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Branko smiled, knowing Nikita had just slipped up. He said, “Another hour or so. But that attack is going to trigger soon, and I have no way to turn it off.”

“Don’t worry about that. Get in the apartment and hunker down. I’ll give you contact information to break free of the men chasing you. And then you’ll take me to the box.”

“I don’t think you’re listening to me. This attack is going to make worldwide news. Andrei needs to know, because when it hits, it’s going to cause America to go nuts.”

“Not my problem. Get to the apartment and bed down. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Chapter43

Gordon Dillard paced about behind the Auriga launch control crew like a nervous father waiting on a birth. As the NASA lead for the launch, he had some sway, but ultimately, he had no ability to alter anything the company was doing. Auriga had rented the space and paid for the launch. It was the first such liftoff the United States had ever done. A solely civilian crew headed to the International Space Station.

To be sure, the Russians had been doing such a thing for years, with various oligarchs paying to head to the space station as tourists, and other U.S. billionaires had launched people into space only to fall right back to earth, but the United States had never sanctioned a civilian flight to the space station—and even when the Russians did it, it was the Russian equivalent of NASA doing the launch. Not an entirely civilian company. Today was a first of firsts. While they’d be using NASA’s launch facilities, nobody from NASA was in charge. It was completely in the hands of the company, which was both good and bad. Good, in that NASA wouldn’t be blamed if something went wrong, but bad in that NASA couldn’t seem to duplicate what the private sector did. They were losing their luster as the preeminent space agency, becoming nothing more than a facilitator of the launches. It aggravated Gordon, not the least because NASA’s chosen successor was Boeing, and they’d had three failed launches in the time that Auriga hadmanaged to not only test, but actually resupply the space station and send up astronauts.

He went to one of the screens, seeing the giant rocket stationed on launch complex 39 of the Kennedy Space Center. The same launchpad theChallengerused, NASA’s first attempt to put civilians in space.

Gordon remembered that day vividly, the disaster burned into his brain, but today wasn’t the same. Auriga’s rocket systems had traveled to the space station multiple times, all successfully. Today should be routine, even if the entire crew were a bunch of dilettantes paying their way into space. It amazed him that they thought money could buy them safety, as if the schoolteacher in 1986 would have lived if she had been rich enough.

It was a cloudless morning, with little wind. At 1107 the countdown began, and he held his breath, praying for a successful launch. The number hit zero and thousands of pounds of thrust blasted out of the vectors of the rocket. It slowly rose into the air, gaining speed as the arms holding it swung away. Within seconds it was hypersonic, traveling into space at five times the speed of sound.

The rocket reached the outer atmosphere, and the second stage broke free, just as it was supposed to do. The Auriga crew cheered, all sitting behind desktop computers—a far cry from the original launch control facilities of the Johnson Space Center. Gordon wasn’t as old as the Apollo series of launches, but he could still remember when the computers were custom made for space travel, not Windows machines with extra RAM. It was definitely a new world.

The second stage fell away, now on its return to earth as a reusable rocket, and the first stage with the capsule began flying into position for its first orbit around the earth. All as planned.

Unlike every single other NASA launch in the past, this onewas completely executed by the ground teams. The men inside the capsule had no control over how or when they would dock with the space station—and truthfully they had no reason to. The rocket had docked with mundane supplies for the space station several times in the past. No human had been inside, and it had worked flawlessly. But Gordon had worked the Boeing launches when the only thing that had screwed up docking was that the computer on board had somehow decided it was twelve hours in front of the current time, and then had decided on drastic measures to realign itself where it should be twelve hours later.

Boeing had to abort, the launch a failure, something that Gordon was sure could have been fixed had there been a human on board with the ability to correct. He’d learned about Neil Armstrong and his extraordinary override flying to the surface of the moon, and knew if it had only been computers on that landing, it would have failed.

Sometime later, the flight lead said, “Starting first orbit. All systems go.”

Gordon knew the capsule would slingshot around the earth for two and a half days before attempting to dock on the space station, something that was part of the “experience package” the space tourists were paying for. After that, they’d spend five days on the International Space Station—probably aggravating the real astronauts on board—before returning to earth.

He looked at his watch, saw it was past noon, and decided to leave them to it to get some lunch.

He went over to the flight lead, congratulated him on the launch, then said, “Gravy from here, right?”

“Yeah. Hard part’s over. We’ll dock just like we’ve done a dozen times before.”

“Hey, just between us, you ever think about the waste of time it is to launch those civilians? I mean, a senator up for reelection, a billionaire, and another schoolteacher? What are they going to do when they get to the station besides get in the way?”

The flight lead laughed and said, “It makes great press, and because of it, great money. That’s why the owner is on board.”

Just then a flight engineer at the end of the room shouted, his hands in the air, staring at his screen. Like dominoes, one after another technician began shouting, all of them waving their hands as if it would stop the destruction.

Gordon looked at the flight lead’s computer and saw a laughing skull. He was pretty sure that wasn’t from the company.

In flight aboard Air Force One, President Hannister received a flash override message: The celebrated launch between private industry and NASA government systems had been hijacked. The computers were corrupted with ransomware and the ship was going to crash unless the systems were cleaned.

Meaning paying the ransom.

President Hannister read the message, then stood up, shaking in rage. He said, “Is it Russia? Did they do this because we’re not using their Soyuz spacecraft anymore? Tell me it wasn’t them, because if it is, we’re going to war.”

The man who brought the message said, “It’s not Russia. The intelligence community has already looked, and we know the group. They have ties to Russia, but they’re just criminals. No geopolitical stuff at all. They found an ability to penetrate Auriga and took it. We have about sixty hours before that spacecraft slams into the space station. It’s operating on its last instructions, and we can’t feed it any more unless the system gets cleaned.”

“Can’t the astronaut inside take over?”

“No. It’s all automated. He can’t do anything but ride at this point. He has the ability to emergency-abort the entire trip on board, but apparently that’s been corrupted as well. Auriga is in contact with the capsule over radio, and the lone astronaut on board is stating that the computer is refusing his commands, like HAL in2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“Just great. Who the hell are these guys that did it? Do we know?”