Semper Mars (28 page)

But there was no way to deny the thoughts, rising unbidden and furious. Yukio had had trouble believing his orders when he’d first seen them. Taka Flight is directed to launch at the earliest possible time in order to intercept American forces now attempting to capture the ISS, currently controlled by our UN allies. Your primary target is the American military space station Shepard and its high-energy laser, which is being used in support of American operations at the station. After the primary target has been neutralized, you will maneuver close to the ISS and render direct military support to UN forces aboard.

“Direct military support.” That meant, of course, attacking the American troops now outside the ISS. Yukio had no wish to kill Americans. He felt trapped, trapped between his orders and that Western part of his soul that loved the United States and Western clothes and the freedoms of speech and thought that Americans took for granted… and Kaitlin. Kaitlin, forgive me…

But for the smallest of cosmic accidents, her father might have been among the troops attacking the ISS, and one of his targets. In a way, he was attacking her father, since the ISS was Earth’s only orbital spaceport, the only way for him to come home when he returned from distant Mars.

For a time, he stared at the blue curve of the Earth ahead, agleam beneath the sun. For Nihonjin there was but one way to resolve the irresolvable, and that was by clinging to duty, to honor, and to family.

Gimu. Duty.

Shikata. It is the way things are done.

Shikata ga nai. There is no other way. The concept of shikata was a peculiarly Japanese sentiment. For Nihonjin, it was attitude first, then effort, and finally result. “It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game” might easily have been an aphorism first voiced by a Japanese sage.

With a decisive movement, he rotated the console at his side and locked it in place in front of him. He was picking up targets now on the screen, a cluster of objects of some size nearly five hundred kilometers ahead and one hundred kilometers above them.

“I have the cluster on screen, Commander.” His gloved fingers tapped across his touch pad. “Working on best firing solution.”

“Very well.”

The cluster was the main group of manned space stations in low Earth orbit. That big one near the center was the ISS, and the smaller mass near it was an American Star Eagle transport. They were still too distant to pick up the American troops reported to be moving around outside of the station.

Other, smaller targets in the area were free-flying satellite facilities, research platforms, independent space stations owned by the ESA and Japan, sharing an orbit for mutual safety and comfort.

That blip, though, trailing the others by twenty kilometers, was the one Taka Flight was interested in. When he touched it with his cursor and clicked the query spot, the Romanji characters scrolling down the screen told the story: US INDEPENDENT RESEARCH SPACE STATION SHEPARD.

Though her engines were shut down, the fighter continued climbing, hurtling along the outward leg of her elliptical orbit. The launch had been timed perfectly; with only a few gentle course corrections, Iijima had put Taka One into a path that would neatly intercept Shepard in another… twenty-one minutes.

The only difficulty, of course, was that the Americans by this time knew that they were coming.

T
WENTY
-O
NE

Tuesday, 12 June

Shepard MOP

2223 hours GMT

“Cheyenne Mountain, Shepard,” Colonel Dahlgren said, peering into the telescopic display. “We definitely have visitors… at least two Inaduma-class fighters on intercept. Over.”

“Roger that, Shepard. We concur. We are tracking two birds, launched fifty-three minutes ago from Tanegashima. Intelligence sources report they are definitely hostile… repeat, hostile.” There was a long pause, filled by the hiss of static. “Shepard, you are cleared for defensive operations.”

Dahlgren drew a deep breath. “Copy, Cheyenne. Initiating defensive operations.”

Defensive operations. It sounded so… sterile. Like “force package” or “direct action.” Like a problem in air-combat maneuvers back at the Aerospace Force Academy, a few million years ago…

He looked at Fred Lance, who was listening in on his own headset. Fred shrugged, then looked away. They’d been speculating for hours now on what Japan was going to do. It looked like they had their answer.

So far, Japan had not been an entirely eager participant in the UN campaign to bring the United States to its knees. The Japanese remained one of America’s most active trading partners, despite the various UN-declared embargoes, and they’d argued forcefully in the General Assembly against military action.

Still, the Charter of 2025 required member nations to participate in “military police exercises” at the behest of the UN World Security Council. While Japan maintained the fiction of its so-called Self Defense Force, which it sent abroad only in very special and very carefully controlled situations, the fact remained that Japan’s military space force was as good as or better than that of the ESA. There’d been some question as to whether Japan would honor its treaty commitments to the Charter.

That question, evidently, had just been answered.

“Fire up the program, Fred,” he said. “Let’s see how this sucker works on antiaircraft mode.”

“We’re tracking ’em. Hecate Program running. HEL powering up. Full charge in thirty seconds.” Dahlgren peered into the display. Even at full magnification, the approaching fighters were hard to see, for they were several hundred kilometers astern of Shepard. But they were also at a lower altitude and, therefore, silhouetted against the vast, sky-blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean. He set the telescope’s crosshairs on the lead fighter and touched the keypad panel, locking in.

“We have full power, Colonel.”

“Fire.”

The bulk of the large and delicate Hecate High-Energy Laser was inside the lab compartment. The beam was channeled through a special port in the station’s hull and out into space, where it struck a mirror on the end of a twenty-meter strut. That mirror, controlled by the Hecate AI Program, could be precisely adjusted to give the laser a full field of fire across nearly the entire sky. The beam itself was invisible in the empty vacuum of space, but for an instant, backscatter from the mirror illuminated half of the space platform like the rising of a second sun…

Taka One

2225 hours GMT

“Kuso!” Kurosawa snapped. “What was that?”

There’d been no sound, no shock, but abruptly a patch of violent, intolerably bright incandescence had flared on the craft’s nose, a few meters below the cockpit. Iijima hit the craft’s roll jets and added some yaw, nudging the craft clear of that deadly beam before it could more than blacken Taka One’s coat of reflective white paint.

“Laser, Commander,” Yukio replied, checking his instruments. “I read it in the half-megawatt range. We are being fired on.”

A moment later, the beam struck again, this time on the wing, clawing at the hull long enough to explode a puff of vapor into space, the jet kicking them sharply to the right. Iijima responded by rolling back, clearing the beam, and accelerating.

“Taka Two reports they are taking fire as well,” Kurosawa said after a moment. “The bastards are shifting between us. First us. Then Ozawa. They’re trying to cripple us before we can get into missile range.”

A decent tactic, Yukio thought. It could work.

For five more minutes, they played this deadly and uncomfortable game. The laser would play briefly against the Inaduma’s hull, the beam itself invisible but the effects startlingly clear. As light flared, as flecks of hull material snapped away or vanished in puffs of glowing white vapor, the pilot would fire the ship’s maneuvering jets, tossing them left or right, up or down, seeking to evade that deadly, clawing beam. For a time, they would be in the clear.

And then the beam would find them once more.

“Range to target,” Yukio said calmly. “Three-two-three kilometers, and closing.” He consulted his main display, where an intercept program was running with a rapidly shifting interplay of numbers representing relative velocities, delta-v, acceleration, time, and distance. “Time to best firing solution on this vector… three minutes, twelve seconds.”

The Inaduma carried two Hayabusa missiles mounted in internal bays, one fitted inside each thick wing. The name was a poetical form of the word for the peregrine falcon, a swift bird of prey and a deadly hunter. In aerial combat they had a range of well over 150 kilometers; in space, technically, their range was unlimited, though a firing solution involved higher or lower orbits and the complexities of orbital intercepts.

The real problem was gauging the best range at which to fire. Obviously, the Defense Intelligence report that Shepard Station was testing a powerful new space-based laser was all too accurate. Launch from too great a distance, and that laser might burn the missiles out of orbit; try to get too close, and the laser would burn the space fighter out of orbit. The program running on Yukio’s console was designed to pick the best of several bad options.

The fighter lurched again, and for a moment, the huge blue Earth seemed to tumble around the ship, alternately flooding the cockpit with turquoise light and plunging them into darkness.

“Unko!” Major Kurosawa snapped. “Stabilize us, pilot-san! Thrusters five and seven! Do it!”

Slowly, the hard roll to port slowed, then stopped. Yukio chanced a quick look forward, past the seats of pilot and commander at the blackness of space beyond. He still couldn’t actually see the American space station, not with the naked eye. It was a strange kind of warfare…

“Taka One, this is Tanegashima Control.”

The voice sounded in Yukio’s headset, but Kurosawa answered it. “Tanegashima, Taka One. Go ahead!”

“Taka One… Taka Two is no longer in communication. It appears to be tumbling on free trajectory. We must assume it has been destroyed.”

Yukio felt cold. Just like that. A ship and three men, killed…

“Tanegashima, Taka One,” Kurosawa said. “We copy. We are proceeding with the attack.”

There was no alternative, of course. They were committed now. Even if they’d wanted to break off and return to Earth, the deorbit maneuver would simply drop them into a lower and faster vector. The enemy would assume they were still attacking.

Besides, honor was involved, and the workings of wa and bushido. To flee now, even if they could, was unthinkable.

Laser fire clawed at the spaceplane’s nose again, the glare off vaporizing hull metal dazzling through the cockpit window. Captain Iijima jinked the spacecraft hard to the right, the sudden acceleration slamming Yukio against his seat. The laser found them again with unerring accuracy.

“Chikusho!” Kurosawa shouted. “Chu-i-san! Give me a solution!”

Yukio was struggling to plug new numbers into the equations, taking into account the last violent change of lateral vector. Whatever drift to left or right the fighter had, the missiles would possess as well. He bit off a curse. They were still a long way from the American station… but it would take too long to try to work closer. “Firing solution!” he announced, fingers stroking the touch panel on the console as he programmed both missiles. “Missiles programmed and ready to fire!”

“Missile release!” Kurosawa announced. Yukio felt the slight hum and thump as the underside of Inaduma’s wings opened wide, and the sleek, three-meter white arrows drifted free. “Missiles clear, Commander,” Yukio announced. “You may trigger ignition.”

“Banzai!” Kurosawa shouted, and the others in the cockpit joined him to complete the traditional chorus of three. “Banzai! Banzai!”

Yukio glanced forward again in time to see two brilliant suns whip out from under the Inaduma’s nose and dwindle rapidly into the blackness ahead.

“Tanegashima, this is Taka One,” he said. “Missiles away…”

The three men waited breathlessly as the missiles continued their run. At least the enemy laser fire had ceased. Shepard’s radar would have announced the launch of the two missiles, and the Americans would have shifted targets. After nearly a minute, Yukio read the telltale flicker of numbers on his screen and shook his head. “Missile one has been destroyed. Objective is shifting the attack to missile two.”

It wasn’t going to work. With four missiles, Shepard’s defenses might have been overwhelmed… but Taka Two had been knocked out of action before they could get their Hayabusas into the game. If the Americans destroyed both of Taka One’s missiles, they would have to attempt to close and engage the enemy with the gatling cannon in the spaceplane’s nose, an attempt that would almost certainly be fatal.

“Stand by to detonate the warhead, Chu-i-san,” Kurosawa said.

“Hai!” Yukio had already flipped open the second of two large, yellow-and-black-striped protective covers on his console, exposing a large, red button. His thumb hovered above it, waiting… waiting…

“Range to target, two-five kilometers,” he announced. “Target has acquired the missile.”

“Trigger the warhead,” Kurosawa said. “Now!”

Yukio pressed the button and, hundreds of kilometers ahead, the Hayabusa’s warhead detonated.

The warhead was a special type designed for antisatellite warfare, with explosives packed behind a cluster of heavy, steel ball bearings. The explosion hurled the bearings forward in a large and deadly cloud, like the blast from a titanic shotgun. By detonating the warhead far short of the optimum range, Major Kurosawa was taking a chance, gambling that enough of the ball bearings would still hit the target to do critical damage. Like an actual shotgun blast, the shot began spreading as soon as it was fired; where detonation at a range of several hundred meters would have fired nearly one hundred steel balls into the target with a velocity difference great enough to shred the Shepard Station’s hull, detonation at a range of almost twenty-five kilometers meant that Taka One would be lucky if they hit with ten. Or five. Or even one…

It also meant that the software AI running the enemy laser was momentarily confused. One large and deadly target on an intercept course had just been replaced by a hundred tiny targets, each one relatively harmless by itself. For nearly one second, the program analyzed courses and drift, arriving at the conclusion that not more than eight of the oncoming spheres would collide with the station proper.

It therefore gave the projectiles a lower threat rating and shifted aim back to the original target… the Inaduma spaceplane still approaching on an intercept vector.

Aboard Taka One, Yukio was just about to report that the missile had detonated successfully when the cockpit abruptly filled with a heavenly, glorious light, a blinding, blue-white radiance unlike anything Yukio had ever seen before. He had no time to scream, no time even to feel pain as his helmet visor cracked and his eyes melted and most of his skull burned away.

Then, a tenth of a second later, uneven heating of the cockpit surface shattered the tough plastic, the spaceplane tumbled forward, and the half-megawatt beam ate through to a large tank of liquid oxygen—part of the craft’s fuel-cell reserves—just below and aft of the crew compartment.

2228 hours GMT

The explosion was clearly visible to the men aboard the American military station, even without the telescope, a silent flare of white light against the peaceful blue backdrop of Earth. “Got the bastard!” Dahlgren cried.

Moments later, six projectiles the size of ball bearings smashed through Shepard’s thin hull like bullets fired through cardboard.

Marine Orbital Strike Force

International Space Station

2235 hours GMT

Fuentes was not outside when the Japanese Lightnings were destroyed. The SCRAMjet transport McCutcheon had arrived on schedule, and half of the Marines standing watch over the ISS had gone aboard. A rotation schedule had been set up, allowing the Marines of the MOSF to spend six hours at a stretch inside a pressurized environment where they could take off their armor and enjoy some downtime. Fuentes had stayed outside for as long as her life support could take it, then gone inside with the last rotation.

The initial battle had been savage but mercifully brief, a necessary result of the sheer deadliness of combat in vacuum. Five Marines had been killed. Three more had missed the station in their headlong charge across space or been knocked away by careless bursts from their ATARs, but all of them either had managed to reverse course and make it back to the ISS or, in the case of Private Bagley, had been picked up by the Thornton on Search and Rescue and brought back to the McCutcheon.

The exact number of UN combatants at the ISS was unknown. Three bodies had been recovered, but it was believed that at least two others had been killed as well. The fighting, Fuentes thought, had been eerily like something out of eighteenth-century naval warfare and the very beginnings of the Marine Corps’s history, with troops clinging to the rigging and spars of the station to blaze away at one another, sometimes at almost point-blank range.

With the enemy withdrawn inside the station, the battle had reverted to something out of an even earlier time, the siege of a medieval castle. The attackers couldn’t get in without destroying what they wanted to capture; the defenders couldn’t get out without risking being overwhelmed. Intelligence reports relayed to the Marines from Cheyenne Mountain indicated that a European SCRAMjet orbital transport was apparently being readied at their primary CSG launch site at Kourou in French Guiana.