Back to London.
To Zavirdyaev's surprise, the "@enemy" attempts to intercept the ship, although they did take place, fell far short of what was expected within the framework of the plan. This could indicate some movement towards a peaceful settlement, which he, Zavirdyaev and his shuttle had initiated!
Another, less humane reason could be that the "@enemy" were not averse to watching their enemy turn one of their capitals into ruins. In general, for a real strike on London, which had already received its "test", it was necessary to jump to an altitude of more than one hundred and fifty kilometers and turn off the ion screen. Still, the shuttle was not a weapon of absolute superiority and was not capable of launching ammunition with the screen turned on.
At least, the ammunition that was in the "revolver". Perhaps it was just their design, which was nothing more than a standard conical warhead with some hastily assembled maneuvering units.
The weightlessness was now quite peculiar - it hadn't gone away, but the constant maneuvers kept sending small items that had appeared unnoticed around the cabin - papers, mini-food bags, and napkins.
Once, a hefty stack of political documents almost hit Zavirdyaev in the face - the damn file flew out of a cloth bag placed on the side of the seat, which Zavirdyaev had forgotten to zip up. Small drops also started flying around the cabin - a seemingly dried-out bag of mineral water was dangling somewhere, which, as it turned out, contained something else.
In general, a regular good old Earthly squabble was starting to form before our eyes. It was no good, but there was nothing to be done - it was dangerous to untie the butt from the chair - at any moment the onboard artificial intelligence could receive data about another, but this time more dangerous attack and maneuver with an overload of several units, changing the ship's speed by a kilometer per second or even one and a half in a matter of minutes.
Zavirdyaev did not want to check whether it would do it purely mechanically or make sure that the pilot was in a safe position. The threat weighing system was quite flexible and under certain conditions the AI could come to the decision that if a person cracked against a bulkhead, it would be better than getting an anti-missile.
After all, those pre-war astronauts on their exquisite fragile ships and stations were such pampered idlers! It seemed to Zavirdyaev that he was about to cough and spit right into the cabin wall. Of course, he did not do this.
The ion screen continued to flicker outside the window. The ship was already rushing over Russian territories and was soon to approach the long-suffering Superfederant. There was one tricky and not entirely obvious nuance in orbital mechanics - a ship rushing along its orbit would not fly over the same places. The exceptions are special orbits with a period of exactly one day or with whole multipliers... It's complicated... The whole point was that the globe around which the satellite cuts its circles also rotates. That's why the shuttle would not have passed over London the way it did the first time. Some orbital correction would have been needed. But that's in the case of a normal orbital flight. What the shuttle had been doing for most of the current turn had turned the orbit so much that a correction was also needed, but in a completely different direction. The ground services tracking the flight of an object unknown to them must have gone crazy. - Whoever built this engine can safely be kissed on the ass, - thought Zavirdyaev to himself.
He did not voice this thought on camera, which still somehow miraculously did not crash.
After several maneuvers, the ship began to gain altitude. Despite the fact that there were no real plans to attack the British capital, the flight program provided for simulating such a combat approach.
Zavirdyaev glanced at the screen with the displayed parameters of the weapons system. All eleven munitions showed activated software fuses. In this position, not a single munition would leave the weapons compartment.
A few minutes later, the ship safely flew half a thousand kilometers north of London.
Zavirdyaev glanced at the screen with the chat, which he had completely forgotten about. In general, the information content and nature of the messages were somewhat reminiscent of the running line that could be seen in the footage of the stock exchanges. There was still no full-fledged two-way communication with ground accomplices, or rather comrades. It would also be useful to look through the world information picture that had developed at the moment - this was exactly what was promised and provided for in the flight plan.
A second meeting with the cruiser "Joseph Biden" was not expected - even above the British Isles, the ship began to turn around, and soon the cruise engine came into action for the umpteenth time, which pushed the ship into a high elliptical orbit. Instead of rushing over the North Atlantic, the shuttle was moving away from Earth. Somewhere far ahead was the perigee point, one hundred and fifty thousand kilometers from the surface of the planet.
The period of revolution was now supposed to be about two and a half days. The threat level from the anti-missile defense systems was falling with each passing minute.
Both sides had anti-missiles capable of operating at such distances, but these were no longer anti-missiles in the classical sense, but anti-satellite weapons. These devices maneuvered using very weak power plants - in essence, they were corrected satellites. They could pursue their target for days, approaching it according to the laws of orbital mechanics.
The shuttle with its thermonuclear engine could get out of this dance in a few seconds, giving another impulse. The main thing was not to miss the approach of the killer device. For this case, there were its own radars on board, similar to conventional aircraft ones.