Rocket Dawn Page 3

  Then a new noise entered the sonic duel, the thunder of an F-22 racing towards them, swinging down towards the helicopter with missiles at the ready. The pilot didn’t waste any time, unleashing his wing-mounted missiles at the enemy craft. The helicopter dived away, no longer interested in slaughtering Knox, now only fighting desperately for survival, but the battle was unequal. They never had a chance. For a second, a blinding light shone over the mountain, the two missiles tearing the helicopter apart in a tissue of smoldering flame, debris raining down all around them.

  The pilot dipped his wings in salute before racing away, returning to base, and Knox stepped into the fiery devastation to see what might remain, picking his way through the destruction to reach the threshold of the observatory, the once-gleaming walls now burned and blackened, pock-marked with a thousand bullet holes where the machine gun had torn into the concrete. Lying on the ground was Schneider, her eyes glazed over, mouth open wide, her back riddled with bullet wounds.

  As Antonova walked over, Knox heard a groan, and knelt down to the corpses to see Dixon, somehow, unbelievably, still alive, an expertly positioned bandage over his chest wound. He was covered in blood, most of it from Schneider’s corpse. She’d thrown herself over the wounded man, using her last act to shield him from the bullets.

  “She must have known she didn’t have a chance,” Antonova said, shaking her head.

  “And at the last second, she gave her life to try and save his.” With a sigh, he reached into his pocket, and said, “Knox to Cooper. Do you read?”

  “I read,” Cooper replied. “I’m on the way with a full security team. We’ll be on the ground in ninety minutes. Medevac will be with you in twenty.”

  “One patient, in serious condition, a chest wound. He’s got a chance if they know what they’re doing, and they give him a fast ride to the hospital. Only two survivors, Katerina Antonova and myself.” He glanced at Antonova, and added, “Neither of us is wounded. Who were those bastards?”

  “I don’t know, Colonel, but we’re damned well going to find out. See you later. Out.”

  “What now?” Antonova asked.

  “I’ll see to the boy,” Knox replied. “You see to the data. Someone went to a hell of a lot of trouble to try and stop us from gathering information about our new moon. I want to know just what was valuable enough to justify the lives of half a dozen people.”

  Chapter 3

  Knox was talking on the radio as Cooper walked into the observatory, flanked by a pair of armed guards on either side. Others were setting up a defensive perimeter, preparing to resist any new assault, but he couldn’t help but think that all of their precautions were being implemented too late to do any good. Too late to save the lives that had been lost. Too late for Schneider and Malone.

  “Any news from Dixon?” Cooper asked.

  Putting down the handset, Knox said, “That was the medical team now. He made it to the hospital in one piece. Critical but stable. I think he’s got a chance, though I’m not sure how good it us.” Shaking his head, he said, “This is one hell of a mess, General. Did the photographs I send you yield anything?”

  “The helicopter was an old Army Lakota, sold off about five years ago to a local mining company. One of our investigators chased it up, and apparently the company went bankrupt last month, all its assets sold at auction. The helicopter was bought by a private individual. Adam Hudson. All the permits and licenses checked out. Whomever he actually was, it seems likely that he put a lot of time and effort into his cover story. ABI raided his house half an hour ago and found a stash of NQLF literature. We’ve also checked up on Gibson, and there are some interesting irregularities with his bank accounts. We think he was funneling money to the group.”

  “What the hell do the Quebec Nationalists have to do with this?”

  “I doubt very much if they were involved themselves, but we know that they’ve been getting help from rogue elements in the DGSE.”

  “French military intelligence. Which means EuroFed.” Shaking his head, Knox asked, “I wonder if any of them knew just what they were actually working for?”

  “Probably not. Best guess they were just given orders and followed them out, though there’s some evidence that Gibson might have been working more directly with the French. His wife fled, took a flight out of Anchorage last night, landing in Tokyo. We’re talking to the Japanese authorities, but she’s probably already moved on. Best guess is that we’re never going to see her again. Naturally, we’ll keep looking. It would have helped if we’d had something more to work with…”

  “They went out of their way to make sure we didn’t get any prisoners, General. I suppose that was all a part of the plan. No witnesses. If they’d got what they wanted, you’d have found nothing other than a collection of corpses and a burned-out observatory. It would have set us back for days.” With a sigh, he said, “We’re damned close to that as it is. Certainly we’ve got to assume that our little secret is out…”

  “But we don’t know how far,” Cooper replied. Walking over to the monitor terminals, she said, “Major, have you come up with anything yet? Anything at all? I’ve got a team of Space Force astronomers on the way to help…”

  “I don’t think that’s going to be necessary,” Antonova replied. “And it’s Doctor, not Major. It hasn’t been Major for a long time.” Turning to Knox, she asked, “Who is this?”

  “Doctor, may I introduce Major-General Sandra Cooper, head of the Space Force Experimentation Directorate, and incidentally, my commanding officer. As well as an astronaut, back when Shuttle was still flying.”

  Glaring at him, Cooper replied, “Not quite as vintage as that. I had the misfortune of being crew commander on this renegade’s first spaceflight. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Doctor, though I naturally regret the circumstances.”

  She reached for a keyboard, entering in a series of instructions, bringing up the last image taken by the telescope before the battle and throwing it to maximum magnification. “We’ve got all the information we need to firm up the orbital plot, and I can confirm that it’s going into orbit. For just under fourteen months, a little longer than I thought. We’ll need another day or two before we can give you a more precise estimate than that.”

  “We’ll get on it right away,” Cooper began.

  “What is far more interesting, at least for me, are the objects orbiting it,” Antonova interrupted. “That’s what Colonel Knox told me to look at, and we’ve found something extremely interesting. There are twenty-two objects large enough to track, and twenty-one of them are just small chunks of rock, probably captured at some point during a close encounter with another asteroid. The other is artificial.”

  Cooper took a step back, and asked, “Did I just hear you correctly?”

  “You heard me right. As far as I can determine with the admittedly poor-resolution image I was able to get, this asteroid, this new moon, is orbited by a Russian Blok-D booster. Of what appears to be an old design, dating back to the days of the Soviet Union.”

  “That just isn’t possible,” Knox said, eyes wide. “There’s no record of any Soviet mission to an asteroid.”

  “Nevertheless, Colonel, the booster is there, and as far as I can tell, it has been there for a very long time. I think I managed to find the explanation when I extrapolated its course back, worked out its trajectory. This isn’t the first time the asteroid has entered Earth orbit. For all I know, it’s come and gone a million times, but it was here sixty-five years ago, in 1968, for at least nine months. There’s nothing in the records I have access to about it…”

  “Hardly surprising,” Cooper said. “Back then we didn’t have the equipment to really take a good look at objects like that, even when they came close. Though I find it hard to believe that it managed to slip through the net entirely…”

  “Evidently it didn’t,” Knox replied. “It might not have been picked up by us, but obviously the Soviets were either smarter or luckier. Or both. They managed
to get a mission up there, all those years ago.”

  “I still don’t buy it,” Cooper said, shaking her head. “We’d have known about it. They’d have made new secret of it, surely. A mission of that scope would have been a propaganda triumph at the time.”

  “Not necessarily,” Knox replied. “There were a lot of things they covered up, anything that went wrong. The Nedelin incident, for example. It’s well within the realms of possibility that we’re looking at some sort of mission that went unreported.” He frowned, then added, “Though surely there would be a record of an unexplained launch, something that seemed to be off the radar. There’d be a record somewhere.”

  “Let’s find out,” Cooper replied, reaching into her pocket for a phone and scrawling a message on the display. “CIA should have something, and so should NASA. I just sent them a priority request.” She turned to Knox, and asked, “Now for the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Is this asteroid suitable? Is it going to serve the role we need it to play?” She paused, then asked, “Fundamentally, can we move it in the time?”

  “CosmoTech has the hardware, and the orbital velocity is pretty good. Subject to further analysis, I think we ought to be able to pull it off. Tricky, but possible. It’s going to cost, ma’am.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Not yet, anyway.” She turned to Antonova, and said, “It might surprise you to know, Major, that you now have a surprisingly high security clearance. We were planning on bringing you into the loop on this anyway, as soon as the preliminary research was completed.”

  “I told you, General, I hold no military rank.”

  “Wrong again.” Cooper reached into her pocket, pulling out a piece of paper, and said, “Sign that.”

  “I don’t sign anything until I’ve checked with a lawyer.”

  “You’ll have a hell of a long time to contemplate that document if you don’t.” She placed it on the table, and said, “That’s your commission in the Space Force. With the rank of Major, naturally. Your adopted country needs you, and I’m afraid we can’t afford to take ‘no’ for an answer.” Tapping the paper, she added, “You get three years of seniority, will be eligible for either promotion or discharge once this operation is completed. To be blunt, Major, you know far too much for us to be able to keep you out of the loop.”

  She looked at the paper, then said, “I get to leave when I want.”

  “With three years of back pay, benefits, and a recommendation to any academic institute or space-based company in the country that will pretty much guarantee employment.”

  With a grimace, she snatched a pen from her pocket, and scrawled her signature, adding, “I guess I don’t have a lot of choice, do I.”

  “Realistically, no,” Cooper said. “Though if it helps, you’ll be working with Tom here for the next week or so.”

  Folding her arms together, Antonova replied, “Now that I’ve joined your little club, perhaps you would be good enough to tell me just what all of this is about.”

  “When you were in the Russian Air Force, you did some work on military communications satellites,” Knox said. Before she could reply, he raised his hand, and added, “I don’t plan on talking about specifics, I just want your opinion on something. What is the biggest problem with our current military satellite network, in general?”

  “Vulnerability, of course. Any one of a dozen countries can shoot down a satellite at will. As you found out to your cost in Venezuela, as I remember. That number’s only going to go up as time goes on.”

  “Actually,” Cooper said, “the current roster stands at seventeen. Confirmed. With another eight probable and several others that could easily develop the capability if they want it, possibly in a very short time. Our military is totally dependent on satellite-based capabilities.”

  “Hell, that’s why they formed the Space Force in the first place,” Knox added with a wry smile. “We’ve been working on Operation Daedalus for years, but only as a theoretical concept.”

  “Operation Daedalus?”

  “We spent years trying to work out ways to better protect our satellite infrastructure, before we finally came up with the obvious solution. Move an asteroid into geostationary orbit over the United States, and dig everything we need in deep, far down enough that it would be damned near impossible to wipe out. If someone down here is sitting on a missile that can knock a million tons of iron out of the sky, we’ve had it anyway.”

  Antonova looked at the two of them, and said, “You have to be crazy.”

  “Perhaps, but the science is fine. There’s no reason why it won’t work. We’ve been quietly backing a couple of the asteroid mining companies for years to develop the hardware needed to bring this project to fruition, but we’d estimated that we were at least a decade away from the capability to bring an asteroid of the size we’d need into orbit. Now we’ve got just the right sort of rock, and Isaac Newton has already done most of the hard work for us.”

  Nodding, Cooper added, “You can imagine the other spin-offs, as well. There’s bound to be ice up there, and that means a refueling station in geostationary orbit. To say nothing of the other mining possibilities. It’s just what we need to really kick the orbital industries into high gear. Of course, you can bet that the other major spacefaring nations would want a piece of the action as well. China, EuroFed, at least. India, Brazil, Britain, Japan. The list goes on, as long as you want. Some of them we might cut in. Others we need to keep out.”

  “That’s why this became a matter of national security,” Knox said. “We needed time to prepare.”

  “Prepare for what, exactly?” Antonova asked.

  “Naturally, it’s critical that we get to the asteroid first, before any other spacefaring nation can make any sort of a claim.” Knox looked at Cooper, and said, “Ma’am, if there was a Soviet mission back in the sixties…”

  Nodding, Cooper added, “That could significantly complicate matters.”

  “Wait a minute,” Antonova said. “You’re talking about a mission to that asteroid. A manned mission.”

  “Why not? A mission like that’s been on and off NASA’s books for thirty years. It’s about time that we dusted them off and got going. We’re going to need a lot of geological data if we’re going to pull this off, and that’s going to mean actually sending astronauts out there.” Knox shook his head, and said, “It’s going to cost a fortune.”

  “We’ll get it if we need it,” Cooper said with a confident smile. “Count on that. We’ve still got a few more hoops to jump through before we get that far, though. We’ve got to find out anything we can about that Soviet space shot. We’re probably talking about something like a Luna-series probe, maybe a Zond, something like that.”

  “There might be some useful data buried somewhere, General,” Knox noted. “Not enough to replace our mission, but perhaps enough to give us a real start. We might have to get the Siberians involved, maybe the Kazakh, some of the other successor governments. Belarus and Karelia have been getting pretty close to EuroFed lately, but neither of them has much of a claim on the Russian space program.”

  “A fig leaf,” Cooper said. “All they need is an excuse, and the lawyers will be arguing about all of this for the next sixty-five years. Maybe they’ll have it figured out by the time this moon comes back. Maybe not. We’ve got to forestall that if we can.” She pulled out her phone again, and grumbled, “Where the hell is the result of that data search? It shouldn’t take anything like this long to pull the records we’re looking for.”

  “An expedition to an asteroid,” Antonova said.

  “Something pretty special,” Knox agreed. “One for the books. I’m pretty sure we can do it. An Orion is more than up to the job. Makes me wish I was still working for NASA.”

  Cooper looked at her phone, frowned, then looked up at the others, saying, “Records drew a blank. CIA and NASA. That’s beyond suspicious. Someone got there first. They’re running a security check right now, but these files are old, were declassifie
d years ago, and are only of any real interest to historians. Anyone could have gone through the digital archive and deleted them.”

  “What about the paper records?” Antonova asked.

  “Destroyed years ago,” Knox replied. “Lack of storage space. There wasn’t any room in the budget to preserve them, so any that weren’t taken off the government’s hands by some research group were burned. And before you say anything, Major, I personally campaigned against that decision, but the NASA Administrator did it to try and placate some budget-hungry Senate committee.”

  “Then we’re no further than we were before,” Antonova said, shaking her head. “Could they have been moved to private hands?”

  “No, there’d have been a notation in the files if there were.” Cooper grimaced, then said, “We’ll get our two satellites onto the case right away. Maybe we’ll be able to find something there that gives us a hint, but if we’re going to get Presidential approval for this mission, we really need to be able to make the best possible case.”

  “There’s another answer, General,” Knox said. “We’re taking the wrong approach. Sure, CIA, NASA, someone in the alphabet soup probably had the files we’re looking for at one time, but they probably wouldn’t have told us the full story anyway. We need to take two other approaches. The first is to go back to NASA again, hit the scientific archives, and see who was looking for near-Earth asteroids around then. Those records will probably be buried in some university lab, and if nothing else, we’d better get some security of our own around them before our DSGE friends decide to pay them a personal visit.”