Robert Doherty - Project Aura

The cargo bay doors of the shuttle swung open to space. Sitting in the lower level of the flight deck, facing the cargo hold, Eagle Six had his hands on the controls for the Remote Manipulator System (RMS), a fifty-foot-long articulating arm. The tip of the RMS was attached to CS-MILSTAR. Earlier, while the doors were still closed, he had gone in and removed the locking bolts on the satellite, freeing it.

Boreas checked the computer program for the tenth time in the past hour. It was all set. Millennia of battling would be over in a minute. If he had the unlock code for CS-MILSTAR. He pressed Redial on his SATPhone once more.

He cursed as the phone rang and rang without an answer.

The dishes on the Yuri Gagarin shifted in orientation, aiming toward the nearest MILSTAR satellite. In the communications center, Cesar was with Valika, the crew under strict orders to leave them alone.

“We will destroy HAARP first,” Cesar said. “Then, I think, maybe the Pentagon.”

Valika frowned. “Señor Cesar, I do not see why-”

Cesar smiled. “Valika. Call me Hector.”

“Why are you doing this, Hector?”

“Because it is-” A confused look came across Cesar’s face. “Because.” The confusion disappeared and anger replaced it. “Goddamn it, can’t anyone do what I tell them to, just because I tell them?” “I’m sorry, sir,” Valika said.

“We have the power!” Cesar said. “Don’t you see that?” “But it makes no sense for you to do this.” “You are like Naldo,” Cesar said. “A coward.” Valika stiffened. After all she had done for Cesar, he was treating her like the Soviet Union had done to its faithful soldiers, turning its back on them. She got up and left the communications center, slamming the hatch behind her, leaving Cesar staring at the program on the computer screen that Souris had set up.

In the small cabin she had been allocated, Valika looked around. Her weapons cases were laid out on the bed, along with the small bag containing her few personal items. She tried to calm down, but her chest hurt and she felt as if she might be ill.

She realized this was the sum of her life. The original of the photo that Souris had used in the simulation, of her parents, was in her bag. Valika sat down next to the case holding her sniper rifle and took the picture in her hands.

Jackson saw the field of antennas. And she could feel the psychic wall like a dog would feel an electronic fence. She hung in the virtual plane, waiting, close by. While she was there, she cast about, searching for others, but there was nothing, just the cold wind over the icy mountains.

“ Mentor ?” she relayed through Sybyl. “ Are you there?”

“ I’m here.”

“ Have you pinpointed my help?”

“ Yes,” Mentor replied. As he relayed the information she needed, Jackson was already moving.

The two B-2 bombers were “hot,” meaning they had live ordnance on board. They’d been in the air for eleven hours, having taken off from their home base at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and flying a complex route, designed to test the crews’ abilities en route to their “target.”

Each plane was loaded with a conventional Block 30 weapons package: forty MK-82 five-hundred-pound bombs and thirty-six CBU-87 combined-effects munitions, each weighing a thousand pounds. Almost forty thousand pounds of ordnance was packed inside each aircraft, more than ten B-17 Flying Fortresses could carry. The bombs were loaded inside the fuselage on cylindrical racks, which allowed them to be dropped at a high rate of speed.

The two bombers were flying north at high altitude, having gone “feet dry” over the southern coast of Alaska. Their designated target was an Air Force bombing range in the middle of the state.

They were using GATS/GAM to conduct their mission: Global Positioning System Aided Targeting System/GPS Aided Munitions. In normal speak, that meant the two-man crews were basically surrendering control of targeting and even flight path to the computer, which had the location of the objective programmed in and which was updating the flight path every one thousandth of a second using Ground Positioning Satellites that fixed the aircraft’s position within two meters. The computer would not only get them to the target, it would release the bombs in a predetermined order to cause maximum destructive effect.

It was cutting-edge technology and something the crews of the planes didn’t particularly care for, as they were little more than observers.

Jackson found the two B-2s by following the GPS downlink. She flew above them on the virtual plane, admiring their sleek lines. While only 69 feet long, each aircraft was over twice that wide, at 172 feet. The smooth black surfaces were designed to make the aircraft virtually invisible to radar, and also served to make them almost invisible as they flew through the dark night sky.

Jackson slid into the first bomber. She found the master computer and entered it, flowing along the electronic paths inside.

Eagle Six’s hand barely twitched on the controls, but the RMS magnified the effort and the CS-MILSTAR satellite lifted off the floor of the cargo bay.

“The mainframe is still booting,” General Mitchell told McFairn. “But we have found access to an outside line. It’s an old one. Landline. As far as we can tell, it’s a regular phone line that someone forgot about.”

“Where?”

Mitchell led her out of the building they were in, into another that held stacks of crates. In the rear an old rotary dial phone hung on the wall. “One of my men checked it. It has a dial tone.”

McFairn grabbed it. There was a dial tone. She began dialing.

Dalton saw the ship below him, the large dishes facing the sky. He jumped once more, to the unoccupied flight deck at the rear of the ship behind the smokestack. He slipped from the virtual plane to the real. He assumed the form of Cesar and began moving forward along the port side.

He wished he had as clear a plan as Jackson did. He was winging it at best, but he figured thirty-five years of Special Operations experience would come up with something.

Mentor checked his watch. Five minutes until CS-MILSTAR was supposed to be on-line.

Hammond was at the computer console. “Barnes is out there, but he’s not responding to my attempts to contact him through Sybyl.” She scrolled down. “His pattern isn’t right.”

“What do you mean?” Mentor asked.

Hammond shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s just not right.”

Boreas glanced out the windows of the control center. Even on this moonless night he could make out the white peaks of the Wrangell Range. He glanced at the red digital countdown at the front of the control room as it clicked through four minutes.

His desk phone rang. He ignored it and hit Redial on the SATPhone. The desk phone continued to ring. He stalked over to the desk and grabbed the receiver.

“What?” he yelled.

“It’s McFairn. I have the code.”

Jackson left the first B-2 and went into the second. She knew what she was doing now and this time it went quicker.

Eagle Six had the arm at full extension. He locked the controls for a second and removed his hands. His palms were wet and he wiped them on his flight suit before regaining the controls.

“Status?” he called out.

“Green,” the payload master replied.

“Position?”

“Right on.”

“Attitude, velocity?”

“Within parameters.”

Eagle Six pulled a trigger and the end of the arm released the satellite. He spun ninety degrees to the right, to a communications panel, and accessed his private, secure link.