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weapon—specifically a kinetic-kill weapon, a projectile that used mass and velocity to inflict serious damage on its target.

“Commander Clayton! Focus every weapon you can bring to bear on that incoming.”

“Already done, sir.”

“Then fire!”

“Firing, aye, aye, Admiral.”

Lasers and particle beams stretched out invisibly across the fast-dwindling gulf between base and object. On his monitor,the object grew suddenly brighter. They were hitting it.

“Keep firing! Knock it down!”

But the projectile was a multi-ton lump of nickel-iron, and the beam weapons could not ablate the material quickly enoughto make a difference. The nukes reached the target a couple of minutes later, and Christie wondered if they could deflectit enough to make a difference.

At the speed it was traveling, though, probably not. Debris would still reach them in another . . . sixty seconds now. Ifthey did push it off course, it would miss the ring but hit the Earth, and Christie didn’t want to think of the effect ofeven a one-meter fragment impacting the Earth at 210,000 kilometers per second.

Thirty seconds.

Twenty seconds.

“Vapor, sir!” the sensor officer reported. “We’re ablating it. . . .”

But too little, and too late. Nuclear fireballs flashed and winked close about the projectile, and still it came.

Five seconds . . .

Three . . .

A supernova erupted across the synchorbital, shredding delicate traceries of pylons and struts, vaporizing structure, obliteratinga huge swath of the naval base.

Christie never felt the impact that killed him.

Chapter Seventeen

25 April, 2429

SupraQuito Facility

Synchorbit

1236 hours, FST

Explosions wracked the synchorbital base, sending glittering shards of debris outward in an expanding, twinkling sphere. F=MA,which meant the force impacting the delicate orbital facility equaled roughly 420 giganewtons, or more than twelve hundredtimes the liftoff thrust of the Saturn V rocket that had first taken humans to the moon.

The incoming two-ton projectile had punched cleanly through the structure, and the intense heat radiation was largely confinedby vacuum. The ring was not destroyed by any means. A two-kilometer section of the main SupraQuito Synchorbital was shredded,however, and nearly five thousand people—perhaps half of them naval personnel—were killed.

The projectile, already badly stressed by beam and warhead detonations on the way in, fragmented with the impact, the pieces continuing on for another 37,000 kilometers, briefly heating in Earth’s atmosphere, and becoming a rain of high-velocity meteors. Their path came in at an oblique angle, striking SupraQuito and almost missing the planet altogether.

That angle of approach saved Ecuador, Brazil, and Peru. The smaller fragments burned up; the larger ones, those larger thangrains of sand, were traveling so fast they were through the atmosphere in an instant, impacting the planet’s surface at overtwo hundred thousand kilometers per second.

A vast swath of the Pacific Ocean southeast of the Galapagos vaporized with the release of kinetic energy. No one was killedby the impact itself, but the rising plume of superheated vapor rapidly swirled into a hurricane more powerful than any everseen before on the planet. Thousands more would die when the superstorm made landfall near the city of Tumbes, then carvedits way inland and north toward Guayaquil.

In the savaged orbital facility overhead, a thousand desperate struggles for survival played themselves out, as some peoplemanaged to reach emergency suits or intact airtight compartments, and others did not.

For those who did not, death came quickly as they fell into emptiness or struggled to breathe in fast-thinning air. Rescueattempts were hindered by clouds of fragments and debris. Naval vessels berthed at the spaceyards were mostly intact, butmost were still awaiting supplies and personnel that now would never arrive.

And on the world below, a stunned populace tuned in to the Global Net channels to watch the unfolding disaster in the skiesoverhead.

 

Command Bunker

New White House

Washington, D.C., USNA

1258 hours, EST

President Walker glowered at his Chief of Staff. “Damn it, Don, what the hell am I looking at? What’s going on?”

Phillips was linked to the same news channel data feed as the President. “A shitstorm, Mr. President. White-hot debris, clouds of ice crystals from ruptured water tanks and freezing atmosphere, metal vapor—”

“The bastards destroyed our orbital port!”

“Not all of it, sir. The projectile went through the C3 center—that’s command, control, and communications,” he explained to the Presidentwho had never served, “and took out some of the civilian factories and habs as well. They missed the shipyards, and most ofthe ships report ready for space. Some are already under way. We’ve already released the tethered asteroid, you’ll recall,so what’s left isn’t being dragged up and out into space. Most of it should stay in orbit.”

“Most of it?”

“A lot of junk got shaken free, Mr. President, and lost some of its orbital velocity. It’s falling. We can expect some prettyspectacular meteor showers over the next few weeks.”

“I don’t give a fuck about meteor showers! What can we do?”

“We wait and see how our fleet manages to deal with the alien planetoids, sir. We get more ships out there as we can, andwe hope to God the aliens don’t have any more of those relativistic projectiles in their back pockets. Until then, there’snothing much else we can do.”

Walker sagged back in his chair, eyes closed. Reports were coming in, fragmentary and confused, of a two-hundred-kilometersteam cloud engulfing the ocean near the Galapagos. Some of that steam was already condensing out as rain—near-solid wallsof water dumping from the sky. Meanwhile, tidal waves were racing out from the impact site in all directions, big enough andfast enough that they would hit eastern Asia and Australia in another few hours.

“Don,” Walker said suddenly, “that was a warning shot!”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“They deliberately targeted our naval command center. Probably homed on the communications relays. That shot almost missed the Earth completely.”

“You’re saying the Galapagos strike was an accident?”

“I’m saying we’re dealing with a technology so advanced they can strike us anywhere and anytime they want, and there’s notone damned thing we can do to stop them! This time they took out our synchorbital command center. Next time they could dropa rock on the White House lawn!”

“All we can do is wait out the fleet action out at—”

“No. There’s nothing they can do.” He opened an