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“Begin mission preparations,” President Wall said, nodding once. “I want a briefing at the end of the day on your timeline. President Puchkov, I would like you and your nation to work side by side with us on this operation.”
“I would like nothing more than that, President Wall.”
“Excellent. And Sergey, I trust you’re taking steps to ensure none of your other satellites are about to go rogue or decay into former Soviet wartime programming. God knows what the Soviets threw up there or what has been orbiting over our heads for decades. Let’s pray we don’t find out.”
“Yes, Elizabeth,” Sergey said softly. “The last thing I want is for any harm to come to the planet or to our joint space program. Or to our astronauts.”
A vacuum seemed to form in the JSC conference room, taking all of the oxygen with it. Mark hissed, trying to capture the last stray molecule as his gaze fixed on Sergey.Sergey, smiling as he watched the fireworks, his chin on Sasha’s shoulder. Sergey, glaring across the video link. Sergey, his hand over Sasha’s heart as they danced cheek to cheek. Sergey, trying to salvage an interstellar incident before a Soviet satellite tried to kill them all.
Nodding, President Wall rose, and the video uplink to the White House Situation Room cut off. General Duncan winked off next.
Before the uplink to Moscow cut out, Sergey’s gaze lasered into Mark, a thousand emotions swirling through his galaxy eyes in the second before the screen went dark.
* * *
14
Johnson Space Center
Houston, Texas
“You’ve seen the news.”
As Mark spoke, Sasha’s gaze flicked from him to Sarah Hogan, sitting across from Sasha at the lacquered conference table in Erica’s corner office in Building 1. Behind them, lining the wall, were NASA’s heavyweights: Chris, Jim, Erica, and Roxanne.
Sasha’s heart raced. Of course he’d seen the news. The whole world had watched in horror as five destroyed satellites crawled across the sky, trails of fire lighting up the heavens for two days and nights as their debris decayed and headed for the Earth.
A Soviet Attack, the headlines said. A rogue Soviet satellite, its programming malfunctioning in a delirium of the Cold War. When would it strike again? And where?
Was this it? Was this the end of his dream?So sorry, but your country just blew our satellites out of the sky. We can’t have you in the program anymore. Take your bags and leave.
He’d been so,soclose.
Sarah sat frozen across the table. She’d been an army captain, an EOD company commander, and her stillness came from a decade of defusing bombs around the world. Her biceps were as big as Sasha’s, her jaw more angled, cheekbones set at sharper angles. She was a hard woman in every way, focused like a black hole devours a star. And yet she had the loudest laugh in the astronaut corps, and she wore her brunette hair in a bobbing ponytail every day. There were two sides of her, and she moved from a hard professionalism to warm laughter in ebbs and flows.
If he was being thrown out of NASA, why was Sarah there? She wasn’t Russian. Far from it. She was as All-American as anyone could get. She’d played quarterback at her high school and had shifted to tight end at West Point, one of only ten women who’d played at the college level. Instead of cheerleading pom-poms, Sarah had her football pads and helmet in her office, next to framed photos of her defusing a hundred and one bombs in a hundred and one battles. If she bled, it would come out star-spangled.
“What you haven’t seen in the news is that the bird is radioactive. We’re not sure what the source is yet. Is it a reactor leak? The Soviets used nukes in their Topaz reactors they sent up. Or did they put nuclear weapons in orbit? We have to accept that possibility, especially since the Russians can’t find any information on this satellite. Her records have vanished. And, she’s moving from her old position into orbit over the United States.”
Mark pulled up a slide on his laptop, and it flashed to the wall display. Earth hovered in the center of the slide, and a satellite track appeared in a dotted line around her like a rubber band had hooked on the Andes mountains in Chile and was being pulled high off the other side of the globe, stretching out over Siberia and the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Arctic Circle. “Thiswasher high-altitude orbit. Now, she’s moving into a semisynchronous orbit, stationed over the United States.”
“Do we know if that rail gun can launch offensive weapons to the surface?” Sarah asked.
“We don’t think so,” Erica said, speaking from the back. “NRO and Space Command have analyzed the data we have from the projectiles they fired at our satellites. Anything that size would burn up in our atmosphere long before it hit the ground. Kinetic bombardment weapons have to be at least twenty feet long and made of a denser material than what we’ve analyzed those projectiles to be made of. So far, we haven’t seen capabilities like that.”
Sarah nodded. “Then what we’re really worried about is nuclear weapons launching from orbit at America.”
“Yes,” Mark said. “Russia can’t tell us anything, and Space Command’s attempts to hack the satellite have gotten nowhere. We’ve got no intel.”
Sasha shifted. He and Sergey hadn’t had more than a few minutes to talk since Sergey had flown away. Sergey was run ragged, he and Ilya both trying to track down anything about the Raduga satellite. “It’s a ghost, Sashunya,” Sergey had breathed, his voice growing weaker as he’d fallen asleep with Sasha on the line the night before. “The records at Roscosmos are gone. Ilya is going to Baikonur. Maybe there’s something there, from when it was launched…”
“President Wall and President Puchkov have ordered the Soviet satellite neutralized.”
Sasha’s belly tightened, like he was pushing against g-forces in a banking turn.Sergey.
“We can’t risk an ASAT kill mission.” Mark pronounced it A-SAT—antisatellite kill mission. “Not with the threat of nukes on board. Which leaves us with one option: an emergency launch to intercept the satellite.”
The breath punched from Sasha’s lungs, awhooshthat left him gulping like a fish out of water. Even Sarah blinked.
