The Medusa stone Read Free

into a cruel phantom that was stooped over the earth like vengeful gargoyle. Medusa looked like Death, if Armageddon's mullins began counting backward in his mind. At eight seconds he could see the five satellites glimmering just above earth's hazy blue horizon. They looked like golden fireflies at this distance, their details lost in the planet's reflective glow. At four seconds, he could see them more clearly; the central bodies of the receiver platforms with their spiderweb collection dishes spread wide. At two seconds, he saw a dull silver flash behind one of the receiver satellites, so brief that had he not anticipated it, he would have thought it a chimera.
    Ground control called out "Now," and a magnetic torque wrench lost during a Gemini space walk twenty-five years earlier, one of a hundred thousand pieces of space junk, passed through the collection dish of one of the satellites, latched on to a steel casing panel, and unbalanced the entire unit. The violence of the impact was lost in the void because there was no sound, but it hit with the force of a bullet and the receiver satellite began to tumble. As a horrified Cullins watched, it flipped three times before slamming into the main satellite.
    "Oh shit, we're going to lose it." Cullins heard the unperterbable General Kolwicki shout.
    "That's affirmative, General," Cullins said as he watched Medusa start falling toward earth.

    Two hundred and sixty miles below the Atlantis, General Reginald Kolwicki watched America's most expensive military accident unfold. In just three and a half minutes, Medusa went from crowning achievement to unrecoverable debacle. Telemetry from the positron gun platform confirmed that the satellite was in a degrading orbit and that it would not respond to ground commands to fire its maneuvering rockets. It was falling, and there was nothing the forty assembled men and women in the control room could do to prevent it.
    "Try the autonomous flight program," Kolwicki said to a computer technician who'd been typing furiously, trying to regain control of Medusa.
    "No response, sir. The central processor is off-line."
    "Are you getting anything from the damned thing?"
    "Positron gun is on stand-by, and all encryption routines are nominal."
    "Great. Medusa is about to burn up in the atmosphere, but it wants to still take pictures and keep the data a secret." Kolwicki growled at the irony. "How much longer?"
    "Medusa will enter the atmosphere in twenty-five seconds. Total loss in thirty seconds at the most."
    "Shit." A career military man who saw his career burning up in outer space, Kolwicki had no options. "What's the bird's position?"
    "Over North Africa, tracking southeast. It'll burn up above the Indian Ocean."
    "Might as well turn on the positron gun as she goes down. Maybe we'll gain something from this snafu." Kolwicki felt like a ship's captain knowing his command was going under and still ordering full steam ahead.
    "Sir?"
    "Just do it," he snapped.
    Fingers flying in a blur, the tech snapped off several commands. The plutonium reactor keyed up, beaming supercharged positrons back to earth in a swath that cut across northern Africa from Chad, across Sudan and Ethiopia and finally to Djibouti and Somalia. In all, it took "pictures" of two thousand square miles, but its data was incomplete. Several passes over the same area would be necessary teep but still radiated the heat like mirrors. Blisters of sweat appeared on the men's faces and exposed arms for the first time. They shuffled their feet in the flaky stones at the bottom of the wash, waiting for their leader to give them the order to dispatch the interloper.
    Jakob's chest rose and fell in a rapid cadence. His heart felt like it was breaking his ribs with each beat. Somewhere beyond his pelvis, in the sea of pain that had once been his legs, his shattered knee throbbed with an unholy pounding. Already the joint had swollen to twice its normal size. Each time his heart beat, the sharp