by Peter Smith
“What can I do?” Her mother asked.
Maria looked at the older woman, wishing with all of her might that she had taken control, that she hadn’t stayed silent. But her mother hadn’t, so Maria would have to make do with what she had, “It’s not likely that Trotsky can get a nuke into North America, but it also wasn’t likely that he could get a Commando team here either. And if I were him and wanted to deploy nukes, I’d kill me first so that no one got in my way or punished me after.”
Her mothered nodded, knowing what she needed to do without being told, “I’ll take Alex into the sublevels, we can explore the hydroponics farms.”
“He likes the meat lines too.” Maria added.
“Because he knows that they creep me out.”
Maria forced a smile, “Let him get some joy out of life.”
Her mother nodded, “Bring our men home.” Was all she said, as she turned and left the room.
As the door slide closed, Maria was already activating the primary defense systems for the North Eastern Sea Board. Concentric rings of defense emanated from this Spire and would disrupt or intercept even the fastest of missiles or kinetic kill weaponry. After the Marine attack on this Spire five years earlier, she had redesigned the defensive systems that kept them safe. It wasn’t impossible to defeat, but you’d have to overwhelm it, pure and simple.
Tobor appeared in front of her, “Maria, are you concerned about the possibility of a nuclear attack?”
“Nathan just informed me that Trotsky intends to deploy his WMD.”
Toby’s was still for a moment. If it weren’t because it was a robot, she might have thought the image itself had paused, “You should know I have just detected a flight of 32 KV-102 STS Missiles leaving a facility a hundred kilometers East of the Moscow Spire. They are en route to Berlin.”
She sat forward in her seat, as if the movement would allow her to control the situation, “How long until they’re in blast range of Berlin?”
“Assuming they are equipped with the Trotsky’s standard cruise missile warheads, and at their current speed, they will reach the likely detonation point in less than thirty minutes.”
The absolute fear that she would have to tell her little boy about his father dying filled her with dread. Tears welled up, and she gripped the edge of the table. She could stop the other potential launch sites and vehicles. Her arsenal was already in motion, but she couldn’t be sure that she could stop this wave. She looked back at Tobor, “Is there anything that we can do to stop them?”
“General Kellen has resources at his disposal to eliminate some incoming ordinance. We have advanced air elements in the region that can violate the sovereign airspace of all necessary families. However, our current force deployment was not design to interdict such a nuclear strike scenario deep within Europe. I will not be able to bring the full brunt of our rapid air assets to bear in time. I cannot assure complete destruction of all inbound targets. What do you wish for me to send?”
She closed her eyes, “All of it, send all of it.”
Her thumb went back into her mouth, only this time, when she tasted blood, it didn’t leave.
Ambassador Watney’s message popped up in her virtual vision for what felt like the millionth time. The Martian leader obviously wanted to speak to her. Maria doubted that the woman could have anything that needed to be discussed badly enough to supersede a nuclear holocaust. Whatever the ambassador wanted to speak about, it would have to wait. Maria cleared the notification and focused on what was before her.
The Air Dominance drone fed its data stream through a series of satellites and directly to her seat in the heart of the New York Spire. Its eyes were her eyes. She watched the combined feed of hundreds of separate sensors projected onto her contacts, consuming the entirety of her virtual vision.
She had considered using a wrap around holographic display, to allow her to still be aware of her surrounding. But she had quickly squashed that approach. She didn’t know exactly why, but she needed this. She needed to feel as if she were there and experiencing what was about to happen.
Maybe it was out of guilt, that so many might die within minutes and it was partly because of her actions and inactions. But ultimately she suspected that it was because Sean and his father were there and if they were, she wanted to feel as if she was there defending them. Even though she was practicing absolutely no control over the drone itself, choosing correctly to let its advanced artificial intelligence manage the machine of war.
For now, she immersed herself with the forward view of what the drone saw and experienced. The ground rushed by quickly as the aircraft flew as fast as it could through the thicker air closer to sea level.
She had turned down the audio input, but could still hear the vibration of the superstructure as every eddy of air put the adaptive metals under extreme stress. The nose of the jet was glowing under the friction it was experiencing moving at such speeds. She knew that the likelihood of this plane or any in the squadron surviving this mission was low; they were already putting themselves under intense strain to enter weapons range in time.
It was a gamble. She could order them to fly higher where the air was less dense, but the Russian Surface to Surface missiles were designed to evade detection, especially when being observed by high altitude radar or orbiting satellites. Tobor had lost the flight of missiles several times, only recently reacquiring them three minutes ago.
The squadron she was observing from had rerouted to adjust their intercept point. The Russian missiles were constantly changing their approach vector and velocity at random intervals, all to disrupt the ability of people such as Maria in predicting where they would be.
The best way to find and engage them was nearly at the same altitude, to catch them from the front or even better against their side profile. The radar returns from that direction were more significant, especially if you could get the missiles between two of your forces approaching from opposite directions. They could synch their data and share where radar holes were, so even if the missiles could absorb high energy emissions, they’d still be detected by the the amount of signal that they blocked.
Maria wasn’t so fortunate. She had a squadron burning itself up in the air over the Baltic Sea, but it wouldn’t be here in time to be of any help with these missiles. The only reason she hadn’t ordered them to slow down was on the chance that Trotsky had slipped an additional wave in after this one that was very near the border with Poland. They would serve as the reserve force once they made it on station.
The Prague Spire came and went as fast as it had appeared on the horizon. Her virtual vision identified a flight of Prague defensive aircraft to the east, intentionally avoiding her squadron. They must have figured out that her fighters were not interested in a strike against the Prague Spire and gambled on that, knowing that if they had engaged her drone craft that they would go to war with the most powerful of all the Spire families.
“Finally, someone using their fucking brains.” She cursed.
A warning indicator appeared. She turned her head to the left and focused on the aircraft that was her wingman a mile away. The resolution sharpened just in time for her to watch as a long stretch of its wing peeled back and was torn away from the aircraft. The plane lost control, tumbled and then a moment later flew apart, exploding in a ball of flame that was quickly left behind, forcing Maria to turn to watch it until it disappeared behind her.
The squadron status window appeared, showing that the outer skin of the aircraft had suffered a critical stability error. She turned forward and reviewed the condition of the other planes in the formation. It wouldn’t be long until they all suffered a similar fate, but hopefully they would last long enough.
Three minutes had passed since they had blown past Prague and they had just entered the airspace of the Berlin Spire. Directly ahead of her, small squares appeared in her vision, red outlines that showed the presumptive location of the Russian nuclear weapon tipped missiles.
One more timer ticked down for her to see. It was the one that displayed how long until the Russian missiles were in blast range of the Berlin Spire. The difference between the first two timers and this third one was a matter of seconds. She would get one chance and one chance only to save the lives of the people of Berlin, her father-in-law and her husband. Her jaw tightened and her hands gripped her armrests so hard her fingernails hurt.
Another notification from the Martian Ambassador appeared in her vision, this time it was marked urgent. Maria swiped it away, wishing the woman would get the hint.
The threat warning system blared as the horizon before her jumped to life. Trotsky’s retreating army was now below her, heading east and away from the devastation that the nuclear detonations would cause. Even though her craft were flying at near ground level, they had still been detected. Missiles leapt from launchers, bullets ripped through the air and ground based anti-aircraft laser systems vaporized the molecules of the atmosphere between the projectors and her drone aircraft. All to stop her from preventing yet another atrocity against innocents.
The need to vomit filled her as her perspective rolled hard to the right, her aircraft quickly moving out of the way of a string of armor-piercing rounds. The squadron engaged in evasive maneuvers to avoid being shot down and as they did, the first two timers slipped closer to the third.
One of the drone craft exploded just outside of her peripheral vision as her aircraft plummeted toward the tops of the trees. She felt her stomach rise into her throat, even though she wasn’t physically in the aircraft, eyes wide as the branches reached for her.
Her heart beat in her chest as she had a flash of the last time she had been in an aircraft that had performed such a maneuver. She had lost her best friend in the world, been forced to abandon her transport and had her entire world view destroyed shortly after. She hoped that this flight would have better results.
The drone pulled up at the last second, the tops of trees being blown nearly flat from the displaced air caused by its supersonic pass over them.
Warning signs appeared in her vision as the system reported intense stress on the airframe and the detection of cracks appearing. The automatic repair systems were responding, mending them for the time being, but it was a losing battle.
Two more of her attack drones exploded, and another failed to pull out of it’s dive ahead of her position. She watched as it nosed directly into the forest and her perspective shifted hard to the left as her drone banked to avoid the fireball and cloud of debris.
The timers showing when missiles could be launched against the Russian nukes wound to zero and went green. Faster than she could process the event, the AI for the drones opened the launch bays on each aircraft and simultaneously launched every single missile in their arsenal.
Each one of the Russian cruise missiles had several interceptor missiles targeting it. What the Russian craft also had were their own defensive systems and Trotsky’s force still providing defensive fire. Her squadron had already exited the engagement sphere of the ground-based missiles and anti-aircraft guns.
However, the Russian lasers were still crisscrossing the sky around her planes. She watched in her virtual vision as the AI software highlighted where it thought the beams were cutting through the air based on the location of the defensive systems on the ground, as seen by the sensor suites of the drones and orbiting surveillance craft.
With that data, her attack craft and their launched missiles altered their trajectories in patterns that appeared random to her. They attempted to avoid the crisscrossing beams of death being fired at them from below and from the Russian cruise missiles directly ahead.
Explosions shook the sky as her missiles were swiped from the air by the defensive lasers. Fire and metal flew through the sky, raining down onto the ground below. She spared a look down and could see the outskirts of Berlin. Most of it was abandoned, but there were pockets of villages in the remains of the once vast metro. There were also thousands of Trotsky’s soldiers retreating down there.
She felt bad about what was falling onto their shoulders and those of the villagers that lived there. She also worried about what would happen once the nuclear warheads were destroyed, and their radioactive payloads spread over the entire area.
She grit her teeth. That was a problem that she could solve. Air patterns could be monitored, evacuations ordered as necessary and drones could detect and clean up the nuclear material. It would take time and some lives would be lost but right now, she was worried about what would happen if she couldn’t stop those warheads from reaching their optimum detonation range.
Her missiles slipped through the web of defensive laser fire and she watched in glee as the first of the Russian cruise missiles was struck from the sky. Her fist pumped into the air as one of her missiles detonated just behind it, sending a cloud of rapidly moving shrapnel into it’s exterior and forcing the cruise missile to tumble. At the speed it was traveling, such a shift in its flight profile led to the catastrophic failure of its airframe, ripping it apart.
More of her missiles were finding their marks and Trotsky’s missiles were being brought down, but not fast enough and not at the rate she needed. Her elation came crashing down a second later as the last of her missiles erupted into flames, hit directly by a defensive laser.
The second timer came to a stop, lighting up green, and she swore she could feel the vibration of the Vulcan cannon located under the nose. It sent thousands of rounds at multiple targets, so did the other drone aircraft. The cruise missiles were rapidly growing in her view and they juked up and down, left and right to avoid the incoming fire from her fighter aircraft.
Two of the drones next to her exploded, one sliced in half by a defensive laser from the ground, another hit directly in its fuel tank from a defensive system on a cruise missile. She had lost every one of her drones except for hers.
Fortunately, there was only one cruise missile left. The remains of the others were carpeting the forest and sparsely inhabited region below, unless you counted Trotsky’s soldiers. Her drone was closing the distance with the last missile so quickly she was sure that if she blinked she would miss passing it.
The third timer ran down to zero, and she screamed in fear and rage at the loss she was sure she would endure. In her peripheral vision she saw Berlin, its impressive Spire soaring into the sky over a sea of recently constructed and renovated buildings. Sean was down there, the man that she loved.
When all of that didn’t vanish in the birth of a new star, she allowed herself to breathe. The warhead hadn’t detonated yet; she didn’t know why, but she would not question the miracle.
The AI presented her with an announcement; it had expended its munitions and was requesting permission to ram the enemy projectile. She nearly punched the virtual button allowing the maneuver, and she watched as the acceleration increased even more. The wings were vibrating, and she saw a panel rip free from the nose of the jet.
The enemy missile was burning as fast as it could toward the city and her AI gave her a projected point of impact which was constantly shifting with each evasive and course correction. Flame erupted from a wing where a defensive laser grazed the skin. Had it penetrated the outer layer, her aircraft would have ripped itself apart at these speeds.
The Russian missile grew in her field of view. She stopped breathing, her hands gripping the armrest so hard that she could feel her fingernails starting to pull away from the skin, “Come on damn it!” She screamed.
Her drone adjusted its flaps, swinging its right wing down, and then she couldn’t see the enemy missile. Warnings blossomed in her vision like the end of a fireworks celebration. The next thing she knew she was in an uncontrolled spin as he
r drone whipped through the air like a frisbee. The right wing was a stub of its former self and the left had ripped away. The ground quickly rose to greet her and the drone was spinning into a building near the city center. She threw her hands up to protect her face, letting out a scream of panic as she did, “Shit!”
She opened her eyes. Her virtual vision was gone, nothing but her office greeted her. Sweat covered her body and strands of hair that had broken free from her bun were plastered to her forehead. She looked around the space, adjusting to the fact that she hadn’t been inside of the drone aircraft when it went down.
Relief flooded her for a second as she took a deep breath.
“Tobor,” She shouted, “Did we get them all?”
Silence was her response.
“Toby, damn it, did we get them!” She said, sitting on the edge of the seat, staring out the window at the horizon.
“Maria, something unexpected has occurred.”
Her throat seized up. She knew that whatever her friend told her next, it would not be good. She closed her eyes, lowering her chin to her chest and faced the consequences of her actions, “Show me Toby.”
She knew the little boy wasn’t Alex, but no matter how many times she blinked her eyes or rubbed at them, her son’s face was on the still body. Alex was here in New York, with his grandmother, safely playing in the family suite. This poor child was in the center of Berlin, his body contorted into a shape she had never seen a human body achieve before.
Her heart ached at the sight and guilt forced her to her knees before the child’s body. Her tears fell to the street, with it’s gray pavers, as she studied his expression of pain. His mother, at least Maria assumed it was his mother, was meters away, reaching for her son while the rest of her body was wrenched into its own painful shape.
She could see the fear in his eyes, the confusion about what was happening. She understood, from an academic perspective, what was going through his mind. There was no fighting happening here, Trotsky’s forces hadn’t penetrated this close to the Berlin Spire, this area was still supposed to be safe.