Patrick shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Mr. President. Given the trajectory the spaceplane is on, their emergency backpack thrusters can’t possibly boost the crew back into a stable orbit. They don’t have the power or fuel required to do the job. And even if they could, by the time we can sortie another S-plane and achieve rendezvous, Brad and Boomer would already be out of oxygen.”
Farrell stared at him in honest bewilderment. “Then how—?” he began. Quickly, Patrick gave him a rundown on the Emergency Return from Orbit gear now carried by every Sky Masters spaceplane. When he finished, Farrell let out a low whistle. “Hell, General, that’s like betting your whole stake without seeing a single goddamned card.”
“It’s not quite that bad,” Martindale said evenly. “While I admit that no one has ever used the ERO system in real life, we have run a substantial number of computer simulations to pin down the odds of a successful reentry.”
Farrell looked straight at him. “Which are?”
“Somewhere around fifty percent,” Martindale admitted. “If everything goes perfectly.”
Patrick’s computer pinged again. He grabbed for it eagerly, read the new message, and looked up with the faint beginnings of a smile. “Brad and Boomer both made it out of the S-19 alive! That satellite spotted both contacts outside the spaceplane executing controlled burns… with a five-minute separation between the first and the second.”
He tapped quickly on the tiny screen, sending a short text message. Seeing Martindale and Farrell’s quizzical looks, he explained. “I’ve ordered Battle Mountain to send us estimates of the crew’s probable landing zones. Between what we know about their known angles of descent, velocity, and the reported atmospheric conditions along their reentry tracks, our computers should be able to narrow those down pretty well.”
Less than a minute later, Battle Mountain’s updated estimates blinked onto the Situation Room’s main screen. Red ovals centered on the most probable landing sites for each ERO were displayed on a large digital map of Asia and the Pacific. For a long moment, the three men stared at the map in horrified silence.
Recovering fast, Farrell grabbed the secure phone next to him. “Get me the commander of the Pacific Fleet,” he snapped. “And then patch me through to the Japanese prime minister!”
Leonov waited patiently for Gennadiy Gryzlov to run through the telescopic imagery collected during Mars One’s first engagement yet another time. They were dramatic, he admitted to himself… more so than he would have predicted. Military-power laser beams, despite the way they were often depicted in films and popular entertainment, were not visible — especially in space. But their devastating effect on targets, especially small targets like the stealth mines or missiles the Americans had launched, was undeniable. Short Hobnail laser bursts had torn them into clouds of glowing superheated debris. The resulting plasma bloom had the additional benefit of nudging those debris clouds safely away from the space station. Eventually, they would drop out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.
The most incredible footage, though, showed the American spaceplane just as it was struck by Thunderbolt’s plasma toroid. It disappeared momentarily in a dazzling flash… and when it reappeared the S-19 was already tumbling wildly away through space, obviously completely out of control.
“Beautiful,” Gryzlov murmured. “Absolutely beautiful.” On the secure video link from his Kremlin office, he looked up at Leonov with a cruel, wolfish smile. “Now that was a successful demonstration of Mars One’s firepower, Mikhail. By now, the Americans must be shitting in their pants with fear.”
Leonov nodded in agreement. While he would have preferred not to reveal the space station’s armament so soon, the wholly one-sided battle ought to deter further American attacks for a time — with luck long enough for them to launch Mars One’s replacement fusion reactor into orbit and bring it online.
“It seems we have been far too cautious,” Gryzlov said, still smiling. “We worried too much about what the Americans could do to our space station before it was fully operational. But now we see the truth. They are impotent. With our new weapons, Mars One is safe from anything the Americans can throw at it.”
“Nothing made by man is invulnerable,” Leonov cautioned. “Without power from a reactor, Strelkov’s defenses might still be overwhelmed by a sufficiently large attack.”
Gryzlov dismissed his warning with a wave of his hand. “You sound like an old hen, Mikhail. Cluck, cluck, cluck.”
“But, sir—”
“Enough.” Gryzlov slapped his hand down on his desk. “I will no longer take counsel from your fears. It’s time to move ahead with the next phase of the Mars Project. You will direct Colonel Strelkov to open offensive operations at once!”
Leonov set his jaw stubbornly. “Such a move would be premature. The scientists and engineers at Akademgorodok are very close to finishing their work on the replacement fusion reactor module. Even so, it will take several more days to transport the reactor to Vostochny and mate it with the Energia-5VR rocket that will carry it into space.” He spread his hands. “True, we’ve won the opening skirmish. But that does not change the basic facts: right now the combat readiness of Mars One’s weapons and sensors is still very limited. Opening full-scale military operations in space remains unnecessarily risky.”
Gryzlov snorted. “How can you be so blind, Leonov? I thought you were a strategist.” He shook his head in reproof. “The station’s potential weaknesses are precisely why we should push ahead fast. Why give the Americans time to analyze their defeat and come up with some new plan to use against us? Now that they know we’ve deployed a military outpost in Earth orbit, it’s more vital than ever to knock them off balance and blind them!”
He leaned closer to the camera. “My new orders stand, Colonel General Leonov. You will hit your targets as originally planned,” he said fiercely. “You will not allow our enemies to regain their footing.”
Twenty-Five
Nearly six hundred nautical miles due east of Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s main islands, a scorched and seared ERO shell bobbed up and down — rising and falling as it crested waves rolling ever onward toward distant shores. Some yards off, its large red-and-white parachute, now cut loose and already waterlogged, drifted slowly away on the current.
Clumsily, a tall, lanky man wearing a space suit wriggled his head and shoulders out through the opening left by the detached parachute. Still shaken up by the rough, high-G ride through the atmosphere and hard splashdown, he cracked open the visor of his helmet and dragged in a few shuddering breaths of fresh air. The wind shifted slightly, bringing with it the acrid, charred smell of Nomex cloth and polyimide-based aerogels. Gagging, he leaned over the edge of the shell and vomited into the choppy sea.
“Geez, Hunter, stick to the kiddie rides from now on,” Boomer muttered to himself. He coughed, winced at the taste in his mouth, and threw up again. “Leave the roller coasters to the grown-ups.”
For several minutes, he lay half folded up across the rocking ERO shell — feeling drained, sick to his stomach, and yet amazed and grateful to be alive. By rights, he should be dead, killed by any one of a thousand things that could have gone wrong during his wild ride down from orbit. Whenever a larger wave slapped into the half-submerged shell, the impact sent pain shooting through every part of his body. All his muscles and joints ached. He felt like he’d just run a marathon… while spectators bashed him with clubs and baseball bats. Considered rationally, he figured that wasn’t too surprising, since he’d probably pulled around seven and maybe even eight Gs during some parts of the descent.