SpaceCorp (10 page)

“So you think this rocket will fool them?” Shirazi asked.

“All our antisat missiles have been launched with
Shahab-7’s
. They go up, they go boom—it’s all over. They’re big—1500 kg warhead, direct attack—obvious. First rule of deception, keep your enemy thinking what he’s been thinking—then do something else. ‘Something else’ is this antisat
satellite
. We call it the
Aqrab
. It even looks like a scorpion, you know, the little yellow one they sometimes call the deathstalker?”

“Hmm… one of my men got stung by one on a training exercise. They don’t inject much venom, but the poor fellow was still begging Allah for a quick death even as the medevac hauled him away.”

“Did he recover?” Rahmani asked.

Farahavi shrugged, “How should I know—he was enlisted.”

“So we picked a good name, yes?” Rahmani asked.

Shirazi nodded, “Yes, it seems appropriate. But like its namesake, will your deathstalker’s sting be big enough to be lethal?”

“Well, it is small—but it carries a 200 kg shaped charge warhead. We’ll put it in a trailing orbit fifteen kilometers behind and 200 meters below a space station. They’ll think it’s a surveillance satellite, one of many already trailing SpaceCorp’s fleet of space stations. And it is... until we fire it to intercept. From that range, there is no defense.”

“But those space stations are bigger than aircraft carriers. How will you bring one down with a 200 kg warhead?” Farahavi asked.

“Yes, they are bigger, but not so heavily armored. We don’t aim for the hull—too much compartmentalization to do any good.”

“We aim for the superstructure—the nerve center?” Farahavi asked.

“Too distributed—no single point of failure. No, we aim for the orbit maneuvering fuel storage center. It’s a monopropellant system—Monomethylhydrazine, if you care about such things. Anyway monopropellant systems are simple and easy to light. The central storage system feeds fuel to rocket motors located all over the ship—little ones for attitude, big ones for rapid maneuvers.”

“But I thought they were using solar electric for orbit maintenance,” Farahavi said.

“They do. But this system is for getting out of the way of an approaching impactor—lots of thrust and right now. It’s stored inside the ring. Blow it up and you get a really big boom.”

“How do you know all this?” Shirazi asked. “You have friends in Intelligence?”

“Better! We have friends in sales. We aren’t about to trust our valuable instruments on any old piece of junk in the sky, are we? Of course not and SpaceCorp sales people are quite happy to blurt out everything they know about everything we ask.”

Farahavi smiled. “Thank you, my friend you have done well.”

*   *   *

By the time the
Shamal
reached cruising altitude, the sun was low over the western horizon.

“Remarkable initiative for a rocket scientist, don’t you think? Antisatellite
satellite
—it’s like a land mine, only in space,” Farahavi said.

Shirazi paused, then smiled. “I think the antisatellite missile may yet have its day in the sun.”

“You mean the
Shahab
?”

“Precisely. If we launch it at a station, all sensors will be on it. And while they are watching the
Shahab
, the
Aqrab
will sting it from behind.”

“It’s a good plan—very military.” He paused looking out the window for a moment, then turned and asked, “Tell me, Hashem, you see the Supreme Leader more often than I do. Why is he so bent on destroying the American space station?”

“Well, that’s a good question. He speaks in riddles and analogies so much that it is hard to determine what he is really thinking. I know he hates them—”

“The Americans? We’ve had the bomb for decades now—they can’t hurt us.”

“No, their space stations are what bothers him the most right now—although he is none too fond of the Americans in general either. As for the bomb… I think he realized early on that while it is great for immunity, you can’t really
do
anything with it—the MAD doctrine applies equally to any country. So it just sits there.”

“That’s interesting. I would have thought most clerics cared more about life in the hereafter than life on Earth.”

“Hmm… I used to think that too. They certainly talk the talk of the hereafter, but when it comes to walking the walk, they have many dodges they bring into play. Get someone else—less important—to make the supreme sacrifice. They used to get a lot of traction with the 72 virgins promise, but—modern young people being more cynical than their predecessors—there were two problems with that. It didn’t work on young women, and the young men eventually began to realize there must be a reason a woman would die a virgin.”

Omid laughed, “Yes, a virgin in life is likely to remain a virgin in the afterlife!”

“And there are very few clerics who are willing to set an example for our youngsters in the suicide brigades. No, the clerics have come up with a very good rationalization for preserving their own hides.”

“And what is that?”

“They uniformly believe—or so they say—that they must cleanse Allah’s world of all infidel abominations.”

“And they regard those space stations as abominations. They have said as much?”

“Not in so many words. I was with the Supreme Leader in his chambers once—this was years ago, but the memory is still vivid. He was looking out the window at the prayers going on in the plaza below. As it happened a station passed overhead—they are so large you can see them quite plainly. By chance this one actually cast a shadow on the plaza and many of the people interrupted their prayers to stare up at the space station. Even though the shadow was quite brief, many of them continued looking about, taking over a minute to return to their devotions. A few even got up and left.”

“And how did the supreme leader react to this?”

“He became enraged—as angry as I have ever seen him. He did not shout or curse or bang things about. But the expression on his face was enough to turn my hair white. He sent me away immediately. I did not get another audience with him for a week. He was completely serene at that visit. It was then that he told me that my mission in life was to see to it that prayers would no longer be interrupted by the American ‘abominations’—that’s what he calls the space stations now.

“I asked if he had guidance for me as to how I should accomplish his wishes. He said nothing. He returned to looking out the window, his back to me. I knew I had been dismissed.”

“So how did you determine that shooting them down was what he wanted?”

“I gave him reports of our technological progress thanks to our friend at the ISA, Dr. Rahmani. I never said what the end goal would be. The Supreme Leader is quite savvy technically—far more than you would think for an ayatollah. But I noticed that any time we achieved a major breakthrough in our space program he would smile. When we accidently destroyed the
Von Braun
, he almost giggled. It was strange—I thought he would be alarmed at our creating such a severe diplomatic incident, but instead he said, ‘Well done, my son!’ He was crestfallen when I said it was an accident. Then he brightened and said, ‘Allah does not have accidents!’”

“And that’s when you knew.”

“Yes, Omid. That’s when I knew.”

Omid looked out the window of the
Shamal
. The Iranian countryside swept passed, random herders tending their flocks in the high desert. The population would not thicken until they were much closer to Tehran. He returned his gaze to Shirazi. “I just hope we don’t wake up a sleeping giant in the interests of undisturbed prayer.”

“If the American giant wakes up, it will only be to ask for warm milk and a cookie. Trust me, Omid. America is done.”

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

September 2070

Underground Super Bunker below the White House

Above ground the temperature had been a sweltering 40°C and the Rose Garden looked it. Everything—shrubbery, lawn, even the Marine guards—looked like they had just been wrung out or needed to be. Inside, the diplomatic reception room had been a few degrees cooler if only for being out of the direct sunlight. But Hank Larson was not prepared for the frigid blast that greeted him when he stepped off the high security elevator into the Super Bunker or Super-B as it was commonly referred to. It was completed at a cost $86 billion in 2013 when terrorist threats were mainly from foreign sources. Today’s terrorists were more often domestic than foreign. The Super-B’s entryway was fifty meters under the West Wing and its floor space was bigger than the entire first floor of the White House. The president moved into the Super-B within a week of assuming office twenty-four years ago and had only ventured outside on rare occasions ever since. He would have gladly stepped down from office after just one term but for a shortage of candidates to run for his office. Today’s politicians preferred the safety of working behind the scenes to death from an assassin’s bullet. As a result, the Congress retained the president without the hazard of campaigning for office by voting him Extensions of Office every four years. Without those Extensions, the presidency would have gone vacant.

The president greeted Hank wearing a thick cardigan sweater, a pair of threadbare suit pants, and heavy sheepskin slippers with the rough side out. The sweater was open exposing a low cut T-shirt. He was a little stooped but not noticeably so given his short height. His face was bewhiskered—about three days’ worth by the look of it—but the whiskers were white and thin. He moved unassisted, a little slow and a little wobbly, like he was used to getting about with a walker but had put it aside for vanity. And he smelled, the smell old men can’t get rid of unless they shower twice a day, and this old man smelled like he hadn’t seen soap for a week.

“Someone get Mr. Larson a sweater. I don’t want our guest of honor catching pneumonia down here.”

He turned his attention back to Hank and grasped his hand to shake it. It felt cold against Hank’s clammy palm. “Come in to my office, my boy. Lots of fake windows in there—we can dial up whatever scenery you’d like. I have a Swiss alpine theme going on right now, but it’s been up for a week now, and I’m tired of it. You can help me pick out something new.”

The president’s office had floor-to-ceiling monitors on three sides, plus the ceiling itself was made to look like a giant skylight. His desk sat facing the ‘outside’ scenery. He seemed not to care that his back was to anyone entering the room. There was a sitting area in front of his desk made to look like a wrap-around porch from a log cabin. It had a comfortable futon couch covered with Native American geometric patterns. There was a rustic ranch-style coffee table to the front of the couches.

As the president and Hank sat down, the president grabbed a remote and the top of the coffee table tilted forward to show a large monitor two meters wide by a meter tall. It was laid out with all the work-a-day tasks of the president. He opened a folder of thumbnails showing different outdoor scenes. “You like the tropics—beach scenes with palms swaying in the breeze? I can even pipe in the sound of waves breaking on the beach and I can have tropic sea breezes coming through the—”

“Uh, Mr. President, this is all very fascinating—I’m sure not many people get a chance to see all this—but exactly why am
I
seeing it now?”

“You’re a player now, my boy! Or soon to be one. Tell him, George.”

George Potter was the secretary of defense. Compared to the president he looked quite young even though he must have been in his late sixties.

“We are commandeering your new space station,” George said.

“Uh, the whole thing?”

“One quad for our crew, one spoke for our Key Hole camera, and we’ll be replacing your bottom hub rocket with a... device.”

“Uh, that’s not possible. Every inch on that station is leased to paying—what
device
?”

George hesitated as he looked at the president who nodded imperceptibly. “It’s a laser, a very powerful laser.”

“That will set our schedule back weeks... months,” Hank said.

“We know,” the president said. “You’ll be compensated.”

Hank stiffened and his eyebrows knit together over the bridge of his nose. “All due respect, sir, can you cut the crap? What’s going on?”

The president smiled. “What is going on is I have a problem, rather a lot of them actually.”

Hank said nothing but kept glaring at the president.

“Sit back and relax—this will take a bit.” The president put the remote down and leaned back in his chair. “You’re a scientist, what is the atmospheric CO
₂
level right now?”

“I’m not a scientist. I’m in operations, but to answer your question, 800 parts per million, more than double what it was in 2010.”

“And what does that doubling tell you about global temperature?”

“It’s gone up a bit over 3°C since 2010.”

“And how much have the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps melted since 2000, just a rough percentage?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, what about the sea level rise? Surely, you know that one.”

“About five meters.”

“Five meters!” the president said. He clapped his hands together like a small child who had gotten just what he wanted for Christmas. “That’s 16 feet! People can see that. They can no longer walk around Lower Manhattan... have to take a boat. What’s left of Miami is a swamp.” The president  leaned in close and whispered behind his hand as though he didn’t want the people in the room to know what he was saying, “People are starting to wonder.
‘Could there be a connection? CO
₂
and sea level?’
they ask.”

“What do you tell them?” Hank asked.

“Oh, I could recite all that data you fellows keep sending me. I get a fresh report every morning. But I don’t tell them anything. If I were to say, ‘Only God can raise the temperature!’ the secular types would get rightfully mad. And if I say, ‘It’s fossil fuels!’ the oil and coal companies tell the religious types to get mad. The religious types work for the fossil fuel companies in case you didn’t know. So I let the news avatars tell their listeners whichever message they care to tune in to. Avatars are very useful for keeping the people in control—no one has to listen to what they’re inclined to disagree with. I’m a coward, you see. I hide in my little hole under the White House so I don’t get shot by some sniper a mile away. That’s how it’s done now. No more debate, no more discussion, no voting. Just shoot any bastard who disagrees with you. Just don’t get noticed in the process, and there are plenty of paid professionals who are very good at not being noticed.”