Chronicles of the Stellar Corps: Sassy

by Bernard Paul Glover

  “So are you gonna share with us what is so special about this house?” Soren asked.

  Smith continued to grin as he explained, “You see, behind that second door was a deep staircase leading to a fully stocked and lead-lined bomb shelter, built way back in the 1960’s.” Smith paused to let his information sink in.

  “These ‘preservationists’ had evolved, by the end of the 20th Century, into an urban militia. Not only did I find the key component for my bomb, I also had the perfect place to build it. Down deep in that shelter where I found the plutonium, I also found protective suits and all the tools I needed. That was two weeks ago. I finished the device yesterday.”

  Everyone sat stunned. Eventually Soren spoke up again. “So, that’s step one. Now how do you leave an atom bomb in Manhattan with enough lead time to get off the Island to somewhere safe, before it blows up, without the bomb being found?”

  “I don’t,” Smith answered smartly. “I’m not using a timer. The bomb has been assembled in two pieces. The device itself is one, the other is the detonator. I have enlisted Remi Saint-Jacques and Jack Boliker to carry it by subway into Times Square, slap the detonator into the bomb and flip the switch.”

  “How did you manage that?” Pat Little asked.

  “Boliker is a psychotic with a messiah complex; a saviour looking for a chance to die for the cause. Remi is just plain suicidal. I offered him a chance to make his suicide count. I promised that when they build the ‘ground-zero’ for Manhattan there will be statues honouring both of them. That sold them.”

  “So, when do we go?” Harry Croll asked.

  “On the last weekend of June; the way I see it, after the mess that Earth Alone made at last year’s Unity Day celebrations, the cops will be much more vigilant this year. But I still want it to happen as close to July 17th as possible. If we wait any longer than the Saturday before Unification Day the more stringent security will be in effect. We would never be able to smuggle the device into Times Square.”

  “About that,” Soren came back, “once you take it out of the bunker won’t it be detectable?”

  “I thought of that, so I’m having them wrap it in one of the protective suits, and carry it in a cloth sack. It will look just like a sack of laundry.” Smith was really pleased with his perceived cleverness.

  To Smith the plan seemed flawless, but then, every would-be “great man” makes one fatal mistake. Smith’s was not explaining to Boliker and Saint-Jacques why he wanted the two elements kept separate until they were in the Square.

  As they were preparing the device for transport the two would-be suicide bombers discussed their task.

  “The big part is very heavy,” Remi noted as he hiked the protective suit containing the bomb into the laundry sack. “…I think that you got de light half, no?”

  “Let me see how heavy the bag is?” Jack asked. Remi handed him the bag. “Shit, yer right. It weighs a ton,” Jack said as he hefted the weight. “Maybe we can trade off as we go. Like, you carry it to the subway, and after we get off I’ll take it as far as the assembly point in Times Square.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Remi said, “but your jacket is de one designed to hide de detonator. Dat means that you will be carrying both parts. We’ll never be able to put the two together in a hurry if someone catches us before we get to the assembly point, like Smith told us to do. You need be to able to take your jacket off to get the detonator out of dat special pocket.”

  “So, we’ll assemble it here.” Jack said as if it was the most obvious idea in the world. “I dunno why Smith didn’t tell us to put it together here anyway. What’s he afraid of?”

  Remi agreed. “Yeah, it makes sense to put dem togedder here. Eh? and maybe we should take de new elevated tramway dat opened last month. If da bomb is already assembled, we can set it off as de tram car crosses Times Square. From what I hear dat would cause a lot more damage…”

  Jack hesitated at first.

  “…and more people in all de boroughs of the city will see it.” Remi continued. “Even Smith didn’t think of dat one!” They grinned at their own brilliance, as Jack reached into his jacket, withdrawing the detonator.

  As Smith had promised, the two parts fit together with ease, and the bomb was quickly armed. Still pleased with their ingenuity, the pair began to climb the long staircase to the surface. All went well for the first ten or so steps. Then Remi began to huff and puff under the weight of the bomb.

  He stopped for a rest. Jack took the bag from him, initially intending to carry it for the remainder of the climb, but being in even poorer shape than Remi, he, too, was soon huffing and puffing.

  John E. Smith had not believed that the bomb would be too heavy for Remi to carry by himself. He never added in the weight of the protective suit that it was wrapped in. By the time the pair reached the top of the stairs both were exhausted. Things had reached the point where they were handing the bag back and forth every third or fourth step, and their handling of it got clumsier each time.

  When they were passing through the lead-lined door at the top of the stairs. Remi reached out to retrieve the bag from Jack, and that was when they learned the number one reason for travelling with a disassembled bomb.

  Just outside the upper doors to the bunker Remi tried to take the bag back. Both men were breathing heavily, worn out from the climb. It was no surprise when the bag slipped from Jack’s fingers, and tumbled back down the stairs, end over end. Two stairs down was all it took before the device landed on the detonator’s trigger.

  The lead-lined door was meant to protect against fallout, not an atomic blast within the structure. Only the fact that the house above was solidly constructed of concrete kept the blast from levelling all of Brooklyn and the southern part of Queens. As it was, the halls and windows of the structure above directed the blast outward over many parts of the borough.

  The house’s heavy duty construction confined the blast radius mostly to the eastern and southern two thirds of Brooklyn, and very select parts of the western half. Anything within a mile of the structure, however, was leveled. Many buildings in direct line of sight of the weaker parts of the house were melted or set aflame by the intense heat. The roof of the building was blown off, and most of the borough was blanketed with radiation from the nuclear cloud. More than half of Brooklyn’s population died in the blast or in the days that immediately followed.

  Ironically, it was League of Systems technology that prevented a more serious loss of life from the radiation following the cataclysm. Within minutes of the incident, teams from the Altinian Embassy sprang into action.

  Being a people who were unaffected by most forms of radiation, they began low level sweeps in skimmer ships, scanning for survivors, while spraying the area with a radiation inhibitor that would eliminate or drastically reduce the half-life of the radioactive fallout. Areas of highest concentration would still be “hot” for four or five hundred years to come unless they were treated much more extensively, but the ambient radiation could be kept to a level at which the population could survive with regular shots of a serum that terrans dubbed “anti-rad” developed by the League from Altinian physiology.

  The citizens back on Altin were immediately contacted by their ambassador, and were lining up to give what passed for Altinian blood, to make the serum that would be needed over the long term. Once these emergency measures were taken, other crews would be able to come in to clean up the radioactive debris and finish decontaminating the soil.

  One group that surprised everyone was a delegation from Galor Prime. They provided extra skimmers to transport rescue squads and ferry the wounded. As Galor Prime’s gravity is one hundred and twenty percent of Earth’s, their skimmers could carry much more weight. Teams of the squat-looking Galorans in radiation suits scoured the debris rescuing survivors and recovering bodies.

  This was surprising because Galor Prime was not yet a member of the League. They had just made their application to join, only, since the Galorans we
re actually an empire they were deemed ineligible for admission. Before they would be admitted, the League insisted that they convert their empire into a federated system of free planets while maintaining the services that Galor Prime now provided until each colony was once again self-sufficient.

  This, they assured the League, was in process. At the time of the explosion, Galor Prime was still just a diplomatic delegation in New York. To be able to aid in the rescue efforts the Galoran delegation stretched its resources on Earth to the limit. That did not go unnoticed.

  The actions of Humans Only devastated Brooklyn. Despite the best efforts of the League of Systems, a certain segment of the population suffered genetic damage, the following year there were many mutant births.

  In the months that followed, in many areas of the borough, law and order broke down totally, to be replaced by gang rule, particularly so in the more heavily damaged areas. In response, Manhattan closed the bridges while Queens quickly erected a wall along its southern border. They said that it was to keep out marauders. It was really to keep out refugees.

  Food was shipped into Brooklyn by skimmers, those vehicles introduced to Earth by the League. In the city they could operate as the terran travelpods did, but they were also capable of short and medium range flight so they could cross the river without using the bridges.

  As well, Mobile Medical Clinics, or MMCs, set up by the City of New York, visited the zone regularly to augment medical services still available in what was left of their local hospitals, but overall Brooklyn was deemed to be an extremely unsafe area.

  Within the borough there were pockets of undamaged homes. In most cases, they had been saved from the blast by high rise apartments that had surrounded them and protected them from the force and heat of the blast. Those who lived in these areas prior to the blast, afterward banded together in tight-knit community groups for mutual support and safety. They established community militias to protect themselves, and fortified their boundaries, forming enclaves.

  Initially, State and local governments conceived a comprehensive plan to stabilize the blast zone or “the zone” as it came to be called. The plan was never enacted. The political will required to spend that much money, and commit such great resources, just wasn’t there. Order and civilization in the zone had degenerated too quickly.

  In the beginning the National Guard took on the task of patrolling the borough, but that didn’t last long either. They were unwilling to get involved in potentially bloody battles with the gangs that had, or were trying, to take control. They were also forbidden to use the advanced weaponry they got from the League. Their new allies were unwilling to risk their advanced weaponry falling into “ganger” hands as it had back in 2070 in Central Park.

  Very soon the law of the jungle was the rule of the day. The gangs battled among themselves for supremacy. Beyond the enclaves, the outer-zone became a very dangerous place to live.

  The enclaves themselves, despite all the help from the State and the other boroughs, were limited in the populations that they could support. Many zone families attempted to join the enclaves, but it was believed that they would be too much of a drain on the enclaves’ limited resources. They were forced to live outside in the outer-zone. Their former homes destroyed in the blast, they sought shelter in what few public buildings had survived, or in the churches or schools still standing, or in the basements of bombed-out houses. They lived by scavenging in the destroyed areas and trading whatever they found for food and other necessities.

  Despite the danger, a form of commerce did emerge in the outer-zone. The need for food and other commodities gave rise to a group of merchants who formed the “outer-market”. They were a mixture of ordinary merchants, criminal fences and black marketers.

  The National Guard, on a limited basis, continued to send patrols into the zone from time to time, but they were not very effective at pacifying the borough. Soon they only entered the zone as protection for the Mobile Medical Clinics.

  In time, however, the real heroes did emerge. Special individuals arose to protect the zone dwellers and enclaves. They were often ordinary people who lived in the outer-zone; hiding among the ruins. They lived off the gifts that were gladly offered by the people of the enclaves. These heroes challenged the gangs. They protected, as best they could, the residents of the outer-zone, and warned the enclaves of impending attacks on their borders, at times taking on the gangers themselves. They patrolled the wastelands, moving against the gangs whenever they attacked the innocent. The residents of the zone called them “the hunters”.

  One other result of the explosion that devastated Brooklyn was that the Galoran application for League membership was fast-tracked, but the League still maintained one condition: that advanced League Technology would not be available to the Galorans until their empire was completely converted into a free federation.

  Despite their apparent sincerity, the Galorans asked for an extended period of time to negotiate freedom for all their colonies. They assured the League that the emancipation process would be complete within a century. If they were hoping that their promises would be enough to convince the League to lift the final condition, they were disappointed.

  For Earth, membership in the League, with its transfer of the promised technology, was a boon to research. New medical tech led to many breakthroughs in cancer research as well as diseases of the brain associated with aging, such as dementia.

  What surprised the League of Systems was the creativity and ingenuity of humans. Less than ten years after humans joined with fellow League scientists, already established lines of League research, in a great many areas, took surprising new directions. When humans were given the chance to work with the League’s top scientists they brought many new approaches to the research projects that were in progress.

  One of their first major developments was a breakthrough in starship propulsion. This next evolution in starship technology, the “Jump-ship” was literally leaps and bounds ahead of warp travel.

  Instead of using the warp of space to travel faster than light, Jump-ship technology allowed a starship to jump from one point in space to another, using a hyper-space technology, bypassing warp travel entirely. Jump-ships could still travel at warp speeds when necessary for shorter trips, but for greater distances they would make calculated jumps that could cover the same distance in only an hour that for a ship at warp fourteen would take a day.

  Family

  Sarah Maloney was born on July 1, 2331, the second child of Earth Senator Francis Maloney and Dr. Mary Maloney, and younger sister of four-year-old Peter. Right from the start it was evident that she was a precocious child. There wasn’t a single milestone in a normal child’s development that Sarah didn’t surpass early. It was as though she refused to be limited; nothing held her back.

  Immediately following the explosion in Brooklyn almost sixty years earlier, gangs from the zone were constantly finding ways to slip into Manhattan, even though the Brooklyn Bridge was sealed very early on to prevent such incursions. The gangs liked to kidnap the children of the wealthy Manhattanites for ransom. Most often the children were never returned. These days the incursions were a thing of the past, but many wealthy families still paid to have their children trained in self-defence.

  The Maloneys lived in a penthouse on Central Park West. Despite the building’s best efforts at security they knew that no place was perfect. So, though their home was well protected, Mary Maloney insisted that the children be taught to defend themselves. When Peter was eight Francis hired Sensei Hikaro Nakamura to train his son in various forms of self-defence.

  Sarah watched the first training session with great interest. Each time the master showed her brother a new movement she eagerly imitated it. While Peter was an excellent student it was young Sarah who showed the greater talent.

  “Mommy, I wanna train with Sensei Hikaro too,” she told her mother later, most indignant that her mommy would suggest that the four-year-old was too young to begin
her training yet. “I’m not too young!” she insisted. “I’m just as good as Peter!”

  Sensei Nakamura waited silently until Sarah left the room before he spoke to Mary Maloney. “She may express herself in what one might say is a bold or sassy manner,” he began in his usual peaceful way, “but the child speaks the truth. She is as good as her brother when it comes to the katas. I would not put her into randori just yet, but she has a natural talent. There is no reason for holding her back, and every reason to let her begin.” He smiled encouragingly, “My fee is the same either way.”

  Mary considered his words carefully. “She has always been precocious, and somewhat sassy,” she added with a smile. “It’s almost her nickname. Let me think about this and discuss it with her father. I’ll let you know tomorrow,” she told the sensei. He nodded his agreement and departed.

  True to her promise, Mary discussed the prospect with Francis that evening. “The master seems to believe that it would be a benefit to start her now. He says that she is at least as good as Peter…”

  Francis Maloney knew his wife well. “I sense that there is a ‘but’ coming,” he observed.

  “But,” Mary answered, in response to his prediction, “It’s the way she reacted when I said no. She is always so bold. I hate to give in. It can only reinforce her bad behaviour.”

  Francis smiled at his wife. “You’re worried that we’ll spoil our child,” he told her, “I wouldn’t worry. Remember last Christmas when there was that request by Fr. Alessandro for aid for the zone children? She volunteered to give them all her presents, even her new Baby Barbara doll, and you know how much she pestered us for that toy. Our daughter is a very special girl – a very good and loving girl. It’s just that she is also a very bright girl, well beyond her years. She expresses her mental superiority boldly.”