Kurjan finally did follow them, numbly, as they went back inside the small bedroom and closed the door. It was now very dark inside, only a single sputtering candle was giving off the barest of light. Outside the storm was raging more ferocious than ever. Oddly, Kurjan fingered his weapon. As if massive bullets could some how affect the course of this tempest.

The women closed in on him and nudged him under the skylight. Then, pressing their naked bodies against his, they pointed, straight up.

Kurjan followed their fingers and was soon looking right out the skylight.

What he saw was… the clear night sky.

“This is impossible,” he gasped, all thoughts of the two naked women leaving his mind for the moment. “The storm. I can hear it.
Feel it.
How can this be?”

“Look closely,” Dominique whispered in his ear.

Kurjan did, and sure enough, once his eyes had completely adjusted to the dark, he saw that they were actually looking up at a huge, spiraling hole which had formed in the middle of the raging stormclouds. It looked like an enormous open drain around which clouds were swirling madly.

Kurjan just couldn’t believe it. The eye of the hurricane was right over the farmhouse! At that moment, they were literally in the middle of the storm.

“This all has to do with something bigger than capturing Viktor or stopping the attacks down in Florida,” Kurjan suddenly gasped again. “This is really something else…”

“It all means something,” Dominique said. “These are signs, someone wants us to do something…”

“Yeah,” Kurjan breathed never taking his eyes off the hole in the sky above him. “That’s the scary part.”

“Maybe I know what it’s all about,” Chloe said suddenly.

Kurjan and Dominique looked over to her.

“Before I left my mountain,” she began, “one of the priests told me something. I really didn’t understand it at first. But maybe now I do.”

“Christ, what was it?” Kurjan asked her.

“He said all these weird things would start happening,” she continued slowly, biting her lip. “People would start disappearing, strange voices would ring in the sky. Wars would break out. Nature would go on a rampage. And then… well, then, the world would come to an end.”

“You mean, a nuclear war?” Kurjan breathed.

“No,” Chloe replied, tears forming in her eyes. “Something worse. Something I saw in a dream. It was this thing. In outer space. It looked like a giant snowball. It was heading right for earth and moving incredibly fast. And I saw this huge hand behind it, almost as if it were pushing it…”

Suddenly Chloe collapsed to her knees. All of the scariest parts of her dream came flooding back to her.

“When I told this priest about my dream, he said it was actually a prophecy of some kind,” she went on, sobbing. “He said it had been written hundreds of years before. And now it must be coming true, because the night I dreamt it, it got very calm up on the mountain. Almost like this…”

She pointed up at the hole in the clouds above the farmhouse.

Kurjan and Dominique just looked at each other, shocked by Chloe’s tale.

“There are many things written about the Final Days, in many religious books belonging to many religions around the world,” Dominique said. “They all claim that truly bizarre, unnatural events will occur before the world finally comes to an end.”

Kurjan looked up through the skylight at the nightmarish scene above.

“Well,” he gulped. “That thing up there fits the bill, I would say.”

A dreadful silence descended upon them. Chloe suddenly stopped crying.

“This priest said one more thing to me,” she began again. “One more word before he… well, before he died. It was something that seemed like it might be the key to finding out exactly what’s happening.”

“Well, what was it?” Kurjan asked her anxiously. “What word did he say?”

Chloe bit her lip for a moment. “He said, ‘Hubble,’” she finally replied. “Is that a man’s name?”

“A man and a telescope,” Kurjan told her. “In fact, it’s probably the most well-known telescope in history. Or it
was.”

“But where is it?” Chloe wanted to now, now getting excited again. “Is it on top of a mountain near here?”

Kurjan almost laughed, an impossible act under the circumstances—or so he thought.

“It’s not on a mountain and it ain’t anywhere near here,” he told Chloe. “It’s up in space. It’s the most powerful telescope ever built, and it can see to the ends of the universe. But it’s up in orbit. That’s why it works so well; it doesn’t have to see through the earth’s atmosphere.”

“Oh, my God,” Chloe suddenly cried, her hands going to her face.
“That
must be it, then!
That’s
why I came here. So I could tell you about this Hubble thing and you can tell Hunter.”

Again Kurjan and Dominique just stared at each other.

“God, we have to tell Hunter to get to this telescope somehow,” Chloe was saying excitedly. “He has to try to find something with it.”

“Find what?” Kurjan asked her. “A giant snowball?”

Chloe just shook her head. “It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

“Everything
sounds crazy these days,” Kurjan said, returning his gaze to the absolutely mind-boggling meteorological event happening about a mile over their heads.

“Then we have to do it,” Chloe said, her breasts bouncing slightly with renewed enthusiasm. “We have to get in touch with Hunter, we have to tell him to use this telescope to find this thing. I think he’ll know what to do from there.”

Kurjan looked over at Dominique, who just stared sadly back at him. She suddenly retrieved her gown and draped it over her.

Chloe detected the immediate coolness in the room.

“You can get in touch with Hunter, right? He’s our only chance…”

Kurjan and Dominique just shook their heads. Then Kurjan slumped to the floor.

“Getting a message up to Hunter in the Zon space shuttle?” he sighed. “Now that is going to be a problem.”

Off UA Florida

I
T WAS THE CREW
of the ancient C-119 Flying Boxcar who saw them first.

The cargo plane-turned-radar-picket craft was flying its usual coastal patrol down from the Kennedy Space Center to the tip of Florida and back again. It had taken off at its usual time—0400 hours—and had reached Key Largo around 7
A.M.
, as usual. The crew quickly took on some more fuel and began the return trip to the KSC around 0720 hours.

It was on the trip back that things started happening. Just as the airplane was passing off the coast of what used to be Vero Beach, its surface-warning radar sets began lighting up like Christmas trees. A large disruption was evident about 22 miles northeast of their present position. The scatter on the radar sets was so extensive, the C-119 crew thought at first the instruments were broken. They’d never seen anything like this before. It looked like a big blob was speeding toward the waters off the Kennedy Space Center. Indeed, this huge indication was moving so fast, it appeared as it would make landfall at the KSC—and keep right on going.

What could be that big and moving that fast?

The C-119 crew didn’t even want to speculate. They knew the area from which they were picking up this enormous radar blot was the same over which the six Sabre jets and then the huge Seamaster flying boat had disappeared just two days before. The last thing the C-119 guys wanted to do was start guessing about what the hell might be out there.

They immediately made a scramble call to KSC staff command instead. This call put the entire KSC back on high alert. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. The surviving personnel were still in shock after the murderous attack the day before. Large parts of the base were still smoldering, and many of the UA facilities from the battle had yet to be identified. As it was, the base defenders had been burying their comrades all night long.

Still, as soon as the warning sirens began howling, the defenders wearily reported to their battle stations. There were just 423 able bodies left now, many of them actually technicians and support people thrust into the role of combat soldier. A huge trench line had been dug along the beaches bordering the KSC—the threat of an enemy amphibious landing was now greater than ever. The remaining Patriot missile batteries had been aligned in a no-man’s land between the beaches and the space center. The shuttle runway was, of course, unusable; the pair of F-14s, the single F/A-18, the Thunderchiefs, and the Delta Dart all had to fly up to the UAAF base at Myrtle Beach in UA South Carolina following the battle, this was the nearest working airstrip large enough to accommodate the unlikely aircraft. But the distance and the time in between left the KSC woefully unprotected in the area of aerial defense. In fact, the only flyable aircraft at the KSC at the moment were the pair of battered Sea Stallions used by the JAWS infiltration team, the two Hueys, and the CH-54 Sky Crane. Any credible air cover was at least 285 miles away.

In other words, if some kind of an attack was coming, the defenders at KSC would have to bear the brunt of it with little more than rifles and a few SAMs for at least an hour and maybe much longer.

About 15 minutes after first spotting the huge radar indication, the crew of the C-119 was finally able to get a long-range TV visual on the enormous surface disruption. Their initial, if unspoken, fears proved true. The huge radar blob was being caused by 12 Cult battleships steaming west at full speed and sailing extremely close together, an old Cult tactic.

And, no surprise, they were heading right for the KSC.

It was the USS
Marconi
that sighted the battleships next.

The diminutive spy ship was positioned about 22 miles off the coast of the KSC, still looking for any signs of the missing Sabre jets or the Seamaster.

Because it had most of its sensitive visual and listening devices powered down, the
Marconi
wasn’t aware the Cult battleships were in its vicinity until its communication officer picked up the original scramble alert message sent by the C-119 to the KSC.

The spy ship went to battle stations immediately. Its armament, three mounted Harpoon missile launchers and several M60 cannons, while formidable, were no match for the 16-inch guns of the Cult battleships. But the spy ship did have one great advantage: its speed. Crammed inside its engine room was not the usual set of smoky diesel engines that combined might muster up a 22-knot battle speed on a good day. Rather, the
Marconi
had a pair of GE-404 aircraft derivative gas turbines serving as its power plant. Though it hardly looked it, the
Marconi
could travel along the surface at close to 55 knots, an incredibly high rate of speed that could be well used either for attacking or leaving an area of danger.

This morning, it would be used for both.

The
Marconi’s
crew got a return message from KSC about 10 minutes after the high alert was called at the battered space base. The twelve battleships were coming, that much everyone knew. But what was their intent, exactly? Were they part of another combined attack? Or were they coming in alone? Even more important, were their holds filled with more specialty troops, meaning another attempt at an armed landing was in the offing? Or were the sinister Cult commanders planning something else?

The coded message sent from KSC command to the
Marconi
told the crew of the spy ship that it was up to them to find out.

The fleet of swift-moving battleships was still 16 miles off the coast of Central Florida when the
Marconi
first made its presence known.

The tiny spy ship emerged from a self-induced fog bank just north of the battleships, and fired two Harpoon missiles at the lead Cult vessel, the sleek new
Sub-shoppi.
The pair of missiles slammed into the side of the battleship, causing some damage but not enough to put the vessel in any real danger. However, it did slow it down, and as the lead vessel in the swift-moving pack, served to slow down the entire squadron of battleships as well.

This had been the
Marconi’s
intent all along. With the battleships’ speed now cut in half, the swift little spy trawler opened up its two jet engines and made a course directly for the middle of the enemy flotilla.

The problem with a battleship was that because it was the biggest thing on the sea, it was also the hardest to maneuver. Turning one quickly was nearly impossible; even slowing one down was equivalent to slowing down a supertanker, a long, complicated thing to do. The crew of the
Marconi
knew this, which was why they were now on the seemingly insane beeline toward the center of the 12-ship enemy formation. They had speed and surprise on their side. It would be enough to last them a minute or so.

The
Marconi
made direct contact with the battleships about 45 seconds later, speeding by the two trailing ships, the
Fuchu
and the
Gooshu.
The elite SSSQ crewmen managed to strafe the decks of both battleships with their M60 cannons as they raced by, taking out several antennas and a radar set.