Death Orbit (3 page)

The urgent call from JT had woken them all. Now, as Hunter bounced his way up to the flight compartment, Elvis, Cook, and Geraci were right on his heels.

“What’ve you got?” Hunter asked, floating up and into the left-side commander’s seat.

“Maybe trouble,” JT replied. “Maybe with a capital T.”

He was pointing to an object that appeared to be about 20 miles straight ahead of them. It was white and twinkling, indicating that it was tumbling.

“That showed up on the radar about two minutes ago,” Ben explained from the makeshift navigator’s station.

“So?” Hunter asked. “We’ve seen a lot of junk up here.”

“But the computer says this particular piece wasn’t there when we came around last time,” Ben replied. “Wasn’t anywhere near here. I checked the radar’s memory. It’s a new object.”

“You mean something that’s been launched since we went around the last time?” Elvis asked.

Ben could only shrug. “Maybe…”

Hunter doubted this. His inner sense would have told him if it were so. Plus, they surely would have detected a new satellite’s entry trail; the telltale stream of smoke and exhaust left behind by a payload’s boosters was hard to miss.

Hunter pulled out the shuttle’s extremely powerful bi-scopes, a kind of computer-driven set of binoculars. The radar on the Zon had been a hasty addition before take-off and Hunter knew better than to rely on it too closely. It was time to go with the naked eye.

He got the tumbling object within his sights and tried to study it. It appeared to be a piece of space trash, one of many thousands of objects floating around above the planet, the result of nearly 50 years of earth-launched space flights. But looking at things up here was different than down on earth. First of all, the Zon at the moment was streaking along at several miles a second. The trouble was, so was just about everything else around them, thus giving the illusion that everything was in fact standing still, and the earth below them was spinning around at a fantastic rate.

Second, just because they were in a stable orbit didn’t mean everything around them stayed in the same position in relation to them everytime around, especially in low-earth orbit. Space was not a static place, though it might look that way from the ground up. Actually, things were changing all the time.

This particular object was bothering Hunter. It had taken a marathon preflight session to figure out the Zon’s rather primitive guidance computers and then link them up in such a way that they could keep track of the spacecraft’s orbital path and avoid any collisions. Up here the tiniest screw spinning free from a deteriorating piece of space junk could prove fatal to something as big and as fast as the Zon.

Colliding with the object Hunter now had in the bi-scopes would prove catastrophic.

The reason they were up here was to apprehend Viktor II and drag him back to earth for trial and hopefully execution. When they realized he was not on the Zon when it was forced to land on Lolita Island, that left only one place he could still be: inside the old Russian-built Mir space station, a frequent destination of Viktor’s previous orbital flights.

But finding the Mir was a task that stretched even Hunter’s estimable talents to the limit. It could be anywhere in orbit—higher than the Zon’s present path, or lower; hundreds of miles ahead, or a few miles behind. It could be on one station one day and move to another the next. It could be on the other side of the globe and by maintaining the proper speed and altitude, forever elude their searching.

But something inside Hunter’s brain was buzzing, and it had to do with this mysterious object which had suddenly appeared in their vicinity.

“Is there anything in the computer memory that can ID this thing?” he asked JT.

The shuttle pilot began furiously punching buttons on the main control panel. The small TV screen before him began generating long lists of known space junk on one side and two-dimensional stick-figure illustrations on the other. Both Elvis and Ben had bi-scopes and were studying the tumbling object, occasionally looking down at the computer readouts to see if there was anything similar.

About twenty seconds into this procedure, Elvis got a match.

“It looks like a Progress M-27 satellite, similar to the Cosmos series,” he announced, keeping the object in view. “Same framework. Same mass and dimensions, according to the computer. Same…”

Suddenly, Hunter’s psyche began vibrating madly.

“Jeezus…” he was just able to whisper. An instant later, the tumbling object blew up.

It was an amazing sight—for about three seconds. The explosion went off as if in slow motion. A bright flash, and then a billowing cloud of flame shooting out in all directions. There was no sound, but a concussion wave hit the Zon a few moments later. It shook the spacecraft from one end to the other.

And then it was gone. The flash, the flame, the sharp jolt. All that remained was the cloud of white specks—and that was the problem.

Before Hunter even knew it, he was deep into the pilot’s seat and pushing buttons madly. He unlocked the Zon’s main systems from the GPS-2 computer, essentially putting the shuttle into manual control. Then he voice-commanded the steering jets to prepare to be lit. Then he lit them.

Suddenly the Zon flipped on its side, which in the directionless environs of space meant it had changed its position relative to the earth. Hunter hit the steering jets again. Now the Zon began moving sideways, shuddering in protest at the violent action. Hunter hit the steering jets a third time. Now the Zon was suddenly standing on its tail and vibrating even worse than before.

Throughout all this, the other crew members held on for dear life, their mouths hanging open at Hunter’s lightning-quick actions. They weren’t quite sure why he had suddenly seen fit to throw the Zon all over the place.

The answer came a few seconds later.

For suddenly the cloud of debris from the explosion was on them. It went by like a thousand tiny missiles, still aglow from the tremendous blast. Hunter had managed to steer the Zon away from the bulk of it. Still dozens of small particles began slamming into the spacecraft, especially around the tail section and the right wing. An outer glass panel directly over their heads was smashed. A large chunk hit the nose of the spacecraft, too. The lights blinked; the computer screens went crazy. Three separate warning buzzers went off at once. Even the intercoms went to static.

But just as quickly as the debris cloud was on them it was gone. Its individual particles losing velocity by the second, it seemed to disappear as the Zon zoomed out of it. Elvis, JT, and Ben were pushing reset panels and hitting panic buttons, but in a relatively short time, the on-board main computers were telling them the damage to the Zon was slight and that all systems were still operating at high integrity.

They had dodged a mighty large bullet.

Finally Hunter pushed a series of buttons, putting the Zon back under control of the GPS-2, in effect, returning it to auto-pilot.

In all, the crisis had lasted less than thirty seconds.

“Christ, what the hell happened?” JT finally breathed. “One moment that thing is in our way, the next, it blows up and almost kills us.”

“Some coincidence…” Ben gasped.

Hunter was already scanning space in front of him. The rock-hard features on his face were not good news to his colleagues. When Hunter looked concerned, it was usually time to worry. And he looked very concerned right now.

“That was no coincidence,” he said finally. “Someone sent that toward us intentionally. In the old days, they used to call it flak…”

On the Jersey Shore

I
T HAD BEEN A LONG
year and a half for the members of NJ104.

The high-tech combat engineering unit had been involved in continuous military action since the beginning of the previous year. Commencing with the war against the Fourth Reich and its Norse allies, the specialized combat engineers—who were actually members of the pre-Big War 104th Engineering Battalion of the New Jersey National Guard—had fought against the Asian Mercenary Cult in the South Pacific, had then transited to Southeast Asia for the Second Vietnam War, and had then played a key role in the capturing of the Zon space shuttle on Lolita Island in the middle of the South China Sea.

In that time NJ104 had lost its air transport—a C-5 gunship specially outfitted for lugging the team’s vast array of CE gear around—along with about 20 percent of its weaponry and nearly 30 percent of its manpower. Moreover, in those 18 months of combat, NJ104 hadn’t had any R & R, vacation, or anything close to what could be considered a day off.

The unit was long overdue for a rest.

So this is what had brought it to the shore town of Surf City, New Jersey. The unit was now about 150 men strong, though just about everyone was nursing some kind of wound or ailment. Many men were suffering from simple exhaustion, others from dehydration and even malnutrition.

Surf City seemed to be just the place for the unit to heal its wounds, regain its strength, and catch its collective breath. The nearby beaches were pristine, the water clean, relatively warm, with high waves and plenty of bluefish and stripers. The town was full of saloons, eateries, gambling halls, and strip clubs. The old O’Keefe Naval Air Station was close by and here a new C-5 Galaxy gunship was being refitted for the combat engineers. A well-staffed medevac unit was also located on the base.

The unit and their families were billeted in a row of beachfront condominiums about a quarter mile south of Surf City, at a place called Ship Bottom Bay. One of the condos had been turned into a command post and chow hall. The hierarchy of the elite engineering unit was stationed here. The place was known simply as the Hut.

Unlike many UAAF-affiliated units, NJ104 was run by committee. Seven officers made up this command staff, all of them members of the original pre-war 104th Combat Engineering Battalion. They were Colonel Frank Geraci, Lieutenant Colonels Don Matus, Ray Palma, Roy Cerbasi, Nick Vittelo, and Frank DeLusso, and semi-retired General Tom McCaffery. Geraci was temporarily up in space. He’d left the command of the unit in the hands of his six colleagues.

These officers had set up the top floor of the Hut as their operations center. From here they could track the progress of their new airplane, the strength reports of the unit, and the recovery rates of their wounded troopers, as well as day-to-day business, such as the number of lobsters and steamers for the nightly clambake and the number of beer kegs the unit currently had under chill.

It was now close to noontime and the NJ104 officers were gathered around a huge radio set, awaiting the daily transmission from UAAF provisional headquarters at Cape Canaveral. The unit was officially on stand-down, and by orders of commander-in-chief and de facto president Dave Jones himself, NJ104 was to divorce itself from all UAAF activities until it was up to full strength again. The radio briefing at noon was Jones’s only concession to the NJ104’s officer staff, the daily fix the CE men needed to stay plugged in.

It was a daily event usually greeted with coffee and sandwiches and today was no different. The six men were lounging out on the top balcony of the Hut, gazing down on their men and their families as they fished, body-surfed the huge waves, or sunbathed on the ultra-white sand below. Some were straggling out of the chow hall three floors down, bringing their noontime meals to the shoreline. Others were preparing a squadron of windsurfers for the daily afternoon boat races. It was August first. The day was hot and breezy.

Matus had just poured out six cups of coffee when the CP radio crackled to life. A message was coming in. Automatically, Matus checked his watch. It was quarter to noon, still fifteen minutes away from the Cape Canaveral broadcast. Usually the CP radio set was inactive except for this daily radio briefing. Who would be calling them now?

Palma was the closest man to the set. He casually flipped down the scramble buttons and activated the initiate panel.

“This is NJ104-CP receiving,” he spoke into the microphone. “Go ahead…”

“I will send a fire,” a deep, echoing voice responded. “And among them who dwell carelessly, I will bring it down upon them.”

Palma looked over at the others who looked back as baffled as he. The CP radio was a secure set; it was almost impossible to use its frequencies without the proper security and scramble codes.

“Who is this?” Palma asked into the microphone.

“Behold, it has come,” the eerie voice intoned. “The day whereof I have spoken is here…”

“Who the hell
is
that?” Cerbasi breathed.

“It sounds like God,” Vittelo replied.

“God, hell,” Palma snapped. “It’s someone down at the Cape yanking us.”

“Let me see it,” Matus said.

Palma passed the mike over to NJ104’s unofficial CO.

“This is radio station Delta Zebra,” Matus said into the microphone, using NJ104’s temporary call sign in measured, even tones. “Who is this, please?”

“All these things are the beginnings of sorrows,” the voice replied. “Whosoever’s name is not written in the book of life shall be cast into the lake of fire. This is the day whereof I spoke…”

And with that the radio went dead.

The six officers just stared at each other, coffee cups frozen in mid-sip, sandwiches in mid-bite. Palma tried to raise the voice again, but to no avail. The transmission was gone.

“Well, Christ, that was some joke…” McCaffery snorted. “Someone down at Cape Comm is in for a court martial, I would say.”

The others would have agreed with him, but oddly, none of them could speak at the moment. The wind had suddenly kicked up, blowing some papers and empty coffee cups around the balcony.

“That was… very strange,” Matus said, breaking the silence. “It was almost as if…”

But he never got to finish his sentence. Suddenly there was a loud noise at the other end of the CP. The main door flew open and two women came running in. They were wives of two troopers. Both were in tears and close to hysterics.

“The kids…” one of them kept repeating. “The kids!”