He turned his attention to two more of his officers. Major Viktor Filatyev, tall and burly for a cosmonaut, was the sole nonaviator aboard. Before joining the Mars Project, he had been assigned to one of Russia’s experimental ground-based laser R&D programs. On the station, he was in charge of their primary offensive weapon, the Thunderbolt coaxial plasma rail gun. Filatyev’s shorter and leaner subordinate, Captain Leonid Revin, was chiefly responsible for their two upgraded Hobnail lasers. Primarily intended for close-in defense, the lasers had a maximum effective range of around one hundred kilometers. But even at that range, they were powerful enough to cut through a centimeter of solid steel in seconds.
“Leonid and I have run systems checks on the three energy weapons,” Filatyev said. “All indicators are green.” The big man frowned deeply. “But without our reactor, power supply is a very serious problem.”
“We’ll dig into that in a moment, Viktor,” Strelkov said with more patience than he felt. It would not do for the crew to know the depth of his own concern about their situation without the lost fusion generator. “Let’s finish running through what works before we focus on what doesn’t, eh?”
Abashed, Filatyev shrugged, quickly tightening his grip on a handhold when the instinctive reaction threatened to send him drifting into the compartment ceiling. “Sorry, sir.”
Strelkov grinned. “Zero-G takes some getting used to, doesn’t it?”
Heads nodded in response. Three of the other cosmonauts looked slightly green around the gills. Even with antinausea medications, completely adjusting to the absence of any defined “up” or “down” would take some of them a few days.
He looked back at Filatyev. “What is the status of our kinetic weapons?”
The big man relaxed slightly, obviously glad to be able to report some good news. “Fully functional, Colonel.”
“Very good,” Strelkov said. Besides its revolutionary directed-energy weapons, Mars One’s armament included a retractable rotary launcher with twelve Scimitar short-range hypersonic missiles and several Rapira or Rapier ground-attack weapons. Like the Hobnail lasers, the Scimitars were part of the station’s defenses — ready to engage enemy missiles or spacecraft that posed a direct threat.
In sharp contrast, the Rapiers were purely offensive weapons. They were kinetic-kill warheads made of high-temperature composite materials originally developed for Russia’s failed Avangard hypersonic glide-boost bomb carrier. Each warhead was mated to a thruster with enough delta-v to change its orbital inclination by up to ten degrees and then make a controlled reentry burn. Slashing down from space, Rapiers could strike fixed ground targets like airfields, ICBM silos, and other military and civilian installations at up to Mach 20.
That left just one member of the Mars One crew to hear from. Fit and trim, Major Pyotr Romanenko looked every inch the tough, aggressive Su-35 fighter pilot he had been before being tapped for Russia’s military cosmonaut program. Assigned to manage both the reactor and solar power arrays as needed, he also had a secondary role — defending Mars One in close combat, should the Americans somehow manage the almost unthinkable… docking with and boarding the station. “Our solar panels are presently operating at maximum efficiency,” he said gruffly. “Right now, in full sunlight, we’re generating approximately seventy-five kilowatts of electricity.”
Strelkov nodded. Romanenko’s stress on the words in full sunlight was the root of one of their biggest problems. At this altitude and with the sun’s current angle to their orbital plane, Mars One spent approximately thirty-four minutes of each orbit in darkness. During those periods in shadow, the solar arrays would not generate any electricity, forcing the station to rely entirely on backup battery power for routine operations.
Even during the daylight portion of each orbit, the power provided by their solar panels fluctuated, depending on the station’s position relative to the sun. And some of that was needed to recharge their batteries. After figuring in the electricity needed to run their life-support systems, computers, and various sensors, relatively little would be left over to recharge the two lasers and their plasma rail gun.
Strelkov shifted his foothold a tiny bit so that he could face Filatyev and Revin more fully. “If we have to fire Thunderbolt or the Hobnails before the replacement reactor we’ve been promised arrives, what is our tactical situation?”
Revin spoke up first. “Each laser’s battery pack provides about thirty seconds of total firing time, sir.”
“That’s what? Maybe six or seven separate shots sufficient to destroy larger targets like incoming missiles or enemy spacecraft?” Strelkov estimated.
“Yes, sir. But killing or deflecting smaller pieces of shrapnel or space debris requires much less energy,” Revin said. “We could successfully engage targets of that type with short, single-second bursts.”
Strelkov breathed a little easier. Even relying solely on battery power, the Hobnail lasers could still defend Mars One against anything but a sustained mass attack. They were orbiting well above the reach of the Standard SM-3 antisatellite missiles employed by the U.S. Navy and Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force. And while the larger, more powerful ballistic-missile interceptors that formed America’s Ground-Based Midcourse Defense might be able to attack the station, there were relatively few of them — and they were only deployed in fixed silos at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base and New York’s Fort Drum. Given Mars One’s high relative velocity, there should be no way the Americans could hope to launch their interceptors rapidly enough to overwhelm his defenses.
But what about the unknown factor? his mind reminded him coldly. What about the Sky Masters spaceplanes? Current intelligence reports from the GRU suggested they were unarmed, but Russia’s spies were never infallible. Defeating an attack by missile- or laser-armed spaceplanes might take a longer-range weapon.
He looked at Filatyev. “And your Thunderbolt rail gun, Major? How many times can you fire using the energy stored in its supercapacitors?”
“Only twice, Colonel,” the big man replied. “The gun requires a substantial amount of power to create plasma toroids and magnetically accelerate them up to ten thousand kilometers per second.”
“You can fire only twice,” Strelkov repeated flatly. He turned to Romanenko. “How much time do you need to recharge the lasers and rail gun using power diverted from our solar arrays?”
The engineering officer shrugged. “Of the two weapons systems, Thunderbolt is the easier to replenish. Its supercapacitors can be charged much faster than conventional batteries. Based on the numbers I’ve worked out in consultation with Moscow, we ought to be able to fully power the rail gun every five or six minutes. That’s assuming, of course, that we shut down every other nonessential system aboard the station. And that’s also assuming the solar panels are in full sunlight and at peak efficiency,” he warned. “Anything less will greatly slow the process.”
“And the Hobnail lasers?”
“Given our battery technology and other power constraints, it would take a miracle to recharge them in anything less than two or three full orbits.”
Strelkov’s jaw tightened. That was pretty much what he’d expected to hear, but it didn’t make the news any more welcome.