Critical Asset

by Ian Tonnessen

  There was a murmuring of agitated conversation around the room, including from Drennan and Stendahl. “Has Arcadia heard any communication from Dirac?” the Joint Chiefs chairman asked. “Any word at all?”

  “No, General. SPACECOM messages were sent there by way of Arcadia, but there’s been no reply.”

  “How long before it happens?” Loughlin asked.

  “Based on Arcadia’s data, which we cannot verify but are confident in its accuracy, within thirty minutes from now.”

  Shocked expressions appeared around the room, some phony and some genuine. They subsided quickly, but none of those already in the know had to push the ensuing conversation in the needed direction. The pieces were finally where they were supposed to be. As the catastrophe loomed, it was clear as crystal who was responsible.

  Five minutes later, the Military Committee of the Democratic Alliance sent out orders from its headquarters in Brussels to DA commands in all forty-two of its member nations. Military forces were to immediately upgrade their readiness level to Defense Condition Two.

  Iron Wolves Regional Headquarters

  Antalya, Islamic Republic of Turkey

  12:20 am, 25 December 2065 (2120Z, 24 December)

  Oz’s world spun all around him, though the nausea that accompanied it somehow didn’t bother him. He had already vomited onto himself once, but the two pleasant men speaking to him didn’t seem to care. He no longer noticed the pounding heart in his chest or the sweat which now drenched his body, and he did not even remember that there used to be a voice deep in his mind telling him not to say anything.

  “This ‘central committee’, you mentioned? Who is in charge?” the polite older man asked.

  “C-Cand... Candemir,” Oz stammered, smiling but drooling. “The genrall… Cand…” A bout of intense coughing gripped Oz for a few seconds before he recovered himself.

  The staff physician monitoring Dr. Ozcan’s vital signs stepped away from his screens to the back of the room and whispered into his director’s ear. “General, there is serious atrial fibrillation, and we’re flirting with an ischemic stroke. A seizure could mean brain damage or death. If I don’t dilute the amobarbital soon, we could lose him.”

  The director dismissed his concerns with a hand wave, and whispered, “Doctor, you will maintain this level of narcoanalysis until I say otherwise. I’d like to keep him here for a long time and wring his brain like a lemon, but urgency requires that we keep pressing even if we push past his limits.”

  The physician returned to his monitors while the director typed another encrypted text message to President Celik.

  URGENT.

  Insurgent leader is likely OKK head Gen. D. Candemir. I am ordering my service to locate and arrest him.

  Interrogation of traitor Ozcan ongoing. Note: I am prioritizing urgency of information extraction over subject endurance. Detainee may soon expire.

  * **

  President Celik switched off his personal tablet and returned to the other heads of state on his screens, meeting again to discuss the DA threat.

  Despite his earlier warnings about the possibility of Dirac Station being destroyed and driving the world into war, the HM leadership hadn’t yet raised their own alert level beyond Yellow, which matched the DA’s DEFCON Three. The Caliphate’s chancellor was on Celik’s side, also believing that the DA were preparing for war, but he wanted more proof. The Americans had so far only retaliated for the missile by striking two minor sites inside Turkey, neither of which had killed anybody. The alliance’s vile station was still in the sky, and few others in the HM liked the idea of signaling an unwarranted escalation to the entire DA.

  Celik addressed the conference. “Brothers, my security services inform me that we are closing in on the organizers of this treachery. I’ve just been informed that the apparent leader of the would-be coup in my country is one of my own generals. We are tracking him down now.”

  There was chatter among the other conference members with their own staffs. Chancellor Shadid of the United Caliphate then addressed the session.

  “We are investigating an associated organization in my own country, and there appears to be some truth to it,” Chancellor Shadid added. “However, the imperialists have not raised their own alert level beyond ‘DEFCON Three’, which is what it was when they launched their strikes against Turkey. President Celik, I must say you have been most tolerant in refraining from retaliation.”

  “As I discussed I would. The pause in tension should give us time to de-escalate, and time to root out the insurgents among us. But brothers, please remember the intelligence I conveyed about Dirac Station earlier. If there is indeed an attack there being made in our name, we must stay ready to defend ourselves from the blame. Now is not the time to lower our guard.”

  Every HM leader understood the tightrope their alliance had to walk, knowing it could decide their fates. A few preferred to lean their balance on the side of nerve, while others preferred to lean towards caution. With Turkey being the apparent focus of the DA’s treachery, Celik knew he must brace for war until their scheme either culminated or fizzled. But Celik and Chancellor Shadid both knew how the grandstanding third of the three primary members would respond.

  “Your intelligence source also said it should have been destroyed hours ago,” said President Kalwar of Pakistan. “Perhaps it would be best to assume that by now such an audacious plan was either incorrect or has failed, and we ought to take the lead in de-escalation. India, which is not a part of the alliance, is still at a high level of alert. Having all our countries ready to strike is perilous even if our intentions are for peace, and the risk of disaster increases on all sides the longer we remain at alert. If one air drone misinterprets another’s motions near our borders, or if one hotheaded missile commander in Kashmir fires off a loose shot, then soon enough we are all dragged into war. Decreasing our coalition’s general readiness from Yellow back to Green seems prudent enough, if Turkey retains its own alert level.” The leaders of most of the coalition’s minor members voiced their agreement.

  General Bera, the supreme military commander of the HM forces, interrupted the conversation from his headquarters in Riyadh. “Brothers, please forgive this disruption. I’ve just verified that the entire alliance has increased their own defense condition from Three to Two. This is a major escalation–”

  Chancellor Shadid leapt to his feet. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “Sir, it means that they are priming for war. Specifically, it means that all their air and nuclear forces are on fifteen-minute readiness, all naval combatants must get underway and await orders, and ground divisions are assembling and making ready for transport. With their orbital ships escalating to their highest alert level, it means they could launch limited strikes within minutes. If they intend a more general attack, they’ll likely need at least another four hours or so for maximum strike capability, at least from what we know of their war plans.”

  “You wish to raise our coalition’s own level from Yellow to Orange?” Kalwar asked.

  “I do, sir. To disperse key forces and make it harder for the DA to target them, and to maximize our response capabilities. Raising our readiness level to Orange is a political matter and out of my hands. But from a military perspective, if they reach DEFCON One and begin their attack, we dare not still be at Yellow.”

  Celik and Shadid did not respond. None of the minor powers needed guess what they were going to say. Kalwar swallowed and addressed the session. “Then I agree with General Bera and my honorable colleagues. We must increase our readiness to Orange. Let us stand together, ready to defend our great nations from these corrupt powers.”

  Dirac Station

  2130Z, 24 December 2065

  There’s no reason to stay here any longer, Demirci decided. His head was still ringing from the flashbang grenade, and he had spent the last few minutes sitting against a wall in the loud reactor room. He avoided thinking about the throbbing pain in his arm or the
reason he could not remove the stifling MAK-issued helmet, with its air filter covering his mouth and nose. Instead his thoughts were of about Dilara, Azmi, and Safiye. For him, the end was close, and there was no need to sit in this noisy place and wonder how close. The control screens in the Ops Center would show the station’s progress away from L3, and it would tell him down to the second when the modules outside would lose their containment. It’s time to take a walk.

  The low rumble of the thrusters remained in the air all the way from engineering to operations, even through the helmet and his ringing ears. A trail of blood drops showed the way the three attackers ran through the corridors back to their ship. Demirci hoped the woman he shot was now recovering.

  The Ops Center was the same hideous sight as when he left it. The bodies of Terzi and Toprak lay slumped near each other, neither of them with much brain matter or blood left in them. A pool of red coagulated around where they lay, and two workstation displays were shattered from stray bullets. But they were displays for internal systems. Demirci went to the station’s navigation controls.

  The maneuvering display was the same configuration as it was in VASIMR Control, but the navigation screen right next to it showed Demirci what he came to see. It repeatedly flashed a warning message that the station was maneuvering away from Earth-Sun L3. Data underneath the warning indicated that it was now nearly a million km away from L3, and that all power channels to the antimatter containment modules would shut down in twelve minutes.

  And then four to eight minutes for the residual power to fade. Sixteen to twenty minutes left to live. He realized the ticking clock had been running in his head ever since he concocted the idea for this attack, and now this display screen was doing it for him. It wasn’t a scary sight. Aydin surprised himself and smiled at the ticking little countdown timer.

  Yet it was happening slower than he first calculated many weeks ago. The timer should have said two minutes until the containment power cut out. Glancing at the external video monitors, he realized why. Kostroma was still docked with Dirac, the ship’s engines pouring out its glowing exhaust. He sputtered a laugh at the ingenuity and the futility of it, and then the grin from his face melted away as he realized what the maneuver meant: he wasn’t alone.

  The comms console on Kostroma’s bridge beeped with an incoming video link request from Dirac. Pavel Vorontsov knew who it would be, though he didn’t know why he accepted the call.

  “Captain,” Demirci began. “I am sorry to see you doing this.”

  “You… you’re the clever one. The tag-along brain with those brutes. Why are you calling?”

  “I wanted to tell you that you’re not going to die in vain. Given what you’re doing, you deserve to know that. The systems in here are tracking the Lincoln, and thanks to you it looks like they might have time to escape. I wish you could have gone with them.”

  Vorontstov glared at him, this madman. “How much time is left?”

  “About fifteen minutes.”

  The captain’s face twisted from too many emotions. Tears welled in his eyes while his teeth grinded from a clenched jaw.

  “You…” He fought to find any words. “You are barbarian filth. I don’t care what you tell yourself. I have a family. How many are dead now because of you? How many are about to be?”

  “Too many. I doubt it’s a consolation, but I may as well tell you that it’s all out of necessity, for a much greater good. Sometimes the world can only find true peace after a war. That’s what’s going to happen.”

  “You sound like a goddamn fool.”

  “I’m sure I do.”

  “You think you’re doing this for a greater good? History’s going to call you one of its villains.”

  “I suspect you’re right.”

  “I hate…” Vorontsov lowered his head, keeping his emotions away from sight. “I hate that you’ve had time. Whatever your crazy reasons, I hate that you’ve had time to prepare yourself.”

  “I know it’s not fair. I’ll switch off now if you’d like to have these last few minutes alone. You’ll be remembered as a hero, and I just thought you should know that.”

  Vorontsov didn’t want to believe the knowledge helped, but it did. Still, he wasn’t going to let this snake have the satisfaction of knowing it. He switched off the comms link and kept his focus on the pilot controls, and held Kostroma in place.

  Demirci sat back and closed his eyes. The relentless hum of the station’s thrusters could almost put him to sleep.

  Mission accomplished.

  His thoughts lingered on his wife and children, and then, eventually, on his father. There was no one else alive on the station, but Aydin instinctively put his hand over his face. For the first time in thirty-seven years, he cried.

  USS Abraham Lincoln

  2142Z, 24 December 2065

  The heart rates of the crew inside Lincoln’s C2C increased with the ship’s speed. Pierce and everyone else in the room saw Venus growing in size through the telescopic view on the primary screen. The planet was nearly dead ahead at three million kilometers, a bright ring of sunlit atmosphere surrounding the dark nighttime side of the planet. Abe calculated the intercept trajectory based on laser rangefinding data bounced off the planet from interferometers in the nose of the ship, and made tiny course adjustments ten times per second. On the navigational chart screen, Lincoln’s course line to Venus held steady: the ship would intercept the planet between three and five hundred km above the surface, only fifty to one hundred fifty km above the atmosphere. But the course line which arced beyond the planet and away from its gravity well flickered on the screen. It wouldn’t become stable until after the ship reached its closest point of approach.

  Even if we hit a good trajectory, a danger with the intercept itself will be the change in internal gravity while we swing around the planet, Pierce knew. It’s never been tried at this speed. Will the lateral grav plates adjust quickly enough? Or will we be flung about like we’re in some wild centrifuge?

  Eighteen thousand kilometers per second. The final approach to the intercept point went by in a matter of seconds as the silhouetted planet raced towards the viewscreen, momentarily filling the left half before it rushed past. Everyone in the C2C held their breath on instinct, all except Beth Yamada who announced over the ship’s speakers, “Brace for gravity intercept!”

  For five seconds there was an odd wobbling inside the ship, but nobody was thrown sideways. Pierce silently thanked the brilliance of the ship’s designers. The internal counter-gravity was in sync with the ship’s maneuvering, even the lateral plates. During high-g thrust it was usually just the powerful fore and aft grav plates that were of any concern.

  “Interception arc complete,” Waters called to the C2C over the line from engineering. “Lateral gravity shift has returned to zero.”

  “Begin reversal for deceleration!” Yamada called out to the helmsman.

  Lincoln shut off its main thrusters at six percent of lightspeed and began slowly spinning until its aft end pointed in the direction of its movement. Having just flown past the planet, Abe couldn’t accurately calculate the change in trajectory until the ranging sensors in the ship’s nose could see the planet again.

  Pierce, Yamada and the others let out an audible sigh of relief. The maneuver worked. The navigation screen showed that the new ship’s heading would keep Venus between the ship and Dirac Station, as long as they slowed and didn’t drift too far beyond the planet.

  “Reversal complete!” the helmsman announced. “Beginning deceleration thrust!” The rumble of the main thrusters once again moaned throughout the ship.

  Pierce magnified the main viewscreen to keep a close optical view of the planet now shrinking away from them. For a few minutes during the deceleration they waited and stared at the planet, knowing what would come soon. Nobody spoke a word.

  Positioned aft of the ship: the Sun. Right in front, magnified to fill the main viewscreen: the full daytime surface of Venus, ghastly brig
ht, its atmosphere choked with clouds of carbon dioxide. Beyond the dark side of Venus, forty-two million kilometers away, was Dirac Station.

  Then it happened. The first magnetic containment field among Dirac’s eight thousand storage pods lost power and failed, and an atom of antimatter came into contact with an atom on the container’s inner chamber lining. The eruption of energy annihilated the rest of the station and its other containers, and four hundred thousand metric tons of antimatter freely mixed with the field of debris.

  Every last atom of antimatter came into contact with an atom of normal matter, all within a fraction of a second from that first interaction. Together, the annihilations let loose the most colossal explosion the solar system had seen in four billion years. From Lincoln’s perspective, the wave of energy first looked like the horizons of Venus’s atmosphere had expanded beyond the planet in a glaring ring of white light. Then the wave kept moving past them, outwards, towards the Sun and beyond, towards Earth and the far side of the solar system.

  On Earth, people saw the same visual effect around the Sun as Lincoln had seen it around Venus. It was as if the Sun’s radiance had discharged a brilliant corona of light, growing ever larger as it approached. Frantic media sources across the world discussed how it could only have come from Dirac Station, while people spent their time alternating between grasping the news and staring at the sky and the oncoming wave. Some news sources reported that Dirac would only have been destroyed if it was safely hidden behind the Sun, while others speculated that such assurance was unsound, and perhaps the Sun’s gravity would curve the advancing edges of the wave into Earth’s path.

  Most of the world’s ten billion people, not sure what to believe in the terrifying fifteen minutes they had before the wave passed, panicked.

  It was still daytime in much of the western hemisphere as people saw the glaring wave of white energy race across the sky, slow at first as it was near the Sun and then faster as it moved down the sky towards the horizons. In places where the Sun was sitting low, like New York at dusk or Tokyo at dawn, the wave streamed overhead from one side of the skyline to the other. In the eastern hemisphere the blast wave illuminated the dark skies as bright as the Sun rising again, the ring of radiance rising from the horizon and continuing up towards the zenith of the sky.