He moved back to the SBR control terminal, entered the command to reset the radar's circuitry. But the computer refused the input. "It won't take."
"You have to find out what component is out and power it down," Ann told him, "or else the SBR will keep short-circuiting. "
Saint-Michael scrolled through the error messages that had zipped across the screen. It seemed every single part of the SBR had been hit by a Russian missile. He switched his comm link to A/A. "Marty, can you see the station? What did he hit?"
"Stand by." Marty, who had stopped trying to detach the Russian bomb when the laser fired, boosted himself away from the keel, flipped upside down to get a better view and maneuvered over the station. "Try the number one SBR array."
Saint-Michael erased the error log and had just entered the code to deactivate the damaged SBR array when a thunderous explosion rocked the command module. "Fire on the keel," Marty shouted over the air-to-air frequency. "The master fuel cell's been hit."
Fire-warning lights blinked on all the surviving panels. Saint-Michael ignored them. "SBR's reset, Ann. Hurry up, we're going to run out of power any—"
As he said those words the main lights in the command module flickered out. A few battery-powered emergency lights snapped on, but they lit a corpse. Silver Tower was dead once again.
Litvyak's second Scimitar missile hit finally produced a spectacular result, even better than the collapsed radar antenna. The secondary explosions, fire and sparking on the keel from the missile hit on the fuel cell created a multicolored fireworks display for dozens of meters from the impact point, then began to creep along the keel toward the pressurized modules. The explosions fizzled out just a few meters away from the double column of modules in the center of the keel, but the end result was still satisfying to Colonel Litvyak: the few visible lights remaining on the station had all gone out. That last hit had finally killed the station.
It was dead, but not destroyed. Govorov had ordered the station destroyed. The Americans had already reactivated a "dead" hulk once; they might do it again. Litvyak swept his laser range-finder designator around the station and finally rested the red beam on the best and most obvious target of them alclass="underline" Govorov's unexploded bomb.
It was all about to end, right now. Litvyak selected his three remaining Bavinash missiles, locked the laser designator on the bomb. He squeezed the trigger. The three missiles fired straight and true with a solid lock-on—
And all three were caught in the intense free-electron laser beam that shot from the station. Skybolt had needed only a millisecond of the station's waning power to energize the laser's ignition circuitry, and once delivered — Skybolt's internal battery did the rest. Skybolt's beam vaporized the Scimitar missiles, and three one-millionths of a second later the beam traveled the remaining five miles to Elektron Three and turned the two-hundred-fifty-thousand-pound spacecraft and its pilot into a few milligrams of cosmic dust.
As Saint-Michael and Ann Page struggled into space suits, the first of the Soviet GL-25 cruise missiles were just a few dozen miles from the sea. Running undetected, they had navigated through the western rim of the Selseleh Ye Safid Mountains in western Afghanistan, down into the Margow Desert valley and along the Chagal Hills down the border between Iran and Pakistan. Now they were well within the Central Makran Range in southwest Pakistan, only minutes from the Gulf of Oman. Their inertially guided course had been well chosen by Soviet army planners to conceal the missiles in the most rugged terrain available and to keep them away from known surveillance sites or large population centers.
Each of the fifty GL-25 missiles had expended three-quarters of its fuel on only two-thirds of its journey, but the easier part of the flight was ahead of them. Once over the ocean the missiles would gradually step-climb to twenty thousand feet, where their ramjet engines would be more efficient. They would cruise at high altitude until within three hundred miles of the outermost escort ship of the Nimitz, then gradually descend back to fifty feet above the water. At approximately one hundred miles from the last known position of the Nimitz, their homing radars would activate…
And the devastation of the American fleet would begin…
CHAPTER 36
Without power, Silver Tower was little more than a fifty-billion-dollar orbiting mausoleum. Air could not circulate, module pressurization could not be maintained because of the leaks in the hull. Electronic carbon dioxide scrubbers were inoperable, and old-style lithium hydroxide carbon dioxide scrubber canisters were much less effective without air being circulated through them. The attitude thrusters that kept the station on a proper orbit were useless without computer control.
The station was suddenly deaf, dumb and blind. But days before, right after arriving back on Armstrong, Saint-Michael and his crew had prepared for another attack, and safeguarding backup power sources had been their first priority. They'd labeled their makeshift control panel the "planter box" because it had been constructed using one of the command module's green plant box. Saint-Michael didn't know whatever happened to the dirt. Even now it resembled a planter box, sprouting a dozen thick bundles of wires, some ending in round twist-lock junction caps or ribbon-cable snap connectors, and others looping back around through the box and out along cable conduits to other parts of the command module.
This was no computer terminal or sophisticated electronic relay center; the circuits were the wire bundles themselves. As for the switches, if a wire junction was plugged into another, the switch was "on." If it was unplugged, it was "off." They had labeled each wire bundle with descriptions of where the wires led and what they did. Saint-Michael anchored himself now to the Velcro deck and began unplugging, watching for the last connector to snap into place and the lights to flicker on in the command module.
He reached down to his spacesuit control panel and clicked on the stationwide interphone. "Ann, how do you copy?"
"I can hear you, Jason."
"Switch to air-to-air with me." He switched to A/A on the comm control. "Marty? How do you read?"
"Loud and clear, General. You missed a Fourth of July barn-burner out here. Those Russian spaceplanes sparkle when you hit 'em with the laser. You all done with your fireworks? Can I come back in to pick up my fares?"
"You can come back in but we're not leaving. It may be crazy, but we're going to try to reactivate the station again."
"One problem, General. That last Russian missile took out your master fuel cell. Where are you going to get the power? I'm pretty good but I can't figure out how to jump-start Silver Tower from Enterprise."
"What about the solar arrays? Can you see them out there? What's their status?"
"Stand by." A few moments later Marty came back on channel. "Looks bad, General. I can't even find half of the arrays. Three and four are still attached but they're collapsed against the keel. It would take an army of techs and a shuttle a week to repair them if it's possible."
Silence, then Ann clicked on channel. "Jason, I might have an answer… We still have a power source on this station bigger than all the fuel cells and solar arrays put together. I'm talking about the MHD reactor."
"You mean you can hook the reactor into the station power circuits?"
"Why not? Until Kevin Baker and I fixed it that's what it was doing all by itself. I can undo some of the fixes we did, reverse the power relays and send MHD power from Skybolt back through the ignition circuits to the station batteries. The battery transformers and overload protectors should be able to protect the batteries from overvoltage damage. All you have to do is route battery power from the emergency bus to the station main bus and we should be able to use the MHD reactor to charge the batteries."