The six missiles under the central keel were not affected by the command; only the two missiles that Marty had manually armed responded. The Elektron spaceplanes were less than three miles away when the Thor missile's rocket engines ignited. Marty stayed long enough to watch both Thors shoot into space toward the Russian spaceplanes, then made his way back to the cockpit and strapped into the commander's seat.
Time to take off, babe. He reactivated the digital autopilot and RCS thruster controls. If those missiles didn't hit their targets, he knew there were two Russians who were going to come at him with everything they had.
They had indeed agreed between themselves who would take the first shot on the American shuttle Enterprise: Colonel Kozhedub in Elektron Two had the honors. Colonel Litvyak, who had put the Scimitar missile into America's fuel tanks, kept his laser seeker-range finder activated but caged it to scan directly ahead of Elektron Three. If he had illuminated Enterprise with his laser, Kozhedub's missile might try to slide across to the second beam and miss the target, or the two lasers could interphase and cancel each other out.
"It's moving away," Kozhedub called out as the shuttle slowly rotated on its longitudinal axis and sped away at right angles to the Elektron's line of flight.
"Can you follow him?" Litvyak said.
"I can—"
Kozhedub told him no thanks, he could get this one just fine.
Litvyak started to say something but a glance at his front instrument panel stopped the words in his throat. Directly centered in his laser spotting-scope screen was a Thor missile unfurling its steel mesh snare! "Watch out. The shuttle has just launched missiles. Litvyak yanked on his control column, trying to translate directly to the right and dodge the missile. It tracked toward him. He switched thrusters again and moved downward at full power, changing directions so hard that his helmet cracked against the cockpit canopy. No change. The Thor missile was still following him, looming larger and larger…
The missile was less than a mile away when Litvyak, in the last-ditch effort, fired three Scimitar missiles at the large cylindrical interceptor. The first two missiles exploded harmlessly on the mesh, but the third impacted directly on the sensor nose of the missile and detonated the Thor's high-explosive warhead.
No sound, but the wall of heat and energy that washed over Elektron Three pounded on the small spacecraft. It went out of control, and Litvyak had no choice but to release his thruster controls and ride out the turbulence, hoping it didn't tear his ship apart. It took a few minutes, but soon the awful vibration and pounding on his spacecraft's hull began to subside.
Kozhedub was not so fortunate. With his laser designator locked onto the Enterprise and watching as intently as he was for the perfect firing aspect, he never saw the second Thor missile. Just as Litvyak shouted out his warning the missile hit Elektron Two's right wingtip and detonated right on top of the canopy. Kozhedub died instantly, and a moment later his Elektron exploded, spinning off into earth's atmosphere.
Litvyak, hearing his comrade's dying noises echo in his helmet, knew he could plunge into earth's atmosphere as well if he failed to bring his spaceplane under control. Using short thruster bursts and concentrating on the gyroscopic inertial horizon, he finally managed to reduce the violent multi-axis spin down to one recognizable spin axis, then gradually applied more powerful bursts until his plane was under control.
He scanned the dark gray skies around him until he spotted the shuttle beginning to accelerate back in the direction of the space station. Stabbing the thruster controls, he applied full power and took up the chase, this time drawn by a need for revenge…
"Jason, this is Clancy. Come in. We've lost the SBR signals."
No reply. "Get them back, Sparks," Clancy said to the communications officer. "Whatever it takes."
The CPO tried hard but there was no change. "It's dead silent, sir. No carrier, no data, nothing. It's as if they—"
Clancy looked at the CPO. "Don't say it, Sparks. Don't even think it."
But the unthinkable was unavoidable, for the admiral as well as the chief petty officer: another disaster had just happened on Silver Tower.
"Ann? How's it?"
"It's ready, Jason. Ready to switch SBR to Skybolt control…"
Saint-Michael took a deep breath, put a finger on the SBR switchover controls. He pressed the button. The SBR immediately issued a solid TRACK indication on Ann's console.
"SBR is tracking targets," Ann announced. "Now showing two hostiles. Friendly identification complete… Target discrimination in progress… Neutral particle-beam laser projector showing faulted." The neutral particle beam used to discriminate between decoys and real targets had been shot off long ago.
"Override."
He searched the SBR command menu, found the command and entered it. "Done."
"Override accepted."
Now what?
Marty Schultz could feel the presence of an enemy behind him even before he visually confirmed it. "One got away," he said out loud, to himself, to his shuttle. "We're in deep shit now, babe." Think multidimensional, he told himself, then selected ROTATE and PULSE on the digital autopilot and jammed the control stick forward. Without the forward RCS pod the motion was a tail-over-heels flip, done by the aft RCS thruster so that the cargo bay was now facing in the direction of flight. He ignited the engines once again, which put Enterprise in a dive straight for earth…
At that instant a flash of glaring light washed out his vision. The control stick felt warm, then hot, then rubbery in his hand, even through the thick nylon gloves. Warning tones, like confused cries for help from Enterprise, beeped over his headset.
Colonel Litvyak aboard Elektron Three felt the blast of heat as well, but for him it was not just a slight glare — it was a throbbing, blinding sheet of light that seemed to illuminate each crevice of his spaceplane's cockpit. His eyelids, then his solar visor when he could finally command his muscles to lower it, had no effect.
When his eyes cleared a few moments later he stopped all thrusters and did a quick systems check. A few minor ones had faulted but they all reset. His lips were dry as sand, as though he hadn't taken a drink in days. The skin on his face seemed dry and cracked as if from a bad windburn. No use flying around half-blind… He used a few short bursts of power to stop his forward momentum and keyed his microphone. "Elektron One, this is Three. Do you copy?"
Govorov was only a few hundred meters away from the Skybolt module when his skin seemed to crawl and feel dusty. He did not feel any of the searing heat felt by the other two spacecraft near the path of the free-electron laser beam, but the side lobes of energy that coiled out of the muzzle of the nuclear-powered laser stream did seem to turn his Elektron One into a huge transistor. The pulse of energy coursing through his body made stars appear before his eyes, and his fingertips tingled and burned as if about to catch fire.
As the unearthly sensation subsided and he began to think more clearly, he realized what had happened. Someone aboard the station had just fired a powerful laser. Armstrong hadn't been abandoned after all…
"Elektron One. Come in."
Govorov keyed his microphone. "Litvyak? Where are you?"