His men had no choice but to kick it and dive headlong back into the fray.
Suen’s planes had the advantage of numbers, but that didn’t last more than a few seconds before another of the fighters dissolved from the inside out.
One-on-one, his fighters still should have had the advantage in a dog fight. These F35s were the heavier, clumsier versions with a second cockpit, specially engineered to attack ground targets.
But the F35s also had better sensor integration and unparalleled collaborative targeting. And although their superior stealth didn’t keep the Chinese fighters from seeing them and zeroing in, it played havoc with the radar-guided missiles. As long as the F35s stayed out of machine-gun range, they still had advantages.
As for the J20 pilots, knowing that their planes might explode around them at any moment might have modestly compromised their coolness under fire.
In any event, the battle ended shortly thereafter. Both the J20s fell from the sky, and the F35s cruised home victorious.
Tricia walked through the Big Sky deck of the Argus. In the promenade area, in one direction, you could see an enormous and distant snow-capped peak rendered on the walls, far in the distance. In another direction, you could see the edge of Yellowstone National Park. Some trick of the rendering—or rather some trick of the place being rendered—made it seem like the sky went on and on, an expanse vast enough to sweep you away.
She halted after stepping through the door into the conference room where Gina and Dawn were already seated. They watched attentively as a charmingly geeky-looking fellow stood in front of the room, fiddling with his tablet as he tried, with little success, to make it sync to the wallscreen.
Tricia cleared her throat. “Sorry I’m late. Business.”
Dawn looked at her severely. “This is business too.”
Gina smiled at her. “Tricia, this is Alex Turner, the chief engineer on the Argus. Alex, this is Tricia.”
Alex looked up from his tablet to acknowledge her. As he did, his eyes widened. His mouth moved, but he stood speechless for a moment before saying, “Nice to meet you.” He stepped toward her, ran into the table, and fell forward before catching himself. His eyes never left her face.
Tricia felt a passing moment of smugness. Here she was in a room with two women who could still work as cover models if they wanted to, and a third who probably could have when she was younger. Yet Tricia was the one who struck Alex speechless. She preened a little, then slithered over to take the seat closest to him.
Alex refocused on the task at hand and finally brought up a photorealistic rendering on the wallscreen. “Here’s the image of our proposed next-generation isle ship.” He rotated it and popped a standard isle ship up next to it.
Gina made the obvious observation. “It’s a lot smaller than the standard one. Is that why it’s so cheap?”
Alex shook his head. “Not entirely. It can carry about half as many people in the standard cabin configuration, but it costs only a fourth as much.” He flipped the ships to show their keels. “The standard ship has two inverted cones for its nuclear reactors. The new ship has a streamlined keel that holds one of Rhett’s new reactors that’s smaller and cheaper, yet produces the same amount of power.”
He zoomed and started to explain other changes that made the design less expensive. “We’ve taken the best ideas from Ciara’s much smaller and cheaper ships that her people designed in conjunction with Diab’s refugees and combined them with some of our newest tech, like Rhett’s nuke.”
Dawn cut to the chase. “So, your proposal is that we license this design and start pumping out ships at twice the speed?”
Alex smiled. “Actually, pump them out at four times the speed. The lower costs translate almost directly to higher manufacturing rates.”
Dawn pressed. “We’ll be the first people producing these babies?”
Alex shook his head. “Diab’s already building them. His earlier design depended on using beta batteries, of which there’s a severe shortage. It makes far more sense if you’re building an isle ship to use nukes that will allow you to manufacture those highly valuable batteries.”
Gina had had Rhett walk her through the economics of the new nukes earlier. “So, not only do the owners of these new ships make money by using spent nuclear fuel and making the governments pay to take the radioactive waste off their hands, but the owners also go directly into the business of producing the batteries.” She laughed. “At current prices, the ship pays for itself, without any people on board, in five years.”
Dawn saw through this. “Those prices for the batteries won’t hold, though, with a big jump in production.”
Tricia took her eyes off Alex and turned to Dawn. “Those prices won’t fall as much as you might think, nor as fast. We’re looking at a world with an enormous demand compared to current supply.” Her eyes drifted back to Alex. “The opportunity is so vast, putting it in numbers sounds fantastical while simultaneously trivializing it.”
Alex nodded at Tricia as if she were the only person in the room. “It’s like we’re creating a whole new world at the very moment when every person with a pioneering spirit wants to escape the old one. It doesn’t make any difference how many ships Diab builds, or how many we build, the number of people who want to leave the current dirtside disasters behind is too large even for all of us combined to meet the need.”
His eyes grew distant, and he spoke from the heart of a true believer. “Our capacity for manufacturing isle ships is growing exponentially. Almost a million people live on the seas today. In ten years, that could be a billion.” For a moment, it looked like he was done, but no. “The tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free? They can join us here.”
His eyes refocused on Tricia. “Everybody who wants a second chance can have one. A chance to leave past regrets behind. A chance, practically, to be reborn.”
A second chance was above all things what Tricia wanted. She found herself wanting to test Alex’s personal willingness to let her leave her past behind.
But she had one last project to complete before she could move on to a new life. A terrible coldness filled her, so deep and pure it burned.
Just one more little project.
She let the warmth of Alex’s smile touch her and breathed her next words as if Alex were the only person in the room. “A chance to be reborn. Can you feel it?”
Colonel Suen suspected his mission was doomed, but he was not given to surrender.
Analytically, even without the tanks and the aircraft, he commanded a formidable force. As his men had already demonstrated, his Red Arrow fire teams could easily blast the enemy’s armored cars.
His Flying Crossbows were useless against the enemy drones. After studying the drones with binoculars, one of his engineers had concluded the problem lay in the infrared homing systems on the missiles. The drones were electric, so they had no heat signatures.
But the drones were harmless. Their only payloads, apparently, were hornet nests, and he had defeated the hornets decisively.
The enemy fighters were invulnerable to anything he still had, flying too high and too fast for his Flying Crossbows, but the jets were best at chewing up tanks and trucks in the open. Now Suen and his men were moving on foot, spread out in the forest south of the dam. Sure, they could kill some of his men, but they’d burn a tremendous amount of ammo doing it. He had to believe Benin did not have an unlimited supply of missiles and bombs.
If he could reach the dam, he would be practically invulnerable. Nobody wanted the dam destroyed. Whoever stood on it could dictate terms.
The only possibly effective fighting force between him and his objective was the Amazonian warriors in their red battle armor, and he simply couldn’t take them seriously. Sure, they’d done great in combat with the usual run of thugs who played at soldiering and ran African countries, but really?
Then he heard machine-gun fire up ahead. His radio came to life. “Colonel, we have engaged t
he enemy.”
Suen asked the obvious question. “Amazons?”
The lieutenant on the other end of the line answered uncertainly, “I’m not sure, sir. I think they’re women, but they’re wearing camo battlesuits, not red. Anybody who pokes his head up long enough with binoculars gets killed, sir.” He paused. “They seem to have an unusually high percentage of snipers in their order of battle.”
Colonel Suen sighed. “Amazons, all right. Can you flank them?”
“I just sent some men north.” At that moment, another round of gunfire sounded on Suen’s right flank. “Sir, our flankers seem to have met their flankers.”
Well, wasn’t that just the jasmine leaf in his flower tea.
At least his men would no longer complain about the heavy crates of ammo they’d been dragging along on sledges. His mortars could make quick work of any enemy strong points. Then he’d overrun them at night.
As he ordered the ammo and mortars unloaded, another country was heard from. One of the F35s cruised lazily up and began to circle.
Colonel Suen bit his lip. Could that plane’s sensor system detect a mortar shell in flight and follow the trajectory back to the launch location? Could they then drop a Hellfire missile on the fire team?
He ordered one mortar team to fire one shell and then run like hell, just to see what would happen.
He didn’t know if the mortar had hit anything, but the mortar and the ammo they’d set out beside it exploded quite spectacularly.
His radio crackled with a transmission made in the clear. A woman’s voice came through to irritate him. “Colonel Suen? Yoohoo, anybody there?” The voice spoke Mandarin with only the tiniest hint of a provincial accent. Much like the voice his truck drivers had described so long ago, he realized.
“Colonel Suen here. Is this Empress Ping?”
The voice sounded delighted. “Oh, goody. So much for introductions.” The voice turned sober. “You’re probably thinking you can push through, kill my Amazons, and take the dam. I wanted to make sure you understood that not only would this be much harder than you expect—”
Suen was already coming to that conclusion.
“—but worse, you are short some information on just how difficult your situation really is.”
Colonel Suen squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “I presume you are about to bring me up to date.”
“No, actually, I was going to let your men bring you up to date.”
A male voice came on the line. “Colonel, I must apologize.” The voice choked. “A herd of goats overran our position. It turned out several of the goats were carrying hornet’s nests.” He finished in barely a whisper. “I’m afraid the hornets got to us before we had a chance to counter them, sir. Then a couple of those women with the red armor showed up.”
It made no sense for the colonel to chew out this fellow. “Where were you stationed, soldier?”
“We maintained the major outpost in the center of the supply line, sir.”
Suen slumped.
Goats. Colonel Suen had been defeated by goats. It made sense in its own strange way. From the first moment, the colonel had been driving through hostile territory with every villager’s hand raised against him. Mao would have been the first to predict this outcome. Goats.
Suen pursed his lips. “Understood. Empress Ping, I presume you are planning to demand my surrender?”
The Empress chuckled. “Colonel, I’m so glad we have a shared understanding of the situation. As it happens, I don’t want your surrender. Not exactly, anyway.”
Suen brightened. Could he somehow salvage something from this fiasco?
Ping continued. “First of all, I’ll make you a trade. Leave all your weapons for my people to collect, and a few miles down the road, I’ll give you a fleet of pickup trucks. Enough to carry all your people back to Lagos.”
Suen grunted.
“Second, I guarantee you that you will continue to get power from the Kainji Dam. I’d already guaranteed that to Imam Ekon, but the message might have gotten garbled on its way to you.” She paused. “There’s another way of looking at this whole undertaking, Colonel. Consider this. You successfully achieved your primary objective. You have completed a treaty agreement with Benin that secures the electricity for your harbor and your oil wells. Honestly, it’s more secure for you with us in charge than it ever would have been with Imam Ekon running the show.”
Well, that was certainly an interesting way to spin the facts. It would allow a lot of people to save face. Maybe even him.
Still, one last thing. “I accept your terms, Empress, but only if you will answer one last question.” He took a breath. “Did you really, personally, come into my camp and sabotage my fuel tanks?”
Guang Jian, President for Life, restrained himself from shooting the new CEO of the China State Railway Group. After all, he had shot this man’s predecessor quite recently. Fan would not appreciate Guang asking her to find yet another replacement. Worse, she might be really annoyed with him for shooting her selected CEO, especially for such a minor infraction of the needs of the state.
But it was a very annoying infraction. How could this man have let the BrainTrust defeat Colonel Suen? He rather liked Suen, actually. Now the reputation of the entire Chinese military was stained. It was completely unacceptable.
Guang took a few deep breaths and let the CEO depart the Presidential palace intact. He realized that blaming either the CEO or Suen was misplaced.
He should be blaming the BrainTrust.
His admin interrupted. “Sir, the Russian Union Premier is on the line.”
Guang rolled his eyes. What could the Premier possibly want? Were they going to argue over the northwest border where Russian troops and Chinese troops took the occasional potshot at each other? Sigh. “Put him through.”
The Premier sounded surprisingly sunny for someone who’d had a stroke recently. “President Guang, thank you for taking my call.” He paused for a moment. “I also have the American President for the Duration on the other line. May I put him on? We have a proposal for you.”
Okay, this was new. “Sure, bring him in.”
In moments, the leaders of the three Great Powers were connected in a teleconference. Guang looked at the Premier, who looked calmly confident, and the American President, who looked enraged.
The President for the Duration spoke. “We have to destroy the BrainTrust before the BrainTrust destroys us. Not content with stealing all our best workers and snatching all the people with the wealth we need to run our country, now this SmartCoin thing of theirs is destroying our economy!”
Guang suddenly found himself simpatico with the American President. How unlikely. “Right! And not only are they destroying our economy, forcing us to create massive unemployment by wiping out our state-run corporations, they’re interfering with our foreign policy, and harassing our military any time we venture beyond our borders.” He frowned petulantly. “It’s intolerable.”
The Premier leaned forward, turning hawkish. “As I was saying, we all have something in common. We need to see the BrainTrust destroyed.”
Cogent News, Lindsay Postrel reporting.
The American President for the Duration, the Russian Union Premier, and the Chinese President for Life have just issued a joint statement declaring war on the BrainTrust. The navies of the “Alliance for the Protection of the Open Seas” will set sail sometime in the next week. The American aircraft carrier Kennedy will come from San Diego. The Russian battlecruiser Nakhimov—the only battlecruiser left in the world, an immensely powerful warship from the days of the Cold War—will travel from Vladivostok. And the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning II, China’s only nuclear-powered ship, will sail from Zhanjiang.
Each of these flagships will be accompanied by an armada individually powerful enough to destroy all the combined navies of WWII. To the casual onlooker, it might seem like ridiculous overkill for taking on an enemy that does not have a single anti-ship missile to its name
, but is the destruction of the BrainTrust really the point? It seems more a declaration of the hegemony of the Great Powers over all civilization than a military force suited to the needs of battle.
However, opinions vary wildly on the probable outcome of this upcoming confrontation. The betting pools in Las Vegas are giving fifty to one odds against the BrainTrust.
Investigation of the prediction markets on the BrainTrust itself surprised this reporter. Here there are no forecasts on the coming battle. It seems that everyone in the fleet interested in buying a futures position is putting their money into Las Vegas to bet on the BrainTrust, to get a piece of that action at odds the BrainTrusters consider a giveaway.
Of course, the BrainTrusters have a rather grim bias with respect to these bets. After all, if they lose, they’ll be dead. Then who cares about the money?
Meanwhile, the Alliance leaders have stood shoulder to shoulder and promised that the BrainTrust shall be wiped from the world. The BrainTrust, they say, will be erased so thoroughly it will be as if it had never existed.
This reporter remains skeptical. The Alliance might very well destroy all the BrainTrust isle ships, but erase it from history?
We should perhaps remember that the Vegas betting pools are priced, after all, in SmartCoin.
Fan Hui sat in the cafeteria, frowning at her strawberry gelato. The gelato was not at fault. Anyone who knew her would take one look at her face and immediately recognize the source of her irritation.
Guang.
She had learned of the Alliance for the Protection of the Open Seas the same way everyone else on board the ship had learned of it: by reading about it in Cogent.
So she’d teleconferenced her ex-boyfriend in a frothing rage, demanding to know what he thought he was doing. “Are you crazy?”
Guang’s voice slid creepily down her spine. “Relax. What could possibly go wrong?” Heated anger suffused his next words. “I have to punish them for embarrassing Colonel Suen like that. His mission was easy and straightforward, and then bang! Here comes the BrainTrust.”
Braintrust- Requiem Page 23
