Eagle Station

Inside the cylindrical command node, Colonel Keith “Mal” Reynolds glided down a narrow, dimly lit corridor lined with storage cabinets and conduits and on though an open hatch. He came out into a somewhat larger compartment crammed full of computer consoles and high-resolution displays. Moving with practiced ease, he grabbed a handhold and arrested his momentum. One more gentle fingertip push off the nearest wall sent him floating over to the nearest console. He hooked his feet beneath it to hold himself in place and plugged his headset into the panel.

The Space Force officer on sensor watch, Captain Allison Stewart, glanced away from her displays. “Good morning, sir.”

“Morning, Allie,” Reynolds said. It was one of those rare moments when station time coincided — however briefly — with the visual cue of the sun rising above the curve of the earth ahead of them. At this altitude, four hundred miles above the planet, they experienced fourteen or fifteen dawns and sunsets during any given twenty-four-hour period. “Anything to report?”

“No, sir. It’s been pretty quiet so far this shift.”

“Alert. SBIRS sensors have picked up a major heat bloom over the Aegean Sea,” Eagle’s threat-warning computer suddenly intoned calmly.

“Is that a missile?” Reynolds snapped.

“No, sir,” Stewart told him. “This looks like a nonballistic trajectory. My computer evaluates it as a spacecraft headed into orbit.”

Reynolds frowned. There were a couple of private U.S. space companies with air-launched rockets in their inventory. But why light one off just south of Greece?

“New data, sir,” Stewart said rapidly. “I evaluate that thermal signature as an S-29B Shadow spaceplane. SBIRS detected the Shadow when its engines transitioned to rocket mode and initiated an orbital burn.” She passed her revised data to his screen. “The S-29 is currently at an altitude of two hundred miles. It’s in a retrograde orbit inclined at 128.4 degrees.”

“So it’s headed our way,” Reynolds said. Eagle Station’s orbit took it from west to east around the world, with an inclination or tilt of 51.6 degrees. That Shadow was circling the earth from east to west along the opposite track.

She nodded. “Yes, sir. And fast. On its current orbital track, that spaceplane will cross two hundred miles directly below us — with a combined closing speed of more than thirty-four thousand miles per hour.”

The colonel raised an eyebrow. He was starting to get an itchy feeling on the back of his neck. It looked a whole lot like the Space Force’s new senior officers were running a snap readiness exercise to test Eagle Station’s commander and crew. He tapped an icon on his own console. Instantly, alarms blared in every compartment in all four connected modules. “Action stations,” he announced over the intercom. “All personnel report to their action stations. This is a drill. Repeat, this is a drill.”

Reynolds heard voices echoing through other open hatches as those crewmen who’d been off duty scrambled out of tiny sleeping cabins and skimmed through corridors to their assigned places.

One by one, readiness reports flowed through his headset. The station’s fusion power plant, environmental controls, and life-support systems were all functioning within their expected parameters.

“Lasers are fully charged. Firing status is green. Simulated controls operational. Primary control systems are temporarily locked down,” he heard from the forward weapons module. Good, he thought. Nobody wanted real weapons firing accidentally during a training exercise.

From the aft weapons module, Major Ike Ozawa, the officer in charge of Eagle’s Thunderbolt plasma rail gun, announced, “Thunderbolt’s supercapacitors are charged. I’m ready to fire. Awaiting handoff of radar tracking data.”

Reynolds glanced toward Stewart. The young captain was busy with her equipment.

“Our X-band radar is online,” she told him a moment later. She looked back over her shoulder with a hint of barely suppressed amusement. “Oh, how I love the smell of burnt plasma in the morning. It smells like—”

“An easy kill.” The colonel nodded. The plasma rail gun was Eagle Station’s main weapons system. Using energy stored in its starfish-shaped supercapacitor array, Thunderbolt created a ring of extremely dense plasma, essentially a form of ball lightning, and then accelerated it with a powerful magnetic pulse. Those glowing, meter-wide toroids of plasma flew through outer space at more than six thousand miles per second — destroying targets by a combination of kinetic impact, heat, powerful electromagnetic pulse effects, and high-energy X-rays.