Nolan types as the general talks, wanting to capture all the detail in the incident log.
“We have lost a good portion of our airpower,” Cooper says. “We ain’t fixing this overnight. It’s going to take a long time to claw this back.”
Nolan fights against the lump rising in his throat. “Understood.”
“I’ll let yah go, but keep an old dog in the loop, yah hear?”
“Will do, sir.”
As the line goes dead, a popup window appears briefly in the bottom right of Nolan’s laptop screen. It’s a preview of an incoming email from Colonel Steele out of Guam. The subject line reads: Grafenwoehr and Greenham Common also reporting broken arrows.
Nolan doesn’t need to read any more. He taps Kath on the shoulder as he gets to his feet, saying, “We need to talk to the President.”
“You don’t understand,” Kath says, obsessing over a spreadsheet full of numbers. She points at her screen. “Neutrinos don’t do anything. They’re entirely neutral. Tiny. Light. They barely interact with anything. They can fly right through the entire planet without hitting a single atom!”
“Could they cause this?” Nolan asks, squeezing past someone as he works his way into the Situation Room.
Kath follows him, replying, “A hundred trillion of them pass through you every second—regardless of where you are. Day or night. They’re ghosts. They’re everywhere all the time.”
Nolan pauses, turning back to her. “But could they?”
Kath’s eyes dart around. “Ah, maybe. I mean, at high enough volumes and energies. In theory, they could dislodge protons or neutrons from heavy elements like uranium. But we’ve never seen anything like this in the lab or at an observatory.”
“Yes, we have,” Nolan says.
“When?”
“Just now.”
The President sees the two of them pushing through the crowd and beckons them over. Several aides move back from the table, less than impressed at being sidelined by them.
“Tell me you’ve got some good news?” the President asks. “This thing is gone, right?”
“Yes,” Kath says. “We’re tracking it on course for Venus at 117 km/s. It shed roughly a third of its speed as it passed over the Gulf.”
“We’re in a bad way,” the President says, shaking her head. “We’ve lost the electrical grid throughout the Southwest. It’ll be days before it’s back online. My biggest worry at the moment is getting portable power to hospitals before their backup generators run dry. We’ve got looting in LA. Fires raging in Houston. Then there’s food supply. Just getting trucks moving again is going to be difficult. Motors aren’t restarting. Even diesel engines. If our supply lines fail, we’ll have real problems. And we’ve got a humanitarian crisis unfolding south of the border. Mexico did not take this well. Neither did Honduras.”
She flicks a button on the TV remote, changing the channel as she asks, “Have you seen this?”
An eerie green glow fills the dark sky, waving like a curtain in a breeze. Below the ghostly haze, sprites reach down into the clouds. They appear as faint red funnels, barely visible in the night. Lightning crackles from on high, breaking from the stratosphere. Lightning bolts reach down into the low cloud cover, causing them to glow from within.
“That,” the President says, pointing, “is scaring the shit out of people. Tell me you expected this? Tell me this is normal.”
Kath says, “Oh. Ah, yeah. A high energy discharge like this will cause auroras. They’ll dissipate slowly over the next week. They won’t be visible during the day, though, only at night.”
“Good,” the President says. “So I’m not lying when I tell people we’re not being invaded.”
“No, ma’am,” Nolan says. “But we have been disarmed.”
The President’s eyes go wide.
“What???”
Fallout
“Everyone out!”
The President points at the door, but her eyes are on Nolan’s laptop. He’s brought up the IMS satellite imagery. Fires rage within nuclear silos in Russia.
“SecDef and Joint Chiefs only.”
Kath flinches, turning toward the door. Nolan reaches out, gently taking her arm. He assures her she’s exempt from the President’s ire. At a guess, she’d rather bail like everyone else. For someone that’s socially awkward like him, it’s funny seeing her wracked with anxiety for a change. Oh, he hates being caught off-guard, like when he was called in to speak with General Cooper or after the abduction, but this is different. For him, having strangers over for dinner the night An̆duru passed Saturn was more mentally taxing than being locked in the Situation Room with the President. It’s the formal nature of the relationship. Somehow that relieves the pressure. Regardless of the implications of what’s being discussed, Nolan’s able to compartmentalize the setting. He has a job—a function. All he has to do is his duty. Simple. Not easy, but straightforward. They both sit at the table.
“Explain.”
The President’s curt. Her clipped comments are the only sign of the stress she feels. She breathes deeply, bracing herself for what’s to come.
Admiral Jacobsen squeezes into the room, pushing past the half-open door with a handful of papers. McGuire is there as well. Apparently, like Nolan and Kath, he’s both invisible and exempt.
There’s no easy way to say this, so Nolan goes with, “They took out our nukes.”
The President shakes her head, saying, “What?”
“And not just us,” Nolan says, pointing at the Russian missile silos.
“What am I looking at?”
“Emergency vehicles responding to a radiation leak.”
“Wait a minute,” the President says. “You’re saying these creatures took out the nuclear capability of an entire planet? Across all nations? In just a few seconds? How is that possible?”
“Ah,” Kath says. “Elements like uranium and plutonium are unstable. They’re so heavy they’re slowly falling apart regardless. Half-life, right? You’ve heard of radioactive decay?”
The President nods.
Nolan relaxes. Kath is on edge. He might not understand the exact details, but he grasps the essence of what just happened. Kath is panicked. Whatever she says is going to be gobbledygook. She might as well blurt out a bunch of random scientific terms for all anyone in the room cares. It’s impossible to condense decades of research into a few sentences. The pained expression on her face reveals her anguish. She struggles with how to articulate this for the President. She’s going to end up with a word salad.
“The plasma formed during the high altitude braking maneuver caused atoms to fuse.”
Kath brings her two fists together, visually portraying what she’s describing.
“That fusion released a surge of subatomic particles cascading through the atmosphere. From what we understand, it formed a neutrino shockwave. An invisible wall moving at close to the speed of light.”
She rests her trembling hands on the wooden table.
“Neutrinos are harmless. Billions of them pass through us every second. Most of them come from the Sun. Not only will they pass through us, they’ll pass right through dozens of planets without hitting anything.”
“But?” the President says.
“But occasionally, they hit a nucleus.”
“Occasionally?”
“Under normal circumstances, yes. Large atoms, like uranium, are big targets. They’re also more loosely held together.”
“And?” the President asks, showing astonishing restraint as Kath struggles to get to the point.
“The surge that came when An̆duru passed overhead was off the charts. That surge caused our nuclear material to overheat.”
“Have any of our nukes detonated?” the President asks. “Are we going to wake to mushroom clouds in the sky?”
“No, ma’am,” Kath says. “The design of our weapons is such that nuclear material is kept below critical mass. The shockwave of neutrinos caused our uranium and pl
utonium to overheat. The temperature would have reached five to six hundred degrees.”
Nolan says, “Enough to disable but not detonate our bombs.”
“Yes,” Kath says.
“Jesus,” the President says. “So An̆duru buzzed Earth, knocked out the US electrical grid, and disabled every goddamn nuclear weapon on the planet?”
Kath shrinks a little. She doesn’t want to admit it, but she manages a sheepish, “Yes.”
“How sure of this are you?” the President asks, turning to Nolan.
“I’ve heard from US bases in Guam, the United Kingdom, and Germany. They’re all reporting nuclear accidents. We won’t know the full extent of the damage until dawn when we can collate responses from across our nuclear triad.”
“But it doesn’t look good?”
“No, ma’am. There might have been some nuclear devices that survived. But given we’re seeing this as far afield as Siberia, though, I doubt it.”
Kath says, “We’ve also had damage to civilian reactors.”
The President buries her head in her hands.
Nolan hesitates. He doesn’t want to burden the President with more bad news, but his sense of duty compels him. She needs to know what they’re dealing with.
“We may have sustained damage to nuclear-powered vessels like our aircraft carriers and subs. Again, we won’t know for sure until we can get everyone to report in.”
“Mitch,” the President says, addressing the Secretary of Defense. “Have you heard anything?”
“Isolated nuclear incidents, ma’am,” he replies. “But we’re still trying to establish communication with a lot of our bases. If they’re managing a radiation leak, they’re probably scrambling to contain the problem. We may not get formal notification until they’ve got things under control.”
“I want to know,” the President says. She presses her index finger against the desk as though it were a button on a keyboard executing a command. “I need to understand our military readiness across the board.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How long before this thing comes back?” she asks, addressing Kath.
“That depends on its final speed after passing Venus, but it’s going to be months, not weeks.”
“So this is a shot across the bow,” the President says, turning to the Secretary of Defense, who’s gone distinctly pale.
Kath jumps on that point. “We still don’t know that this was intentional.”
The President laughs, shaking her head. “Kath. We would be naive to think this was an accident. They know what they’re doing, right? You’ve said as much yourself. For us, this visit is a surprise. For them, it’s the result of planning and preparation.
“We have been hit with a measured, targeted attack. The passage of An̆duru was designed to cripple our most effective deterrent. I know you want to believe they come in peace. They don’t. That much is clear. Whether we like it or not, we are at war.”
Kath hangs her head.
“Whether it’s weeks or months, we don’t have long,” McGuire says.
Nolan says, “And Earth is huge. We have no way of knowing where they’ll make landfall, but if I was them, I’d be going to the hardest-hit areas.”
McGuire shakes his head. Nolan gets it—it’s not that McGuire disagrees but rather that he hates the implications for the US.
“We have to be ready,” the President says, gesturing to McGuire. “I need to talk to the British and the European Union, followed by the Canadians and the Australians. We’ve got to start thinking about defense.”
“What about the Chinese?” Admiral Jacobsen asks. “And the Russians?”
“We’re in this together,” the President says. “Regardless of whether it’s South Africa, Saudi Arabia, India, or Indonesia, we need to stand together. If one of us is attacked, we’re all in the fight. No country should stand alone.”
“Agreed,” the admiral says. “We could set up geographic defense zones. Have each country manage and monitor their own zone. If an attack comes, we all wade in.”
“Okay,” McGuire says. “This is going to take some work at a diplomatic level, but it’s the only viable approach.”
“I need options,” the President says. “I need scenarios. Based on what we’ve seen, what’s likely? How can we defend ourselves? What weaknesses could they exploit? How do we protect our people? Do we evacuate major cities to reduce the way our population is concentrated? What industries are critical to a protracted war? Should we be hiding some of our strike capability, like the Russians are doing with their subs?”
Kath shakes her head.
Nolan says, “We have an X-37 already armed and in orbit.”
The President raises an eyebrow, as does Kath.
Nolan explains. “They’re a miniature shuttle—a drone.”
“What’s it armed with?” McGuire asks.
“A rail-gun,” Nolan replies. “It’s the modern equivalent of a crossbow. No explosives. It’s simple and effective.”
He brings up an image on his laptop, showing them a spacecraft sitting on a runway. A couple of engineers stand next to the vessel, giving them some perspective. The X-37 is small for a spaceship. It’s roughly the size of a delivery van, perhaps slightly longer.
The X-37 looks like a miniature Space Shuttle. Its delta wings, along with its white upper body and black underbelly, are all familiar. Dark tiles line the leading edge of the wings and the tip of what should be the cockpit, but there are no windows. The front of the craft has been sealed with white panels.
The Space Shuttle was huge, big enough that engineers could walk beneath it. They’d have to crawl beneath the X-37.
“No crew,” Nolan says. “We timed the orbit so it was on the other side of the planet during the encounter. That bird can stay up there for years if needed.”
“Okay,” the President says. “So we have an ace in the hole.”
“Wait?” Kath says. “You’ve been planning for this all along?”
“We’d be negligent if we didn’t,” Nolan says.
“You want to go to war with them?”
“Nobody wants anything,” the President says. “They came to us, remember. Unannounced. Uninvited. And hostile.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Kath says.
Nolan is stunned. He’s used to debates within a leadership group, but not dissent. In the Air Force, there comes a point where swallowing pride is mandatory. Once a decision is made, the discussion is over. Time to unify. Make the best of it and move on. But Kath is digging in. It’s as though she has no respect for authority. If it weren’t for Nolan including her in the early days of the crisis, she wouldn’t be within several thousand miles of this room. Regardless, she feels she has a right to speak out.
“This is madness,” Kath says.
“How so?” McGuire asks. “Since when has the defense of the United States been madness?”
Kath taps the desk in front of her, saying, “War is not a universally understood concept, even here on Earth. The only animals that go to war are those with territorial colonies—humans, chimps, meerkats, ants. You don’t see tigers going to war, or elephants, or eagles. War doesn’t exist for sharks or snakes.
“As big as we think it is, Earth is tiny. There’s no territorial incentive for them to start a war. We’re interpreting this as an act of war, but it could be a purely defensive measure. None of our bombs went off, right? They may not even have the concept of war. For them, this could be an entirely pragmatic move for their own safety. This could be the celestial equivalent of a police officer taking a gun from a suspect.”
“Kath,” Nolan says, but she cuts him off.
“No, wait a minute. You’re sitting here planning the end of the world without having all the facts.”
“We’ll never have all the facts,” McGuire says.
“We can’t wait any longer,” the President says. “We listened to you. We listened to the science and look at what happened
. We were sideswiped. Blindsided. I cannot allow that to happen again. We must defend ourselves.”
“From what?” Kath asks, incensed. “From a civilization that’s hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ahead of us? That is equal parts insane and unrealistic. If they can strip the entire planet of nuclear weapons in under a minute, what do you think they’ll do to an M1-Abrams tank?”
She laughs, shaking her head in disbelief.
“What would you have me do?” the President asks, exasperated. “Nothing?”
Kath speaks with careful deliberation, slowly enunciating each word. “Do—not—panic.”
McGuire raises his voice, pointing at the far wall, on the verge of yelling as he says, “People are dying out there! Don’t you get that?”
Kath points at the table in front of her, saying, “And we can make that worse. Us. Right here. Right now. We can make that exponentially worse if we make ill-informed snap decisions.”
“Like what?” Nolan asks.
“Like emptying our cities,” Kath says, referring to one of the earlier points. “It’s winter. All our supporting infrastructure is focused on sustaining millions of people in cities. Food. Water. Electricity. Fuel. Health. Roads and rail. If we panic and people scatter, they’ll overwhelm the surrounding communities, and people—will—die. A lot of people.”
Reluctantly, the President nods.
Kath says, “We can’t sit here thinking the enemy is out there somewhere in space. Our own fear can be just as explosive and damaging.
“We’re in uncharted territory. We need to proceed with caution. An̆duru isn’t predictable, but humans are. If we panic, we’ll react without thinking and make things worse. It’s a lot harder to undo a problem than it is to avoid it in the first place.”
“So what would you have us do?” Nolan asks. It’s notable that neither the Secretary of Defense nor the President asked that question. He’s sure they’re wondering the same thing.
Wherever Seeds May Fall (First Contact) Page 23
