Scott went on, “Look … I knew what I was getting into when I pushed Patricia to send me up here. And you’re right: This piece of space metal is too important to abandon ship. So what can I do to help?”
Still without looking at him, Kimberly said, “Give me an idea on how to spook the warheads, get around their course corrections. I cut the thrusters when the Aegis ASATs went ballistic and I was able to sneak between their paths. Can I use that tactic to confuse the Chinese warheads?”
Shaking his head, Scott replied, “The Dong Neng-3s were designed to overcome that tactic. They probably lifted the idea from our own latest-generation air-to-air missiles. But we countered those improvements with electronic spoofing, and metallic chaff before that: you know, clouds of radar reflectors.”
As Kimberly continued to prepare for an extended PDAM, it hit her that Scott had actually been schooled in this spy-versus-spy stuff, including countermeasures and everything else one adversary might throw at another to get a leg up on the opposition, to gain even a small advantage that might allow you to sneak through the other guy’s tactics. If there was anyone who knew how to out-strategize the opposition, it was her ex-husband. And what was it he was rambling about…?
She looked up suddenly. “What did you say about chaff?”
Scott lifted an eyebrow. “That’s old school, confusing the enemy with a fake of the head, a feint. Electronic countermeasures give you more finesse, a wider range of outcomes. Why? Do you have any ideas for generating electronic chaff? Like using that traveling wave tube you brought up to stimulate crystal growth, maybe beam it at the ASATs?”
“That’s already served its purpose,” Kimberly said, remembering both Farid’s and Bakhet’s surprised reactions when she’d hit them with the burning millimeter waves. “But there was something else you said. It was just at the tip of my tongue.”
She closed her eyes, thinking as hard as she could. She realized that Scott agreed with her, and he was right. The survival of the ISS was much more important now than just about anything else, even though Chief Astronaut Tarantino had already told them they should abandon the station and use Scott’s Starliner capsule to return to Earth.
“The Starliner!” Her eyes snapped open. “And the Soyuz vehicles!”
She reached out and shoved Scott back toward the MRM-2 Russian airlock. “I’ve already expended all the fuel in the Soyuzes, so you’ll have to eject them both manually.”
“Eject them?” Floating backward toward the port, Scott’s eyes widened as he followed her train of thought. “You mean send them out as free-flyers. Use them as chaff!”
“Right. Since the Soyuz at MRM-1 is docked at the nadir, when you eject it, it’ll go into a slightly lower orbit than the station—”
“Meaning it’ll be traveling faster than us, and out in front, the same direction that the ASATs are coming!”
“Like chaff in front of us,” Kimberly agreed. “It’ll have enough delta-v to start physically drifting from our orbit, and we can start it transmitting on whatever RF frequencies you can bring up to really confuse the incoming ASATs. Ejecting the other Soyuz at MRM-2 zenith, and the Starliner at Node 3 zenith, will make them both go higher and slower than us. So between the two Soyuzes and the Starliner, the DN-3s just might home in on them instead of the station’s big optical or radar cross section. And when the ASATs are too close to us to commit to a large delta-v course correction—”
“You’ll execute your extended PDAM and maneuver out of the way, beyond the ASATs’ ability to recover and home in on the ISS.” Scott kicked off the side of the module and headed off for the closer of the two Soyuzes. “We’ve still got at least ten minutes before the DN-3s arrive. I’ll power up the Soyuzes, override their three-minute emergency scuttle, and eject them as soon as I can. The Starliner may take a little more time—”
“Just do it, Scott. And make sure the RTGs are all secured in MRM-1 when you eject the Soyuz—we don’t want to lose any of them.”
“Copy.”
“And when you’re through, grab a pair of binoculars and get up to the Cupola. Start looking for the ASATs, get a visual to give me a few seconds’ warning for the PDAM.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Turning, he gave a curious look at the prybar sealing the hatch to MRM-2; he quickly removed it before disappearing into the airlock leading to the Soyuz that brought up the two terrorists and kicked off the whole debacle.
Kimberly went to Scott’s laptop to watch the SBIRS feed of the approaching ASATs. He’d said the images were being scrubbed by STRATCOM before being chopped over to TOPO, so she didn’t know how up-to-the-moment they were. So she didn’t know how much time they had left. But if Scott could scuttle the three space capsules to serve as a cloud of chaff, it might be enough to confuse the ASATs, even if it only gave her a few more seconds to try to quickly maneuver out of the way.
Moments later, Scott appeared at the hatch, his eyes wide. “The MRM-2 Soyuz is ready to scuttle … along with a dead body.”
Kimberly threw him a glance. “Thanks.” She didn’t have any remorse for Bakhet, not after what he and Farid had done; Scott didn’t ask what happened, and she didn’t try to explain.
He shrugged, and before turning to head off for the other Soyuz docked at MRM-1, said, “I’m … sorry. I didn’t know you had it in you. Nice work.…”
Kimberly grunted.
Scott grinned at her as he turned and started for the Soyuz.
Kimberly smiled to herself as she turned back to the laptop. Inwardly she felt a warm glow: that grin was more recognition than he’d ever given her—or anyone else, for that matter.
She forced herself to focus on the screen, running through her options. The Chinese DN-3s had the capability of making last-second course corrections. With their velocity, and the station’s limited capacity for delta-v, that translated into perhaps the ASATs missing the ISS by less than a meter. But again, if Scott was right and those missiles actually were hit-to-kill and not filled with explosives, then all she’d need was for them to miss by millimeters, not meters.
It was like horseshoes—a miss was as good as a mile.
But the consequences of not missing was killing herself, her ex-husband, and most likely America’s space program.
CENTRAL POST, INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION
Kimberly kept her eyes glued on the updated link from MCC as Scott stood watch in the Cupola, searching for any sign of the approaching ASATs. A smattering of debris from the last ASAT encounter still enveloped the station in a thin cloud.
The emergency crew return Soyuz now flew in front of the station in a slightly different orbit. The zenith-docked Soyuz that the terrorists had arrived in, as well as Scott’s Starliner followed slightly behind the ISS, at higher orbits. All three capsules broadcast their positions in an attempt to fill the electromagnetic spectrum with radio frequency interference. In addition, hopefully they would provide optical, infrared, and radar clutter to further confuse the incoming ASATs. With all that, Kimberly steeled herself for radically changing the station’s own position.
She tried not to think that in some ways this was exactly what Scott had been trained to do in the air during his fighter pilot days. He should be at the controls, she thought. But realistically, she had more recent experience; it was up to her to evade the incoming warheads.