Keystone

by Talbot, Luke

  They watched the horror unfold from the screen built into the wall of the President’s office.

  “Mr President, Sir,” an aide entered the office bearing a clipboard and a grave face. She didn’t bother with further formalities, striding to the screen and tapping it abruptly. The mash-up of video feeds from surveillance satellites and various computer programs gave way to the video conference setup.

  “Neither Russia nor China are taking responsibility for the attacks on New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.” She passed the clipboard to the President. On it were some simple bullet-points in large bold font. The President took one look at the notes and discarded the clipboard on his desk.

  “They think we made it up? We tracked those missiles from their silos all the way here, and then bang!” he slapped his fist into his palm. “Three American cities wiped off the map.”

  “Mr President, there have been some reports coming to us from NASA. There were allegations made that one of the Satellite Defence Network contractors was planning an attack this afternoon.”

  “Any reason why we should believe them? This wasn’t mentioned earlier, so I’m guessing none of the Federal agencies knew anything about it?”

  “Well,” the aide looked straight into his eyes, “a counter terrorist unit was sent in as a matter of course, but we’ve not heard anything from them since. All communications with the team were lost shortly after they entered the contractor’s headquarters.”

  The President stared fixedly at the young aide. There was something cocky about the way she addressed him. A lack of respect of his judgement, he was sure. Right now ICBMs, the American counter-attack, were racing through the stratosphere on their parabolic trajectories that would take them to their targets on the other side of the planet. At the same time, the SDN was tracking dozens of similar weapons coming the other way.

  The Chief of Staff of the United States Army stepped forward and voiced what the President was thinking. He was a large man with deep-set, cold eyes and a lack of compassion she had always disliked.

  “Don’t doubt for one second that these attacks are real,” he pointed at the screen dramatically. “What do you think our enemy wants most of all? Do you think they want global destruction? Of course not!” he threw his arms in the air. “They want us to recall our weapons, while theirs head towards us as we speak. They want to take us out of the picture, while at the same time minimising any damage to themselves.”

  She looked around the room. These dinosaurs, she thought with contempt. She struggled hard to fight back her emotions. Her beloved Nation, at its knees, was about to wipe out half of Asia, and she was certain that it was a mistake.

  For even if the attack on the United States was real, the only just course of action was to not respond in kind. In the same way she abhorred the death penalty, she could not understand the basic premise that mutual destruction was in any way justifiable.

  “Mr President, Sir,” she said, taking great care to ignore the Chief of Staff. “I do thank you for your patience.” Humility was the best way to subtly get what you want, she had decided years ago when first faced with the egos of men. “Our counter attack will destroy China and Russia almost completely. If we are wrong, and NASA is correct, then we will have performed the first strike.

  “The Chinese are enraged by our destruction of their Pacific fleet, but at the same time they accept that the fleet’s counter-attack, authorised by Beijing, has caused considerable damage to military targets along the West Coast. They are willing to talk to avoid this escalating any further.”

  The President looked down at the clipboard on his desk; a bullet-point list of events, one by one, leading up to the now. He rubbed his chin pensively.

  Seeing the hesitation the Army Chief of Staff tried to interject but the aide quickly capitalised on her short advantage.

  “Our ICBMs are still in disarm range,” she said quickly. “We have less than two minutes to destroy them harmlessly in the upper atmosphere.”

  “And if their attack is real, and destroys us?” the Army Chief sneered.

  She didn’t take her eyes off the President. “Then if you still decide that a counter-attack is appropriate, the combined strength of our deployed nuclear submarine fleet and remaining domestic silos is still enough to destroy both China and Russia.”

  “Damn you,” the President muttered under his breath. Damn her, he thought, for sowing this seed of doubt. Counter-attack was justifiable, he knew that, but only with enough evidence on their side to make it clear-cut. “When will we have visual confirmation of the ICBMs launched against us?”

  “No sooner than five minutes, Mr President,” she replied. It was simple maths: they couldn’t confirm that the next wave of attack against them was real until their own counter attack was three minutes beyond the point of no return. In effect, the President had launched his nuclear weapons too soon, and based on too little evidence.

  “General,” he said addressing his Army Chief of Staff, “can you confirm we will still be in a position to launch a counter offensive should the weapons we believe to have been fired against us prove to be real?” He stared his aide in the eyes as he addressed the Chief of Staff, and she stared right back.

  There was a pause, followed by a frustrated intake of breath from the Chief of Staff. “Mr President, that scenario is not my recommendation. We will have a reduced capability to respond.”

  “Is reduced still enough?”

  “Yes,” the General eventually conceded.

  “Then cancel our attack,” he replied.

  “Sir, I must insist that –”

  “General, your orders are to stop the attack, now!” the President barked.

  Reluctantly, the General returned to his computer and tapped in the command sequence. Looking up briefly at the President and his aide, he shook his head in disgust.

  They then both entered the codes that would destroy their counter-attack in mid-air.

  The SDN received the command from Air Force One.

  A loop in the security protocol detected that this command had initiated a previously unused, new, function.

  The SDN was intelligent enough to know this function was new. It had been received during the latest update, which it had accepted. But it hadn’t yet been tested or proven. That wasn’t so unusual; as an advanced defence system, many of the SDN’s commands and events had yet to be exercised for real.

  Basic logic tests confirmed the validity of the commands, and ensured that the parameters received did not exceed the specified data types. A simulation of the function call was tried, and completed with success.

  The SDN was an array of independent devices positioned in Geostationary orbit above the United States of America. Covertly, of course, some dozen or so other satellites in lower non-geostationary orbits were also part of the SDN, allowing for surveillance of other parts of the world to be linked in to the defence network.

  Each independent satellite’s processing and memory contributed to the network’s ‘brain’, which could be thought of as self-aware insofar as it knew of its own component parts, what it was designed to do, and had an understanding of the importance of that role in the defence of the United States of America, which to it was simply a geographical location that contained a number of potential military and civilian targets.

  The SDN’s brain had proven the validity of the command it had received. It did not understand the logic of the command, as it was not part of the brain’s known scenarios. But human logic was still tantalisingly out of its reach, as for all its intelligence it was still simply a machine.

  Taking its attention away for a nanosecond from the highly classified simulation exercise it was still running, the brain executed the strange new function.

  “In an effort to achieve peaceful resolution of the current situation, we have issued the command to destroy our counter-attack until the nature of the threat to the United States of America is more clear.”

  The President addresse
d the video wall. His aide stood nervously behind him. She had made a potentially dangerous enemy in the Chief of Staff, who stood threateningly behind her left shoulder.

  The video wall was split between the Russian and Chinese leaders.

  “We are still tracking your missiles.” The Russian President didn’t try to hide his anger. “You must recall them now.”

  “A delay in your satellite feed, surely,” the President’s voice wavered.

  “You bluff!” cried the Chinese head of state. “You seek to destroy us and avoid us destroying you!”

  The President turned to his aide. “Can you confirm our offensive has been recalled?” he asked.

  She stooped over the computer screen on the desk and tapped a few commands. The results popped up. She typed the commands in again and the same result returned.

  “The command was received and confirmed. However,” she swallowed hard, not knowing where to look, “our offensive has not been recalled. It’s too late to recall them now.”

  “Mr President,” the Chinese President said with disdain, “Your acts of unprovoked aggression towards the People’s Democratic Republic of China and our friend and ally Russia have left me with little choice but to launch full counter offensives against the United States of America before we are left completely defenceless.”

  The video wall blanked out, and a stunned silence fell on the office.

  “So what command did you actually send?” The President turned on the Chief of Staff.

  “The command to self-destruct all of our missiles,” he said defensively. “I cannot understand why the command failed, when we can clearly see it was received and confirmed by the SDN.”

  “Unless NASA is right,” the aide said slowly. She turned the screen towards the men, showing the Russian and Chinese weapons finally reaching their targets around the United States. Seconds after each one hit, the live text feed below updated: RUS010:Negative Impact… RUS018:Negative Impact… RUS006:Negative Impact…

  One by one, the weapons reached their targets. One by one, the ground reports confirmed that no impact had occurred.

  “The SDN was compromised.” She let the fact sink in. “Our attack on Russia and China has not been recalled, and therefore we can probably expect a real attack from them to reach us in the next half hour.”

  The Army Chief of Staff looked at her screen and double checked on his own. His silence confirmed what she had said.

  “So, we have been deliberately provided with false information by our own defence systems, on top of the real nukes that blew up this afternoon. Whoever planned this knew we would possibly try to recall our own weapons, so made sure that wouldn’t work,” the President said, astonished.

  “God help us,” the aide whispered.

  Air Force One’s alarm system broke the long silence that followed. The Captain’s stern voice came over the speakers in the office.

  “Get the President to the evac’ pods, we are under attack!”

  Guards ran in to the office and bundled the President down a staircase that had opened up in the floor, leaving the Joint Chiefs and the aide above. Moments later, through the small window, they saw the starboard engine of the aircraft explode, severing the wing a third of the way along its length.

  The plane lurched to the right, inexorably falling into a downwards spiral in slow motion as the pilots valiantly battled with the one-and-a-third remaining wings to keep Air Force One as steady as possible while the President was evacuated.

  “Laser!” the Army Chief of Staff shouted. “The SDN has a built-in network of lasers designed to bring down ICBMs. Only they’re not as effective as we hoped – the power draw is too great and ICBMs move too quickly. We, on the other hand, are an easy target.”

  “Why did the SDN never try to use those lasers against the nukes that hit New York, Chicago and Los Angeles?” the aide asked in disbelief.

  They were being ushered down another flight of stairs to the secondary evac’ pods. The President’s pod was now clear, and the pilots had confirmed that Air Force One was going down.

  “They’re not active,” he said shaking his head. “Not technically allowed by international treaty. They’re not even supposed to be up there. But we still have them in case we need them.”

  “And you didn’t think that would be now?”

  Each evac’ pod took five occupants. She was relieved when she and the General were each herded into separate capsules opposite each other.

  “Like stopping the holes of a sieve with your fingers,” he shouted over to her as the door closed.

  The door to her own pod closed. She found herself sat next to a cook, two stewards, a man in a dark suit and a marine. The rockets on the evac’ pod fired and the negative G force pushed her against the restraints towards the ceiling. The cook’s harness was badly fastened and he knocked his head against the side of the cabin, losing consciousness instantly.

  She caught a glimpse of the crippled Air Force One through the small window in front of her, but any hope of seeing its fate was swallowed up by a blanket of clouds.

  The pod jerked sharply as the parachutes deployed to control its descent, and they floated gently down towards an already different world.

  Chapter 90

  Gail woke with a start, her dream replaced in an instant by the cold, grey ceiling above.

  The short paralysis that accompanied her frequent abrupt-awakenings no longer scared her; she had grown used to the effect long ago. George had explained to her that when dreaming, muscles were deliberately disabled by the brain, allowing free movement in dreams without endangering the body at rest. Sleep walking was the result of an error in this process. Conversely, and as was her case, when you woke suddenly you sometimes found yourself conscious in a still-paralysed body. He’d sounded so knowledgeable about it all until a little questioning revealed everything he knew came from a BBC documentary he’d watched over thirty years ago.

  In any case, Gail was used to the phenomenon now because her sleep pattern was completely messed up, and she almost always woke with a start.

  Her husband put it down to the added responsibility of parenthood; there was simply so much more to be worried about now that she was a mother.

  But she knew that was only part of the story.

  The fact was that the world was very different now. It was colder, bigger, and much more dangerous. They had lost so much many years before, and what little remained was that much more important to them all.

  And in the post-Chaos world, there was often little to distinguish the nightmares from reality.

  She was greeted by the chill southerly wind as she stepped out of the tent and into the dull morning. The faint circular glow of the sun barely managed to make its way through the clouds on the horizon, and she knew that would be all they would see of it until sunset when it might peek under the sheets of grey, if they were lucky.

  George beckoned her over to the fire, which was crackling soberly in the centre of the small clearing around which six tents had been pitched. There were three similar arrangements of tents in the clearing, which with their sixty-three inhabitants made up their nomadic village. The tents were far from the usual run-of-the-mill camping affair. Instead, they were Bedouin-style, like small beige houses with short walls and long sloping roofs. Inside, the bare minimum of furniture and rugs ensured that they were comfortable, yet mobile. They had been in their present location for several months now; since Spring.

  Spring, she thought. Now there’s a word that doesn’t mean anything anymore.

  She leant in to kiss her husband on the cheek and grab the tin mug of something they still referred to as coffee, but which bore little relation to its ancient cousin. If farmers still produced the beans in Africa, they were keeping it to themselves; as a rule, anything you couldn’t eat was a waste of land and effort, and trade had more or less stopped happening on any large scale. Gail had stopped caring what went into her coffee many years ago, and certainly wasn’t about to
ask what was in her mug on such a cold day.

  After taking a short sip of the acrid black liquid, she huddled up to the fire and used the heat of the mug to warm her hands.

  “It’s not that cold this morning,” George said, distantly.

  She shivered and leaned in closer to the short flames licking round the dry branches that had been bundled onto the fire. It was generating more smoke than heat, but to her it provided immeasurable warmth.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked. They were alone by the fire, which was unusual insofar as there weren’t that many other places for everyone to be.

  “Jake’s asleep, Ben’s out hunting with the others.”

  “You didn’t go with him?” she said, surprised.

  He shook his head and gave her a sympathetic smile.

  She hugged him back. “You and Jake should go along next time; he needs to be more active and you need to spend more time with him.”

  Even after the end of the world, it seemed, seventeen-year-olds were still teenagers, and their son was a prime example.

  “Agreed,” George nodded and poured some more coffee from the pot sitting next to the fire. “But we’ll be moving on soon, we’ll have plenty of time to stretch our legs then.”

  It wasn’t long before the twenty tents that made up their village were packed and bundled up as tightly as possible, then lashed to the sides of their six remaining donkeys. They were then weighed down with two twenty-litre tubs of drinking water each. As much as possible was carried by the sixty-three nomads, who led the animals back to the relative warmth of the north. The water would last them a couple of days, by which time they would have completed a third of their journey.

  Ben caught up with Gail and George, who were near the front of the caravan. Jake, as usual, was straggling somewhere near the rear.

  “Have you thought of what I said?” he asked them, nervously.

  They exchanged a quick look. “Yes,” Gail said after a while.