by Scott Mackay
“I checked the GK historical file on the subject,” said Cody. “Thirty years ago they used seven launches with two neutron warheads apiece. They’ll fire at least that much if not more. Thirty years ago they launched from an altitude of 2,500 kilometers.”
“What about warhead deployment?” asked Claire.
“The warheads separated from their launch vehicles at the 1,000-kilometer mark.”
She nodded. “So we should try to intercept the launch vehicles before the warheads deploy. If the warheads deploy you’ll be looking at twice as many targets. How soon till they launch?”
“Between ten and twenty minutes from now. I can’t be more precise than that.”
Claire glanced at the bar graph. “This is a great idea, Cody. We’re up to 500,000 kilowatts.” She put her hand against the microwave converter. “That gives this thing a range of 750 kilometers. If they deploy the warheads at a thousand it still means you’ll be faced with all those extra targets. Do you think we can get any more range than we already have?”
He gestured toward the thousands of Meek. “They’re working hard,” he said. “If we can get the plant up to a million kilowatts, that’ll give the converter a range of 1,500 kilometers, and that’s well above the warhead deployment zone. At least historically speaking. That’ll cut down on the number of targets considerably.”
“Those launch vehicles travel at 600 kilometers per minute,” said Claire, not at all encouraged. “That won’t give you much time.”
“I’ll have just under a minute to shoot down as many launch vehicles as I can. After that, I’ll have to deal with the separate warheads.”
“And just under two minutes to destroy whatever warheads get through.” She shook her head. “I don’t know, Cody. Those odds aren’t great.”
“It’s what we’ve got to work with. Key in the provisional parameters, but be ready to change them if we have to.” She followed his instructions. “Now let’s see what it looks like on the graphics.”
She nodded, punched up the graphics. “The holo-grid in green here is for reference,” she said, “with the distances marked horizontally and vertically along the sides. The Conrad Wilson will be represented by a blue triangle, the launch vehicles by yellow triangles, and the warheads by red triangles. Your targeting is represented by this white arrow. Once you’ve got your arrow in any of your target grids the microwave beam will automatically home in. If you’ve got two or more targets within the same grid the beam will pick off the closest, then the next closest, and so on.”
Cody nodded. “Is the targeting lock mandatory or can you move to another square if it seems more pressing?”
“Just hit Enter and the targeting will disengage until you move it to whatever grid you think is necessary. If you decide you want to stay in the same grid after all, just hit Enter again and the targeting will reengage.”
He nodded.
He tried it in test mode, getting the feel of the joystick, the thumbstick, and the trackball, watching the arrow move through the grid sideways, up, down, backward, forward, the little white arrow growing larger or smaller to enhance the effect of perspective, the scene panning left or right as he tried the trackball.
“I should do okay,” he said.
“I’m concerned about the strength of the microwave beam,” said Claire. “And I still haven’t located the glitch in my targeting software.”
“Those are the least of our worries,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“We’re trying to stop a full-scale strategic neutron strike with a piece of hydroequipment that’s 200 years old,” he said. “Might as well try to saw through a brick with a feather duster.”
The Conrad Wilson appeared as a blue triangle, swimming along the top of the green holo-grid like a shark along the surface of the sea. Thousands of Meek continued to sweep. Every panel cleared showed a corresponding rise in power. Each rise in power meant an increase in range for the old microwave converter. He now had 750,000 kilowatts. That gave him a range of 1,075 kilometers, an unspeakably narrow margin, just a hair’s breadth above the warhead deployment zone.
He looked up, squinting against the sun, which now slanted toward the west, thinking he might see the Conrad Wilson, maybe as a moving star against millions of stationary ones, but the ship maneuvered for attack 2,500 kilometers away, too far for the naked eye.
On his screen, he saw three yellow triangles detach themselves from the Conrad Wilson and head west toward the Angle Territories. Cody pushed the joystick in that direction, but the arrow wouldn’t rise above the 1,100-kilometer-altitude mark. He followed the yellow triangles along this power-deficiency barrier toward the Angles, the little white arrow reminding him of a helium balloon bobbing along a ceiling, unable to go any higher because of lack of power. The farther west he went, the more his arrow sank, trading altitude for distance. The launch vehicles breached the warhead deployment zone and the three yellow triangles turned into six red ones.
With a quick thump of his heart, he realized that the red triangles had sunk below the 1,000-kilometer-altitude mark, that he was within range.
He swung his white arrow all the way to the left, placed it in the target grid of the three nearest red triangles, and watched the three red triangles disappear. He then brought it over to the next square, was able to get two of the red triangles, but the last of them strayed to the next grid before target acquisition. He saw a flash on the horizon. He looked at the screen, at the damage-assessment window.
He saw that the City of Fair Argument, a city of 100,000 souls in the Territory of the Angle of Incidence, had taken a direct hit.
A hundred thousand souls. And nothing he could do. He felt momentarily shaken, that he was fighting against unbeatable odds, and that in the end he would be responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, but he shook these thoughts away, controlled them, concentrated, bolstered his nerve, and found a new resolve to fight harder than ever.
The Conrad Wilson launched another three weapons. He checked the power readouts. He had 900,000 kilowatts on-line now, a range of 1,350 kilometers. He moved the white arrow forward and to the left, then lifted it into the appropriate square. He knocked out all three launch vehicles before they reached the deployment zone. The explosions, visible to the naked eye, looked like big blue donuts 1,200 kilometers straight up. His success gave him courage.
He contacted Deirdre, who was out in the field supervising hundreds of Meek in the laying of new optical cable to replace the old impact-compromised stuff.
“Can we get any more power?” he asked her. “I think they’re going to attack east next, toward the Forest of Peace and Understanding.”
“We’re just about ready to go with the panels in northwest grid number 16,” she said. “That should give you an extra 50,000 kilowatts.”
Which meant an extra 75 kilometers; an advantage of seconds, but every second was precious.
Eight yellow triangles left the lethal underbelly of the Conrad Wilson. The launch vehicles traveled through a wide range of grid squares, spreading out from each other like the legs of a spider, deploying over an area of 62,500 square kilometers. His gridwork reference immediately panned back, showed the entire northern hemisphere of the football-shaped Ceres, allowed for targeting straight through the carbonaceous planetesimal by showing the asteroid in transparency.
He targeted. He had a 1,425-kilometer range now.
He wiped out four of the eight launch vehicles before they could deploy their warheads.
But the others …
The others got through. Reached the warhead zone.
The four remaining yellow triangles turned into eight red triangles.
Eight neutron warheads he had to destroy in under two minutes.
He swung his white arrow two squares over and vaporized two of them. Then down three squares to get another three. The remaining three triangles hurtled eastward. One toward Equilibrium, one toward the Forest of Peace and Und
erstanding, one toward the City of Resolved Differences. He pressed the joystick forward, caught the two trailing warheads, watched them burst into bright blue donuts on the eastern horizon, was about to move his white arrow into the next square where the last remaining warhead was heading ever closer to the City of Resolved Differences when a message popped up to his screen: error in targeting link 6579. Claire’s glitch, Claire’s software problem, Claire’s invisible trouble spot.
The huge microwave dish, towering above him like a giant white flower, swung suddenly to the left.
He hit Enter, hoping to disengage the automatic targeting.
On the top line of the gridwork the Conrad Wilson pulled away, disappeared from his screen, its mission over, had to retreat because of fuel concerns, even though its attack had been only partially successful. The error message blinked off for a second, then came back on. The microwave dish swung ninety degrees to the right. The beam slammed into the oxygen mine’s carbon slag heaps. The last red triangle had its nose down, dipping the 500 remaining kilometers toward the City of Resolved Differences.
He saw a blinding flash in the direction of the City of Resolved Differences and thought for sure he had failed, that the warhead had struck the Meek’s primary city; but then he saw another blinding flash to the south, another to the north, and finally one to the northwest. He felt some gee force, grabbed on to the rail to steady himself, watched the four detonations light up the surrounding terrain, saw the explosions form themselves into white spheres. Nuclear detonations, such as they looked when fired from the silos. The Meek had just made another trajectory change, and none too soon …
On the screen the asteroid broke free of Claire’s computerized targeting gridwork, ducking away from the oncoming warhead.
The warhead came to within 100 kilometers of the City of Resolved Differences, remained on its trajectory, was still too high to be caught by the asteroid’s gravity well, kept going straight, even as the asteroid acted like a head ducking out of the way of a bullet. The warhead passed the asteroid, now headed away from Ceres in the opposite direction from which it had come, on its own straight tangent. Cody exited the targeting program.
The microwave dish settled down and finally grew still.
PART THREE
CARSWELL
CHAPTER 19
Buster said: We have no wide-scale relief capability for this kind of attack. We are a peaceful people. We have trained ourselves to be meek. To be otherwise would be the end of us.
Cody and Buster rode in a skimmer over the bleak surface of Ceres. Thousands of other skimmers rode like a swarm of insects around them. Lulu was somewhere out there in one of them with Deirdre. Agatha rode with Ben. Jerry and Claire rode with Rex and Boris, ranking members of Buster’s clan. Annabel, another ranking member of Buster’s clan, drove a heavily sedated Kevin Axworthy. Sedated because he had insisted on resisting, such as was his legitimate duty. They went with the Meek because there was nowhere else to go. To stay behind in Newton, to wait for a rescue when all ships would be out of range for the foreseeable future, and when they had been given up for dead anyway, would make their chance of survival tentative at best.
Cody felt the thoughts of the Meek—the thoughts of thousands of them, thoughts of gratitude, of acknowledgment. He also felt the deaths of a 100,000 souls in the City of Fair Argument.
Cody said: And you’re sure about Equilibrium? My gridwork showed all warheads down over that area. I don’t know how one got through.
Buster said: The Village of Mutual Tolerance sustained a direct hit with a partially compromised warhead. The becquerels are still high—lethal—and casualties there could run as high as 25,000, even despite our code-written protection against it. For three decades our culture has conscientiously vilified arms. We carry these knives more as talismans than weapons. When we learned of the Conrad Wilson‘s attack we had no idea how we were going to defend ourselves. We owe our lives to your ingenuity.
They continued over the cratered terrain, skirting far to the south of the contaminated area.
Cody said: You owe your lives to your second firing sequence. The Conrad Wilson continues to retreat?
Buster said: They’re well out of range now. In 22 hours we’ll be within the orbital plane of Mars, well on our way.
Cody said: And there’s no possible way we can help the people in the Village of Mutual Tolerance or in the City of Fair Argument?
Buster said: In response to this emergency we have in production a pressure tape designed to shield against the intense radiation. We’ll dispatch aid workers as fast as we can but I fear it won’t be enough. The doses delivered by the Conrad Wilson are much too high, even for us, and we expect a great number of fatalities.
Cody hated to think of all those people dying slowly. All those people suffering and no one well enough to help anybody—a microcosm of Armageddon. He racked his brain trying to think of something else he could do, remembering the collapse in Residential Sector 5—all that suffering, a universe of suffering, people trapped in horribly injured conditions for days under all that rubble. The suffering in the City of Fair Argument and in the Village of Mutual Tolerance would be different. All the buildings would still be standing, all the infrastructure would be in place, but everybody would be sick and dying from the radiation, hair falling out, open sores forming, teeth falling out, with weakness, disorientation, nausea … a nightmare.
Cody said: We have to do something.
Buster said: We’ll send out as many as we can. We’ll save those who can be saved. But mostly we’ll just bring comfort. In the meantime the Father asks for you. He wishes to meet the protector of our home, the rescuer of our future.
As they flew over the treetops of the river valley habitat toward the City of Resolved Differences, Cody saw that only a few skimmers flew in formation with them now, that others were breaking away from the main group and disappearing beneath the canopy of the forest. He felt tired. The life-or-death challenges of the last eighteen hours had exhausted him. The air was warm on his face, scented with the light perfume of a thousand different rain-forest blooms. Now that he didn’t have to think about what he was going to do next to save not only his own life but the lives of everyone around him, he felt shaky, traumatized by the whole ordeal; not like a hero at all but like someone who knew how to grit his teeth and bear his own fear, squeaking by on willpower alone. He had done his best. He had done what he could, and despite the grief he felt for the dead he would just have to accept the outcome.
He slumped in his seat. That was it. It was over. The Conrad Wilson wasn’t coming back. Cody was on his way to the Martian orbital plane with no idea of what he was going to do, no plan for getting back to Vesta. He didn’t even know if he wanted to go back to Vesta. Would Vesta City even let him come back?
The forest canopy ended and he saw fields below. The skimmer dipped, flew two meters above the ground. He saw cantaloupes, big ones the size of watermelons, glowing in the light of the five moons. He saw tomatoes. Corn. Wheat. Peppers. Lettuce. They flew into ranchland. He saw cattle, slim-boned and elongated, produced to thrive in weak gravity. Sheep. Bison. Stegosaurs. Ostriches. A half dozen ungulates he didn’t have names for, hoofed creatures concocted with designer genetic code, one looking like a cross between a pig and an elephant, another like a mix between a zebra and an ox, still another like a hybrid of wildebeest, wild boar, and donkey.
Buster said: We are farmers now, not warriors.
The river curved from the north, wide and flat, a mile across, muddy-looking, dotted with several effluvial islands. They skimmed across the river and came to the City of Resolved Differences.
The polished stone, flecked with pyrite, sparkled in the moonlight. It was a city of perches, not roads. Buildings soared for fifty stories or more, none of them just straight towers, all of them fanciful, each a creation in itself, designed in concert with the others so that there existed a unity to the composition of the city as a whole. One was a double h
elix. Another was a pyramid. Still another was like a roll of pennies knocked edgewise, creating a series of circular terraces going all the way up. The building gave the illusion that it might topple into the square at any second.
It was to this building that Buster took Cody.
They settled lightly into the square. Air pressure was at least 700 millibars.
Cody said: If you don’t need air to breathe, why do you pressurize this place?
Buster said: Our industry and agriculture depend on it. And we like the feel and the smell of air. We are of human ancestry, after all.
Cody removed his helmet and took a deep breath. Beds of marrow grew in raised ornamental gardens, interspersed with genetically developed night-bloomers. The others took off their helmets as well. He looked around at his crew: Jerry, Deirdre, Ben, Claire, and … and Kevin Axworthy, still partially sedated, now being helped from his skimmer and out of his helmet by Annabel. Axworthy looked up at the coin-roll building with bleary eyes, then turned to Cody and stared at him as if he didn’t know who he was.
Lulu looked at Cody too. He tried to sense what she was thinking but she wouldn’t let him in. She kept glancing at Buster as if she were afraid of him again. Cody felt disoriented. He wanted to be near her. He wanted to touch her. If he could only touch her he knew he would feel greatly restored. Deirdre walked over and slipped her arm through his. He didn’t mind. She was as distraught by the last eighteen hours as he was. Her touch soothed him.
They entered the building. Inside it, for at least the first seven or eight floors, was an atrium with a vast botanical garden, even full-grown trees. At the atrium’s zenith a perfect scale model of Saturn with all its rings and moons glowed with a much higher holographic resolution than anything they had on Vesta, washing the entire area with a soft butterscotch light, brighter than the light of the five moons. As they walked through this atrium, they came upon small gardens and glades, where Meek could be seen conferring quietly. Cody came to understand that this was a place of government. In some gardens the Meek sang at shimmering blue cellophane, such as Cody had seen during his drug-induced interrogation of Lulu. Small waterfalls cascaded down the walls at regular intervals, and birds flitted through the branches of the trees.
