Page 36 of Stars

Everything they once were was dying, and President Puchkov had both hands around Mother Russia’s neck.

Zeytsev—and the rest of his spiders, across all of Russia—would sink their fangs into Puchkov’s grand New Russia. Into Puchkov himself.

“All that you need to change the world now is a lever large enough to move it.”

In front of Zeytsev, a satellite uplink connected his computer to the heavens, bouncing a laser relay off an old navigation satellite and out to a orbiting glint of metal that didn’t exist in any records. Their relay satellite was coming over the horizon now, arcing on a path that would bring her directly above their location.

His lieutenant, Kolmogorov, kept his eyes on his watch. He had plotted her course for a year, tracked each looping orbit, the rise and fall of her movements above the clouds. He knew where she was at all times, had calculated her position to the tenth of a second. Kolmogorov met his gaze and nodded.

Zeytsev began transmission. “And you need the high ground.”

In moments, his code would beam through the sky and catch a satellite, then arc higher, out to the stars. Latch onto its target and burrow into her ancient operating system, turn the relic above entirely over to his control. It was quaint, how few protections there were in the old days. But who could have ever conceived of this happening?

Who would think to protect Mother Russia from herself?

“Transmission complete.”

Zeytsev and his officers stared at the sky, watching the streak of light pass overhead.

“Russia will soon be back in the hands of patriots.”

* * *

11

NORAD

US Space Command

Peterson Air Force Base

Klaxons splitthe silence of the monitor bay in the United States Space Surveillance Network headquarters just after the shift change.

Space surveillance analysts were still sipping their coffees and reviewing the previous shift’s logs when the alarms blared, out of nowhere. For days and weeks and months before, the orbits NORAD monitored had been calm. Satellites hummed in and out of apogee, the dance of GPS and Milstar and weather satellites weaving above the ISS’s orbit amid the ebb and flow of thousands of pieces of debris left over from hundreds of manned space launches. Near-Earth space was crowded, but perfect calculations kept everything synchronized. In a high orbit, twenty thousand miles above Earth, geosynchronous satellites kept continuous watch over their respective faces of the planet.

“Ma’am!” one of the junior analysts, Airman Lawson, called out to the duty officer. “A Soviet satellite in low Earth orbit just changed course!”

“Soviet?” Lieutenant Jeanette Van rose from her command station, frowning at the display screens at the head of the monitor bay. A wireframe model of the Earth tracked over forty thousand objects in spaghetti-plot orbits.

One of those orbital tracks strobed in vicious ruby around the wireframe Earth. Collision warnings sounded, alerts flashing on a dozen tracked objects in the new path of the rogue satellite.

“Yes ma’am!” Airman Lawson called. “Catalog number 2-1-0-3-8!”

Every near-Earth object larger than two inches was tracked by NORAD, NASA, Space Command, and a hundred other agencies. They were numbered in sequence from the dawn of the space age. The first entry in the catalog, 00001, was the Sputnik rocket that launched the Soviets into orbit, and entry 00002 was Sputnik itself.

Lieutenant Van searched the digital catalog as Airman Lawson called out the rogue Soviet satellite’s information. “Ma’am, 21038 is listed as a Soviet Raduga satellite. Launched in 1990, but… it looks like we don’t have information on where it launched from. Just a general latitude, ma’am.”

“What the hell is a Raduga satellite?”

“They’re obsolete Soviet military communications satellites. We have 21038 tagged as inoperative, ma’am.”

“If it’s inoperative, then why the hell is it moving? Is the orbit decaying?”

“No ma’am,” Airman Karthi chimed in from her monitoring station. “The satellite is performing an orbital maneuver. It’s changing course.”

“It’schanging course?”

“Ma’am, there’s new data coming in,” Karthi said, her voice rising sharply. Her station collected telemetry, radar, imaging, and thermal readings from ground stations across the earth and military satellites in orbit. “I’m tracking multiple objects coming off of 21038, as if the satellite has broken apart.”