Battle Station Read Free

opposite wall of his cubicle. He zipped himself into the bag and slipped the terry-cloth restraint across his forehead. Hazard was a bulky, dour man with iron-gray hair still cropped Academy close, a weather-beaten squarish face built around a thrusting spadelike nose, a thin slash of a mouth that seldom smiled, and eyes the color of a stormy sea. Those eyes seemed suspicious of everyone and everything, probing, inquisitory. A closer
look showed that they were weary, disappointed with the world and the people in it. Disappointed most of all with himself.
    He was just dozing off when the emergency klaxon started hooting. For a disoriented moment he thought he was back in a submarine and something had gone wrong with a dive. He felt his arms pinned by the mesh sleeping bag, as if he had been bound by unknown enemies. He almost panicked as he heard hatches slamming automatically and the terrifying wailing of the alarms. The communications unit on the wall added its urgent shrill to the clamor.
    The comm unit’s piercing whistle snapped him to full awareness. He stopped struggling against the mesh and unzippered it with a single swift motion, slipping out of the head restraint at the same time.
    Hazard slapped at the wall comm’s switch. “Commander here,” he snapped. “Report.”
    â€œVarshni, sir. CIC. The bridge is out. Apparently destroyed.”
    â€œDestroyed?”
    â€œAll life-support functions down. Air pressure zero. No communications,” replied the Indian in a rush. His slightly singsong Oxford accent was trembling with fear. “It exploded, sir. They are all dead in there.”
    Hazard felt the old terror clutching at his heart, the physical weakness, the giddiness of sudden fear. Forcing his voice to remain steady, he commanded, “Full alert status. Ask Mr. Feeney and Miss Yang to meet me at the CIC at once. I’ll be down there in sixty seconds or less.”
    The Hunter was one of nine orbiting battle stations that made up the command-and-control function of the newly created International Peacekeeping Force’s strategic defense network. In lower orbits, 135 unmanned ABM satellites armed with multimegawatt
lasers and hypervelocity missiles crisscrossed the Earth’s surface. In theory, these satellites could destroy thousands of ballistic missiles within five minutes of their launch, no matter where on Earth they rose from.
    In theory, each battle station controlled fifteen of the ABM satellites, but never the same fifteen for very long. The battle station’s higher orbits were deliberately picked so that the unmanned satellites passed through their field of view as they hurried by in their lower orbits. At the insistence of the fearful politicians of a hundred nations, no ABM satellites were under the permanent control of any one particular battle station.
    In theory, each battle station patrolled one ninth of the Earth’s surface as it circled the globe. The sworn duty of its carefully chosen international crew was to make certain that any missiles launched from that part of the Earth would be swiftly and efficiently destroyed.
    In theory.
    The IPF was new, untried except for computerized simulations and war games. It had been created in the wake of the Middle East Holocaust, when the superpowers finally realized that there were people willing to use nuclear weapons. It had taken the destruction of four ancient cities and more than 3 million lives before the superpowers stepped in and forced peace on the belligerents. To make certain that nuclear devastation would never threaten humankind again, the International Peacekeeping Force was created. The Peacekeepers had the power and the authority to prevent a nuclear strike from reaching its targets. Their authority extended completely across the Earth, even to the superpowers themselves.
    In theory.
    Pulling aside the privacy curtain of his cubicle,
Hazard launched himself down the narrow passageway with a