“Wait a minute — Captain—”
Dan nodded to the chief master-at-arms, who with a grim-visaged Master Chief Tausengelt had been standing behind the White House staffer for the past few minutes. He didn’t know who’d called them, but it was time. “Mr. Ammermann, I’ll ask you to leave now. But stay inside the skin of the ship. And don’t try to interfere again.”
“You can’t — you can’t just … just sacrifice us. This is insane. You have to—”
“Take him out, Sid,” Dan told Tausengelt. The old machinist’s oversized hands closed on the staffer’s shoulders. Ammermann’s face went white, and he gave a grunting squeak.
The chiefs hauled him to his feet and led him away. Dan squinted after them, then back at Staurulakis. “Cher? I gave an order.”
Her face seemed to waver, and finally, set. “Got it. — Shift fire gate selection. Launchers into operate mode. Set up to take Meteor Bravo, one-round salvo. Next salvo, Meteor Charlie, also one-round salvo. Salvo warning alarm forward. Deselect all safeties and interlocks. Stand by to fire. On CO’s command.”
Her fingers raced; he leaned in his seat, body-Englishing Savo into the turn as she heeled harder, bringing her bow on to the incoming payload. Making herself as small as possible, like a dueler turning sideways to his opponent’s pistol.
Time slowed. He lifted his head, attention flicking from screen to screen, which seemed to strobe more and more slowly. A camera picture shutter-flicked past; the black sea, gleaming as it heaved; the drive of snow sideways like a white wall. Cold outside. Air-conditioned cold within.
And bearing down on them, burning down through the thickening air at a heat far beyond what even steel could stand, a weapon that would in seconds begin searching for its prey. If it got through, they could all die. If it hit the VLS. Or the gun magazines. They had a little steel and Kevlar around them, here in the command spaces. The magazines, a few inches of hardened armor plate. But neither would stop a projectile arriving at three miles a second. The thing wouldn’t even need an explosive charge. Like an antitank round, its velocity alone would be enough to drill through whatever it hit. If it was a heavy pyrophoric, like depleted uranium, it would spread flame and toxic smoke wherever it penetrated.
Not looking at what his hand was doing, Dan flicked up the red metal cover over the Fire Auth switch. Deep in its silicon blades of reason and memory, ALIS was computing the parameters that ensured the highest probability of kill. When he clicked the switch to Fire, the computers would fire at the instant P-sub-K peaked. At his elbow Staurulakis typed away, entering her own command in case the switch failed. A microsecond’s hesitation; then she clicked again, and the rightmost screen switched.
“Duckies deployed,” someone called behind him. “Standing by on chaff.”
The launchers would mortar out a dozen rounds at once, spaced to burst to both sides of, ahead of, and behind the ship, littering the sky with millions of tiny radar dipoles. They also carried pyrotechnics that burned fiercely in the same infrared spectra as the ship’s exhausts. But they didn’t burn long, and the dipoles needed time to bloom. They’d have to fire the chaff no more than twenty seconds before the enemy homer arrived.
Which meant … now. “Stand by on chaff. Pass that to Red Hawk, too, on chaff and flares. Stand by—”
“Terminal body separation,” Terranova called.
Dan jerked his gaze up. Blinked at the screen, unable to make sense of the blurring, vibrating images. Instead of a single radar return, grotesquely swollen with the ionization plume, the screen now showed two. As he blinked again the larger one subdivided. Now three blips pulsed, two brightening and dimming like pulsars, but unsynchronized; one strobed twice as fast as the other.
“Meteor Alfa’s breaking up,” Wenck called.
Dan pitched his voice across CIC. “Noblos! Is that a breakup, or just the warhead detaching from a second stage?”
The PhD’s voice came hesitantly, then gathered force. “I don’t read that as a warhead or a — or a decoy. See that brightening and dimming? That’s something tumbling over and over. Varying the cross section from our viewing angle. There — see — it’s disintegrating.”
“Ionization bloom,” called Terranova.
The rightmost screen jerked and zoomed back as more and more numerous fragments, each surrounded by a comet-halo and streaking trail of radar-reflecting gas, drew apart from one another. Now five or six, seven, were pulsing, each at its own rate, tumbling over and over as they fragmented under the g-forces of hypersonic reentry.
Meteor Alfa was burning up. “Whatever they cobbled together, it didn’t hold,” Cheryl murmured beside him. “Came apart in reentry.”
“Okay. A lucky break. Ready to kill Bravo now?”
The keyboard clicked; the brackets snapped into place around the second incomer. “Ready to fire on Meteor Bravo. One-round engagement. Followed by Meteor Charlie, also a one-round engagement.”
“Kill them both,” Dan said. He waited until he was sure the brackets changed color — he absolutely didn’t want to fire on any of the still-incoming debris — and flicked up the switch cover.
A long, heart-stopping pause, during which the toxic vent dampers clunked shut. The recirc ventilation wound down, and the steady rush of cold air ceased.
He was just starting to think Is it going to—when the roar came through the deckplates, the stringers, the hull, and the falling snow glared bright white in the camera display.
“Bird one away … Bird two away.”
On the center screen two small bright symbols left the own-ship circle-and-cross. They blinked into blue semicircles rapidly moving east. Dan eased a breath out, then pulled his mind back from the departing missiles and swept it out and around. “Cher, inform Higher we fired on two TBMs, launched from western Iraq with predicted points of impact within our defended area. That exhausts currently available inventory of Block 4s, but we’re working to bring the second pair back online.”
“The missile targeted on us? Mention that, too?”
“Sure. It’s a new capability, but obviously not quite operational yet. Too bad we didn’t get to see if the decoys worked on it.” He caught her wide-eyed glance and grinned. Keeping his palms flat, so she couldn’t see how shaky he was himself. “Just joking. Okay, let’s get around headed north, get back into our area. Fuel state on Red Hawk?”
“Half hour to bingo fuel, Captain.”
“EW: Any change on those threat emitters?”
“No change, Captain.… Stand by one.… Ku-band from Patriot. Patriot going active?… Lost track, freq shifting too fast to follow.”
He keyed combat systems maintenance central, but got no joy from the report on the after VLS. Savo rolled through the night, powerless against another attack. Surely these weren’t the only missiles the enemy had. But he too might be keeping something in reserve. A bargaining chip.
On the center screen the bright symbols of the outgoing missiles were still clicking east. The first was already almost to the red caret of the first reentering body. A chill trickled through him; the hairs erected at the back of his neck. But for that moment, in his mind, there existed only the digital world. Reflecting the universe not as it existed, nor as human beings knew it, but as machines alone perceived it: sheared of all meaning and all value. Only atoms, and the void.
“Stand by for intercept … stand by … now,” called Singhe, from her hover behind Terranova.
The callouts merged. Then the red brackets jerked, slewing crazily off Meteor Bravo into space. They hunted back and forth for a second or two before finding it again and locking on once more.