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Ray Kenney's mummy bag was deployed next to Quantrill's. Both of the boys were still awake when the late bulletins came, and both listened with breathless awe until the highway blockage bulletins began to repeat. “How're we gonna get to Raleigh now?" Ray whispered.

"The question is, will it still be there?" Quantrill regretted his reply but felt curiously detached from Raleigh. His father was on active duty; his mother had left to spend a week with kinfolk in Danville; his little sister had died two years ago. Quantrill thought of his upstairs room with its soccer posters, the pylons he used to fly his formula racers in the room, his hidden trove of pornflick cassettes, his suspended model of the Venus lab. It all seemed priceless to his childhood, valueless to his future.

Quantrill framed several replies to Ray Kenney, heard the boy weeping hoarsely, and realized that he was as likely to make things worse as to improve them. He recalled something his father had said once: "Talk is cheap, but silence is just about free." The smile of reminiscence was still on his face when Quantrill began to snore.

Once in the night, Quantrill waked for a moment; puzzled at the heavenly — hellish — display overhead. A meteor-bright line scrawled a curve, winking regularly before a final yellowish flash. The line disappeared almost instantly. Halfway across the sky a tiny star flared, then winked out just as abruptly. Quantrill thought sleepily of Perseid showers; failed to note that meteorites do not maneuver; rolled over and slept. Thus he did not see the awesome streaks that laced the night sky later when space junk began to plummet into the stratosphere.

Chapter Eighteen

The series of launches near Ining, in northwest Sinkiang, were too suspiciously spaced and too numerous to ignore. The RUS passed its data on by coded link with a US synchronous satellite thirty-six thousand klicks above the Pacific. Almost certainly the Americans were monitoring the launches anyway, in addition to the SinoInd subs known to be nearing Scotland, Australia, the US eastern seaboard and elsewhere.

We were monitoring. Our Air Defense Command computer complex, in nanoseconds, offered the 0.858 probability that the Chinese were aiming a stab for our eyes in the sky. Red telephones were in use and fingers were near buttons. All that remained was for any one of those Chinese devices to achieve low orbit, then 'jink' suddenly to higher orbit in a classic pop-up intercept. ADC scrambled the F-23's equipped with Vought AA-Sat (anti-antisatellite) systems from England, California, and Queensland. It was still possible that the Chinese were flinging up saanzi, 'umbrella', surveillance satellites, and not one of Vought's dreadnaughts must slip its leash unless a Chinese vehicle initiated the maneuver that would assure an intercept path with a US satellite.

No human presence could have kept track of so many satellites, from lunar-orbit Ellfive study projects to the synchronous-orbit Comsats to the nineteen-thousand-klick Navstar navigation devices and barely orbital research facilities. ADC's computer watched it all with ease, simultaneously keeping tabs on existing RUS, Chinese, and other satellites.

On one end of a hotline, Col. Robin LoBianco jumped. “Jink, Mr. President! It's targeted against a RUS Molniya."

From the other end: "That's not our war, Robin. I'm watching the display."

"Yessir. Russkis will be mad as — jinkl Shit, it's a Demi-tasse, I have seven jinks! Against ours…"

"Fire the Moonkillers, Robin. That's our war."

Chapter Nineteen

China had hoped to conceal the extent of her A-Sat weapons, the most sophisticated being her Jin ji, 'urgent', system. We had specs on it, a multiple independently-targetable antisatellite weapon cluster; hence a MITAS, hence a Q-clearance word, Demitasse. We had bragged on our Vought AA-Sat systems, which deployed interceptors on rocket boost as first-stage launch vehicles. The F-23's followed programmed pop-up maneuvers before releasing their solid-propellant missiles, which then would seek warheads such as Demitasse in pinpoint intercept. What we had not bragged about was our Moonkillers.

Though offensive armament had been prohibited by treaty on US satellites, defensive weapons had been installed. Satellites with sufficient energy storage were furnished with lasers capable of holing three-centimeter titanium plate. Heat dissipation in the system was so crucial that only five or six laser bursts could be rapidly fired at an approaching enemy. It was, of course, line-of-sight — but it could zap you from almost any orbital distance.

Satellites without surplus electric energy storage used something less elegant. It was a curious version of an idea used by Germans, then in our old SPRINT rockets. Solid propellant rockets are so simple and storable that a five-stage hypervelocity bird could be depended upon after years of storage. The entire weapon fitted into a cylinder fifteen cm. wide, seven meters long. The most deceptive feature was the propellant and chamber walls, so flexible with thermal protection that the cylinder could be curled into a hoop which passed as a segmented toroidal pressure vessel. It was a pressure vessel, all right…

The automated drill was 'uncurl; aim; fire.' Four stages of the weapon were straightforward boosters; the fifth carried a shaped charge that shotgunned a cloud of metal confetti, and the average 'burnt velocity' of those pellets relative to their launcher was on the order of 8,000 meters/sec, perhaps double that figure relative to an onrushing target.

Altogether, some fifty American satellites had been fitted — some retrofitted — with laser or shotgun defenses Taken together with their control modules they composed the Moonkiller system. The name was an obvious conceit, since they would not have stopped a sizeable asteroid; but in the early hours of Monday, 12 August 1996, they made expensive colanders out of forty-two Demitasse warheads,

RUS satellite defenses, Moonkillers and Vought AA-Sats accounted for most of the other Demitasse weapons but, in an hour-long display of orbital pyrotechnics watched by uncounted millions, some of those warheads obliterated their targets. Particularly galling to the US Navy was the loss of fully half of its laser translators. American subs, equipped with extremely sensitive detectors, had for years depended on communications via blue-green satellite laser that penetrated hundreds of meters into ocean depths. If you were on-station, you got the flashes.

In a small Extremely Low Frequency radio facility near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Lt. (JG) Boren Mills whirled from his console. “ELF grid test program to standby, Chief," he said, remembering to speak far down in his throat. Mills had been jerked from reserve status in grad school at Annenberg less than thirty hours before, to this Godforsaken tunnel in cheese country, but Mills was — had been — the kind of grad student who seldom forgot to employ the communication theory work he read. It had already earned him one promotion.

"At your mark, sir," said the balding chief, prompting him.

"Uh — yes, at my mark: mark." Mills touched fingertips to his headset, gnawed his lip, caught himself at it, forced his personal display to read calm.

"Running, sir. Should I test the time-sharing translators again? I can't believe anybody wants to use the ELF grid as main trunk transceivers."

Mills saw a red-code flash on the display, studied it a moment, muttered, "Jesus Christ on Quaaludes," then remembered the chief's query. "Test them again; all possible speed, Chief. We're losing laser translators over the Pacific and Arctic." The ELF radio grid, though it lay across thousands of square klicks of dairyland and had cost an immense fortune, was a distant second choice to orbital laser methods. The message rate of extremely low-frequency radio was, by definition, extremely low. But it was not as vulnerable as an orbital translator either, as Mills was learning.