Lord August, sitting to JC’s left on a plastic lawn chair on level thirty, said: “No. We’re going to stay. Our best chance of survival is here.”
“Our victory over Silo 6 will be pyrrhic, old man. The NPRF are going to come looking for more underground dwellers and rout them out before they’re attacked again. They’re ruthless sons of bitches. There’s no way we can fend off that kind of firepower. Do you want to stay here and be butchered, or escape and have at least some chance of survival?”
“Where exactly do you propose that we go?” Lord August said, resignedly.
“I propose we escape through the tunnel at level fifteen, the one leading towards Silo 8. Only, come up at the service shaft midway between ourselves and Silo 8. Then take the streets, in small groups, and get out of the city. At least some of us may make it.”
“But what about…” The whole silo began to shake violently. The platform on which they sat bucked and twisted, as did the six walkways leading out from it. Both men were tipped from their chairs. “Mother of God!” Lord August said. The noise sounded like the entire earth were being pounded with an enormous jackhammer. On all the inhabited levels, people held on for dear life. Cracks developed in both the inner and outer silos. Pieces of concrete fell. Most of the platforms were shielded from debris by the platform above. Possessions, equipment, and a few people fell into the void. The screaming was only drowned out by the deafening, reverberating vibration and buckling of masonry. The lights flickered, and then went out. Thirty seconds later, everything went quiet. The lights came back on, though they were diffused by dust swirling in the air.
Lord August propped himself up on his hands. “What the hell was that? A nuclear strike?”
JC was already sitting up. “Negative. It would have been shorter, and likely more intense.”
“You don’t know that. If it brought the roof down…”
“My theory is that the sky level fell in. Or at least part of it.” JC already had his radio out. “All unit leaders, please report damage and status of your area.”
“21F here,” a frantic female voice said. “Three people unaccounted for. Our water supply’s smashed.”
“21E. Total chaos. As far as I know we haven’t lost anyone.”
“24C.” Magana. “Water supply and light gone. No loss of life, that I can tell. However, our platform’s half-detached from the wall now. We’re evacuating.”
----
“All leaders, we need to do recon outside to assess the situation,” JC said urgently into his radio. “All Defenders to level thirty.”
A few minutes later, the fighters began to amass, forming a tight group around JC. Once most of the leaders were there, JC said, “We don’t know what happened out there, or why. We need patrols in all directions to assess the situation and report back. Of course, absolute caution and secrecy must be maintained. Nobody has set foot outside of Silo 7 since the battle with Six, because the NPRF will likely kill any silo dweller on sight. Don’t go more than a kilometer away. Understood?”
“Understood,” the dozen gathered squad leaders replied. They made the X salute with their forearms. JC reciprocated.
Blake turned around and looked at Thaddeus, Taygete and Asterope, who were gathered with him. Kassandra stood back, trying to avoid JC’s gaze. “Okay, guys, let’s suit up. No need for major weaponry this time, so don’t go up to thirty-one. We’ll take exit B.”
“Right on,” Thaddeus said. They pulled on their active camouflage uniforms. Kassandra patted her inside front pockets, making sure she had her sheathed hunting knives. Other squads began to disperse. “All ready?” Thaddeus said.
“Yep,” Taygete said. Others nodded. They began to walk along the bridge to the outer silo wall.
Kassandra scanned the wall above the exit. “Look at the cracks,” she said. They exited into the white corridor, the same one Kassandra had come through the first night they had entered the silo. The group went into ghost mode.
Just before they reached the final exit, Blake turned around and said: “No heroics this time, Kass. This is just recon.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.” Under her breath, she added: “Didn’t plan on it the last time either.”
Blake pushed the metal roller door up a crack and peered out. “Clear.” It led out into the loading dock. They filed out into it, and then huddled. The shadows of the recess’ corners flickered, along with the street lights. Blake and Thaddeus checked right and left respectively.
“See anything?” Asterope whispered.
“A few wanderers,” Blake said.
“Headlights,” Thaddeus said. “Let’s get back inside the door, in case it’s the NPRF.”
“Actually, no,” Blake said. “If we get back in the corners in here, we can see without being seen. I want to check out who or what it is.” They pressed into the shadows. Thaddeus, Asterope and Taygete were on the left, and Blake and Kassandra on the right. Thirty seconds passed, until the headlights began to illuminate the right side of the alcove. The shadow of the left corner moved back increasingly fast, towards Thaddeus, as the vehicle approached. At once, it passed at high speed, with a low whine and a whoosh of air. After that came another, and another. The two groups of Raiders looked at one another as the convoy kept going. Blake nodded with each black shape that passed, as he counted them. On and on the armored personnel carriers and tanks went, like a freight train. On the side of each was the Tricolor flag. At last, all that was left of the convoy was tail lights disappearing down the tunnel. “The French Army!” Blake said excitedly. “Thirty vehicles!”
“They’re going to take the underground city back,” Thaddeus said gravely. “There’ll be a war that’ll make the other night look like a minor skirmish. That may have been what caused the earthquake, if they were already fighting at ground level.”
Blake radioed this news back to JC. “Okay, Blake. I’m going to recall some of the patrols. You guys keep doing your recon. Be very, very careful.”
“Roger.”
Blake turned to the others. “This is Rue Borchal. We’ll go right on it, then north on Circular Route 19, then take the next left, Rue Duguesclin. It looks clear now, so let’s go.” The group ran right along the road, taking cover behind a wrecked red van.
“This thing was in the middle of the road the other night,” Taygete said.
“Clear up to the intersection,” Thaddeus said. They ran the fifty meters to the crosscutting Circular Route 19. Blake checked right, and Thaddeus left.
Then Blake looked straight ahead. “Couple of bodies up there,” he whispered.
“Yeah,” Kassandra said.
“Clear,” he half-whispered to the group on the other side of the road.
“Clear,” came the reply. The group rounded the corner onto the wide, white-tiled, Circular Route 19. Some of the wall tiles had fallen to the ground and broken. Usually well lit, it was now nearly dark.
“Look up there,” Thaddeus said. “Part of the roof’s collapsed.”
Blake nodded. “Let’s take cover behind the rubble.” They ran up to the one meter-thick piece of concrete, half the size of a basketball court, lying in the road. It had broken into smaller chunks when it fell.
“Bunch of people on the sidewalk up ahead, before the corner,” Asterope said. A group of people lay on blankets, 100 meters ahead on the right. “No more cover until Rue Duguesclin.”
“Then we’ll have to chance it,” Thaddeus said. “Be fast and quiet, and get round the corner quickly. That’s the left we were going to take anyway.” They sprinted to the corner, and turned left. It was a dismal gray road, just like Rue Borchal. They followed it for half a kilometer, making slow progress as they picked their way around rubble, wrecked vehicles, and small groups of refugees. Some limped, and others sported bloody bandages. One was clearly blind, as he held onto the shoulder of the one in front for direction. Kassandra shook her head sadly on seeing the condition of the people they encountered. They were able to slip by easily, being almost in
visible.
The group reached a major north-south road. “Left on Circular Route 20, left on Rue Borchal, and back home,” Blake said. They found it to have suffered damage to the roadway, walls, and roof, like Circular Route 19. Some vehicles picked their way slowly along, trying to negotiate the cracked and buckled asphalt. Two hundred meters later, they were at the intersection with Rue Borchal. As usual, Blake and Kassandra checked right, and the others checked left. Refugees wandered around. Kassandra looked along the drab, half-lit tunnel. On the sidewalk on their side of the road, twenty meters down, two figures lay huddled on the sidewalk. Kassandra looked at them, narrowing her eyes as they adjusted to the lower light level on the intersecting road. “Clear,” Blake said, turning to the others. Kassandra’s gaze didn’t move from the objects of her interest.
“Clear,” Thaddeus replied from the opposite corner.
Blake began to head towards them, as they would be turning left. Before he could leave, Kassandra put her hand on his arm. “Wait,” she said, without turning towards him. There was a note of urgency in her voice.
“What do you see?”
“I need to check out those people on the ground, over there.”
“Don’t go near them. We’ve made it this far without being seen. Plus, I told you, no heroics.”
“Blake, I have to. I’m going.”
“No!” he said. Kassandra slipped away, along the road towards the figures. “Oh, good Lord!” Blake said in exasperation. He followed her.
Kassandra got within three meters, crouched, and moved in for a closer look. “It can’t be!” she said, loudly enough to be heard by the others thirty meters away. “Mom and Dad?”
----
Planet Earth reflected in the convex silver hull of the warp spaceship Arcadantera. Six hundred meters long, she was shaped like an immense coffee bean. Her exterior was completely featureless. Two hundred meters of her interior, both fore and aft, were filled with zero-point energy units which supplied power to hundreds of tons of internal spinning warp machinery. Most of her center was taken up by a cargo hold as big as a small aircraft hangar. Captain Isaac Orlando, a graying man in his middle fifties, floated in it, with pilot Justyna Ibarra. Her mid-length curly black hair was tied up in a bun. They were the only two crew on the enormous ship. They were near the front of the rectangular hold. It was a strip-lit sterile white space. Their cargo, which was much smaller than the space that held it, consisted of a 3D metal lattice. Within each cube, delineated by the structure, was a white cone-shaped atmospheric entry vehicle the size of a small bus. In all, there were ninety-five of these. Thick conduits of wires ran between them. At the front was a gray control box. The whole affair was fixed to the inside of the hold by thin metal beams. When the time came, giant roller doors at the bottom of the hold would open. The outer skin of the ship would peel back as though it had zippers. Telescoping rods would push the 950-ton weapon out, make sure it was stationary, and then retract again. The ship’s skin would close up and she would reenter warp flight, having delivered the deadliest payload ever carried since the Extinction Switch itself.
Isaac and Justyna, both wearing white flight suits, looked at each other, and then back at the weapon. “Can you imagine that much explosive power?” she said.
“Not really. This is nearly two hundred times the blast at Tehran. If it doesn’t shatter Vesta entirely, it’ll at least hollow it out pretty well.”
“There’ll be nothing left of the so-called Entara.”
“How confident are you of the gravity maps of Vesta?” he asked.
“Ninety-nine percent. But, the resolution decreases as you get deeper, of course.”
“The cavern was mapped very clearly. It showed up like a Christmas tree. I wonder why they dug it out,” Isaac said.
“I have a theory about that,” Justyna said. “They probably used it to test the Extinction Switch.”
Isaac narrowed his eyes as he pondered this. “You might well be right. I just hope to God there isn’t any debris floating in it where we dewarp.”
“There is one other unknown,” Justyna said. “That map, originally made by ISI when they were prospecting Vesta, is over twenty years old. What if the inhabitants of Ent… Vesta built, or dug out, something so big that its center of gravity has changed?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!”
“I’m not. Think about it. The point we’re aiming for is big, but it’s only about twenty kilometers out from the center. If they made another cavern, for instance, that’s further out, it would change the gravity map enough that the one we have is invalid for our purpose. The CG of Vesta would only have to shift by a couple of hundred meters to make what we’re attempting impossible.”
Isaac was strapped into his white seat on the left side of the cockpit, and Justyna on the right. This windowless oval room was ten meters forward of the hold, connected to it by a tunnel. There was a hatch at either end, completely sealing the two spaces off from each other. The hold was now completely depressurized.
“Hail, Arcadantera!” came a familiar voice over the radio. Revenant had dewarped five kilometers away. Her hull shone brightly in the sun.
“Hi Kato,” Isaac said.
“That sure looks like a good ship from here,” Kato said.
“Likewise.”
“So, this is it. You’re carrying the most important payload of any warp ship since my dear daughter was rescued all those years ago,” Kato said.
“Yes we are.”
“How are you doing Justyna?”
“I’m fine, Sir.”
“No need for ‘sir’, Justyna. You guys are flying right into the eye of the storm, carrying the hope of us all. You’re the best of the best, flying one of the finest ships ever created.”
Justyna chuckled. “I just hope we make it out of there before it goes off.”
“You’ll have ten minutes, and I doubt they’ll even know you’re there since you won’t show up on any radar. I should have written ‘to Seung Yi, with love,’ on it while I was there. Still, this should be the end of him once and for all. Godspeed, Arcadantera.”
Isaac turned to Justyna. “I guess there’s not much left to do or say.”
“Right. Nobody except Kato and the Pentagon know we’re even going.” Both of them saw a vast array of indicators, readouts, and controls projected into their minds using their neural implants.
“Weapon status good,” Isaac said. “Warp systems, ZP source, gravitometry are all good.”
“Concur on all,” Justyna said.
“Course set for Vesta internal coordinates 23.66 degrees west, 45.9 degrees south, 21.75 kilometers from gravitational center.”
“Start.” At that, the Arcadantera disappeared from spacetime. The view outside turned black, as her six-and-a-half minute warp flight began.
“I want to go back to the Alpha Centauri runs after this,” Justyna said. Isaac nodded. His eyes remained glazed over, as he focused on the information displayed in his brain.
Justyna sat back and closed her eyes. “God, please let this work,” she mouthed silently. “One minute,” she announced, soon after that.
“Let’s see if the simulations were accurate,” Isaac said, in his usual reassuring, calm manner, born of years in the cockpit. One of the displays they could see was a grayscale gravity map of their surroundings. Soon, the humble 500 kilometer-wide Vesta was shown, as they approached it. Normally, gravity maps were rendered in real time, from the ship’s instruments. However, being inside of a large rock meant that the gravitational field was so strong as to overwhelm the detectors. Hence, the twenty-year-old map of Vesta’s interior had to be used.
Isaac and Justyna saw the rock all around them, and then the spherical void in which they were to dewarp. Its position was known exactly, in relation to the center of Vesta. What nobody outside of that world knew was that Manufacturing Facility Number 4 had been built ten years previously. It was so large that it threw the body’s center of mass off by over a
hundred meters. “Dewarping,” Justyna said, after one final check of the large ship’s position.
Arcadantera re-entered spacetime inside Vesta. The rear of the ship smashed into the inner wall of the cavern, with enough force that the spinning warp machinery was thrown from its bearings. Its huge momentum tore the ship apart. The nuclear cluster was torn apart, and didn’t detonate. However, the entire cavern wall was blasted apart as Arcadantera herself exploded. The concussion sent a massive, highly destructive shock wave out in all directions.
----
Seung Yi sat at the end of a long dark wooden conference table. Zan Tang sat on his right, and Tai Zu on his left. The other ten high council members occupied the rest of the seats. The conference room was rectangular and generously-sized, with mottled red walls. Its place in the High Council’s artificial-gravity centrifuge meant the floor curved up very slightly along the room’s length. Above the table was a 3D midair projection of the domed Martian city of Marineris. All of its thousands of buildings were rendered perfectly, along with its kilometers-deep underground section. Different parts were shaded red, blue or green. One nasal-voiced council member halfway along the left side of the table spoke. “The shaded areas represent the stages of the city’s occupation over the next fifteen years, by population growth. In the beginning, of course, we will have more space than we could ever need. After Master Yi has chosen his primary residence and we have chosen ours, we will need to balance the number of people in each area with the maintenance it needs to avoid falling into disrepair in the decades before full repopulation.” There were grunts and nods of assent around the table. Seung Yi looked on with his usual stony, unwavering expression. Suddenly, everything and everyone was smashed against the left wall of the room as though by an unseen fist. The air was rent with a terrible screeching, grinding around, as screaming, flailing bodies hit the wall. The heavy table crushed several Councilors. Then, the chaotic mass abruptly flew to the front of the room, with even greater force. Furniture splintered and blood spattered everything. Unlike the initial punch, this force was unrelenting.
The Extinction Switch: Book three of the Kato's War series Page 19