Noblos, bending next to him. “You haven’t figured it out yet, have you, Captain?”
Dan snapped, “If you have, Doctor, please enlighten us.”
The scientist leaned forward, over his shoulder, and tapped Dan’s keyboard. The screen jumped back.
Dan stared, his spine going rigid. The display jumped again, zooming away. Showing the missile’s extended track.
Pointed almost due east.
Three hundred miles to the southeast of Savo, four hundred miles east of Taiwan.
At the battle group. And even as he watched, an IPP blinked into existence on the rightmost display. An oval, outlined in blinking yellow. Quivering at the edges, like some invertebrate alien life-form not yet decided on its shape as ALIS calculated and recalculated ten times a second.
Centered over the far-flung circular formation of the oncoming carrier and its screening units.
“Pass to FDR, pass to Fleet, pass to PaCom. Flash red. Incoming ballistic missile, type unknown, possible DF-21.” But next to him, Singhe was already typing. He unsocketed his handset, waited for the red light, and went out on high-frequency Fleet Warning. “Shangri-La and all stations this net, Shangri-La and all stations this net: Flash, flash, flash. From Ringmaster. Ballistic-missile launch, targeted roughly 21 degrees, 46 minutes north, 123 degrees, 40 minutes east. Premliminary IPP, location Shangri-La. ETA one-one minutes. Flash. Flash.”
He repeated it, then signed off without waiting for acknowledgment. Swung to yell across the compartment, “Donnie, can we take it?”
“It’s a crossing engagement,” Noblos observed. “You’d be wasting your ordnance.”
“We only have two Block 4s left,” Singhe murmured.
“That’s FDR it’s targeted on, Amy. Remember, intel said they were deploying on an anticarrier weapon.” He pushed back and joined Wenck and Noblos as they huddled behind Terranova at the console. The chief looked worried. “Can we take it?” Dan asked again.
“Wait one… trying to get you an answer on that, Skipper. But the numbers aren’t good.”
Dan waited. Then, putting his revulsion aside, faced Noblos. “Doctor, we need your advice here.”
The bristly eyebrows lifted. “Really? I don’t see why. If you plan to throw your rounds away.”
Dan tried for patience. He gritted his teeth. “How to maximize our probability of kill. If we take this guy on. Anything we can do?”
“Oh. Absolutely.” The physicist nodded, all too smugly.
“Then what?”
“Be three hundred miles south of here.” The physicist smiled. “Short of that, all I can say is, remember, the Block 4 is a terminal-phase interceptor. It’s not designed for midcourse, in-space interception at the velocity and altitude this thing’s traveling at. If you shoot too soon, the sustainer will burn out before it gets up there.”
Noblos lifted his gaze to the overhead. “Your optimal intercept point will be the product of its closest slant-range point of approach to you. And long enough after it starts its descent so the terminal body still has enough fuel to maneuver to a collision. You can plot the vectors. A three-dimensional solution… On second thought, better let ALIS do that. Once your target crosses 125 degrees longitude, it’ll be traveling away from you. Converting from a crossing engagement to a tail chase. In which case, it will actually be moving faster than your own warhead.”
“I could have told you that, Dan,” Donnie Wenck said. His cheeks were flushed; his hair was pawed into a roostertail. “We don’t need this asshole to explain the obvious.”
“This, from the technician who doesn’t know how to tune for temperature differences across the array face.” Noblos smiled sadly, and shook his head. “Fools,” he whispered, just loud enough to be heard.
Dan slid between them, figuring Wenck was just hot enough to throw a punch. Not that he didn’t feel like it too, but… “Leave it. Leave it! Yeah, we’re just the button monkeys, Doctor. Help us out. Show us how it’s done.”
Noblos cleared his throat. With a superior smile, he leaned in to type rapidly on Terranova’s keyboard. His left hand came to rest on her shoulder. She looked up, and her eyes widened. Dan tensed, began to grab for it, but the hand removed itself to enter another command.
Noblos straightened. “There. They’ll still miss, but it’s the best you’re going to do.”
“Donnie. Terror. Does that look good to you?” As they nodded he called across the slanting space, “Amy, did FDR roger on our flash?”
“Yes sir. They rogered up. Asked if we could intercept.”
Terranova murmured, “ALIS is giving a probability of kill of less than ten percent.”
“Thanks, Terror. — Tell ’em we’re trying, but the odds are against it. Do what they can. It’s”—he eyed the screen—“eight minutes out. Prepare to engage.”
Singhe muttered, “Fire authorized?”
“Not just yet, Amy. Goddamn it, don’t hurry me!”
He regretted the outburst at once, but set it aside as the CIC officer laid a red-bindered book atop the console. Pointed to a subhead. “It’s probably just a warning shot,” the officer muttered.
“I’d say so too,” Singhe called across the compartment. “Just firing over our bow. They’d never dare…?”
Dan was inclined to agree, but couldn’t shake an ominous feeling. Zhang had threatened to take on anyone who intervened. Savo shuddered; she was slewing around, coming to a better launch bearing, a compromise between a course to clear the booster smoke and one that would smooth out her roll in these rougher seas. Theoretically, a Standard could exit its cell at up to a 15-degree angle. But the more nearly vertical, the less chance of a glitch or hang-up.
The salvo alarm began to ring, a steady drone far aft. “Now set material condition Circle William throughout the ship,” the 1MC announced. The vent dampers clunked closed, cutting off the air intakes from the exhaust plume, which seethed with toxic chemicals. The firing litany began.
Dan stood swaying as the deck slanted beneath his feet. He pressed his eyelids together and knuckled his eyeballs. Behind them fireworks bloomed. Coruscating scarlet and viridian shapes pulsated, migrating across the blackness of his visual field. Like the ionization trails that the warhead, traveling five or six miles a second, would shortly grow as it began its plunge, drilling down toward its target.
Time was running out. He tried to go over it again, to make sure he was right. Noblos said it was a waste. And they were his last two rounds. Despite his fatigue, his growing confusion, lack of sleep, he had to do this right.
Meteor Juliet, whatever payload it carried, whatever message it was meant to convey, was nearing midphase. The data callouts registered the unvarying speed consistent with ballistic flight. Coasting in a huge parabola, most of which lay outside Earth’s atmosphere. His Standards would be trying to intercept it there, before reentry. But despite its terrific speed, there was no friction heating in the vacuum of space. The missile was infrared-dim, though seeing it from the side, its radar cross section should make it visible to the seeker head.
Another plus: ALIS indicated a solid lock-on. Since Standards began their flights depending on commands from the launching ship, both rounds should go out boresighted on the target. Or, rather, that patch of imagined space ahead of it, where it should be when their courses met, far above the last wisps of air.
And yet a third reason for optimism: the upper stage would still be in one piece. Once reentry began, temperature would build. The warhead’s ablative sheathing would char off. The ionization plume would blur the radar return. At some point, also, the burnt-out engines would break apart into tumbling, burning debris. Sometimes releasing decoys, too.