"You lot bed down, I'll watch for a couple of hours," offered Aswon. "We should plan to do the bare minimum today – try to limit food and water intake to what you need, and don't do any unnecessary activity. Should prevent heat build-up, cut down on the risk of us being spotted and limit our exposure." Nobody argued – they all knew that he could get by on only a few hours of sleep a day and be perfectly fine, while the rest of them needed six to eight hours, and they'd long since given up arguing. Shimazu especially was fine with bedding down and getting some sleep – carrying the others had been wearisome, even for someone of his fitness, especially in conjunction with the tension of the situation. Never knowing if you'd somehow made a sound that would tip off a listening enemy.
Soon the steel grating that made up the launch tower was covered in survival mats, and the team were trying their best to get comfortable – and discovering that while their high-tech thermal mats were great at insulating them from the cold floor, they were rubbish at holding a shape over metal grating with 25mm gaps between the slats, and they were soon tossing and turning, trying to get comfortable. After some experimentation Hunter found that putting down his alternate change of clothes over the mat but under his sleeping bag gave just enough padding and protection to make it comfortable enough to sleep, and the rest soon followed suit.
Aswon ignored the movement behind him, keeping a careful watch out of the side of the tower, scanning with his scope in a slow, methodical and patient sweep all around them. Occasionally, he would spot a flicker of movement, mostly the wind rustling the odd bit of scrubby growth. At most he saw a mouse, or something that looked very much like it, scurrying from a plant to an earthen mound and disappearing quickly. Other than that he saw no signs of life in the vast open space, and he resigned himself to watching as the sun slowly crawled up and over the horizon, starting on the gentle arc through the sky.
The skies were clear, but not the azure blue he was expecting – instead it was a stained and slightly brown affair that filled the heavens above him, and he wondered just what manner of toxins and pollutants filled the air, and he checked the seal on his gas-mask one more time, just to be certain.
The sun beat down upon the landscape, keeping it dry though not particularly warm and the sky remained clear, not even the faintest wisp of cloud visible through the polluted haze. Their elevated position meant they caught a fair amount of wind, but at least they were far enough up that almost no sand was being carried by the gusts, and they weren't pelted with the fine grains on a constant basis.
Around ten am, Aswon saw a train arrive, backing up to the launch pad slowly and coming to a halt. At this range his binoculars could make out only the grossest of details, but it seemed to trigger a bustle of activity at the launch pad. Over the next few hours, massive crane arms swung into position and the rocket was slowly lifted from the horizontal position to a vertical one, swung onto the pad through some massive mechanism and then clamped into place on the launch tower, which seemed to be a functional sibling to the one they were hiding in – though far more modern and slender from what he could determine. During the operation, he took some images, trying to get a picture every thirty seconds or so and building up a library that could be converted into a time-lapse video later.
He also spotted vehicles moving, establishing some kind of patrol route around the pad, perhaps a kilometre out. Unlike the dune buggy they'd seen on the perimeter, these were slower and seemed bulkier – more likely to be armoured personnel carriers or possibly even light tanks – it was hard to tell from this range, and the undulating terrain meant he caught only glimpses of them as they crested a ridge or rise.
Now that the sun was well and truly up, he also took a little time to check out the area around their own pad – confirming their earlier suspicions that the pad had long since been abandoned. The fence was sagging in places and had an air of age to it – though little was rusty, given the dry conditions and the constant sand-blasting they received from the local environment. The gate was locked shut with a heavy chain, and there were no signs of footprints or tyre marks anywhere around them though, so they did seem to be reasonably safe.
The rest of the team started to rouse in the early afternoon – not well-rested given the comfort of the platform, but having had at least six hours of fitful sleep they were somewhat refreshed and more than capable of sitting around and doing nothing. Eating cold rations was a dreary affair, but they didn't dare use a fire or even any of the chemical heat blocks to warm up their food – combined with the fact that the air had a noticeable chemical tang to it when they took off their masks to cram in a few mouthfuls of food. All of them had red marks around their faces now from the tight seals on the masks, and were uncomfortable and slightly irritable as a result, but at least they didn't actually need to communicate much, and most of the afternoon was spent in sullen silence, each of the team keeping watch or doing some reading between shifts on the binoculars or various optics.
Marius pulled out his deck and set up a couple of receivers, and after double and then triple-checking that he had everything locked down and nothing was capable of transmitting, powered up his systems and idly scanned across the various frequencies, listening out for traffic, drone signals, ground to air communication or any other signals that might be useful to them later. He found one signal broadcasting on the guard frequency, one of the default bands of the RF spectrum that was allocated for global air communication – and that was programmed into every plane or flight capable vehicle as a consequence.
"You may want to listen to this." He said gently, keeping his voice low. As the others drifted over he gradually increased the volume on his receiver until they could just about hear the message, being broadcast in Russian at first, then repeated in English.
"Warning – this is a restricted area. This area is owned and operated by Saeder-Krupp Space Systems. Permission to overfly this area is specifically denied. Corporate defences have been placed around this area, and are authorised to shoot down any and all intruders. All commercial and private entities are instructed to stay clear of the following area." The message rattled off a set of co-ordinates and Hunter plotted them on the map, quickly setting out an exclusion zone that covered a good four hundred kilometres in all directions, covering over half the distance to Tashkent and most of the way to Nukus – but all in desert areas with no villages or towns to speak of.
"Good job we kept low on the way in. I'm not sure they can actually enforce that, legally speaking. Even if they own most of the desert around the cosmodrome, there's still the New Silk Road – they may have been a major sponsor of that, but they don't own it."
"True, Aswon, but if you were a commercial pilot, would you want to risk it?"
"Probably not, Marius, probably not. You found anything else?"
"Nein. I am sure the APCs are probably communicating, but they are keeping their power down or staying passive – I get nothing from any of the bearings we have observed."
"They probably do try and keep the area fairly sterile for launches, I would guess – so they can listen in for faults or systems misbehaving."
"That would make sense. You would not want to drown out any signals or equipment that was malfunctioning."
"Talking about drowning out signals… we're going to be here for most of a day, right?" Tads asked. The others nodded and she continued. "I wondered if it was worth putting up a ward. We should have enough power and control between us to overcome the background corruption here and put up a defensive barrier – and we all know how to make it almost invisible and impossible to spot at range. It would keep the area around us much clearer, and we can destroy it on the way out easily enough… probably."
"I don't like the sound of that!" Kai exclaimed, then spoke more quietly when the others glared at him. "What do you mean by 'probably'. That doesn't sound like you're entirely sure!"
"Well, any magical barrier is going to create a shadow in astral space, even after its destroyed. A memory, if you will, of what was once there. Like when I cast my spells, it leaves a fingerprint behind that can be tracked and traced – so would a ward. It would fade and decay, and be even harder than usual to detect out here, but it would be around. And there's a clean spot to worry about as well."
"What's that?"
"Well, if we put up a ward to keep the filthy and polluted bits out, it'll be cleaner and nicer in here. And that will make it brighter and clearer, and look wrong to anyone looking. Like if we washed just one bit of your clothing and made a clean patch – it'll stand out against the rest of the dirt much more than normal."
"Ahh, gotcha. In that case I think we'd best not. Much as I'd like to be able to take this frakking mask off, I don't think the risks are worth it."
Hunter, meanwhile, had connected up his deck to the sat-phone and was patiently waiting while it downloaded some news items, relying on the base carrier wave and passive connections to ensure that they didn't radiate any kind of signal. It made for a very slow download speed, but meant there were no betraying emissions at all – they were just collecting the stream of data broadcast to any devices that were listening.
"Looks like Seattle had some kind of power cut." He started with, scanning the news story as it appeared on his system. "Woah – not just a small one. Apparently the entire metroplex lost power for two days. That's pretty unhead of. Wanna bet that was as a result of some shadow activity?"
"Seems a bit extreme. Two days without a fix? Someone's going to be facing the chop for that!" Kai responded.
"You may not be wrong – I think it was Shiawase that was responsible for the power grid, so they've got the whole honour and tradition thing going on. Wouldn't surprise me if the manager in charge of the division has decided to take his own life as a result."
"Really?"
"Really. Well, so rumour has it, about 50% of them have got the balls to actually go through with it and try to reclaim honour for the corp."
"And the other 50%?"
"Well, they do it too after meditating for a while – at least according to the PR handouts. Just in actuality, someone has to 'help steady the knife'…"
"Well, someone just got paid a boat-load of cash if they pulled that job off."
"I do not think it would be just one team." Marius added. "There are too many nodes, too many systems. Redundant pathways, alternate routes, backup systems. Something as critical as the power grid for a major metroplex has multiple layers of redundancy and protection. I cannot see how it could be compromised by one set of people alone. Many people, acting in concert – maybe. But not one team. The scope is too broad."
"Well, someone has deep pockets then. What do you think – someone trying to get control of the contract for providing power, making out that the Shiawase can't handle it?"
"That is the most plausible theory I can think of, Kai." Marius rubbed his chin a little as he stared off into the distance. "As to which of the other nine mega-corps were bankrolling this – who knows. They all could be in the running for such a thing. There are even a few of the smaller double-A corps that might be able to pull something like this off if they focussed their resources." Marius glanced over at Hunter as he gave a deep, long sigh. "What? They could – they are smaller, but much more tightly focussed."
"It's not that. It's the next news story – just finished downloading. The big news story of the day – just broken. Announced from the Zurich Orbital – the Corporate Court has announced the foundation of a new organisation - the 'Grid Overwatch Division' – gee, I wonder how long it took them to come up with those letters – a cross-jurisdictional law enforcement division with responsibility for matrix security and stability."
"Police force for the computer?"
"Worse than that, Tads. International police, with the ability to chase you around the world."
"How is that even going to work, though?" Aswon looked confused.
"Reading between the lines, it looks like they will have agents drawn from all of the big-ten corps, and maybe some talented types from the minors, armed with cutting edge decks and nova-hot utilities, that are authorised to pursue intruders into restricted hosts all the way across the grid. So even if you deck out of a Renraku system back onto an SK public grid, then hop across back to your regional grid run by Ares… they're still allowed to and able to follow you. They'll have access codes for all the PLTGs, and can get on and off them with full attack loads. That's going to make decking runs much, MUCH harder from now on – assuming it's not all a load of bollocks anyway. And there's enough detail in here that makes me think it's not. Drek…"
Hunter went into more detail, until most of the team had gone cross-eyed trying to keep up with his description of sprites, security tallies, admin codes, root-kits, stack overflows and buffer underruns and he tailed off, repeating his statement that hacking was likely to be harder now, and considerably more dangerous.
They chatted more as the light steadily faded, turning afternoon into evening, analysing the news stories that gradually filtered down from the sat-link, discussing them in far more detail than they would normally, just to keep their brains from frying as they stared out at the seemingly endless nothing in all directions bar the launch pad – upon which the assembled rocket now stood lit by floodlights from a dozen different directions. Occasionally they saw something fall from the rocket, sliding down with sudden speed and disappearing out of sight – Hunter told them it was likely sheets of ice from the fuel systems that were normally super-cooled, making moisture freeze on the metallic skin of the rocket.
The temperature dropped as night fell, and the wind picked up a little – lowering the felt temperature even more. Though he'd originally been in favour of the team spreading out to keep their heat signatures diffuse, it was starting to get cold enough to worry Aswon, and by eleven that night he was rousing people from their miserable dozes and getting them to congregate together, forming a nest of bodies. Hunter drew the short straw and was on the windward side to start with, his body forming a barrier against the biting winds and lying uncomfortably with the heat leeching from his back while the others managed to doze off. Every two hours they rotated though, and the person in the middle moved out to the edge, while the rest of the team rolled inwards, giving everyone a turn in the warm for a while, and as the wind-break for a while.
Stars rotated in the sky, moving in a slow arc as the world turned. Tads looked up at them, tracing the familiar patterns she'd grown up with subtly distorted by the transposition south from her homelands.
"Why are they twinkling? All of them? They look like they're flickering?"
"Pollution. I would imagine it's something to do with the temperatures and the eco-system around here – what's left of it anyway. It must keep all the gasses and toxins contained over the desert, filling the air and making the light scatter." Hunter lifted his mask and gave a cautious sniff, letting his chemical analyser take a fresh sample. "Yeah, lots of complex molecules, toluene, hydrochlorofluorocarbons, benzene derivatives, ammonium perchlorates, hydroxyl-terminated polybutadienes… all kinds of good stuff. And by good stuff, I mean stuff that will rot your lungs and make your brain see stuff that isn't there."
"But… they looked so pretty. And now I know it's all for a bad reason…" Tads sounded disappointed, and tried to go back to sleep – finding it difficult being stretched out and sandwiched between Kai and Marius, rather than curled up into a tiny ball as she normally did. Inside her gas-mask her bottom lip protruded slightly as she grouched and wiggled, trying to get comfortable, before drifting back to sleep, occasionally murmuring about polluters and how they should be forced to live in their own mess…
The dawn eventually came, bringing with it the first faint rays of sunlight and a glimmer of warmth – barely a rise in temperature, but welcome after the freezing cold of the long night. They could still see the patrols cruising around the launch pad at irregular intervals – presumably they had been rotated through the night, and no doubt their crews were looking forward to a comfy bed, hot meal and a nice shower after their shift…
Hunter had left his deck on overnight, downloading a trickle of news stories and he searched through the waiting media now, looking for any information about the rocket launch. Nothing was listed for Saeder-Krupp specifically, but there was a segment on the probe race as a whole, detailing the efforts of the corporations seeking to get a probe to meet up with the comet, and the various sizes and styles of probes being sent. Alongside the talking heads from science foundations describing the difficulty of intercepting Halley's comet and the kinds of things they would find, they also had a number of "counter-views", which mostly seemed to be crackpots of various sects and religions who claimed that disturbing the comet would lead to the end of the world, or that it would disturb the giant dragon inside – because the comet was actually an inter-galactic space egg. Or contained a horde of parasitical alien beings which would hitch a ride back on any probe that landed there and come back to destroy the earth.
They sounded crazy, of course, and were no doubt included just for the ratings they'd get – but with the craziness of the world over the last fifty years, it couldn't be ruled out entirely that they were all dead wrong. Nobody had seen the awakening and the return of magic to the world but a few fringe cultures that had kept their shamanic traditions alive, and before the Awakening they had all been dismissed as crackpots too. Add in the plagues that had ravaged the world, the birth of the matrix arising out of the crash of the internet, the development of cyber and bio technology to undreamt of levels and the birth of the various meta-variants of humanity that now were taken as normal – at least as long as you weren't buying the Humanis propaganda – and suddenly the idea that the comet could be a lump of magic space rock that could spell disaster for humanity didn't seem quite so far-fetched…
Once they'd eaten another depressingly cold meal, Aswon motivated them to start clearing up, relocating their rucksacks down near the ground level with all their kit packed up and ready to go at a moment's notice. He swept across the stair-cases and landings carefully, checking for litter, scuffs, marks, stains or debris that would indicate they'd been here, cleaning (or dirtying) any signs he found and making sure nothing was going to be left behind. The others grumbled a little, but nobody argued – if this job did end up doing something that harmed or affected the launch, nobody was under any apprehensions about how pissed off Saeder-Krupp would be, and just how far they'd be chased!
By 9:15, they could spot more activity at the rocket – but it was far enough away to be indistinct and impossible to make out details, and they couldn't tell what was going on – just that it was. Plenty of the activity was centred around the top of the rocket, and Aswon speculated that this might be a manned launch, rather than an automated one, but they had no real way of telling. The increase in activity prompted them to increase their surveillance though, and they made sure someone was on each of the scopes or set of binoculars they had, while others kept watch on the wider area and tried to keep track of the armoured vehicles and their movements. At 9:45, half an hour before the scheduled launch time they heard a klaxon sounding, the note undulating up and down in a mournful-sounding tone – but at a volume fit to wake the dead. It carried clearly over the ten kilometres to the tower and must have been painfully loud at the site. Clearly, nobody would ever have the excuse that they 'hadn't heard the warning'…
"Oh drek. Everyone! Get ready to move – we have an APC coming our way – heading straight for us!" Aswon adjusted the scope and watched as the APC crested the ridgeline and continued to head in their direction, slowly dropping down until it was mostly concealed as it drove across a shallow valley.
"Hang on – look – pan left, Aswon. There's another one, heading out but in a different direction. One to the right as well, about thirty degrees." She gestured out with a pair of outstretched arms, and Aswon swung to look down those bearings, spotting identical looking vehicles heading out from the launch pad.
"Well, if that rocket is gonna launch, you don't want anyone sitting nearby in a vehicle – not unless you want it throwing around all over the place. Makes sense to move them out of the way." Hunter pointed out. "And probably good to push the perimeter out as well, this close to launch time. Just in case. As long as they don't come all the way over…"
"That does make sense. And if you're right, they'll find a balance between being safe and outside the rocket blast from the rocket, and being close enough together to maintain line of sight to their neighbours and to cover the ground in-between." Aswon watched as the APC continued to grow in size, advancing over the ground at a steady pace until it finally drew to a halt about five kilometres away – roughly half-way between the team and the rocket. He was about to speak when Marius glanced up suddenly and held his hand up for silence.
"Keep still, hold positions. Incoming aircraft. I am detecting active sensor emissions. Powerful search radars and others." He gestured with a hand to the north, keeping the rest of himself as still as possible and shuffling to the side by a small amount to shield his body from the approaching dots in the sky with some of the gantry struts. The rest of the team hunkered down quickly as well, watching as the black dots grew quickly into the sleek and deadly looking silhouettes of jet-interceptors, wings laden with missiles that flew towards them in a line. They were fairly low, only a few thousand metres up, and probably separated by around three kilometres, flying line abreast in formation directly over the rocket pad, clearing a corridor thirty kilometres wide with their sensors and scanners.
The team watched as they flew past, wondering if they were going to be picked up or if the massive tower was going to shield them from the questing probes of the high-tech aircraft. They didn't spot a change in the formation, or even a wobble in the nearest aircraft indicating that they might have spotted something, and the jets flew on, maintaining their formation as they continued to the south, dwindling into black dots and then disappearing entirely.
"If they had detected us, that APC would be moving by now – it looks like the tower has shielded us." Marius checked his systems again, scanning passively and once more making sure his systems were locked down tight and couldn't emit any kind of signal that would lead to their detection. "Carrier waves, the repeating message about the airspace. Encrypted communications between the APCs. Much the same as before. I think we are good to go."
"Well, I think we want to wait until seconds before the launch before turning that thing on – the less time we have for it to be kicking out a signal, the better." Aswon said.
"What about the calibration and stuff – it took a few minutes to run through the tests before. It might take that long again."
"But why, Hunter? It's already done that? Why would it do it again?"
"Well, for starters it's been packed in a box and lugged over thirty kilometres of desert. And more importantly, you have no idea how bad some program design can be. It we tell it it's not a test, it's likely gonna do the same thing anyway, just to be sure!"
"That's stupid!"
"Welcome to my world…" Hunter gave a deep sigh. "It's probably a good thing though – the number of exploits you can use with a good masking chip that are as a result of idiotic behaviour programmed in by someone making short-sighted decisions is the only thing keeping most hackers in a job…"
"Right, fine… well, we've got about fifteen minutes until they are ready for final launch preparations. When should we set it up?"
"Now, please," Kai said, his normal grin missing. "We have once chance at this. If we miss it, we blow the mission. I'd rather it sit ready for a few minutes on standby with a chance of us being detected, than be doing its test routine when the rocket launches and we miss it." Aswon looked somewhat defiant still, but saw Hunter nodding in agreement with Kai.
"Marius – you want to do the honours?" Hunter nudged.
"Why me?"
"Well, you're the most skilled with electronics out of all of us. Sure, it's got a computer, and if that breaks, I'll look at it. But otherwise it's a big mass of electronics and servos and shit – and that's all you…"
Marius sighed and approached the designator.
"Try to be gentle with it when you're entering commands. I spent about ten minutes getting it lined up on the right spot and getting it perfectly set." Aswon warned. Marius nodded and keyed the system alive, waiting for the screen to finish the internal diagnostics and run through the startup sequence.
[ARE YOU PERFORMING A SYSTEMS TEST? KEY 1 FOR YES, 2 FOR NO]
Marius grabbed a piece of loose strut that had fallen from the tower, and wedged it in front of the emitter, blocking the line of sight to the launch pad. Aswon meanwhile leant in and took a note of the various readings, checking the bearings the emitter was currently locked onto. When he moved back out of the way, Marius gently hit the 2 key, and then moved out of the way as the system went through the same physical test process as before – panning left and right, up and down and then working through the extremes of movement in a smooth motion.
[PHYSICAL CALIBRATION COMPLETE. DISABLE ANY JAMMING FOR GPS SIGNAL LOCK. SYSTEM TEST WILL TAKE 15 SECONDS]
[SEEKING SATELLITE.]
[SEEKING SATELLITE.]
[SEEKING SATELLITE.]
"Why's it taking so long?" Tads asked. "Is it broken?"
"No. The tower is blocking the signal. The same thing that has kept us safe from the jet overflight and any airborne surveillance.
[ SATELLITE 1 FOUND. LOCKING SIGNAL.]
[SEEKING SATELLITE.]
The system repeated the message several times, taking even longer to acquire the signal around the massive metal structure they had set up in.
[SATELLITE 2 FOUND. LOCKING SIGNAL.]
[SEEKING SATELLITE. SATELLITE 3 FOUND. LOCKING SIGNAL.]
[SEEKING SATELLITE. SATELLITE 4 FOUND. LOCKING SIGNAL.]
The locks on the third and the fourth satellites took longer than before as well, though they were slightly quicker than the first two satellites this time.
[TIME UPDATE COMPLETE. DRIFT COMPENSATION FACTOR COMPLETE. ALTITUDE CORRECTION COMPLETE. JITTER COMPENSATION COMPLETE.]
[LOCATION ACQUIRED 46.1041334, 63.0080462. CHECK LOCATION ACCURACY IS ACCURATE. KEY 1 FOR YES, 2 FOR NO]
Hunter moved to one side of the platform to check his own GPS, making sure he could see the sky more easily and get a lock relatively quickly. Marius headed to the other side and checked his own. When they accounted for the distance between them, the designator seemed to have their location nailed down perfectly, and Marius keyed in 1 to the system.
[GPS SYSTEM TEST COMPLETE.]
[ATTACH ALL BATTERY MODULES. KEY 1 WHEN COMPLETE]
Marius looked down and visually confirmed all the batteries were still attached, from when they'd initially set up the system, then tapped another 1 into the keypad.
[CHECKING CHARGE LEVELS.]
[CELL 1...97% CAPACITY. CELL 1 ONLINE]
"What would it do that it needs that much power?"
"I don't know, Tads. Maybe it's for redundancy? Like Kai said a few minutes ago, it'd be a shame to get this far and fail for having a dead battery." Aswon leant in and checked the alignment of the emitter, then swore under his breath – the calibration had knocked it off target and it was aiming past the rocket now. He carefully started to align it again, slowly tapping the housing and adjusting the digital readouts with minute movements to get it back on target.
[CELL 2...100% CAPACITY. CELL 2 ONLINE]
"I mean – it could be a laser. But ten kilometres in atmosphere is tough. Really tough. So much scatter…"
[CELL 3...100% CAPACITY. CELL 3 ONLINE]
"Especially here, with all the pollutants and muck in the air, and sand and stuff."
[CELL 4...100% CAPACITY. CELL 4 ONLINE]
"That very much depends on the type of laser, though. It is possible that an x-ray laser or something operating in a different wavelength to the visible spectrum might not be as badly affected." Marius countered.
[CELL 5...ERROR READING CELL LEVELS RETRYING... ERROR. CELL 5 OFFLINE]
"Drek!" Marius bent down and checked the terminals on cell five. It looked to be connected to the neighbouring units fine, and there was no sign of obvious damage. He pulled out his multi-meter and placed the probes over the terminals.
"Getting good voltage – but no current. That is not right…"
[CELL 6...100% CAPACITY. CELL 6 ONLINE]
"Maybe the cell is defective, or was not fully charged?" He mused.
[CELL 7...100% CAPACITY. CELL 7 ONLINE]
"Or perhaps it is a manufacturing defect. I have no idea on the impact of this though."
[CELL TEST COMPLETE. POWER LEVELS EXCEED REQUIRED THRESHOLDS.]
[CONNECT EXTERNAL DATA STORAGE UNITS]
Marius checked the slots, making sure the optical chips inserted the previous day were still secure. The system was well ahead of him, though, and had queried the media already and a small activity light next to the reader was flashing furiously.
[I/O DEVICE FOUND. FORMATTING STORAGE. FORMAT COMPLETE.]
The system paused for a moment, then cleared the screen, before displaying a new message.
[ARE YOU READY TO ENGAGE FINAL SEQUENCE? KEY 1 FOR YES, 2 FOR NO]
"Is this lighting up the target, do you think?" His hand hovered over the keypad, hesitating to push the button.
"I guess so. It's not entirely clear… we've still got a minute or two before launch time. Enough time to scrub if they detect something." Aswon checked down his scope, examining the rocket and seeing more material sliding off the upper stage – a sure sign that the fuelling process was done and that ice was forming on the outside of the rocket body.
"I shall have to wait then!" Marius curled his finger back into his fist, and stood still. "The question is – for how long."
"Do it. We don't know how much more of this nonsense there is, and we can't risk blowing the mission." Kai said again. He wasn't using any of his powers, but he sounded definite, so Marius took a deep breath and extended his finger once more, then gently pressed the '1' key on the pad.
[LASER ACQUISITION MODE. PREPARING LOW INTENSITY SPOTTING BEAM. KEY 1 WHEN READY]
A tiny sliver of low power laser light illuminated a spot on the strut of steel in front of the emitter. Marius moved around to remove it and allow the aiming laser to reach out towards the target while Aswon moved in to verify the aim point.
"It's a hair off target. Adjusting now…" Aswon adjusted the device carefully, making increasingly small movements until he was just tapping at the emitter with a fingernail to provide just enough force for the minute movement needed to adjust the laser over a few centimetres on the rocket body.
"Can we leave the batteries when we're done do you think?" Tads asked. "I mean they make up more than half the weight of the thing, and if we need to move fast, it would really help to leave it behind."
"I don't think so. At least here it's not because we're worried about polluting the place – that ship has already sailed. But I'm more worried about leaving evidence behind that might be useful to track either us or our employer."
"Well, can we throw them over the side then? As a way to destroy them?" She paused for a second, then sniggered to herself slightly. "Of if it all goes horribly wrong, maybe you can use them as missiles – you are a pretty good shot after all." Aswon glanced at her, surprised to hear her thinking along those lines – but he had to admit that she was right. Even drained of power, the cells were still going to be weighty things, and one dropped or thrown out of the tower and falling twenty metres was going to kill a man on impact most likely.
"There, all lined up. Again. Perfectly on target." Aswon stood back up straight and then pulled up his scope again, checking on the position of the APCs – thankfully they were all still at rest, and showed no sign of activity – so whatever wavelength the spotting laser was on clearly hadn't triggered any kind of alarm. Marius moved back behind the emitter and carefully pressed the 1 key again.
[DETACHING KEYPAD. ENSURE ALL PERSONNEL REMAIN 1M FROM EQUIPMENT. KEEP VIBRATIONS TO MINIMUM. DO NOT STARE AT EMITTER]
The clamps holding the keypad in place opened and the keypad dropped out – with Marius snatching at it to catch it before it hit the floor. Aswon squeezed in place to check that the movement hadn't moved the sighting laser at all, but gave them a quick thumbs up.
"Do not stare at emitter? How stupid do they think people…" Marius glanced around at the team, his gaze holding for a moment longer on Kai, before he turned to examine the keypad and display module. "Never mind. Oh… a network. Ahh, not to worry. There is a low power Wi-Fi network formed, allowing the keypad and screen to communicate with the emitter. Only has a very short range though – no more than a few metres. I presume this is so that any input on the keypad will not disturb the aiming point at all. We may want to step back a few metres…" The team obediently shuffled back, congregating at the top of the stairwell leading down.
[ADJUST LASER TARGET TO MATCH MISSION PARAMETERS. KEY 1 WHEN COMPLETE]
Marius hit the 1 key immediately, trusting in Aswon's accuracy.
[TARGET IDENTIFIED. PATTERN RECOGNITION MATCHED - TARGET IS VALID. RANGE IS 9116.45983M]
There was a pause, the cursor on the screen blinking slowly as the computer performed some final internal checks and then the screen cleared once more, before a fresh message appeared at the top.
[AWAITING FINAL COUNTDOWN. KEY 9 WHEN LAUNCH KLAXON IS HEARD]
"Now we wait, I guess." Marius checked the time. "Two minutes and eight seconds to launch."
Sixty-eight seconds passed, and they once more heard the klaxon sounding, the mournful tone carrying through the air clearly. Marius hit the 9 key, then watched the screen carefully.
[FINAL SEQUENCE MODE. KEY * WHEN MAIN ENGINE IGNITION IS SEEN]
The seconds passed, and they heard noise faintly in the distance – it sounded like a countdown, though they couldn't make out the actual numbers, the cadence was right though and Marius looked towards the pad, his finger hovering over the key, waiting. There was a sudden flash of sparks, and the bottom of the rocket was bathed in orange light – his finger pressed the key before the sound reached them. A split-second later they heard the deep rumble of the rocket engines blasting past them. They had thought the klaxon was loud, but the roar of the five main engines and two solid rocket boosters all firing at the same time had a pervasive and all-encompassing nature that put it to shame. They winced as the roaring noise washed over them, unrelenting in its loudness.
[GATHERING TELEMETRY]
The rocket lifted off the pad, ponderously and slowly, thrust fighting against gravity…
.
[..]
They cleared the tower, gathering speed, the rocket riding on a tail of fire that seemed to be as long as it was…
[...]
The emitter tracked the rising rocket, swinging around smoothly and tracking it with unerring accuracy.
[HARMONIC VARIANCE DETECTED. TARGET WILL REACH MAX=Q IN 5]
[4]
The rocket was starting to lean over, still accelerating hard as the millions of kilograms of thrust threw it away from the planet.
[3]
The rocket started to roll and arc over, settling upon the correct trajectory to intercept the chosen geosynchronous orbital point.
[2]
The rocket stopped its roll, presenting a new aspect to the team…
[FIRING]
The emitter hummed, loudly enough to be heard over the diminishing roar of the engines. Heat haze formed over the back of the emitter as it sucked in power from the cells and converted it into light which blasted out of the front of the emitter.
[1]
Whatever the beam was, it wasn't in the visible spectrum. Several of them could see the effects of the beam however – whether it was the ultrasonic clashing of molecules that were ripped apart by the beams passing, or the ripple of heat given off by the air being superheated by the flow of energy through it. Whatever the beam was, it was clearly aimed at the rocket.
[POWER CELLS DEPLETED]
The humming stopped, but all eyes were trained on the rocket. A second passed, and they saw the front end of the rocket appear to bend or deform, one section of the hull collapsing in on itself as it started to crumple like an empty beer can being pushed on the side. The rocket veered wildly off course, the engines still burning but now leaving a smoky grey trail behind them as parts of the body fell off and were incinerated in the fiery trail behind them. The movements became more and more pronounced, and the rocket turned into a corkscrew, swinging wildly through the air, all the time shedding parts of the structure behind it.
[TELEMETRY GATHERING COMPLETE. PLEASE KEY IN THE NUMBER OF MINUTES FOR SELF-DESTRUCT CHARGE]
"Well, that answers that question. Are we leaving it here?"
"Take it down and put it in the hole I dug! At least it won't draw attention to us then!"
"Good call, Tads. Set if for fifteen minutes, Marius, that should give us time to get it down and underground, out of the way." Aswon swung his rucksack up into position, then grabbed Hunter's equipment and pulled it up onto one arm, and made a grab for Shimazu's pack with the other. "One of you grab the emitter – carefully! The other grab the power cells. Let's get out of here!"
Two loud cracks ripped through the air, making them stop and look up – and they saw the top of the solid rocket boosters were on fire, spewing flames from the very tips of the rockets. The whole body of the craft had spun wildly and was now aiming nearly ninety degrees away from the initial flight angle, and it was spinning wildly and out of control. As the flames shot out of the top of the rocket, its forward momentum slowed abruptly, but the spin continued.
The team tore their eyes away from the sight and started to hammer down the metal stairs, trading stealth for speed.
"That must be a safety measure." Marius blurted out as he jumped down the last few steps to the landing below, then swung around to race round to the top of the next flight of steps. "The main rockets, they are easy. If you shut off the fuel flow, they stop burning. But solid rockets are tougher. Once you light, they they burn until consumed. You cannot shut them down. So I think the range officer has activated a fail-safe. You cannot stop it burning, but you can also light the other end. Generate an equal and opposite thrust, to cancel out the forward motion."
"But that means it's gonna start falling back to earth. 'Cos gravity!" Hunter managed, as he carefully ran down the stairs, gas-mask steaming up slightly as he breathed in and out heavily, the rubber sides drawing in tightly against his face as he laboured for breath as he struggled down the stairs with the weighty and ungainly emitter clutched tightly to his chest, while Shimazu did his best to keep pace with him just behind, battery cells held tightly to his own body, linked together by the massive power cable.
There was another loud crack, and a new tone added to the faint roar of rocket engines – the front third of the nose of the rocket blasted away from the rest of the body, arcing over in a parabola.
"No… no no no!" Hunter stopped and peered at it for a moment, checking the angle of thrust, arc of parabola and doing some quick estimations in his head.
"That's gonna land near us, isn't it?" Aswon called back, as much based on Hunter's reactions as his own guestimate on the flight path.
"Near enough. Probably about a kilometre away based on that arc. But close enough that all their rescue efforts are bound to be heading this way! MOVE IT, EVERYONE!" They picked up the speed, barely noticing as the escape pod element of the rocket suddenly bounced into the air as three large parachutes deployed in a cone above it, swinging it wildly through the air before it started to descend much more gently towards the desert below.
They were down to the first level of the tower when the rocket exploded. Both solid boosters were still burning, and the rocket itself was still mostly full of fuel – enough to make the explosion that occurred the most devastating and violent thing that any of the team had ever personally witnessed. The rocket body was transformed into a shower of particles as it was blown apart, riding outwards upon a blast wave travelling outwards in a globe that turned the rocket into the world's biggest shotgun.
The three parachutes holding the escape module were shredded, torn violently apart and sending the capsule spinning down to earth, accelerating wildly. But more importantly to the team, the remains of the rocket were blasted down towards them. Most of the rocket body had been vapourised and turned into super-hot gasses and plasma that were expended way before it had crossed the fourteen kilometres from the centre of the blast to the retreating forms of the team as they abandoned their positions.
But not all of it.
Shards of metal, most no bigger than a needle were riding the blast wave, forming a cloud of self-forging flechettes that travelled fast enough that they continued to lose mass as they were blasted out of the centre of the explosion. The body armour worn by most of the team was more than sufficient to defeat the lightweight flechettes though, no matter how fast they were going. The trouble was, the armour was on the inside of their chem-suits and gas masks.
The outer layers of clothing were shredded by the blast, punctured and split, and in some cases ripped wide open. Gas masks were vented and equipment on the outside of their suits took a ferocious beating. Kai and Tads both went down clutching at their necks, faces and hands as a few stray shards of metal impacted on skin not protected by armour.
The blast wave passed, sending a wall of dust high into the air as the explosion slammed into the desert and sent loose material outwards in a torus that rolled rapidly outwards from the epicentre of the explosion.
"Come on, we have to go! Use the dust cloud for cover, get that emitter into the hole! We have to get out of sight before anyone else gets here!" Aswon cried out. Hunter and Shimazu nodded and lumbered over to the hole that Tads had prepared earlier, carefully sliding the emitter and power packs inside and letting them drop down to the bottom of the hole. Aswon meanwhile led the way to the edge of the blast pad and started looking for a way down. "I'm thinking we should aim to get down under the pad, into the bowl below. No line of sight from above, good overhead coverage – lots of heavy concrete and rebar. No way we can get spotted on sensors. And unless they come down to find us, we shouldn't get picked up. We can lay low for hours – days if we need to."
He found the edge of the pad and carefully tested the soil, looking down the thirty metres into the massive bowl below. He spotted a ledge, about twenty centimetres wide that didn't look natural, maybe half a metre down the dirt face. About another fifty centimetres below that, there was another. He steadied himself on the edge of the pad and then lurched down the edge, mindful of the large fall on the exposed side. The ledges made steps – but at a distance that was unsuited to the human form, and very unnatural.
Once he made it down the first two, he found enough of the third ledge to step down, though he struggled with the fourth, eroded to the point where it had almost disappeared – but that bought him to just below the bottom of the concrete pad, and he saw a deep alcove in the dirt, underneath the pad itself that would provide excellent cover for them.
"Down here! Marius – you'll probably need a rope slung up to get people down safely." He saw the pilot nod and strip off his rucksack, scrabbling for the short length of climbing rope strapped to the side. A few moments later the loose end was thrown down to him, and he pulled it up and under the pad, finding a piece of exposed rebar to tie off to. One by one the team managed to half climb, half slide down the side and swing into the hidey-hole underneath the pad. When they were all down, Aswon steeled himself and then activated his gecko-crawl, climbing up the side of the wall to retrieve the rope and bring it down, making sure they had left no sign of their presence above.
By the time he'd come back down, they'd managed to strip off their rucksacks and Kai and Tads were having their wounds tended to by Shimazu, while Hunter and Marius arranged the rucksacks against the back wall and made sure their weapons were ready and trained outwards, just in case.
"Any idea what this is? It's not natural."
"Yeah – it's a smoking shelter." Kai winced as Shimazu pulled out a long aluminium splinter from the side of his neck, then relaxed a little as the wound was covered with a clean dressing. "Whoever built this place carved out a little hiding spot under the pad, somewhere they could come and be out of the way and have a little break." As Shimazu turned towards Tads to check on her, Kai bent down and picked up an empty cigarette pack, remarkably well preserved by the desert air. "Reckon these have been down here since the place was built. But that's human nature for you. Some people like to have the occasional break from hard labour, and will come up with cunning places to hide from their manager to do it – even if they have to excavate a drek-load of earth to do it."
"If they've been here for a long time, does that make them antiques?" Tads asked, looking for something to occupy her mind and distract her from the shards of metal Shimazu was plucking out of her scalp.
"Actually yes – some of these may be over a hundred years old. No doubt worth something to a collector." Kai checked through the debris on the floor, finding half a dozen packs in good condition, all covered in Cyrillic writing and bizarre pictures.
Their heart rates started to drop, and their respiration returned to normal as their bodies recovered from the mad-cap scramble down from the launch pad. It was dimly-lit down here, just the reflected light from down in the massive pit illuminating the area they waited in, but Aswon was clearly uncomfortable.
"Tads – I hate to ask. But if someone does drop down over the side, or we get a helicopter or gyro over there – we're very exposed. Do you think you could move some of the earth to create a barrier?"
"I can try it – it's going to be tough, though. And we'll want to leave some holes top and bottom to make sure there's airflow. Ideally I need something to shape the earth over, to make it easy."
"I can stand there and put my feet and hands out?" Tads nodded to him and Aswon went to the edge of the lip and stood spread-eagled, putting his hands forward to match the positions of his feet as far as possible. Behind him Tads concentrated, ignoring the pain from her scalp and drawing in the mana from the area, doing her best to ignore the pollution and toxic nature of the area and shaping a wall of clay to rise up and around Aswon's extended limbs. It was difficult, and the spell worked much more slowly than normal, but a wall of material formed, filling in the opening and blocking their way in or out, and dropping them into complete darkness – at least until with a muddy popping sound Aswon managed to withdraw from the wall, leaving four dimly lit spots where the wall was breached.
Tads sat down heavily, her head pounding from the effort and with a trickle of blood oozing from her nose. Shimazu moved around to sit behind her and gently pulled her back to rest against him, giving her something to relax into and laid a reassuring hand over her shoulder.
The distorted sounds of a helicopter made it down to them, reverberating off the launch tower and the various vents in the blast pad, the sounds of the rotors beating on the air were warped and intermittent – but it was clear that someone was out there in a fast response vehicle. Soon after, they started to hear the sounds of APCs and then what was definitely a thunderbird – the distinctive sounds of the vector thrust jets reverberating through the air.
They sat in the dark, keeping quiet and trying not to do anything that might attract attention or leave evidence of their presence. Aswon had a hand over his commlink, shielding the light from the display and watching the timer on his stopwatch count up. He, along with everyone else gave a start as a loud explosion made it down into their hiding place.
"Eight minutes – too early for the designator! Way too early!" He listened again, and heard a second explosion, a few seconds later. "Crap – that's a missile strike. I've heard them before, lots of times. Sounds like someone is launching missiles at the tower we were hiding in! I didn't think we'd been spotted or left any evidence…"
"Well, if they're launching missiles at it, they aren't going to get much from the forensics!" Hunter pointed out. A third explosion shook their hiding place, as a third missile hit wrecked the tower above them, sending support struts and debris flying everywhere. It fell silent after that, and a few more minutes passed by without much noise – until a deep 'crump' made the floor shake.
"Ok, now THAT should have been the emitter. Timing was spot on….ohhhh! I get it now. Marius – that power pack that was down. Number five. Just how much C-12 do you think you could cram in there instead of a battery? And would the detonator for it need lots of voltage but very little current?"
"Yes, now that you mention it. That would make perfect sense."
They waited a little more, and could hear the sounds of voices now above them, twisted and indistinct from the convoluted reflections and echoes. Silently they listened, trying to make out the voices and determine what was going on – but the wall that hid them also made it difficult to hear. The most they could determine was that someone was telling people to find things, and some mention of 'isotopes' which gave several of them a chill down their spines.
Gradually the voices diminished though, as either the search or the operation moved away from their pad, and they were left sitting in the dark, with nothing but the quiet sound of the wind whistling through the air holes left in the wall, waiting and wondering when it would be safe to leave their hiding place, while above them Saeder-Krupp forces combed the desert, looking for clues as to what had happened during their launch operation.
