Inspector

A powerful orbital laser could be made safe—but what do you do when you need it to be dangerous?

I waited until the last moment to fire thrusters to rendezvous with the satellite. The exhaust plume blasted the back of one of the solar panels, abrading circuits and shaking the satellite.

Normally I’d match speeds a safe distance away and coast slowly in. Not today. I couldn’t spare the time.

I transmitted on the guard frequency as I unbuckled from my rocket sled. “SkyPower Ops, this is Inspector 732, visiting SPS 328 for unscheduled inspection.”

The sled hooked onto a bracket on the outside of the satellite’s main hull. That would hold it still while I went inside.

“Inspector, this is SkyPower Ops. Acknowledge inspection. Your approach caused some damage. We’re going to bill OIO for the lost lifespan on the bird.”

I was tempted to tell her to wait an hour to submit that bill. Thruster damage was going to be the least of their complaints to the Orbital Inspection Organization. But that would violate security. “I apologize, Ops. I was doing a manual approach to maintain proficiency and mistimed the firing.”

She sniffed. “Noted. We’re still going to submit the bill, that cost us at least three months lifespan on the arrays. You need more simulator time before doing your next proficiency run.”

“Thanks for the advice, Ops.” I pulled open the hatch and went in, careful not to scrape my spacesuit against the edges. It was sturdy enough to handle some abuse, but you still want to be careful.

The powersat’s interior could hold two people. Three if they were in love. It still felt cramped to me. My suit lights lit up. Every surface was some piece of vital equipment.

“You can call me Sally, Inspector. Be advised, the bird will be performing support to a Pacific flight in two minutes.”

“Thanks, Sally. I’m Joe.” I looked over all the components. It all looked like it should. The control system ports were sealed, with an OIO mark and date confirming when they were last accessed.

The largest pieces of the satellite, after the solar panels and laser, were the momentum wheels that adjusted its attitude to keep it pointed precisely. They were powerful and responsive enough I could dance a jig in here without ruining their aim.

Which was good. The satellite twisted around me as it lined up to do its job.

A couple thousand kilometers East and three hundred below, an airplane was crossing the Pacific ocean with a few hundred passengers aboard. The kerosene powered engines which handled take-off and landing were turned off. It was propelled by another engine on top of the plane, which heated air by absorbing UV light from a laser. A laser coming from a satellite just like this one.

As the other satellite moved out of view, it would turn its laser off. My satellite would emit a faint beam, barely strong enough to detect. If the handshake laser on the plane sent back a signal that it was on target, the satellite would up the power to megawatts.

The plane would only coast for a few seconds during the hand off.

When I pressed a glove against a truss I could feel the faint hum of the laser firing at full power. That’s why the OIO exists. A laser that powerful could be a horrible weapon. Our job was to ensure they’d never be used for harm.

Normally.

Today I was here for a different reason.

On panel six was the destruct package. It could blow apart the satellite if it detected the bird was pointing away from Earth, possibly threatening a station or satellite, or if someone just commanded it to.

It had a dedicated wide-field visual sensor to check the satellite’s facing. I spliced a Y-fitting into the fiber optic line from the sensor to the package. Snapping a recorder onto the new end started a feed of the Earth going into the package. I cut the other line.

The destruct package also had two antennas not integrated with the rest of the satellite’s systems, just listening for a destruct command. I cut the wires leading to them. The space suit gloves were clumsy, but my tools were made for them so I had a decent grip.

Sally’s voice came back on the radio. “Joe, what the hell are you doing?”

Were they watching me? I looked over the compartment and spotted it. The temperature sensor array included a camera. I put a piece of tape over it. “Just doing my job, Sally. Making sure you’re behaving.”

“Like hell you are. You just sabotaged the destruct package. What’s this about?”

I’d like to tell her. SkyPower could help me with the mission. But we were talking over an open channel. If I told her what my mission was, there’d be a worldwide panic. Thousands would die. Maybe millions.

“It’s a routine inspection.”

The satellite was shifting smoothly under me, tracking the aircraft it was powering. More compensating for its own movement than following the plane. Compared to a satellite flying low over the Earth, a plane going nearly Mach One was stationary.

“Bullshit, Joe. Come clean or we’re calling OIO.”

“Go ahead. They’ll explain it.”

Well, no. They’d deny me completely. Otherwise people would start to figure out what was going on and—panic.

But it should buy me a few minutes. I peeled the seals off the data access ports and shoved in a memory stick. I needed to rewrite the software on this thing to make it do what I want.

The satellite finished with the plane it was powering, shut down the laser, and reverted to pointing straight toward the Earth. Another satellite would take over serving the plane.

Sally piped up again. “OIO denies any knowledge of why you’d disable the destruct package, Joe. What are you doing?”

“Just doing my job, Sally.”

“Who are you working for?”

“OIO, just like the rest of the inspectors.”

“Stop whatever you’re doing or we’ll take action.”

“Okay, I’ve stopped.” I was commanding the upload of software through the twenty-button command array. The first task was to block SkyPower ground control from changing the satellite’s pointing. Then I neutralized some other controls, but I didn’t have time to block them all if I was going to do the real work.

In freefall, typing forced me to brace my boots against the opposite side of the compartment so I wouldn’t fling myself away from the console with my finger taps. I didn’t pause.

Sally issued more demands, which I promised to obey while not changing my actions. She didn’t seem to believe me. Had I missed another camera? Probably. There were all sorts of devices surrounding me, and a low-resolution camera doesn’t need a big lens.

Almost done. And with time to spare. I still had thirteen minutes until the moment.

Suddenly, blinding pain. I blacked out for a moment. When I came to, I was bouncing around the compartment, curled up in an almost fetal position, my legs and crotch in agony. Warning messages were flashing on my heads up display. Beeps told of more warnings. There was smoke in the compartment.

Smoke? In a vacuum? I couldn’t pay attention to that.

I had to figure out what happened.

Some of the electronics in my suit were dead, but everything essential was working. Looking around I saw wires with their insulation burned off, others broken. The boots of my space suit were scorched.

Ah. Somehow SkyPower managed to feed some the megawatts of solar power this satellite produced into the sides of the compartment. Pressing my feet against it made a circuit, and a tiny bit of that power went through my legs.

I was damn lucky not to have died of a heart attack.

One of the beeps was the air pressure alarm. My suit was leaking. It was obvious from where. When I looked, there was a hole burnt in one of the boots. A small one, some tape would patch it.

Ever try to touch your toes in a space suit? They’re not made for flexibility. I had to brace myself in a corner with my helmet against a momentum wheel housing and good boot against a truss to force myself into enough of a bend to reach the hole in my boot.

One square inch of tape on the hole and the beeping stopped. The other warnings weren’t important.

Yes, normally having my radio fried would be bad, but right now it just meant I couldn’t tell Sally to stop gloating, she hadn’t killed me.

I wondered if the jolt had fried their hidden camera.

Didn’t matter. I had to focus on the mission.

A terrorist had launched a nuke. He was going to drop it on a random city if the world’s governments didn’t pay ransom. They paid, of course. Then he demanded twice that the next day. And four times the original ransom the day after.

That’s when they authorized OIO to take action. There weren’t any weapons in space that could take out the nuke. OIO had done too good a job of enforcing the treaties. We’d have to use some civilian gear to do the job.

I was assigned because my family lived on a ranch in Montana. No temptation to warn a relative to get out of a city.

I was still tempted. I had friends and cousins in cities, lots of them. But if the word got out . . . imagine the whole population of a city stampeding to reach safety. People would die.

That happening in every city in the world at once? Might kill more people than the nuclear bomb.

I figured out the ‘smoke.’ The ash from all the burnt insulation and other materials was bouncing around the compartment in random patterns. It looked like smoke, but it didn’t move like smoke.

The control computer was dead. Not burnt up, just had no power.

A quick check showed the power lines were good. Apparently whatever SkyPower used to zap me had burnt itself up, and there were enough redundant systems to continue normal function without it.

Tracing the lines found an empty socket where a fuse had lived before becoming vaporized metal. My toolkit had a screwdriver which fit. If SkyPower zapped me again the computer would be toast.

It booted up quickly. Thank God for efficient software. My changes had been saved. I started installing the rest of the updates.

The power satellite already had most of what I needed. A secondary mission was cleaning up space junk. The megawatt laser could burn off a piece of some object. The reaction from the vaporized material could alter its orbit enough to make it reenter.

People worried about that, of course. So the debris removal function wouldn’t work unless the target wasn’t emitting any signals, and was over ocean, and was over a cloud to keep most of the UV energy from reaching the surface.

I had to remove all those safeguards to destroy the orbital nuke.

And I had to do it before my satellite’s orbit brought it over the nuke’s orbit. If I didn’t hit it now I wouldn’t be in range to fire again for hours at least. That would be enough time for word of my actions to get out.

If people figured out why an OIO man would seize control of a laser satellite . . . panic.

Seven minutes left. I typed fast. Fortunately the software changes were all done for me, I just had to install them correctly.

I ran the code on a test trajectory. The momentum wheels slewed the satellite to track it. They’d survived the short circuit. Good.

Four minutes. I uploaded the nuke’s trajectory. The satellite pivoted to the horizon, waiting for it to come in view.

I had a couple of minutes to spare. I hooked my suit’s data cable to the console and tapped into the satellite’s communications link.

“You there, Sally?”

“Dammit. I thought we fixed you.” She was angry.

Well, for all she knew I was going to destroy an orbital hotel full of tourists. Can’t blame her.

“Sorry about that. Inspectors are tough.”

Sally made some very rude remarks. This whole conversation had been in violation of the SkyPower guidelines for dealing with OIO personnel.

Granted, I wasn’t complying with normal OIO guidelines either.

The nuke came into view. I used the laser’s LIDAR function to get a quick image of the thing.

Yes, it matched what they’d briefed to me. A simple ovoid containing the death of millions, attached to a retrothruster powerful enough to put it on the ground in twelve minutes.

I triggered the full power beam.

A normal space debris removal shot was just long enough to vaporize a tenth of a millimeter of material. That wouldn’t do for this mission. I kept the beam carving holes in that ovoid until it was back over the horizon.

I noticed the message it was transmitting went silent after the first minute. The propellant tank exploded, blasting some fragments away from it. There were visible gouges, one going clean through.

Hopefully that would keep it from detonating. It couldn’t deorbit now, so the cities were safe, but a nuclear detonation in orbit would cause a lot of damage. From the lidar image it was probably a piece of junk, but I still worried.

I switched frequencies. “Inspector 732 to OIO Control. Mission complete.”

The response only took a few seconds. “Control to 732. Confirmed. Multiple nations have confirmed their imagery shows it destroyed. Good work, Joe.”

“Thank you, sir.”

I was using a SkyPower transmitter to call my boss, so it was no surprise when Sally broke in. “What the hell is going on here? Was OIO officially hijacking our bird?”

Control answered, “SkyPower Ops, long story. Check the news reports, there should be an announcement shortly. Joe, come on home.”

“On my way.”

I unplugged from the console and went out the hatch. A quick inspection showed my rocket sled wasn’t going anywhere. The electrical jolt had fried it. I sighed and went back in to call for a lift.

The concept shown here was inspired by “Laser Aircraft Propulsion” by Sun and Hertzberg in the Journal of Aircraft Propulsion and Power, as described by Jerry Pournelle in A Step Farther Out.

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More stories by Karl K. Gallagher are on Amazon and Audible.