The sleepy look and deep circles under his eyes he carries to school these days are worth it for the midnight hours he usually spends at the keyboard, but tonight has been a disappointment. It was shaping up at first to be a bonus with his father and mother doing their lock-the-door intimate thing at ten, but two hours have gone by. Now all he’ll have is three uninterrupted hours before having to hit the sack as usual at three to be up by seven.
While so many of his school chums have their heads buried in video games, he’s touring the world real time every night. And it isthe whole world that pours into his personal portal, filled with information on just about anything he would ever want to know.
His father will never understand of course, and he’s tired of being called a geek whenever he’s discovered hunched over the keyboard at some ungodly hour. He loves his dad, even though he knows he’s a hopeless dinosaur when it comes to computers and communication, thinking his GSM cell phone is cutting edge. Alastair can’t bring himself to tell him that they’ve had the same phones in Africa for over a decade.
The operating system goes through its start-up routine and he waits it out, reviewing his surfing plan for the next few hours. A new bulletin board from England, a number of Web sites in the U.S.—including one featuring bikini shots of famous actresses—and an attempt to hack into a poorly protected Internet e-mail provider are all on the agenda.
The house is quiet as a tomb, and he double checks to make sure the volume is zeroed before running the risk of a burst of noise—a big mistake he made a few weeks ago that brought his father flying up the stairs.
There’s a parcel of e-mails from friends, including one with a link he’s never seen before, some sort of Internet router service.
Oh what the heck,he decides, clicking on the address and waiting for the screen to stabilize.
A long list of active e-mail accounts parades by, and he selects a few at random, watching a stream of 1’s and zeros without being able to discern their meaning.
Right! A challenge!
He selects a translation program and tries it with no effect, then pulls in another, and on the third try someone’s real-time transmission is crawling across his screen, some teenage girl complaining about a feckless boyfriend.
Boring.
He pulls back a level and scrolls down to the very bottom, finding a message in progress without a coherent address.
Hm-m-m. Let’s look at this private, personal communique.
He triggers the translation program again, and the words assemble themselves in English, the transmission apparently still in progress and scrolling across his screen.
…record, I suppose I should yell Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! ( At least I think that’s the right phrase.) I’m a passenger on the private spaceship Intrepid, whichlaunched from Mojave, California, and we were hit by some sort of small object which came right through the cabin and right through my pilot’s head, killing him instantly. No one can hear me on the radios, and apparently I only have only five days of air left.
And this isn’t fun anymore.
Alastair sits back, scratching his head. The syntax and tone don’t match any of the hackers he knows who might try to pull such a stunt, but then he can hardly know all the tricksters on the planet. Someone, however, is trying a sophisticated scam, and he triggers a save program to record whatever comes and sits back to watch what the trickster will try next.
Private spaceship. Yeah, sure.
Just to be certain, he triggers the Google search engine and throws the words private spaceship and Intrepidinto the search box, expecting a cascade of gobbledygook.
Instead sixteen thousand hits come back with the starting point the official Web site of American Space Adventures. Alastair sits forward slowly as he pages past the home page and reads about—the launch one day before—the name of the craft: Intrepid.
What the hell?
A smile spreads across his face. Buggers almost got me!Whoever the hacker is pulling the stunt, he’s cleverly used the right names and references.
Can’t fool me!he thinks, watching the evolving message once again. After ten minutes, he decides, he’ll run the whole thing through a matching program and see where in reality it came from.
Help, I’m trapped in a Chinese fortune cookie factory! Yeah right. A new twist on the oldest scam in the book!
The chief master sergeant toggles another command and turns to the NORAD commander. “Sixty-seven minutes left before impact, General, and thirteen minutes to target intercept.”
The special liquid crystal display he’s been controlling in a closed conference room changes views.
Chris Risen nods at the duty controller as he scans the orbital threat to ASA’s Intrepid,now displayed on the screen. The effort he set in motion is now approaching the critical moment, and with the Situation Room maintaining an open line for the President, it’s eating at him that there’s nothing NORAD can do but watch and hope.
“What will they see in the main control room?” Chris asks.
“They would see a launch, sir, but we’ve nulled it out of the computer, so it will not show.”
“And if it impacts the target?”
“They’ll see the debris with no explanation.”
“What’s the status of the ASAT launch?” He’s very aware of the serious fuel mistake.
“Bluebird Two-Three has elected to continue, sir, despite the… ah… problem. He’s positioning now for the run.”
“We have radar on him?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll bring it up.”
The track of the F-106 appears to be moving in slow motion relative to the track of the oncoming piece of Soviet space junk streaking south on its polar orbit. The Delta Dart is flying at just under six hundred miles per hour now while the target approaches at seventeen thousand. A digital readout next to the F-106’s target depiction shows his heading changing and his speed increasing as Chris settles into one of the command chairs to watch. It will be up to him to call ASA if the attempt fails, and it’s a call he does not want to make.
“He’s starting his run, sir.”
Owen Larrabe tries to ignore the persistent itching on the side of his face in a place he has no hope of reaching. Sealed inside his pressure suit, it will just have to itch, he decides. But the damned itch is leaching away his attention at a critical moment, and he summons up the willpower to combat the distraction as he nudges the throttle into afterburner. He’s level at thirty-five thousand and keeping the flight director target dead center as he lets the Delta Dart accelerate smoothly through the speed of sound, the airspeed indicator winding up toward the needed airspeed of 1.22 Mach. He sees the Mach-meter already at 1.2 and accelerating and pulls back the throttle, holding constant at 1.22 as he mentally counts down to the pull-up point, now just five miles and less than twenty-five seconds ahead. He checks his lateral flight path, reconfirms that the missile arming sequence is complete and precisely on target, pulls the F-106 into a sharp 3.8-g climb until reaching sixty-five degrees nose up, holding the attitude as the airspeed remains constant with full burner, the fighter climbing at more than forty-six thousand feet per minute, the altimeter more or less a blur as he shoots up through fifty thousand, then sixty and seventy, slowing slightly as the engine gulps for air and fuel and flames-out.
Oh, shit! Too soon! I hope the missile can compensate.