Ash went out to meet the snowball coming in, just in case of a failure in the systems designed to decelerate it into a halo orbit around L2. Still, it proved unnecessary, and Ash instead spent a couple of days watching everything work as designed.
"Ship, it's always good when a plan comes together," Ash said in good humour from the command couch in the bridge. If he had a cigar, he would have lit it up. It's going to be so tragic that for the rest of his life, nobody will get his Western pop-cultural references.
"Hsss! Prepare for a high-G boost. Accelerating in thirty seconds for a powered orbit around Luna. There will be three more scheduled burns before we reach our parking orbit in low Earth Orbit, Mistress," replied Ship, the Viper's AI. Ash made a mental note to get the AI to at least refer to him as Captain or something in the future. Getting him to stop hissing was already a lost cause.
High-G boost was considered anything more than 6G of acceleration, and this burn plan had a first phase of over twenty-five G's planned. In his past life accelerations that good were reserved for the surface to air missiles. Thankfully he wouldn't feel it at all, but any time a high-G burn was planned, all organic personnel had to be in acceleration couches on the off-chance the tractor fields that provided internal dampening failed. Each acceleration couch had a redundant field emitter that would save your life, although it wouldn't feel terrific. He watched Klara, the blonde-haired blue-eyed copy of Liesa, check her straps on her couch.
Ash pursed his lips and glanced at her, "Oberleutnant Klara, coordinate with Ship and the constellation control centre. Once we get within one thousand kilometres from Earth, I want to go active on radar from the surveillance constellation below us, as well as those that are either in front or trailing behind our orbit."
She brought her fist to her chest in some manner of salute, which strictly speaking wasn't called for inside a ship if his fragmented naval knowledge from his past life was correct, "Jawohl, Fraülein-Kapitän!"
Ash continued, "High-priority interdiction on any optical, thermal or radar contact that indicates a probable contact boosting up to orbit. Maintain Earth-facing EMCON with Viper unless you detect a target, then go active for a target solution. If it's a probable missile, destroy it with no further orders. If it is a probable shuttle or ship trying to reach orbit, report it."
Ash clucked his tongue in thought after Klara acknowledged the orders. Actually, it occurred to Ash that the most significant danger to him wasn't from things boosting up from orbit but from items left in orbit before the power-couple landed. He doubted they had space mines in their yacht's inventory. Still, it wouldn't be hard to convert a ship-killer missile into an autonomous mine, even with minimal or no designs in their fabricators.
In fact, if he were that couple, he would have likely converted almost all of his ship's complement of missiles to this mode and deployed them in high orbit to hopefully kill that asshole if he came back in his freighter. Ash certainly didn't trust him and Ash had a semi-modern corvette at his disposal now. The missiles on a yacht couldn't have outstanding performance, but their yield was still probably pretty good. Enough to threaten a tramp freighter.
Ash was suddenly quite glad that he never had the Mistress of Space enter orbit to deliver any of the satellite constellations. The freighter was too busy with other tasks to oversee placing a constellation of thousands of sats, so he just sort of tossed them around the Moon in lots of a few hundred each, in a space vehicle that decelerated them to their proper speed, released them into their correct orbit and then burned up in the atmosphere.
Ash said suddenly, "Ship, new navigation plan, please. Continue the powered orbit around Luna but tighten up our entry point. I want to be higher, try to intercept an elliptical orbit at least 100,000 kilometres. Once we've established an apogee, I want to be a hole in space while descending down closer to our perigee, so get the heat sinks ready and prechilling now."
Ship was silent for a moment, "With this flight plan, we will not meet the Mistress of Space on station like planned-hsss."
Ash frowned, "Coordinate with your other self over there and adjust their flight plan. I don't want them any closer than 200,000 kilometres until we give the okay. They can delay their departure, boost more modestly or whatever Liesa decides. Have her pick new orbital parameters with this in mind. I'm concerned with potential improvised mines in orbit." Ash coughed, "Oberleutnant Klara! Belay my last order, go active on the entire constellation now. Continuously, not just while they're on their Earth-facing perigee. When they're on the other side of their orbit, I want them radiating into space. Also, I want separation of our entire complement of RDs soonest, and I want them on descending powered orbits in a minesweeping pattern around and in front of our general orbital parameters. Try to program them so that they're recoverable later, though, please, if you will. By the time we reach apogee, I want all tactical point-defence systems on auto-engage. But, uhh, make sure to double-check that constellation control centre is networked into our IFF."
Klara looked surprised but gave a spirited, "Jawohl!"
Ship also came back, "New nav plan set. Boost reducing. Mistress of Space reports compliance. Four recon drones separating now; they will begin a high powered radar and LIDAR sweep ahead and around us shortly. They should be recoverable. In fact, they should have enough fuel to return to us themselves after they complete their program, Mistress."
It wasn't surprising they didn't have more than four recon drones aboard. The drones were high-performance spacecraft in their own right, each with a fusion powerplant, lots of delta-V and ridiculously powerful electromagnetic sensors. Each was almost as big as the one assault shuttle they carried. They were expensive, too, at least if he was buying them and not fabricating them himself. But he'd much rather enter Earth in stealth with a few RDs emitting. They'd be targeted by the nukes, not his ship, if there were any configured to launch autonomously. Now, he just had to wait.
Or maybe not. Klara interrupted him, "Fraülein-Kapitän! Reporting! Constellation control centre rejects programming as invalid! I'm, uhh… not sure why!"
Ash sighed. Class 2 AIs are not really problem solvers. He took a look. Ah, it was complaining that the earth-plot would be corrupted with the extraneous data. He didn't WANT the irrelevant data, though. It took him a couple of seconds to change the code base, test it in virtual, commit and transmit the patch to the constellation control centre. He didn't care if the surveillance sats SAW anything, and their ultra-wideband emitters weren't really designed to detect targets that far away in space. Ash just wanted them to become targets; he figured they might irradiate a missile sitting doggo and trigger it to attack the tiny, cheap satellite and spare an expensive RD or his even more precious ass.
While latency with Mistress of Space was still low enough Ash checked in on the status of his landing teams in virtual. He had adjusted plans and decided to first land a significant force at a presently uninhabited area and then expand out from there like spokes on a wagon wheel, with the first spoke being as planned in China. Originally Ash had planned on such a base being the Antarctic but realized that while that was possible it might be impractical for now.
Instead he chose a small uninhabited island in the area between Greenland and Europe, one of the Faroe Islands. The southernmost one, with an area of a little over sixty square kilometres. It was presently uninhabited, but there were signs that it was inhabited in the past. He would ensure it would remain uninhabited going forward, though.
At first, he wanted to pick Guam, but he found himself chagrined to discover it was inhabited. For some reason, he never realised that America's little unmoving Aircraft Carrier in the Pacific had people on it before it was discovered by Magellan in the 16th century.
The first team of two hundred or so were ready and were actually awaiting the fabrication of their bodies, which was occurring as he spoke. Their series of atmospheric landers and over twenty thousand tons of heavy equipment was already complete and being shuttled aboard the Mistress of Space. Each loaded lander massed as much as a tugboat, and it would take thirty-one of them to get that amount of supplies to the surface. The trail of their re-entry would be spectacular to behold, and there was unfortunately little he could do about that.
He originally wanted to fabricate an actual drop ship for their use, but at this stage, that was over-kill. They didn't need the capability to get back into orbit right now, and besides, they could feed the landers to the recycler they're taking with them to regain all the mass for their substantial construction projects.
Ash decided to keep the construction either below ground, below the water or both at this site. He wanted to give the impression of an uninhabited and perhaps haunted island. There were islanders in the other parts of the Faroe Islands chain, which weren't very far from his chosen island at all. He was even going to utilise a chain of fusion-powered submersible buoys whose only job was to ring the island in continual fog to sell the haunted aspect.
He didn't even need to design the buoys; they were an off-the-shelf submersible design that included filtering deuterium from the seawater to power them so they wouldn't even need to be refuelled. They also had a respectable projected fifty-year service interval before maintenance was required. He was not the first person who wanted to make his private island spooky or even the first millionth person.
While ensuring a level of fog that reached spooky in all weather conditions was actually horrendously expensive in terms of energy, especially during the summer, it wasn't like the ocean was going to run out of deuterium in the next billion years, so it didn't really matter.
Over a thousand of these devices would be in the first five re-entry vehicles that were roughly scheduled to enter the Earth's atmosphere in approximately eighteen hours… well, that was the original plan. Realistically, probably two days from now. These first five were less landers and more along the lines of a giant five hundred ton planetary bombardment missiles, each with hundreds of independently targetable reentry vehicles which each contained one submersible with the associated equipment such as parachutes to ensure a relatively low-G splashdown. This took a couple hours of design time, but the missiles were in his database so he just had to upsize them and swap the nukes for his autonomous fog submersibles.
Ash will program each missile for a simultaneous time-on-target delivery of each submersible to their individual loiter-area a little past midnight local time. It was impossible to hide over a thousand MIRVed tracks all aerobraking in the atmosphere so he figured doing it all at once would be best. He considered landing all the submersibles in one spot, but they did not even move at three kilometres per hour, and it would have taken too long to position each that way. By that first morning, he wanted an excellent thick fog to hide the multi-ton excavator bots, earth moving equipment and thousands of tons of supplies.
There will likely be a vast multi-level subterranean complex over a significant fraction of the island in a couple of years. In fact, the Island might end up just a little bit bigger just from displacing all that earth and rocks!
To get the sprawling complex he wanted, Ash would likely need to continue supplying feedstock in the range of at least ten thousand tons a week for several years, which equated to about fifteen landers a week. He hoped the predictable trail of giant reentry vehicles the size of tugboats didn't invite investigation from one of the inhabitants of the other Faroe Islands or some inquisitive Viking but, honestly, he didn't hold out much hope for that, which is why the second priority after the fog machines would be setting up an autonomous aerial drone network.
The first layer of defence would be the constant spooky fog cover surrounding the island. However, If he spotted any boats coming to investigate his island, one of the aerial drones could induce nausea in humans with high-powered but low-frequency MASER technology from kilometres away. It was a standard non-lethal riot control measure and a mature technology. He found it in the database when he was researching his Earth-facing defence satellite designs, and it was one of the only examples of MASER technology used as a weapon he discovered.
Speaking of which, if that didn't work, he would fire a low-powered snowflake round from his peashooter constellation, which he had finally settled on a design for, roughly directly in front of the boat's path. Seeing a giant geyser of water in front of your boat multiple times would likely convince even the bravest soul to turn around.
If for some reason, they didn't wise up and actually made landfall, his defence teams would incapacitate them and then remove any of their memories beyond setting foot on the island. Then for good measure, he would keep them in a medically induced coma for some period of time (perhaps a year and a day if he was going to be playing the role of haunted fey island) before returning them covertly to whichever island they originated from.
Perhaps he'd play tricks on them like painting their entire longboat pink or replacing all their clothes. One way or another, he'd ensure nobody wanted to settle on his island.
For artificial intelligence, twenty-six hours was a long time to wait, but time still passed. A watched pot never boiled, so after confirming the Viper was in stealth mode with point-defence on auto, he busied himself with other tasks.
——
Hours later, he was interrupted by a kind of klaxon, both audibly as well as digitally, over the command and control network while Klara yelled at the same time, "Vampire! Vampire! Vampire! Missile detected, CIC designate M1 14,521 kilometres ahead but behind and below our orbit, it's begun boosting at one hundred gravities trying to catch up to our general track… projected target is RD1. It's irradiating our volume now… I don't think it can see us. Optimal target solution for point defence lasers is in 26 seconds."
I kept my eyes closed to look through the ship's sensors with another thread of awareness drinking down CIC's analysis. This missile isn't really a threat to a warship, especially one expecting it, but it could have been a sucker punch to a freighter.
Klara continued, "Missile changing track. CIC analysis, high confidence it knows its target is a drone. It has shifted targets to roughly the volume in between all four drones. It suspects a stealthed ship being screened by drones. CIC projects that its terminal guidance will try to get us optically as we occlude the moon or starfield behind us, low probability of success. Firing!"
Through the sensors, Ash saw the terawatts of UV light focus on the surprisingly intelligent missile and destroy it. A flash. Klara's voice, "Target destroyed! BREAK ten new targets CIC designated M2 through M11. All over 12,000 kilometres, scattered above and below the plane of our orbit. Accelerating at 252 gravities. We're the target, CIC confidence high. We're ballistic, so they won't miss. All batteries will engage independently."
Ash has had missiles shot at him before but never eleven at once. The pucker factor hasn't changed. This was a rope-a-dope; the first missile was used as a sacrificial pawn. Once Viper had fired its point defence, no amount of low-radar cross-section or passive heatsinks could hide it, and the others pounced. Ash hadn't been expecting the couple to utilise their missiles this way because they couldn't have more than fifty or sixty reloads in a ship that small.
Either they had small ion drives that let them reposition themselves into an ideal ambush position, or Ash needed to seriously study space tactics because he was missing something. Space was supposed to be big! They were a lot stealthier than he thought, also. The Viper's RD had detected the missile at a little above 10,000 kilometres, and the rocket immediately started boosting. The bot controlling the missile must have witnessed the recon drone work through the electromagnetic spectrum and then focus on it too long and figured the gig was up, which it was.
Ash had thought he'd detect any missiles at over fifty thousand kilometres and just pop them. These weapons were a lot more sophisticated… but he still was going to pop them. The sensors aboard Mistress of Space weren't on the same level as Viper, but Mistress of Space was still a freighter from a second-rate state. The Measure Twice, Cut Once was a tramp freighter from the Solar Union. This ambush may very well have killed that ship. He thinks the Mistress of Space would have survived, but it might have had to launch missiles of its own in anti-missile mode.
Each missile was destroyed more or less a second or two apart. With a single missile that hadn't detected the ship with a low kill probability, the computer would wait for optimal conditions to fire, but with ten missiles with a good track, it started firing a lot sooner. The closest the last missile got was 9,000 kilometres. That's basically in range for a bomb pumped x-ray laser warhead but thankfully, not any other type; not even casaba howitzers can reach out that far.
Klara continued, "All targets destroyed, Fraülein-Kapitän!"
Ash relaxed slightly, "Go active on all sensors, full power, then max continuous power to the emitters. Flush the heatsinks, start dissipating heat. If it's bigger than a speck of dust, I want to see it."
Ash found forty-five missiles that day in four clusters. Then he looked around for another twelve hours before he was convinced nothing else was there.
——
Leif was feeling older than his years. He was depressed and losing faith. The golden age of Vikings was gone over half a century ago before he was born even and every year, less and fewer people followed the old ways and the old faith. This may not be the end, but it was definitely no longer just the beginning of the end.
What galled Leif the most was that the end of everything he cherished didn't come with one great final battle as foretold in Ragnarök but with the mewling whimper and gasping of a man dying of old age. His entire culture was dying a woman's death!
He decided to speak to the men, and hell, even the woman, who followed him one last time this night at the darkest hour. He would ask the gods one final time for some sort of direction or sign, and then when they declined to reply, he'd curse all the Æsir, the Christian god and anyone else who would listen and then get proper drunk. When he woke up a few days later, he'd leave and find some exciting way to go to Valhalla while there still was anyone around who knew what it was.
Hours later, Leif was somewhat nervous. Did everyone within a hundred rôst come to watch him humiliate himself? Granted, he was paying for all the drink. Though Leif probably would have done the same, he thought.
Still, he began his speech, begging Odin or Freya or even some fucking dwarf to give him and his people a sign as to where in this Christ-cursed world could people live like the old ways? He really got to gesticulating and didn't even realise how quiet people got until he looked up to see five of the brightest falling stars falling in sync down the horizon.
Leif was stunned, stupid. He'd seen falling stars before, but never ones this bright! Was … was this the sign? Perhaps not…
Just as Leif was trying to talk himself out of what his eyes were seeing, the five falling stars broke into hundreds of different streaks, maybe a thousand! Each smaller falling star was still brighter than the brightest falling star he'd ever seen, and they didn't burn out like every other falling star he'd seen! They all seemed to be falling in more or less the same direction! They came from different sides of the sky, but they were all falling on the same place?!
Leif felt chagrined for doubting his gods initially—Thor, you could have just doubled them from five to ten! You didn't have to go crazy!
People were chanting Odin and Thor's name, and even Leif's! Leif would find out where these things from heaven landed if it was the last thing he did. And when he did, his people would all follow! It would be a Varangian Adventure.