Systemic Shock tq-1 Read online

  "Yessir. Russkis will be mad as — jinkl Shit, it's a Demi-tasse, I have seven jinks! Against ours…"

  "Fire the Moonkillers, Robin. That's our war."

  Chapter Nineteen

  China had hoped to conceal the extent of her A-Sat weapons, the most sophisticated being her Jin ji, 'urgent', system. We had specs on it, a multiple independently-targetable antisatellite weapon cluster; hence a MITAS, hence a Q-clearance word, Demitasse. We had bragged on our Vought AA-Sat systems, which deployed interceptors on rocket boost as first-stage launch vehicles. The F-23's followed programmed pop-up maneuvers before releasing their solid-propellant missiles, which then would seek warheads such as Demitasse in pinpoint intercept. What we had not bragged about was our Moonkillers.

  Though offensive armament had been prohibited by treaty on US satellites, defensive weapons had been installed. Satellites with sufficient energy storage were furnished with lasers capable of holing three-centimeter titanium plate. Heat dissipation in the system was so crucial that only five or six laser bursts could be rapidly fired at an approaching enemy. It was, of course, line-of-sight — but it could zap you from almost any orbital distance.

  Satellites without surplus electric energy storage used something less elegant. It was a curious version of an idea used by Germans, then in our old SPRINT rockets. Solid propellant rockets are so simple and storable that a five-stage hypervelocity bird could be depended upon after years of storage. The entire weapon fitted into a cylinder fifteen cm. wide, seven meters long. The most deceptive feature was the propellant and chamber walls, so flexible with thermal protection that the cylinder could be curled into a hoop which passed as a segmented toroidal pressure vessel. It was a pressure vessel, all right…

  The automated drill was 'uncurl; aim; fire.' Four stages of the weapon were straightforward boosters; the fifth carried a shaped charge that shotgunned a cloud of metal confetti, and the average 'burnt velocity' of those pellets relative to their launcher was on the order of 8,000 meters/sec, perhaps double that figure relative to an onrushing target.

  Altogether, some fifty American satellites had been fitted — some retrofitted — with laser or shotgun defenses Taken together with their control modules they composed the Moonkiller system. The name was an obvious conceit, since they would not have stopped a sizeable asteroid; but in the early hours of Monday, 12 August 1996, they made expensive colanders out of forty-two Demitasse warheads,

  RUS satellite defenses, Moonkillers and Vought AA-Sats accounted for most of the other Demitasse weapons but, in an hour-long display of orbital pyrotechnics watched by uncounted millions, some of those warheads obliterated their targets. Particularly galling to the US Navy was the loss of fully half of its laser translators. American subs, equipped with extremely sensitive detectors, had for years depended on communications via blue-green satellite laser that penetrated hundreds of meters into ocean depths. If you were on-station, you got the flashes.

  In a small Extremely Low Frequency radio facility near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Lt. (JG) Boren Mills whirled from his console. “ELF grid test program to standby, Chief," he said, remembering to speak far down in his throat. Mills had been jerked from reserve status in grad school at Annenberg less than thirty hours before, to this Godforsaken tunnel in cheese country, but Mills was — had been — the kind of grad student who seldom forgot to employ the communication theory work he read. It had already earned him one promotion.

  "At your mark, sir," said the balding chief, prompting him.

  "Uh — yes, at my mark: mark." Mills touched fingertips to his headset, gnawed his lip, caught himself at it, forced his personal display to read calm.

  "Running, sir. Should I test the time-sharing translators again? I can't believe anybody wants to use the ELF grid as main trunk transceivers."

  Mills saw a red-code flash on the display, studied it a moment, muttered, "Jesus Christ on Quaaludes," then remembered the chief's query. "Test them again; all possible speed, Chief. We're losing laser translators over the Pacific and Arctic." The ELF radio grid, though it lay across thousands of square klicks of dairyland and had cost an immense fortune, was a distant second choice to orbital laser methods. The message rate of extremely low-frequency radio was, by definition, extremely low. But it was not as vulnerable as an orbital translator either, as Mills was learning.

  In moments the chief completed his software tasks, glanced at the new weekend warrior who, though green as a NavSat's eye, was shaping up damned fast on short notice. The chief judged Mills's age as twenty-seven, putting it three years on the long side because of the jaygee, the widow's peak high on a forehead that never sweated, and the hard brown eyes that never wavered. Slim, erect, with a strong nose and graceful movements, Boren Mills could surrogate maturity better than most. The voice was soft, almost a caress, when he wasn't working at it. The chief had seen lots worse. Mills might be one of the Navy's braintrust brats, but he knew how to do a job. The chief eased over to see past Milk's shoulder, and gulped at what he saw.

  "Stay at your post or go on report," Mills snapped, then spoke softly into his throat mike as the chief leaped back to his post. “With enough power, you may be able to get Arctic coverage from echo soda module, I say again echo soda. That's an awfully shallow angle to penetrate that deep in sea water, but it's your lasers, Commander. I 'm just an elf… Affirm; grid test programs running and green, we're ready when you are."

  Mills turned the level, heavy-browed stare on the chief. "Pull the test programs, ready ELF grid for main-trunk use at-my-mark…mark! Chief, we're losing more orbital modules; too many bogies are getting through."

  The chief took a deep breath. “Sir, last time we really tried this grid for main trunk we caused a brown-out in Eau Claire, got charged with witching milk from cattle, and had downtime here you wouldn't believe."

  Mills listened again to his headset, saw verification at his console. "ELF grid to main trunk, logged and confirmed," he said softly, watching the display as he typed. "Chief, I want a man on every auxiliary power unit and I want your hangar queens running."

  "We don't call 'em that, Sir, we—"

  "We are at war, Chief, tell me another time. I don't give a fat rat's ass if every cow in Wisconsin gives condensed milk and farmers freeze in the dark; we are at this moment the Navy's first-line comm net and if any part of the grid goes down it will not be this one. There are SinoInd subs launching God knows what right now. You think they're propaganda leaflets?"

  "Nossir. But I notice we seem to be getting a lot of comm from orbit."

  "Not enough of it from the Navy. And it's Navy that's got to bag those subs."

  The chief scanned his console, nodded to himself, mopped his face. "I'll set up four-hour watches. What should I tell the ratings?"

  "Tell them I want no surprises."

  "I mean about the A-Sat attack, Sir."

  A pause. Then, "Tell them the SinoInd effort to sweep our satellites away has been repulsed. Failed. Defeated."

  The chief brightened. "Aye, Sir."

  Boren Mills permitted himself an almost silent snort at the ease with which men could be manipulated. Statistically, the SinoInd attack was a failure. But it had been a tactical success. Our hunter-killer teams would suffer delays in coordination. Allied bases in Germany, South Africa, Australia, the Seychelles, and Scotland were to take loads of fast-dispersing nerve gas launched from SinoInd subs offshore. Even these ghastly weapons implied a certain restraint; a hope on the part of Peking that US/RUS strategists would follow her lead in avoiding nuclear weapons and attacks on mainland centers.

  But China could not dissuade India from repeating her one-two punch which had overwhelmed Pakistan. Once India's closest ally, the RUS had rained cruise missiles with poor discrimination onto Kanpur; and the RUS presence among Afghans was a chronic thorn in Islamic flesh. Two waves of Indian choppers formed near Peshawar and essayed a blitzkrieg liberation war on Afghan soil. The immediate gains, they felt, could be bargained away
after the cease-fire that must surely follow China's sweep of Allied satellites.

  RUS patrol craft spotted the first wave of assault choppers using side-looking radar that scanned valleys in the towering Hindu Kush range. Indian choppers, though limited in speed and range, were almost equal to the task of dodging the grid of particle-beam projectors that flared from hardened mountain sites. Almost, but not quite. Offense and defense can celled, leaving the way clear for the Indian troop choppers. The RUS then drew its defensive curtain.

  The curtain bomb, a megaton-yield nuclear device, was the culmination of two generations of research into directional-effect neutron bombs. Properly oriented, delivered by unmanned vertols to various altitudes, a curtain lanced its deadly radiation in a tight conic pattern that was lethal a hundred klicks from the detonation site. Since the RUS detonated her devices in a wavering line from Qandahar to Kabul — territory of a tribute state, if not precisely RUS soil — she did not expect this tactic to be considered as a nuclear attack on foreign soil. The fallout, blast, and thermal effects would be largely confined to Afghan regions.

  But thousands of India's first-line assault troops perished in the actinic glare of curtain bombs, and by the political definitions that led her into Afghanistan she did not consider that to be RUS soil. China did not know how closely her enemies were linked and interpreted the neutron curtain as an Allied willingness to tempt Armageddon. Within an hour, the full panoply of SinoInd nuclear, chemical, and bacteriological weapons was committed.

  The first strategic exchange had favored our side, with the survival of a few US/RUS satellites while the SinoInds had only orbital debris. But both China and India had placed much of their air power on submersibles, some with skyhook choppers to provide midair retrieval for aircraft that could not land vertically.

  Both the US and the RUS had spent tens of billions on surface craft, enormous nuclear-powered floating airfields that were too easy to find, too vulnerable to nukes. SinoInd attack subs, with data provided by drones and buoy translators, fired their missiles without surfacing and moved off at flank speed to make second strikes as necessary.

  The SinoInd air-launched ballistic missiles were easier to spot, and many were creamed by the tremendous wealth of defensive fire from our carriers and missile frigates. But our carriers were such potent offensive platforms that the SinoInds threw everything at them at once. For every

  US/RUS carrier in the Indian Ocean, at least one nuke got within a thousand meters or so; and that was all it took. We lost a carrier in the Mediterranean; we lost one each in the Atlantic and Pacific.

  Chastened, stunned by the terrible algebra of One Nuke = One Carrier, our surviving flattops raced for anchorages inside bays with sub nets, with steep mountains nearby, and there were few such places available. The best that could be said was that twenty per cent of the aircraft on our carriers managed to get aloft in search of an enemy, and a place to land.

  Governments across the globe ducked for cover. Long-drilled and partly prepared, millions of RUS urbanites sealed themselves into subway tunnels, then slid blast-and-firestorm-proof hatches into place to ride out the blastfurnace interval. Most Americans were asleep and, in any case, had only the sketchiest notion of adequate shelter. When the Emergency Broadcast System went into operation, most American stations ceased transmission while the rest broadcast belated warnings. Many Americans had never heard the term “crisis relocation" until the past day or so, but it was obviously a weasel-phrase for "evacuation". A few city dwellers — the smaller the city, the better their chances — sped beyond their suburbs before freeway arterials became clots of blood and machinery.

  The American public had by turns ignored and ridiculed its cassandras; city planners, ecologists, demographers, sociologists, immigrants, who had all warned against our increasing tendency to crowd into our cities. Social stress, failure of essential services, and warfare were only a few of the spectres we had granted a passing glance. We had always found some solution to our problems, though; often at the last moment. Firmly anchored in most Americans was the tacit certainty that, even to the problem of nuclear war against population centers, there must be a uniquely American solution; we would find it.

  The solution was sudden death. A hundred million Americans found it.

  Chapter Twenty

  The Civil Defense merit badge had not been popular with Purvis Little, but Tom Schell's parents had insisted. "What we really need," Tom sighed, "is a better map."

  Robbie Calhoun: “Maybe Tim has his cartography manual," with a nod toward his twin.

  As Tim Calhoun dug feverishly into his pack, Ted Quantrill flogged his own memory. Never very active in collecting merit badges, he did not at first conclude they had done him much good. Woodwork? Cycling? Aviation? First aid? Weather? Weather] "Most of the continental United States lies between thirty and forty-five degrees; and in these, uh, longitudes, prevailing winds are west to east."

  "Latitudes," Tim corrected him, flipping through a dogeared pamphlet.

  Little regarded Quantrill with interest. “What in the world are you talking about?"

  "Meteorology, Mr. Little. Merit badge stuff; I either remember it word-for-word, or not at all."

  "Durn if you do," Tim insisted, stabbing at the open pamphlet. "Latitude is the word."

  "So I blew it," said Quantrill;'the important word is west-to-east."

  "That's a phrase," said Ray Kenney.

  "Stop bickering," Little snapped. A dozen times during the hour since they'd waked, he had seen senseless quarrels flare this way — once in a fistfight. Little did some things right, and keeping the boys busy until the bus arrived was one of those things. "Tim, I want an 'X' over every place that's been — hit." He did not want to say 'annihilated by a nuclear weapon'. Not yet. Not even if the Knoxville and Charlotte stations both said so.

  Slowly, Tim marked through Raleigh; then Wilmington, Huntsville, Little Rock, Charleston on his regional map.

  "Anybody know where Tullahoma is?"

  "Couple hundred klicks west of us," said Quantrill, and could not keep from adding, childishly, " — some cartographer you are."

  "What does it matter, Quantrill?" Little said quickly.

  "No matter — unless you're east of it; downwind. Like we are."

  Tom Schell recalled his civil defense study and nodded. "If we head for town now, we might find a deep shelter in time. Mr. Little, it's been twenty minutes since the last car zoomed past here. I 'm gonna hitch the next one and you guys can all rot here if you want to."

  Little studied the pinched faces around him, saw Thad Young guarding the radio from shadows that diminished its pathetic output to silence. "Thad, anything more about Asheville?"

  "Just that the highways are all clogged. Some looting," said the boy, his ear near the speaker.

  "Safety in numbers," Little muttered for the dozenth time, then raised his voice. "Boys, I want you to march single-file behind me. If we can get to Cherokee, we can find a way to Asheville."

  Five minutes later the troop had settled into a good pace eastward, just off the left shoulder facing traffic, most with packs though Ray and Thad had discarded theirs. “Yeah, I 'll share my sleeping bag if we have to," Quantrill said to Ray, then made an effort at levity. "But one little fart and you're outside lookin' in."

  Tom Schell, at the rear, walked just behind. “But that's all he is," Tom laughed.

  "You're supposed to be flagging cars, not ganging up on me," Ray replied.

  "So show me a car," Tom said. None had passed since they began their march. He clapped a good-natured hand on Quantrill's shoulder: "Anyhow, Teddy's a gang all by himself. Take it from an expert."

  Quantrill turned to smile at Schell, saw the vehicle behind them swerve into sight before he heard it. "I never thanked you for — hey, here comes one!"

  The vintage motor home teetered on the curve before its rear duals found purchase, then picked up speed on the downslope. Quantrill saw the lone driver, realized th
at the vehicle could hold them all, stepped into the near lane and waved his arms hard. Ahead of them, the others were reacting the same way. Tom must have realized that the driver had no intention of slowing; made a gallant gesture by stepping almost into the vehicle's path, facing it, arms up and out.

  The driver slammed at his brakes just long enough to provoke a slide, then corrected desperately as the motor home straddled the center stripe. Tom Schell gasped, "Ah, God," before the left front fender impacted his chest at high speed, the sickening sound of his imploding ribcage half lost in the roar of the diesel.

  The body of Tom Schell hurtled a full forty meters, pacing the motor home and nearly parallel to it before colliding with an oak, five meters up in its foliage. The driver fought the wheel through the next bend, tires squalling, and continued.

  Not one of the survivors moved until the body slid, supple as a bag of empty clothing, from tree to gravel where it lay, jerking. Then something in Purvis Little cried out, not in grief but for retribution. Reaching down for a stone, sprinting ludicrously after the motor home, the scoutmaster howled his impotence without words.

  Quantrill raced to within a few paces of the victim, saw Ray Kenney speed past him in pursuit of the others, stopped in revulsion at what he saw. Quantrill bit his lip, knelt at the roadside to think while steadfastly refusing to stare again into the dead eyes. In the distance he could hear the cries of a mindless mob, now all but lost in Smoky Mountain stillness.

  It was much easier to hear your radio estimate megadeaths than to see and hear and smell and — Quantrill swallowed against a sourness in the back of his mouth — taste a single death. Big hearty Tom Schell: one moment a mixed bag of vices and companionable virtues, the next a flaccid bag of skin leaking away into imperturbable gravel, one eye winking as though it had all been a grotesque joke. But the dirt would soak up Tom's blood without qualm or shudder. Lucky dirt; you die for it, and it doesn't give a damn.