Doomsday Warrior 14 - American Death Orbit (2 page)

They came to the top of the winding broken stairs and Rockson breathed out a little, realizing he had been tense the whole time he had been on the narrow stairway. Not that it was much better ahead—a dark tunnel about five foot high that was sandwiched from all sides by black granite. Pedersen began walking along bent over. Bats and other things flapped and slithered off in the darkness of the long tunnel system. Rock felt his claustrophobia creeping up on him. He was a man of the outdoors—not meant to be squashed in a sardine can made of stone.

“We began our observations trying to catalogue just what had been left up there,” Pedersen went on. “And discovered to our horror that there was all kinds of junk, tens of thousands of satellites, pieces of satellites, missiles, empty booster stages, you name it . . . It had either been shot up there before the Nuke war—or left in smokeless flames after the Star Wars systems virtually obliterated one another.”

“The Star Wars?” Rock asked as he ducked even lower when the ceiling above dropped down a few more inches. How the hell anyone had ever had the nerve to go through all this every time they used the telescope was beyond him. He wasn’t a cave person.

“Most people don’t know about it. It was a whole other war, Rock. One that was fought in the upper atmosphere just as we had our lower atmospheric war down here. There was a vast shooting war between missiles and antimissiles, satellite systems equipped with everything from laser beams to antiparticle generators to thousand of smart bombs. You name it, it was up there—and it was shooting when the shit hit the fan.”

“Must have been like the Fourth of July,” Rock muttered cynically.

“Oh, it was, it was,” the head space tech replied just as darkly. “A radioactive Fourth of July which has poisoned the entire atmosphere from the stratosphere to the ionosphere. It will remain like this for hundreds, if not thousand of years—an area up there with so much radioactivity and dark twisted junk floating around that we renamed it the Death Zone.”

“So nothing can live up there?” Rock asked, not knowing exactly who the hell would want to go back up—or who was capable of it these days. “No spaceship could get through?”

“That’s what we thought, that’s just what we believed,” Pedersen went on as they came to yet another opening in the ceiling of rock above them, and the tech began ascending a metal ladder, this one clearly of ancient origin as the rust had formed so deeply and coagulated so firmly over it that it had hardened in calcified fossilization, and was now firm though sharp where the rust crystals had grown out from the surface.

“We used a computer to catalogue it all,” the scientist continued, talking in a gasping voice as he rose up step by clanking step. Rock waited until he was a few yards up, so that if he fell, which didn’t seem at all impossible, he would at least have a second or two to react. “I’d say we have about ninety percent of the big stuff, maybe thirty percent or so of the smaller Death Zone space objects on disc. But all of a sudden, about a week ago—we see a lot of new activity. And I mean a lot. Like the dead dancing in the graveyards.”

They reached the top of the ladder and Rock crawled up after the head tech. They were in a dimly red-lit plastic dome about ten feet in diameter and through it—though there was a thin camouflage netting covering most of it—Rockson could see the entire cosmos above, bursting in all its infinite glory. And he gasped and felt his heart speed up from the sheer beauty and power of the stars and galaxies like flakes of endless, unfathomable snow. Over at one side of the dome a tech was peering through a large telescope that was mounted on a crude pulley and gear system. The main sat on a bicycle-like device and by turning the handlebars to the left or right and using the pedals of the bike, he could apparently alter the angle and direction of the eight-foot scope which protruded through the plastic dome.

“It seems so exposed,” Rock commented, not being used to offering up his flesh to the Reds in such an indefensible situation if they should suddenly show on the scene.

“With netting—it’s really not visible from above. We pull in the scope during the day and close down shop. Anyway, haven’t been detected yet.”

“How are they doing?” Pedersen asked, leaning over and addressing the man in the bike/telescope arrangement who was peering with great intensity into the device. Wires ran down from the sides leading to two computers below on a table. Two more techs monitored these intently, taking down notes on pads of recyclable paper. Evidently the computers enhanced images.

“Busier than ever,” the man in the telescope unit said, stopping for a moment and looking up. He jerked when he saw Rockson standing alongside Pedersen and stiffened, his hand coming up to his forehead in a salute. Ted Rockson, a.k.a. the Doomsday Warrior, was a hero to more than just the oppressed and slave classes of America—he was a larger than life figure even to his own people in Century City. Ever since he had arrived as a teenager years before, making his way across the country after his entire family had been killed, mother and sisters raped by KGB death squads, Rockson’s legend had grown. Stories of how he had spent years in the mountains leaving C.C. for months at a time. And it was even said he could communicate with some of the mutants—like the feared Glowers far to the West. This plus his great military prowess, his near dissection of Red forces throughout America, his involvement in casting out Col. Killov and much of the KGB, had all earned him a special place in the heart of every man, woman, and child in Century City. And though they tried not to, not wanting him to feel uptight in his own home, their actions altered noticeably whenever the Doomsday Warrior was around.

“Here, please,” the man in the bike seat said, rising as he let Rock take his place. “It’s focused on it.” Rock sat down at the scope. He had never been up here and had to admit that it was pretty fucking nifty even for Shecter’s miracle boys.

“You guys never stop tinkering, do you?” Rock laughed as he glued his eyes to the viewing lens of the scope.

“Tinkering is what science is,” Pedersen laughed as he looked down at the computer monitor to the right of the scope. The screen was in dull amber with mesh grids over them dulling them even further. They couldn’t chance an errant Drone spyship flying overhead and catching a glimpse of light on their photon sensors. “Turn the scope a little to the right,” Pedersen directed Rock. “Turn the handle bar—the scope will follow.” Rockson did so and suddenly saw the object of everyone’s attention spring into view.

“Jesus, what the hell is that?” he asked with suddenly dry lips. For floating there high above him, in the star-splattered darkness of the exosphere, was an immense wheel. A half-wheel really, though there was a thin frame clearly in place for the rest of the wheel, giving it a sketched but circular shape. The half that was complete was lit up—hundreds of windows.

There was clearly activity, and lots of it. And his tongue shrank even smaller in his mouth as he saw a winged ship suddenly come alongside the wheel and lock onto it. And the spaceship brought the wheel into perspective. The ship was large, yet it wasn’t a hundredth the size of the half-wheel. It slowly spun like a smashed bicycle wheel that had been in an accident and had half of it sheared right off.

“How big is—”

“It’s five miles wide we estimate,” Pedersen said. “We’d had it on catalogue in the computer system for over a year. But it was dead, a steel coffin all those months. Then it just started up a month ago. A little at first, just a few lights—we thought it was a faulty solar-battery system that had suddenly charged up. Then boom! All of a sudden it was like they were moving to build a city up there. Don’t know who it is, or what the hell they have in mind.”

“But what is it?” Rock asked, turning the pedal of the bike slightly to raise the scope and keep up with the orbit. “I had no idea we ever had whole space stations up there. Did I miss something from my history books?” Every member of Century City underwent rigorous schooling equal to the best of the old American universities. And that included a thorough grounding in America’s past—her economic, social, and military history.

“You’re right about there being no space stations, if you’re thinking of places designed specifically for human habitation and all that that implies. But what were built in the last days were Missile-Killing Super stations. MKS’s—giant orbiting battlewagons if you will. We were lucky enough to get hold of some hard disks from an Air Force computer system that one of our archeology field teams dug up. That collection of computer disks was one of the reasons that Shecter decided to give his full support to the observation program. For the disks gave us a thorough designation and function of all that U.S. Intel had learned of Soviet space gear. The disks were like Rosetta Stones enabling us to interpret all that junk up there.

“Humans did inhabit the fully automated MKS Wheels—but only tangentially—as troubleshooting crews. They were designed for space warfare—could shoot down anything from up there, anything targeted for the U.S. Or that was the idea!”

“Obviously it didn’t work quite right,” Rock commented. “The mutants that come out at night and howl in the mountains are testament to that.”

“There were two completed Wheels,” the scientist continued. “This one, the third, was only partially completed. The other two were shot down, broken up into debris during the war. This one escaped destruction. Only now it’s come to life. And just why—we’re not sure. But we don’t like it at all.”

“I can damned well see why you don’t like it. I don’t like it either,” Rockson commented as he peddled the bike to keep his angle up. The half-wheel was slowly moving across the star-jeweled sky like a curved sword ready to slice the Earth below. “It looks ominous as hell. Don’t tell me it can still do what it was designed for?”

“We believe—after computer analysis of all the data—that it is armed with functioning weaponry. And in fact with the additional supplies being shuttled into it by other ships—we think they’re building the wheel—extending it out to its full configuration.”

“You mean whoever these space bastards are, they could just aim down on us from the heavens—and take us out with a zap of laser—or one of these particle beams?”

“It’s entirely possible,” Pedersen replied coolly. “Ah, you’re about to lose them,” he said. “We only pick them up for about twenty-seven minutes every three hours. Just enough to really get all our tracking instrumentation going. We’ve been focusing only on this baby for a week now. You can see why. And why we’ve requested an emergency meeting of the Council. For according to our computer projections, that wheel will be complete within seventeen days, Rockson. And if it is—God help us all. Every man, woman and child in this city, this country, the whole damned planet for that matter, could be in mortal danger if the thing actually works. And we have no idea if they’re friend or foe. But somehow, I don’t think they’re friends.”

But Rockson didn’t have to be told that. Even without computer analysis—he knew they weren’t friends. Not with the scalpel shivers that traced itself around his spinal cord like lizards scampering in the cold darkness. He kept his eye glued to the huge tilted wheel that couldn’t quite get a full revolution going. No matter how hard it tried as it wobbled unevenly in a twisting orbit. He knew by the sheer darkness of the immense structure in space that it was evil. Darkly, hideously evil. And even as it disappeared completely from his view behind a high peak of Rocky Mountain granite, Rock knew that all other concerns of C.C. paled beside this one. The hand of some god was preparing to strike. And that god was a punishing one.

Three

T
he Century City Council Chamber crowd was as usual belligerent and sprinkled with enough curses to make a sailor blush. Century City was, if nothing else, democratic to the core, the snapping jaws screaming out their two cents. For every man and woman had the right to be heard in open debate on all important issues. Not just the elected Council members who made politicking a full-time vocation—but everyone. Which meant that sessions often lasted far into the night with debate rising to crescendo pitch. But Ted Rockson, for all the sound and fury, loved it more than than just about anything on this planet. For it was the free expression of people who were free to think and say what they wanted. The highest evolution of civilization on the planet. Freedom had always been something in many ways uniquely American, something much of the rest of humanity had never quite understood. That one was willing to die, to give one’s blood, one’s life, for this hooting and hollering gathering. When you come right down to it, a man has little else on this Earth but the thoughts in his head and the decisions he makes from them. Without the freedom to be yourself, there is nothing else.

Thus Rockson grinned as he made his way into the curved chamber as bushy-eyebrowed, bald Council President Wilcox, the newest elected President of the governing body, banged away with his gavel on the podium like he was trying to tenderize its shining hickory veneer.

“Order, come to order at once. You have your right to speak, but so does everyone else. If you continue to shout above the voice of your neighbor—so he or she can’t be heard when it’s their turn—then I’ll have to have the sergeant at arms escort you from the chamber.”

Wilcox’s admonitions and Rockson’s entrance quieted them down a bit as Rock brought out the best in them, made them their most civil. At least for the first few minutes. He nodded and made his greetings as he walked down one of the side aisles. Rock had fought alongside many of those gathered here, had told many of the widows that their men wouldn’t be coming home again. Century City was not a huge city. People knew each other, cared about one another. Thus he had to respect all their opinions. And they knew that.

Bonds forged in blood are the strongest of all.

“Come on Rockson, we’ve been hoping you wouldn’t make your usual de rigueur late entrance,” Wilcox shouted, moving his seat away so Rock could take the one next to him. The nine Council senators sat around a semicircular table set up on the stage at the front of the large curved auditorium/meeting hall. There had to be three thousand people packed into a space not meant to hold more than a thousand. And more waited in the halls listening to the debate over loudspeakers. For this particular meeting was of utmost concern to all. It involved the use of funds and energies at a time when things were tight, very tight.