Ion plant. Attack on London.
Zavirdyaev reached for the instrument panel block and unfolded the flat screen, placed in the upper part of the block. According to the designers' idea, two flat folding panels were placed in the upper and side parts of the control module, which in zero-gravity conditions could be unfolded and used as monitors for regular computers.
These computers were not much different in functionality from regular civilian ones and had nothing to do with the process of controlling the ship. Their functionality was the usual Internet, broadcasts, well, maybe use for scientific tasks as an "office computer". In general, these were a couple of regular laptops, made to the appropriate size and attached to the block. They could just as well be mounted on a wall or a cabinet. One of the computers had a connection to a communication node, not directly connected to the AI. The second allowed access to the regular Internet, if the orbital parameters did not take the ship beyond the coverage area of ordinary civilian satellites. Now, down there, the network of the super-federalist movement, which no one took seriously, was coming into action. They had already organized their headquarters, and now Zavirdyaev had to get in touch with this headquarters. With the headquarters of "his revolution."
He leafed through the massive stack of foxes once again. After all, the archaic-looking paper document had some advantages in terms of secrecy over an electronic one loaded into a computer, albeit a protected computer.
The ship was rushing in the direction against the rotation of the Earth, which was not rational from the point of view of launching satellites into orbit, but the thermonuclear engine had such an energy resource that this could be ignored.
There was some time before the second pass over Europe and the daring maneuver.
Zavirdyaev again immersed himself in studying the document, this time the part that concerned the implementation of the revolutionary scenario.
The first thing he noticed was a third-party attack on the buildings of the auxiliary infrastructure of the rocket launch site. The document showed that this attack was destined for a historical role. Like the attack on the Moncada barracks during the Cuban revolution. The details of the attack were to be made public - another beautiful legend would have been created.
Zavirdyaev himself, in accordance with the "Cuban" analogy, acted not as the immediate leader and ideologist of the Revolution, but as a kind of Che Guevara. Of course, this daredevil stole a shuttle!
After a warning strike on London, a German cell was to be activated, which was supposed to attack the barracks, plus an arsenal. In general, a rear training base.
Zavirdyaev remembered Munich and Hanover and the German soldiers, rowdy before being sent to the front. These certainly had a high destructive potential and were capable of turning the entire country into one big SSSF. This, however, was not envisaged. Another cell operating in the United States was supposed to seize administrative buildings in several states at once, then consolidate there and prepare for an assault by the police and national guard.
This had happened before, but those were seizures of individual buildings with vague demands. This time, the rebels' connection with the super-federalists and de-escalation demands were to be clearly declared.
Zavirdyaev tore his gaze away from the document and turned his attention to the control panel screen, then glanced at the monitor folded down from the side of the control module. Now they had to conduct an important flight test and also a demonstration. They had to demonstrate the ion plasma generator, after which they would record a video message.
The plasma generator created an ion curtain held by a magnetic field and, under favorable weather conditions, clearly visible from Earth. Such a curtain, in addition to other tasks, was supposed to make the object's radar more difficult and had already been tested on the V-shuttles. However, it was clear to the layman who had some understanding of tactics that no ion glow would prevent the target from being localized optically and the anti-missile from being aimed at the desired point of its trajectory in the same way. On the V-Shuttles these were only applied tests, but for the flight, for a separate part of the Supershuttle's flight, this curtain was of fundamental importance. Zavirdyaev was privy to the technical details and therefore now he felt uneasy, like a person who was afraid to fly but had already passed customs inspection at the airport. Still, he was not even an applicant for the role of a real astronaut.
AI reported the readiness of the ion-plasma installation. It consisted of several ejectors - electrostatic guns that fired an ion stream, if not in beams, then in fairly narrowly focused jets. The speed of the streams could be adjusted, and during the introductory briefing it was pointed out that the ion streams interacted with the atmosphere and could be carried back or to the side - contrary to the widespread simplification about the vacuum in which all satellites fly, anyone with more than average knowledge of the topic of orbital flights knew that the environment even at the altitudes of geostationary orbits differed from that in the vicinity of the Moon's orbit or at any point in space of the Earth's orbit itself.
What could we say about the altitudes of low and aggressive ultra-low orbits, which were often used by shuttles, especially P-shuttles.
The memory of the latter that arose in my thoughts could not in any way add to the cheerfulness of the mood. In September 2113, when the Pre-War became the War, the then command proceeded from the fact that a raid of the fifteen ships that were available, which also needed to pass in low orbit and drop low-power precision nuclear weapons, would put the "Chinks" in their place and stabilize the situation on the then Indonesian Front. The ships were shot down, every single one, and the escalation only received an additional impetus. Although, if they had had such generators on board, perhaps their mission would have been successful, and who knows, maybe the War would not have flared up the way it did. Now there was an ion screen and of course this could not but be encouraging. Not so much Zavirdyaev's, probably, as the ground ones. The second component of the ion installation, in addition to the ejectors, was a magnetic system built on the basis of these newfangled monocrystalline superconductors, truly mastered already during the War. This plasma gun, it must be said, was not additional equipment installed on the military version of the shuttle - it was also present in the design of civilian, pre-war interplanetary ships.
That civilian installation, built on conventional superconductors, was supposed to protect a group of ships from solar wind and high-energy particles, and at low solar activity it could cope without ejectors and sodium - an unmanned ship moving at the right point relative to the rest of the group would simply turn on its electromagnets. Even conventional inductors, without superconductors, would be enough there.
Zavirdyaev gave the AI permission to conduct a preliminary, "lightweight" cycle of the plasma installation. The countdown began, starting from the thirtieth second, then the lines of the pre-launch check results appeared. Zavirdyaev's role in all this was very reminiscent of the role of a simple user launching some new game on a computer. It would be more correct to compare it with a user installing a game or a program - there, as a rule, were also a bunch of explanations, which the person only looked at with an indifferent look.
Finally, the AI reached the start in its countdown. Nothing special happened. Only on the display, in the window dedicated to the operation of the installation, the power increased to the maximum was displayed, expressed in one inconspicuous line. The power was measured here in joules per second.
Zavirdyaev began to figure out how to convert this into more familiar kilowatts. This delay did not do him credit as an astronaut. He began to figure out whether to divide the readings by one second or maybe by three thousand six hundred - after all, they use kilowatt-hours.
And so it turned out that the power was like the engine of a good tank - more than a thousand kilowatts, that is, more than a million watts. Zavirdyaev decided not to ask stupid questions to the AI - you never know, maybe something is being recorded somewhere, and now he did not want to look stupid. In a simple, previous life, this image problem would not have been a problem, but now he was a living symbol of the revolution. A hero, who, among other things, had taken possession of the shuttle.
Meanwhile, the color of the sky in the windows on both sides of the compartment began to change. At first, it seemed that something was wrong with the glass, as if some light from the cabin, scattered by the wall, was reflected in it, but after a few dozen seconds it became clear that the ship was enveloped in that magical thing that the polar lights are made of. In other words, ionized rarefied gas.
The glow was uniform, but upon closer inspection, thin veins became visible, which added to the resemblance to the polar lights.
The onboard artificial intelligence announced the activation of the ion cloud configuration system. The glow suddenly began to tremble, as if it were vibrating, and then flared up and disappeared. Meanwhile, in the windows on the opposite side, it did not disappear anywhere.
Zavirdyaev glanced at the screen - now it displayed how the shining cloud should have danced in time with the magnetic lines jumping back and forth.
And that is exactly how it danced.
It would hardly have helped to fight off an anti-missile, but if an enemy satellite had been within the cloud, it would certainly have been possible to disable it. Perhaps the V-shuttles did exactly this, and the laymen were told about tests of anti-radar protection. Zavirdyaev caught himself thinking that he was happy about this toy that created glowing clouds and about the shuttle as a whole, like a teenager who got his hands on a weapon lost at the front, or a weapons geek would be happy if he had the opportunity to sit in the cockpit of a real plane.
All this was despite the fact that during the years of his semi-conscious life in Superfederant, he seemed to have become completely indifferent to any technical innovations and weapons refinements, news about which regularly flashed. In his youth, of course, it was a completely different matter, but then he grew out of it. And then again "it started playing in the ass".
The "test" program ended. Zavirdyaev did not dare to interfere with the work, although he could have done so and extended the performance for a couple of minutes. However, there was a reason - it was necessary to have time to record the first address. The ship at this time should have passed over the territories of the states of the Asian Bloc. There was a certain risk in such a flight, but it was insignificant - at altitudes of about a thousand kilometers or more, orbital interceptions were undertaken only in relation to attacking blocks descending from orbit or any other objects that were sure to undertake aggressive actions. Anti-missiles were still a rather expensive pleasure to throw them away on God knows what.
High-orbit hunting was another matter - unmanned shuttles chased satellites and other similar unmanned shuttles, but these were rather drawn-out maneuvers, and the fact that the ship would fly over enemy territory would have practically no effect on the course of the orbital battle if it, the ship, were involved in it.
Zavirdyaev took a portable camera he had prepared in advance from the side compartment of his seat and pointed it at the window, which now looked towards Earth. The picture with the glowing network of Asian cities looked quite distinguishable.
- Everyone listen! - Zavirdyaev began. - I am Andrey Zavirdyaev. I am on board the new generation V-shuttle. The ship is armed with twelve controlled blocks with a maximum capacity of five megatons each. At the moment, I am flying over enemy territory - I ask for your attention.
He demonstrated a portable camera, after which he brought up a picture from it, from the camera, to the corner of the broadcast window. Having turned the video camera, he showed the viewers the cabin and the objects floating along it in zero gravity - a telephone dangling nearby, a bag of water, a pencil previously suspended to the side.
- Now let's see what we have overboard - he again directed the camera to the window.
- It will be difficult for me to visually identify the cities like this, but I think among you, friends, there are those who can handle this task. Oh, and yes, I completely forgot about a small formality, - he reached for the phone and demonstrated it, as was often done before some statements that they wanted to clearly tie to a time and date. In general, everything was arranged as is customary.
- So, we have sorted out the welcoming part, - announced Zavirdyaev. - My ship is flying fast, so I will briefly voice my position and demands...
Zavirdyaev began to list the points of the super-federalist program. He did not mention the initial strike on London - there was a time for that. After presenting what the super-federalists had been discussing at their gatherings for years, Zavirdyaev began to present purely de-escalationist theses that had no direct relation to the super-federalist program - such thoughts, or rather theses in various combinations, could be heard from anyone, unless that someone lived off military contracts.
- And in the final part of my speech there will be an optical show in the form of an ion glow. For those who did not understand, the ship has an ion generator. I have already turned it on. The coordinates for reactivating the system... - he dictated the latitude and longitude, then explained that the operation of the installation could be observed in the area from the west of Russia to central Europe.
- In addition, I came to the conclusion that it would be appropriate to demonstrate my weapons. Detonating the device will be no more dangerous than selective detonation and will occur at an altitude of sixty kilometers. Residents of London and adjacent territories are strongly urged not to neglect safety measures and put on glasses. The power will be chosen minimal - twenty kilotons.
Zavirdyaev announced the time of detonation.
- This ship is a weapon that, in my opinion, is capable of leading to irreversible escalation. Together with you, we will make sure that the result of my flight, on the contrary, is de-escalation.
Zavirdyaev ended the broadcast and exhaled.
- And the performance turned out well! - he thought.
Short messages started running on the computer screen, which was intended for communication via an encrypted chat program. In the first minute, the broadcast only got a few thousand views, but by the end of the address, the promotion had done its job and the number of unique views had reached one and a half million.
Surely, private authors had already posted numerous reviews and comments on his address. It was assumed that even before the strike on London, the video message would be broadcast by a number of leading media companies - an ion show on the approach to the British Isles would have been enough to attract such attention, and after the strike...
It was very depressing that the AI could not interact with the interlink, and all that was left was to glance at the screen, on which the radars tracking the ship were constantly displayed, without understanding the whole picture. Fortunately, aggressive actions against the shuttle were no longer taken.
The shuttle, rushing "from morning to night" was now flying over the Urals. Siberia had already been passed.
It was time to activate the weapons system. Zavirdyaev took the "weapons" document from behind his seat, opened it and found a red envelope - an insert - that was noticeably sticking out from the adjacent pages.
The envelope contained a sheet with activation codes for both the system as a whole and the ammunition separately.
Everything was arranged somehow in the old way, in the pre-war way - the process of using ammunition in the conditions of a modern war was not so cumbersome. Such relics of the deep past on a super-modern ship took place because the platform, due to the atypical nature of its flight mission, was not properly integrated into communications.
It followed from this that such archaism, oddly enough, was a consequence of the special importance and high combat potential of the platform. Having thought about this issue during the first turn, Zavirdyaev came to the conclusion that the developers, or rather the organizers, saw a weak element of the system, in him, Zavirdyaev, and the paper envelopes were a kind of fuse against possible spontaneous unpredictable actions of a rebel-revolutionary pilot. Ordinary bomber pilots pressed their triggers without fuss, as if they had conventional weapons in their ammunition. Those pilots, if necessary, could be instantly constrained in their actions by the communication systems into which their machines were integrated. The factor of a "crazy implementer" was reliably blocked there.
Here, however, the possibility of providing for such a "dog leash" was excluded - if the ship had been integrated as it should have been, its weapons would have simply been blocked. Paper envelopes just allowed Zavirdyaev to convincingly portray a monkey with a grenade.
Activation of the weapons system brought a certain inspiration - now the AI was able to operate the information provided by the interlink and could comment with his voice on any event related to the Shuttle flight, be it the readiness of an optical observatory in South America or the transfer of aircraft with missile defense to the sector over which the ship's orbit lay. The flight, however, had already made a lot of noise and provoked an unprecedented fuss.
At the same time, everything indicated that until now the ship had some strange, unclear status, otherwise it would have been attacked in full force long ago. Another question is that intercepting such an energy-armed ship was a much more difficult task than intercepting an ordinary shuttle.
However, I still didn't want to test it on myself.
It was time to activate the ion emission again. Again, the steady glow of ionized sodium began to flare up outside the window.
As AI reported, at that moment, all missile defense radars, in whose line of sight the ship was, began to irradiate it as an attack target, tracking it. It could be assumed that they had some problems with localizing the ship - at least, all onboard radio channels were blocked while the ion generator was running.
If there were no optical lines connected to the satellites via a laser beam, the ship would have been completely without communication and interlink. In turn, the satellites that maintained contact with the shuttle via an optical channel had data on its coordinates - if there were enough satellites, and there were enough of them, the triangulation principle worked. However, with the help of optics, it was easy to localize the shuttle even from Earth - Zavirdyaev understood this perfectly well. The ion system did not make it invulnerable, or rather invisible. However, there was no time to think about tactical formations, triangulation and trajectories. Now Zavirdyaev was busy entering the coordinates for the detonation over London.
Somewhere, either below the cabin, if we mean the shuttle as something standing vertically, or behind it, if we consider the shuttle as a flying ship, the doors of the cargo bay swung open with a quiet mechanical buzz. The "revolver" turned, causing the ship to shake slightly, but the gyrostabilizers did not allow it to fly swaying and immediately leveled everything - all this was felt physically, without any displays.
The ion frenzy suddenly died down - the magnetic field holding the plasma streams and playing with them was so strong that it could affect the launch of the munition. It was necessary to turn off the system.
A dark silhouette of a device flashed in the window, illuminated in the rays of the red setting sun - a conical warhead with a maneuvering unit behind it. Zavirdyaev even managed to make out the letters "GBA" proudly written on the deadly cone. However, now the lethality of the munition was turned down to the minimum - instead of the maximum five megatons, the power was chosen at twenty kilotons - for this, even a thermonuclear component was not needed. The chat resumed its work and now informed mainly about the events in the USA. Despite all the destructiveness of the events that were now taking place in various regions of the rear, and the general confusion in the minds of ordinary people, the situation did not pose a particular threat. At least, this was assumed within the framework of the plan.
To a large extent, this was a performance, a show for the Asian Bloc, arranged so that they would finally enter the settlement process without fear of deconvention, or, in other words, deception on the part of the Western Bloc. The observed entry of the Western Bloc, its rear into a depressing state was supposed to reduce the risk of deconvention in the eyes of the Asian side. Although this was precisely the trick. One way or another, the constructive forces in both camps wanted to pave the way to de-escalation and this was only a search for such a path. The process was supposed to be so controllable that the presidential elections in the USA were supposed to take place as expected - in a couple of weeks. In this crazy and at the same time amazing twenty-second century with its "parity war", one of the parties, intending to implement a global de-escalation initiative and collect maximum benefits, was forced to demonstrate not superiority, but weakness. The trick, as has already been said, consisted precisely in this. In the global confrontations of the past, such methods were unthinkable and, most importantly, pointless.
The munition was already rushing towards the target. The distance from the munition to the shuttle was over fifty kilometers and continued to increase. And yet, by orbital standards, the trajectories of the carrier and the munition diverged insignificantly. Everything indicated that Zavirdyaev would be able to visually monitor the result of this test firing. And so it happened - two bright white rectangles suddenly appeared on the side wall of the cabin - this was the light from the high-altitude explosion that passed through the side windows. The radiant flux was too weak for the light filters, and they did not even darken.
Meanwhile, Zavirdyaev gave the AI the order to activate the optical station - the main Cassegrain telescope, located in the front of the ship, in the very nose. The device could not record the moment of the explosion itself - the twenty gigapixel matrix was not designed to emit such intensities, but there were other optical devices on board that recorded the moment of the high-altitude detonation of the nuclear device without any problems.
These shots were undoubtedly destined to become historical, as were those that were now being produced by the main telescope, running its field of view along the streets of the British capital, which was rushing back. There was no visible damage, which was expected. Only here and there on the roofs of houses red lights were blinking - the warning system was working.
- I wonder if they have an anti-alarm with white lights, like in Superfederant? - thought Zavirdyaev, then uttered this thought out loud - in his hand he held a portable camera recording a short, five-minute video. AI, meanwhile, reported that the coalition forces cruiser covering the routine route of the strategic headquarters, the American "Joseph Biden", essentially a small floating MDS terminal, carried out a group launch of three anti-missiles with the aim of intercepting the shuttle.
The probability of defeat, although it was lower than the nominal one - the shuttle was moving against the rotation of the Earth and had excess speed, but still such a probability was not zero.
Zavirdyaev's mouth was dry, but he still kept his cool and pointed the camera at the display with the interlink. A plasma stream flared outside the window. The ship was already turning. Zavirdyaev knew what was about to happen, but there was also the realization that death, released from a distance of many hundreds of miles, would cover this distance in just over two minutes and would be ready to meet him at the lead point. Zavirdyaev stretched out in his seat and pressed his head into the headrest. He also managed to place his hand with the camera.
At these moments, the cruise engine came to life and the forgotten heaviness fell on his whole body. If he had not fixed the camera, leaving it dangling, the camera would have certainly smashed to pieces. He had also been warned not to scatter small items like pencils or food bags around the cabin, and now it became clear why.
The accelerometer had squeezed out five units - the ship was changing its orbit, taking the expected point of meeting with the anti-missiles to such a distance that the missiles simply could not fly. And it succeeded. Half a minute of engine operation had wasted all the efforts of the "Joseph Biden" and completely changed the orbit parameters.
Now it was necessary to return everything to how it was, well, almost how it was - by the standards of ordinary shuttles, which also evaded attacks, such a return to the previous orbit parameters after an evasive maneuver was an unprecedented waste, but the thermonuclear engine could do it.
The ship turned vigorously and a new wave of overload followed. The shuttle was rushing towards the South American continent, where "Lacaille" was located - exactly the same missile launch site as in the SSSF. There was also a defense there, not inferior to the Siberian one. According to the plan, it was supposed to launch the first attack on the shuttle, although the premature actions taken by the "Joseph Biden" were not a sign of a breakdown in the original plan - the probability of such activity was quite possible. After all, in the confusion that had probably reigned, the cruiser's missile defense commander could see in the unknown shuttle a threat to the headquarters flying over the Atlantic. Zavirdyaev took a deep breath, felt the camera clutched in his hand and exhaled. The previous mood that had prompted him to shoot a video somehow evaporated. It was necessary to pass the South American positional area with its "Amandas" and their lasers, capable of damaging optics from low-orbit distances. Zavirdyaev lowered the light filter and prepared for new maneuvers.