15th October 1984
Barents Sea
The escalation had been intentional. The carriers JGS Zhou Enlai and JGS Franklin D. Roosevelt had been forced to retire from the Mediterranean due to heavy damage (the Roosevelt under tow). A REFORGER convoy, escort and all, had been sunk by a Soviet submarine wolf-pack in the North Atlantic.
The Navy needed prestige and wanted payback.
On the 15th, the Navy had been given the go-ahead for Operation RIGMAROLE. A submarine group sank a Soviet surface action group in the Barents Sea. Part of the Arctic Ocean, the Barents Sea was one of the Soviet Navy's bastions – secure seas where Soviet ballistic missile submarines could safely hide, protected by minefields, surface action groups, attack submarines, and aircraft.
The loss of the Soviet surface force allowed JOINTGOV maritime patrol drones and aircraft to briefly operate over the Barents, while navalized FA-22C/Ds and F/A-14F Tomcats from the carriers JGS Deng Xiaoping kept Soviet interceptors at bay.
Guided by top-secret satellite-mounted lidar systems, they hit pay dirt almost immediately.
A Typhoon-class ballistic missile sub, three Delta IV-class ballistic missile subs, and four Kilo-class diesel-electric attack subs were sunk before Soviet surface action groups chased the Navy from the Barents on the morning of the sixteenth. The Navy had lost a destroyer, a frigate, two attack submarines, half a dozen patrol aircraft, and five fighters. Only one pilot was recovered from the icy seas of the Barents before the Navy was forced to leave.
The Politburo was incandescent over the loss of four ballistic missile submarines. The Soviet Navy, unable to locate any JOINTGOV SSBNs against which they could vent their fury, was unable to sate their bloodlust. The Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, however, had plenty of JOINTGOV strategic nuclear assets in plain sight and within striking distance.
16th October 1984
JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu
Inclined High Earth Orbit
Betty was woken from her fitful slumber by the alarm klaxon. Leaping to action, she tore off her blindfold, earmuffs, and travel pillow, stuffing them into a plastic bag attached to her crash couch. Around her, Sparky and Paloma performed reactor startup checks.
"Noah, status report!"
"The Val's maneuvering. She's prepping to burn… No, she's burning! She's raising orbit! Heading for the Vesuvius!"
Betty slammed down her helmet. "Darn it! They weren't scheduled to do that until three hours from now!"
Noah snorted. "They know we have less delta-vee to burn. This inefficient burn puts them at an advantage. Do we give chase?"
Betty nodded. Defending SAC's continent-killing nuclear pulse battleships was top priority for SAC. The loss of the battleships would significantly weaken JOINTGOV's nuclear deterrent, opening JOINTGOV up to a Soviet first strike. Or so went the theorists.
"Sparky, follow that ship! Noah, tightbeams to Vesuvius and Chongqing! Paloma, we're going on suit air! Depressurize on my mark!"
Betty slammed against the side of her crash couch as Sparky burned methane, and felt her body weigh something again as the ship accelerated. A male voice came in through the crew's helmet speakers.
"JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu, this is Chongqing. We've got you and the bandit on screen. You have permission to engage the bandit the moment he shoots."
Betty grunted as she connected her air hose to her seat supply. Chongqing had obviously decided on a more aggressive stance. "Are we all on suit air?"
Four voices chimed in the affirmative. "Paloma, depressurize!"
"Depressurizing. Air's going in the tanks. Reactor's stable. Weapons hot."
Noah turned his head. "Vesuvius on the line."
"Iron Fan Princess, this is Vesuvius. We've changed course so that you can get between us and the bandit. See you in an hour."
"Roger that, Vesuvius. By the way, we go by Tieshan Gongzhu."
"Solid copy, Iron Fan Princess. Over and out."
Betty, scared out of her wits, tried to laugh. "Bastard keeps using the English translation!
Her crew chuckled, and Noah raised his head in fear-addled mirth. "Makes us sound like some kind of manga character!"
Paloma laughed as she monitored the ship's systems. "We are some kind of manga character! The kickass Iron Fan Princess blows the Monkey King and his fellow travelers a thousand klicks away with her superpowered mystical hand fan in Journey to the West. She loses to the main characters in the end, but all cool villains do."
Betty chuckled. "It's Chinese, not Japanese. Okay, people. Let's blow those Soviets right out of the sky!"
"Hooah!"
16th October 1984
JGSS Tieshan Gongzhu
Inclined High Earth Orbit
Noah watched as the Val made course adjustments with thrusters. "Valentina Tereshkova closing to weapons range. 1200 klicks… 1195… 1190…"
Around him, his three crewmates performed various tasks, faces hidden behind helmets and the darkness of the command module. All were intently focused on the cathode-ray-tube screens in front of them. The red blackout lights of the command module, designed to preserve night vision and enable viewing of dim monitors, added to the palpable sense of foreboding.
"Sparky, can you get us closer?"
Sparky shook his head. "Unless you want to burn a lot of water, this is as close as we get for the next half-hour."
Betty nodded, and pressed a button on her suit radio. "Vesuvius, you may commence your positioning burn."
"Roger that, Iron Fan Princess. Stand by for burn."
A thousand kilometers away, a chain of nuclear explosions went off, each accelerating the 5000-tonne nuclear-bomb-propelled battleship by 50 m/s. The Val burned to reorient.
An alarm beeped, and Paloma killed it. "Radiation alarm. Harmless."
Betty nodded. The "armored", heat-shielded, reentry-capable command capsule would protect them from x-rays created by distant nuclear explosions.
Sparky's squeaky voice came in over the suit radio. "Chief, we're in position!"
Paloma turned to Betty, alarmed. "Attack run, attack run! The Val's burning toward us at three gees!"
Betty cursed the JOINTGOV trade negotiators who had authorized the transfer of liquid-core nuclear rocket technology to the Soviets in exchange for half a billion barrels of Soviet oil. The Tieshan Gongzhu could barely make one gee fully fuelled.
Paloma began yelling. "Vampire, Vampire, Vampire! Fifteen missiles, new type! They're not burning very fast, but that probably means they're high-impulse birds!"
Vampire was the brevity code for enemy anti-ship missile.
Noah smashed down on the ECM button. "Enemy jammer, enemy jammer! Countering! Music on!"
Betty worked her console. "Salvo Fox two. Antimissiles away. Salvo Fox Two. Bruisers away."
Her crew's voices sounded tinny on Betty's too-loud suit speakers. She cursed combat depressurization protocols. The deck shook slightly as many metric tons of ordinance detached from the Tieshan Gongzhu. Solid boost motors boosted octets of anti-ship missiles – bruisers - towards the Val at fifty gees while antimissiles plodded leisurely forward on maneuvering thrusters.
X-5 beeped, and found a new frequency. Noah tried to image the Val, but his screen filled with flashing lights.
"Light jammer! Light Jammer! Filtering!" The enemy had jammed their lidar and telescope.
Paloma could not believe her screen (still online thanks to the efforts of Noah and X-5). At the speed they were going, the vampires should have burned out a minute ago. "Vampires still burning! Closing fast! What on earth are they using for boost motors!"
Noah could have smacked himself if it hadn't been for the helmet. "They're using nuclear rocket motors on their vampires! The cylinders on the Val were missile propellant tanks!"
Paloma hastily imaged the plume with the spectrometer. Hot hydrogen. Not hot enough. Solid core nuclear rocket. "Noah's right!"
Betty got on the line. "Vesuvius, enemy is employing NTR missiles, repeat, vampires have NTRs and delta-vees of potentially sixteen thousand m/s. Chongqing, Vesuvius, confirm copy!"
How much had the Soviets spent on putting expensive nuclear rocket engines on throwaway missiles? Even SAC's cash-flush bean counters had deemed the concept uneconomical!
The bright side of this was Betty wouldn't have to worry about deciding when to command-detonate her missiles – the Soviet missiles would reach her first.
"This is Chongqing, we copy. You have permission to shoot down the bandit."
"Vesuvius copies."
Paloma spoke again. "Missile buses have split! Two hundred eighty eight bogies! Impact with us sixty seconds! Impact with Vesuvius one hundred seconds!"
Betty exhaled. The bogies would spend 20-40 seconds in range of the lasers - far fewer than previously expected, and inadequate to destroy all the bogies with certainty.
She modified the trajectories of her own anti-ship missiles, and reassigned half her missiles to anti-missile duty.
Paloma turned her head. "Betty? With barely sixty missiles after her, the Val's going to shoot them all down."
"Watch your screen, Lieutenant Ramirez! Prioritize missiles inbound for us!"
A hit on the Tieshan Gongzhu would mean less firepower available to shoot down the missiles inbound to the Vesuvius.
"Missile crossover in five, four, three, two, one…"
Betty watched as her salvo of missiles and the enemy missiles closed at six hundred kilometers. Forty pairs of missiles collided, blossoming into pinpoints of light.
Noah yelled. "Betty! The bandit's still inbound! One thousand klicks and still burning!"
A shriek came through Noah's helmet speakers. "They just jammed us again! Countering… Never mind! Dropping probes and decoys!"
For all the good it did the Tieshan Gongzhu, Noah was reasonably certain that he was jamming the enemy's radars and communications. The intensity of the enemy's ECM, however, had taken him by surprise.
"Laser on! 1 down. 2. 3. 4." Paloma began counting the bogeys shot down, and Noah fought the urge to close his eyes as he focused on hosing the inbound missiles with infra-red jammers and false radar returns. A few stupid missiles, infra-red cameras blinded by flashing IR lasers and unable to find any shapes, fell for the trick, peeling away towards the decoys.
Betty yelled for Sparky to gun it, and Noah was pressed into his seat by two-thirds of a gee of acceleration. This would force enemy missiles to either attack the Vesuvius or the Tieshan Gongzhu, but also rendered decoys useless.
It's hard to outshine a twenty-gigawatt reactor.
Theoretically, a three-megawatt 190 nm UV free-electron laser with a 5-m mirror is an unbeatable death ray with stupendous range. At five hundred kilometers – a little less than the distance between Winnipeg and Moose Jaw - such a laser can burn through five centimeters of titanium armor plate per second. Because laser effectiveness increases exponentially with decreasing distance, at one hundred kilometers, this increases to six meters of titanium per second.
In practice, against spinning, mirror-buffed, and maneuvering missiles with fuel tanks less than a millimeter thick, such a laser is only effective at about two or three hundred kilometers – especially when fired from a jinking platform.
Paloma was counting off five or six missiles per second now. The autocannon swung to track missiles.
Paloma's voice was tight. "Fifteen seconds to impact…"
Betty blinked. If this was a provocation – which, given that the enemy had expended some very expensive hardware, was unlikely – the enemy missiles would back off any second now. If this was an engagement… it would probably end up in the history books. As an incident if they were lucky, as the opening shots of a war if they were not.
"Sparky, jink thrusters. Brace for impact!"
Computer-controlled systems have much superior reaction times to humans. In the space of three seconds, the autocannon mounted opposite the laser on the Tieshan Gongzhu's spine had directed eighteen bursts of fire at the nearest twenty-one surviving missiles (all coming from approximately the same direction). The caseless autocannon rounds were not decoy infra-red emitters this time, but spinning mesh rounds which expanded into four-meter-wide spinning nets in the airless vacuum of space. Travelling at the slowpoke speed of one kilometer per second, they would intercept enemy projectiles tenths of a second from impact.
The surviving handful of Soviet projectiles never gave them the chance. At forty kilometers, they detonated into unstoppable clouds of ball-bearings.
"Buckshot, buckshot, buckshot!"
Sparky pressed hard on the stick, and Betty was thrown upwards against her seatbelt. Missiles might have been able to follow the tiny last-minute maneuver, but dumb buckshot could not.
A ghastly ripping noise rang through Betty's chair, alarm klaxons blared, and Betty felt the sensation of freefall return.
The Tieshan Gongzhu was dead in the water.
