Frontier by Patrick Chiles

Author:Patrick Chiles [Chiles, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Action & Adventure, Hard Science Fiction, Military
ISBN: 9781982125417
Google: 9_j1zQEACAAJ
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2021-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

Roberta had been resisting the temptation to eavesdrop on the Borman’s control team, as she was becoming swamped with her own work. They could take care of their own problems without her shoving her nose in their business, she figured. It was dramatic, it was no doubt exciting for the people involved, but in the end this was why the ship had been commissioned in the first place: A couple of high rollers had gotten themselves into a fix, and ultimately it was up to the US taxpayer to come to their rescue. She wondered if they’d get a bill, like for an ambulance ride.

It was an amusing mental diversion, but her concerns had been more numerous if not quite as dramatic. There were now fully one dozen ridiculously expensive satellites out of action in geosynchronous orbit, concentrated on two fairly narrow bands of longitude over both Western and Eastern hemispheres. All of them civilian, mostly communications with a few remote-sensing birds in the mix. While not leaving their customers completely blind, it still represented a loss of capability not easily replaced.

Yet other than the comm angle, she hadn’t been able to determine a pattern. And she was becoming increasingly convinced there was a pattern. This was too much, concentrated in locations that were too specific. Somebody was disrupting GEO, and the solar flare event had created enough chaos to cover their tracks.

Nobody could plan for that, she knew. They’d gotten lucky. If anything, maybe it had led them to overplaying their hand. Whatever their goal was, they’d gotten greedy.

That was reflected by the latest satellite to go dark, which had finally gotten the brass’s attention: they’d lost control of a major asset over Asia, a KH-13 bird in a high inclination orbit that gave them access to high-resolution visuals of much of the world’s more interesting locales, at least from a military-intelligence perspective.

They’d lost its telemetry, and it had not responded to repeated tasking orders. The Keyhole was, for all they could tell, dead in space. Roberta suspected it had not died of natural causes.

Of course, she knew none of this through official channels. It had all been compartmentalized to the point of absurdity, as she could watch the reactions of the Keyhole control team and see that 13 had been lined out of the tasking order as if it were simply down for maintenance, like a software upload.

Ivey pulled up next to her. “I don’t think we’re going to be getting any help from S-2,” he said, as if reading her mind. “It’s all hands on deck in there right now, trying to find out what happened to that Keyhole.”

“So we’re supposed to stick with cleaning up trash in orbit and not ask too many questions,” she said, her irritation mounting.

“You hear anything from your friend on the Borman?”

Funny you should ask, she thought. “No, and I haven’t wanted to bother him. I was thinking about wandering over by their control team just to see what I can pick up.

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