Dark Star

Brognola stood and followed her to the rear of the aircraft.

Walking up to a plain door, the woman tapped a code into a keypad set into the burnished steel frame, then pressed her hand against a glowing plate. There was an answering beep, a light above the door turned green and the flight attendant stepped aside as electromagnetic bolts disengaged and the door slid into the wall with a hydraulic sigh.

“Good to see you, Hal,” the President said from behind a large wooden desk in the corner of the room. “Glad you could make it on such short notice.”

“No problem, sir,” Brognola replied, stepping into the office. “The fish weren’t biting worth a damn.” Softly, the door closed behind him and resoundingly locked into place.

“Fishing…” the President said with a wan smile. “I haven’t done that in ages. You’re probably using the wrong type of bait again, my friend. Can’t catch catfish with a pop fly, you know.”

“As you’ve mentioned once or twice before.” Brognola grinned as he took a seat.

“I’ll get you to switch from lures to flies yet.”

There was a soft beep from the door. The President pressed a button on the intercom set into his desk and the door opened again, admitting a steward pushing a wheeled cart holding a steaming coffee urn, stacks of cups and saucers and several serving trays piled high with an assortment of sandwiches. Both men nodded politely to the steward as he departed, then completely ignored the food.

“All right, what’s so important that we couldn’t talk at the White House?” Brognola asked, crossing his legs at the knee. “Has there been an assassination attempt?” He paused in consternation.

“Nothing that simple, I’m afraid,” the Man said with a grimace. “And I will not be returning to Washington until further notice. My double is sitting in the Oval office while I stay at Cheyenne Mountain. The Veep is heading for Camp David.”

That was unsettling news.

“Okay, what happened?” the big Fed demanded bluntly. “Are we at war with somebody?”

“You tell me,” the President replied, pressing a button on the intercom.

Silently an oil painting of President John Adams rotated on the wall to display a plasma-screen monitor. There was a brief strobing effect as the room dimmed, and Brognola found himself looking at the smoke-covered remains of Cape Canaveral in Florida. The Vehicle Assembly Building was on fire, the flames licking skyward for hundreds of feet, the blaze occasionally punctuated by a powerful explosion. Several fire trucks were positioned around the blaze and countless firefighters hosed the structure with steady streams of water and foam.

In the foreground of the screen lay a smashed crawler-transporter. The colossal machine was designed to ferry a space shuttle from the assembly building to the launch pad so that the technicians could work on the vehicle and save days of time for a fast turnaround. With a top speed of one foot per hour, the crawler-transporter couldn’t catch a snail, but it was tough enough to roll over an Abrams battle tank without ever noticing. But now the monstrous crawler was deeply bowed in the middle and covered with glowing rivulets of molten metal only partially congealed. The engines were blackened ruins, the armored treads lay broken and randomly scattered. A gigantic pool of hydraulic fluid and diesel fuel covered the ground several feet deep.

Even worse, lying across the top of the crawler-transporter was something that only vaguely resembled a space shuttle. A dozen burned skeletons were sprawled around the crushed wreckage, almost every ceramic heat tile gone or dangling loosely from the warped and badly dented hull. The cockpit was open to the sky, the cargo hatches crumpled like old newspaper. The rear engines were jagged pieces of twisted metal and tubing.

“Son of a bitch,” Brognola muttered, leaning closer.

“Wait, there’s more.” The President sighed.

Slowly the camera panned to the right showing the toppled remnants of two gantry towers, extended over the lip of a huge crater large enough to swallow the crawler-transporter intact. The interior of the depression was filled with a dense gray cloud, tarnished steel rods rising out of the swirling fumes like the desperately reaching fingers of a dying man.

“That was the fuel depot,” the President said in a monotone.

With his heart pounding, Brognola gave no reply, studying the scene of destruction closely as the camera took almost a minute to get past the smoking blast crater to finally focus on a relatively undamaged section of the launch facility. Spread out in neat rows were dozens of black plastic body bags, armed soldiers standing guard while medics ferried the still forms into waiting ambulances. Far in the distance, several Navy warships could be seen along the coastline, while swarms of Apache and SuperCobra gunships hovered overhead.

The room seemed to grow still as Brognola said nothing for a few seconds; there was only the muted hush of the jet engines.

“How many people did we lose?” the big Fed asked, controlling his seething emotions. Normally the Cape was as clean as an operating room, washed and scrubbed almost daily. Now it looked like the bombed-out sections of Beirut.

“Eighty-six are confirmed dead,” the President reported. “With another hundred missing, including a lot of tourists.”

Inhaling deeply, Brognola turned away from the grisly vista of destruction and sat back in his chair. For a long moment he said nothing, lost in dark contemplation.

“Any idea who did it?” he asked.

“None.”

“Damn. And we’re sure this was not a nuke?”

“Absolutely positive,” the President replied, scowling down at the closed report. “Both NASA and the DOD checked for residual radiation, and NSA Keyhole satellites registered nothing out of the usual on the magnetic spectrum.”

“All right, if they weren’t hit by a nuke, then what happened?”

“We’re not exactly sure,” the President replied, tapping a few buttons on his desk. “But the NSA was able to retrieve this image from the cell phone of a Mr. Thomas Hutchings who was fishing about a mile off Cocoa Beach.”

The monitor flickered, then abruptly changed into a jumpy view of the bow of a fishing boat, and a white line stretching down into the water.

Just then something fiery shot down from the sky like a film of a missile launch played in reverse. Smoke exploded from the Cape, then a series of bright explosions, closely followed by a blinding light flash that extended outward. The corona was dotted with bodies and tumbling cars, and pushed back the choppy waves to create a tidal wave that slammed into the fishing boat and sent it flying. The cell phone was dropped to the deck with a clatter and there were only chaotic images for a few seconds, mixed with the sound of splintering wood before the screen went blank.

“Hell of an explosion,” Brognola said in an ordinary voice.

“A hell of an explosion,” the President agreed.

“How long did the attack take?”

“Three minutes, fourteen seconds.”

“To destroy the whole damn Cape?”

“And escape,” the Man said.

Unbelievable.

“Was radar able to track the trajectory of the…whatever it was, coming or going? That could tell us a lot about it’s origin,” Brognola stated.

“No.”

Frowning, the big Fed started to speak, but the one-word answer spoke volumes. This was just incredible, but horribly true. The entire facility had been destroyed, annihilated was a better word, in only a few minutes by something that moved faster than a missile, dropped straight down from the sky, was radar invisible and killed with fire from the underneath.

“Show it to me again,” Brognola ordered brusquely. “Slower this time, with maximum magnification focused on the flying object.”

The President hit another button on the small console and the monitor came to life once more, the nightmare scene advancing in a series of freeze-frame shots every few seconds.

“Hold it right there,” Brognola said as something moved horizontally across the base.

The picture went motionless, and he stared hard at an object momentarily silhouetted by a rising cloud of white smoke. It looked like a cone of some sort. A cone riding a column of fire…

“So it has finally been done,” the big Fed said with a sigh, rubbing his forehead. “Somebody solved the power problem and built an SSO.”

“Unfortunately that is also the opinion of the Department of Defense,” the President said, turning off the monitor. “As well as myself, which is why I immediately called you.”

A working SSO, a single-stage-to-orbit rocket. Brognola tried not to shudder. Several years ago he had been present at the maiden flight of the Delta Clipper, the first test model of an SSO ever built. If successful, it could have been the first true spaceship in human history, a rocket that launched straight up, standing on its own legs, and landed doing the same thing. Just like in the comic books. A genuine rocket ship. Unfortunately the Delta Clipper failed. The vehicle had gained barely a hundred feet of height when it had a massive short circuit in the controls and developed a fuel leak that almost killed the crew. Also, the engines had been pitifully weak, barely able to lift the tiny, thirty-foot-tall X-ship. The test flight was considered a total failure, and the project canceled. It was the considered opinion of everybody involved that the present state of modern technology was simply insufficient to build such an incredible complex piece of machinery.