“Your jet is fueled up and waiting for us,” said O’Brien.
She grabbed the collar of his shirt as he started to head down the wide sweeping staircase to the ground floor entrance, jerking him back, nearly strangling him.
“Yo, bitch!”
“No,” she said. “Up to the roof. To the helipad. We have clearance for the chopper, and you don’t want to be trying to drive out of the city now. Word just went out on the radio.”
“What word?” he asked.
“The Warsaw Pact has declared war. Which really just means that Stalin has finally gone insane and has declared war. He’s claiming the mandate of history. Saying the Transition happened because the forces of history were misaligned or broken or some crazy bullshit. It doesn’t matter. What matters is getting up to the roof and out of the city. Now!”
He couldn’t disagree with that. They moved in formation to the elevators. His bodyguards elbowed aside a couple of anxious-looking house guests, telling them to “fuck off” when they protested.
The ride up to the helipad—an architectural feature which could only be incorporated into the redesign and rebuild of the Dupleix because of the massive structural damage done to the building during the war—took less than a minute. Slim Jim could hear the thump of the rotor blades before the doors opened. He squeezed his eyes shut as the down blast whipped grit into his face. One of the bodyguards pressed a hard, calloused hand into the back of his neck, bending him over as they hurried towards the chopper. Good thing, too. He would have probably walked right into the blades.
The helicopter, like a lot of his technology, was a close facsimile of an uptime model—a luxury eight-seater based on a Eurocopter design. His engineers had copied the plans from a troop carrier on one of the Australian ships in the Multinational Force. There was a suit waiting for him in the back seat, carrying an oversized briefcase.
Slim Jim and Maria climbed in beside the man. The security detail piled into the seats up front.
“Who is this guy?” Davidson shouted over the roar of the rotors and engine.
“Your launch codes, sir,” the man said, ignoring the question and handing Slim Jim the briefcase.
“What the hell do I do with this?”
The last door slammed closed, and the aircraft took off, banking away as it climbed. Slim Jim had a great view out of the window as they powered away, the acceleration pressing him back into the soft leather of the seat. The suitcase was heavy, oversized and awkward to hold onto under the press of G force. O’Brien took it from his hands, and told him to strap in. She took out a phone and entered a code number, before passing it across to him.
“It needs your thumbprint,” she said.
He clicked his harness into place and did as he was told, laying his thumb on the screen.
“Is this it? Is this the satellite thing?” he asked.
“It is,” she confirmed, as the locks on the briefcase snapped open with an audible click. She was seated across from him, but at an angle that allowed Slim Jim to see the contents of the case. It looked like somebody had crammed the innards of a couple of computers in there. He started to get nervous. The guy in the suit, the one who had brought the briefcase, who had presumably arrived in the helicopter with it, remained silent.
“Hey, Maria, can we really do this? Is it such a great idea?”
The look she gave him was withering.
“The Russians are invading. They are shooting everything out of the sky. They take down the satellites. They blind us. Then they kill us. They are hitting the military birds first, but they will take out all of the civilian space infrastructure as well, especially anything that has dual use capability. All of your satellites are dual use. The Russians know that. They’ve always known it. What they don’t know is that we designed a couple of them to be a little more aggressive than usual.”
He knew all this. They had briefed him on it at the start of the project three or four years ago, and he had agreed. Signed off, as the uptimers said. He had never thought it would come to this, though.
The helicopter had leveled out and was hammering over the lights of the city, leaving the old center behind them, racing north. It was not flying high. He could still make out individual people on the streets below. He saw the flashing lights of emergency vehicles here and there, but no more than you would expect in a city the size of Paris. There was no other sign that anything unusual was happening down there.
It was like something out of one of the science fiction movies his studios made so much money on. The ones with all the computer-generated explosions and stuff. But it was happening. O’Brien had turned the briefcase around and pushed it back towards him. Placing it firmly on his lap.
She took a chain from around her neck and handed it to him. A small silver key dangled from one end.
“You need to put your thumb on the touch sensor, down there, bottom left corner, and turn the key two full revolutions. Clockwise. It’ll click into place.”
He hesitated.
“But what happens if… Will I get in trouble?”
Her lips quirked and her face rearranged itself into an unfamiliar expression. It took him a second to realize she was about to laugh at him. Or maybe at the situation.
“No,” she said, and her voice was surprisingly gentle. “You won’t get in trouble. In fact, if you live, you’ll probably get a medal.”
He watched her, weighing his options. Not that he seemed to have any. Not really. The commies were coming, and they were coming in hard. Guys like him were going to end up swinging by their heels from meat hooks.
“Why won’t I get in trouble?” he asked. His thumb was resting on the touchpad, but he hadn’t yet turned the key. “How do I know I’ll be protected?”
“You’re about to save the world, Jimbo. The only protection you’re gonna need is from the long line of kneeling down dick-sucking motherfuckers coming to pay their regards when this is all over. Turn the fucking key.”
Slim Jim Davidson did as he was told.
###
Davidson Aerospace had launched thirteen of its own satellites over the previous four years, as well as boosting loads into orbit for customers, and even for competitors—at a very unreasonable profit. It was a challenging schedule. Karen Halabi had not been blowing smoke up his ass. He had grabbed what the uptimers called the “first mover advantage” in launch platforms and orbital technologies. Howard Hughes was intent on giving him a run for his money, but he had moved too slowly and, just as importantly, Howard Hughes was as crazy as a shithouse rat. He simply could not compete at scale with Davidson Aerospace.
Slim Jim’s rocket scientists were the best in the world. He paid them two or three times what they could get from the government. It meant he could securely invest in building out the infrastructure of the high frontier. That’s what his press people called it, the high frontier. He’d always liked that.
The thing about frontiers? They were dangerous places. Things were not settled on the frontier. Law, power, order and precedence? None of the established realities have anything more than a toehold in the realm of the frontier. On the frontier, when individuals and empires meet and contend with each other, there will be blood.
This was the reality of the high frontier, not the fine words and shiny dreams that his press people were so good at packaging up. Slim Jim hadn’t needed much convincing about the truth of it. A career criminal—even now he would admit to that in his more private, honest moments—he didn’t need a postgraduate degree in Asshole Studies to know that most people were basically assholes. If Slim Jim Davidson was going to push out into the high frontier, Slim Jim Davidson would be going armed.
Of the thirteen satellites launched by Davidson Aerospace, four had been weaponized. Some very smart guys had explained the whole thing to him at a bunch of meetings in his headquarters back in LA, but most of the technical detail was lost on him. What he unders
tood was all he needed to understand. These four satellites would do perfectly well at collecting weather data or making maps or whatever the hell it was they did for him.They would continue to provide benign and reliable service for as long as they were up there. There were only two reasons this happy state of affairs might change.
The first was time. Space was a harsh environment, as his eggheads never tired of explaining to him. It was hard on men and equipment. Eventually both failed. Eventually all of the satellites he had launched would fail. But they would do so gracefully, their orbits decaying at a planned time and place, the now useless equipment burning up as it re-entered the atmosphere.
The second reason those four satellites could cease operations was less benign. In the event of Slim Jim Davidson authorizing the activation of the satellites’ secondary protocols, new instructions would arrive in encrypted, compressed data packages. The unusually large and heavy spacecraft would dump whatever data they had collected under the auspices of their original mission, before re-tasking themselves for their secondary assignment, one that would ensure they did not gracefully re-enter the earth’s atmosphere in a spectacular, but entirely harmless display of fireworks.
Within seconds of Slim Jim completing the turn of his key, a signal pulsed out of the dark, dense machinery packed into that briefcase. It was strong enough to interfere, just momentarily, with the flight instruments of the helicopter. Static crackled over the intercom, and their forward flight seemed to stutter as though they had hit turbulence. The instant passed, however, and they flew on. The signal, meanwhile, flew skywards, seeking and finding the nearest satellite within the thirteen-strong Davidson Aerospace network—one of the later models, a comms unit solely devoted to handling traffic within Slim Jim’s corporate empire. Subroutines deeply buried inside the onboard systems decrypted the message and passed it on to its intended receivers: two mapmakers, a GPS station and a mineral exploration unit.
The transformation was not instantaneous, but it was close enough. Within seconds, normal operations ceased. Each of the birds fired off its last data packet, and then they transformed themselves from satellites to anti-satellite weapons. During the briefings, Slim Jim had always imagined this process as looking something like one of those uptime Transformer movies. He liked those movies. He’d even made one himself, or rather his studios had. It didn’t do very well though. The critics said it was because people weren’t yet dumb enough to appreciate them.
The actual transformation looked nothing like the movies. The most important change took place within the satellite’s software. The old system shut itself down as new code unpacked itself and took over the hardware. Sensor suites—some of them repurposed from their original function, others waking up for the first time—began scanning inner space, sweeping the heavens along predetermined tracks, looking for others just like themselves. For killers.
They were not long in finding their prey.
Small thrusters fired, reorienting the birds. Recessed doors silently folded open and the dark secrets held within finally revealed themselves.
The missiles initially detached and deployed with short bursts of hydrazine rockets. When they were a safe distance from the launch platform they fired their main boosters and raced away. The science behind their flights was very advanced; the technology within their onboard systems even more so. They were such dangerous, destructive weapons that their development had been banned. A ban ignored by the Soviet Union. And Davidson Aerospace.
Slim Jim was not simply being paranoid. He assumed, as did many observers and analysts, some of them employed by him, that the US would resume testing and deployment of an anti-satellite system as soon as President Eisenhower left office. Not only had Slim Jim been looking to protect his own birds, he wanted to steal a march on his competition. To seize that first mover advantage again. It now made him the lone guardian of the high frontier.
The first targets serviced were the Red Army Air Force ASAT platforms which had taken down NATO’s low orbit surveillance assets. Slim Jim had no idea how the missiles knew what to look for, but O’Brien kept him updated on their progress as the chopper raced over the outer suburbs of Paris. He had hoped there might be a little video or a cartoon or something cool for him to watch. But the small screen glowing inside the briefcase was full of numbers. It looked like one of the spreadsheets his accountants knew not to bother him with.
“Kill one,” O’Brien said. He wasn’t sure she was talking to him. She had fitted a headset and her attention seemed elsewhere.
Thousands of miles away, and hundreds of miles above them, the first of Joseph Stalin’s satellites died in a silent white explosion that flared in the night sky like a distant supernova.
More followed.
“Kill two. Kill three. Kill four confirmed,” O’Brien announced over the next few minutes. There was no passion in her voice, almost no emotion on her face at all. He was reminded of how strange these people had seemed when they arrived from the future, the way they killed and laid waste all around them with arctic detachment.
The only sign that she might be feeling anything came when she announced they were “now servicing the secondary targets”.
He had no idea what those were, but it seemed that they were an even bigger deal than the primaries. Why the fuck hadn’t she gone for them first then? Nobody else spoke as they flew through the night. Maria’s lips were pressed into a thin line as she followed the readout on the small screen.
“Kill five,” she announced at last, obviously relieved.
He could see her jaw working as she followed the progress of whatever was happening. She looked like a card player who’d bet the farm on a pair of threes.
There was nothing to indicate anything wrong, except for the way her shoulders slumped just before she announced, “No kill six. Repeat, no kill six.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Once again, Harry timed his run to coincide with Charlotte’s next assault, charging out of the cabin as she laid down fire, darting across the narrow passageway, and bouncing off the internal bulkhead to propel himself back towards the stern of the ship. More than a few stray rounds zipped past his head, clanging off the solid steel framework of the Bulgakov, punching through the flimsy fiberboard that did for cabin walls.
He hit the crossing of the ship’s main passageway and a smaller corridor providing access to the starboard and portside weather decks. A crew member, seemingly just standing there, not knowing what to do, barred Harry’s way with a grappling hook, but the man looked terrified, and dived over the side of the ship when Harry raised one of the guns at him. The sailor’s scream as he fell between the ship and the dock sounded like the dying cry of a wounded animal.
Harry didn’t hesitate.
As he sprinted past the porthole that peered into the cabin in which Julia lay dying, he spared her a brief glance, but did not slow down. He was fully visible to everybody on the dock. Loading operations had ceased; either because the cargo had been stowed away, or because of the gunfire which had broken out. It didn’t matter. There were still men on the dock, pointing at him, shouting, one of them raising a rifle and firing. His aim wasn’t even close. The sound of the bullet hitting home, assuming the idiot could actually hit the side of the ship, was lost in the general uproar.
Harry’s shoes pounded along the deck-plating, his expensive loafers a poor choice for this sort of work. He slipped at one point and almost joined the unfortunate crewman smeared between the ship and a pylon. The storm of gunfire did not abate as he drew closer. Whatever Charlotte was doing inside, it was pissing them off mightily.
Where the hell had Viv found her? She was a terminator, and possibly a little psychotic. She had escaped the dockside ambush and had a clear run out of the killing zone. She could have withdrawn, made contact with Six, or whatever cut-out they were using, and sought new orders, reinforcements. Instead she had dived into the heart of the furnace. It was not a rational
choice.
A man emerged from a hatchway just a few yards ahead. He seemed shocked to find a berserk, blood-covered Englishman coming at him with murderous intent. Unlike his comrade who had jumped overboard, however, this kulak was made of sterner stuff. He snarled defiance and set himself to charge, lowering his head and shoulders like a bull. Unfortunately for him, that merely offered Harry the tempting target of his bright red, shaved head, which he blew apart with a well-placed round. He was close enough to be splattered by the blowback.
The corpse dropped to the deck, almost tripping Harry in his forward flight. He leapt over the obstacle, landing lightly on the other side and slowing himself as he approached the next opening in the side of the vessel’s superstructure. It gave onto another lateral passageway, the intersection where the Russians had hunkered down to exchange fire with Charlotte. The noise of battle was huge. He didn’t stop because he couldn’t stop, not with Julia bleeding out back in that cabin.
One pistol in each hand, he swung around and into the passageway, firing methodically at anything that moved. He dropped three of the bastards straightaway, taking them in the flank, where they had not expected to be hit. The angles did not work for him, however. He could not get all of them with his opening shots, and soon enough he was forced to dive for cover when they switched their aim from Charlotte to him. Harry hit the deck, quite literally, launching himself back outside, and dislocating his shoulder as he slammed into some heavy steel deck fitting, draped with a thick hawser. He screamed in pain and rage.
He was going to die. Julia was going to die.
Stalin's Hammer: Paris: A Novel of the Axis of Time Page 13