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Fortress
David Drake
1987
Editorial Reviews
Ingram
Fortress is America's guarantor of freedom, an orbiting arsenal of laser
weapons and nuclear missiles. It was considered impregnable--until now. Former
CIA officer Tom Kelley is sent to learn the secrets surrounding a dead alien
found in Turkey and discovers a maze of lies and treachery that could
transform America's shield into an engine of global terror. HC: Tor.
From the Publisher
"One of the most gifted users of historical and military raw material at work
today in science fiction." --Chicago Sun-Times
"Lots of action, a well worked out plot, and a suitably exciting conclusion."
--Science Fiction Chronicle
Prologue: - Another 1965
Sergeant Tom Kelly listened to John F. Kennedy's fifth State of the Union
Address - his so-called "Buck Rogers Speech" - at a firebase in the Shuf
Mountains, watching Druse 122 mm rockets arc toward Beirut across the night
sky.
The broadcast, carried live over the Armed Forces Levantine Network, hissed
and sputtered in the plug earphone of Kelly's cheap portable radio. Inside the
high-sided command track against which he leaned, the young sergeant could
have gotten a much clearer signal through some of the half million dollars
worth of communications-intercept equipment which the Radio Research vehicle
carried. This was good enough, though, for a soldier who was off duty and
waiting for the attack Druse message traffic made almost certain.
Shooooo . . . hissed the green ball of a bombardment rocket.
"Our enemies, the enemies of freedom," said the President, more distant from
Kelly's reality than seven time zones could imply, "have proven in Hungary, in
Cuba, and in Lebanon that they respect nothing in their international dealings
except strength. Their armies are poised on the boundaries of Eastern Europe,
ready to hurl themselves across the remainder of the continent at the least
sign of weakness among the Western democracies."
By daylight, the berm which bulldozers had turned up around the firebase for
protection was scarcely less sterile in appearance than the crumbling rock of
the hills from which it was carved. Now, in the soft darkness, the landscape
breathed. Kelly's left hand caressed the heavy wooden stock of his M14,
knowing that beyond the berm other soldiers were nervously gripping their own
weapons: Mausers abandoned by the Turks in 1917; Polish-made Kalashnikovs
slipped across the Syrian border in donkey panniers; rocket-propelled grenades
stamped in Russian or Chinese . . .
"In Europe and the Middle East," continued the President in a nasal voice
further attenuated by the transmission and the radio's tinny speaker, "in
Africa and Latin America - wherever the totalitarians and their surrogates
choose to test us, the free world must stand firm. Furthermore, ladies and
gentlemen of Congress, we in the United States must undertake an initiative on
behalf of the free world which will convince our enemies that we have the
strength to withstand them no matter how great the forces they gather on Earth
itself.
The five tubes of howitzer battery - the sixth hog was deadlined for repair -
cut loose in a ragged salvo. The white powderflashes were a lightninglike
dazzle across the firebase while the side-flung shock waves from the muzzle
brakes hammered tent roofs and raised dust from the parched ground. The short-
barreled one-five-fives were firing at high angles and with full charges.
Nothing to do with the turbaned riflemen crouching to attack, perhaps nothing
to do with even the Druse rockets sailing down toward the airport in the flat
curves of basketballs shot from thirty feet out.
"We must have an impregnable line of defense and an arsenal of overwhelming
magnitude in the heavens themselves," continued Kennedy through the squeal of
hydraulic rammers seating the shells of the next salvo. Clicks of static from
command transmissions cut across the broadcast band, but Kelly was used to
building sense from messages far more shattered and in a variety of languages
beyond English. He was good at that - at languages - and his fingertips again
tried to wiggle the magazine of his rifle, making sure it was locked firmly
into the receiver.
"Space is both a challenge - " said the President as Kelly's hearing returned
after the muzzle blasts of the howitzers which were more akin to physical
punishment than to noise. " - Now also the unbreachable shield of freedom and
the spear of retribution which cannot be blunted by treacherous attack as our
land-based weapons might be."
The breechblock of a fifty-caliber machinegun clanged from the far side of the
firebase as the weapon was charged, freezing time and Tom Kelly's soul. Only
the sounds of the howitzers reloading and traversing their turrets slightly
followed, however. Nothing Kelly had seen in ninety-seven days in the field
suggested the hogs were going to hit anything useful, but their thunderous
discharges made waiting for an attack easier than it would have been with only
the stars for company.
"My detailed proposals ..." said the radio before the words disintegrated into
a hiss like frying bacon - louder than the voice levels had been, so it
couldn't be the French dry cells giving out. . . .
"Fuckin' A!" snarled Chief Warrant Officer Platt as he ducked out the rear
hatch of the command vehicle. He, the intercept team's commander, was a
corpulent man who wore two fighting knives on his barracks belt and carried
the ear of a Druse guerrilla tissue-wrapped in a watch case. "We're getting
jammed across all bands! What the fuck is this?"
Something with a fluctuating glow deep in the violet and presumably
ultraviolet was crossing the sky very high up and very swiftly. A word or two,
" - dominance -- " crept through a momentary pause in the static before the
howitzers, linked by wire to the Tactical Operations Center, fired again.
"Commie recon satellite," Platt muttered, his eyes following Kelly's to the
bead shimmering so far above the surface of dust, buffeted by hot, gray
strokes of howitzer propellant. "You know those bastards're targeting us down
to the last square meter!"
Tom Kelly reached for the tuning dial of the radio with the hand which was not
sweating on the grip of his rifle. Anybody who could come within a hundred
yards of a point target, using a bombardment rocket aimed by adjusting a
homemade bipod under the front of the launching tube, ought to be running the
US space program instead of a Druse artillery company. The hell with the
satellite - assuming that's what it was. If the rag-heads could jam the whole
electromagnetic spectrum like that, there were worse problems than Radio
Research teams becoming as useless as tits on a boar. . . .
" - domestic front," said the radio just as Kelly's fingers touched it, "the
curse of racial injustice calls for - "
Tom Kelly never did hear the rest of that speech because just as normal
reception resumed, a one-twenty-two howled over the berm and exploded near a
tank-recovery vehicle. It was the first of the thirty-seven rockets preceding
the attack of a reinforced Druse battalion.
The only physical scar Kelly took home from that one was on his hand, burned
by the red-hot receiver of his rifle as he worked to clear a jam.
Another 1985
The three helicopters were orbiting slowly, as if tethered to the monocle
ferry on the launchpad five hundred meters below. When the other birds rotated
so that the West Texas sun caught the cameras aimed from their bays, the long
lenses blazed as if they were lasers themselves rather than merely tools with
which to record a test of laser propulsion.
The sheathing which would normally have roofed the passenger compartments of
the helicopters had been removed, leaving the multi-triangulated frame tubing
and a view straight upward for the cameras and the men waiting for what was
about to happen on the launchpad.
Sharing the bay of the bird carrying Tom Kelly were a cameraman, a project
scientist named Desmond, and a pair of colonels in Class A uniforms, Army
green and Air Force blue, rather than the flight suits that Kelly thought
would have been more reasonable. The military officers seemed to be a good
deal more nervous than the scientist was; and unless Kelly was misreading
them, their concern was less about the test itself than about him - the staff
investigator for Representative Carlo Bianci, chairman of the House
Subcommittee on Space Defense. Sometimes it seemed to Kelly that he'd spent
all his life surrounded by people who were worried as hell about what he was
going to do next. Occasionally, of course, people would have been smart to
worry more than they did. . . .
The communications helmet Kelly had been issued for the test had a three-
position switch beneath the left earpiece, but only one channel on it was
live. He could not hear either the chatter of the Army pilots in the cockpit
or the muttered discussions of the two officers in the passenger bay with him,
though the latter could speak to him when they chose to throw their own helmet
switches forward. The clop of the blades overhead was more a fact than an
impediment to normal speech, but the intake rush of the twin-turbine power
plant created an ambiance through which Kelly could hear nothing but what the
officers chose to direct to him through the intercom circuitry.
"Someday," Kelly said aloud, "people are going to learn that the less they try
to hide, the less problem they have explaining things. But I don't expect the
notion to take hold in the military any time soon."
"Pardon?" asked Desmond, the first syllable minutely clipped by his voice-
activated microphone. The scientist was Kelly's age or a few years younger, a
short-bearded man who slung a pen-caddy from one side of his belt and a worn-
looking calculator from the other. It was probably his normal working garb -
as were the dress uniforms of the public-affairs colonels, flacks of type
which Kelly would have found his natural enemy even if they hadn't been
military.
"I'd been meaning to ask you, Dr. Desmond," said Kelly, rubbing from his eyes
the prickliness of staring into the desert of the huge Fort Bliss reservation,
"just why. you think the initial field test failed?"
"Ah, I think it's important to recall, Mr. Kelly," interjected one of the
colonels - it was uncertain which through the headphones - "that the test was
by no means a failure. The test vehicle performed perfectly throughout eighty-
three percent of the spectrum planned - "
"Well good god, Boardman," snapped the project scientist, "it blew up, didn't
it? That's what you mean, isn't it?" Desmond continued, snapping his head
around from the officers across the bay to Kelly seated on the portion of the
bench closest to the fully-opened starboard hatch. "I certainly don't consider
that, that fireworks display a success."
Kelly smiled, the expression only incidentally directed toward the colonels.
"Though I gather many of the systems did work as planned, Doctor?" he said,
playing the scientist now that he had enough of a personality sample from
which to work. Even among the project's civilians, there were familiar - and
not wholly exclusive - categories of scientists and scientific politicians.
Desmond had seemed to be in the former category, but Kelly had found no
opportunity to speak to him alone.
The public affairs officers were probably intended to smother honest
discussion within the spotting helicopter the same way the administrators had
done on the ground. That plan was being frustrated by what was more than a
personality quirk: Desmond could not imagine that anything the military
officers said or wished was of any concern to him. It was not a matter of
their rank or anyone's position in a formal organizational chart: Colonels
Boardman and Johnson were simply of another species.
"Yes, absolutely," agreed the project scientist as he shook his head in quick
chops. "Nothing went wrong during air-breathing mode, nothing we could see in
the telemetry, of course - it'd have been nice to get the hardware back for a
hands-on."
"I think you'd better get your goggles in place now, Mr. Kelly," said the Air
Force officer, sliding his own protective eyewear into place. The functional
thermoplastic communications helmets looked even sillier atop dress uniforms
than they did over the civilian clothes Desmond, and Kelly himself, wore. "For
safety's sake, you know."
Kelly was anchored to a roof strap with his left hand by habit that freed his
right for the rifle he did not carry here, not on this mission or in this
world where 'cut-throat' meant somebody might lose a job or a contract. ... He
looked at the PR flacks, missing part of what Desmond was saying because his
mind was on things that were not the job of the Special Assistant to
Representative Bianci.
The colonels straightened, one of them with a grimace of repulsion, and
neither of them tried again to break in as the project scientist continued, "
- plating by the aluminum oxide particles we inject with the on-board hydrogen
to provide detonation nuclei during that portion of the pulsejet phase. Chui-
lin insists the plasma itself scavenges the chambers and that the fault must
be the multilayer mirrors themselves despite the sapphire coating."
"But there's just as much likelihood of blast damage when you're expelling
atmosphere as when you're running on internal fuel, isn't there?" said Kelly,
who had done his homework on this one as he did on any task set him by
Representative Bianci; and as he had done in the past, when others tasked him.
"Exactly, exactly," Desmond agreed, chopping his head. "Just a time factor,
says Chui-lin, but there's no sign of overheating until we switch modes, and I
don't think dropping the grain size as we've done will be - "
"Fifteen seconds," boomed a voice from the control center on the ground, and
this time Kelly and the scientist did slide the goggles down over their eyes.
The cameraman hunched behind the long shroud of his viewing screen. A guidance
mechanism as sophisticated as anything in the latest generation of air-to-air
missiles should center the lens on the test vehicle, despite any maneuvers the
target or the helicopter itself carried out. Machinery could fail, however,
and the backup cameraman was determined that he would not fail - because he
was good, not because he was worried about his next efficiency report.
The monocle ferry was a disk only eighteen feet in diameter, and at its
present slant distance of almost half a mile from the helicopters it would
have been easy to ignore were it not so nearly alone on a barren yellow
landscape. With Vandenburg and Cape Canaveral irrevocably surrendered to the
US Space Command when it was formed in 1971, the Army and Air Force had chosen
Fort Bliss as the site for their joint attempt to circumvent their new rival's
control of space weaponry.
Not only was the huge military reservation empty enough to make a catastrophic
failure harmless, but its historical background as the center of Army Air
Defense Training lent a slight color to the services' claim that they were not
trying to develop a 'space weapon' of their own in competition with the Space
Command.
Not that that would help them if Carlo Bianci decided the program should be
axed. The congressman from the Sixth District of Georgia had made a career - a
religion, some critics claimed - of space defense, and it wasn't the sort of
thing he permitted interservice squabbling to screw up.
"Now, there may be a critical limit to grain size," Dr. Desmond was saying,
"below which none of the aluminum will form hot-spots on the mirror surface,
but at these energy levels it won't take more than a few molecules to - "
"Go," said the control center, and the landscape changed in intensity.
The beams from the six chemical laser lift stations in orbit above the launch
site 'were in the near infrared at a wavelength of 1.8 microns. Not only was
light of that frequency invisible to the human eye, it was absorbed by the
cornea instead of being focused by the lens to the potential injury of the
retina. The wavelength was a relalively inefficient one for transmitting
power, especially through an atmosphere which would have passed a much higher
percentage of the ultraviolet. The five megajoules of energy involved in the
test, however, meant that even the least amount of reflection raised an
unacceptable risk of blindness and worse if the operation were in the visible
spectrum or shorter.
"Go-o-o ..." whispered Desmond, probably unaware that he had spoken aloud. Tom
Kelly leaned outward, bringing his shoulder and helmet into the dry, twenty-
knot airstream.
The six-ton saucer quivered as it drank laser energy through the dozen windows
of segmented corundum which ringed its upper surface like the eyes of a
monstrous insect. The central hub of the ferry contained the one-man cockpit,
empty now except for instrumentation, which did not rotate as the blast
chambers around the saucer's rim began to expel air flash-heated within them
by laser pulses.
Dust, as much a part of West Texas as it was of the hills above Beirut,
rippled in a huge, expanding doughnut from the concrete pad. It formed a
translucent bed for the ferry, a mirage landscape on which the saucer seemed
to rest instead of lifting as planned. Then the dust was gone, a yellow-gray
curtain across distant clumps of Spanish bayonet, and the ferry itself was a
lens rather than a disk as it shot past the helicopters circling at five
hundred meters.
"All right!" blurted Kelly, jerking his eyes upward to track the monocle
through the frame members and shimmering helicopter rotors against a sky made
amber by his goggles.
"Twenty-two g's!" babbled the project scientist happily. "Almost from the
point of liftoff! There's no way Space Command's ground-lift barges can match
that - or any chemically-fueled launcher."

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