The drone immediately rolled him toward the elevator and Maria followed. If her father questioned why she didn’t kill him, she could respond that she was waiting for him to regain consciousness so that she could question him for additional information on Chen facilities, ones that his father may have kept off the family servers. Two elevator cars were waiting when they arrived. She saw to it that Nathaniel was on the first before boarding hers. As she ascended upward to her father’s private sanctum, she looked out over the sun drenched forest that covered the whole of Manhattan and had the strong realization that this was the day that everything changed.
___
Beautiful. That was how she usually thought about her father’s sanctum at the top of the world. The last floor of their home and the center of their empire was her father’s personal office. But the word office did little properly justify what this space was. Aside from the elevator and stairwell, every single wall was transparent, at least to those standing within it. The roof ascended ten stories into the air. The walls coming together in a grand arch well above. The light of the sun poured in during the day bringing to life the sea of forest land that now made up the island of Manhattan, and not too far to the East, the actual ocean itself. At night, the heavens themselves were on full display. Maria loved to sit up here with her father when she was younger and drink in the disk of their own galaxy the Milky Way.
Her father had a passion for space and exploration, and they spent countless hours up here, watching as the glass provided them with data from the orbiting telescopes that he had maintained and added to after the fall. She was able to actually see Valles Marineris from above, without ever having to leave the Earth, let alone this building. Days had been spent together speculating on topics such as the cause of for the massive upheaval of the Venusian crust. Were the high resolution scans of the obstructions around the Boyajian stars actually signs of alien life? While she was up here, she felt a liberty that she only ever achieved when directly in nature. Now though, all she was experiencing was oppression and disgust. The wonder had long since faded.
The sun was beginning to fall toward the horizon. Its rays bathing the entire room in golden light. She stepped up to the holographic projection table that her father motioned toward. Motes of dust slowly danced in the golden light of Earth’s star. Her mother and father stood on the opposite side, her mother nearly as far from her as from her father. Maria suspected that their marriage may be over and for a brief moment wondered how they would manage spending eternity together but then smothered the thought. She was past caring.
“What am I going to do?” she said, getting to the point to end the awkward silence that was hanging in the air, like the dust particles.
Her father cleared his voice, his hand subconsciously rubbing the back of his neck, “I’ll continue to run combat operations throughout greater Asia, Africa, and Europe. Your mother will focus on logistics, and I’m going to keep you as far from the fighting as I can by having you responsible for managing security at our facilities in the Americas.”
She ordered her contacts to pair with the table and an instant later the large flat surface sprung to life responding to her commands. Her mom looked like she was about to speak when Maria cut her off, “I think you should go to your stations.”
She watched as her mother closed her eyes, squeezing them tightly. Her father reached for mother only to have her arm jerk away from him as she spun and walked to her holographic table. He turned toward her, shaking his head slightly. “I hope I can make everything up to both of you one day.”
He turned and began to walk toward the glass wall, opting to not use a holographic display but instead to see everything as mental imagery. “Billions of people hoped you wouldn’t kill them. Why should you get what you want when they didn’t?” she said to his back.
The only indication that she had gotten to him was the slight hesitation in his gait. She altered her gaze from his retreating form to her table which was spooling through the data that was being transferred to it. One moment there was a loading screen, the next a spreadsheet of data from every single facility in the Americas was before her. She began to review the data. It was a flood of information, but she had been preparing for this from a very young age. She already knew about most of these facilities, but a few of them were new to her. She raised an eyebrow at the number of space launch facilities located in central America, closest to the equator. She was a little shocked at the volume of production facilities they had embedded deep in the Rocky Mountains. She ordered all facilities to initiate their security protocols and began to take stock of the defensive resources she had available to her.
If any of them were attacked, she’d have to rely on the defensive systems that each facility had built into them along with a small garrison force at platoon strength which would be quickly overrun in any serious offensive. The only significant force left in the Americas was the home division, nearly two thousand standard combat drones and LDU stationed within the Spire itself and across the nearby grounds. She shook her head. Her father was all in with his deployment, and even though their manufacturing facilities were working at full capacity, her mother was transferring all newly created combat drones to maintain their ten million strong army fighting against the combined forces of their enemies. She pulled up data from his engagements, watching as their numerically inferior force won battle after battle across Asia.
She was amazed at how fast the battles were occurring and couldn’t help but be impressed at how her father was managing them all. The Chen alliance had finally realized what had occurred; however, up until that point, Chen’s armies in the field had followed false orders issued by her father. They attacked without reservation the members of their alliance, and both sides had inflicted heavy losses against one another. When units began to fail to follow the orders of the AI programs he had implanted in their military network, her father had used his control over the remaining units he still influenced to lure them into death traps for their family’s drone forces. The Chen alliance had at one point significantly outnumbered them, but now the difference in their forces was more equitable. While they were still numerically inferior, their quality was far higher than that of their opponents. Victory would be gained by intellect and cunning. Her father masterfully managed the deployment and maneuvers of their forces. He did have help from AI subroutines, but he was taking on a significant amount of the load himself. Possibly too much.
She could see where he was making mistakes, missing an opportunity to destroy an encircled battalion in Vietnam, not probing Japanese carriers to see if their fighter craft were able to defend them, and ignoring a division in Moscow that misinterpreted their orders and were isolated from the rest of their forces. None of them were terribly significant, the encircled battalion was eventually carpet bombed, the Japanese warships were sunk by drones placing bombs on their keels, and the lost Russian division was eradicated by a potent biological weapon. But each one was left in the field longer than it should have been, and each one inflicted more damage on their forces than necessary.
An alarm appeared on her display, letting her know that the Russian Spire had just deployed an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile strike against their Spire. She moved her hands through the virtual field, activating dozens of interceptor batteries sprinkled throughout Alaska and what was once Northern Canada. She closely watched as each one of the inbound warheads, that could vaporize an entire city, blinked out of existence on her tracking radar. She ordered the AI systems to track the debris field using both radar and LIDAR systems, on the off chance that they had figured out some way to slip a warhead through. She ordered a portion of the drone aircraft at her disposal into a higher altitude and further north. If something did slip through, they’d be able to intercept it with greater ease from that position.
Her mind slipped to the children below, playing and living their lives as if the fate of the species wasn’t hanging in the balance. She activated their prote
ction protocol. After ten minutes the drones monitoring the children confirmed that they were all indoors, preparing for an early nap. She ordered the ring that they lived on to descend into its storage area. Slowly, methodically, it began the process of lowering itself several stories below surface level, going at a pace that wouldn’t alert the children to what was happening. She verified with her own eyes that the protective roof had rolled out over their ring, hiding their world from view. She knew that a direct hit from a warhead would vaporize everything, including their protective enclosure, but they would be protected from a nearby detonation at least.
“The Russians are getting desperate,” she said to no one in particular. Her father grunted and her mother smiled at her. Maria didn’t return it, just because she understood why they were doing what they were doing right now didn’t mean she would ever forgive the woman. After a moment her mother sheepishly focused back on her virtual vision.
“The others might follow suit,” she said to her father.
Her dad decided to respond, “They can’t. I just eliminated the Russian and Chen stationary nuclear holdings… keep monitoring for any more of those Russian mobile launchers. Good job by the way.”
She appreciated his willingness to accept that he wasn’t perfect, to share part of the stress of the war with her mother and herself. He was brilliant and she saw so much of her own intellect in him, which is why it hurt so much to hate him. She decided then that she could respect his abilities, but never again love the man. Another alarm appeared in her vision. She opened it and expected to see another Russian missile launch. Instead the alarm focused in on a region of the Manhattan shoreline.
“Dad, we’ve got a—” she never finished the sentence. The ground beneath her feat bucked upward, like an angry titan might after having been stung by an annoying pest. The entire Spire shook and as she fell backward. The golden light of the setting sun flashing into her eyes as she slammed the back of her head into the solid tile floor. Her vision tunneled for a moment, and she lay there, staring up into the heavens, with her breaths coming in shallow gasps. Reality came crashing back into her at the same time a searing pain etched its way through her skull. Tobor, who had been silently standing guard near the entrance, was at her side in an instant. Its hands probing her skull looking for a fracture and assessing her condition. She waved the robot off. “I’m fine."
“You have a concussion. You must be taken to medical facilities.”
“If I don’t do my damn job, that won’t be the last explosion, and a concussion will seem like a luxury.” She sat up, gritting her teeth through the intensifying pain and looked at her parents. Mother was pulling herself up, immediately locking eyes with her. They both looked toward her father who was down on one knee, his hands flying through the air as he manipulated his virtual vision while simultaneously using his neural link to manage the war effort by thought.
“What the hell was that?” Mom blurted out, as Tobor assessed her injuries.
“I don’t know, Maria. I need you to do your job. Don’t let anything else they have through,” her father said, barely loud enough to be heard.
She felt icy rage flow through her veins. “If you suddenly don’t like how I’m doing, then maybe you should have thought about that before eradicating the human race." Despite the contempt she was feeling at how quickly her father could go from complimentary to critical, especially given his life choices, she focused on her tasks. She silenced the alarm from the building’s Tuned Mass Damper system and quickly dispatched a work crew to verify its integrity and another to deal with the damage caused by the explosion. Her thoughts focused on the nearby space around the Spire and how a projectile had managed to evade all of the facility’s detection and defense systems until it was too late to act.
The damage was easy to find, an entire section of the defensive ring wall around the base of the Spire was collapsed and aflame. Smoke billowed out of it, black and roiling. Her heart dropped as she remembered the children below. She quickly queried the nanny robots and to her great relief immediately received a confirmation that everyone was safe and sound, albeit very afraid. The protective cap had held, and no damage had come to their habitat so recently placed below ground.
Her attention shifted to identifying the source of the attack. Drones were already deploying from the wall and heading toward the tree line. She had the Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles she kept in reserve immediately fly toward the coast line looking for where the device had come from. As they quickly moved along the path of the projectile, she reviewed what little sensory data she had available on it. It was fast, extremely fast. With that information she quickly realized that the explosion likely wasn’t chemical based but instead relied on the release of raw kinetic energy upon impact. She rapidly went through the intelligence files of the weapons of the other families, finding nothing that matched in their arsenals or even their suspected research programs.
The hair on the back of her neck began to rise. The Spire families might not have such a weapon at their disposal but that didn’t mean other forces didn’t. She quickly reviewed historical files and located a hypersonic weapons program of the United States military that had produced a number of missiles that could achieve the speeds that she had recorded.
This wasn’t the other families. The Marines were coming.
Her UCAVs suddenly stopped transmitting. A moment later the Spire sensors detected explosions in the sky.
“What the hell did I just see Maria?” her father asked, his attention still mostly on running the war in Asia but not able to completely ignore the flashes of light he saw in the sky.
Before she could respond, the minefield that protected the Spire grounds began sending reports that a number of its components had been triggered and her sensor system was picking up a wave of radio signals coming from the forest. She looked down upon the sea of green, seeing what appeared to be random explosions ripping it asunder.
Her mother who was now at her side asked, “What’s going on?"
“I don’t see anything,” she hissed in reply.
And then the drone units she had deployed from the Spire defenses were reporting visual contacts within a 45-degree arc of the forest and directly in line with the part of the wall that had been destroyed. She quickly pulled up the visual of one of the lead units and couldn’t believe her eyes. Ferals. Not a few but thousands of them were swarming through the tree line, rushing toward the pristine park land that existed outside the defensive ring and the wilderness beyond. She ordered the units to take up defensive positions half way to the tree line and prepare for the assault. Rather than shortening the distance and increasing the likelihood that the creatures would encounter her drones and possibly destroy some of them, she’d use the range advantage her drones had over the unarmed humans and remove as many of them from the equation as possible before hand to hand contact was inevitable.
The mass of humanity streamed from the forest. Their variety of sizes, ethnicities, and disheveled appearances were in stark contrast to the drone army they were facing. But still, something deep inside of her was disturbed by the sight of the insanity in their eyes and the utter lack of intelligence. The moment they broke from the cover of the trees they began to fall by the dozens. Plumes of fire erupted where the focused lasers of the standard combat drones burned through the remnants of clothing and hit deposits of fat under their skin. Others were literally blown to pieces by the 20 mm cannons and mortar systems of the Land Dominance Units that made up the core of each defensive position. She had never seen this level of violence in her entire life, even taking into account what she had experienced so recently. The carnage occurring before her very eyes as she viewed in from the perspective of the drones disturbed her. It was a slaughter and she was the one who gave the order. She switched her perspective to the observation drones she had orbiting over the massacre a moment before several pockets managed to make direct contact with her units. She didn’t want to watch the rending of those p
eople in such close detail.
If she was right and this was the responsibility of the Marines, how had they managed to force these poor creatures against her family and why was this their first move in what had to have been a decade long battle plan in the making?
And then she saw what they must have been planning for. Her forces were in a number of densely packed defensive groupings. She quickly sent out the order to disperse, but it was already too late. The tracking system for the Spire blared out warnings as dozens and then hundreds of fast-moving projectiles arced toward her units. The Spire’s laser interceptors fired, burning several of the incoming shells out of the sky but far too few and far too late. She watched, stunned as her army which had been handily dispatching the feral wave evaporated in a shower of fire and debris and as the spaces of her youth were turned into a nightmarish hellscape of craters, smoldering robotic components, and viscera of thousands of human bodies shattered in the powerful detonations.
A new wave of projectiles came, this time far fewer in number. Their parabolic trajectories took them not to the battle field below but straight to the Spire. These warheads easily appeared on her tracking systems, unlike the previous barrage which had been harder to track. The turret mounted lasers on the wall and the Spire itself hummed to life, scoring direct impacts on the incoming rounds but producing no effect. They continued on their paths unscathed as a reflective coating over each of the incoming rounds refracted away most of the energy of the beams, preventing their destruction. Confusion merged with frustration which then morphed into fear as the high explosive ordinance detonated against her home. Once again, the building shook, this time as entire sections of it were ripped apart, but overall the structural integrity of the Spire itself held strong. Clearly the goal had not been to destroy this place but something else. All of her available defensive weapons had fired on both waves of artillery shells and each and every one of those emplacements had just been destroyed. The Marines had wanted her to reveal her defenses so that they could knock them offline. An entire side of the Spire was now defenseless, with each of the artillery shells finding their marks except for one, which had been knocked off course by a laser and instead detonated against the Spire itself, ripping apart the outer surface over the third, fourth, and fifth floors on one side.
The Spire Page 34