[slowhand09]

Chang resecured himself to the space station and made his way to the main hatch while Huan brought Tiangong-3’s weapons online. The station crew had realized they were moving to war footing twelve hours ago when Huan switched off the live viz feed of their activities. But it still felt slightly unreal. Once the taikonauts were all inside the station, Huan powered up the weapons module. The chemical oxygen iodine laser, or COIL, design had originally been developed by the U.S. Air Force in the late 1970s. It had even been flown on a converted 747 jumbo jet so the laser ’s ability to shoot down missiles in midair could be tested. But the Americans had ultimately decided that using chemicals in enclosed spaces to power lasers was too dangerous. The Directorate saw it differently. Two modules away from the crew, a toxic mix of hydrogen peroxide and potassium hydroxide was being blended with gaseous chlorine and molecular iodine. This was really it, thought Chang as he watched the power indicators turn red. There was no turning back once the chemicals had been mixed and the excited oxygen began to transfer its energy to the weapon. They would have forty-five minutes to act and then the power would be spent. The firing protocol for mankind’s first wartime shots in space was well rehearsed. The targets marked in the firing solution had been identified, prioritized, and tracked for well over a year in increasingly rigorous drills the crew eventually realized were not just to support war games down on Earth. The long hours spent in the lab would finally pay off. “Ready to commence firing sequence,” said Huan. “Confirm?” One by one, the other taikonauts checked in from their weapons stations. Chang touched the photo taped to the wall in front of him. His fingers lingered on the image of his beaming wife and their grinning eight-year-old son. The smiling Ming, missing his two front teeth, wore his father ’s blue air force officer ’s hat. What the photo did not show was how upset his wife had been when he’d given Ming that hat the night before. She thought it made her son look like a prop in a Directorate propaganda piece. He moved his hand away from the photo and began his part of the operation, monitoring the targeting sequence. He startled even Huan when he cried out, “Ready!” For years, military planners had fretted about antisatellite threats from ground-launched missiles, because that was how both the Americans and the Soviets had intended to take down each other ’s satellite networks during the Cold War. More recently, the Directorate had fed this fear by developing its own antisatellite missiles and then alternating between missile tests and arms-control negotiations that went nowhere, keeping the focus on the weapons based below. The Americans should have looked up. Chang snuck another look at the photo and caught Huan pausing, his trigger finger lingering above the red firing button. He appeared to be savoring the moment. Then Huan gently pressed the button. A quiet hum pervaded the module. No crash of cannon or screams of death. Only the steady purr of a pump signified that the station was now at war. The first target was WGS-4, a U.S. Air Force wideband gapfiller satellite. Shaped like a box with two solar wings, the 7,600-pound satellite had entered space in 2012 on top of a Delta 4 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral. Costing over three hundred million dollars, the satellite offered the U.S. military and its allies 4.875 GHz of instantaneous switchable bandwidth, allowing it to move massive amounts of data. Through it ran the communications for everything from U.S. Air Force satellites to U.S. Navy submarines. It was also a primary node for the U.S. Space Command. The Pentagon had planned to put up a whole constellation of these satellites to make the network less vulnerable to attack, but contractor cost overruns had kept the number down to just six. The space station’s chemical-powered laser fired a burst of energy that, if it were visible light instead of infrared, would have been a hundred thousand times brighter than the sun. Five hundred and twenty kilometers away, the first burst hit the satellite with a power roughly equivalent to a welding torch’s. It melted a hole in WGS-4’s external atmospheric shielding and then burned into its electronic guts. Chang watched as Huan clicked open a red pen and made a line on the wall next to him, much like a World War I ace decorating his biplane to mark a kill. The scripted moment had been ordered from below, a key scene for the documentary that would be made of the operation, a triumph that would be watched by billions.

-Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War by P.W.Singer and August Cole https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2J8BG-XlCfeNHlYbWN4aVhDQlE...

[fragmede]

As soon as it came over the horizon I could tell that its orbit had shifted radically. As I closed the distance, I could see why. Their escape pod had blown its hatch, and because it was still docked to the primary airlock, the entire station had depressurized in seconds. As a precaution, I requested docking clearance. I got nothing. As I came aboard, I could see that even though the station was clearly large enough for a crew of seven or eight, it only had the bunk space and personal kits for two. I found the Yang packed with emergency supplies, enough food, water, and O2 candles for at least five years. What I couldn’t figure out at first was why. There was no scientific equipment aboard, no intelligence-gathering assets. It was almost like the Chinese government had sent these two men into space for no other purpose than to exist. Fifteen minutes into my float about, I found the first of several scuttling charges. This space station was little more than a giant Orbital Denial Vehicle. If those charges were to detonate, the debris from a four-hundred-metric-ton space station would not only be enough to damage or destroy any other orbiting platform, but any future space launch would be grounded for years. It was a “Scorched Space” policy, “if we can’t have it, neither can anyone else.”

-World War Z, by Max Brooks.