Death Orbit Read Free Page B

neither one knew about the other. Yet.
    No wonder he liked it so much in space.
    Hawk woke up to find the still-sleeping form of Elvis Q floating by him.
    One of the original United Americans, Elvis Q had just escaped several years of captivity by Viktor’s allies, a time during which he’d been brainwashed and taught how to fly the Zon spacecraft. Now that he was back in the fold, he was probably the most rabid Viktor-hater among them all, if that was possible.
    Also on board and floating nearby were Jim Cook of the elite JAWS special ops unit, and Frank Geraci of the famous NJ104 combat engineers. Both were close allies of Hunter. The only ones awake up on the flight deck at the moment were JT Toomey and Ben Wa, two of Hunter’s oldest friends.
    Hunter had been asleep for only an hour or so when his deep inner sense told him to wake up. The same extrasensory perceptive ability that made him the premier fighter pilot of his day worked when he was out of the cockpit as well. Now a vibration rising up inside him told him he had to get up, get alert. Trouble was on the way.
    Sure enough, the intercom inside the crew compartment came on not two seconds later.
    “Flight deck to Hunter,” JT’s very distinctive voice crackled. “You’d better get up here, Hawk, old boy, on the triple…”
    It was a short float up from the crew compartment to the flight deck of the Zon.
    Three days in space had acclimated Hunter and the others to the quirks of zero-gravity. Drifting along weightless was a very pleasant experience; it was almost like sex—Hunter just could not get rid of the feeling that this was how man was supposed to be.
    But when you had to get somewhere in a hurry, you had to bring one of Isaac Newton’s laws into play: once a body is in motion, it tends to stay in motion. It was amazing how little muscle power it took to propel oneself across the crew compartment or up to the Zon’s flight deck. Hunter just gave himself a tap of the boots and he was spinning like a bullet toward the overhead hatch and the flight deck beyond. It was the slowing down part that could be painful. Usually a well-placed shoulder or even a preemptive kick of the boot would do the trick. Hit the right place on the ladder or the compartment wall and you had the equivalent of brakes. Miss it by a centimeter or two and you’d wind up with a space bruise, painful and long-lasting.
    The urgent call from JT had woken them all. Now, as Hunter bounced his way up to the flight compartment, Elvis, Cook, and Geraci were right on his heels.
    “What’ve you got?” Hunter asked, floating up and into the left-side commander’s seat.
    “Maybe trouble,” JT replied. “Maybe with a capital T.”
    He was pointing to an object that appeared to be about 20 miles straight ahead of them. It was white and twinkling, indicating that it was tumbling.
    “That showed up on the radar about two minutes ago,” Ben explained from the makeshift navigator’s station.
    “So?” Hunter asked. “We’ve seen a lot of junk up here.”
    “But the computer says this particular piece wasn’t there when we came around last time,” Ben replied. “Wasn’t anywhere near here. I checked the radar’s memory. It’s a new object.”
    “You mean something that’s been launched since we went around the last time?” Elvis asked.
    Ben could only shrug. “Maybe…”
    Hunter doubted this. His inner sense would have told him if it were so. Plus, they surely would have detected a new satellite’s entry trail; the telltale stream of smoke and exhaust left behind by a payload’s boosters was hard to miss.
    Hunter pulled out the shuttle’s extremely powerful bi-scopes, a kind of computer-driven set of binoculars. The radar on the Zon had been a hasty addition before take-off and Hunter knew better than to rely on it too closely. It was time to go with the naked eye.
    He got the tumbling object within his sights and tried to study it. It appeared to be a piece of space