Death Orbit (30 page)

Only two guards remained on the Mir and the girls said they’d fucked them strictly out of boredom. When Hunter and Elvis informed the girls that the guards were now gone, they were overjoyed.

Now these girls were part of the crowd on the Zon, and while it did cut down on the living space for everyone else, no one had yet complained. Floating around in the Zon was always a matter of bumping into things: overhanging equipment, hatchways, door locks, and especially, fellow crewmen. Bumping into one of the young, beautiful girls made the crowded conditions bearable, especially since they insisted on staying topless, and when sleeping, cuddling up together in a still life of living, breathing, and floating zero-gravity erotic art.

These thoughts, too, wafted through Hunter’s mind as he drifted off to sleep. Once deep into REM however, his brain shifted into overdrive. His dreams, complicated and highly detailed, passed before his eyes like the episodes of an old movie serial. Here he was, chasing Viktor across the frozen wastes of eastern Europe. Here he was, on top of a Swiss alp, watching the Zon go over and plotting its eventual reentry path. Now he was fighting the hordes of airplanes sent by Viktor to protect the last runway on earth capable of landing the Zon; now he was shooting down all those airplanes.

Visions of wild sex now enter Hunter’s dreams: a blonde, thrashing this way and that, in a darkened room that is both hot and cold. She is denying him and satisfying him at the same time. She is laughing, then crying. A bare candle lights her face. The sound of the wind rages in the background. A huge, fiery snowball is falling out of the sky. Hunter is suddenly home, back on the Cape, at Skyfire. The blonde is smiling down at him. He opens his eyes, expecting to see Dominique’s face, only to find it is Chloe, the girl he met while chasing down Viktor—the girl he’d fallen head over heels for, the girl he’d left atop the sacred peak in the Himalayas, the girl he’d promised to return to, once this space flight was over…

Yes, his dreams were about secrets, and secrets usually led to questions. Could he find Viktor’s secret hiding place? Should he leave Dominique for Chloe? What could be more important than those two things right now? How about this one: exactly how much longer did he have to live?

That last thought had the potential to turn this dream into a nightmare—and only JT’s shaking him awake saved him from that fate.

“Hawk! Hawker, old buddy,” JT was yelling at him. “Wake up! You ain’t going to believe this…”

One minute later, Hunter was awake and up on the flight deck, staring out the front windshield in disbelief.

They had found Viktor’s hiding place—that much, at least, was certain. At the same time, they’d finally discovered how the space mines had been laid out for them.

But still, looking out the window, his mouth hanging open in astonishment, Hunter couldn’t believe what his eyes were telling him. Was he still dreaming? Was this real?
Could
a huge snowball really catch fire and fly through outer space?

What he saw hanging in space about 15 miles away was nothing less than a gigantic swastika. It was on a virtually identical orbit path as the Zon and turning slowly on the spokes of its twisted cross. It looked monstrous and overwhelming—and completely unreal.

“Christ, where did that come from?” Hunter gasped. He’d never been quite so astounded.

JT and Ben felt the same way.

“‘When’ might be the better question,” Ben replied. He handed Hunter the long-range binoculars. “Take a closer look,” he urged.

Hunter did, and immediately he knew what Ben was getting at. The space station was made not of lightweight aluminum or thin stainless steel, as one might expect. It appeared to be constructed of heavy metal sections, hundreds if not thousands of them, quite clearly welded into place, like the plates on a battleship. In fact, that was exactly what the overall construction reminded Hunter of—a battleship, in space, something built circa 1940. Even in the middle of the twisted extensions, there was a large observation-deck structure that looked very much like the bridge of a World War II-era ship. The gaggle of antennas and receivers and space periscopes looked very much like what would be found on the
Graf Spee
or the
Bismarck.

Hunter took his eyes off the binoculars and looked over at his two colleagues.

“This is happening, right?” he asked them, just to make sure. “We’re not dreaming or having hallucinations because of high CO
2
?”

“It looks real to me…” JT breathed, taking the spyglasses and zooming in on the strange structure again. “Damn real…”

“It’s registering on the radar,” Ben offered. “Coming back like it weighs a thousand tons.”

Hunter turned back and just stared out at the monstrosity. Ben was right: the question wasn’t really how, but when.

The truth of it was, this thing looked like it had been up here in orbit for many, many years.

“Can we really believe,” Ben began saying, “that… Werner Von Braun and those cats were able to put something this big into space—back in the 1940s?”

“And it stayed a secret,” JT added, “for this long?”

Hunter shook his head, mesmerized by the gigantic rotating swastika. It did seem impossible. Even if by some wild leap of the imagination the World War II-era Nazis—the Third Reich, Hitler and his gang—had been able to lift all these materials into orbit, using secret, more powerful boosters than the V-2s, how could this thing have possibly been flying up here all this time and stay hidden? How did none of the old NASA astronauts see it? Or the Russians cosmonauts? Or the hundreds of telescopes, big and small, and their astronomers, professionals and amateurs, back on earth?

No, these things were impossible, just like a giant fiery snowball flying through the heavens. There had to be some other explanation.

But what could it be?

Hunter looked at his two friends and they stared back at him. He didn’t even have to ask the question.

“It beats me,” Ben said. “It would have been the biggest and most well-kept secret of all time if this thing has been up here for more than fifty years. Even if they were somehow able to mask it from appearing from earth—which is impossible, in my opinion—the conspiracy to keep it quiet would have to be huge, carrying over several generations, and I just can’t imagine everyone involved—astronauts, military types, politicians, or whatever—keeping quiet about it all those years.”

“But the damn thing looks so… so
fucking
old,” JT blurted out, in characteristic abruptness.

Ben went below and roused the others. Soon the flight deck was crowded with five other people: Cook, Geraci, Elvis, and the two girls, who everyone had taken to calling Six and Eight.

Geraci above all just couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The engineer in him wouldn’t let the reality of the situation sink in.

“It’s got to be a prop, or something,” he kept saying over and over. “A fake, put up here to confuse us.”

“Well, it’s doing a good job of that,” Cook chimed in.

Hunter let Elvis take his place close to the front windshield.

“What do say, King?” he asked him. “Ever see it up here before?”

Elvis was shaking his head slowly from side to side.

“Not in a million years,” he finally replied. “That I would have remembered.”

Hunter passed the binoculars to him. “Recognize any of that stuff?” he asked. “The steel plates? The bolts? The girders?”

But Elvis never stopped shaking his head.

“I doubt if I ever lifted any of that stuff up here,” he said. “It all looks so heavy, it would have taken hundreds of NASA shuttle flights to lift it all. Certainly not in the five missions I flew in this piece of crap…”

Everyone moved aside and allowed the girls to get a better view.

“How about it, ladies?” Hunter asked them. “Ever see it before?”

Both teenagers shook their heads.

“You mean we were living in that crummy tin can and everyone else was floating around in that?” Eight said indignantly. “It looks like an old hotel—up here in space!”

“I agree with the G-man,” Six said, taking a long look through the binoculars. “I think it’s a fake. No one ever mentioned this to us before…”

Hunter retrieved the spyglasses and trained them on one of the twisted appendages. Sure enough, there was a crowd of space junk lashed to the sides of the last module. Old satellites, discarded booster rockets, even a couple of old NASA capsules, unmanned experimental prototypes launched into orbit before the human astronauts began coming up. Now it was clear they were being swept up by the huge space station and converted into orbiting space mines.

In contrast to the huge revolving swastika as a whole, this little operation looked very real.

“Do you think they know we’re out here?” Ben asked. “I mean, if we can see them, they can see us, no?”

“Probably,” JT replied. “But what can they do? It ain’t like they can come out after us or shoot at us or anything. Can they?”

But suddenly Hunter felt his inner psyche start vibrating.

“We might have spoken too soon,” he said, retrieving the spyglasses again.

Sure enough, a hatchway on one of the modules at the end of another twisted arm had opened, and now small objects were drifting out of it. Hunter zoomed the electronic glasses up to full power—and nearly dropped them, again so surprised by what he saw.

Without a word he passed the glasses to Ben, who took a look and had the same reaction.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ben said. “Now I know this
has
to be a joke…”

Busting at the seams, JT yanked the glasses away from Ben and took a look for himself.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” he breathed. “Komets?”

That’s exactly what they looked like: Messerschmitt Me-163 Komets, a type of German wonder-weapon rocket plane used by the Third Reich at the tail end of World War II. Incredibly, they appeared to have been adapted for space use.

“This is just too much,” Ben was saying. “Those things were barely able to fly during the war. How in hell could they get way up here?”

There was no easy answer for that one. The only thing that was certain was that six of the stubby, rocket-powered fighter planes had just come out of the module, each one carrying some kind of large muzzle-heavy weapon under its wings.

And now they were heading right for the Zon.

Hans Schikell was sick and tired of being in orbit.

He hated the food, hated the air, hated being weightless all the fucking time. He was German and by blood this meant he didn’t enjoy the same things other people did. But for Schikell, all this flying in outer space stuff was for the birds.

He especially hated flying inside the cramped little Komet 363, but that’s what he was doing. He was the flight leader for the half dozen Komets sent out to investigate the large spacecraft which had been spotted approaching the
Himmel-zwischenraum-Rang,
which was the grandiose name for the huge, spinning swastika and could be loosely translated into “Heavenly Space Station.”

Schikell had spent most of the past 20 hours supervising the layout of more than two dozen space mines, a pain-in-the
-Esel
job if there ever was one. Like the Komets and the
Himmel-zwischenraum-Rang
itself, the tools and machinery used to convert the free-floating pieces of space junk into orbital bombs was old, unreliable, and poorly made in the first place. That was another reason Schikell hated being in space. He had a hard time living with the fact that at any minute an oxygen seal could burst or an electrical bus could melt and everything—the Komets, the space mines, the Heavenly Space Station, and everyone inside it—could go up and be gone, in less than a second.

But the pay was good, and as far as the politics went, Schikell was a Nazi, just like his father before him and his father before him. Besides, he was due to go back to earth sometime soon, and when he did, he would collect his wages and disappear—and never go into space again.

Schikell looked around him and saw the five other Komets were in their proper positions. The precision was as surprising as it was admirable. Of the six pilots in his squadron, Schikell was the only one with more than 200 hours of spacetime; the others were jet pilots hired back on earth and given crash courses in how to fly the Komet 363. This took more than a little doing; the whole relative-speed thing could be very disconcerting to someone who was used to whacking a jet into afterburner and getting an immediate kick-in-the-
damenschlupfer
result. These men were getting to know the ropes about flying in space in a machine that was designed by someone old enough to be their great-great-grandfather—and so far, they’d been doing a pretty good job of it.

It would take them five minutes to reach the vicinity of the intruding spacecraft. Though Schikell was not privy to exactly who was flying inside the interloping ship—not officially, anyway—he knew this was the one and only Zon they’d been sent out to intercept. It was hard not to recognize it. Not only had just about all of them on board the Heavenly Space Station come into orbit aboard the Zon, it was, to his knowledge, anyhow, the only other spacecraft from earth capable of operating in space.

Rumors had abounded aboard the
Himmel-zwischenraum-Rang
that the Zon had been captured by the United Americans after its last reentry and that no less a figure than Hawk Hunter, the
Flugelmensch
himself, had engineered the seizure. If this was true, and if the further rumors that Hunter was now in space and coming to kick ass on anyone up here were too, well, then, Hans Schikell
did
want to get back to earth. In a hurry.

But Schikell couldn’t worry about that now. His orders, direct from the
Stationsvorsteher,
demanded he intercept this spacecraft, no matter who was driving it, and “hold” it in place. Being a good German, he knew it was best to follow orders.

His flight was about halfway to the spacecraft now, and only an idiot would disagree that this was not the infamous flying rattletrap called the Zon. But whoever was behind its controls was certainly acting in an odd fashion. They weren’t trying to evade the oncoming flight of Komets or change their orbital path. Schikell could see no evidence of steering jets being employed or main engine start-up. The Zon was just sitting there, drifting along in space, almost as if no one was aboard it. Schikell felt a chill go through him, even though he was typically roasting inside his spacesuit. Who was flying this thing? Ghosts? He chuckled a little, knowing it was an action akin to whistling by the graveyard. Were there ghosts in space? he wondered. Could the unsettled souls of the quickly departed actually attain escape velocity to haunt those who’d left earth’s untidy bonds? Schikell shook off another chill. He really did have to get back to earth.