The entire launch/descent phase had taken less than a minute. Saint Petersburg was well within range, and these were fast missiles. They released their individual warheads, which spread out to encircle the doomed city. The timing and location were critical. This had all been agreed in advance, the physicists and engineers from America, Russia, and other countries confirming that a ring of fire must be established to trap and burn any and all nano invaders. Should even one of the tiny warriors survive, the entire mission would fail. They all had to burn.
The warheads streaked downward. The twelve cones detonated five hundred feet above the ground, just as planned. Twelve sparks of light became twelve small suns. The blast waves preceded the heat. The raw power was enough to overcome the circular sway of the nanorobots, disrupting their intricate dance and forcing them toward what had once been the center of the city. The machines were whipped into a tight ball, a roiling mass, defanged. A nanosecond later came the fire and the city was wreathed in flames.
The periphery of the city, untouched by the alien swarm, was incinerated by the human weapons. Buildings were annihilated, along with everyone inside and outside of them. The ring of fire tightened like a noose, squeezing the city, choking alien and human alike. Six seconds after the initial detonations, the firestorm reached the center of the city. With no avenue of escape, the airborne gray invaders were burned, returned to the primordial carbon, hydrogen, and other basic elements of which the entire universe had been born. And so was everything else around them.
The city was pummeled, then cremated.
Saint Petersburg, once Petrograd, then Leningrad, birthplace of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet empire, site of the murder of the monk and mystic Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, home to nearly five million Russians, was wiped from the map.
Parchomenko slumped in his chair. The room was quiet, funereal. There was nothing left to do. Not now. Maybe not ever. He watched the lumpy mushroom cloud push up into the sky, the only gravestone these dead would ever get. Parchomenko thought of his gun. He tapped a button on his console, and Rickert’s haggard face appeared.
“Comrade, it is contained. You may alert your president. Your Superman apparently could not save us all. But it is done. Perhaps it was enough.”
“Sergey, I . . .” With another tap, Rickert was gone.
Parchomenko lit another cigarette, ignoring the blinking light of incoming calls.
He inhaled deeply, filling his lungs and savoring the bitter sensation. He finally let it out, blowing a ring of smoke up to the ceiling. It looked not unlike the ring of smoke now crowning what had been Saint Petersburg. His parents, he realized, were almost certainly a microscopic part of that ring.
Ash to ash, dust to dust.
Parchomenko took another drag and closed his eyes. His hand dropped to his belt again.
15
It was a beautiful day.
Sunlight skipped across the snow on the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, white wisps of clouds sailing the deep blue sky like clipper ships bound for the New World. The granite mountains seemed eternal and fixed, but they too were travelers, drifting to the southwest aboard the North American geologic plate at the speed of about one centimeter per year. Everything was migrating. Whether molecule or moon, every element of the physical universe was in transit. Creation would not tolerate stasis. For now, it was a beautiful day. It would become something else eventually. Maybe still pleasing, maybe not. But undoubtedly different.
Ben stared out the window of the black SUV, not speaking, watching the road unfurl across the rugged landscape. He noted without interest through his tireless internal digital sensors that the truck’s exhaust emissions were increasing. The catalytic converter was dying, although no one else, not even the SUV’s onboard computer, was aware of it yet. The vehicle would almost certainly fail its next inspection.
The inconsequential malfunction nevertheless tugged at Ben’s mind and he did not chase it away. Perhaps because it was an easier thought to deal with than the ones which had been haunting him the last few days. Fallout from the engagement had been severe and was still unfolding. Russia was now in a full-scale civil war, with elements of the army in open rebellion, joined by scattered yet numerous civilian elements. The government was in tatters, with the president in hiding and Parchomenko nowhere to be found and presumed dead. Gretchenko had taken command of what was left to command. That gave Ben some comfort, but he knew there was only so much the man could do. A series of confused tank battles outside Moscow had left hundreds dead and no clear winner, while IEDs exploded at all hours in cities and military bases across the country. The Russian ambassador to the United States had first gone on CNN demanding the US surrender Ben as a war criminal, and then three hours later requested political asylum in the US. It was total chaos, and the entire Russian defense industry had shut down, including the half dozen facilities that had been building additional defense satellites.
The Chinese, on the other hand, had gone completely dark, which made the rest of the world even more nervous. Not a peep since Ben had been whisked out of the country aboard a Chinese military helicopter to the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier stationed 200 miles off the coast of China. Seeing a Ka-28 Helix chopper with a People’s Liberation Army red star emblazoned on the fuselage land on their decks had certainly been a new experience for the crew of the Nimitz. But then, most everything over the past several months had been a new experience, and the sailors had only stopped what they were doing when they’d recognized the passenger who’d stepped from the aircraft.
It hadn’t been Ben’s first trip aboard Nimitz, as he and his SEALs had toiled anonymously on those previous trips, moving in silence and deploying at night. He felt like something completely different now, an object of fascination and fear. A celebrity or a pariah. Maybe both.
Then the Chinese helicopter had retreated to the mainland, and the official communications channels had been extinguished. Every nation was on some form of emergency footing. The obliteration of Saint Petersburg was still round-the-clock news. The fact that the initial battle was essentially a victory for the planet had gone largely unnoticed in the horror at the deaths in Russia and China. The headlines screamed that none were safe, that Ben was dead. Or maybe alive, but badly wounded. Or uninjured, but that he’d fled from battle and left the cities to their fate. Or he’d joined with the mrill.
Borders were shut. Weapons were pointed in every direction. Riots were spiraling out of control. Even in the US, where things were relatively calmer, the demonstrations were getting out of hand, with a ragtag collection of anarchists, conspiracy theorists, and environmentalists firebombing government buildings and other property. In one case, a masked group of thugs had blown up a dozen cell phone towers outside Seattle. After four members of the group were shot and killed by a local SWAT team, the remaining members insisted during interrogations that they had proof the cell towers were part of a human/alien conspiracy. Those sorts of flare-ups were increasing, getting more violent.
The Israelis had shut their borders and expelled all Arab residents, while Egypt had declared war on Israel. It was a meaningless declaration, as the Egyptians could barely contain the seething mass of their own terrified people. Nevertheless, Israel retaliated by bombing an Egyptian munitions factory that had actually been abandoned years before. Any way you looked at it, people seemed to be working on faulty intelligence these days, Ben thought. Panic lapped at the shores of most minds now, from government leaders to schoolchildren.
Oddly enough, the greatest threat was the most thoroughly ignored. News coverage of the space battle had been intense the first several hours. With only limited video footage from a few ground-based telescopes and even the leakiest government sources themselves unsure what had happened, there wasn’t much to report. China had somehow managed to put an airtight lid on any and all amateur video shot during the battle of Shanghai. The lack of footage was only part of the explanation, though. The truth was that no one wanted to ack
nowledge such an inscrutable and mysterious threat was looming overhead. It was like receiving a diagnosis of end-stage cancer and wanting to shift the conversation to the weather or politics.
The technology involved was nearly incomprehensible to most people, but Ben thought the real reason for the scant conversation was that the threat itself was so primitive. This wasn’t a skirmish over borders or economics, with diplomats drafting terms even as brigades deployed. This was a raw, fingers-to-throat tribal brawl for survival. Losing wouldn’t mean peace treaties, occupations, and reparations. It would mean stacks of corpses. Mass graves. The world hadn’t seen that in a long time. Not the “civilized” parts, anyway. Most people had forgotten what war, in its most basic form, really meant. Some would remember in time to stand up and fight, Ben thought (and hoped). But for over seven billion people, the dominant emotion now was a thrumming, barely contained panic. So people kept their heads down from the threat they could not understand and instead picked fights with their neighbors, friends, families, and colleagues.
The world was tearing itself apart. It was only a matter of time before someone—maybe India or Pakistan—was overcome with the fear and hysteria blowing in the wind and lobbed a nuclear bomb at an old enemy. The chain reaction would be swift, as everyone rushed to fight the foe they understood so they could ignore the invader they did not. Something had to change, or everything would fall apart.
Ben could almost taste his guilt and shame, like bile in the back of his throat. His failure with the drones was all-consuming. He endlessly replayed the feverish pursuit of the machine over China. He understood why he had done what he had done. Scarred by hundreds of missions where civilians and fellow soldiers died in droves before his eyes, he could no longer tolerate collateral damage; could not distinguish, in the heat of battle, between immediate action and the greater good. He couldn’t take watching one more person die while begging for help. There were already too many faces that he saw when he closed his eyes at night. He knew he should have turned his ship around, left Shanghai to its fate, and pursued the other threat. One machine versus the nano bomb should have been an easy decision.
But he couldn’t do it. To turn his back, to deliberately abandon the city, was intolerable. Even if he could rewind back to that moment, he wasn’t sure he would have acted differently—could have acted differently. Between the nanobots in his cells and the guilt coursing through his soul, maybe he wasn’t really in control of himself anymore. Forces beyond his grasp or even understanding seemed to be shoving him to and fro, a small ship in a big storm. Or maybe that was just a cheap dodge, unearned absolution. The hell of it was, he would almost certainly be faced with this situation again: two battles when he only had time for one. He would have to acknowledge defeat or send someone else to fight when he couldn’t. That was the most terrifying possibility. Not just that someone else would die, but that Ben would have to order someone else to go die for him. There would be no escaping that responsibility, no pretending it was someone or something else’s fault—not the machines in his blood or the scars on his mind. The deep dread of that seemingly inevitable future pressed down him, almost blacking out the cloudless sky.
Ahead, just a bit farther up the immaculate road under the beaming sun, was the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, the Cold War–era command center for NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Designed to withstand as much as a 30-megaton nuclear blast, the aging underground compound had been repurposed and expanded to oversee America’s space defense, dubbed Skywatch. President Lockerman was at Cheyenne, and he wanted to speak to Ben personally.
The convoy wound its way up Norad Road, and Ben watched as the famous semicircular entrance to the facility came into view. The massive tunnel looked like a gun barrel whose bottom half had been sawed off, then shoved into a rock. Rickert occasionally glanced over at Ben, but he also stayed quiet. His pinkie finger tapped against the side of his leg, a nervous tic Ben noticed he’d picked up recently and which he could barely suppress.
The lead vehicle of the six-car caravan stopped at the guard shack and the driver, a Secret Service agent, reached out with his ID badge and a small thumb drive. The beefy military policeman manning the gate snapped the thumb drive into his tablet and scanned the screen. The MP waved everyone out of their SUVs and to a narrow metal corridor that would take them from the main parking lot to the 50-foot asphalt road leading into the mountain itself. As each person stepped into the metal hallway, doors clanged shut at both ends and a pair of cameras did a 3D scan of the visitor, matching his height, weight, facial features, and retinal characteristics against a database. In addition to the MP scanning the visitor list, fifteen or so marines patrolled the grounds, while a pair of towers with snipers flanked the scanning corridor. Ben had been here years ago and knew this amped-up security was a recent addition. It would be effective at keeping human trespassers out, at least, he thought.
After they were all in, a marine drove up in an extended electric cart. Ben, Rickert, and four Secret Service agents climbed aboard, and the driver turned the cart around and steered it toward the yawning entrance. The portal swallowed the small vehicle and its passengers, and darkness enveloped the men.
Ben’s eyes adjusted immediately. Beyond the opening, the two-lane road extended a couple hundred feet directly into the granite mountain. There, a massive steel door blocked their path.
At a station inside, a guard with the US Air Force 721st Mission Support Group watched on his monitor as the various video feeds were assembled into a single three-dimensional image. He could now rotate around the cart and its occupants like a camera floating through a video game, seeing any angle he wished. He scanned the visitors as the hidden sensors in the entryway sniffed for chemical, biological, or radiological material. They couldn’t yet scan for the nano materials the mrill had used in their bombs, Ben realized with a quick glance through the compound’s encrypted security bulletins. Not that it mattered. If the nano weapons had made it this far, they could easily gnaw their way through any conventional defenses. As the engineers in the facility had noted, if the visitors were carrying the nanomachines, the only way to destroy them would be incinerating them with nuclear weapons, as they had in Saint Petersburg.
And in fact, the entire mountain complex was now rigged with half a dozen nuclear bombs. Everyone inside the Cheyenne complex lived with the knowledge that they were surrounded by armed nukes that could go off at any moment if the security teams determined a nano invader was inside the structure. Given the speed with which the nano weapons could devour their targets, there were multiple guard locations throughout the multi-story facility, each with individual authorization to turn the key if needed. Ben figured these had to be the most loathed jobs in the complex. Probably the world.
The massive steel blast door rumbled open as the security screening was completed. The cart rolled forward before the three-foot-thick doors were even half open, and they began closing again as soon as the cart was through. They clanged shut and the cart stopped. As the eleven hydraulic pistons on the inside of the first door clanked into the locking mechanism embedded in the granite, a second blast door swung open. Once through that second line of defense, the cart came to a stop inside an empty, cavernous garage.
Ahead loomed the first of the fifteen three-story buildings carved into the mountain. On the white metal wall were painted the insignias of the main tenants of the Cheyenne complex: NORAD, US Northern Command, Air Force Space Command, and US Strategic Command. Inside that building was the main entrance to the facility, and the last security checkpoint for visitors entering the complex.
But that wasn’t where Ben and his group were going.
To the right, against the granite wall, a cluster of metal junction boxes sat atop half a dozen or so gray metal conduits running into the main building. Rickert hopped off the cart and flipped open one of the junction boxes. He placed his palm on a flat black surface inside. Three amber lights lit up in succession as his prin
ts were scanned, then a final green light as he was verified. A strobe light on the wall blinked twice as the only warning, then the granite wall receded half a dozen feet into the mountain, stone grinding on stone, and slid to the side. Rickert climbed back on the cart as LED lights inside the hidden chamber came on.
The driver turned and backed into the chamber and stopped as the granite door slid back into place. The moment it ground shut, the floor dropped and Ben realized it was actually an elevator. As the heads of the occupants sank below floor level, a metal plate slid in over them, sealing off the elevator shaft. Everything was built to defend against the most apocalyptic of attacks here, and usually the engineers had built two or three of everything. The backups had backups.
The elevator sank deep into the mountain. A hundred feet, two hundred, Ben measured. It was getting warmer inside the shaft. He noticed that Rickert was sweating. The postcard-perfect weather up above might as well have been on the other side of the planet. The elevator stopped and another door opened, releasing a rush of cool air. The cart whirred down the passageway about 300 feet or so and stopped in front of a metal door. This time everyone got off, although Rickert again was responsible for unlocking the door. Ben glanced at him. Rickert caught it and shrugged.
“Don’t be that impressed. I’m sure the catering crew in the mess hall has access, too.”
Despite everything, Ben suppressed a grin.
The door opened and Ben, Rickert, and two of the Secret Service agents filed through, while the other two took up positions outside the door.
The room on the other side was large and tall, although the overwhelming bulk of the mountain above still seemed to fill the air. The room was sparsely but elegantly furnished, with a long oval oak table ringed with silver and black chairs. Flat-screen monitors coated the walls, but were all off. At the head of the table, President Lockerman was sipping a glass of ice water while flipping through a thick binder as the usual assortment of generals and staff murmured among themselves.
The First Protectors: A Novel Page 15