Orbital: This is the Future of War (Future War Book 3) Read online

  ORBITAL

  A Future War Novel

  by FX Holden

  © 2020 FX Holden.

  Independently Published

  Typeset in 12pt Garamond

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. To contact the author, please write to the email address below.

  [email protected]

  With huge thanks to my fantastic beta reading team for their encouragement and critique:

  Alan McNamara, Bob “WhirlyBob” Hesse, Bror Appelsin, Gabrielle “Hell Bitch” Adams, Greg Hollingsworth,

  Ian “Bikerman” Flockhart, Joe Lanfrankie, Johnny “Gryphon” Bunch, Jonathan “Greycap” Harada,

  Mike “Nuke” McGirk, and Richard “Rollnloop” Campan.

  Each Future War novel is a self-contained story, with occasional recurring characters.

  Other titles in the Future War series:

  Bering Strait, 2018

  Okinawa, 2019

  Contents

  Cast of Players

  Foreshadowing

  First strike

  Athena’s thunderbolts

  Ultimatum

  Presidential decree

  Conscientious objector

  Rain from a clear sky

  The Gulf between us

  Uncomfortable encounters

  Economic repositioning

  After fire, flood

  Orbital

  Running scenarios

  Positioning the pieces

  Manure, meet fan

  Take-down

  Epilogue

  Author’s note

  KOBANI: Preview

  Cast of Players

  By nation and order of appearance

  RUSSIA

  Anastasia Grahkovsky, Chief Scientist, Titov Main Test and Control Center, Moscow

  Sergei Grahkovsky, her brother

  Major-General Yevgeny Bondarev, Commander, Titov Main Test and Control Center, Moscow

  Denis Lapikov, Minister of Energy, Russian Federation

  Corporal Maqsud Khan, Squad Leader (Targeting), Baikonur Groza Command and Control Center

  Colonel-General Oleg Popovkin, Commander of the 15th Aerospace Forces Army

  Colonel Tomas Arsharvin, Fifth Directorate Aerospace, Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU)

  Roman Kelnikov, Defense Minister, Russian Federation

  Alexei Avramenko, President, Russian Federation

  ITALY

  Roberta D’Antonia, Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna (AISE)

  USA

  Colonel Alicia ‘The Hammer’ Rodriguez, 615th Combat Operations Squadron (COS), 45th Space Wing, Cape Canaveral

  Ambre Duchamp, Lead Data Scientist, 45th Security Forces Squadron, Cape Canaveral

  Major KC ‘Kansas’ Severin, 2IC, 615th COS, Cape Canaveral

  Sergeant Xiaoxia ‘Zeezee’ Halloran, 45th Space Wing Intelligence

  Captain Karen ‘Bunny’ O’Hare, Crew Training Officer (External), 615th COS, Canaveral

  Stuart Fenner, President of the United States of America

  UK

  Flight Lieutenant Anaximenes ‘Meany’ Papastopoulos, Royal Air Force (RAF) 23 Squadron Space Operations

  Squadron Leader Gregory ‘Paddington’ Bear, RAF 23 Squadron Space Operations

  SAUDI ARABIA

  Prince Taisir Al-Malki, Saudi Head of Delegation, OPEC (Plus)

  Captain Amir Alakeel, No. 92 Squadron Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF), King Abdulaziz Air Base, Dhahran

  Lieutenant Hatem Zedan, No. 92 Squadron RSAF, King Abdulaziz Air Base, Dhahran

  CHINA

  Major Fan Bo, People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Xichang 27th Test and Training Base

  Chen Minhao, Premier, People’s Republic of China

  Foreshadowing

  The Hidden Risk of Plummeting Oil Prices: War

  Only three developments could conceivably alter the present low-price environment for oil: a Middle Eastern war that took out one or more of the major energy suppliers; a Saudi decision to constrain production in order to boost prices; or an unexpected global surge in demand.

  The prospect of a new war between, say, Iran and Saudi Arabia – two powers at each other’s throats at this very moment – can never be ruled out, though neither side is believed to have the capacity or inclination to undertake such a risky move. A Saudi decision to constrain production is somewhat more likely sooner or later, given the precipitous decline in government revenues. However, the Saudis have repeatedly affirmed their determination to avoid such a move…

  The Nation Magazine, USA, January 2016

  War With OPEC Can’t End Well for Russia

  Oil prices plummeted this week after a stalemate in talks between Russia and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Convinced it can force OPEC members to unilaterally decrease production, Russia may well end up worse off than its rivals in its bid to save face.

  It might seem that the best option would be to reach an agreement to reduce production in a coordinated fashion so as to stabilize prices. But the Russian side chose confrontation. It’s possible that Russia will choose to fight until the bitter end. The Kremlin is accustomed to using force as a prelude to negotiations and typically refuses to make face-saving concessions.

  But war – even a price war – always means destruction and loss.

  Moscow Times, Russia, March 2020

  First strike

  Chelyabinsk 15 February 2013, 0915 local

  Nine-year-old Anastasia Grahkovsky had the same breakfast ritual every morning and as she spooned her semolina porridge into a bowl, careful to avoid the biggest lumps, she had no idea it would nearly cost her her life.

  Anastasia hated the lumps. Not only did they stick in your throat, but if they were big enough, then the semolina on the outside of the lump was squishy, while the grains in the middle of the lump were uncooked and crunchy. Her mother made the porridge when she was working night shifts at the Zinco plant, but at the moment she was on day shift which meant her brother Sergei had made breakfast, and at this, he sucked.

  But she had no one to complain to because he had already left for school when she got up, even though he was supposed to wait for her. He was always doing that. So she loaded up her bowl, picked out the biggest lumps and dumped them back in the pot, then pulled her dressing gown tighter around herself and walked to the window of their apartment, climbing up to the windowsill and sitting on the ledge looking out over the line of birch trees between herself and the refrigeration works. She was really getting too big to sit there but she’d done it every morning as long as she could remember, and though she was really too chubby now to sit comfortably, she still did it. Her class was doing a fitness assessment this morning, but it was only 14 degrees outside and she had asthma, so she didn’t need to be at school until they were finished at 11.

  The sun was just coming up, though at this time of year, it never really got far into the sky before it was going down again. She shivered. Lumpy and cold. It described her porridge and herself. She shifted her backside on the narrow windowsill and leaned her head against the cool glass.

  Then the sky lit up.

  There was a brilliant ball of light moving across the sky from right to left, leaving a trail of white smoke behin
d it. Her eyes were drawn to it like it was magnetic and as she watched, it speared toward the ground at incredible speed, then while it was still high in the sky, it exploded!

  The entire sky flared brilliant white and Anastasia blinked, her irises slamming shut, but too late. When she opened them again, all she could see were red and black blotches.

  “Mama!” she screamed reflexively, though she knew she was five miles away at the zinc factory. She panicked, hands scrabbling at the glass window pane. “Mama!”

  Then came an ear-shattering sonic boom, the window she was sitting beside splintered into a thousand needle-sharp fragments and Anastasia was blown back into her kitchen, skin flayed from her face, sunburned, blind and deaf.

  Athena’s thunderbolts

  Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, 2032

  It was a meteor that detonated over Chelyabinsk in 2013, though for Anastasia Grahkovsky, it might as well have been a nuclear bomb. She’d been one of 1,200 people injured that day when the 66-foot wide, 12,000-ton lump of rock had slammed into the earth’s atmosphere at a speed of 40,000 miles an hour and exploded 20 miles above Chelyabinsk.

  Anastasia got her hearing back, but not her sight. And as she stood at her washbasin 19 years later and applied thioglycolic acid to her ravaged scalp to remove the hair which grew there in random tufts, she couldn’t help reflect on how she could draw a direct line between that day in 2013 and now.

  The roof of her mother’s zinc factory had collapsed, trapping a hundred workers, including her mother. Her school had been locked down and the students kept inside, and her brother hadn’t been able to come home until the middle of the afternoon. So Anastasia had lain on the floor of the kitchen, curled into a ball, whimpering and bleeding from a hundred cuts, until her brother got there at 2 p.m. He didn’t see her at first, the apartment a scene of devastation, a freezing wind blowing through the gaping window, glass all over the kitchen, cupboards and their contents strewn across the bench and floor. And Anastasia.

  A neighbor had driven them to hospital, Anastasia wrapped in a bedspread, not crying, barely breathing. The hospital emergency ward was chaotic – a woman with a broken back lay on a stretcher in a brace, people with cuts and broken limbs sat on chairs or on the floor up and down corridors as nurses and doctors ran from one to the other trying to triage the worst cases. The car crash victims were the worst, blinded by the flash and then injured as their cars plowed head-on into buildings, poles, trees, or each other.

  Thanks to the quick action of her brother and neighbor, to the care of overstretched doctors and nurses who stopped her from dying of shock and cold, Anastasia had lived. And on that day was born her dread fascination with the power of meteorites.

  She could trace the day it really took hold to a morning when she was thirteen, and walking with her brother to school. She knew the way herself by then; after all, it had been four years since she became blind. She had a cane, and could walk herself there, but her brother insisted on walking with her, made her take his arm the whole way. He was sixteen, stronger than her and sighted, so she couldn’t exactly fight him.

  One morning there had been roadworks, and they had to take a detour through an abandoned car yard.

  “See,” Sergei had told her, “this is why you need me. How would you have found your way around the roadworks?”

  “I would have asked someone,” she’d said grumpily.

  “Yeah? Before or after you fell in that pit over there?” he’d asked.

  She’d been about to say something smart right back at him when her foot had come down on a stone, and she twisted her ankle. He let go of her as she gave a small cry and dropped to one knee, grabbing her foot.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  “No, stupid,” she said angrily. “You walked me straight over a dumb rock.” She sat down on the cold ground and began massaging her ankle.

  His feet scuffed beside her, and he grunted, “Hey, I think it’s a piece of the meteor.” She heard him bend over and pick something up. “Yeah, for sure.”

  People had been finding the small pebble-sized meteorites all over Chelyabinsk since the explosion. Nearly every family had one or two on a mantlepiece or bookshelf. But not their family. She was sure her brother would have found one before now, but either he or their mother had decided it wasn’t a thing they wanted inside their house after what had happened to her.

  She stood up and held out her hand. “Give it to me.”

  “Nah,” he said. “It’s worthless. You used to be able to get a few rubles for them, but no one is buying anymore.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I want it.”

  “Mama will throw it out,” he told her.

  She stuck her hand out further. “Just give it me!”

  He dropped it in her palm and she closed her hand around it. It was hard, like a lump of coal, but round. She ran her fingers over it. The surface was smooth in parts, rough in others; pockmarked, like her face.

  She slipped it into the pocket of her jeans and tested her ankle. “Let’s go,” she said.

  From that day, she had started collecting meteorites from friends, from her mother’s workmates, from people selling them on the internet. Her mother had tried to stop her at first, then had complained about the growing pile of rocks in Anastasia’s bedroom; on shelves, in boxes, under her bed. Eventually she shrugged and gave up.

  Anastasia learned how to classify them and sort them by feel. Two-thirds were smooth-surfaced chondrites, some with shock veins of nickel or iron running through them. But about one third were melt breccia; a fine matrix of chondrite fragments fused together by a collision sometime in the meteor’s past. She valued these more. They felt like she felt; blackened and battered. But they were survivors, like her.

  She had a quick mind and an obsession with science, and one of her teachers had taught herself braille so that she could feed Anastasia’s insatiable thirst for knowledge about the universe outside Chelyabinsk, outside Russia, outside Earth. She was studying textbooks from the Chelyabinsk State University while she was still in junior high, and left high school two years early to start undergraduate studies in astrophysics. As an honors student, she had been the first researcher to quantify exactly how much energy the Chelyabinsk explosion had released, her calculations revising the previous estimate up from 1.4 to 1.8 petajoules or the equivalent of 480 kilotons of TNT, 33 times the energy released by the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. She had published her calculations together with her physics professor, and it had been at an astrophysics forum 1,000 miles across the Ural Mountains to the west in Moscow, where they had presented a poster, that she had been talent-spotted by an officer of the Russian Aerospace Forces’ Titov Test Center.

  Six months later, at the age of 22, she joined the research program called Groza.

  Colonel Andrei Yakob was accustomed to the effect his Chief Scientist had on people she had never met before. The first thing they usually noticed was her shaved head. The second thing they noticed was the filigree pattern of scars over her scalp, face and neck from where she had been sliced by flying glass. Curiously, they did not always notice her blindness, especially if, like now, she was sitting quietly at a table full of people, having been the first to arrive, and being largely ignored by the many senior officers and government staff around the table who considered themselves rather more important than some woman they had never met and who, frankly, made them a little queasy to look at.

  The group around the table called itself the Technical Committee, but there was nothing technical about it. There were no engineers or scientists among the 12 members present, and they were not interested in debating technical issues in anything more than the most superficial of detail. If the name reflected the truth, they would call themselves the Political Committee, because their one and only function was to approve or reject recommendations from the Titov Test Center’s senior officers about whether to progress a project to the final milestone, which was a recommendation to the Minister o
f Defense, Roman Kelnikov, either to deploy, redirect or abandon a project.

  Project Groza had now completed its final trial, and reached its final milestone.

  Despite having served in the armed forces all of his adult life, Yakob was also an accomplished bureaucrat. He knew that to walk into a meeting such as this, without knowing in advance how each of the members of the committee would vote, was suicidal. So standing at the end of the table, next to his lead scientist, he already knew that today’s decision was hanging on a thread. Six of the voting members were in favor of canceling Groza, six in favor of deploying. None believed the research should be continued or redirected into other avenues. The committee required a simple majority of seven votes to confirm a decision, so unless Anastasia Grahkovsky could persuade at least one of the ‘no’ voters to change their mind, Groza would be canceled today. He’d told Anastasia Grahkovsky this, and had rehearsed with her every single argument he felt might sway his colleagues to change their vote.

  Andrei Yakob was a firm believer that Groza would change the balance of military power in Russia’s favor in a way no other weapon under development could do, and in a way none of the other superpowers could easily match inside the next decade or more. He fervently believed it should be deployed, and the sooner, the better. With the Middle East about to go up in flames due to the collapsing price of oil, and Russia’s oil and gas-based economy on the brink of a meltdown, he was convinced that Groza would give Russia leverage no other nation could match. That was what he had just spent the last half hour explaining to the committee. The why. He felt he had brought most of the room along with him. Now it would be up to Grahkovsky to seal the deal by explaining the how.

  “In conclusion, ballistic missiles armed with nuclear weapons are not an option in the current threat environment unless we want to trigger mutually assured destruction and planetary devastation. Hypersonic cruise missiles like our Tsirkon, traveling at a mere five times the speed of sound, can now be intercepted by quantum AI-supported high energy liquid laser defenses with more than 80 percent certainty. There is no conventional weapon in our arsenal that can be used to strike an enemy at a moment’s notice, with devastating effect, in a way that cannot be countered, and that guarantees the absolute destruction of even highly protected hard targets.” He paused, letting his words sink in, looking around the table into the eyes of the doubters. Good. He could tell they were listening. “Groza is the solution to these problems. As you know it has completed the final phase of its testing. Chief Scientist Grahkovsky will now run through the results of those tests and take your questions, and I will sum up with our recommendation.”