Semper Mars(108)
Aboard Taka One, Yukio was just about to report that the missile had detonated successfully when the cockpit abruptly filled with a heavenly, glorious light, a blinding, blue-white radiance unlike anything Yukio had ever seen before. He had no time to scream, no time even to feel pain as his helmet visor cracked and his eyes melted and most of his skull burned away.
Then, a tenth of a second later, uneven heating of the cockpit surface shattered the tough plastic, the spaceplane tumbled forward, and the half-megawatt beam ate through to a large tank of liquid oxygen—part of the craft’s fuel-cell reserves—just below and aft of the crew compartment.
2228 hours GMT
The explosion was clearly visible to the men aboard the American military station, even without the telescope, a silent flare of white light against the peaceful blue backdrop of Earth. “Got the bastard!” Dahlgren cried.
Moments later, six projectiles the size of ball bearings smashed through Shepard’s thin hull like bullets fired through cardboard.
Marine Orbital Strike Force
International Space Station
2235 hours GMT
Fuentes was not outside when the Japanese Lightnings were destroyed. The SCRAMjet transport McCutcheon had arrived on schedule, and half of the Marines standing watch over the ISS had gone aboard. A rotation schedule had been set up, allowing the Marines of the MOSF to spend six hours at a stretch inside a pressurized environment where they could take off their armor and enjoy some downtime. Fuentes had stayed outside for as long as her life support could take it, then gone inside with the last rotation.
The initial battle had been savage but mercifully brief, a necessary result of the sheer deadliness of combat in vacuum. Five Marines had been killed. Three more had missed the station in their headlong charge across space or been knocked away by careless bursts from their ATARs, but all of them either had managed to reverse course and make it back to the ISS or, in the case of Private Bagley, had been picked up by the Thornton on Search and Rescue and brought back to the McCutcheon.
The exact number of UN combatants at the ISS was unknown. Three bodies had been recovered, but it was believed that at least two others had been killed as well. The fighting, Fuentes thought, had been eerily like something out of eighteenth-century naval warfare and the very beginnings of the Marine Corps’s history, with troops clinging to the rigging and spars of the station to blaze away at one another, sometimes at almost point-blank range.
With the enemy withdrawn inside the station, the battle had reverted to something out of an even earlier time, the siege of a medieval castle. The attackers couldn’t get in without destroying what they wanted to capture; the defenders couldn’t get out without risking being overwhelmed. Intelligence reports relayed to the Marines from Cheyenne Mountain indicated that a European SCRAMjet orbital transport was apparently being readied at their primary CSG launch site at Kourou in French Guiana.
That transport would have reinforcements—probably too many for the MOSF to handle. Only the presence of the High-Energy Laser aboard Shepard Station was discouraging them from launching. Cheyenne thought that the Japanese fighter attack had been intended to knock Shepard and its laser out, clearing the way for the arrival of UN reinforcements.
And there was one piece of extremely disturbing news. While the rest of the Marines aboard McCutcheon were still cheering the news of the destruction of the Japanese fighters, Captain Fitzgerald, McCutcheon’s commander, had taken her aside and quietly told her that Shepard Station’s radio was off the air—knocked out, apparently, by the impact of several projectiles fired by one of the Japanese space fighters during the attack. That could mean simply that their communications had been knocked off-line. It could also mean, however, that Colonel Dahlgren and Major Lance were dead, the station’s HEL smashed, and the Marine Orbital Strike Force’s one ace in the hole permanently out of the game. There was no way to tell just by looking at the station; it continued to trail the ISS by about twenty kilometers.
But all radio messages from Dahlgren had ceased abruptly at the moment projectiles from the detonated Japanese warhead had swept past the station.
The biggest danger now was that the UN would pick up on the fact that Shepard had fallen silent. According to Fitzgerald, even moving the Thornton over to the Shepard’s vicinity to check out the damage might call unwanted attention to the fact that the laser seemed to be off-line. If the UN decided that it was safe to proceed with the SCRAMjet launch from Kourou, it would only be another hour or so before local space was swarming with enemy troops…or possibly some more fighters similar to those downed by Shepard. The Marines would have no alternative then but to pack up and head back to Earth.