by Dani Kollin
“Yes, Madam President,” said the exhausted Technology Secretary, “but just barely. Speaking of which, I should be getting back there.”
“We have to survive for two more days—a little less, even—and the enemy now knows it,” said Sandra.
“Or soon will,” grumbled Kirk loud enough for all to hear.
“Trang knows that if he destroys us, he’ll probably win the war,” Sandra continued, ignoring the new VP. “So we must expect more surprises, but he’s getting low on ammo and even lower on time. It’s just a matter of who can hold out longer. And I believe we hold the advantage in that arena.”
All heads nodded appreciatively.
“Meeting adjourned.”
UHFS Liddel
Near Ceres
Hour 58
Trang reviewed the data and called Zenobia. “So what do you think of Padamir’s little announcement?”
“Was it just me, Admiral, or was the man actually salivating?”
Trang smiled. “Can you blame them? Look at what she’s accomplished. The woman has won more battles than anyone and saved them every single time she’s been called to do so. If I were them, I just might be salivating too.”
Zenobia shrugged, unimpressed. “But she’s coming at us with a fleet that’s outnumbered and has to be badly damaged.”
“And we have a fleet that’s taken damage as well and is extremely low on ordnance.”
Zenobia nodded, brow narrowed. “What are you thinking, sir?”
“I’m thinking that in two days’ time, the Alliance will have their Blessed One here. They know that in less than half a day, I’ll be able to blast through their orbats defending the Via Cereana. And they know that when that happens, Ceres is doomed.” Trang’s lips cinched together, his eyes radiating curiosity. “So what are they planning?”
“What makes you think they’re planning anything?”
“Because in their situation, Zenobia, I’d be planning something, anything to delay us. Think about it: Thirty-some hours is all that stands between them and defeat. After six years of war, that would be intolerable.”
“Still not sure what you’re getting at, sir.”
“We’re not going to lose this war because we were waiting for them to try something desperate.”
A knowing smile crept across Zenobia’s face. “We’re going to do something desperate first, aren’t we?”
Trang’s sparkling eyes were all the answer she needed.
Via Cereana’s entrance and exit
Ceres
Hour 64
Twelve ships of the UHF’s main battle fleet, six at the entrance and six at the exit point of the Via Cereana, moved from rear positions to forward positions in the attacking line. This was not unusual, as the ships attacking the surviving orbats of Ceres did so in volleys in order to give them time to repair damage, transfer wounded personnel, and rest their crews. The pressure on the orbats was constant, though not for the attackers.
But these ships were different. Rather than assume their role as the next wave of battle cruisers whose job it would be to slowly wear down the Alliance orbats, these ships used atomics to accelerate into the Alliance line of fire. The orbats, though diminished in number and badly damaged, were still dangerous weapons platforms that could punish any headlong attack foolish enough to forget their might. Shot after shot of rail gun fire smashed into the UHF’s new group of heavy battle cruisers and it soon became obvious that the enemy ships would be destroyed long before they could do any significant damage to the orbats. And as such, had no chance of getting into the Via Cereana, where they could have done the most damage. But just as the heavy cruisers were about to be pulverized by the Alliance’s defensive barrage, they unleashed wave after wave of small missile fire. The UHF force shot far more missiles than ships of that class should have had and from far more launchers than they normally carried. It didn’t matter that most of the missiles were intercepted before they made it into the Via or that most of the ships they were fired from were destroyed before releasing all their ordnance. What did matter was that for the first time since the war began, the Via Cereana, symbolic artery of the heart of the Alliance, had been breached. Of the twelve attacking heavy battle cruisers, seven had been utterly destroyed. But their sacrifice allowed thousands of UHF missiles to fly down both ends of the Via Cereana seeking targets to destroy—and targets were not hard to find. It had been in Trang’s estimation a very fair trade.
NEHQ
Ceres
Hour 65
Mosh’s eyes darted furiously about the report. Hildegard was dead, caught in the unexpected barrage that had infiltrated the Via. Gedretar too was a loss—quite possibly a total one. Most of the missiles had been targeted at the well-known shipyard, and they seemed to have done their job, much to Mosh’s chagrin, admirably well. The Alliance had lost six years of effort in less than six minutes, not to mention one of its best organizational talents. Mosh had been especially proud of Gedretar, which started the war as nothing more than a well-maintained repair facility and had grown into the most efficient and one of the most productive shipyards in the solar system. As such, it had become a source of justifiable pride to the entire Outer Alliance. Now the shipyard and the person who’d been responsible for overseeing so many of its miraculous retrofits were gone.
“We were very lucky,” he said, putting the DijAssist onto the table, “in that almost all Gedretar personnel were away at the time.”
“You mean lucky that Trang’s been blowing the shit out of us so they were needed elsewhere,” Kirk said dispassionately. “Of course, I’d have preferred to lose a few thousand techs to Hildegard. That loss is gonna hurt us.”
“Yes.” The Treasury Secretary’s voice was dispirited. The fact that Mosh hadn’t challenged Kirk on his cold calculation of human life was testament to the breaking of his will.
“The missiles Trang used on his fire ships,” interjected Sinclair, coming to the rescue of his friend, “were small, tiny, most no larger than a pencil. He sent some larger atomic armed missiles, but we intercepted all of those, thank God. But the little ones are designed to evade interception. By themselves, they don’t pack much of a punch—usually they’re used to intercept enemy missiles and damage or destroy them. Programming them to attack in swarms like this was a clever move,” Sinclair conceded. “Ten or twenty exploding at once causes far more damage.”
“Why haven’t we seen this earlier in the war?” asked Sandra. By her tone, it was clear she meant it as an actual question and not as an accusation.
“Not much purpose, really. Fleets normally engage at such immense distances that point defenses could take care of the vast majority of the missiles if fired at range. The truth is, even without warning, just using basic defensive systems we were able to destroy a large number of them before they entered the Via Cereana.”
“But not enough,” said Tyler Sadma.
Sinclair’s grimace was all the answer Sadma got.
“What about weaponizing the Via bump stations to replace the orbats?” asked Rabbi.
All eyes turned to Kenji Isozaki. It was only when Tyler reached over and gently nudged the engineer with the downcast eyes that Kenji seemed to become aware of the roomful of people now staring at him. Rabbi repeated his question.
“Not enough time,” was all Kenji said.
“No one in this room has enough time, Kenji,” said Kirk in about as patronizing a tone as would be tolerated from the rest of the Cabinet. “It’s your job to make the fucking time.”
If Kenji was insulted or even aware that he had been insulted, he gave no sign of it. He simply sighed and answered the question. “It’s mostly a matter of programming. The bump stations were hardwired to prevent anyone from gaining outside control. This was true for both stations: the one defending the exit and the other defending the entrance.”
“So what seems to be the problem?” asked Sandra.
“The bump station that got hit … the one Hildegar
d—” Kenji choked back his emotions. “—was in … was the master bump station. It was meant to be linked up to mine.”
“So then link it,” said Kirk.
“Mr. Vice President, I barely have enough time to link up my half. And Hildegard and I were the only ones who knew the protocols, having created them on the fly.”
“We’ve got a lot of smart people in this rock,” said Sinclair. “If you need someone from my fleet, I’m sure—”
Kenji shook his head as vigorously as a small child refusing to take a bath. “If there is the slightest error in installing the firmware, the rest of the bump stations won’t link with the master section and you have to start programming again from scratch. This was meant to prevent an accidental or subversive takeover of the system.” Kenji looked over to Kirk. “Those safety protocols were insisted on by you, Mr. Vice President.” Kenji mustered enough emotion to glare at Kirk, but even that emotion faded. “The whole thing was built on a wall of secrecy so intricate, it would be impossible to discover or use the system against us. Most of the coding was done by Hildegard herself. It took me—and I know this stuff—five days just to learn it, and frankly, I doubt anyone else could do it any faster. I can’t be expected to finish my programming while simultaneously teaching someone else Hildegard’s. And remember, even the slightest error and we have to start all over again. Hildegard herself would’ve needed five hours—at her fastest—to create a master bump station.”
“Then we’re finished,” said Mosh, deflating even further. The level of dejection seemed to wash over the Cabinet like a wave carrying away the last remnants of a sand castle. The bickering had only just begun when Sandra stood up and announced, “I can program it.”
The mutterings ceased immediately as everyone stared in disbelief at the figure standing resolute at the end of the table.
“Really, it’s not a problem,” she continued. “Hildegard trained me.” Sandra looked over to the Vice President. “Sorry, Kirk, she just felt someone other than Kenji should know if something went wrong, and apparently she felt I was the most qualified. Turns out, her fears were more prescient than she realized.”
“But how?” asked Kenji, his face betraying his incredulity.
Sandra could see, based on the looks she was garnering from the rest of the Cabinet, that Kenji was not alone in his dubiety.
“Mr. Isozaki, I was not an idiot before I was suspended, and the programming is not particularly difficult, just especially complicated. If I can program the clock on my VCR, I can easily do a bump station slave protocol.” The comment was met by a roomful of blank stares. “Yeah, that joke was dated even in my time.” Sandra then began spewing forth a complicated set of instructions that to all but one person in the room sounded like utter gibberish.
Everyone, though, watched Kenji’s dour mouth turn ineluctably upward until it was positively beaming. After about a minute and a half of Sandra’s incantation—he was listening for a flaw but could find none—Kenji jumped up, shouted something in Japanese, and rushed to Sandra, hugging her as if she were salvation itself, which in a very real sense she’d just become.
When he released her, he said, “Her death was not in vain and her wisdom in telling you will save us all.” He then looked around, confused. “What are we doing here? We must get to work!”
“Meeting adjourned,” Sandra said with a wry smile.
“Madam President,” said Kirk, raising his index finger.
“Yes, Kirk?”
“Mind if I join you?”
Sandra shot the VP a quizzical look. “To what end?”
“Maybe no end at all, Madam President. But it seems my paranoia almost got us all killed, and if I can be of assistance to you, even if it means passing you tools or whatever, while you work … well, I guess what I’m saying is my skill set is clearly of no use right now. So I figured you could put me to work.”
Sandra regarded Kirk for a moment, even though Kenji’s darting eyes were attempting to force her out of the room.
“We both know I’m not usually this nice, Madam President,” added Kirk. “I suggest you take advantage of it before I come to my senses and prevent somebody else from sharing critical secrets.”
“Good point,” agreed Sandra as a small laugh escaped her lips. “I suppose you’ll do far less damage by tagging along with me.”
“Thank you, Madam President. I won’t let you down.”
Bump Station 192
Via Cereana
Ceres
Hour 68
Kirk Olmstead watched the woman he’d come to admire and again felt regret. She was such a talented and cunning individual. Of course she’d gotten the simpering technocrat, Hildegard Rhunsfeld, to tell her everything useful. Why had he doubted for a second that Hildegard would not have? Kirk had spent months trying to figure out who was the power behind Sandra’s throne when all along it had been her. It was the most brilliant manipulation of power he’d ever seen, worthy of the Chairman, indeed worthy of Hektor himself. But now she and her pit bull of a guard, Holke, would have to die. That man Kirk would not mind killing at all. Every time Holke looked at him, Kirk knew it was with contempt.
But soon they’d both be dead and therefore no longer Kirk’s problem. He’d devised such an elegant solution too. His DijAssist was in actuality a sophisticated bomb, quite a powerful one for its size. It didn’t scan as one, of course. Kirk had made sure of that. It had been relatively easy to create something undetectable to the Alliance, given that he’d designed most of the protocols for such detection. What made the testing even more foolproof was that he knew he could never actually get caught. If he got stopped, all he had to do was congratulate the one who’d “found him out” and give that person a promotion for passing Kirk’s “test.” Then Kirk would go and make the next one better. But such was Kirk’s genius that he’d never once been stopped and the bomb he was carrying now had avoided detection for months. Kirk had been waiting for an opportune time to use it, and the President had just delivered it on a silver platter. She’d be mostly isolated, and the rest of the Cabinet would be off somewhere else, too worried about their own necks to give much notice to hers.
So now Kirk would use his device to bring an end to this farce of a war on the best terms he could manage. And what better terms could he hope for than surrendering to Trang as the newly promoted President of the Alliance? Hektor may not like the situation, but he would recognize that as the legal successor to Sandra O’Toole and Justin Cord, Kirk could bring the Outer Alliance to a confused and staggered halt. Oh, there’d always be those who would fight on. Eris would have to be blown to dust, but with Sandra dead, Ceres captured or destroyed, and the legal President calling it quits, most of the Outer Alliance would fold. Hektor would take that deal any day of the week. Kirk knew, of course, that he’d never be allowed near the seat of power again. That was Tricia Pakagopolis’s place now, and as far as Kirk was concerned, she was welcome to it. Let others have the power and the danger that went with that. Hektor would let Kirk have a healthy majority of his own stock and enough credits to own an island somewhere on Earth or Mars. Kirk would write his memoirs and go on tour and be the most interesting person at most any party he attended, and that would be good enough for Mama Olmstead’s little boy. Much better than dying heroically in some stupid war the misfits who called themselves the Alliance would lose either now or later.
So Kirk waited in the bump station, pretending to make sure nothing went wrong with this most vital of tasks Sandra had volunteered to do, smiling amiably at every single glare Sergeant Holke threw him. He thought it would be difficult getting the good sergeant to ban all the TDCs from inside the bump station itself except for Holke, of course, but Sandra had sided with him over her sergeant’s strenuous objections. “The room is too small,” she’d said, and, “The TDCs can do their job just as efficiently waiting outside of it as opposed to making me more nervous than I ought to be, in it.” And that, thought Kirk, was that. So now he waited.
The bump station was laid out rather simply: a rectangle of a room, ten meters long by three meters wide, with a window that looked out over the Via Cereana. In front of the window were a number of consoles. There was a small table and two chairs near the entrance. After being told by Sandra that there really wasn’t much for him to do, Kirk went over to the table, emptied some of the contents of his briefcase onto it including his DijAssist, and then pretended to pore over official government work. Sandra meanwhile flew from one end of the console to the other, adding components, inputing code, and staying utterly focused on the task at hand. If she even noticed Kirk sitting there, she gave no indication of it.
Finally Kirk saw his chance. Sergeant Holke was holding a component under the console while Sandra was attaching it to something out of Kirk’s line of vision. It didn’t really matter—neither of them was paying him any attention. Kirk quietly got up and placed his DijAssist between two of the consoles. Out of sight, out of mind. By the time Sandra and Holke were getting up from under the board, Kirk was back at his table, working away. His heart skipped a beat when Sandra went directly to the spot where he’d hidden the DijAssist. She blocked his view for a moment while checking the settings on another piece of equipment. But she was gone in flash, rushing to another part of the room.
Kirk could see that the device was still in place, barely visible. It was time to go. His future was waiting, even if it had to be purchased with the deaths of forty million people. He activated his hand phone and brought his thumb to his ear, speaking into his pinkie.
“Are you sure?” He paused and then sucked his breath in, turning to momentarily look out the bump station window. “No, you did the right thing calling me. I’ll be right there.” He shook his hand, pretending to disconnect the call, then turned back around. “Madam President, I’m afraid I have to go—urgent business.”
