Marines for a number of seconds. The transport, its circular base now glowing white-hot, accelerated rapidly into the clear, deep blue of the early evening sky.
âWhee-oo!â Tone said, excited. âWhat a ride! What you think, Luck? Theyâre pulling maybe eight Gs?â
âCargo launch,â he replied. âBetcha itâs unmanned and pulling twelve Gs, easy!â
The hurtling transport began arching overhead as it slid into an easterly launch path. When Vandenberg had first been converted to launch operations in the last century, all launches had been into polar or high-inclination orbits, since an east or southeasterly launch path would take the vehicle over the dangerously crowded urban areas of Greater Los Angeles. Low-inclination launches from V-berg had become possibleâif not exactly politically acceptableâwith the development of single-stage-to-orbit boosters and, later, the Laser Launch System, or LLS. Launches routinely passed over Greater LA every day nowâ¦though that, too, was yet another cause for periodic demonstrations.
The cargo transport was now nothing but a star, brighter than Venus, sliding rapidly down the eastern sky. The ground-based lasers, playing their steady, invisible tattoo against the water reaction mass in the transportâs plasma chamber, could boost it to orbital velocity in less than 120 seconds. Downrange lasers, at Edwards and San Clemente, would pick up the vehicle when it passed beyond Vandenbergâs laser-launch horizon and see it safely past LA. Once it was in orbit, conventional onboard engines would kick in and guide it to its final destinationâalmost certainly the U.S. Deep Space Orbital Facility at L-3.
It was a bit eerie for Lucky, imagining himself riding that invisible laser fire into space in another few days.
Space. Yeahâ¦even if it was Europa, he would be in space at last.
19 SEPTEMBER 2067
Space Tracking and Navigation
Network (STAN-NET)
Widely Distributed, Earth and
Near-Earth Space
0238 hours (Zulu)
They called him Stan, although, like most artificial intelligences, he never thought of himself in terms of names or self-identity. Even the pronoun he wasnât appropriate, though it didnât matter to him one way or another. It was simply part of the persona assigned him by his human handlers for their own comfort and convenience.
âHeâ could not even be said to have a particular location in space. Like all AIs, he was the product of softwareâinterconnected programs running on over three hundred different pieces of hardware, and those machines were scattered across space, from the TCC-5000 still coordinating space tracking operations from Cheyenne Mountain to the fifteen different Honeywell-Toshiba IC-1090s aboard each satellite in the TrackStar Geosynch constellation. His primary task was to monitor all spacecraft, satellites, and orbital facilities in cis-Lunar space; his secondary tasks changed periodically, but frequently involved alerting other AIs in the Global Network of specific events within his purview.
Such an event, linked to such a task, was occurring now.
One of Stanâs remote trackers, a twelve-ton Argus-Hera satellite in high Earth orbit, had just registered an unscheduled burn and funneled the observation through to all of Stanâs extended and massively parallel processor sites.
The source was KE26-GEO, the Chinese industrial/construction park in geosynch, at 108° East.
There were many such parksâin LEO, HEO, GEO, and in the various LaGrange points of the Earth-Moon system. Most had started off as small space stations for research, communications, or small-scale microgravity industrial sites, then grown, often haphazardly, into collections of fuel tanks, pumping apparatus, construction shacks, solar cell arrays, habitat and lab modules, and spacecraft. A fewâlike the U.S. facility at L-3, or the Chinese KE26 station in geosynchâincluded the