Death Orbit (39 page)

No, the numbers didn’t lie.

The enormous burning comet was heading right for the earth.

Kennedy Space Center, UA Florida

G
ENERAL DAVE JONES WAS
asleep at his desk when the radiophone next to his ear started beeping.

He was hardly being derelict in his duties; he hadn’t slept in 72 hours. He hadn’t eaten in that time, either, or washed much more than he could by standing at his sink. He hadn’t even shaved.

He would still be in the same clothes, too, if a bundle of fresh laundry hadn’t shown up miraculously at his office door every morning. He had the feeling that some kind soul in the chow hall was washing it in the sink and pressing it with a rolling pin. The uniforms came cleaned and pressed, but they smelled mightily of flour and Ajax soap.

Jones was working too long and too hard, and he had fallen asleep at his desk. It was actually fairly comfortable—his head was resting on his codebook where he had brushed away the dust and residue from the day’s shelling. The VAB might be the largest one-room freestanding structure in the world, but it was still made of concrete, and that stuff got pretty powdery after so many hours of vibration.

The Cult’s fearsome barrage had been going on for nearly two full days. The battleships were still cruising about 24 miles offshore and their shells were still landing everywhere around the KSC, except in the heart of the base. Sticking to the game plan, the Cult gunners were dropping their enormous 16-inch warheads on the battered runway, on parts of the deserted beach, and in the swamps to the north and west of them—all with frightening accuracy. But they still weren’t hitting anything. Or at least, nothing important.

But a nonstop barrage of one-ton shells coming in at a rate of nine a minute will shake things up a bit, and before Jones had fallen asleep, he’d been reading a report from the NJ104 engineers on the extent of damage to the KSC buildings resulting from the vibration of these horrific explosions. Some structures on the outlying areas were about ready to come toppling down if the shelling continued. The only working launch platform—the famous Pad 39-A—was experiencing some “structural mistreatment,” as were the VAB and thirteen other key buildings. The Cult and their Nazi cohorts might be set on capturing the KSC relatively intact, but with each passing hour, whether they realized it or not, they were slowly turning the space center into a bunch of wobbly, undermined buildings and launch platforms.

At this rate, the report had concluded, by the end of the week, a medium-sized firecracker might bring down a crucial structure. Jones knew that short of destroying it all themselves, this continuous, yet harmless bombing might actually be the best scenario for the UAAF, because either way, the KSC would not be operational if and when their combined enemies managed to conquer it. The UAAF command staff had vowed that.

It was no surprise, then, that Jones was dreaming about standing in a field with a bag of cement powder tied to his back and a heavy rain pouring down. The more it rained, the heavier the cement bag got. Eventually, it would get so wet and heavy it would harden and crush him to death. Like getting hit with a rock, except in slow motion—this was how Jones’s dream state was predicting his eventual demise.

So the gentle buzzing of the radiophone sounded like a klaxon echoing across this wet, powdery field. Jones opened his eyes after the fourth series of beeps. He was up and stretching by the fifth series and answering it by the sixth.

“General?” he heard the familiar yet faraway voice begin. “It’s Major Hunter. Did I disturb you, sir?” Jones thought he was still asleep.

“Hawk?” he asked. “Really…?” Jones hadn’t spoken one word to Hunter since the Zon had lifted off about 100 years ago.

“Really, sir. Please excuse me for…”

“Jeezus, Hawk, where the hell are you? It sounds like you’re at a pay phone…”

“You’re not that far off, sir,” was the reply. “And I’ll have to make this quick, because…”

“Christ, man,” Jones interrupted. “Are you still up in orbit?”

“Yes, sir. Definitely, sir. I realize I’m using a unconventional means of communication. But the circumstances really dictated it. And I’m afraid I must be brief.”

“You’re calling me on my desk phone, for Chrissakes.” Jones just couldn’t get over it. “How is that possible?”

“Well, I’m forced to use some rather primitive communications here, sir. I’ll be happy to explain it all to you later. If… if I can, that is. I think the best thing we can do now is have me explain why I’m calling you like this and let me relay a very important piece of information to you. Is that okay, sir?” Jones sat back down at his desk, cleared it of debris, and retrieved a pencil and notepad. He knew this was serious and he wanted to get it all down.

“Go,” he told Hunter.

There was a long pause.

“General, I have some very grave news to report,” Hunter began—and, for the first time ever, Jones thought he heard a tremor in his voice. “We were able to recover and rejuvenate the Hubble space telescope earlier today. We got it working with some unorthodox wiring, and…”

“Did you say the Hubble?” Jones had to ask. “That big one-eyed mirror?”

“Yes, sir,” was Hunter’s reply. “That’s the one. We were able to turn it toward a certain section of the sky, to a coordinate that was, well,
provided
to me. And… and, well, sir, we detected a large object—a comet—that is heading straight for the earth, sir. It is more than 300 miles across. We estimate it weighs at least a billion and a half tons. If it hits, well… I don’t think I have to tell you what will happen…”

Jones had dropped his pencil. His jaw was hanging open, but also curling up slightly. This had to be a joke. Hunter, calling him on the office telephone to tell him the world was about to end?

“I know it sounds crazy, sir,” Hunter went on. “I know it sounds like a bad movie, or some tent preacher’s prediction or something—but it
is
true, sir. I’ve seen this thing myself—and you’ll be able to see it soon, too. It is enormous. I’ve done the calculations. It will intercept Earth’s orbit in exactly a hundred twenty hours—five days from now.

“Now, I would say that at least one-third will burn up on the way in, but that will still leave an object weighing a billion tons on impact. If it hits land, the debris and dust will be equal to a million hydrogen bombs. If it hits the ocean, the hot gases alone will vaporize more water than is presently in the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans combined.

“The poles will melt. The tides will run up to fifty feet in places like Kansas City and Omaha. It will be catastrophic. Disastrous to the
nth
degree.

“It will be the end of the world. At least, as we know it…”

Jones was still listening. Still sitting rigid, with his jaw open. He couldn’t talk. Couldn’t ask a question or even form any kind of opinion. He knew this was Hawk Hunter speaking and knew what he was saying was the truth, and therefore he knew that the end of the world, Doomsday, was at hand.

For a brief moment, it suddenly dawned on him that all of the crazy stuff that had been happening all around the world suddenly made a strange kind of sense to him.

Whom the Gods choose to destroy, they first make crazy.
Was that how that old saying went?

Well, damn now if it wasn’t true. The earth was going to be destroyed—and it had gone crazy first.

“Is there…”Jones finally managed to gulp, “…is there any chance at all… that it might miss? Or that the sun’s gravity might…”

Now it was Hunter’s turn to interrupt.

“The sun’s gravity is making this thing come at us even faster,” he told Jones soberly. “We figured it’s been going at a rate of about two hundred miles a second for a long time. No one saw it because it was just too far out. But now that it’s getting close, we jigged out its velocity at
three
hundred miles a second. When it hits us, it will be up to
four
hundred miles… a second. There’s just no way the numbers can be wrong.”

Jones was now thinking about his family. His wife, out in California. His two grown kids, living up in Boston with their families. His six grandchildren. How would they go? Quickly? Or painfully?

“So, it is… the end, then?” Jones stammered.

There was a very long silence at the other end of the phone. Jones had gone numb by now; he wasn’t even sure if his ears were even working. Or his voice.

“It is the end… right, Hawk?”

Another short silence.

“Maybe…” he finally heard Hunter say.

“Maybe?”
Jones breathed.

“I mean that we have a one-in-a-billion shot at doing something about this,” he heard Hunter reply. His voice was suddenly as chilling as the news he’d just delivered.

“Well then, spill it, man!” Jones ordered him. “If there’s a chance for us to do something, then hell, we’re better off going down fighting than ending with a whimper!”

“My feelings exactly, General,” Hunter replied.

There was another short silence, followed by a brief burst of static.

“So, sir,” Hunter came back on. “This is what we have to do…”

Fifteen minutes later, Hunter was hanging up the very ornate, highly stylized telephone.

Like everything else in the huge, circular room around him, the phone looked like it had been manufactured some time back in the thirties, by hands who’d spent most of their idle time raised in a one-arm salute.

It looked so old, he was amazed it worked at all.

“Well? Did he buy the idea?”

Hunter looked up at the man standing right over his shoulder. He was tall, thin, ugly, and had bad breath and bad skin, but his black uniform was neatly cleaned and pressed, as were his gloves, his socks, and his cap.

“Fuck you,” Hunter told him, floating up from the Bavarian antique desk and depositing himself on the long velvet salon couch. “I’m not talking to you—or any of the other flunkies. If I talk, I’m talking to the Man himself.”

The officer in the black uniform smiled. His teeth were crooked, too.

“‘The Man,’ as you so rightly call him, will not speak to anyone directly,” he sneered, floating over to a spot right in front of Hunter’s nose. “Least of all, you. Therefore, you have to report your conversation to me and then I will transmit it to the
Fuhrer…
”

Hunter burst out laughing. His voice echoed around the cavernous compartment and came right back to him again. He just couldn’t get over how big the Heavenly Space Station was inside.

“The Fuhrer!” he spit derisively. “Jessuzz, you guys kill me. That asshole can’t come up with a better name for himself than the
Fuhrer?”

The man in the black uniform looked authentically puzzled.

“He is our leader,” he reasoned out loud. “Why shouldn’t we call him the
Fuhrer?”

Hunter resisted the urge to deliver a boot to the man’s crotch. But how far could he kick him if he did, Sir Isaac? At least across the huge compartment. Maybe if he aimed it correctly, he might be able to kick the man right out of the room.

But that just wouldn’t do right now.

Right now, no less than saving civilization was at stake. He could go around kicking Viktor’s flunkies in the balls all he wanted after this was over.

So he just grabbed the man by the lapels instead and yanked him to within one inch of his nose.

“Listen,
Schultz,”
he sneered. “You tell your A-hole fearless leader to come down here,
schnell!
That’s the only way he’ll get what I just got…”

Hunter was suddenly aware of another presence in the room. An evil one, fucking up the last of the positive waves. He looked up at the set of mahogany doors right above his head and saw the grinning, sinister, Luciferian face of Viktor staring down at him.

In his hand he was holding what looked to be the world’s oldest tape recorder. In reality, it was the world’s oldest telephone tapping device. There was a gaggle of grinning, smelly goons surrounding him; these were the same people Hunter and Company had captured just the day before.

“I
already
have what you got, Fly Boy,” Viktor hissed with obvious satisfaction, indicating the wires and the headphones and a long piece of thin paper that appeared to be a transcript of some kind. “So we don’t even have to fuck around with that point. Let’s progress to step two… shall we?”

Hunter shoved the officer he’d been holding away from him, lodging the man high up on the room’s curved ceiling.

“Step two?” he asked Viktor in a mocking tone. “Now, exactly what would that be?”

Viktor looked momentarily surprised, but then he started laughing. Softly at first, but building in volume with each guffaw, until it was booming around the entire space station—theatrical, mocking, and not in a small measure feminine.

“You’re asking me?” Viktor roared. “I think you should be
telling
me, that’s more like it, isn’t it?”

Viktor’s minions were all laughing now, too. Including the guy Hunter had just deposited up on the ceiling.

“After all,” Viktor continued with a well-rehearsed sneer,
“you’re
the one who came to
me,
Mister Wingman.

“You’re
the one who wanted to make a deal…”

Off the Coast of UA Florida

I
T WAS CLOSE TO
midnight when the Cult battleship known as the
Sudai
retired from the KSC firing line and began steaming further out to sea.

The
Sudai
was now the flagship for the Cult battle fleet; ever since the loss of the
Miajappe,
all orders for the battleship flotilla had come from its command center. Its officers and crew had been elevated to the status of
mushimushi,
or “most holy,” meaning they were just one step away from being divine in the eyes of the Cult members. It was a high honor, though one that carried with it the disturbing fact that the bodies of the last people to have it bestowed upon them—the crew of the
Miajappe
—were now providing a feast for the sea creatures of KSC Bay.

No matter, because of the
mushimushi,
the
Sudai
was close to being a deity, and as such, many of the people on-board believed they were invulnerable, even immortal, and completely protected from any sort of outside harm.