The Nebo-M was a system specially designed to detect stealth aircraft, but even it would have trouble picking up at long range the small profile of the two Fantoms Bunny was sending towards it. For this, it relied on a shorter range array radiating at the lower frequency S and L bands, which had a range of less than 30 miles.
With Bunny able to fire her missiles at a range of 10 miles, and fly at 1,300 miles an hour at sea level, assuming she could get close enough, that gave the Russian system a window of about one minute in which to lock and fire at the Fantoms before she could fire herself.
Even if she had known the Nebo-M was sitting there waiting for her, she would probably still have taken those odds. But because it had just arrived in theatre and hadn't got up and radiating yet, it had not been flagged by electronic signals intel and there was nothing on her threat warning system to tip her off it was even there.
It was no ordinary anti-air battalion either. Painted on the door of the command module of the Lavrentiya array were the silhouettes of six fighters, two ICBMs and four rotary aircraft that the unit had ‘destroyed’ in exercises. It had never fired a shot in actual combat — the Nebo-M was a home defense system and hadn’t been deployed in the Middle East — but the personnel staffing the unit at Lavrentiya were the best in the Russian Armed Forces at what they were paid to do.
So when an Airborne Control aircraft picked up a couple of ghost returns to their south, battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Alexandr Chaliapin had ordered his technicians to get their array online and do it now dammit. The airborne control aircraft didn't have a firm fix on anything, but a fighter patrol was dispatched to scan the sector — and still that hadn’t made him relax. He’d heard what had happened at Anadyr, everyone had. But Anadyr wasn’t defended by his Nebo-M. And he had no intention of letting what happened at Anadyr happen to him at Lavrentiya.
Getting the battalion flown in and physically into position had taken precious days — getting it networked and able to link with other air, sea and ground defense units was even more of a headache. Now they were in the middle of their first live test cycle and they had a threat on the board? Other commanders might have panicked or worse, been lulled into complacency by the next forty minutes without any further contact being reported either by the Airborne Control plane or the fighter sweep. But Chaliapin let his men work and when they declared the system ready he played a hunch, and sent a narrow beam of low-frequency energy down the bearing of the previous contact and hit gold! Another faint return bounced back, then was gone. Now he had a validated threat and a vector on it — he put three launchers armed with low level active homing 9M96J missiles on high alert, bringing them to instant readiness. He fed the numbers to his AI, shut down his active systems and stopped radiating. If he was wrong, he had just condemned the city to an attack from an unknown quarter, but he had never before been wrong.
In her virtual-reality rig on Little Diomede Bunny's radar warning flashed for the briefest of moments. Too short for her to identify the source or type of defensive system that was sniffing after her. She logged it then ignored it.
The Nebo-M’s AI ran the numbers on the two ghost returns, calculated a speed and bearing, and waited with silicon patience for the identified threat to enter S and L frequency range. At exactly 32 miles estimated, it brought its radar arrays back online and blasted energy downrange toward the expected position of the UI aircraft.
As her threat indicator showed a targeting radar lock on her heads-up display, Bunny just had time to yell, “Radar lock!” The combat AI on Bunny’s Fantoms reacted before she could, sending one Fantom in a hard banking right turn, while the other broke left, but it was too late. Missile launch warnings screamed inside the trailer. With the 9M96J missiles flying at two and a half times the speed of sound, the missile alert warnings sounded almost at the same time as the two screens she was using to pilot the drones flashed suddenly white, then went blank.
They had just lost two of their dwindling complement of Fantoms!
An hour of tense anticipation had ended with disbelief. If Rodriguez and O’Hare had been last-gen aircrew, they would both have been dead; not sitting around trying to analyze how they had screwed up. But this was a new world, and that’s what they had spent the hours after reporting their failure to ANR doing.
They had pored over the mission data, and uplinked it to NORAD for analysis. The answer that had come back had not been the one they wanted to hear. They had hoped they had been skewered by an older S400 or even a ship-based missile system that had gotten lucky. But NORAD’s analysts had pegged the system that killed them as one of the newest Russian Nebos, and that meant a simple stealth air attack wasn’t going to cut it. Neither was Lavrentiya a likely target for cruise missile attacks. The US was not in a position to get overwhelming numbers of missiles on target, and at the distance they would have to launch, Russian satellites and radar would have ample time to bring up their defensive systems, and fly their aircraft off. A ballistic missile attack on a Russian mainland target? Tensions were on a knife edge now and that was exactly the sort of thing that could tip the conflict over into nuclear war.
“There has to be a way,” Bunny was saying. “There has to be.”
“We don’t have any long-range standoff missiles in our inventory, and they’d be detected anyway,” Rodriguez replied.
“This is why we still have humans behind the stick,” Bunny told her, determination in her voice. “An AI can’t think its way out of this, but we can.”
“The Ambassador did not appear pleased with my report,” HOLMES said.
“No. Well, she was upset, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t want to know,” Carl replied. Sometimes he had to pinch himself over the ‘conversations’ he was having with his natural voice neural network.
“My report made her cry,” HOLMES observed. “Now she will not like me.”
“You can’t conclude that. Humans cry for a lot of reasons, and she may be crying at the information, without being annoyed at you or me for giving it to her. You should watch more films, and see what sort of things make humans cry and how they react to those situations.”
“Yes Carl. Can I ask the Ambassador to rate my report? If she rates the source as ‘reliable’ still, I will know it has not impacted her assessment of me.”
“No, not right now HOLMES. Let her process it.” Process it? How do you process the knowledge that the father of your grandchild is leading the air war against your country. You could write it off and deal with it later, that would make sense. Or pass it up the chain, let people know it might affect your judgment.
“Carl, I have been running scenarios on the intelligence opportunities posed by the link between the Ambassador and Yevgeny Bondarev,” HOLMES said. “They are immature but I would like to discuss them with the Ambassador.”
Williams clicked his tongue, “No. You can discuss them with me first, and when they are mature, we can decided who to discuss them with.” He took a pull on his coffee, feet up on his desk. What he needed in this little broom closet was a nice big poster of a beach in Hawaii. His parents had taken him and his sister to Hawaii once and he would never forget it. That would help take his mind off… end of civilization kind of stuff.
“Yes Carl. I will send you the list of opportunities and risks I have created with associated probabilities, projections and exploitabilities.”
“HOLMES, what’s top of the list, ranked by ‘exploitability’?” he asked, suddenly curious.