Eon (Eon, 2)

  He shut his eyes to review their actions once they had entered. Each of them carried a lightweight spacesuit in a plastic bag; bulky helmet strapped to one side with coiled and tied connectors; backpack with two hours' oxygen and battery power; and in another bag, a parachute and a folded aerodynamic shield. Each also had a kit containing small vapor propellant rocket. The rockets had three nozzles only a few centimeters across, aimed radially outward when attached to the bottom of the backpacks. They were controlled by buttons on flexible cords that laced through loops and fit into pockets just below the gloves. The nozzles in their plastic packages were folded inward and the propellant sloshed gently when moved.

  So equipped, clutching their laser rifles and Kalashnikov AKV-297 vacuum projectile weapons (just machine guns with bigger clips and folding stocks, modified not to jam in airless condition) they proposed to win back the honor and historical place of the Soviet Union and its concerned allies. Not that their briefings had included such phrases—no leader would ever admit that honor and place had been lost.

  Mirsky was a practical man, however.

  In the half-darkness, another man began retching miserably. Perhaps they would be over it in a day or so. That is what the medical experts had told them; no worse than the first few days on a troop ship. Russians had spent enough time in space that what the experts said had to be based in fact.

  He tugged on his sling. When the time came, it would convert into a harness. They would all be hitched to the dispersal trolley and pushed, one by one, out of the ship. From that point on, they would be free agents until they gathered within the Potato—the Stone.

  Mirsky wondered how the bore hole was defended, and what lay beyond. Details were tantalizingly specific while the overview remained sketchy; they had been told the absolute minimum necessary to let them do their work.

  No objective in orbit had ever been assaulted by troops before.

  There was no way of knowing or even guessing everything that could go wrong.

  Not that any soldier had ever expected to live through a battle. In the Great War, his grandfather had died along the river Bug when Hitler's troops had made their first crossing, and of course there was Kiev. . . .

  Russians knew how to die.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Hoffman had taken only the most essential items; seven high-density memory blocks out of perhaps two thousand, a few personal effects and two pieces of jewelry given to her by her late husband, ten years before. She had left the Taos home with the doors open; should any vagabonds chance upon it, she would let them have a few days of pleasure.

  There was nothing more she could do. She had asked for a few return favors. There was no doubt what was going to happen within the next four days; no one she had talked to had ever seen tensions so high.

  Operating on the instinct which had served her so well in the past, Judith Hoffman was on her way to the Stone. She hoped she hadn't started out too late.

  She drove the innocuous second car—a leased Buick—for hours across the desert and open countryside, through small towns and medium-sized towns, trying not to think or feel guilty. There was nothing more she could do.

  She had been stripped of all authority by an angry and foolish Chief Executive. Three cabinet members had accused her of actually starting this entire mess.

  "The hell with them," she whispered.

  Beside the turnoff to Vandenberg Launch Center, in a small complex of civilian stores serving the base personnel, she saw a garden shop. Without hesitating, she pulled into the parking lot.

  Inside the store, she found a skinny young male clerk in a leaf-green apron and a Robin Hood hat. She asked where the seed racks were. "Vegetable or flower?" he asked.

  "Both."

  "Aisle H, just across from hand tools, next to mulch."

  "Thank you." She found the racks and took one package of everything she could see, two or three of some of the vegetables and fruits. When she was done, her basket was filled with about ten pounds of seed packages. The clerk looked at the pile in bewilderment.

  Hoffman threw two hundred-dollar bills down on the counter. "Will that be enough?" she asked.

  "I think so—"

  "Keep what's left over," she said. "I'm in a hurry and I don't have time to count them all."

  "Let me get the manager—"

  "I don't have time," she repeated, and she took out another bill and laid it next to the two.

  "I'm sure that will cover it," the clerk said quickly, swallowing.

  "Thank you. Put them in a box for me?"

  Hoffman picked up the box and returned to the car.

  Lanier was asleep in his cubicle when the comline chimed. He reached over to press the button, but no message awaited, only silence.

  He rubbed his eyes clear, blinking. Then he heard the other comlines in other rooms throughout the barracks, all chiming. Footsteps sounded in the hallway.

  He punched a number into the unit. A shaky voice answered, "First chamber communications."

  "This is Garry Lanier. Are we having a central alert?"

  "Yes, Mr. Lanier."

  "Why?" Lanier's voice was infinitely patient.

  "I'm not sure, sir."

  "I want to speak with axis communications right now."

  "Yes, sir."

  When a woman's voice answered some seconds later, he requested a briefing.

  "We have DefCon three from London and Moscow," the woman said. "Radar activity is up, especially orbital tracking. There's been some action against communications and navigation satellites."

  "Any messages from Florida or Sunnyvale?"

  "None, sir."

  "Messages from the lunar settlement?"

  "Nothing to us, sir. They're farside to us now."

  "I'm coming up to the axis now. Tell Link and Pickney to set up a special situation room with seating for about fifteen people."

  Roberta Pickney's voice interrupted. "Garry, is that you? Everything's already set up, Kirchner's orders. He wants science and security coordinating on this. Get up here immediately."

  In the elevator, surrounded by security personnel and baffled engineers who hadn't heard details yet, Lanier tried to think of all the things left to be done, all the preparations yet to be made. He felt his rough, unshaven chin.

  It had all been hypothetical, a long-running nightmare. Down below, where he had spent most of his life, where most of the people he loved—and how few they were!—still lived, it was probably beginning.

  He couldn't block images of what people back home were doing at this moment. He had lived through it as a pilot, but never as a civilian. Listening to radios, to sirens, to civil defense instructions never comprehensive enough to be of real value. Orders to evacuate, issued over cable communications from neighborhood to neighborhood. People afraid, people throwing things into automobiles or scrambling for buses or trains or Civil Defense trucks. . .

  He tried to quell such thoughts. He needed his wits about him.

  At the axis chambers, the security guards organized the people into priority tram groups. He was plucked from crowd by three young marines and ushered almost forcibly into a special car.

  The center of Stone external communications was a walled-off area about twenty meters square in one corner of the prime dock staging area. Six marine corporals stood by the door, rifles at ready, their boots hooked into special loops to brace them in case they needed to aim and fire. Lanier passed between them. Inside the room, ten people had gathered. They watched him closely as he pulled himself into a seat.

  Four video screens were mounted in one wall. Innumerable repeaters had been wired into most of the consoles. Only one of the big screens was on, showing a fuzzy picture of the Stone itself surrounded by data readouts. That was a picture from the Drake: just as he had first seen the Stone, four years ago.

  Pickney handed him a pair of Velcro galoshes. "It hasn't started yet," she said. "But there's been an alert. Something's hit the fan but we're not su
re what it is. Put this on." She wrapped earphones and mike around his head. "I've been getting everything coordinated for the past half hour."

  "Orders yet?"

  "Nothing specific. Just the alert."

  He sat where he was told and a bank of keyboards and viewers was moved near to him. Captain Kirchner and his aide, a young mustachioed lieutenant commander dressed in khakis, entered a few minutes later and were seated a few meters away in similar accommodations.

  Kirchner, in charge of external Stone defense, was really the central figure now. Gerhardt was in the first chamber, making preparations; but for the moment, what happened in the chambers was incidental. "Get fifteen men outside the bore hole with portable detection systems," Kirchner said. "I want them hidden behind those honey-comb walls, out of sight—no heat signatures. And get those goddamned Gatling guns in position."

  Quiet descended. Pickney, earphones clamped over her short, bobbed hair, listened intently. A burst of static issued from a speaker on the other side of the room.

  On the largest screen before Lanier, a picture flicked on, wavered and steadied into crystal clarity. The source was a camera just outside the bore hole, in the honeycombed dimple. The camera was oriented toward the Earth at that moment. The limb of the Earth, still in darkness, came into focus. The picture shuffled twice as enhancers did their work. Lanier could then make out continents, cloud patterns, city lights in the night. They were within a few minutes of being nearest their orbital path to Earth—less than three thousand kilometers.

  A crackly radio voice came over their headphones. "Heavensent, Heavensent, this is Red Cube. Alert situation Remarkable."

  "Shit," Kirchner murmured.

  "Bears have just announced their end run. Captain Kirchner, we are devising responses now. Your situation is unknown. Please advise."

  "We are secure and making preparations," Kirchner said.

  Red Cube—the Joint Space Command western headquarters in Colorado—came back with, "You are now out of our response pattern, Captain. We must conduct affairs as if you did not exist. The steam in the sweatbox is thick. Looks like they're going to take out our near-Earth capability. Understood?"

  "Understood. Hope to God you can keep them in line, Red Cube."

  "Heavensent is now on its own, Captain."

  "Yes, sir."

  The transmission ended.

  "My screen shows an OTV approach," Kirchner said. "Is it identified?"

  "OTV forty-five, carrying supplies and reinforcement personnel, launched nine hours ago from Station Sixteen," Pickney said. "We've been monitoring."

  Kirchner's aide confirmed that the marines in the dimple had picked up a blip on their scanners.

  "Take it aboard," Kirchner said. "We're going to be getting a lot more in a day or so if this goes all-out."

  "Yessir—several more launching already."

  A screen before Lanier rolled up a picture of the OTV approaching the bore hole. Suddenly, the OTV expanded into a glowing sphere. Silently, quickly, the sphere dissolved at its edges and darkened to dull orange. Debris scattered in silhouette against the diffuse shells of gas.

  "Sir," Kirchner's aide said, "they're seeing dark transits out there, blocking stars. Behind the OTV."

  "The OTV's gone," Lanier said. "Captain, they've snuck in behind our ship."

  "My God," exclaimed a voice over the hissing and crackling loudspeaker. Pickney had opened the marines' frequency to all in the room. "Something's taken out our ship. Am I seeing—"

  "Transits, transits! No blips."

  "Durban here. I'm getting dark spots but they have to be retinal."

  "No way. I didn't see the flash and I'm getting four, five, six transits blocking stars. Big suckers."

  "They're going to come down the pipe," Kirchner said. "Get the OTV tanks rigged to block them. Team A, release your cables."

  Cameras in the bore hole showed ghostly infrared- and low-light-enhanced images of men in suits moving behind the first rotating dock. Mortar-like cannon fired coiled steel cable across the hundred-meter diameter of the bore hole. Harpoons fixed the cables in the opposite wall. Seven were fired in rapid succession, making a web in the bore hole. Three discarded OTV tanks were maneuvered up from the sides and fixed in position with more cables. All this was done in less then ten minutes.

  "They won't come into the staging areas," Kirchner said confidently. "It would be a waste of time. If they come down the pipe, they'll go for the chambers. They can mop us up later. I hope Oliver's soldiers are prepared."

  In the commotion, Lanier had directed his eyes away from the screens displaying the Earth. He returned his attention to them.

  Tiny orange spots blossomed along the Soviet coast west of Japan, simple suborbital rockets deploying solid debris to bring down low-orbit satellites and battle stations. "Pop-ups," Kirchner said.

  One of the marines outside the bore hole said something garbled. Then, as Pickney enhanced the reception, the voice continued, "Sir, they're blowing the masks."

  The large screen switched to a view down the bore hole. Stars twinkled beyond the flare-lit rotating dock and the outer lip of the bore hole. Three shadows moved against the stars. Then, fire rimmed the shadows and pie slices of black material drifted away, revealing shapes difficult for the eye to define. The mirrored noses of the intruders were reflecting the dark interior of the bore hole and the illuminated prime dock. "Signature," Kirchner's aide said. "They're Russian, ocean-launched heavy-lift cargo vehicles. First is in the pipe."

  Twenty meters wide, the Russian ships resembled Christmas decorations as they entered the bore hole. Invisible beams of energy from guns hidden beyond the rotating dock were already making parts of the leading heavy-lifter glow orange. Lanier could not begin to keep track of what was happening. His eye moved from screen to screen; Kirchner spoke rarely now. The procedures had already been outlined; his men were doing all they had been trained to do, all they could do.

  "Pickney, patch me through to seventh chamber," Lanier said.

  "Everyone's in first and fourth chambers by now," Gerhardt said.

  "Then get me fourth chamber. Wherever. I want Heineman."

  "Lead ship returning fire," said an anonymous voice from within the bore hole. "Looks like they're aiming for the tanks, maybe the cables."

  "Maybe they don't see the cables," another voice suggested. The tone of both soldiers was calm, expectant.

  Lanier noticed a monitor showing the tiny star of Station Sixteen, in low Earth orbit of one thousand kilometers. As he watched, the star became a glowing smudge of white light. The light winked out.

  "Heineman on your button five," Pickney told Lanier. He punched the button.

  "Lawrence, this is Garry."

  "I was almost out the door and they pulled me back in. I'm in fourth chamber, Garry. I was on my way—"

  "Lawrence, we're in—we're being attacked. Just get to the V/STOL and take it up. Hitch to the tuberider and take it down the line. Stay there until we call you back."

  "Got you. I was on my way."

  The button popped up and dimmed.

  More brilliant white flowers grew from pinpoints to blue-white smudges over Japan and China—four in all. These were orbital nuclear bursts, designed to incapacitate communications and power nets with intense flashes of electromagnetic interference—the source of more static over the speakers. As the Stone moved in its counterclockwise orbit, and as the Earth turned beneath them, he saw more bursts over the Soviet Union and Europe—fourteen in all. A veritable nuclear springtime. They had upped the ante since the Little Death. No strategic exchanges yet—but no unshielded electronics or communications systems would survive these preliminary steps in the dance.

  The smaller viewscreens showed pictures intercepted from those scanning satellites still intact and broadcasting.

  The coast of North America, southern and Baja California prominent, came into dawn, high-altitude glows casting an eerie light across the ocean and land, like penlig
hts on a relief map. The carnage still hadn't begun. What was the plan—bluff? Deception?

  The negotiations would have begun already. What has been done, what will be done unless. . . How to scale back, defuse, settle for a limited confrontation. . . Who was bluffing whom, and how far they would go.

  Who would surrender.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Colonel Mirsky gripped the edge of the hatch leading to the ship's cockpit. There was no direct view of the bore hole; the laser shield and armored outer hull covered the forward windows. He couldn't understand the displays before the two pilots; they were a confusion of vague lines, spinning circles, things like Easter eggs rolling and precessing in a grid pattern. "Get your men ready," the ship's commander said, glancing over his shoulder. "Tell them to stay close to the bore-hole walls until they exit into the first chamber. They have men with lasers waiting. Sting like bees."

  Heavy fists seemed to slam on the outside of the hull in a rapid tattoo. Alarms went off. "Naughty fellows; that was a Gatling gun," the copilot said. "Laser shields penetrated. Minor outer hull breach."

  Mirsky backed out and closed the hatch behind him, the commander's comment about bees still echoing in his mind. Mirsky had once tended bees on a city co-op in Leningrad as a student project. We invade the hive, he thought. Naturally, they try to sting.

  He floated across the first compartment, picked up his helmet and issued terse instructions. The sergeants—squad leaders for the second and third compartments—pulled themselves through the hatches to alert their men. Minutes and it would begin.

  "Why so glum, Alexei?" he chided a soldier inspecting his helmet. "Friends, are your weapons charged?"

  They pulled their rifles out of a charging rack and checked the glowing LEDs.