Critical Asset

by Ian Tonnessen

  “Everyone who can stand up, get up!” Yazici yelled. “Get into that room!” Eleven of the hostages staggered into the accelerator control area and were forced face-down onto the floor by Sergeant Kervan. The other four remained in the corridor, either unconscious or still seizing from the shocks. Yazici left them to their fate and secured the control room door.

  Demirci stood in the center of the room, examining the master display of system operations. “The accelerator is definitely shut down, no power running through it…”

  “Can you bring it back up?” Yazici asked.

  “I’ll need to look around first, find out what they’ve done to the equipment before we try that.”

  Two of the MAKs set about searching the large space in opposite directions, peering around corners and equipment, while the others held the hostages at gunpoint. Demirci studied the large assortment of displays in the control area.

  “Minimum suppression levels of cosmic ray background for ”… shouldn’t that equation show a simple ? There are others… and... They’re not just producing antihydrogen; they’re experimenting with all sorts of antiparticles! Even ones which don’t exist in nature, they’ve been creating new types. Is it really possible? There… the filling pod they just removed was aligned to harvest antihypernuclei and resultant quark-gluon plasma after synthesis. Anticarbon! Nor are they experimenting; they’ve been stockpiling it! Normal carbon is more than twenty-thousand times as dense as hydrogen, and anti-elements follow similar rules for mass. My God, the potential energy in all those containment modules outside…

  Far down the beam line from the detectors Toprak shouted, “You! Come out of there! Hands on your head!” Jakub Lisowski, the room’s watch supervisor, emerged from behind a decelerator pipe. As they approached the control area, Demirci concealed his recent astonishment and walked over to them.

  “Hello to you, sir,” he said, clutching his sidearm. “I would like you to give me a tour. Show me everything that’s been done to take this equipment offline.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The White House – Situation Room

  08:56 a.m. (1356Z), 24 December 2065

  The Situation Room’s wall screen flickered, and on came the dour face of His Excellency Orhan Celik, President of the Islamic Republic of Turkey. Like President Loughlin in the Situation Room, he was standing in his own command center, surrounded by military advisors.

  “President Celik,” Loughlin began, “I would like you to think of this as a courtesy call. I expect it will be brief. Would you care to explain your nation’s action against our satellite?”

  Celik remained stone-faced. He replied in his native language, but the screen on the Situation Room’s wall auto-translated for Loughlin and her team. “Madam President, I do not know what deception is being performed, but let me be clear to you and to everyone there who is watching. Turkey is not responsible for this preposterous act. If we had done it, what do you suppose we would have to gain?”

  “The rocket originated from your nation, sir. Surely you do not deny this.”

  “I do not. However, I am told it was meant only for scientific collection. We are investigating this. But we detected its acceleration the same as you. My science advisor insists it could only have been powered by a significant amount of antimatter. You know this is something my nation does not have, nor do we have the facilities to produce it.”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t know that for certain, Mr. President. I only know that you don’t have the means to produce it legally, in deep space. But the power source did not come from us. As you know, we only have one facility which produces it in quantity, the same facility whose communications were cut off by your missile.”

  Celik glared at his counterpart. “Madam President, conflicts among nations have often begun by stratagems of deception, have they not? There is indeed a deception happening here, and it is being perpetrated by powerful forces. I am obliged to believe this is your deception, because I know it is not mine. Please understand this plainly: any aggression against my nation by yours will be met by retaliation.”

  Loughlin nodded in the direction of the Joint Chiefs before turning back to Celik.

  “As I said, Mr. President, this has been a courtesy call. Please keep this channel available. I expect you’ll wish to call back.”

  Loughlin signaled to Diandra Stone, who switched off the video link even before Celik could respond.

  “Most effective with him if it’s short and to the point, I think.”

  “You didn’t bring up the cables in the Med, ma’am,” said Drennan.

  “We still haven’t proved it was them, but it’s obvious that it’s no coincidence. Talking about it doesn’t really matter anyway. They’ll know our thoughts on the cables in a minute. Our next move will cover our response for them as well as for the satellite.”

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs looked up from his link with SPACECOM. “The orders have gone through, Madam President.”

  * **

  Onboard Theodore Roosevelt, the orders came up on the screens in the C2C: the president had approved Selected Attack Options 206-46 and 560-6. The capacitors in two of the ship’s four coilguns had already completed charging and the cannons trained towards their pre-selected targets. Upon receiving the orders, the captain had only to press a button to acknowledge them and allow the ship’s AI to open fire. He did it within a second.

  Instantly, the first cannon’s capacitors discharged half a million amps into its superconductors, accelerating the Mk-8 projectile inside and shooting it from the barrel at nine kilometers per second. The second coilgun fired two seconds after the first.

  Roosevelt was positioned eight hundred kilometers above the Aegean Sea. The Mk-8s scorched through the atmosphere at almost vertical angles, and they needed less than a minute of flight time before simultaneously reaching their targets.

  The first round struck the hilly southern coast of Gokceada Island, outside the western entrance to the Turkish Straits at the Dardanelles. The bridge crew of an Italian merchant ship twenty kilometers away gasped in surprise upon seeing and then hearing the near-deafening explosion, as the shockwave raced across the sea surface and a plume of water and dirt rose hundreds of feet into the air. Some people in the small town on the island’s western coast were knocked off their feet as the earth shook, but nobody was close enough to ground zero to be hurt. The only casualty was the military fiber optic line connecting the island’s defense garrison with mainland Turkey. Ground zero was the line’s unmanned shore landing station.

  At the same moment two hundred kilometers away, the space launch pad at Cigli Military Air & Space Facility –now empty since the launch of the Isyan “probe” the previous morning– exploded with the same shocking force. Every north-facing window in the eight story Space Operations Center over a kilometer away, including Ozker Ozcan’s office, shattered as the concussion slapped against everything on the base. Inside the building, dozens of people were hurt from being knocked to the floor or from flying shards of glass, though nobody was killed. The injured included many of the sixty Iron Wolves troops who had arrived at the facility within the last hour to investigate the Isyan incident. People outside the building either lay unconscious on the ground or they stumbled about in a deafened, dazed stupor, the blast having literally rattled their brains.

  Dirac Station – Accelerator Control Room

  1447Z, 24 December 2065

  The accelerator is down hard, Demirci thought. They dumped the entire positron line’s coolant and caused a magnetic quench, and now half the quadrupole superconductors are totally corrupted. Ruined. With them, so is Plan A. There’s no way to fix this, not without bringing in new magnets and installing them. It would take days even if the station had them here, but there aren’t nearly enough spares.

  The man they captured had described everything his people did to sabotage the equipment, though he didn’t mention venting the coolant. He knows it’s not going to be repaired. But does h
e know that I know that much? Either way, the MAKs have no idea. What I need now is time.

  Jakub Lisowski stood in front of his supervisor’s desk next to the eleven hostages from the exomatter labs. Five of the armed intruders surrounded the group. The tall, sharp one stood behind him.

  “My friend,” Demirci said, putting his hand on the top of Lisowski’s back while the others watched and listened. “We are going to bring this accelerator fully back online. We will use it to continue antimatter generation, and my comrades and I will collect no less than two kilograms of antihydrogen. It will be contained in one of your standard storage pods.”

  Jakub stuttered. “But... I don’t think that–”

  “Yes, we can do it,” Demirci said. He unholstered his sidearm and jammed the barrel to Jakub’s back, just behind his heart. “It may take some time, and we may need more of your people to help, but we can do it. If you’re absolutely sure that we can’t get it working again, then I suppose there would be no reason not to shoot you right now.”

  “Yes, of course we can,” he said, shaking and breathing hard.

  “Good answer! Now please, have a seat and relax for a minute before you urinate on yourself.” On the other side of the room, Toprak and Kervan shared a mutual look which read I didn’t know he had it in him.

  Demirci put Jakub and the eleven exomatter lab workers to work on rebooting the accelerator from the control consoles, then walked out of earshot with Yazici.

  “I can’t get all this working again with just me and him, or at least not configured to mass-produce antihydrogen,” he whispered. “And these other hostages don’t normally work in this space. We’ll need more technicians familiar with this equipment. About half a dozen people escaped before we took this place, but there should be others in the Hub cafeteria right now. I’d like to go there and sort through them, so we can bring back the people we need.”

  “If you’re sure that’s what it takes.”

  “I’m afraid so. The sabotage they did here is extensive. I can’t be sure everything will be repaired properly, and even after threatening him he could still be daring and do something to undermine us that I might not notice. It would be better to have more appraisals on the repairs before we switch it all back on.”

  “None of the vital equipment is destroyed, right? We don’t need any spare parts, we only need to undo what they did?”

  “It looks that way, yes,” Demirci lied. Spare superconductors would be great, though he knew the station wouldn’t have anywhere near enough for the entire positron line. His preparation had been thorough. But Yazici wouldn’t know a corrupted superconductor from a functional one if his life depended on it.

  “Very well,” Terzi said over the comms screen after Yazici called and explained what had happened. “Captain, split your group into two for now. Heavyweight will escort Doc back up here while the remaining three of you hold the accelerator and supervise repairs until Doc returns. I want Doc and Heavyweight to sprint down the starboard corridor, by the way, weapons ready. Nobody from the warship has tried walking into it yet, but with all of you back aft they could go out and set up charges whenever they realize it’s empty.”

  * **

  “I can’t believe this,” Jake Waters said to one of his engineers. “It’s surreal.”

  “It sounds like your hydro-bombs have been put to some good use.”

  “Yeah. Still, I was optimistic. I was even looking forward to seeing the station again, if only for a few hours.”

  He and three of his engineers, the only people in his department still onboard the ship, walked through the small mob of forty-odd Dirac scientists in the Lincoln’s mess decks. Some of them received medical attention by the ship’s corpsman, and all of them looked frightened. Riding the cargo lift down to the Labs dock, everything became even more dreamlike. There was a row of eight covered bodies along the wall, shipmates whose identities he did not yet know, and streaks of drying blood on the floor. Other shipmates held his jerry-rigged bombs while they stared through hatch windows at the hallways beyond, waiting to see a hint of movement. Three Dirac people talked with seven others who had just arrived in the dock after fleeing the accelerator control room, and all of them looked shaken.

  At the counter along the aft wall, Captain Pierce focused on a paper map of the station while she spoke over a comms link to crewmembers spread out around the Labs. At the forward end of the dock, behind pallets of plastic chemical container drums, Commander Yates put his energy into interrogation. He furiously beat one of the intruders, a large man in an unmarked black military uniform whose hands and feet were bound behind him.

  “Tell me who sent you!” Yates smashed the man back and forth across the head with a stun gun. The man’s face was a bloody mess. “Do you speak English? Türkçe konuş? Hal tatahadath al arabiya? Habla fucking español? Talk, or so help me God I’ll find a blowtorch next.” The man remained silent and expressionless.

  Waters tried not to listen to Yates as he and his engineers approached their captain. “Ma’am, you asked to see me?”

  “Cheng, there you are.” Her face seemed tighter than normal, and her brow stayed furrowed as she spoke. “First, what’s the ship’s status? Can we detach and move out within a couple minutes’ notice if we need to?”

  “I’m confident of that much, ma’am. There’s only nine crew left on the ship. Doc Ford grabbed two guys from Ops department, and they’re tending to forty or so of the station’s people, but the rest are all in C2C. Yamada’s keeping an eye on everything from there. There’s not even anyone in Engineering Control right now, but as long as a few key people are back inside before we go, we can manage a high-g transit.”

  “Good. The exomatter fuel canisters are right over there, next to the XO,” she said, not actually looking at Yates.

  “I’ll have a couple of my guys set one up at our reactor straight away. And we’ll take a spare onboard for after we get home.” He pointed at two of his technicians, and they got to work.

  “What about comms? The relay satellite is down, but is there any way we can send off a message to somewhere else?”

  “Yes, ma’am, but only if we detach the ship long enough to maneuver away, so we can extend the laser comms suite. There’s no way to do it while we’re docked like this.”

  “I thought so. I’ll send the order to Yamada if I think it’s needed, but I doubt I’ll want to risk it until everyone is onboard.”

  Pierce motioned for Lynch and the other Dirac people to come over. “Folks, this is my chief engineer. I wanted to run another idea past everyone, including him. We only have people in a few of the labs back here, holding access points, and nowhere else in the station. Whoever these invaders are, they control most of it, and they’re gathering people as hostages in the Hub right now. Now we’ve lost access to the accelerator–”

  “Not exactly,” one of the new arrivals said. “They’ve got the room, but our sabotage is done. They won’t be able to repair it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Our supervisor stayed behind,” she replied. “Jakub only needed another minute. I’m sure he finished the job.”

  “Or died trying!” another said. “We can’t be sure yet.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Pierce replied to the first one, “but either way, we don’t have much leverage over them. That’s what I want to talk about.”

  Yates walked over to join the group, breathing harder than normal. “That bastard’s not going to say a word. I’d like to get tougher with him, but I think it would take some time.”

  “No, enough already. Just keep him tied and under guard. Having him might be an asset. Besides, XO, we conduct ourselves according to the law of armed conflict. He’s a prisoner, and we’ll treat him appropriately.”

  ‘I think tougher is appropriate, Captain,” Yates said, raising his voice a bit. His Louisiana drawl was clearer than normal. “That son of a bitch killed six of our people–”

  “–and whatever he
might tell us can’t be much worse than we’re imagining already,” she said, taking a breath. “As I was saying, we’re going to need some real leverage over them. They’re gathering hostages right now and trying to access the antimatter, but none of that does much good if they can’t fly home. Lincoln can fire on their ship, but we might not dare if they’re carrying precious cargo. Cheng, here’s a thought… we still have plenty of EVA suits onboard. Can we get a couple engineers over to their ship, get inside and sabotage the engines the way these folks from the accelerator room sabotaged their equipment? If these invaders are stranded, they may open up to negotiation.”

  “What about their hostages?” Lynch asked. “Our people. They’ll have well over a hundred. They could start executing them every few minutes until they get what they want.”

  “That’s leverage we can’t match,” Yates agreed.

  “I know, but there’s no reason to think we can just charge into the Hub and rescue them. That’s why we’ve got to do something else, and do it fast. Killing hostages without telling us about it gives them nothing, and they haven’t tried to contact us yet. So, let’s get ahead of that.”

  “You can try mucking about with their ship, Captain,” Lynch said, “but when I said ‘get what they want’ I also meant repairs to their ship. They don’t need to take one hundred and sixty-five hostages back with them. They could kill dozens until you’re forced to fix what you’ve done, and then they’d still get away. No, we must find a way to attack them and put them down.”

  “Captain, if I may,” Will Groves said with his arms folded. “It seems that the problem with attacking them is that your people are outgunned. I mean, we all are. Maybe it doesn’t have to be that way.”