Semper Mars(105)

“Direct military support.” That meant, of course, attacking the American troops now outside the ISS.

Yukio had no wish to kill Americans. He felt trapped, trapped between his orders and that Western part of his soul that loved the United States and Western clothes and the freedoms of speech and thought that Americans took for granted…and Kaitlin.

Kaitlin, forgive me….

But for the smallest of cosmic accidents, her father might have been among the troops attacking the ISS, and one of his targets. In a way, he was attacking her father, since the ISS was Earth’s only orbital spaceport, the only way for him to come home when he returned from distant Mars.

For a time, he stared at the blue curve of the Earth ahead, agleam beneath the sun. For Nihonjin there was but one way to resolve the irresolvable, and that was by clinging to duty, to honor, and to family.

Gimu. Duty.

Shikata. It is the way things are done.

Shikata ga nai. There is no other way. The concept of shikata was a peculiarly Japanese sentiment. For Nihonjin, it was attitude first, then effort, and finally result. “It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game” might easily have been an aphorism first voiced by a Japanese sage.

With a decisive movement, he rotated the console at his side and locked it in place in front of him. He was picking up targets now on the screen, a cluster of objects of some size nearly five hundred kilometers ahead and one hundred kilometers above them.

“I have the cluster on screen, Commander.” His gloved fingers tapped across his touch pad. “Working on best firing solution.”

“Very well.”

The cluster was the main group of manned space stations in low Earth orbit. That big one near the center was the ISS, and the smaller mass near it was an American Star Eagle transport. They were still too distant to pick up the American troops reported to be moving around outside of the station.

Other, smaller targets in the area were free-flying satellite facilities, research platforms, independent space stations owned by the ESA and Japan, sharing an orbit for mutual safety and comfort.

That blip, though, trailing the others by twenty kilometers, was the one Taka Flight was interested in. When he touched it with his cursor and clicked the query spot, the Romanji characters scrolling down the screen told the story: US INDEPENDENT RESEARCH SPACE STATION SHEPARD.

Though her engines were shut down, the fighter continued climbing, hurtling along the outward leg of her elliptical orbit. The launch had been timed perfectly; with only a few gentle course corrections, Iijima had put Taka One into a path that would neatly intercept Shepard in another…twenty-one minutes.

The only difficulty, of course, was that the Americans by this time knew that they were coming.





TWENTY-ONE




TUESDAY, 12 JUNE

Shepard MOP

2223 hours GMT

“Cheyenne Mountain, Shepard,” Colonel Dahlgren said, peering into the telescopic display. “We definitely have visitors…at least two Inaduma-class fighters on intercept. Over.”

“Roger that, Shepard. We concur. We are tracking two birds, launched fifty-three minutes ago from Tanegashima. Intelligence sources report they are definitely hostile…repeat, hostile.” There was a long pause, filled by the hiss of static. “Shepard, you are cleared for defensive operations.”

Dahlgren drew a deep breath. “Copy, Cheyenne. Initiating defensive operations.”

Defensive operations. It sounded so…sterile. Like “force package” or “direct action.” Like a problem in air-combat maneuvers back at the Aerospace Force Academy, a few million years ago….

He looked at Fred Lance, who was listening in on his own headset. Fred shrugged, then looked away. They’d been speculating for hours now on what Japan was going to do. It looked like they had their answer.

So far, Japan had not been an entirely eager participant in the UN campaign to bring the United States to its knees. The Japanese remained one of America’s most active trading partners, despite the various UN-declared embargoes, and they’d argued forcefully in the General Assembly against military action.

Still, the Charter of 2025 required member nations to participate in “military police exercises” at the behest of the UN World Security Council. While Japan maintained the fiction of its so-called Self Defense Force, which it sent abroad only in very special and very carefully controlled situations, the fact remained that Japan’s military space force was as good as or better than that of the ESA. There’d been some question as to whether Japan would honor its treaty commitments to the Charter.

That question, evidently, had just been answered.

“Fire up the program, Fred,” he said. “Let’s see how this sucker works on antiaircraft mode.”