14th October 1984
Inclined High Earth Orbit
Noah, roused from his sleep, descended one deck from the bedroom, did a somersault in mid-air, and entered the command deck. Betty, Paloma, and Sparky were clustered around the bridge's biggest CRT. His skintight spacesuit chafed his neck. Noah hated DEFCON 2 procedures. No hot food, no spin gravity, low air pressure with increased risk of fire (necessary for compatibility with low-pressure skintight suits), living in the darned spacesuits…
"Okay, run the simulation again."
The cathode ray tube screen showed a pair of intersecting trumpet-bell-shaped cones, each representing the presumed maneuvering envelopes of the Tieshan Gongzhu and the Valentina Tereshkova. A pair of circles representing presumed effective weapons ranges appeared around the edges of each cone.
Again, the line representing the Tieshan Gongzhu quickly found itself inside the Valentina's weapons circle.
Sparky shook his head. "We can't outrun the Val. A liquid-core reactor that size, with that much water to burn, can always outrun and outmaneuver us. We shipped out with barely 12,000 m/s of delta-vee, and we have 11,000 left. The Val has 16-20,000 m/s of the stuff."
Noah, still not fully awake, looked puzzled. Sparky reiterated his last point.
"Delta-vee? The amount in meters per second by which we can change velocity, meaning our ability to run, throw missiles, and turn? The stuff they talked about in OCS?"
Noah looked at Sparky, an irritated look on his face.
"I know that." He furrowed his brow. "How did we find out what they were using for propellant?"
Paloma was the first to speak. "We dropped a drone for a closer look. They burned away with maneuvering thrusters. We back-calculated spacecraft mass: It's huge. They kept a big tank meant for liquid hydrogen and filled it with water – which is fourteen times denser than LH2."
Noah raised an eyebrow. "Why on earth are they doing a regular HEO patrol with 20,000 m/s of delta-vee? It's like driving a tanker truck from Calgary to Winnipeg because you're worried you'll run out of gas. You end up spending a lot more on gas!"
Betty looked sheepish. "That's actually why we woke you. We just went on a war alert. The Joint Chiefs don't think the Soviets are posturing anymore. Things are going to heat up, and probably within the next 48 hours."
Betty put her arm on Noah's shoulder. "You might want to send a message home before things start exploding down there."
Sparky crossed his arms. "And we're stuck out here with just two tanks of propellant. If I had four I could run circles around the Val."
Betty watched worriedly as Noah floated over to his station, tired and angry. She needed her crew at 110%, now more than ever, but if Noah was mentally unprepared to shoot at the enemy…
She stopped herself. Heck, nobody was prepared for this. The Joint Government is too powerful; Our military is too advanced; The Soviets have too much to lose; All the wargames say that starting a big war is hard. Or so went the mantras of the advocates of reduced defense budgets.
Even she had believed it. Heck, when she was assigned to deep-space operations, she thought that she would never see combat. Even the most ridiculously up-scaled proxy war would at most involve shoot-downs of the Rods from God platforms and laser-stars in Low Orbit.
A global conventional war, on the other hand, would almost certainly involve the industrial facilities of High Earth Orbit. And the unthinkable scenario of a global thermonuclear war would see SAC's space battleships scream down on Earth to release thousands of thermonuclear warheads.
She had full authorization to use her ship's four nuclear-tipped anti-ship missiles (a regulatory hangover from SAC's nuclear-missile-armed interceptor force). If their use proved necessary, was she prepared to fire them, and unleash more destruction than all the bombs dropped during World War II? If ordered (which would indicate that JOINTGOV was running mind-numbingly low on nuclear deterrent), was she prepared to launch them at Moscow? Warsaw?
Was she prepared, as the saying went, to cross the nuclear threshold?
Paloma tapped her CO's shoulder. "Ma'am? Should we close to engagement range? We probably outgun the Val, and it'll probably help to minimize the amount we need to maneuver."
Sparky shook his head. "If we do that, they might start shooting at us. If the Soviets invade Europe, we'll fight 'em in Europe. We do not want to start the first space war!"
Betty furrowed her brow. She was privy to the results from the most recent war games. The Joint Government's scattered territories (especially the Chinese Administrative Area) had the most to lose if a European war went global. On the other hand, the Joint Government was also much better-equipped to fight a global conventional war than the Soviets, and would probably win a quick global conventional war in other theaters.
The war games had concluded that public opinion – especially from a billion Chinese voters - would probably dictate that the war be confined to Europe if possible. More importantly for Betty, CINCSAC had concurred with that conclusion, and given orders to that effect.
Betty shook her head. "We stay here, and keep the reactor warm."
Noah suddenly jumped up, and the blue globe of Earth appeared on-screen.
"Guys, we've got a launch."
Noah magnified the image, and overlaid tracking data. A thousand dots, each representing a hot tactical ballistic missile rocket motor, appeared on a tracking grid over Eastern Europe. Seconds later, hundreds of dots winked off the screen, destroyed by Brilliant Pebbles and Hellbeamers (High Energy Lasers). Other dots (with friendly IFF tags helpfully tacked on by X-5) began winking in and out as Soviet antisatellite weapons (ASATs) took their toll on defense platforms. Tens of thousands of dots – rocket artillery weapons and divisional ASATs – came next.
Nobody spoke as Noah, Paloma, Sparky, and Betty scrambled to their stations and donned helmets. Similar scenes played out across cis-lunar space as thousands of men and women rushed to prepare for an enemy attack that might or might not come.
An encrypted radio message came in from Chongqing.
"Attention all spacecraft, this is Chongqing. The Soviets have begun conventional combat operations against our forces in Western Europe, and have begun shooting down space weapons platforms in LEO. This is not a drill. As per previous orders, you are not to engage the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces unless fired upon. We're at war now, people. Stay sharp."
Betty, alongside half her crew and hundreds of better-informed military personnel, counted the minutes until impact of the first salvo of IRBMs and SRBMs, even as she frantically double-checked her firing solutions.
Five minutes later, the first Scud warhead burst into a thousand small bomblets over an airfield in West Germany, showering the parked JGAF F/A-22s and Luftwaffe F-15F/Gs with steel-coated carnage.
Similar scenes repeated themselves across the length and breadth of Western Europe as aerospace defense batteries, command centers, bridges, airfields, and other strategic installations were hit by missiles.
No mushroom clouds rose from the wreckage, no lethal chemicals choked or persisted, and no flashes (IR, visible, x-ray, or gamma) were visible from High Orbit.
Betty and Paloma sighed with relief. X-5 chirped, and Noah spoke. "Return salvo outbound."
The radio cracked to life again. "Attention all spacecraft, this is Chongqing. The situation has not changed. Previous directives remain."
As AFCENT got its act together, hundreds of conventionalized Redstone IRBMs and Atlatl hypersonic cruise missiles raced skywards from surviving launch sites in Western Europe, striking targets in Eastern Europe in a similar fashion.
Hundreds more cruise and ballistic missiles surged skywards from surviving Navy ships in the Mediterranean and Baltic, and a fierce missile battle erupted between a Soviet cruiser group and a carrier battle group in the Aegean. Orbital kinetic weapons soon joined in, hurling guided tungsten rods and multi-megawatt laser beams at the combatants and receiving missile fire and sprays of seawater in return. Submarines dueled beneath the seas around Europe, and a total of six submarines – each built at the cost of tens to hundreds of millions of rubles or dollars – would be sunk by the end of the hour.
In the skies over Europe, thousands of aircraft unleashed salvos of missiles upon each other as both sides vied for air superiority. A hundred fell from the sky. It was expected that total aircraft losses over the first four days would amount to a thousand aircraft.
The artillery barrage had yet to lift, but when it did, half a million WARPAC troops would march across the borders of the Czech Republic, and advance a hundred kilometers by the end of the day. A division of JOINTGOV "military advisors" entered Yugoslavia.
Across Europe, firefights were already ongoing around a few airfields, ports, bridges, and strategic installations, as JOINTGOV Special Warfare troops and Soviet Spetsnaz wreaked havoc behind enemy lines. Other special operations personnel, CDO and WARPAC, silently monitored launch sites of enemy nuclear-tipped IRBMs, ready to pounce at the first sign of a launch.
On other fronts, in Guangxi Province, the inter-Manchurian border, the Mongolian border, and Central Asia, JOINTGOV/CDO and SOVIET/COMECON troops faced each other warily, but did not open fire – or, when they did, they stopped as soon as orders came down the command chain. That sometimes took hours, during which hundreds of men and women became casualties.
Betty continued to watch the Valentina Tereshkova, her finger an inch from the fire controls.