The UN raiders had struck late in the evening two days before, a flight of German stealth K-120s coming in off the Pacific at wave-skimming altitude, minutes behind an initial wave of cruise missiles. The aircraft had been launched by a UN submarine aircraft carrier that had crept to within twelve hundred kilometers of the California coast. The cruise missiles had been launched from a pair of French arsenal subs lurking eight hundred kilometers farther north.
Both UN squadrons had been hit by US retaliatory strikes; one of the arsenal ships, the Pluton, had been sunk by Aerospace Force A-40 Wasps vectored out of Travis by a spotter aboard a US military orbital recon station. The German carrier, believed to be the Seeadler, had been heavily damaged by the Lakota, a US strike sub, and was still being hunted in the dark, cold waters beyond the Jasper Seamount. None of the six attacking K-120s had made it back to their carrier.
Still, the raid had to be chalked up on the big board as a UN success. The stealth attack had left twenty-one Wasp and Defender Aerospace Force fighters destroyed or crippled on the ground. Worse, far worse, a Zeus II being readied on Pad 4B had been destroyed in a titanic fireball that had lit up the western night skies for all of Los Angeles, and six precious SRE-10s being readied in the assembly hangars had been badly damaged. Those Sparrowhawks had been on the prep line, being fitted with missiles to bump those surviving fragments of 2034L that still posed a threat to the Earth; there would be no more counter-asteroid launches now, and the techies still weren’t confident that the oncoming fragment cloud was going to leave the Earth unscathed.
Rob pulled the Samurai into the parking lot outside Building 12. The two of them stopped in the lot and saluted as morning colors sounded, then walked up to the entrance, returned the salutes of the two Marine sentries posted there, and went inside.
Room 310, on the third floor down from ground level, was the Marine enclave’s main briefing room in a building devoted to the planning of the missions that were extending the reach of the US Marine Corps from the surface of sea and land into the empty reaches of space. Several dozen men and women were already in the room when Kaitlin and Rob checked through the last security station and walked in, but they were still early. A buffet table to one side provided doughnuts and coffee, and they helped themselves as the crowd quietly milled about, ate, and talked.
Captain Fuentes approached them, coffee cup in hand. “Action briefings the civilized way,” she told them. “Complete with breakfast.”
“Don’t want to get into a firefight on an empty stomach,” Rob said.
“So, what’s the word?” Kaitlin asked, pouring herself a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “Are we going to get clobbered or not?”
“I imagine we’ll hear today,” Fuentes said. “The astronomers’ll have a precise vector for it, and any splinters that got bumped off.” She shook her head. “I still find it hard to believe that we have the power to change the orbit of something like that!”
“Who was it who said, ‘Give me a lever long enough and I’ll move the Earth’?” Rob wanted to know. “Euripides?”
“You rippa-dese, you pay for ’em,” Kaitlin shot back. “Actually, he wrote plays. Archimedes played around with moving the Earth.” She frowned at the thought. What was it about humans, what was it about her that cracked jokes three days before the greatest catastrophe on Earth since the ice ages? Life went inexorably on; maybe people simply weren’t able to face disaster on such a scale squarely.
“I still like the first idea that was floating around the base for a while,” Rob said. He chose a doughnut from a plate, broke off a piece, and ate it—leaning forward carefully to avoid getting powdered sugar on his uniform. “Send in the Marines and blast the thing out of the sky.”
“Not an option now,” Fuentes said. “I heard we won’t have any more Zeus IIs on the ready-pad for a couple of weeks, now. That leaves 1-SAG sitting in the mud, all dressed up with no way to get there.”
“A permanent Marine presence in space,” Rob said. “That’s what we need, and we needed it a year ago.”
“You want to be stationed in space?” Kaitlin asked, smiling. “I hear the liberty is awful. No bars, no cat-houses, no tattoo parlors, no girlie reviews or skin flicks. I mean, what’s a Marine supposed to do with his free time?”
“Well, this special-launch-for-every-mission business stinks,” Rob replied. “If we had SAG teams stationed up there all the time, they’d be in a position to do something right away if some nut-case decides to drop rocks on Earth. The farther away we intercept an incoming rock, the smaller that lever needs to be.”