Fortress
David Drake
1987
Editorial Reviews
IngramFortress is America's guarantor of freedom, an orbiting arsenal of laser weapons and nuclear missiles. It was considered impregnable--until now. Former CIA officer Tom Kelley is sent to learn the secrets surrounding a dead alien found in Turkey and discovers a maze of lies and treachery that could transform America's shield into an engine of global terror. HC: Tor. From the Publisher"One of the most gifted users of historical and military raw material at work today in science fiction." --Chicago Sun-Times
"Lots of action, a well worked out plot, and a suitably exciting conclusion." --Science Fiction Chronicle
Sergeant Tom Kelly listened to John F. Kennedy’s fifth State of the Union Address - his so-called “Buck Rogers Speech” - at a firebase in the Shuf Mountains, watching Druse 122 mm rockets arc toward Beirut across the night sky.
The broadcast, carried live over the Armed Forces Levantine Network, hissed and sputtered in the plug earphone of Kelly’s cheap portable radio. Inside the high-sided command track against which he leaned, the young sergeant could have gotten a much clearer signal through some of the half million dollars worth of communications-intercept equipment which the Radio Research vehicle carried. This was good enough, though, for a soldier who was off duty and waiting for the attack Druse message traffic made almost certain.
Shooooo . . . hissed the green ball of a bombardment rocket.
“Our enemies, the enemies of freedom,” said the President, more distant from Kelly’s reality than seven time zones could imply, “have proven in Hungary, in Cuba, and in Lebanon that they respect nothing in their international dealings except strength. Their armies are poised on the boundaries of Eastern Europe, ready to hurl themselves across the remainder of the continent at the least sign of weakness among the Western democracies.”
By daylight, the berm which bulldozers had turned up around the firebase for protection was scarcely less sterile in appearance than the crumbling rock of the hills from which it was carved. Now, in the soft darkness, the landscape breathed. Kelly’s left hand caressed the heavy wooden stock of his M14, knowing that beyond the berm other soldiers were nervously gripping their own weapons: Mausers abandoned by the Turks in 1917; Polish-made Kalashnikovs slipped across the Syrian border in donkey panniers; rocket-propelled grenades stamped in Russian or Chinese . . .
“In Europe and the Middle East,” continued the President in a nasal voice further attenuated by the transmission and the radio’s tinny speaker, “in Africa and Latin America - wherever the totalitarians and their surrogates choose to test us, the free world must stand firm. Furthermore, ladies and gentlemen of Congress, we in the United States must undertake an initiative on behalf of the free world which will convince our enemies that we have the strength to withstand them no matter how great the forces they gather on Earth itself.
The five tubes of howitzer battery - the sixth hog was deadlined for repair - cut loose in a ragged salvo. The white powderflashes were a lightninglike dazzle across the firebase while the side-flung shock waves from the muzzle brakes hammered tent roofs and raised dust from the parched ground. The short-barreled one-five-fives were firing at high angles and with full charges. Nothing to do with the turbaned riflemen crouching to attack, perhaps nothing to do with even the Druse rockets sailing down toward the airport in the flat curves of basketballs shot from thirty feet out.
“We must have an impregnable line of defense and an arsenal of overwhelming magnitude in the heavens themselves,” continued Kennedy through the squeal of hydraulic rammers seating the shells of the next salvo. Clicks of static from command transmissions cut across the broadcast band, but Kelly was used to building sense from messages far more shattered and in a variety of languages beyond English. He was good at that - at languages - and his fingertips again tried to wiggle the magazine of his rifle, making sure it was locked firmly into the receiver.
“Space is both a challenge - “ said the President as Kelly’s hearing returned after the muzzle blasts of the howitzers which were more akin to physical punishment than to noise. “ - Now also the unbreachable shield of freedom and the spear of retribution which cannot be blunted by treacherous attack as our land-based weapons might be.”
The breechblock of a fifty-caliber machinegun clanged from the far side of the firebase as the weapon was charged, freezing time and Tom Kelly’s soul. Only the sounds of the howitzers reloading and traversing their turrets slightly followed, however. Nothing Kelly had seen in ninety-seven days in the field suggested the hogs were going to hit anything useful, but their thunderous discharges made waiting for an attack easier than it would have been with only the stars for company.
“My detailed proposals ...” said the radio before the words disintegrated into a hiss like frying bacon - louder than the voice levels had been, so it couldn’t be the French dry cells giving out. . . .
“Fuckin’ A!” snarled Chief Warrant Officer Platt as he ducked out the rear hatch of the command vehicle. He, the intercept team’s commander, was a corpulent man who wore two fighting knives on his barracks belt and carried the ear of a Druse guerrilla tissue-wrapped in a watch case. “We’re getting jammed across all bands! What the fuck is this?”
Something with a fluctuating glow deep in the violet and presumably ultraviolet was crossing the sky very high up and very swiftly. A word or two, “ - dominance—“ crept through a momentary pause in the static before the howitzers, linked by wire to the Tactical Operations Center, fired again.
“Commie recon satellite,” Platt muttered, his eyes following Kelly’s to the bead shimmering so far above the surface of dust, buffeted by hot, gray strokes of howitzer propellant. “You know those bastards’re targeting us down to the last square meter!”
Tom Kelly reached for the tuning dial of the radio with the hand which was not sweating on the grip of his rifle. Anybody who could come within a hundred yards of a point target, using a bombardment rocket aimed by adjusting a homemade bipod under the front of the launching tube, ought to be running the US space program instead of a Druse artillery company. The hell with the satellite - assuming that’s what it was. If the rag-heads could jam the whole electromagnetic spectrum like that, there were worse problems than Radio Research teams becoming as useless as tits on a boar. . . .
“ - domestic front,” said the radio just as Kelly’s fingers touched it, “the curse of racial injustice calls for - “
Tom Kelly never did hear the rest of that speech because just as normal reception resumed, a one-twenty-two howled over the berm and exploded near a tank-recovery vehicle. It was the first of the thirty-seven rockets preceding the attack of a reinforced Druse battalion.
The only physical scar Kelly took home from that one was on his hand, burned by the red-hot receiver of his rifle as he worked to clear a jam.
The three helicopters were orbiting slowly, as if tethered to the monocle ferry on the launchpad five hundred meters below. When the other birds rotated so that the West Texas sun caught the cameras aimed from their bays, the long lenses blazed as if they were lasers themselves rather than merely tools with which to record a test of laser propulsion.
The sheathing which would normally have roofed the passenger compartments of the helicopters had been removed, leaving the multi-triangulated frame tubing and a view straight upward for the cameras and the men waiting for what was about to happen on the launchpad.
Sharing the bay of the bird carrying Tom Kelly were a cameraman, a project scientist named Desmond, and a pair of colonels in Class A uniforms, Army green and Air Force blue, rather than the flight suits that Kelly thought would have been more reasonable. The military officers seemed to be a good deal more nervous than the scientist was; and unless Kelly was misreading them, their concern was less about the test itself than about him - the staff investigator for Representative Carlo Bianci, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Space Defense. Sometimes it seemed to Kelly that he’d spent all his life surrounded by people who were worried as hell about what he was going to do next. Occasionally, of course, people would have been smart to worry more than they did. . . .
The communications helmet Kelly had been issued for the test had a three-position switch beneath the left earpiece, but only one channel on it was live. He could not hear either the chatter of the Army pilots in the cockpit or the muttered discussions of the two officers in the passenger bay with him, though the latter could speak to him when they chose to throw their own helmet switches forward. The clop of the blades overhead was more a fact than an impediment to normal speech, but the intake rush of the twin-turbine power plant created an ambiance through which Kelly could hear nothing but what the officers chose to direct to him through the intercom circuitry.
“Someday,” Kelly said aloud, “people are going to learn that the less they try to hide, the less problem they have explaining things. But I don’t expect the notion to take hold in the military any time soon.”
“Pardon?” asked Desmond, the first syllable minutely clipped by his voice-activated microphone. The scientist was Kelly’s age or a few years younger, a short-bearded man who slung a pen-caddy from one side of his belt and a worn-looking calculator from the other. It was probably his normal working garb - as were the dress uniforms of the public-affairs colonels, flacks of type which Kelly would have found his natural enemy even if they hadn’t been military.
“I’d been meaning to ask you, Dr. Desmond,” said Kelly, rubbing from his eyes the prickliness of staring into the desert of the huge Fort Bliss reservation, “just why. you think the initial field test failed?”
“Ah, I think it’s important to recall, Mr. Kelly,” interjected one of the colonels - it was uncertain which through the headphones - “that the test was by no means a failure. The test vehicle performed perfectly throughout eighty-three percent of the spectrum planned - “
“Well good god, Boardman,” snapped the project scientist, “it blew up, didn’t it? That’s what you mean, isn’t it?” Desmond continued, snapping his head around from the officers across the bay to Kelly seated on the portion of the bench closest to the fully-opened starboard hatch. “I certainly don’t consider that, that fireworks display a success.”
Kelly smiled, the expression only incidentally directed toward the colonels. “Though I gather many of the systems did work as planned, Doctor?” he said, playing the scientist now that he had enough of a personality sample from which to work. Even among the project’s civilians, there were familiar - and not wholly exclusive - categories of scientists and scientific politicians. Desmond had seemed to be in the former category, but Kelly had found no opportunity to speak to him alone.
The public affairs officers were probably intended to smother honest discussion within the spotting helicopter the same way the administrators had done on the ground. That plan was being frustrated by what was more than a personality quirk: Desmond could not imagine that anything the military officers said or wished was of any concern to him. It was not a matter of their rank or anyone’s position in a formal organizational chart: Colonels Boardman and Johnson were simply of another species.
“Yes, absolutely,” agreed the project scientist as he shook his head in quick chops. “Nothing went wrong during air-breathing mode, nothing we could see in the telemetry, of course - it’d have been nice to get the hardware back for a hands-on.”
“I think you’d better get your goggles in place now, Mr. Kelly,” said the Air Force officer, sliding his own protective eyewear into place. The functional thermoplastic communications helmets looked even sillier atop dress uniforms than they did over the civilian clothes Desmond, and Kelly himself, wore. “For safety’s sake, you know.”
Kelly was anchored to a roof strap with his left hand by habit that freed his right for the rifle he did not carry here, not on this mission or in this world where ‘cut-throat’ meant somebody might lose a job or a contract. ... He looked at the PR flacks, missing part of what Desmond was saying because his mind was on things that were not the job of the Special Assistant to Representative Bianci.
The colonels straightened, one of them with a grimace of repulsion, and neither of them tried again to break in as the project scientist continued, “ - plating by the aluminum oxide particles we inject with the on-board hydrogen to provide detonation nuclei during that portion of the pulsejet phase. Chui-lin insists the plasma itself scavenges the chambers and that the fault must be the multilayer mirrors themselves despite the sapphire coating.”
“But there’s just as much likelihood of blast damage when you’re expelling atmosphere as when you’re running on internal fuel, isn’t there?” said Kelly, who had done his homework on this one as he did on any task set him by Representative Bianci; and as he had done in the past, when others tasked him.
“Exactly, exactly,” Desmond agreed, chopping his head. “Just a time factor, says Chui-lin, but there’s no sign of overheating until we switch modes, and I don’t think dropping the grain size as we’ve done will be - “
“Fifteen seconds,” boomed a voice from the control center on the ground, and this time Kelly and the scientist did slide the goggles down over their eyes. The cameraman hunched behind the long shroud of his viewing screen. A guidance mechanism as sophisticated as anything in the latest generation of air-to-air missiles should center the lens on the test vehicle, despite any maneuvers the target or the helicopter itself carried out. Machinery could fail, however, and the backup cameraman was determined that he would not fail - because he was good, not because he was worried about his next efficiency report.
The monocle ferry was a disk only eighteen feet in diameter, and at its present slant distance of almost half a mile from the helicopters it would have been easy to ignore were it not so nearly alone on a barren yellow landscape. With Vandenburg and Cape Canaveral irrevocably surrendered to the US Space Command when it was formed in 1971, the Army and Air Force had chosen Fort Bliss as the site for their joint attempt to circumvent their new rival’s control of space weaponry.
Not only was the huge military reservation empty enough to make a catastrophic failure harmless, but its historical background as the center of Army Air Defense Training lent a slight color to the services’ claim that they were not trying to develop a ‘space weapon’ of their own in competition with the Space Command.
Not that that would help them if Carlo Bianci decided the program should be axed. The congressman from the Sixth District of Georgia had made a career - a religion, some critics claimed - of space defense, and it wasn’t the sort of thing he permitted interservice squabbling to screw up.
“Now, there may be a critical limit to grain size,” Dr. Desmond was saying, “below which none of the aluminum will form hot-spots on the mirror surface, but at these energy levels it won’t take more than a few molecules to - “
“Go,” said the control center, and the landscape changed in intensity.
The beams from the six chemical laser lift stations in orbit above the launch site ‘were in the near infrared at a wavelength of 1.8 microns. Not only was light of that frequency invisible to the human eye, it was absorbed by the cornea instead of being focused by the lens to the potential injury of the retina. The wavelength was a relalively inefficient one for transmitting power, especially through an atmosphere which would have passed a much higher percentage of the ultraviolet. The five megajoules of energy involved in the test, however, meant that even the least amount of reflection raised an unacceptable risk of blindness and worse if the operation were in the visible spectrum or shorter.
“Go-o-o ...” whispered Desmond, probably unaware that he had spoken aloud. Tom Kelly leaned outward, bringing his shoulder and helmet into the dry, twenty-knot airstream.
The six-ton saucer quivered as it drank laser energy through the dozen windows of segmented corundum which ringed its upper surface like the eyes of a monstrous insect. The central hub of the ferry contained the one-man cockpit, empty now except for instrumentation, which did not rotate as the blast chambers around the saucer’s rim began to expel air flash-heated within them by laser pulses.
Dust, as much a part of West Texas as it was of the hills above Beirut, rippled in a huge, expanding doughnut from the concrete pad. It formed a translucent bed for the ferry, a mirage landscape on which the saucer seemed to rest instead of lifting as planned. Then the dust was gone, a yellow-gray curtain across distant clumps of Spanish bayonet, and the ferry itself was a lens rather than a disk as it shot past the helicopters circling at five hundred meters.
“All right!” blurted Kelly, jerking his eyes upward to track the monocle through the frame members and shimmering helicopter rotors against a sky made amber by his goggles.
“Twenty-two g’s!” babbled the project scientist happily. “Almost from the point of liftoff! There’s no way Space Command’s ground-lift barges can match that - or any chemically-fueled launcher.”
The chopper rocked between paired sonic booms, a severe one followed by an impact of lesser intensity. The monocle ferry had gone supersonic even before it reached the altitude of the helicopters, buffeting them with a shock wave reflected from the ground as well as the pulse streaming directly from the vehicle’s surface. The roar of the ferry’s exhaust followed a moment later, attenuating rapidly like that of an aircraft making a low-level pass.
“All right,” Kelly repeated, disregarding the colonels, who he knew would be beaming at his enthusiasm. There was a hell of a lot more to this ‘air defense’ program than the mere question of how well the hardware worked; but hardware that did work gave Kelly a glow of satisfaction with the human race, and he didn’t give a hoot in hell about who knew it. It was their lookout if they thought he was dumb enough to base his recommendations on that alone.
Their helicopter and the other two essed out of their slow starboard orbits, banking a little to port to make it easier for the cameras and observers to follow an object high enough above them to be effectively vertical. There were supposed to be chase planes, T-38 trainers with more cameras, but Kelly could see no sign of them at the moment. The ferry itself was no more than a sunstruck bead of amber.
“Normally,” Dr. Desmond explained, “we’d continue in air-breathing mode to thirty kilometers before switching to internal fuel. For the purpose of his test, however, we’ll convert to hydrogen very shortly in order to - “
“God almighty!” cried Boardman, the Air Force flack, so far forgetting himself that he started to lurch to his feet against the motion of the helicopter. “For the demonstration you do this?”
“We’re modifying the test sequence in response to earlier results, of course,” the scientist said, glancing over at the military man.
Kelly continued to look upward, squinting by habit, though the goggles made that unnecessary. Boardman didn’t matter. He was typical of people, not necessarily stupid ones, who cling to a view of reality against available evidence and their own presumable benefit. In this case, the public affairs officer was obviously so certain that the ferry would blow up that he preferred the test do nothing to advance the project rather than have Bianci’s man watch a catastrophic failure.
The bead of light which had almost disappeared detonated into a fireball whose color the goggles shifted into the green.
The cameraman had been only a nervous spectator while his unit’s servos tracked the ferry with inhuman skill. Now he squeezed the override trigger in the right grip and began to manually follow the shower of fragments picked out by the sun as they tumbled and danced. His left hand made minute adjustments to the focal length of his lens, shortening it to keep as nearly as possible the whole drifting mass within his field of view.
“God damn it to hell,” said Dr. Desmond very distinctly before he lowered his head, took off his commo helmet, and slammed the helmet as hard as he could against the aluminum deck of the helicopter. It bounced, but the length of communications cord kept it from flying out the open hatch as it tried to do. The two officers straightened their backs against the bulkhead with expressions of disapproval and concern.
Kelly slid his goggles back up on the brow of his helmet, sneezing at the shock of direct sunlight again. He put a hand on the scientist’s nearer shoulder, squeezing hard enough to be noticed but without trying to raise Desmond’s head from where it was buried in his hands. “ ‘Sokay,” the ex-soldier muttered, part of him aware that the scientist couldn’t possibly hear him and another part equally sure that it wasn’t okay, that even future success would not expunge this memory of something which mattered very much vaporizing itself in the Texas sky.
“It’s okay,” Kelly said, repeating words he’d had to use too often before, the words a lieutenant had spoken to him the fire-shot evening when Kelly held the torso of a friend who no longer had a head.
“Maybe switching to straight calcium carbonate’ll do the trick,” Kelly’s lips whispered while the PR men grimaced at the undirected fury in the veteran’s eyes.
“Oh, good evening, Mr. Kelly,” said the young woman at the front desk - a second-year student out of Emory, if Kelly remembered correctly. She looked flustered as usual when she spoke to the veteran. She wasn’t the receptionist, just an intern with a political science major getting some hands-on experience; but the hour was late, and service to the public - to possible constituents - was absolutely the first staff priority in all of Representative Bianci’s offices.
“Marcelle, Marcelle,” said Tom Kelly, stretching so that his overcoat gaped widely and the attache case in his left hand lifted toward the ceiling. His blazer veed to either side of the button still fastening it, baring most of the shirt and tie beneath but continuing to hide the back of Kelly’s waistband.
He’d been on planes that anybody with a bottle of gasoline could hijack to god knew where; he’d been walking on Capitol Hill at night, a place as dangerous as parts of Beirut that he’d patrolled in past years with flak jacket and automatic rifle; and anyway, he was a little paranoid, a little crazy, he’d never denied that. ... It was no problem him going armed unless others learned about it ... and with care, that would happen only when Tom Kelly was still standing and somebody else wasn’t.
Kelly grinned at the little intern, broadly, as he had learned to do because the scar tissue above the left corner of his mouth turned a lesser smile into a snarling grimace. “If you don’t start calling me Tom, m’dear, I’m going to have to get formal with you. I won’t be mistered by a first name, I’ve seen too much of that . . . and I don’t like ‘mister.’ Okay?”
All true; and besides, he was terrible on names, fucking terrible, and remembering them had been for the past three years the hardest part of doing a good job for an elected official. But Marcelle, heaven knew what her last name was, colored and said, “I’m sorry, Tom, I’ll really remember the next time.”
Filing cabinets and free-standing mahogany bookshelves split the rear of the large room into a number of desk alcoves, many of them now equipped with terminals to the mainframe computer in the side office to the right. Another of the staff members, a pale man named Duerning, with a mind as sharp as Kelly’s own - and as different from the veteran’s as Brooklyn is from Beirut - was leaning over a desk, supporting himself with a palm on the paper-strewn wood. It was not until Carlo Bianci stood up beside Duerning, however, that Kelly realized that his boss was here rather than in the private office to the left where the closed door had seemed to advertise his presence. Never assume. . . .
“That’s all for tonight, Murray,” said Representative Bianci, clapping his aide on the shoulder in a gesture of camaraderie as natural as it was useful to a politician. He stepped toward Kelly as Duerning, nodding his head, shifted papers into a briefcase.
Carlo Bianci was Kelly’s height and of the same squat build, though the representative was further from an ideal training weight than his aide and the difference was more than the decade’s gap between their ages. Nonetheless, Bianci’s thick gray hair was the only sign that the man might be fifty, and he was in damned good shape for anyone in an office job. Kelly suspected that Bianci’s paunch was really a reservoir like a camel’s hump, enabling the man to survive under the strain of constant eighteen-hour days for the decade he had been in Congress.
At the moment Bianci was wearing a blue jogging suit, which meant it was not expectation of a roll-call vote which kept him in his office at ten PM, and something was sticking worry lines around the smile of greeting which accompanied his handshake for Kelly. “Wasn’t sure you’d be in tonight, Tom,” he said, and there was an undercurrent below those ordinary words. “Thought you’d maybe want to get some rest.”
“Well, don’t count on me opening the office tomorrow morning,” Kelly said, expecting to be led toward the door of the congressman’s private office. Instead, Bianci guided him with a finger of his left hand into what was basically the workroom of the suite in the Old House Office Building, a bull pen where the mainframe, the coffeepot, and a crowd of desks and files would not normally be seen by constituents. “I’m on El Paso time and anyway, I always need to wind down awhile after I get off a plane. Figured I’d key in my report if you weren’t around for a verbal debrief tonight.”
“Well, how was the demonstration?” Bianci asked. He leaned back against a desk whose legs squealed slightly on the hardwood as they accepted the thrust.
“It really was a test,” Kelly said, frowning as he made the final decisions about what to present to his employer, “and I guess the short answer is that there’s bits of graphite composite and synthetic sapphire scattered all over West Texas and New Mexico.”
“Sounds like I was right six months ago,” said the congressman, with a nod. “Overripe for the ax, exactly the sort of boondoggle that weakens the country in the name of defending it.”
“That’s the hell of it, sir,” Kelly said with a deeper frown, the honorific given by habitual courtesy to a man he felt deserved it. “Like you say, typical interservice wrangling. And you bet, the ferry went off like a bomb, she did that. But - “ He shrugged out of his overcoat, his eyes concentrating on that for a moment while his mind raced with the real problem. When he looked up again, it was to say, “Damned if I don’t think they’ve got something useful there. Maybe useful, at any rate.”
“ ‘Hard-nosed Investigator Suckered by Military’?” said Bianci, quotes in his voice and enough smile on his lips to make the words a joke rather than a serious question.
“Yeah,” said Kelly, sitting straddled on a chair across the narrow aisle from his employer, the wooden chair back a pattern of bars before him, “it bothers the hell outa me to believe anything I hear from the Air Force. I remember - “
He looked up grinning, because it hadn’t happened to him and this long after the fact it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. “I remember,” he said, rubbing his scalp with a broad hand whose back was itself covered with curling black hair, “the Skybolt missile that was gonna make Russki air defense obsolete. Hang ‘em under the wings of B-52’s and launch from maybe a thousand miles out, beyond the interceptors and the surface to air missiles. ...”
He was tired and wired and there were too many memories whispering through his brain. ‘B-52’ had called up transparent images, unwanted as all of that breed were unwanted except in the very blackest moods. The Anti-Lebanon Mountains were lighting up thirty clicks to the east with a quivering brilliance, white to almost blue and hard as an assassin’s eyes: seven-hundred-and-fifty-pound bombs, over a thousand of them, dropping out of the stratosphere in a pattern a kilometer wide and-as long as the highway from Kelly’s family home to the nearest town. The flashes could be seen for half a minute before the shock waves began to be heard at Kelly’s firebase; but even at that distance, the blasts were too loud to speak over.
“Damn, that was a long time back,” Kelly muttered aloud, shaking his head to clear it, and Representative Bianci nodded in agreement with what he thought he had heard, part of a story about a failed missile. “Early sixties, yes?” he said aloud, again giving Kelly the impression that he was being softened up for something on an agenda the congressman had not yet broached.
“Oh, right,” the younger man said with an engaging smile to cover an embarrassment known only to him. He couldn’t lose it with Carlo, couldn’t have his mind ricocheting off on its own paths in front of his boss. Kelly and Representative Bianci were as close to being friends as either’s temperament allowed, and his support - what he told Kelly he had done, and what the aide knew from the result he must have done - had saved the veteran from the very bad time he’d earned by the method of his separation from the National Security Agency. But Carlo couldn’t afford to associate with a psycho, a four-plus crazy like some people already said Tom Kelly was.
“Right, they tested Skybolt and they tested it, the Air Force did,” the aide continued. “Kept reporting successes and partial successes - to the Brits, too, mind, the British government was basing its whole defense policy on Skybolt - right down to the time the Air Force canceled the program because they never once had gotten the thing to work right.”
Kelly leaned back, flexing his big arms against the wood of the chair they gripped. “Turned out on one of those ‘partial successes,’ they’d detached the missile from the bomber carrying it, and it hadn’t ignited, hadn’t done anything but drop a couple miles and put a new crater in the desert. S’far as anybody could tell, the only thing the fly boys had tested successfully was the law of gravity, and that continued to perform up to specs.”
“Which is why you’re on my staff, Tom,” said Bianci after an easy chuckle. “But you don’t think the monocle ferry’s another Skybolt?”
Kelly sighed and knuckled his eyes, relaxed again now that he was back in the present. “Well, Hughes isn’t prime contractor,” he said, “that’s one thing to the good.”
He opened his eyes and looked up to meet the congressman’s. Kelly was calm, now, and his subconscious had organized his data into a personal version of truth, the most he had ever tried to achieve. “Look, sir,” he said, “they’ve got a glitch in the hydrogen pulsejet mode they need from a hundred thousand feet to, say, thirty miles. Probably soluble, but on this sort of thing you won’t get guarantees from anybody you’d trust to tell the truth about the weather outside.”
The aide spread his hands, palms down to either side of the chair, forming a base layer for the next edifice of facts. Bianci’s eyes blinked unwilled from Kelly’s face to the pinkish burn scars on both wrists. The man himself had when asked muttered, “Just a kerosene fire, price of bein’ young and dumb,” but the file Bianci had read carefully before he’d hired Tom Kelly spoke also of the helicopter and the three men dragged from the wreckage by Sergeant E-5 Kelly, who had ignored the facts that one of the men was dead already and that the ruptured fuel tank was likely to blow at any instant.
“If they do get that one cured,” Kelly continued, absorbed in what he was saying, “then sure, there’s a thousand other things that can go unfixably wrong, all along the line - but that’s technology, not this project alone, and the one guy out there in El Paso willing to talk gave me a good feeling. Don’t think he’d be workin’ on a boondoggle. And okay, that’s my gut and I’m not in the insurance business either.”
He looked at the print on the wall before him, then added, “But I think it might work. And I think it might be nice to have an alternative to Fortress.”
“Which works very well,” said the congressman. The only sign that his own emotional temperature had risen was the way his fingers, playing with the modem beside him on the desk, stilled. Belief in space-based defense, as embodied in Fortress, had more than any other single factor brought Carlo Bianci into politics.
The framed print on the wall behind Bianci was from the original design studies on Fortress. The artist had chosen to make the doughnut of shielding material look smooth and metallic. In fact the visible outer surface was lumpy and irregular, chunks of slag spit into Earth orbit by the mass driver at the American lunar base and fused there into armor for Fortress.
The space station itself was a dumbbell spinning within the doughnut. Living quarters for the crews were in the lobes, where centrifugal force counterfeited gravity, but the real work of Fortress was done in the motionless spherical hub. A great-winged ferry, launched like an aircraft from a Space Command base in Florida or California, was shown docking at the ‘north’ pole - the axis from which the station’s direction of rotation was counterclockwise.
The array of nuclear weapons depending from the south pole had been left out of the painting. Three thousand H-bombs, each with its separate reentry vehicle, would have been too nightmarish for even the most hawkish of voters. That was often the case with the truth.
Mounted on the shielding were multi-tube rocket batteries intended to smash any warhead that came close enough to Fortress to do harm. The primary defenses were out of the scale of the picture, however, the constellation of X-ray lasers which orbited with the space station. Each was a small nuclear weapon which, when triggered, sent in the moment of its dissolution up to a hundred and forty-four simultaneous pulses, each capable of destroying any missile or warhead which had risen above the blanket of the atmosphere.
“It’s everything President Kennedy dreamed of,” Kelly agreed, aware of what he was saying and too tired to more than wonder why he ...
Januszek66