In Missouri’s briefing room, Mei Ling gestured at the slides with a pointer.
“Haven is headed southward through the Pacific at a speed of thirty-three knots. We’re falling behind at a rate of about two nautical miles every hour.”
Displayed on the projection screen was an aerial view composited from several dozen images. Far ahead of Missouri and its trailing hyphen of white wake, a faint whalelike shadow could be seen beneath the ocean’s surface. But the shape, at more than two times Missouri’s size, couldn’t have belonged to any whale—not even one from a Japanese monster movie.
I asked Mei Ling, “Can’t this thing go any faster?”
She smiled tightly, the expression part umbrage at my lack of respect toward her relic of a ship and part apology.
The situation wasn’t without irony. The US Navy’s Arsenal Ship Program had aimed to create a battleship for the twenty-first century. Now the last of the old battleships pursued its modern counterpart like a father chasing after his runaway child.
“I’m afraid not,” Mei Ling said. “This is as fast as she’ll go.”
In other words, we would never be able to catch up with Liquid and blast him out of the water. But all was not hopeless. We didn’t have to overtake him on the way.
“Liquid’s target is JD, a US military satellite disguised as orbital debris. Haven will have to surface in order to use its railgun.”
As she gave her briefing, Mei Ling regarded the room. Seated among the gathered soldiers were members of the Rat Patrol—but only Meryl and Johnny. Ed and Jonathan hadn’t recovered from the events in Eastern Europe and remained shoreside.
In a chair beside Meryl, Johnny began typing on his wrist computer and said, “If we have JD’s orbit, we can predict where Haven’s going to surface.”
Mei Ling nodded and advanced the slide. On the screen, the earth was enveloped within a particulate haze—every satellite, whether military, weather, communications, or any other kind, under NORAD’s watch. Gradually, the dots and orbits winked out until only one remained.
JD.
Adding the locations of Missouri and Haven to the simulated globe, Mei Ling said, “JD is in a synchronous elliptical orbit. So its next perigee should be in …”
“Got it!” Johnny read the results from his wearable computer. “Fifteen hours, six minutes, and twelve seconds.”
At that time, the satellite would be closest to sea level.
“Right,” Mei Ling said. “In fifteen hours, JD is going to be over the Bering Sea, 494 nautical miles from the Bering Strait. Haven will be in holding position in that area.”
Meryl asked, “Do they really have to get that close to launch?”
REX’s railgun could launch a nuclear warhead to any location on Earth. So why did Liquid need to wait for the satellite’s perigee? I stood and approached the screen to explain not just to Meryl but to the rest of the team.
“REX may be armed with nuclear ordnance, but JD floats in an orbit high enough to be called outer space. Why is this important? Because up there, there’s virtually no air, and without air, there’s no stuff to envelop the fission event, absorb the massive output of energy, and turn into plasma.
“In terrestrial nuclear explosions, whether fissile or fusional, a certain amount of the destructive power comes from forces external to the initial blast, including shock waves, fragmentation, and thermal waves. Even assuming that all of the energy will radiate, between the distance of the satellite’s orbit and the yield of REX’s nukes, the effective damage radius won’t be much larger than a thousand feet, or approximately three hundred meters.
“Some of you may be thinking that a two-thousand-foot blast radius sounds impressive. But your typical satellite is always moving forward, so as not to be pulled down by Earth’s gravity, and maintains an orbit traveling at a relative velocity that can exceed ten kilometers per second.
“Down on Earth, in the presence of air resistance, producing such a ludicrous speed is impossible. An object moving that fast wouldn’t even be captured by a twenty-four frame-per-second movie camera, passing by entirely in that instant between frames. To put it another way, without sufficient acceleration, the satellite would be pulled down by gravity and crash.
“Say REX’s nuke manages to explode precisely on JD’s orbital path. The satellite, moving at ten kilometers per second, will pass through the six-hundred-meter blast diameter within six hundredths of a second. That’s barely the blink of an eye. Even with the Arsenal-class targeting computer, the only chance of shooting down such a high-speed object is to reduce the range as much as possible. Though the elliptical orbit means that JD will be at peak velocity at its perigee, the possibility of a close or direct hit is maximized at relatively short range.
“So even when Liquid reaches the firing location, he’ll have to wait to launch his nuke until he has the highest probability of success, when JD is at its perigee. Time enough for Missouri to catch up.”
Mei Ling made sure everyone understood my explanation before moving on to our battle plan.
“Haven will need to open the outer cover to launch the nuke via the railgun. That’s our one and only chance to board.”
The next slide was a photograph of Missouri firing upon Haven’s exposed bridge back on Shadow Moses. The two electromagnetic rails of REX’s stolen weapon looked like a pair of chopsticks.
“To board?” Meryl asked. “Why can’t we attack it from the outside?”
Missouri didn’t have digital guidance systems, but the ship did have large caliber cannons. She was a relic from the last century, but new or old was inconsequential: a giant mass of metal and explosives would punch a hole in even the newest of vessels.
Meryl’s question was reasonable, but the problem rested in the source of Liquid’s power.
“It wouldn’t do any good,” I said, then stood and again made my way to the front of the room. “As long as Liquid has control of the System, physically destroying GW would still leave supreme authority over SOP in his hands. We can’t simply blow Haven apart when she surfaces.”
Mei Ling nodded. “Yes. Dr. Emmerich is right. That’s why we need to destroy GW from the inside before attacking Haven itself.”
Snake, who was leaning against the wall at the back of the room, removed the oxygen mask from his mouth to joke, “Liquid’s very own Death Star.”
In the nine years I’d known Snake, this was the first time I’d heard him reference Star Wars. If he had been hoping for a reaction from the room he was disappointed, for as soon as he had made the remark, he began to cough painfully and reaffixed the mask.
When his coughing quieted, Mei Ling continued. “We know Haven will have to surface in order to fire the railgun. When it does, we’ll know, and Missouri will make a quick approach and deliver our strike team. Our goal is twofold: prevent that nuke from launching and wipe out GW’s programming. The enemy relies entirely on electronic means of threat detection, so they won’t be able to see the Missouri until they surface.”
Mei Ling gazed across the dark room at the faces illuminated by the projector’s light. All thought this talk preposterous at least to some degree. Liquid’s elite guard of Haven troopers were a death trap in waiting. This wasn’t a plan but a suicide mission—that much was as clear as day.
But they all knew there was no other way.
Mei Ling explained the plan. “We’ll launch the strike team from catapults at the exact moment Haven’s armored cover opens. They’ll then penetrate GW’s physical server room and infect it with Dr. Emmerich’s worm cluster.”
Johnny, watching a simulation on the display of his wrist computer, asked, “But what if Liquid turns off GW before we get in there?”
Even if the team made it inside the server room, the computer terminal needed to be powered on and functioning in order to receive the virus. Of course, Mei Ling and I had already thought of all the potential problems and contingencies, so she was ready with an answer.