“Which gives us twelve minutes.” Pushing off from the back of the electronicist’s seat with a practiced shove and half turn, he floated across to the main control center and palmed a flat red button. The harsh bray of general quarters sounded through the ship’s hab compartments. He touched the needle mike next to his lips. “All hands, all hands, this is the captain,” he said. “Battle stations! Engineer, prepare for maneuver! Weapons Officer! Ready the laser for firing!”
Sagittaire only carried a complement of eight, but the deck plating and bulkheads carried the rattlings and clatterings of men going to their ready stations so well it sounded like a much larger company. The roll and pitch indicators on the main console’s readouts showed the slight but definite change in the big ship’s attitude as so much mass shifted position inside the ship so quickly.
“Sir!” Abelard said. “I’ve got a fix on the cloud’s central impact point. It’s on 2034L, grid coordinates two-five-three by zero-one-nine.”
Gallois called the data up on his primary display, revealing the potato-shaped asteroid as a topo-relief network of green lines in three dimensions, the impact site flashing red, and columns of numbers scrolling up the side of the screen. Impact—now in eight minutes, thirty seconds—would be at a spot just over the horizon from Sagittaire’s current station. “I’ve got it.” He keyed some figures into the ship’s computer, then watched the result scroll onto the screen. “It looks like they’re attempting a course change on our…baby.”
“Sir?”
“An explosion at that point will give 2034L a delta-v along a new vector. The computer can’t give me precise figures without data on the warhead’s type and size, but my guess is that they’re trying to shove our mountain off course, to make it miss the target.”
Major Yvonne Ponet, the ship’s senior pilot, slid into her seat at the Sagittaire’s thrust controllers, slipping the harness over her shoulders and snugging the belt tight. “Helm ready for orders,” she announced.
“Very well. We will need a delta-v of five meters per second, bearing three-two-zero by zero-zero-eight.”
“Three-two-zero by zero-zero-eight, delta-v five mps. Initiating.” The sound of thrusters firing thumped hollowly through bulkheads, and Gallois felt the slight but definite surge of low acceleration. Slowly, the Sagittaire pivoted…and then came the stronger nudge of her main engine, firing for just an instant with a bump from behind, as though Gallois had been nudged in the back.
“Captain, Main Gun,” the voice of Captain Paul Marichy, the weapons officer, said in Gallois’s headset. “I can’t find a target! Weapon track-and-lock radar is being blocked!”
“Do it manually, if you have to! My guess is that there’s at least one large, chemical warhead behind that chaff cloud, and probably more.”
“What if they’re throwing something heavier at us, Captain?” Abelard asked. He sounded worried.
“Then the bastards are escalating this war. No one has used nuclear weapons in the fighting yet.”
Even so, the question was disquieting. The Americans would be desperate, once they found out that a mountain was about to smash into the heart of their country, with the explosive equivalent of hundreds of megatons of TNT. Such a threat might warrant, in their eyes, a nuclear response….
As an aide to General Bourges, before he’d received his latest command, Colonel Gallois had been privy to some of the EU planning sessions in Brussels and Geneva, and he knew quite a bit about the top-secret ship-construction project at Tsiolkovsky, on the Lunar farside. In his own mind, it would have made far more sense to wait until the Millénium was ready for combat than to tempt the gods of war with Operation Damocles. Once Millénium was ready, the EU would have a sword of terrible, dazzling power, a weapon that would bring the United States to her knees and guarantee both the union and France a solid position of leadership within the UN for the next century, at least.
But then, the generals, the bureaucrats, and the politicians rarely seemed to make sense these days. All a soldier could do was keep quiet and follow his orders in the highly risky assumption that the civilians really did know their asses from rabbit holes, even if they gave the impression at times that they did not.
On the main display, the graphic animation representing Sagittaire was rising slowly from the asteroid, maneuvering now to bring the oncoming chaff cloud, an irregular and ragged blob of translucent red, well above 2034L’s horizon. When the range closed enough, Marichy ought to have a good, clear shot; if he missed, even a chemical explosion could hurl fragments of the asteroid that would sweep through the Sagittaire like shrapnel. And if the warhead was a nuke…