At Mach 22, traveling 350 miles—the distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles—takes just under a minute and a half.
The Orbital ran through protocols, checking the decision tree for responses. As it did, it picked up another inbound threat.
Military engineers built the NFIRE satellite to do two things. The first was the difficult task of tracking intercontinental ballistic missiles. The second was even more complex—shooting those missiles out of the sky.
The NFIRE orbited at an altitude of 240 miles. It targeted an ICBM’s apex, typically about sixty miles above the Earth. The part of the NFIRE that actually shot down an ICBM was known as a kill vehicle, a small missile that got close to a target, then launched a high-speed spray of dense shrapnel. In basic terms, the kill vehicle was a high-tech, $560 million exoatmospheric hand grenade.
Certain senators, however, objected to putting a kill vehicle in the NFIRE. Such an act would open up a new arms race, they said. It would begin the “weaponization of space,” and that was something the world could do without.
Defenders of the project said Congress was a bunch of myopic, tree-hugging hippies who deserved to die the radioactive death they would surely bring upon all freedom-loving Americans. The defenders said that only to themselves, of course. What they said publicly was that the kill vehicle had a range of only four miles, a minuscule distance compared to the vast ranges of space, so the kill vehicle could really only be used to shoot down a rocket aimed directly at the NFIRE. It was strictly for self-defense, and how could that be a bad thing?
Congress didn’t care. Senators insisted the kill vehicle would cross a line. So to secure funding, NASA and MDA (the Missile Defense Agency) had agreed to remove the kill vehicle and instead include a laser communications terminal, also known as an LCT.
The thing was, military engineers are pretty sharp cats, and they quietly figured out how to fit both the kill vehicle and the LCT into the NFIRE. So Congress, and the public, was told that the NFIRE did not include the kill vehicle.
That was the first lie.
The second lie was the four-mile killing range. Of the two whoppers, this might have been the big one because the NFIRE’s killing range was actually thousands of miles. Thanks to triangulation data piped up from NASA, the NFIRE could both target and hit the Orbital.
Exactly ten seconds after P. J. Lindeman released his ASM-157, the NFIRE launched its kill vehicle.
Primary threat: the missile launched from the Mach 10 jet. The Orbital tracked the missile’s trajectory, then fired a supersonic stream of pellets made from an iridium alloy. The pellets spread out like a tight cloud, a cloud traveling at several thousand miles per hour. Air friction melted the pellets. By the time they intersected the missile’s path, they were globs of dense, molten metal that tore through the ASM-157 like twelve-gauge shot through rice paper. The missile shattered into dozens of useless pieces.
The Orbital switched its targeting solution to the NFIRE kill vehicle. As it did, temperature sensors suddenly registered a spot on its beer-keg-size surface that almost instantly shot from normal to five hundred degrees, then a thousand, and kept climbing….
Four hours earlier a heavily modified Boeing 747-400F cargo plane had taken off from Edwards Air Force Base in California. The flight plan called for a normal trip from Edwards to Langley Air Force Base near Hampton, Virginia. Unlike the HTV-6Xb, this 747 flew at normal speeds. It attracted exactly zero attention from the Orbital. Just another big cargo jet, just another cross-country flight.
This particular 747, known as the YAL-1, carried the YAL-1A airborne laser. The YAL-1A was designed to shoot down incoming missiles, including nuclear-tipped ICBMs or any other kind of ballistic missile. This chemical oxygen iodine laser, or COIL, could also theoretically be used against hostile bombers, fighters, cruise missiles—or even against low-Earth-orbit satellites.
Thirty seconds before P. J. Lindeman released his antisatellite missile, the crew of the YAL-1 had activated the COIL by combining chlorine gas, hydrogen peroxide and potassium hydroxide to create highly energetic oxygen molecules. Pressurized nitrogen then pushed the oxygen molecules through a mist of iodine, transferring the oxygen’s energy to the iodine molecules. These fired-up iodine molecules shed the excess energy in the form of intense light.
Intense light that created an infrared laser.
This light bounced between mirrors, forcing more iodine molecules to give up their energy as photons, further increasing the laser beam’s intensity. From there the beam traveled into a chamber where mirrors instantly adjusted to compensate for movement of the airplane and for atmospheric conditions. Finally the beam moved into a swiveling pod on the YAL-1’s nose. The pod focused the laser to hit the Orbital as a tiny, concentrated pinpoint of immense energy.
Within three seconds a spot on the Orbital’s hull superheated to almost three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The Orbital abandoned all calculations and just moved, gaining altitude as it shot due north. At fifty miles above the surface, the YAL-1A beam tracked on-target again, this time hitting a different spot on the Orbital’s hull. A four-second cat-and-mouse game ensued as the Orbital changed headings five times and climbed to an altitude of sixty miles. After each turn the YAL-1A’s targeting system instantly compensated and reacquired, but only for a second each time, and always in a different spot as the Orbital rotated to mitigate heat buildup.
The NFIRE satellite’s kill vehicle tracked the Orbital’s evasive action. With a nice three-thousand-degree hot spot on its hull, the Orbital could bend all the light it wanted and still stand out plain as day to an infra red sensor. The kill vehicle marked the Orbital’s sudden acceleration and climb, course-corrected, then detonated a warhead that released an expanding cloud of shrapnel traveling at thirty-three thousand feet per second.
The Orbital was still accelerating when the kill vehicle landed the technological equivalent of a money shot.
Dozens of depleted uranium ball bearings punched through the Orbital, shredding its fragile interior, including the computer system that had caused humanity so much trouble. The multiple impacts instantly rendered the Orbital inoperative. The YAL-1A laser reacquired and started heating up another hot spot, but the Orbital performed no further evasive maneuvers.
The Orbital’s desperate actions had taken it out well over Lake Michigan. Cracked and shattered, a hollowed-out husk, the Orbital started to descend. As it reached terminal velocity, the surface heated to over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Air friction dug at the cracks, ripping free small bits and pieces of the once-pristine hull.
It didn’t melt. While a few pieces trailed behind, there was no comet-like flame trail. The Orbital just fell.
Three hundred pounds of broken machine hit the surface of Lake Michigan at well over two thousand miles an hour.
It made a pretty big splash.
The impact shattered what was left of the Orbital, breaking it into hundreds of pieces that spread and sank and sizzled as the water rapidly cooled them off.
The Orbital was truly dead.
Not that it had ever really been alive.
Perry stopped drinking in mid-sip.
The grayness vanished.
For the first time since his triangles had started talking to him months before, his brain felt… clear.
He was so focused on this new sensation, or rather the absence of a sensation, that he didn’t notice the beer spilling out the corner of his mouth and down his chin.