Contagious

That shattered the official record for manned flight that had stood since 1967, when Major William J. “Pete” Knight took his X-15A-2 to Mach 6.7. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Pete.

Knight’s flight had been very different. For starters, Knight’s X-15 dropped from the bottom of a B-52 bomber, while Lindeman’s HTV-6Xb took off under its own power from a military airbase at Groom Lake, Nevada. Knight’s X-15 was basically a rocket with wings and a c.o.c.kpit.

Lindeman’s plane used fairly standard turbojets for takeoff and landing, combined with scramjets to hit such obscene speeds. The most important difference? Knight’s plane was built for speed only. It couldn’t fight.

The HTV-6Xb was a bona fide war machine.

Known by its nickname, “the Wasp,” the HTV-6Xb was the world’s premier air-superiority weapon. The world didn’t know of its existence, of course, but that didn’t change the fact it could eat a couple of M16s for breakfast, wash them down with the best Mirage the French had to offer and then casually pick its teeth with an F-22 Raptor. The Wasp could reach any target zone faster than anything on the planet and outfly anything it found in that airs.p.a.ce.

This particular combat mission didn’t require a great deal of skill. Lindeman had taken off on a northwest heading, flown to ten thousand feet, then came around in a slow turn that pointed his nose toward South Bend, Indiana. The conventional jet-turbine engines drove the Wasp to Mach 2. At that speed, the turbines’ air inlets closed off, forcing that same air intake into the scramjet engines. The turbines had to shut off, because once the plane reached Mach 3 or so, air friction would melt the spinning intake fans. The scramjet portion, however, acted more like a funnel—it had no moving parts. Air shot in at supersonic speeds, compressed, mixed with a gaseous fuel and ignited in a highly controlled reaction that drove the plane to Mach 10.

Lindeman’s record-breaking flight would take him from Groom Lake to South Bend in fifteen minutes. Almost seventeen hundred miles. In fifteen minutes.

Twelve minutes into the flight, Lindeman released an ASM-157 antisatellite missile. His speed of Mach 10 wasn’t even half that of the ASM-157, which would max out at Mach 22.7—fifteen thousand miles per hour.

Aircraft normally come nowhere near Mach 5, let alone Mach 10. As a result, anyone or anything watching the skies for unusual flight patterns would notice the Wasp. Hard to miss something like that.

Which was precisely the point.

There was no way the Orbital could track every plane in North America. It couldn’t even track all the military planes in that area—far too much traffic to monitor. It did, however, try to keep tabs on particular military bases. So when the HTV-6Xb took off from Groom Lake, the Orbital noted the flight and marked a subroutine to watch its direction.

When the HTV-6Xb turned and accelerated to Mach 1, that didn’t merit the Orbital’s primary attention. At Mach 2 the Orbital changed the marking status to potential threat. By the time it hit Mach 5 and was flying straight for South Bend, the Orbital knew it was under attack. When the jet launched a missile, it was only 350 miles away.

At Mach 22, traveling 350 miles—the distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles—takes just under a minute and a half.

The Orbital ran through protocols, checking the decision tree for responses. As it did, it picked up another inbound threat.

Military engineers built the NFIRE satellite to do two things. The first was the difficult task of tracking intercontinental ballistic missiles. The second was even more complex—shooting those missiles out of the sky.

The NFIRE orbited at an alt.i.tude of 240 miles. It targeted an ICBM’s apex, typically about sixty miles above the Earth. The part of the NFIRE that actually shot down an ICBM was known as a kill vehicle, a small missile that got close to a target, then launched a high-speed spray of dense shrapnel. In basic terms, the kill vehicle was a high-tech, $560 million exoatmospheric hand grenade.

Certain senators, however, objected to putting a kill vehicle in the NFIRE. Such an act would open up a new arms race, they said. It would begin the “weaponization of s.p.a.ce,” and that was something the world could do without.

Defenders of the project said Congress was a bunch of myopic, tree-hugging hippies who deserved to die the radioactive death they would surely bring upon all freedom-loving Americans. The defenders said that only to themselves, of course. What they said publicly was that the kill vehicle had a range of only four miles, a minuscule distance compared to the vast ranges of s.p.a.ce, so the kill vehicle could really only be used to shoot down a rocket aimed directly at the NFIRE. It was strictly for self-defense, and how could that be a bad thing?

Congress didn’t care. Senators insisted the kill vehicle would cross a line. So to secure funding, NASA and MDA (the Missile Defense Agency) had agreed to remove the kill vehicle and instead include a laser communications terminal, also known as an LCT.

The thing was, military engineers are pretty sharp cats, and they quietly figured out how to fit both the kill vehicle and the LCT into the NFIRE. So Congress, and the public, was told that the NFIRE did not include the kill vehicle.

That was the first lie.

The second lie was the four-mile killing range. Of the two whoppers, this might have been the big one because the NFIRE’s killing range was actually thousands of miles. Thanks to triangulation data piped up from NASA, the NFIRE could both target and hit the Orbital.

Exactly ten seconds after P. J. Lindeman released his ASM-157, the NFIRE launched its kill vehicle.

Primary threat: the missile launched from the Mach 10 jet. The Orbital tracked the missile’s trajectory, then fired a supersonic stream of pellets made from an iridium alloy. The pellets spread out like a tight cloud, a cloud traveling at several thousand miles per hour. Air friction melted the pellets. By the time they intersected the missile’s path, they were globs of dense, molten metal that tore through the ASM-157 like twelve-gauge shot through rice paper. The missile shattered into dozens of useless pieces.