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Europa Strike(36)



“But that means a ship launched those missiles,” Kaitlin had told General Talbot. “How could a ship get close enough to fire missiles without being picked up?” Peaceforce cruisers had the best sensor nets of any spacecraft or orbital facility in the system. They could track ships leaving Earth orbit from out in the Asteroid Belt, for God’s sake. How could they close the range enough to launch missiles or railgun projectiles without being spotted and tracked all the way in?

“We are looking at a possibility,” Talbot had said. “This is still classified, mostly because we don’t want Triple-N to be jumping to conclusions just yet.”

“Why not? They will anyway.”

“True enough. But…remember the Heavenly Lightning?”

“The Chinese research ship that left geosynch three weeks ago? Sure.”

“Nineteen days ago, they detonated a nuclear warhead in what they claimed was a test, but because of the plasma cloud, we lost touch with her for a period of several hours. We think it’s just possible that she used a railgun to launch antimatter warheads at the Kennedy. On that trajectory, they would have come out of the sun, and at extremely high velocity. We estimate 300-plus kps. If the warheads were stealth designs, and if they mounted sensor and maneuvering systems so they could come in as a smart weapon with terminal track-and-control, they might have been inside the Kennedy’s defense network before her AI even realized they were there.”

And Robbie never had a chance. Somehow, she held the tears at bay.

“It’s still just a theory,” Talbot had told her. “The Lightning would have had to generate absolutely incredible ac celerations in some sort of onboard railgun to delivery a package at that speed.”

“What kind of accelerations?”

“Well, the Lightning is about 200 meters long. For a muzzle velocity of over 300 kps? Something on the order of 25 million Gs.”

“That’s…impossible.”

“Agreed. With her power system, she might have managed a million Gs, for a few shots. Maybe. But…there are some other possibilities we’re looking into as well.”

It was a fascinating problem in applied military science, she’d thought. How to carry out a bombardment of a target at extreme range, across several astronomical units. You could fire a missile at such ranges, but your target would be certain to see it coming, and point-defense lasers, aimed by AIs with very fast reaction times, could knock down just about any solid object approaching a naval warship while it was still several thousand kilometers away.

But an artillery shell, with a course correction at the far end of the trajectory for pinpoint smart-weapon accuracy, could do it. If you could fire the shell at a high enough velocity.

Her mind turned the problem, desperate to stay cold and calculating and remote and not think about the reality of the target—about Robbie. Like tanks, heavy artillery in the classic battlefield sense was long extinct. As far back as the end of the twentieth century, missile launchers and heavy artillery had more and more been evolving as mobile artillery, with the idea of being able to launch a few rounds before enemy radar pinpointed your position and plastered you with counterbattery fire and air strikes. Really big stationary artie batteries and missile launchers were dinosaurs, easily killed, and ineffective unless massed in large, logistically complex numbers. Even a relatively small artillery shell or missile could be tracked by radar or lidar and brought down by point defense lasers. For the past eighty years, at least, the trend had been toward smaller, lighter systems—especially shoulder-launched weaponry like M-614 Wyverns, artillery support a single man could carry with him.

It appeared, however, that the Chinese might have just revived the old idea of long-range bombardment, but only by carrying the concept to mind-numbing extremes. How would you defend against such an attack? Improved sensors, perhaps…or employing picket systems or satellites to warn of high-speed incoming rounds.

Or by taking closer note of the movements of suspicious warships like the Heavenly Lightning, and not letting them deploy in such a way that they became a threat.

Robbie!

Blinking back the tears, she looked out the port-side window, at the purple curve of the far horizon to the north, an arc pinned beneath the black of space and the white glare off the thick clouds below. The sun was low in the west astern, casting each swirl, each bump of the clouds into sharp, three-dimensional relief. She felt a series of bumps transmitted through the deck. They were over the Great Plains now, and beginning the descent toward Washington.

She’d asked for—and General Talbot had granted—a special leave, time for her to go back and be with her family, at least until more was known. Damn…home was where she should have been all along.