Judgement

by Fergus Bannon

And the revelations seemed endless. Pollution, drug running, the influence multinational corporations had on world politics. The channel devoted to recent history was running an almost unedited replay of the Yalta conference. Yesterday it had gone through the real reasons leading up to the American use of atomic bombs on Japan.

  He noticed that Stallard was looking at him. The Comptroller made the sign of the cross. 'I forgive you.'

  'What?'

  'I'm sorry I got so upset when you appeared back here after the St. Louis fiasco. I thought you were playing Judas.'

  'When you already know everything, who needs a Judas? No, I guessed System X had this capability when Durrell told me about his Afghanistan experience. It explained how their intelligence was so good. How they knew things which were only obvious to us retrospectively, like with Middleton and his crew. With Middleton they must have looked back to one of the explosions on a Taurus aircraft, then stayed with the aircraft, moving it back through time, until they saw Guin planting the bomb. Then they just followed him forward to Middleton and Garner. I presume they followed it all the way to Cole which explains why he hasn't been heard of since.'

  'But I don't deserve your forgiveness because I did screw up. The St. Louis thing was an even bigger trap than I suspected. They know about us now.'

  Stallard smiled sourly. ‘I can hardly blame you, Bob. You couldn't have been expected to predict this. We had to investigate. No matter who we sent, no matter how many intermediaries and 'cut-outs' we used, they could have tracked us back. We never had a chance! 'We've got to assume that they're always listening to us, but I can't see that making a difference now.' He spread his hands. 'So what are we up against? What's your best guess?'

  Leith shuffled some papers. ‘This isn't going to be comfortable to say. It's going to sound crazy, but then every step that's brought us here has been crazy. Each time we learn something about them we try and explain it in our own terms. They kill half the hoodlums and Durrell nods his head sagely and says: 'An 80-man SWAT team.' We realise they have access to 4-space and I say: 'Let's check through the universities and research centres.' But I think the time has come where we can't fool ourselves any longer.

  'The thing that was de Meer clinches it as far as I'm concerned. It wasn't human. It was an alien. That's what we're up against. We're undergoing some kind of ideological invasion. And this-' he lifted a finger towards the screens '-is just a way of softening us up, of demoralising us. Durrell tells me it’s a trick our 'good old boys' used a lot in South America. Apparently nothing saps a man more than being made to bathe in his own shit.'

  INTERCUT 5

  'Bucket O' Nails', 22,300 miles above Nairobi

  Africa swung by below. The tip of a boomerang of dense cloud was passing over the southernmost tip and the tropical rain forests were covered in clouds like freshly forked mashed potato. Further north all that could be seen was the scorched brown of the North African deserts contrasting with the cobalt blue of the seas around them.

  Bucket O’ Nails was completely unaware of this as it crossed Africa heading for the Americas. Its minuscule intelligence was concerned with more important things like the surface temperature on its reflective carapace and the power levels of its batteries. For five years now it had patrolled this lonely orbit hearing only the periodic diagnostic probes from Fire Command making sure its silicon brain was still operating within acceptable limits.

  But suddenly there were new commands and things started to change. By the time it crossed a flat white pancake of thunderclouds over the Amazon Basin its orbit had altered slightly. Attitude jets nudged it into a spin then nudged it out again. Now its square funnel assembly pointed just out of the orbital plane.

  A steel claw slid aside the front plate from the first square box. Linear induction motors tickled the box forward along four guiding rails. As the box eased its way out of the funnel, its side plates were gently sheared away by electromagnetic forces.

  It was like a metal flower opening.

  Out from the centre of the steel petals came a close-packed cubic matrix of nickel steel ball bearings, kept in place by a fine network of thin rods ending in the back plate. The electromagnetic forces tugged playfully at this, slowing it down so that the steel balls started to roll along the guiding rods until they trickled out into the void.

  The cube of steel balls moved slowly out from the satellite, but managing to maintain their shape. It was only when the satellite had left the Americas behind that the cube started to blossom.

  The packing rods attached to the back plate had been carefully machined to diverge microscopically from the parallel. The cube seemed to grow, uniformly at first, and it wasn't until the satellite was several miles behind and below that the effect of the balls' slightly different 'launch' times became apparent. The cube was warping as though a hand was pushing it from one side. It seemed to be toppling as successive planes of bearings shifted sideways, so that by the time they crossed Africa again the drifting cube had become rectangular in aspect and covered nearly 100 square metres.

  ESA's Meteosat 6 was not the target, but it was the first to contact the net. Where ten of the ball bearings touched the leading surface they left perfect little circular holes, but when they emerged from the other side, they took with them huge gouts of metal and silicon vapours.

  The satellite began to spin rapidly, its almost untouched face alternating with something that looked like a swiss cheese.

  Bucket O' Nails had by now already launched three other cubes and had lapsed back into its former state of minimal activity. Bucket O' Nails, or USN JK8 as it was officially known, had been launched by cooler heads during Reagan's Star Wars euphoria. At that time 100 billion dollar orbital battle stations had been envisaged that would direct particle beams and rail guns to blast approaching enemy missiles as they nosed their way out of the atmosphere.

  Crazy days.

  For staff in the White House and Pentagon it was a 'King wore no clothes' situation. It would have taken a brave man indeed to point out the practical difficulties in ensuring even a 50% effective 'nuclear shield'.

  One such brave man, a prominent scientist who knew he was risking his livelihood from the almost certain withdrawal of his military grants, had tried to illustrate one of the many absurdities. Asked onto a chat show to pontificate on such matters, he had asked the host what he thought it would take to destroy a 100 billion dollar battle-station.

  'I don't know. What?' said the interviewer, perfectly prepared to play the straight man.

  'A bucket of nails,' replied the scientist triumphantly. The host mugged surprise. ‘Take for example a battle-station in geosynchronous orbit, that's one about 22,000 miles above the Earth's surface. The satellite travels a path of nearly 180,000 miles every 24 hours, keeping its position above the Earth's surface pretty constant. It manages that by travelling at about 8 miles per second in the same direction as the Earth's rotation.

  'Now suppose you send up an astronaut but you launch his space craft so that it's in the same orbit but travelling in the opposite direction. Then you get him to throw a bucket of nails overboard. The bucket of nails will be travelling at 8 miles per second, but in the other direction. That means that the nails will hit the battle-station at a relative velocity of 16 miles per second. Do you know what would happen then?'

  'No,' said the interviewer.

  'Neither do I,' said the scientist. 'It's only in the vacuum and huge distances of space that you can get macroscopic objects like that up to those kind of speeds. We can't run tests like that on Earth, so the physics of it really haven't been fleshed out. All I can say is that the effect wouldn't be … constructive.' The chat show host had liked that and so had the audience, but strangely the scientist had never been invited back onto the program.

  The people who worked on the Star Wars program weren't dumb. It was a tremendous source of finance and was seen as a way of boosting technology, the way the space program had done with the silicon chip. The Bucket o
f Nails argument was a good one. Unlike other arguments, such as the inconceivable amounts of computer power required for real time systems control, the swamping of the shield by decoy missiles and so on, the Bucket of Nails argument could be answered to a degree. The US itself would launch a whole bunch of anti-satellite satellites using the bucket of nails approach. They wouldn't need astronauts of course: that had just been part of the scientist's fanciful illustration. Just a few automatic satellites, and the high tech equivalent of birdshot. They would use their buckets of nails to destroy the Soviet’s buckets of nails before the Soviets could use their buckets of nails to destroy the surveillance satellites and the battle-stations, they said. Somehow this had made sense to their government paymasters.

  Bucket O' Nails’ first target, the System X satellite almost directly above Panama City, was now less than a thousand miles away. Its position had been determined to within one square metre by radar scans from NORAD. There was some consternation that the thing was so small, presenting a profile to the incoming buckshot of less than three square metres. The Navy scientists calculated a one in ten chance of the satellite passing through the net without being hit by a single bearing.

  This didn't worry them because they'd get another chance when the net and satellite met again on the other side of the Earth in twelve hours time. And again, twelve hours after that. With the net continually expanding the chances of a miss would grow and grow, but they calculated at least twelve meetings before probability levels fell to less than 10%. It was a shame that the net would take out so many other innocent satellites in the process.

  So they weren't worried when the satellite wasn't destroyed at the first meeting, not worried at all.

  The unscheduled loss of the Chengdu reactor from the Sichuan power grid was the first warning sign. The loss was gradual and well compensated for. Programmed rumours about cracked fuel rods were already circulating and medical services in the nearby towns had been put on standby.

  As Chengdu's power to the grid decreased, its contribution to the military site on the sloping foothills of the Jiuzhai Gou Mountains increased exponentially. Thousands of pumps laboured to drain the last few molecules of gas from the already near-vacuum along the 30 kilometre length of the buried ring. Thousands more pumps lowered the temperatures of the electromagnets that would constrain the beam to the ring.

  A tunnel, thrown off at a tangent from the ring, bored upwards for 10 kilometres through the mountain before emerging from the other side at a height of nearly fifteen thousand feet. Titanic forces were already at play within it as power to the compression plates was slowly ramped up. Scientists making final adjustments to the steering gradients heard the steel reinforcement skeleton creak as it took the strain. They cast nervous glances at each other and hurried to finish their work.

  On the near side of the mountain several hundred chambers full of hydrogen and fluorine were being powered up. The chambers were connected via a series of right-angled tunnels drilled into the rock. They emerged finally into a single tunnel, which opened out into the side of the ring tunnel at a height of 10,000 feet.

  In the control room at 1500 metres below and 18 kilometres to the South, a forest of red indicator lights seemed to catch fire as the myriad systems came to readiness. On one wall three screens each showed a picture of the System X satellite over Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. The pictures in visible, infrared and ultraviolet were being taken from an internal resources satellite commandeered from the Ministry of the Interior. The satellite was in a geostationary orbit, five hundred miles to the North.

  Even the appearance of the System X satellite troubled the Chinese scientists. It had no obvious features: no solar cells, no receiver antennae and, worst of all, no dishes to transmit the signals. It was just a grey featureless cube, visible only by reflected sunlight, adding nothing even in the infrared.

  But that was the least of their worries. The Sichuan facility was new and had not been fully tested. It had begun as a relatively low-key military research effort in the 50's, but had received massive support during the height of the Reagan years and his Star Wars initiative. In the years since, things had got a lot better politically, then started to get a worse again. But throughout, financial support had been substantial. Star Wars would never have worked as intended but it was considered a Pandora's box, capable of spawning a whole series of unexpected technologies. The Chinese had not dared to be left behind. In the free markets of the world, they had long since learned, knowledge was the most precious commodity.

  In the Chengdu control room General Guang had watched once again as the satellite flicked out of existence for sixty seconds, before reappearing. Over the last twenty minutes it had done this three times. The scientists had made a move to check the satellite link but Guang had waved them away. Only he knew about the three blasts of American buckshot directed at the satellite. The buckshot had been moving far too fast to be visible to the cameras on the resources satellite.

  He wasn't surprised therefore when the direct line to Beijing gave its shrill summons. Neither was he surprised to hear the single word. 'Fire!'

  Smoothing down his thick black moustache he turned to the scientist at the fire control. 'Fire when ready.'

  The scientist could hardly hide his glee. Grinning from ear to ear he began the firing sequence.

  Bells and sirens started up and lights began to flash. Guang regarded this as pure theatre, the generation of the two beams being totally soundless. He smiled to himself as the scientists began their votive dances over the controls.

  As the time approached Guang looked at the monitor on his desk which showed the cloudless sky above the nearby dam. Beside him he heard the scientist yell: 'Fire!'

  The photons in the tanks of hydrogen and fluorine lased and the beam flashed through the air above the Sichuan province. As it emerged from the mountain the beam was narrow, barely a foot across, but was subject to the subtlest of divergences. In its centre it was plasma hot, fading at its periphery to temperatures barely above the melting point of steel. Atmospheric atoms, many of them instantly ionised, were blasted away down the huge pressure gradient. For a microsecond a column of vacuum stretched right through the thin atmosphere above the mountain.

  The ring discharged. Protons accelerated up to near light speeds were flung off it through the high-density fields of the compression plates, then out of the mountain. Lancing up through the column of vacuum and out of the atmosphere, their repulsive charges began to cause the beam to diverge. By the time it hit the satellite its energy density was reduced by many orders of magnitude. But it was more than enough.

  On Guang’s monitor the clear air above Chengdu glowed with a purple line of Cerenkov radiation disappearing into space. The scene from the resources satellite was more dramatic. Camera filters had been increased as a precaution, so much so that the System X satellite was no longer visible. When the beam hit it appeared again, climbing into incandescence on all frequencies before vaporising. By the time filters had been reduced there were only stars.

  Guang smiled to himself and nodded. The scientists cheered.

  He sat back in his chair, put his feet on top of a dark green waste bin and lit a cigarette. Bottles of Maotai, no longer so frowned on, appeared like magic and the talking got louder as the tension eased. Guang was starting to have amorous thoughts about one of the scientists, a striking woman with long dark hair, when he was suddenly deafened by a hell's chorus of alarms.

  'My God,' someone shouted, 'the pressure seals have gone!'

  Guang scrambled out of his chair and pushed people aside in his hurry to get to the containment monitors. A line of digital readouts gave pressures at forty points on the ring. He watched aghast as two low-pressure waves worked in from the peripheral readouts in a pincer movement towards the opposite point on the ring. For a second he imagined the corrosive gases blasting into the vacuum of the ring, filling it and condensing out as hydrofluoric acid on to its surface.

  The control
room floor kicked under him and he had to grab the monitors for support. Then he heard the far away bass rumble of heavy ordnance. He fumbled at the shutter control and the heavy plates lifted, flooding the room with harsh daylight. Blinking hard and squinting, he saw the ring and the tangential fire tunnel etched out on the barren ground. How was that possible? It was as though he had x-ray vision, seeing these systems as they lay deep underground. Then he realised that what he was seeing was dust clouds from detonations every few hundred metres along the ring's length. Every single alarm in the room started ringing.

  'For God's sakes turn those things off,' he shouted into the pandemonium.

  Ten minutes before the destruction of Chengdu, explosions had ripped through anti-satellite control stations at Vladivostok, Sakalin, Vandenburg, and San Diego. All the anti-satellites vanished as one.

  At the same time the beam weapon facility under construction on the slopes of Santa Blanca in New Mexico was buried by rubble. Only the sections containing base personnel were spared. The few staff who had been in the trashed sections were later found confused and retching several hundred metres from the explosions.

  Nobody was killed by the blasts, although one elderly scientist in Vandenburg died from a heart attack.

  Above Dhahran, a new System X satellite appeared.

  Whilst in space the remaining superpowers concentrated on the destruction of the satellite chain, on the ground they and other nations tried more conventional means of suppression. Satellite dish factories and warehouses were impounded or destroyed. Campaigns of refutation were launched in other media.

  In the democracies these tactics immediately backfired. The public had for the first time seen the people they elected in a light unfiltered by the sophisticated machinery of public relations. They saw sleazy deals being struck, petty vendettas arranged at great public expense. They saw waste and negligence at the highest levels. Worst of all they sometimes saw politicians in their private moments, talking to their cronies, perhaps after a drink or two. The prejudice and narrow mindedness of these unguarded moments was appalling.