Joe Haldeman - Future Weapons of War

However, the sensor/guidance matrixes of the first flight of homing missiles proved to be too effective for all involved. They held a dead lock on their initially designated target, totally ignoring the chaff clouds, dispersing package debris and the primary projectiles. The scepter flight struck and annihilated, but nothing was destroyed beyond a burned-out rocket motor and an empty vehicle frame.

“Shit!” Valdez swore savagely. “She MIRVed! She MIRVed just before she took the hit! We got a warhead swarm up there! I got three good-sized projectiles holding the original trajectory. Designating targets, Ballistic Two, Three, and Four. Projectile size, roughly one meter in length. They could be slugs or kiloton-range mininukes.”

For Judith there was not even one fragment of a second available for frustration or despair.

“Do we have dispersal?”

“Negative! We got a tight package! I’d say they’re shotgunning a single target!”

“We’ve got time enough for one more try with the scepters. Ready flights two and three. Reset two rounds on each target! Fire on reprogramming! Targeting projection! Do you have a refined impact point?”

“Somewhere in the state of Colorado! Christ, Major, they could be targeting us!”

“I hope they are!” Judith snapped back. “We can take it! Close all blast doors! Seal the mountain! Sound shock warning alarms!”

The three deadly sisters swept on toward their objective. Each was elegant in its sophisticated simplicity. Each a slender wasp-waisted dart designed to pierce the Earth’s atmosphere like a needle through gelatin without bleeding velocity. Each weighed only about one hundred pounds, but striking at over twenty thousand miles per hour, every pound of that mass would carry the equivalent kinetic energy of twenty pounds of TNT, the force equivalency of one ton of high explosives released by instantaneous thermic conversion.

But each kinetic kill weapon held a second deadly secret at its core. Its outer skin was of a tough, heat-resistant industrial ceramic while the bulk of the projectile was of machined stainless steel.

But in its heart was a rod of inert uranium, the same ultra-massy material used as the penetrator rod for armor-piercing shells and as a protective mesh layered inside Chobham tank armor.

Essentially benign in its natural state, inert uranium changed radically when involved in a major kinetic event. Superheated into a molten vapor it would explode and burn furiously like magnesium or white phosphorous. And like iron or steel, if struck hard enough, it would produce sparks. But the sparks produced would be hard neutrons, a searing radiation pulse that would lethally flash any living thing in its immediate vicinity. In effect, it would act as a small, solid-state neutron bomb.

In a heatproof aeroshell in the tail of the dart, a miniature guidance system purred, cross-referencing positional readings from the Global Positioning Satellite system with a ring-laser inertial tracker. During the last seconds of the projectiles plunge through atmosphere the guidance package would steer the precision-guided weapon on target by extruding drag-inducing “hyper-bumps” into the surrounding airflow.

It was a back-room laboratory rig, producing a circular area of impact probability roughly a hundred meters across. A true weapons-grade guidance package could produce a much higher degree of accuracy, but for the makers of the three sisters, the radius of a football field would do nicely.

But the defender rockets screaming up from the California coast had to be vastly more accurate.

They were endeavoring to take, head-on, a target six inches across at a combined closing velocity of mach forty. Comparatively speaking, hitting a bullet with a bullet was child’s play.

But it could be done. Given computer systems powerful to make not merely millions but hundreds of millions of calculations per second, computers that were almost precognitive in their capacity, it could be done.

Some of the time.

Two of the sisters died, taken by the scepter flights fixed on them. There were no “explosions”

in the conventional sense of the term. The interceptors mounted no warheads. At the meeting velocities involved, high explosives would have been a triviality. There was just a flash and the interceptor and intercepted vanished in a dissipating cloud of metallic vapor.

The third sister plunged on. The guidance systems of the two missiles aimed at it had not quite been able to make that last microsecond’s calculation required for a hit.

The tip of the kill dart’s nose began to warm as it whispered into the outer fringe of the atmosphere.

“Missed the bastardo!” Valdez smashed his fists on his chair arms. “One of ‘em got through, Major! Scepters are offline! Vandenberg no longer has angle of engagement.”

“Designate target Ballistic Five for laser point defense engagement!” Judith fought to keep the scream out of her voice.

“Impact point now projected as the Denver urban area!” The tracking board SO yelled.

And Judith Maclntyre knew. Without the faintest shadow of a doubt she knew. It was the Superbowl stadium. The ultimate, perfect, soft target. A hundred thousand helpless people jammed in shoulder to shoulder, celebrities, officials, families. It was the big game, a symbol of Americana. And the whole world’s media would be present to bear witness to the devastation. What could be a better target for those who fought no longer to win but only to wreak a spiteful, savage vengeance?

“Laser point defenses ready to fire” the laser board called. “Valid battlestrats tracking. Sequential or convergent fire pattern?”

The last human decision to be made. Sequential or convergent? Sequential would give each laser platform its own independent shot. Convergence would complicate and slow the engagement equation by trying to bring all three beams in on the target at the precise same instant. Sequential fire would improve the hit probability while convergence would maximize energy on target and improve the kill potential. There would be time for one or the other. The battlestrats would not be able to recycle their lasers last enough for a second shot.

What was up there? What was that damn thing? Bombs were more disruptable, more easily destroyed or damaged. A solid slug was more resistant and required more killing.

Sweat Pit indeed. Judith’s hair and her clothing were drenched in icy perspiration. The incontrollable trembling was only instants away.

“We have an ionization trail! Target Ballistic Five entering the atmosphere! Major, we gotta call the shot!”

“Convergent fire! Burn him!”

Aboard each of the widely dispersed battlestrat platforms, exotic fuel compounds intermixed and consumed each other in incandescent fury, pumping the High Energy Lasing tube that ran from the keel to the spine of each airship. Unhampered by atmospheric thermal blossom at this high altitude, the mirror turrets caught the appropriately named HEL beams and flashed them across hundreds of miles of sky, aiming at one, precise, distant point.

The third sister burned dazzlingly bright. Pushing a plasma shock wave the temperature of the suns surface ahead of it, it drilled its hole through the atmosphere, homing on its target. And then, for a split second, it burned brighter yet, caught in the nexus of three focused gigawatts of projected energy.

And then it streaked on.

“ Jesus madre Maria! It’s through! It’s gonna hit!”

In its last seconds of flight, a few grams of the third sister’s ceramic coating, superheated beyond incandescent tolerance by the laser strike, bled away unevenly from the outer shell. Drag unbalanced, the kinetic kill projectile started to roll off target. The guidance system failed to counter, its cooked microchips pushed beyond their thermal operating limits as well.