Free Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) by August P. W.; Cole Singer

platforms, ground vehicles, and dismounted soldiers. Then came the U.S. Navy’s Ultra High Frequency Follow-On (UFO) system, 19 which linked all of its ships. It was almost anticlimactic, the onboard targeting system moving the taikonauts through the attack’s algorithm step by step, slowing down only when a cluster of satellites sharing a common altitude needed to be dispatched one by one.
    The last to be “serviced,” as Huan dryly put it, was a charged-particle detector satellite. The joint NASA and Energy Department system had been launched a few years after the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster as a way to detect radiation emissions. A volley of laser fire from Tiangong-3 exploded its fuel source.
    When Huan finally put the pen back in his suit pocket, there were forty-seven marks on the wall.
    They had been told that the ISS would be taken care of “by other means.” On the other side of the Earth, discarded booster rockets were coming to life after months of dormancy. The boosters turned kamikazes advanced on collision courses with nearby American government and commercial communications and imaging satellites. The American ground controllers helplessly watched the chaos overhead, unable to maneuver their precious assets out of the way.
    â€œI will run diagnostics and flush the laser power systems,” said Chang. He kept moving in order to avoid thinking about what was happening on the Earth’s surface below.
    â€œGood,” said Huan. “Then see if you can pull up the imagery from the attack; I want to watch it again later.”
Of course you do
, thought Chang.
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    USS
Coronado
, Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam, Hawaii
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    The coffee was just like that first cup his father had allowed him to sip from, back when he was seven. No sugar. No cream. It had tasted acrid, awful, not like the vanilla-flavored lattes his mom had loved. “When you’re in the Navy, you don’t have time onboard to add in all that junk,” his father had explained, typical of the kind of advice he gave his kids.
    The boatswain’s mate in charge of brewing up the coffee on the USS
Coronado
was no barista either, and so the bridge crew all sipped his awful coffee, 20 watching the harbor wake up around them. Stim tabs and the other pharm provided by the corpsmen worked better, but the Navy clung to its traditions. The bitter coffee was as much a part of the morning watch as the sunrise.
    Simmons set down his mug and eyed the sunlight illuminating the
Coronado
’s deck. The LCS had just celebrated its tenth birthday, but Jamie still thought the sharp, triple-hulled trimaran design gave it the look of a futuristic starship, like out of a Star Wars movie. His dad loved that old stuff, so much so that he had taken Jamie and his sister, Mackenzie, to one of the reboot movies when they were way too young to understand it. Their mother had gotten so mad when she’d found out. It was still a good memory, though, Mackenzie coming home with the empty paper popcorn bucket, cherishing it in the way that little kids make souvenirs of the most mundane objects. That was one of the few happy memories from before his father left, before Mackenzie died.
    Simmons walked over to a spot near one of the port windows to inspect a blemish no bigger than a quarter. He ran his finger over the epoxy patch. On the last anti-piracy patrol, a burst of machine-gun fire had gone right through the window and two spots below in the ship’s aluminum superstructure, now also repaired. No one had been hurt, fortunately, but it reminded the crew that the LCS had been designed for speed, not for heavy combat. Some of the crew had later wrapped Captain Riley’s chair in aluminum foil as “ballistic protection,” a joke that went over poorly with the captain.
    As Simmons watched the morning sun paint the other warships in the crowded harbor orange, he savored the moment, knowing this was one