Strike Force

It obviously helped, because Boomer found himself awakened by the warning tone that the computer was beginning the pre-rendezvous checklist. Moments later the thrusters activated to flip the Black Stallion around so it was flying tail-first, and shortly afterward the LPDRS engines flared briefly to life. Soon the speed of the station and the spaceplane were just a few miles an hour different. “Okay, Colonel, she’s all yours,” Patrick radioed.

“Roger that,” Raydon said. Using the opposite set of thrusters in order not to deplete too much propellant from one set of maneuvering engines, Raydon carefully nudged the Black Stallion up and around until they were facing the direction of flight again…

…and Boomer felt himself take a deep, excited breath as their objective came into sight. My God, he breathed, it’s beautiful…!

At magnitude minus-6, the Armstrong Space Station was fifty percent brighter than the planet Venus in the night sky — only the sun and moon were brighter. It was so bright that quite often the light reflecting off its solar panels, radar arrays, antennae, and reflective anti-laser outer skin cast shadows on Earth. Boomer knew all that and had studied and even photographed “Silver Tower” through a telescope as a kid. But seeing it this close was breathtaking.

The main cluster of four large habitats was arranged perpendicular to Earth’s horizon, which gave it its “Tower” nickname, with a short service, storage, and mechanical spar horizontal. It had four rows of solar power — generating panels on the upper half, each over four hundred feet long and forty feet wide. Two large remote manipulator arms were visible, ready to assist loading and unloading cargo and inspecting all of the modules.

The lower half of the station below the keel had two rows of electronically scanned phased-array radar antennae each over a thousand feet long and fifty feet wide, resembling a delicate ribbon floating in mid-air. This radar, the largest ever built, could detect and track thousands of stationary and moving targets as small as an automobile on land, in the sky, in space, and even hundreds of feet underwater and dozens of feet underground. A number of smaller antennae for signals collection, datalinks, and station self-defense surveillance were mounted on arms connected to the keel. Atop the tower was another device Boomer knew was the station self-defense system, nicknamed “Thor,” but it had been destroyed and had been mostly removed.

“Can you see it, Boomer?” Ann Page asked. “How does it look?”

“It looks…lonely,” Boomer replied. He knew exactly what Ann was asking about — and it wasn’t the space station.

At the very “bottom” of the station below the keel and radar arrays was a single module almost as long as the upper “tower” of the station itself. It was actually four separate modules that had been lofted up to the station by the Shuttle Transportation System over a period of three years. This was Skybolt, the world’s first space-based anti-missile laser, designed and engineered by Ann Page and a team of over a hundred scientists.

Skybolt was a large free-electron laser, powered by a small nuclear-fueled generator called a magnetohydrodynamic generator, or MHD, that produced massive amounts of power for short periods of time. The generator cranked an electrostatic turbine that shot an electron beam — a focused, intense bolt of lightning — through to the laser chamber. Inside the laser chamber a bank of powerful electromagnets “wiggled” the electron beam, thereby producing the lasing effect. The resultant laser beam was millions of times more powerful than the energy generated by the MHD, creating a tunable and extremely powerful beam in the megawatt range that could easily destroy objects in space for thousands of miles and, as Ann and her crew soon discovered, even damage targets as large as a warship on Earth’s surface, or aircraft flying through Earth’s atmosphere.

“Good. That’s good,” Ann cooed. “What are we waiting for, Kai? Let’s hook up and get aboard.”

“Hold your water, Senator,” Raydon said. “I don’t like distractions when I’m flying, so everyone pipe down. That’s an order.” He flexed his fingers one more time, then unstowed the thruster controls and carefully placed his hands on them. Resembling small bathtub faucet knobs, the controls could be twisted, pushed, pulled, and jockeyed sideways or up and down to activate the small hydrazine thrusters arrayed around the Black Stallion. The controls were “standardized,” meaning that the same manual controls had been used in manned spacecraft since Mercury and extending all the way to the Black Stallion.