Checking my watch, I saw that I would probably arrive ahead of schedule, but I felt the urge to get started. I could stand around up here, safe and sound on the Salah ad-Din, or I could stand around down there, on the planet. Down there I would be in place, ready to react if something went wrong.
Hollingsworth stayed on the observation deck as I went to my quarters and swapped my service uniform for combat armor. “Nickel” Hill had offered to loan me shielded armor; but I turned him down. What a laugh. With shielding from head to toe, the only weapon you could carry was a dart gun that ran along the outside of the right arm. It fired fléchettes made of depleted uranium, good for killing people, but I doubted it would have much effect on the Avatari.
My mood turned dark as I fastened my armor. Hill said that the Avatari we faced on New Copenhagen were just the janitors and that this time we would face the A-team. When I asked the ghost of Sweetwater about it, he said, “Not so much janitors. We think they were more like scarecrows, mostly harmless and designed to scare away pests.”
I had answered him with one word, “Bullshit.”
But it hadn’t been bullshit, and I accepted that now as I prepared to fly down to Olympus Kri. Alone, in my billet, I owned up to the truth.
My armor included a rebreather, temperature-controlling bodysuit, and protection against radiation, yet it only weighed a couple of pounds. My portable arsenal, on the other hand, registered seventy-three pounds and thirteen ounces. My go-pack contained six disposable grenade launchers, six handheld rockets, a particle-beam pistol, a particle-beam cannon, and a handheld laser. Facing anyone but the Avatari, that would have been overkill.
I wondered what weapon the Avatari would use when they attacked and realized that while I was down there, my fate was entirely in their hands. Handing over the controls always made me nervous. No Marine expects to live forever, but we all hope to see the day through.
“Wheel, are you there?” I asked, testing the special interLink connection Hill had given me so that I could contact the virtual version of the Arthur C. Clarke Wheel.
Arthur Breeze answered. “Are you heading down to the planet?”
“That I am,” I said.
“Sweetwater is asleep,” said Breeze.
The virtual versions of Sweetwater and Breeze ate, slept, passed gas, and shat. Whoever designed them had to give them foibles along with strengths to prevent them from figuring out that they lived in a computer. Along with mapping and scanning their brains, the engineers had mapped and scanned their bodies. Nothing was left to chance.
The digital ghosts of Arthur Breeze and William Sweetwater spent their time playing with digital replicas of the finest scientific equipment in their little virtual laboratory on a computer model of the Clarke space station. When interactive Breeze ran atoms in his virtual collider, did he control real equipment accelerating real particles and getting real results? When he peered through his spectroscope, did he examine real samples with virtual eyes? Even now, he was watching the real me through eyes that only existed in a computer. Did the digital program that emulated his brain hear the digital protocol that simulated his voice?
If I allowed myself to play with these questions long enough, I could have driven myself insane. A lab assistant worked at a desk behind Breeze. I wondered if the avatar was attached to a real man and if that man currently stood in a real-world lab working with real-world equipment.
Breeze was a physicist who had published volumes on particles. He was probably a better scientist than Sweetwater, but his lack of confidence was an Achilles’ heel. He stuttered during briefings and used so much jargon that he could never communicate his ideas clearly. Sweetwater, whose expertise extended into chemistry as well as physics, had no shortage of confidence.
“You’re sure fifty feet down will be enough?” I asked.
“Based on my best calculations, ten feet might be enough,” Breeze said. He pulled off his thick glasses, polished them, and replaced them on his face. The grease and dandruff were still there, now wiped into a spiral pattern.
“The combustion on New Copenhagen was strictly a surface event. Sweetwater sent a drone down to take soil samples. The heat penetration was only a few feet.”
“So if someone was in a basement apartment on New Copenhagen, they might have survived,” I said, thinking not so much about survivors on New Copenhagen as civilians on Terraneau.
“It’s not likely,” Breeze said. “Concrete calcifies at two thousand degrees. At three thousand, soil melts.”
“Not all of the buildings melted on New Copenhagen,” I said.
“The surface of the planet retained heat longer than the atmosphere,” Breeze said. “The soil and air samples show that the atmosphere reached temperatures of nine thousand degrees before the heat subsided. If you were in a building with any kind of ventilation system, you’d be incinerated.”
“Good to know,” I said.
“Harris, you might want to consider flying down to the planet’s surface after the event. Any structure exposed to those kind of temperatures is going to sustain fundamental damage. You could survive the event and still find yourself buried alive.”
I thanked Breeze and signed off. Buried alive, Hell’s lobby. I thought about the Unified Authority Marines I buried in that underground garage on Terraneau. If I died the very same way, the irony would not be lost on Hollingsworth.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
As my shuttle exited the ad-Din, Lieutenant Nobles offered to stay on Olympus Kri for the mission.
Ahead of us, swarms of transports clambered in and out of the Olympus Kri atmosphere. The planet looked normal and healthy, just another green-and-blue marble no different than Terraneau, or St. Augustine, or Earth for that matter, only this one had a death sentence hanging over it.
“Are you out of your specking mind?” I asked.
“I don’t understand, sir. I heard you were going to stay down there,” he said.
Interesting point.
Here in the cockpit, this shuttle was no more comfortable than a transport. The ceiling was lower. I sat in the copilot’s chair and considered the instrumentation, which was more like the controls in my old Johnston Starliner than the controls in a transport. I might be able to teach myself how to fly this bird in a pinch, I told myself.
I started to say, “I fight, you fly,” but that sounded dismissive. Instead, I asked, “Do you know about any underground runway systems?”
“Not offhand,” he said.
“Then we wouldn’t have anyplace safe to store the shuttle.”
“Oh, yeah. I didn’t think about that,” he said
“See if you can get your hands on a transport for the return trip. If things go wrong, I may need to get off this rock in a hurry.” Unlike transports, which had skids instead of wheels, the shuttle needed a runway. I would have flown down to the planet in a transport as well, but I did not want to risk some other officer commandeering my luxury ride.
As we reached the atmosphere, a convoy of transports rose past us. They looked awkward and overburdened by their own weight. There had to be a better way of emptying the planet than evacuating its population one hundred people at a time; but when I tried to think of an alternative, I came up empty.
Because transports take off vertically, the evacuation was not limited to airports. Sports stadiums, shopping malls, schools, train stations, anyplace with room for processing masses of passengers and an open field for landing became an evacuation center.
Crossing Odessa, I saw hundred of transports flying in wing formations like flocks of geese. Below us, the streets were choked with cars.
“I’ve got your friend’s signal,” Nobles said. “He’s by an airstrip on the edge of town.”
A call came in from Sweetwater, his gravelly voice sounding anxious and excited. “We just got back the results from our atmospheric test,” he said, the “we” meaning him. “The Tachyon D concentration is rising quickly.”
“Are they forming a
n ion curtain?” I asked.
“Breeze doesn’t think so. He says these new tachyons act differently than the tachyons in the curtain. Their energy levels are off the charts.” Tachyons were subatomic particles traveling at sublight speeds. How Breeze could measure their activity and energy levels was a mystery; but I did not ask about it.
“How much time do I have?” I asked.
“Before the event?” he asked. The event, now there was a euphemism for the ages. Not the cataclysm, or the holocaust, or even the big bang; the event? It sounded so specking benign.
“Yeah, how much time before the event?” I asked.
“We have no frame of reference, General. Your guess is as good as ours.”
We were coming in for a landing, flying just a couple of hundred feet off the ground, slowing, dropping altitude. Freeman’s signal had led us to a private airstrip. Whoever owned the property had apparently abandoned it. No planes sat on the runway.
“We can tell you that the Tachyon D concentration on Olympus Kri has increased significantly over the last hour, perhaps by a factor of four.”
“Does that mean something is about to happen?” I asked as we touched down.
“It may mean several things, General; but we do not have sufficient information to make any predictions,” Sweetwater said.
Nobles taxied. There was a three-story control tower at the far end of the runway. Freeman stood beside the tower, dressed in custom-fitted Marine combat armor. He might well have been listening in on this conversation, Sweetwater had contacted me on an open frequency. If Freeman wasn’t listening, it meant he and Sweetwater had already had this conversation.
“If we have drawn correct conclusions from New Copenhagen, the tachyon particles the Avatari are using for this attack won’t be recycled like the ones they used in their first wave of attacks,” Sweetwater said.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Nobles slowed the shuttle as we approached the tower.
“In their first invasion, the Avatari kept recycling the same base of particles. They bonded them together to form soldiers and guns. When we destroyed the soldiers, the tachyons returned to the atmosphere, where they recharged. We believe these new particles vanish once their energy is expended.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” I said. Images of atomic explosions danced in my head.
Nobles stopped the shuttle, and the fuselage lowered, but I remained in my seat.
“That is the bad news. The good news is that the Avatari appear to want the planet in one piece.”
“Do they have other options?” I asked.
“General, with the kind of energy those tachyons produce, the aliens could demolish Olympus Kri. They could reduce it to a floating cinder or make it explode into atom-sized fragments. Our analysis of the attack on New Copenhagen leads us to believe that the aliens plan to annihilate any opposition on the planet without destroying the planet itself.”
“That’s the good news?” I asked.
“We do feel a little better knowing that they do not want to destroy the planet, yes,” Sweetwater said. I could not tell if the cocky little bastard was joking or not.
“Breeze says we’ll be safe if we’re fifty feet underground.”
There was a pause.
Normally, I let these pauses work themselves out. This time I asked. “What am I missing here?”
“We’ve looked at Arthur’s calculations,” Sweetwater hedged.
“You don’t agree with them?” I asked.
“Arthur’s calculations always add up perfectly,” he said, still not sounding confident. “In fact, we think you would be safe fifteen feet underground. It’s the intangibles that have us worried.”
“The intangibles?” I asked.
“With the kind of power the Avatari have in those Tachyon D particles, they could destroy the entire planet. That is clearly not what they plan to do; but our question is, how much damage will they be willing to inflict on the planet if they know you are on it?”
CHAPTER FIFTY
“Why is your fleet landing men?” Freeman asked me, as we watched the shuttle streak across the runway. I felt like a passenger on the deck of the Titanic watching the last of the lifeboats rowing away.
“Are you sure they’re ours? Maybe the Unifieds are landing troops,” I said, sensing another betrayal.
Freeman shook his head, and said, “No, these men are clones, and they are riding in on E.M.N. transports.”
“Shit,” I said, realizing who those clones would be. They were leaving the Double Ys behind. What do you do with seventeen thousand unwanted prisoners? I asked myself, and I knew the answer. If you considered them an inferior form of humanity, you sent them to burn.
“They’re killing the Double Y clones,” I said.
I felt no urge to prevent the genocide. I could not stop it if I wanted to; but deep down, I did not want to stop it. The Double Ys were volatile, as unstable as primed grenades, and potentially more dangerous. The universe would be a safer place without them.
“Are they in Odessa?” I asked, halfheartedly wondering if perhaps there might be some way to lead them to safety. I would not put my life on the line to save the pathetic bastards, but I might warn them to go underground.
“Jerome, it’s on the other side of the planet,” Freeman said. Jerome was the second largest city on Olympus Kri.
“So it’s out of our hands,” I said.
Freeman said nothing.
Our conversation had hit a stalemate that Sweetwater broke when he contacted us over the interLink. “Gentlemen, you should be aware that the temperature on Olympus Kri has risen by six degrees over the last fifteen minutes.”
Six degrees, I thought, putting the Double Ys out of my mind completely. “That doesn’t sound so out of the ordinary,” I said. It was late in the morning . . .
“Was that change global?” Freeman asked.
“Global,” said Sweetwater.
“So at this rate, we’ll hit nine thousand degrees in another six months,” I said.
“The surface temperature is unstable; but for what it’s worth, we don’t believe this change is a preamble to the event,” Sweetwater said. “Still, you might want to get to safety as quickly as possible.”
“Have you notified the fleet?” Freeman asked. He meant the Unified Authority Fleet. The Enlisted Man’s Fleet had supposedly come to oversee the evacuation; the Unified Authority had come to conduct it.
“Yes, sir,” Sweetwater said. “They are on the last stages of the evacuation as we speak.”
There were so many transports climbing through the skies over Odessa, they looked like a swarm of flies. How long would it take to lift seventeen million people? At one hundred people per transport, it would take 170,000 trips. How in God’s name did we ever get ourselves into this speck-up? I asked myself. I knew the answer. We didn’t. This one was thrust upon us.
Sweetwater said a quick good-bye and signed off.
Freeman had an all-terrain armored truck waiting just off the airstrip. Without saying a word, he headed toward that truck, knowing that I would follow. And I did.
I walked to the truck and climbed in on the passenger’s side, pausing for one last glance at the metropolis that had been zoned for extinction. The air was still and quiet. The sky was crisp and blue and clear, with frothy clouds floating across it. Twenty miles away, downtown Odessa loomed like a vertical shadow, like a butte that filled the horizon. The thousands of smoke trails rising above the city looked no more substantial than the filaments of a cobweb. They rose in odd angles and twisted into the sky.
“I used to know a girl from Olympus Kri,” I told Freeman. “I met her when I was on leave.”
“So she was scrub,” he said.
“She was my first,” I said, feeling nostalgic. I could not remember her name, but I remembered her smile and her laugh. The truck’s engine growled like some kind of prehistoric beast, and I sat back and closed the door and wondered if
the girl had made it off the planet alive. I wondered if she remembered me.
We did not have far to drive. Freeman, as always, considered every contingency when he made plans. We cut across an empty suburb. I had seen many abandoned suburbs in the last few years, but I still got a haunted feeling when I saw them. Driving down avenues in which houses sat empty, the doors of some homes left open, I wondered if I would ever drive down neighborhood streets in which children still played.
Freeman veered toward the mountains, and I saw our destination. We would ride out the event in a power station that had been built into the side of a cliff.
Only the façade of the administrative offices was visible from the street. It was a three-story pillbox made of concrete and steel, with no effort given to ornamentation.
The land in front of the building was parklike, with sprawling hills, a manicured lawn, and a footbridge spanning a man-made river. Freeman drove us across this jade-and-sapphire setting and into a concrete alley that opened to a parking lot in which a fleet of heavy equipment sat unguarded—ladder trucks and cranes and bulldozers. Across the lot, the open maw of a subterranean bunker gaped from the side of a mountain.
“Picturesque,” I said to Freeman, who only grunted. He stopped the truck just inside the bunker, climbed out, and worked some buttons, causing a thick metal curtain to close behind us. Lights bloomed along the ramp leading down deep below.
“Think we’ll be able to exit the same way that we came?” I asked.
“There’s a back door if we need it,” he said as he climbed back in the truck. He had to work to wedge himself in behind the steering wheel. I would have offered to drive, but he would not have accepted the offer. Comfortable or not, he preferred to drive.
We drove down the spiraling ramp, passing floors with twenty-foot ceilings. The walls of the ramp were foot-thick cement. The subterranean structure housed massive turbines and generators. We had entered a shadowy underworld of concrete and steel, driving three floors down beneath the foot of a mountain.
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