by Stephen Moss
“Which brings me to my second point,” she said, as he returned her handshake with a confused look, “which is that we should probably dispense with the Doctor and Captain nonsense.”
He nodded, his smile becoming even more genuine and heartfelt.
“Birgit,” she said.
“Rob,” he said.
They looked into each other’s eyes, finding a kind of peace there. The mirth was only skin deep, of course, as the stark reality of their fate kept scratching away just under the surface. But if they must face oblivion, Birgit for one knew she would be glad of the company.
She looked at him as they held each other’s grasp. Her look said she was about to say something else, that was going to admonish him again for being here, for sacrificing so much. But his expression was one of immovability. His look said with infinite patience and firm resilience that it was not a choice she had asked him to make, and, in fact, it had not been a choice at all when it came down to it.
It was his station, now his ship, he supposed. He could not have let one of his charges go adrift alone, it was simply not in him.
She would not forgive him for it yet, but she would spend a decade thanking him for it, and her gratitude would go a long way toward healing the pain of his loss, as his presence would go a long way to healing hers.
Their understanding clear, their shared burden truly halved, they turned as one and looked out the window once more.
They looked out toward the beauty of Earth, a jewel in the darkness as it reared into view once more. It already seemed visibly smaller. Nodding once more and breathing deep, they turned away from it. It was a sight at once too wonderful and too terrible to behold.
- - -
Minnie:
Amadeu: ‘i don’t know, minnie. maybe she is doing something aboard. maybe she doesn’t know yet.’
Minnie:
Amadeu: ‘i know, minnie.’
Amadeu was amazed at the way Minnie was reacting to the loss of her Artificial Parent. Proud on some level of his child and achingly sad on another, watching her trying to comprehend the concept of loss, of grief. He wept to hear and feel Minnie struggling with her mother’s departure.
And he wept for the loss of his friend as well, for the loss of that magnificent mind. Not dead, but vanishing away into the void with every moment.
He looked for a way to distract Minnie from her first brush with the harshest of reality’s truths, but he knew there was virtually no task that could keep her monumental mind busy enough.
Amadeu: ‘¿minnie, have you finished the upload of your simulacrum to terminus?’
Minnie:
Amadeu: ‘then this is not goodbye. you will be able to speak to her every day. and we will still be able to communicate with them. they have a whole range of lasers aboard in their laboratories. your simulacrum will help them configure one to communicate with us.’
Minnie:
He was, it was true; and it was pointless, Amadeu knew that. Unless …
Amadeu: ‘yes, minnie, i am. because i love you and i know birgit does too. she would speak with you if she could. i know that as well. as do you.’
Minnie:
Amadeu: ‘so will i, minnie, so will i.’
Their shared grief was tangible in the ether, a substance clogging the very cables and airwaves that linked them. Amadeu spoke through it.
Amadeu: ‘you know, minnie, there is one thing you can do. i am aware it won’t affect the outcome for birgit, but it will resolve the imbalance that has led to this. you can reach out to banu, minnie. you can help her. the skalm is airborne even now, it is seeking retribution. help banu find the people responsible for this. help her hunt them.’
Minnie:
There was a brief pause then Minnie spoke again. When her voice came to him again, it was with a coldness and a purpose that made Amadeu shiver. They had created Minnie in order to help them fight the coming alien armada. Now she would fight a different foe, a foe closer to home, but one that posed just as great a threat to their chances of survival.
Minnie focused her attention on that task as she spoke to Amadeu once more.
Minnie:
Chapter 46: The Lion’s Tail
Mikhail watched with glee as his planes tore at the concrete hulk. Mankind had long ago discovered the safety of the fortress, the great castles and forts of the Middle Ages rising as signs of power and wealth and as safe havens for the people who ruled, both with malice and mercy. They had survived for hundreds of years, right up until the invention of gunpowder.
The quick rise of artillery in the fourteenth century had made the stone wall pointless, rendering it obsolete through blunt trauma and obliging the kings and warlords of the time to come out from behind their crumbling edifices and go on the offensive, facing their enemies on the battlefield.
And so it was even now as the mighty SpacePort One crumbled under the barrage. The remaining Ubitsyas’ awesome weaponry made bloody work of SpacePort One’s superstructure even as the mighty cables that had been anchored here rose eerily into the sky. Their links to Earth severed they now swam upward and outward into space; the very place they had been humanity’s bridge to.
Mikhail himself came up now. Now that the forces around Rolas had been destroyed. He came to join the remainder of his fleet in the bloody morning’s murderous conclusion.
His ship was a freak. An attempt at something akin to the Skalms of his home but built using the only the two-meter-wide resonance chamber he had managed to coax the Russian premier into making for him. The strange-looking spiny sphere came in low over the water, passing over the remnants of the taskforce fleet and he laughed at the carnage his Ubitsyas had wrought. His smaller Skalm had only two wings, and those fitted after the central sphere had been finished. But he believed it could outrun anything on Earth and with one notable exception he was right.
One of his two wings carried a bulky subspace tweeter so he could command his small fleet, and the other wing carried his own inert agent body, slaved to the ship, but ready should he need it.
He reveled in his faith that his little ball of fury could outrun anything the humans had, even the StratoJets, and the knowledge that it could also go exo-atmospheric, where the StratoJets could not follow. He grinned with a cold cheer as he joined his remaining Ubitsyas and opened up his weapons as well. Not flechette guns, but three thin particle beams, lancing out of some of the smaller nozzles on his spherical hull and the ends of his wings.
He had only twenty-five Ubitsyas left. He had known it would be costly, but with the StratoJet fleet distracted it had been all but a foregone conclusion. He knew he did not have much longer, though. With the StratoJets finally returning to their nest, he would have to leave or face yet another fight, and he would be unlikely to win. But he would leave them only ruins to come home to. He would leave this place burned, slagged, and destroyed.
He had exacted a terrible cost on his enemies today. He knew they would hunt him, but they would not catch him.
Mikhail watched as the StratoJet fleet closed. He would wait until the last moment before pulling his fleet back. He would lead them on a merry chase, try to save a few Ubitsyas if he could, but go space bound if he couldn’t, and escape them, until Pei, safe in Beijing, signaled to let him know what target to hit next.
&nb
sp; But the StratoJets weren’t coming.
Mikhail watched the TASC fleet on his sensors. Ten StratoJets now, more incoming, but already enough to engage his smaller, weaker, and frankly less well-piloted Ubitsyas with a very real chance of victory.
But they were holding back. What were these fools waiting for? Had he shocked them so much with his attack? Had he finally cowered them into subservience? He laughed. He would win this war single-handedly. He would deliver this great orb into the hands of the Armada tied and wrapped for their pleasure. These humans were fools to have thought they could stop the Agents. Fools to have even dreamed of building an armada capable of stopping the great Mobiliei fleet even now descending on them.
But still this was strange. Mikhail could not question their tenacity in a fight. No, the humans were nothing if not tenacious. So why were they not engaging?
But the reason was coming up fast now, faster than any sound that might have preceded it, seemingly trying to catch the very light waves bouncing off its crossed wings as it came up at Rolas with ferocious abandon. It would only be a few minutes longer now.
- - -
Premier Svidrigaïlov blustered with ever growing bravado at the ambassadors arranged on the screens in front of him. In the face of his army’s rebuffed incursion into Hungary and his top commandant’s sudden disappearance, he had opened his doors to diplomatic conversation for the first time since taking power. Peter had advised him that he had little choice.
The leaders of Western Europe were already talking of regime change in Russia, of a forced incursion into Moscow, of all out war. He knew they wouldn’t do that, they could not risk it, but neither could he risk insulting them any further now that his very best general, the very reason behind his success to date, had gone rogue.
He spoke without apology though, “Ladies, gentlemen, please, you forget who has invited you here today. Do not mistake the brief success of your forces over the last couple of days for anything other than the need for me to send some of my more capable troops to take down the illegal …” he grossly over-emphasized the word, “… space elevator that your countries built …”
He went on even as the collected ambassadors erupted at this mention of the attack on Rolas. They could not know he had not ordered it, that he had not even known it was occurring until after it was almost over, and Premier Svidrigaïlov certainly was not going to tell them. Better to take credit for it now that it was done and take care of the traitor Beria later.
“… that your countries built, without UN permission.” They were shouting at him now, indignant, news of the collapse of the great elevator filling the airwaves. Words like ‘peaceful’ and ‘humanitarian’ were being used to describe the elevator, while words like ‘act-of-terror’ were being used to describe his commandant’s actions.
The premier spoke over their objections once more, “Your lies did not fool me, and they did not fool the Russian people. The Space Elevator was a weapon, nothing more. A weapon built by the Americans and their allies in Europe to build a military capability in space. You built it with the sole intention of militarizing space, in violation of the Outer Space Treaty, and the proposed PAROS Treaty, and Russia was not about to allow that to happen!”
It was, under its sheen, a bluff; even if, deeper still, the lie had its roots in a reality the premier could not even guess at. But he marched on, shouting at the ambassadors of his erstwhile allies and neighbors, no stranger to the push and pull of international brinkmanship.
The call went on, achieving nothing except the reopening of diplomatic channels with the petulant Russian would-be emperor, and in that alone it might have been considered a step in the right direction. But there were some around the globe that were no longer interested in small steps. They wanted leaps and bounds and they were prepared to make them.
A quarter of a mile away across Red Square from three top-floor windows of an all but empty state library, two men and one woman leveled their weapons. They could not see the premier’s exact location but the signal being relayed to them from one of Minnie’s communications AIs showed him sitting in a conference room that they knew to be below and to the right of his main office. Minnie was relaying the schematics directly.
Hektor’s team triangulated the image they were seeing of the premier arguing with various foreign ministers and secretaries of state with schematics born of half a century of information gathering focused on this very building. They adjusted their firing controls to encompass a meter-wide point on the orange and white brick exterior of one of the Kremlin’s many vast edifices. They waited.
They waited until the very moment the Russian man nodded to his assistant to break the connection and the instant the screens went blank they opened fire.
Even as the ambassadors of various NATO powers no doubt went off to inform their respective leaders of the unreasonableness of the Russian leader, the wall behind Yuri Svidrigaïlov started to shake. The ancient brick seeming to flake and vibrate and turn to dust and suddenly three streams of blurred energy were slicing into the room, shredding the Russian man and spraying his blood like mist over the screens he had been so belligerently shouting into a moment before.
Peter Uncovsky watched from one side, stunned as his president suddenly evaporated, simply vanished in a haze of energetic rage. Rage that could have penetrated a tank’s armor and which now obliterated any last remnant of Premier Yuri Svidrigaïlov and pounded onward, drilling through the desk, the monitors, and almost through the wall beyond.
As the cloud that had once been a man filled the room, the three assassins silenced their tri-barrel cannons and waited. They could not stay where they were for long, but nor could they leave till they had confirmation of their success.
Walking across the square, their friend Tomas suddenly started to accelerate. He was young and inexperienced, but he was also one of the fastest runners they had in the battleskins. They watched him start to sprint, they watched him build up speed, the stunned crowd looking from the sudden hole that had appeared in the side of one of their most important national monuments to the man sprinting at inhuman speed toward it. He calculated his jump, then braced and catapulted himself into the air.
The secretaries and guards filing into the conference room to join Peter Uncovsky were stunned by the sudden rolling landing of Tomas through the ragged hole that had been opened up in the wall. He was clothed like an ordinary russian, but his helmet had folded up to cover his head as he leaped through the air and as his lumberjack shirt flapped around his arms and neck, his black armor could be seen coating his body beneath.
He landed in the debris of the room but did not hesitate. As he skidded across the floor, Russian guards among the throng were already starting to shout.
“стоп! конец!” they barked, calling for him to freeze. They were reaching for their guns but Tomas was not going to wait around for them to fire. He had seen all he needed to and a voice rang out in his ears as Hektor used their subspace comms for the first time in a week.
Hektor: ‘move, tomas. mission confirmed. get out of there. recon team two, covering fire.’
Tomas was already gripping at the floor, kicking and scrabbling to halt his ridiculous momentum and then turning and running back out the way he had come, using all his machine strength to get the hell out of the hornet’s nest he had jumped into before they figured out what was happening. A bullet or two rang out as he leapt clear once more but he was already gone, vanishing as quickly as he had come.
They watched him come flying back out of the crumbling red brick dust like he was being fired from a cannon. Hektor had cleared them to use subspace comms for this core part of the operation.
Hektor: ‘niels, blanket that hole with fire once he’s clear in case any of them decide to fire out after him. cara, take out the apc coming into the square at [1342.4596]. bohdan, frederik, you have your fields of fire, take out anyone following tomas.’
They were already doing it, the APC folding and cru
mpling into a molten heap as Cara fragged it, the hole behind Tomas’s flying figure blurring once more as Niels bathed it in hypersonic fire. As Tomas landed and began sprinting away across the square, uniformed figures all across its wide expanse were reeling and falling, picked off by the barium lasers and sonic punches of Bohdan and Frederik.
Hektor watched even as he covered his own sector, taking down assailants left and right. He was starting to feel something close to confidence, though he would never call it that. Confidence that they would make it. The primary plan was going to work. And with that he redirected his fire to a small, innocuous manhole cover about a hundred meters ahead of Tomas.
With a precise circle of fire, he punched the manhole out, and as the concrete and cobblestones around it cracked and crumbled, it began to fall into the sewage line it was covering. It was still falling toward the floor of the drainage pipe as Tomas was dropping into a skidding slide, like he was sliding into home plate, and then he was gone, dropping out of sight and into the sewer below.
Hektor: ‘tomas is clear. everyone, go! go! meet at rendezvous point alpha. comms silence reinitiated!’
And with that it was over. The bewildered citizens and surviving soldiers tried to compute what had even happened as Hektor’s team all turned as one from their vantage points and skitted this way and that, following well-planned routes down, down, into the labyrinth of tunnels under the medieval city and away. Anyone who dared to chase any of them would pay dearly, if they could keep up.
- - -
Mikhail was fighting an unsettling feeling. He looked at the burning, crumbling hulk of the SpacePort. It was done. He could refocus his fire on the complex across the water on mainland Sao Tome, but that would mean coming into range of the phalanx of guns protecting the complex’s land border. No, he had killed this place, he had destroyed it, more completely than he had dared to hope.
No. Something was wrong. They should be attacking him. They should have engaged. Enough. He had won. It was time to leave.
