Anne Miller was out of her seat.
“Prepare to abort sequence,” said the launch controller.
“No!” I said. “Keep it going.”
“That’s right, sir.” A different controller, now.
“What do you mean, ‘that’s right?’ ”
“Mr. Polaski said there were to be no aborts.” She glanced backward over her shoulder. Polaski was standing by the door.
Number Three burst from the ledge. It hesitated, then rotated and arced gracefully into the sky.
“Three on profile.”
“Hold abort.”
“Data on Number Two, steering vane coupling failure.”
“Six released.”
Number Four dropped and rotated, then climbed into the sky behind Number Three. Controllers let out their breath. Charlie Peters looked down at the crushed phone in his hand.
“Seven released.”
T
hree-forty-two released.”
“Three-three-niner on profile.”
“Two-seven-seven insertion and close.”
“Three-one-eight fan separation failure, auto destruct.”
Miller frowned. We were inserting better than ninety percent into orbit, but she wasn’t accustomed to a kind of hardware that failed.
“Are they still okay?” I said.
“Oh, yes, of course. You lost both ships carrying agricultural programs, and both ships carrying history and the arts, but all the mission-critical groups are still redundant.”
There had been more permanent loses on the airfield, however. The huge fan bearings on one of the ships had oscillated when at full power and the blades had shattered, killing six of Elliot’s people in the hail of shrapnel. An airlifter crew had gotten the coasting ship off the rails just in time for the next one.
The same airlifter crew had then tried to pull the troublesome Eighty-Three out of line, but the sled had caught on a pylon. The lifter crashed between the rails and burned, killing all eleven of the crew.
Another ship’s nitrogen hose hadn’t sealed off on decouple—it lashed about like a steaming snake and froze the tanker driver in a cloud of ice.
“Three-forty-six release.”
I nodded to Rosler. “I’m going up to see the last ones off. I’ve got a phone. Charlie—you want to ride up with me?”
I looked for Polaski, but he wasn’t anywhere in the command complex. Something was nagging me about him.
“Aye, I’ll come,” said Peters. “Can’t take much more of this, I know.”
We found a cart in the corridor.
“Eddie, the girl in there said it was two thousand hours to the tunnel. But I thought the torus was close to Venus’ orbit and only twenty days away. Not eighty-something.”
“Well, even less than twenty under steady thrust. And we could wait for the torus to line up between us and the sun and get there even faster.
“The problem is that Holzstein’s Star is north of the plane of the ecliptic, the plane the planets orbit in—Holzstein’s is above it. So we’ve got to go through the torus at an angle from underneath the plane aiming up. If we made a beeline from here to the torus we’d be in the plane all the way and we couldn’t turn the corner.
“So what we do is break them out of Earth orbit, then fire their engines to slow their orbit around the sun, so that they plunge toward it. At the same time we accelerate them hard out of the plane southward. They pass under the sun and the sun whips them back up through the torus northbound. The torus steers them in and fires one through every twelve seconds for over an hour, which is as fast as it can recharge.”
“My word,” said Peters.
T
he boosters’ fury firsthand was like nothing I could have imagined. The ground shook and the wind swept back like hammer blows in the confined cavern.
The next-to-last ship shredded its steering vanes. The shock wave from its destruction pounded down the cavern with a concussive force that shook the entire island. Workers bled from their ears. Many of them stumbled as they worked, dazed from the exhaustion and the pain.
The last ship roared off of rail four an hour and twenty minutes after it had all started, then without pause the work of clearing the wreckage and tearing up the rails began.
The first phase of the journey had begun. Our messengers had been sent, our minions cast to the heavens. Yet there was no joy in it, no release from the fear. No rest from the growing urgency. Instead, their departure had only brought closer our own launch, which was something I feared nearly as much as I feared staying behind. I would go through with it, but I feared it. I would go through with anything.
I started down to the central complex to begin the long night of inspecting the orbiting ships. We would study each of them with interferometers and cameras from the neighboring ships, to make sure it wasn’t damaged or out-of-round from the launch. No stray sliver of metal could be allowed to touch the torus on the way through.
I shared the elevator with a field ambulance and troops heading for their beds. But three minutes into the drop the elevator stopped.
An instant later it began accelerating back upward at many times its normal rate. It pressed us into the floor. Speakers burst into life at the same time as the massive doors rolled open in mid-shaft. Bare rock rushed by.
The ambulance driver spun his wheels and moved to one side. The pedestrians struggled against the extra weight to reach the benches. I made it to the communications panel at the front and punched for the tactical channel.
“—rim defense to withdraw! Personnel on the back wall, clear apron Foxtrot for incoming airborne. You’ve got ninety seconds. Calhoun, Tawali, Pham, I need you on Tac now. Lift three is for personnel only, people, clear it out! Outbound with hot engines, kill them now. There will be no mobile defense—repeat, no Tac-Air. Bates and Kolawski, get onto your people now. I want them down.”
Sirens grew louder and the elevator slowed.
“Stand on the benches,” I shouted, “stand on them. Get your feet up!”
The elevator was still two feet below the ledge when trucks began hurtling across the lip with their horns sounding, racing for the back wall. Other trucks hammered into their bumpers to smack them up against the tires in back. Work platforms flew in to crash down onto the trucks’ roofs in a shower of sparks.
Warning horns blared as the other two elevators started their drops. Ours was only half full, and the doors stayed open. Outside on the apron waited thirty soldiers. Standing farthest from the elevator was Michael Bolton.
These were his Special Operations Engineers. Techno-commandos, the regulars called them. They’d been on the airfield to take control of the launch if the MI failed.
Helicopters beat toward us from the opening at full speed, inches off the ground. They struck the apron still moving and spun to a stop outside the elevator doors. A hundred or more men and women poured out, followed by Pham, harassing and cursing them through a megaphone. When they were inside the elevator, Bolton’s troops folded in behind them, Bolton last. He motioned to the cameras and nodded to me to hit the all-clear. The elevator sank out from under us.
Pham climbed to the top of a truck and shouted at her troops.
“Okay, ladies, you listen good now. Their majesties not say why we run, but we not run too far, okay?” Shouts of approval.
“So no ready-room, no ready-talk—we stay ready, okay? At the doors down below, where we can move quick or someone’s got to fuck with us, yes?”
“Yes Sir!”
“Yes Ma’am!”
“Yes, Sir, Sweetie!”
They were Technical Warfare graduates and no fools, but they loved Pham. She stood on the truck with her hands on her hips and her feet apart, very sleek in short hair and jumpsuit. It was made of some slick, dark material stretched tight around her thighs and hips. Polaski said she slept indiscriminately with her troops, men and women alike.
She saw me when I tossed my phone to Bolton.
“So! Mr. N
o-Balls comes out of his little hole to see real world, hah?”
Bolton waved me over.
“Pay her no mind, lad. She’s harmless.” He frowned at the phone. “Nothing. I can hear them quite losing their little minds down there, but I can’t get any of them to talk to me.”
“I know. Let’s make a run for it.”
“Right.”
The elevator crashed to a stop and we raced to Operations, stopping in front of the windows. Bolton stopped half way out of the cart.
“Good God in Heaven.”
The main screen in Air Defense was painting a hundred-mile radar picture, and for a moment I thought it was covered with interference spots. But it wasn’t. It was showing incoming aircraft, in staggering numbers. Air Defense was in chaos.
It didn’t make sense, though. It couldn’t be the Chinese—we’d watched them leave after the launch. Someone else had to have been waiting for the Chinese to go. And in these numbers it had to be a major power, or one of the consortia, ready to risk everything for the batteries. But why wait until after the drones had launched? The drones were no good to anyone without us to run them.
Nevertheless, it was clear what we would have to do. We would have to use the trap I’d laid the day the first battery had rolled off the line.
I shouted for the signals coordinator.
“Give me the main screens. Patch all signals up front.” He looked confused.
“Now!” I pushed him away from the central console and kicked the master reset underneath. Up and down the room people shouted as their screens went blank. Rosler whipped around and started toward me, Polaski behind him.
“What the fuck did you do, Torres?”
I typed INTERLOCK.
“You’ve taken down the airfield radar, Torres!”
The monitor on my console cleared. Code that had lain dormant for years began to scroll past.
“They won’t attack the cavern,” I said, “if they don’t know the radar is out.” I pressed a key. “Remember I said I would seed the batteries with a second trap? They’re about to get trapped. Any sign of who it is?”
I picked up a light-pen and aimed it at the main overhead screen. When the image was ready, the light-pen would make a bright circle that could be read by the computers.
The main screen came up with a map of the area, hollow rectangles indicating each of the approaching aircraft.
But the rectangles were empty.
I stared at the screen, suddenly disoriented. What had I forgotten? Each of the rectangles should have had one or more twelve-digit numbers inside it. If the aircraft were using our batteries.
Nothing. They had to be using the batteries. Every aircraft in the world used them. I looked at the code on the monitor.
Perfect. I broke out in sweat. Polaski and Rosler and the controllers watched me as the aircraft closed in. I tried to think.
I keyed for a signals trace and backed through it.
Nothing. Farther back. Nothing.
There!
“How in the hell?” It wasn’t possible.
When the island had been built I’d had an extra line of antennas mounted on the ridge, and I’d tested every one of them personally. But now—nothing. Impossibly, not one of the antennas was feeding us a signal. More aircraft appeared on the horizon.
“Where’s Elliot?” I said.
Then I was shouting. “Where’s Elliot? Get me Elliot, now! And ridge cameras. I need to see the ridge!”
Elliot was out of breath when he arrived, and his clothes were black with oil and dried blood.
“Tyrone, my perimeter antennas are dead! Now, listen—all of their cables feed into the main mast on the ridge, so there’s something wrong at the mast. Here, look.”
Beyond the heavy antenna mast on the ridge a mile above us, unmistakable shapes slid up over the horizon. Frogs.
“Get us infrared, if you would, please,” said Bolton.
Infrared overlays came up—no hot targets. The frogs were running on our batteries after all, no longer nuclear.
“Hell, Torres,” said Elliot, “we unplugged those antennas years ago. Look at the base of the mast, here—that’s the connector hanging next to the empty socket. No one knew what the hell it was for, and Polaski needed the juice for his antennas.”
“Polaski’s antennas? What fucking antennas?”
“Take it easy. You’ll have to ask Polaski.”
I stared at the connector on the screen, inches away from its socket. Gunships and frogs slid around the island and into position.
“Well,” said Bolton. “We seem to have spiked our own cannon, haven’t we?”
No one answered.
With the connector plugged back in we could knock out every one of those aircraft instantly. Without it, nothing else would matter.
“Right,” said Bolton. “If I understand correctly, you need that small round object, there, plugged into that small round hole, there. At which point you are going to do some mysterious thing.”
“Yes.”
“Very well.” He reached for a phone. “Roscoe, the sled. You and I and two volunteers.”
He picked up a radio-telephone headset, then leaned closer to me. “Sailing a bit close to the wind, aren’t we, Torres?” He turned for the door. “I’ll be on Tac. Follow me with the cameras, please.”
The room went quiet. Technicians worked to reload the programs I’d dumped. Attackers deployed across the map. They were avoiding the eastern end of the island with the opening, putting up a wall of pickets on the other three sides, instead.
The largest rectangles on the map moved up against the north and south walls of the island. They were armored frogs, sliding in below the island’s roof-line, out of sight of our cameras. Blunt pulse-lasers protruded from their armor, deadly relatives to the diggers that had made the island in the first place.
In the corridor outside the lower elevator doors, Pham’s troops made way for Bolton’s troops bringing up the tunneling sled. It was heavy and ugly, ninety feet long, welded onto twelve flying work platforms. At the stern, like the deck-house on a barge, a cage protected the air-tight cabin. Forward of the cabin lay an invention we’d borrowed from the ill-fated Major Cole: sixty-four synchronized diggers and heaters, stripped of their housings and welded into a single tunneling gun. It had many times the power of a battle laser, but the sled was very, very slow.
Whump. The command complex shook under a heavy blow.
Again. Whump. Equipment rattled.
“North wall, right up against us here. Tunneling in with those lasers.”
While the rest held onto their chairs and listened, I went over to Polaski and hit him in the chest. I hit him again, pushing him against the wall.
“What antennas, Polaski?”
“Jesus, take it easy. They’re just listening antennas, Torres. A few inside, a few outside. Nothing you needed to know about.”
“And why the fuck not?”
“Why the fuck not? Because you would have pissed and moaned and dicked around about privacy and ethics and crap like that and wasted everybody’s time making yourself feel better—that’s why not.”
“God damn it, I’m running this—”
“That’s right, Torres. You’re running it and you want to win so bad your prick hurts. You want your little picket fence in the sky no matter what it takes and I’m getting it for you. And that means there’s going to be shit you don’t want to know about, doesn’t it?”
I stared at him.
“Isn’t that right, Torres? You never want to know the shitty parts.”
I left him standing against the wall.
Bolton had the tunneling sled into the center elevator. How was he going to reach the connector, though? Tunneling up through half a mile of rock would take hours, but his only alternative was to go out through the opening, up the eastern face, and back along the ridge. Which he couldn’t do.
Up on the airfield, a frog’s laser barrel slid above the lip and began
aiming bursts at the middle elevator’s blast door. I reached for a microphone.
“Bolton, there’s a burner on the doors to your elevator shaft. When you reach the top and open your inside doors, that blast door’s all that’s going to be between you and the frog.”
“His position?” A grid snapped onto the screen.
“Inclination zero, azimuth three decimal niner left. I say again your left, three decimal niner.”
“And where is he targeting, please?”
“Bottom center, middle doors.”
Inside Bolton’s elevator, the sled floated up to the ceiling so that it wouldn’t slam into it when the elevator stopped. Then it moved to one side, still facing the doors.
“Open my inside doors, please.” The doors slid aside to reveal the shaft speeding by.
Suddenly the elevator flared white as Bolton fired his entire bank of diggers in the confined space. The picture went blank.
Looking at the outside of the outer doors, from cameras up on the airfield, the frog was rapidly enlarging a gaping hole in the elevator’s blast doors. Then all at once a patch at one of the upper corners of the doors, away from where the frog was firing, burst into flame. It grew brighter and brighter, then a bolt of fire lanced through it and down the full length of the cavern into the frog. The frog spun away.
The sled immediately pushed through the new hole and rose to the cavern roof for its run to the opening.
“Listen!” One of the controllers cocked an ear and held up a hand.
Nothing.
The room shook from another blow, but soundlessly.
“There!” A high-pitched whine, coming through the walls right after the blow.
“Heaters. They’re blowing chunks out of the wall with lasers, then clearing it with heaters. How long to go through a hundred-foot-thick wall, do you think?”
“Not very long.”
“How the hell do they know where to tunnel, though? That wall is six miles long and a mile high, and it all looks exactly the same from the outside.”
“Someone told them.”
Why, I thought. Why now?
Whump. Then the whining again, louder.
“There he goes!”
A Grey Moon Over China Page 12