difference.
“Orion launch window in ninety seconds.”
On the plot, the Lanky is barreling down the trajectory to Earth, course unchanged, still racing along much faster than I’ve ever seen a seed ship move, ten kilometers per second. Our heavy combatants are lined up like a welcoming committee, obliquely along the projected path of the Lanky, weapons trained on the approach like a gang of robbers ambushing a traveler on a highway. We are more prepared than we were just a year ago, but my mouth is still a little dry as I follow the progress of the blaze-orange icon on the plot, hurtling toward my home planet at hypervelocity.
“Orion batteries, weapons free. Switching to autonomous control.”
The seed ship is coming in at ten kilometers per second, but the aspect is directly head-on, a down-the-throat shot that’s almost trivial for a computer to calculate. Still, the Orions are made of steel and alloy, and they are propelled by atomic charges, so there’s plenty to go wrong even if the computer pulls off perfect aim.
On the optical feed in the CIC, one of the Orion batteries releases its missile from the mount soundlessly. It drifts away laterally, and I can see tiny booster rockets firing on the missile’s body. When the missile is a few kilometers away from the mount, the main propulsion system ignites.
“Orion 34, firing.”
In space, atomic explosions look nothing like they do on Earth. Without an atmosphere to transmit a shock wave or heat, most of the detonation is radiation energy. On optical, it doesn’t look like much, just an iridescent sphere expanding outward from the ignition point. The radiation scanner, however, comes alive with a brightly colored gamma burst that looks like a reverse-polarity shot of the sun. The Orion missile instantly leaps out of the frame, accelerated by the shaped nuclear charge aimed at the pusher plate on its tail end, pulling fifty times the acceleration a human could endure. More gamma spheres appear on the radiation scanner, stringing themselves onto the intercept trajectory for the Lanky seed ship like miniature suns. The Orion pumps out one nuke per second, and every time one goes off, the missile leaps forward at a rate no chemically or fusion-propelled object in our arsenal can hope to match.
“Orion 42, firing.”
Another Orion mount launches its payload from a different vector, from somewhere over the southern hemisphere. Another missile races toward the incoming Lanky at unbelievable acceleration. These are crude weapons, assembled in space and launched from orbit to save the Earth’s atmosphere the fallout from the hundred or so nuclear charges it would take to get an Orion up to escape velocity and out of the planet’s atmosphere. They are too large to be mounted on ships and too dangerous for a launching vehicle besides, so we can’t use them for anything other than local defense of Earth at the moment, but by God, we finally have a hammer that will crack a seed ship and make it scatter its guts, and I want to cheer every time I see an Orion launch.
“Time to intercept is t-minus twenty. Orion 48 and 71 standing by for second-tier intercept.”
Space warfare is a high-stress combination of endless waiting and sudden, overwhelming bursts of extreme force and violence. For the next twenty minutes, all I can do is to watch icons move on a plot while our drop ship hangs in its clamp with nothing but space below. The Orions rush out to meet their target, picking up speed with every second and every nuclear detonation slamming billions of joules into their pusher plates.
“Orion 34 intercept in ten seconds,” AEGIS announces when the small, blue, v-shaped icon on the plot has almost reached the much bigger orange lozenge representing the Lanky ship. I hold my breath in anticipation, and the dread I feel at the prospect of a miss squeezes my stomach like a vise. I imagine that everyone else who’s tied in to the big picture is feeling the same
“Orion launch window in ninety seconds.”
On the plot, the Lanky is barreling down the trajectory to Earth, course unchanged, still racing along much faster than I’ve ever seen a seed ship move, ten kilometers per second. Our heavy combatants are lined up like a welcoming committee, obliquely along the projected path of the Lanky, weapons trained on the approach like a gang of robbers ambushing a traveler on a highway. We are more prepared than we were just a year ago, but my mouth is still a little dry as I follow the progress of the blaze-orange icon on the plot, hurtling toward my home planet at hypervelocity.
“Orion batteries, weapons free. Switching to autonomous control.”
The seed ship is coming in at ten kilometers per second, but the aspect is directly head-on, a down-the-throat shot that’s almost trivial for a computer to calculate. Still, the Orions are made of steel and alloy, and they are propelled by atomic charges, so there’s plenty to go wrong even if the computer pulls off perfect aim.
On the optical feed in the CIC, one of the Orion batteries releases its missile from the mount soundlessly. It drifts away laterally, and I can see tiny booster rockets firing on the missile’s body. When the missile is a few kilometers away from the mount, the main propulsion system ignites.
“Orion 34, firing.”
In space, atomic explosions look nothing like they do on Earth. Without an atmosphere to transmit a shock wave or heat, most of the detonation is radiation energy. On optical, it doesn’t look like much, just an iridescent sphere expanding outward from the ignition point. The radiation scanner, however, comes alive with a brightly colored gamma burst that looks like a reverse-polarity shot of the sun. The Orion missile instantly leaps out of the frame, accelerated by the shaped nuclear charge aimed at the pusher plate on its tail end, pulling fifty times the acceleration a human could endure. More gamma spheres appear on the radiation scanner, stringing themselves onto the intercept trajectory for the Lanky seed ship like miniature suns. The Orion pumps out one nuke per second, and every time one goes off, the missile leaps forward at a rate no chemically or fusion-propelled object in our arsenal can hope to match.
“Orion 42, firing.”
Another Orion mount launches its payload from a different vector, from somewhere over the southern hemisphere. Another missile races toward the incoming Lanky at unbelievable acceleration. These are crude weapons, assembled in space and launched from orbit to save the Earth’s atmosphere the fallout from the hundred or so nuclear charges it would take to get an Orion up to escape velocity and out of the planet’s atmosphere. They are too large to be mounted on ships and too dangerous for a launching vehicle besides, so we can’t use them for anything other than local defense of Earth at the moment, but by God, we finally have a hammer that will crack a seed ship and make it scatter its guts, and I want to cheer every time I see an Orion launch.
“Time to intercept is t-minus twenty. Orion 48 and 71 standing by for second-tier intercept.”
Space warfare is a high-stress combination of endless waiting and sudden, overwhelming bursts of extreme force and violence. For the next twenty minutes, all I can do is to watch icons move on a plot while our drop ship hangs in its clamp with nothing but space below. The Orions rush out to meet their target, picking up speed with every second and every nuclear detonation slamming billions of joules into their pusher plates.
“Orion 34 intercept in ten seconds,” AEGIS announces when the small, blue, v-shaped icon on the plot has almost reached the much bigger orange lozenge representing the Lanky ship. I hold my breath in anticipation, and the dread I feel at the prospect of a miss squeezes my stomach like a vise. I imagine that everyone else who’s tied in to the big picture is feeling the same
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