by Douglas, Ian
“Damned desperate” didn’t seem to cover it by half.
“Give me a virtual channel to Roettgen,” Koenig said. He linked into the bunker’s communications suite in-head, and waited for the connection to complete.
A long moment passed. In an electronically interconnected world where anyone could talk directly to anyone in an instant or two, a delay of ten seconds seemed ridiculous.
“Madam Roettgen does not appear to be accepting your call,” Whitney told him. “We’re getting her avasec.”
“Then I’ll talk to that.”
Avatar secretaries—avasecs—were digital sentients used by CEOs, government leaders, Net celebrities, and anyone else who needed a degree of insulation from the electronic chatter across the Net. Such personal AIs could be programmed to emulate their owner to a degree that would fool most ordinary callers, could make decisions on the importance of incoming messages, and report back to the owner when it was convenient. They were required to carry a tag identifying them as AIs and not humans, though there were ways around that detail. By leaving her identifying tag in place, Roettgen might be deliberately telling Koenig that she didn’t wish to speak with him.
The channel opened, and Roettgen’s face appeared in Koenig’s mind, indistinguishable from the real person. “This is Madam Roettgen’s personal AI secretary,” the face said. “The president is not available at—”
“I know,” Koenig said. “But you can give her a message for me.”
“Recording.”
“We are tracking incoming missiles that we believe are fitted with nano-D warheads aimed at one or more of our cities. This is in violation of the Geneva Protocols of 2150, and a serious violation of international law.
“I am willing to believe that some of your military subordinates have . . . ah . . . taken this step without your personal knowledge or approval.”
It was a possibility, though Koenig doubted that this was the case. The Chinese Hegemony had distanced themselves from the Wormwood asteroid strike of 2132 by blaming it on a rogue ship commander, and Roettgen might well be hoping to do the same thing. The important thing at the moment was to give her an honorable way out, an excuse rather than trapping her.
“I very much hope that this is the case,” Koenig continued, “for your sake, Madam President. I promise you that if those city-eaters hit, every detail of the attack will be documented and published across the Net. I doubt very much that the Confederation will survive that sort of—”
The image of President Roettgen changed in his head, the formal business attire replaced by casual clothing, the face becoming harder, sharper, more deeply lined. Even the President of the Confederation Senate wasn’t above a bit of electronic vanity, it seemed.
“It’s me, President Koenig. For your sake, surrender. Now.”
“Call off your nano-dogs, Ilse,” Koenig replied. “You’re destroying the Confederation.”
“No, Herr Koenig. It is you who are destroying the Pax!”
On the big screen, two more of the incoming warheads were wiped away. There was still a chance. . . .
“I don’t see it that way, Madam President. And I certainly am not going to cave in to the threat of high-tech mass murder. Nano-D is expressly—”
“Nano-D?” She looked shocked. “We are not using nano-D. This is some kind of trick.” Either she was being truthful or she was a damned good actress.
“We’re tracking . . .” He looked up at the big screen again, checking. “We’re tracking two warheads inbound from the Estremadura. Our best analysis suggests that they are non-nuclear. They’re too large to be incendiary, chemical or biological warheads, and too slow to be relativistic kinetic-kill rounds. That would seem to leave nano-D, wouldn’t it?”
Pittsburgh managed a precisely targeted long-ranged shot from behind, destroying one of the inbound rounds. Koenig didn’t mention it to Roettgen. She would have battlespace sensors as good as those employed by the USNA.
“We have fighters from Washington and from Oceana trying to reach that warhead,” Armitage said. “Intercept is going to be damned close. . . .”
“Kill it,” Koenig snapped.
“Yes, sir.”
“Impact in ten seconds,” the AI announced. “Target is now confirmed as Columbus, D.C.”
“Damn it, Gene, the Columbus, D.C., metro area has a population of over three million people. . . .”
The warhead traveled those last 300,000 kilometers, more than half the distance from the Earth to the moon, in a few pounding heartbeats, seared into Earth’s atmosphere, and plunged on a shaft of superheated ionization toward the geopolitical region known as Ohio. An incoming flight of Starhawks fired their particle beams in unison from 500 kilometers away. . . .
But too late . . . too late. The warhead, massing nearly fifty tons, detonated 100 meters above the surface and 300 meters south of the Freedom Concourse, firing a shotgun blast of microscopic dust particles at the ground and towering buildings below. Each dust mote was programmed to reduce anything it touched to its component elements. Water vapor in the air flashed into hydrogen and oxygen atoms; ferrocrete walls dissolved into iron, silica, oxygen, carbon, and other elements; people in the street disintegrated from the top down, evaporating into free carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, sodium, and dozens of others as bonds between atoms were broken and molecules dissolved.
And the dust kept moving, kept devouring as it ate into the buildings and the parklands and vegetation and walkways between them.
The energy in all of those molecular bonds amounted to a very great deal of heat, and in an instant, the fireball was growing, swelling, rising on a column of superheated air. Much of the nanodust was destroyed in the fireball, but far more reached the ground within the next second and continued eating its way into the surface. The destruction, now, was uneven. Partial buildings began to fall as winds kicked up by the heat shrieked with hurricane force. Sections of pavement caved in . . . skyscrapers crumbled, floor upon floor collapsing down onto lower floors in roiling clouds of dust. Horribly, many humans caught in the open were only partially disintegrated, randomly mutilated by the fast-spreading plague.
Most of those who didn’t die immediately were immolated in the firestorm sweeping through the heart of the city.
Stunned, Koenig and the bunker staff watched the devastation by way of surveillance cameras and drones throughout the city above them. As the drones began succumbing to the nano attack in rapid succession, the view jumped back in jerky steps, revealing a yawning, still-spreading crater with a white-hot interior, collapsing rubble, a spreading ring of roiling dust. They could feel none of this in the bunker 2 kilometers down, but graphics on secondary monitors showed the destruction gnawing down through bedrock toward them.
On the surface directly overhead, the Executive Tower, half eaten away, began to fall. . . .
Chapter Twenty-Two
16 November 2424
TC/USNA CVS America
Osiris space, 70 Ophiuchi AII
0715 hours, TFT
The America battle group had burst out of metaspace well beyond the 40-AU limit and immediately launched her fighters. After that, they began accelerating at high-G boost sunward, a journey of almost six light hours.
CBG-40 was deployed in three assault waves. Leading the way, all by herself, was the ancient cargo freighter Altair.
The Altair was listed as a fleet auxiliary vessel. She didn’t have an Alcubierre drive, couldn’t travel faster than light, and so made jumps across the light years nestled into a hollow along the much larger Shenandoah’s spine. Her grav drives could accelerate her at ten thousand gravities, allowing her to match the pace of the rest of the fleet.
She’d been designed and launched nearly a century and a half earlier and, despite numerous updates to her drives and computer network, was considered to be well past her ex
pected life span. She’d been retained on the fleet lists because new ships were expensive and because after the Sh’daar Ultimatum of 2367, fleet appropriations had focused on conventional FTL warships—on battle cruisers, destroyers, and star carriers like America.
And mostly, of course, she’d been retained because she still worked. Provisioning vessels like Shenandoah would maneuver into a resource-rich zone—an asteroid belt, perhaps, or the fringes of a gas-giant ring system—and deploy robot miners to begin breaking down and returning raw materials to the ship. Resource freighters like Altair could be deployed to more remote areas, load up on water ice, carbon, iron, or other resources, and return them to Shenandoah’s capacious bunkers. The Altair had facilities on board for a small crew—six or eight people—but normally was deployed as a robot under the command of an AI. Even with near-c capabilities, mining operations tended to be long, drawn-out affairs that taxed human operators with their monotony.
Altair currently was carrying some fifteen hundred tons of asteroidal debris—the maximum load possible for a freighter of her class. Since the earliest years of the twenty-first century, it had been understood that most asteroids were loosely bound collections of smaller rocks and debris enclosed within a blanketing shroud of dust. Fluffy was the word often used to describe them, though even a small asteroid represented tens of billions of tons of fluff. Altair had rendezvoused with this particular mass half an astronomical unit from Goewin, using her on-board fleet of robot miners to pull a small fraction of the asteroid into pieces and loading them into her cargo bays. Most of her cargo consisted now of closely packed rubble, the spaces between each rock filled in with dust. She’d cast loose from Shenandoah moments after emergence from metaspace, swung to orient on Osiris, and kicked in her full, ten-thousand-G acceleration.
Altair was uncrewed, save for her on-board AI.
Next behind the Altair were four squadrons of fighters, launched from the star carrier America beginning immediately after emergence, formed into open strike formation, and boosted to near-c. This time, they didn’t use their full acceleration; it was important to remain in formation astern of the Altair.
And finally came the capital ships—America and sixteen smaller vessels, escorted by America’s two remaining fighter squadrons. Shenandoah accompanied the formation, following in America’s gravitational wake. She was unarmed save for mining and sampling lasers, and possessed little in the way of armor. Gray had not wanted to leave her unescorted at the edge of the Osirian system, however, where her isolation would make her an easy target for any passing Sh’daar warships in the area . . . and where she would be five and a half light hours away from learning the outcome of the battle, or anything else happening in close to the local star. Nor was Gray willing to detail a destroyer—or even just a couple of fighters—to stay behind with her out there on the cold, dark fringes of the system. He needed every weapon he had for the attack on the Sh’daar forces.
Besides, her skipper, Captain Linda Alvarez, had volunteered to make the fly-by of Osiris with the rest of the force. She could at the very least draw off a little of the enemy’s defensive fire from the warships, and just maybe there was something else she could contribute to the battle. Gray and America’s command group had worked out the details during the flight out from Arianrhod.
The Shenandoah might be able to contribute more to the fight than simply being a target.
Gray sat in the command chair, watching the big screen on the forward bulkhead, allowing his in-head to add details and downloaded data as it became available. The c-fog was slowly clearing as the squadron hurtled down the dark light-hours, getting closer and closer to the objective. At a range now of just thirty light minutes, they were seeing events transpiring around Osiris that had happened just half an hour before. There’d been no outlying squadrons, no pickets on the way in. The entire enemy fleet appeared to be concentrated in orbit around Osiris—and over the past few minutes they’d been spreading out in a cloud extending perhaps a half million kilometers from the planet. The tactical idea would be to keep their ships spread out so that one nuke couldn’t destroy more than one vessel . . . and to give them more options for fire and maneuver when the human squadron passed through. There were, Gray noted, now that they were close enough to detect them on radar, a large number of inert objects—several tens of thousands of them—dispersing across the fleet’s path. Those would be obstacle mines, O-mines, and were probably nothing but lumps of rock. A ship hitting one at near-c, however, would be vaporized.
The good news was that even tens of thousands of O-mines would be all but lost when scattered through many billions of cubic kilometers of space. The chance of any of the human ships hitting one were relatively low. They were a threat, but not strategically significant.
Thirty light minutes out . . . but at 0.997 c the subjective time on board the human ships would pass at a rate of thirteen to one—just two minutes and eighteen seconds.
Altair, he thought, was getting close to her flash point.
Lieutenant Donald Gregory
VFA-96, Black Demons
Osiris Space, 70 Ophiuchi AII
0715 hours, TFT
His unaided vision showed only the weirdly compressed starbow colors of relativistic flight, but his AI fed Gregory images teased from the distortion and made intelligible. He studied the unfolding display through his in-head, watching as his AI identified ship classes and assigned potential targets as they emerged from the c-fog. Fifty-seven enemy ships ID’d so far . . . three quarters of them big ones, Slan Ballistas and Trebuchets; Turusch Papa, Romeo, and Sierra-class cruisers. Perhaps a quarter were ship designs unknown to Gregory’s warbook, and representing, therefore, new species with unknown technologies and capabilities.
Gregory stared at the image of the planet—at Osiris, his home.
Osiris—70 Ophiuchi AII—was one of the very few garden worlds known to Humankind . . . a planet with a breathable atmosphere, a temperate climate, and an evolved biochemistry similar to Earth’s, a place where humans could walk in the open without environmental suits or oxygen masks. Humans couldn’t eat the native life—the local sugars were left-handed rather than right, a tiny difference in evolutions that meant they couldn’t utilize Osirian nutrients—but numerous gene-tailored Earth species had adapted well since their introduction in 2214, and by now perhaps a quarter of the sprawling southern continent had been taken over by the imported ecology. The capital city, New Egypt, had had a population of more than 5 million; the colony as a whole had numbered around 12 million, with cities like Luxor, Sais, and Dendara scattered from the Aten Sea to Point Horus. There was even a native species that might be sentient—the Marine cuttlewyrm—though communicating with an atechnic species that apparently exchanged information by changing color patterns on its mantle posed some unique problems for the xenosoph people.
The world still harbored some enigmatic mysteries. Chief of these was the speed of evolution on the surface, the result, planetologists thought, of high radiation from the sunspot-tortured type K0 primary. The system was believed to be less than 2 billion years old, compared with 4.6 billion years for Earth, and yet surface vegetation and the exuberant marine surface flora had generated oxygen enough to make the atmosphere breathable for humans. When Earth had been 2 billion years old, the highest form of life in her zoosphere were single-celled algae and bacteria that hadn’t yet even invented sex. The cuttlewyrms and their kin had not developed backbones as yet—they were similar to the squid and octopi of Earth’s seas—but they did possess highly complex nervous systems, and their behavior suggested a keen if bizarrely alien intelligence.
Gregory’s family had been xenobiologists studying the cuttlewyrms from a research colony at New Alexandria, up on the Naucratis Coast.
No one knew how many of those people were still alive there, twenty years after the Sh’daar had moved in and taken over. New Egypt had been nuked, that much was kno
wn. It was possible that none of the human population had survived . . . including Gregory’s family.
Twenty years was a long, long time.
The worst of it was that in a few moments, Gregory would be hurtling past the world he’d once called home, at a hairbreadth beneath the speed of light, with little to no chance whatsoever of learning whether there were humans still on the planet.
His family . . .
Donald Gregory remembered clearly the chaos at the Nuit Starport outside the capital, with oily smoke hanging in vast clouds that cast shadows across the city. Despite the post-traumatic memory therapy, he still had dreams . . . nightmares. . . .
He remembered the lines of refugee children, remembered screaming that he didn’t want to go. He remembered clinging to his mother, and the pain in her eyes and in his father’s voice. “Don’t worry, Donny. We’ll be together again soon. I promise you.”
His mother had been crying . . . his last memory of her.
“So how’s it feel to be going home, Nungie?” Kemper asked him over the tactical net. Gregory was so entangled in the memories of an eight-year-old boy that he didn’t even feel the jab of that hated handle.
“Don’t know, Happy,” he replied. “I’m not going home, am I?”
“Might be a good thing,” Kemper said. “After we c-gun that planet, there might not be much left of it!”
“Heads up, people,” Mackey snapped. “Thirty seconds subjective! And the Altair’s gonna blow in—”
And on his corrected in-head display, the freighter Altair flared into a dazzling white star.
In fact, Kemper was being his usual asshole self, poking at him just to get an emotional rise out of him. Altair’s course had been precisely planned, and tweaked on the way in to make sure that Osiris was not in the line of fire.