Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  “Yes,” Yuri repeated patiently. “And as far as any of my followers know, it is more of the nanovirus being launched at Capital City, this time.” He raised a cautionary finger. “They had best not learn differently from you, do you understand?”

  “Of course, my friend,” Antonov assured him, laughing conspiratorially. “There may be weak souls among them who would cower at the thought. They want power for the comfort it brings them, just like the Americans. They don’t understand that the true glory of power is to control not just your own destiny but that of the world.”

  “Not just this world, Sergei,” Yuri corrected as the duplicate Antonov clambered out of the vehicle to join him as they walked toward the door. “Every world, eventually.”

  He’d thought the idea would bother him more, but somehow it didn’t. It seemed a fitting end for all of them, for humanity. He raised a hand cautioning Antonov to silence as he pulled the door to the blockhouse open, having to yank hard against the wind. Just inside the door was a short hallway that ended in a hanging plastic dust control barrier to keep out the ubiquitous sand. They pushed past it, the plastic feeling tacky and gritty against Yuri’s hand as he brushed it aside.

  Through the hallway was a set of concrete stairs that took them down another twenty meters beneath the surface to a small auxiliary control room separated by another dust barrier from a catwalk that circled the warhead of an intercontinental ballistic missile. The frame and skin were original Protectorate manufacture, abandoned here two hundred years ago but preserved by the dry air. The engines were original as well, although they had been refurbished by his people. The rest, including the guidance system, had been replaced with new equipment, either acquired on the black market or fabricated in their own shops. The fuel had been the most difficult part, but the Kazakhs were a very resourceful and independent people, and free-flowing money had a way of motivating them to get creative.

  “Mr. Yuri!” One of the crew that was working on the disassembled warhead noticed his entrance and hurried over, wiping greasy hands on an equally stained brown work shirt. “Good morning, sir! We didn’t know you would be coming over this morning.”

  The man was short and dark haired with a broad nose and beady eyes sunk deep into a face lined and weathered with years. He reminded Yuri of a gargoyle perched on a cathedral roof, but he was a supremely competent engineer and he was intensely loyal both to Yuri and to the idea of the Rodina.

  “I don’t wish to interrupt the work, Gennady,” Yuri said with an apologetic air. “I just wanted to check on your progress.” He smiled genially. “You know how boring it can get out here.”

  “Everything’s basically on schedule, sir,” Gennady Sobchak assured him. “We’ve had a few problems refitting the MIRV warheads to adapt to the size of the canisters you provided though…is there no way to reload the nanovirus into another size container?”

  “No.” Yuri’s answer was curt and final, his earlier bonhomie vanishing in a heartbeat. “The weapons must not be tampered with at all, understood?”

  “Of course, sir,” Gennady said, nodding energetically. “It will be as you direct.”

  “I am curious,” Antonov said---Yuri felt an intense annoyance that the copy was speaking at all but he held his tongue, “as to how you will ensure the survivability of the warheads in the face of the enemy’s lasers.”

  “Forgive me, but you are?” Gennady asked, frowning as it seemed he thought he should recognize the man.

  “Gennady,” Yuri said quietly by way of introduction, “this is General Antonov.”

  Gennady blanched, his eyes widening in their dark recesses. “Bozhe moy! General, I apologize for not recognizing you…”

  “Softly, Gennady,” Yuri cautioned him. “The General does not wish to interrupt the work and neither do I. But you may answer his question.”

  “Of course, sir,” Gennady stuttered, blinking as he tried to make himself concentrate on the subject they’d been discussing. “Ah, well, the countermeasures are quite ingenious.” He grinned, a truly disturbing sight. “I can say that without the danger of bragging as that was not my area of responsibility. First of all, the original reentry vehicle itself has several features to defeat missile defense systems. It’s a fast-boost rocket, so vulnerability during boost phase is reduced, and the engine skirt reduces the infrared signature anyway, so the window between their satellites detecting the launch and engine cut-off should be very narrow. I doubt they can target it in time.

  “After that, one of our engineers designed a system to deploy Mylar balloons as decoys, each with a small booster attached that will take it kilometers away from the warhead. And once the reentry vehicles separate, they’ll be unpowered and far too small to detect, much less intercept.”

  “Excellent,” Antonov enthused, clapping the man on the shoulder. “You’ve all done a wonderful job.”

  “And we will allow you to get back to it,” Yuri added, nodding meaningfully back towards the catwalk where the other engineers were still hard at work. Every now and then, one would glance back nervously, no doubt wondering what they were discussing. “Please update me when the warhead is assembled.”

  “Yes, sir,” Gennady said. “It shouldn’t be more than another two days, maximum.”

  After the chief engineer had gone back with the others, Yuri led Antonov away from the catwalk and towards the control panels. They were as antiquated as everything else in the Cosmodrome, but they would do the job when the time came.

  “Can it be launched from here?” Antonov wondered, trailing a finger over old flat-panel LCD screens.

  “It can,” Yuri told him, “but its course has to be set from the main control room. This whole place,” he waved a hand around them, “will be destroyed when the missile’s engines ignite.”

  “Tell me something,” Antonov said, seemingly genuinely curious, “why bother with all this?” He glanced around, making sure no one was near before he continued. “From what you’ve told me, the…what do you call it?”

  “There’s no word for it in Russian,” Yuri admitted, “or English. It’s a preprogrammed self-replicating nanite designed to rearrange any sufficiently complex life form to suit its purposes.”

  “That is a mouthful,” Antonov grumbled, eyes narrowing in thought. “You should call it the…” His face lit up with an idea. “The Proteus virus. How’s that?”

  “It hardly matters,” Yuri said dismissively.

  “But I still wonder, my friend,” Antonov persisted, “why you are bothering to deploy the Proteus virus with this missile? Wouldn’t it work if you simply let it loose here?”

  “Possibly,” Yuri admitted. “But it needs intelligent life to pass itself on. The population here is spread too thin. We need to strike where there are enough to ensure that it survives and spreads. If it were trapped here, they could still destroy it. If it is deployed in one of their mega-cities, they are lost.”

  “It is incredible, almost inconceivable, that such a race that transformed the very texture of spacetime,” Antonov mused, “would do this to themselves.”

  “And yet they did,” Yuri said with a cynical snort. “It was all in the records I found on the moon with the weapons cache that the thing that called itself Misha directed me to. I had him create a translation program for me in case I found anything his people had made.” He laughed now, a raspy cough of a laugh. “That poor deluded machine. He thought he was a crusader, saving the universe from some unknown, mysterious threat. He’d only read the propaganda his government had fed its people in wartime. The reality…” He shrugged.

  “Their civilization stagnated; they had begun to turn back in on themselves centuries before the war began. Many saw it and tried to halt it, but nothing seemed to work. They were divided and becoming more splintered with each passing decade. Then someone had the idea that if there were an external threat, something to unify them, something to work together against, that it might be the one thing that could save them. So, this individua
l, or group, whatever it was---the records weren’t clear on that---they created what you wish to call the Proteus virus and they used it to turn a handful of volunteers into what they came to call the Destroyers.”

  “They didn’t know it would spread?” Antonov asked, shaking his head. “How could they not know?”

  “They counted too heavily on the mental stability of their sentient computers,” Yuri spat harshly. “Their intent was simply to create a few menacing aliens that would lay waste to some of their outlying worlds and galvanize their people into an energetic and unified response. In that, I suppose, they may have succeeded, since their whole civilization wound up on a war footing.

  “But when the first group of ‘alien’ soldiers was killed, the nanites hitched a ride home with the ones who’d done the killing. The nanites had become a hive mind, and a much more complex one than their creators had counted on, apparently.” He glanced at the Antonov copy and laughed again. “How utterly ironic, no? That stupid machine Misha created a threat to unify the Earth to prepare us for a threat created by his own Builders to unify their society. Life is, indeed, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

  He realized that Antonov was staring at him blankly, and understood why: the copy could not reconcile the fact that he was not the original, nor could he accept the idea that the alien computer Misha had created him as a pawn in a game begun millennia ago. The duplicate Antonov was not capable of processing those facts so he was shutting them out.

  “Come with me, my friend,” he said gently, taking the poor, pitiful thing by the arm and leading it toward the door. “Let us go back to the control center and have a drink…to the end of the world.”

  * * *

  This is fucking nuts, Tanya Manning thought, not for the first time.

  It wasn’t just that she felt incredibly exposed. That was mostly psychological and she knew on an intellectual level that the vast interior of the ancient, crumbling arena was no more visible to satellite or drone observation than the subway tunnels in which they’d been hiding; but standing in the middle of the emptiness of what had once been called the Barclays Center, she felt like a bug on a dinner plate. The floor was bare cement, cracked and grown over with weeds where light could filter in from the holes ripped in what was left of the roof; though the only light this night was from the moon. There was an autumn crispness to the air that alleviated the stale mustiness of the ruined auditorium.

  No, it wasn’t the location that bothered her; it was the horrible risk that Valerie O’Keefe was taking by meeting them here. She bit back an urge to say something about it again to Drew Franks. He was a few meters away, crouched on a small platform behind a row of rotted plastic seats with his carbine cradled in his arms, eyes hidden behind night vision glasses. She’d already said her piece both to him and via a recorded message to Senator O’Keefe, but the Senator had insisted on a personal meeting and this was the safest place they’d been able to come up with on such short notice.

  Well, the safest place that could allow the Senator’s flitter to fly through a whopping big hole in the roof and set down on a tiny stretch of relatively flat cement block, anyway. She heard the vehicle before she saw it, a faint hum of fans that barely registered despite the noise amplification built in her ear bud. She craned her neck and caught a faint glimpse of a shadow against the moonlit clouds. There were no running lights, of course, but she wasn’t sure if that mattered. If someone had taken notice of the flitter’s course, they could still follow it from orbit via its thermal signature. They…and the Senator…were counting on her flight not being noticed.

  She wasn’t sure what hoops Valerie O’Keefe had jumped through to leave her offices in Capital City and board a spoofed flitter without anyone seeing, but she had to hope the Senator knew what she was doing. Franks seemed confident enough, as he moved out from behind cover and raised a small flashlight to shoulder level, blinking it three times quickly, then another three. The aircraft didn’t respond in kind, but that had been part of the plan. Instead, it slowly and carefully descended down through one of the huge holes in the auditorium roof, the whine of the motors and the hum of the fans growing louder and a cyclone of dust and soil thrashing around the hollowed out interior of the old arena.

  Manning blinked automatically at the haze of particles, even though her night vision goggles protected her eyes from the onslaught of the fan-driven cloud of dust. Finally, the flitter touched down gently near the center of the arena, the whine of the engines dying away slowly as the side hatch swung upward.

  The pilot/bodyguard emerged first: a tall, blond-haired man with a hint of age and experience to his bearing, dressed in a loose-fitting overcoat that she was sure concealed body armor, right hand holding a pistol by his side as he quickly scanned the area for threats. He saw the two of them, but they were expected and he showed no reaction except a barely-perceptible scowl at their weapons. She could tell he really didn’t want to be here and she definitely sympathized.

  The tall man made a motion back toward the flitter and Valerie O’Keefe climbed out of the rear seat, dressed in jeans, a long-sleeved shirt and a light jacket. Her dark hair was up in a bun and Manning was struck by how different she looked from the perfectly-coifed Senator she was used to seeing on the news. Franks stood and strode towards the Senator, letting his carbine retract back to his tactical vest on its sling; she followed from a distance of about ten meters, still keeping a careful watch around the perimeter. The bodyguard did the same, she noted with approval.

  “Senator O’Keefe,” Franks said, offering her a hand. “A pleasure to finally meet you.”

  “Glad to meet you too, Captain Franks.” Valerie shook his hand, her face serious. “Though I’m not sure anything about this is a pleasure.”

  “Why did you insist on meeting us in person, ma’am?” Manning asked her pointedly, with a little more anger than she’d intended. “This is extremely dangerous.”

  “I understand that,” Valerie said soothingly, “but events are proceeding rapidly and if we don’t come up with a response quickly, we’re going to be left wondering what happened. This isn’t something that can wait for text exchanges between dead drops. It’s a risk I had to take.”

  “So, anyone have any ideas?” Manning asked, trying to keep the cynicism out of her tone.

  “I’ve got one,” Franks said. “Why don’t we go public?”

  Manning looked at him, fighting to keep her mouth from dropping open. “What?” She blinked. She nearly corrected herself, instinctively starting to call him “sir,” before she realized how absurd that would be under the circumstances.

  Franks chuckled. “I know, it’s a bit out there for someone from Intelligence to suggest, but let’s get real for a second. The President of the Republic is a sock puppet for a shitbird with an eye for opportunity, the head of the CIS and the Chairman of the Multicorps Executive Council have been conspiring with a criminal to commit atrocities against civilians and both the last two wars we’ve fought were engineered by some alien computer to get us ready to fight some dubiously named enemy.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “And no one out there knows about any of it. We need to start a net campaign to get the word out. We can use the video we got from the General showing Kage trying to take over and killing Podbyrin, we can show the video his ‘link took of that Misha thing explaining what happened with the Protectorate. And we can publicize what we have about Asatru and the financial ties between Riordan and the bratva. We don’t have anything to prove Ayrock is behind it, but we can sure as hell get people behind you and General McKay, and put some public pressure on the administration to cut loose Colonel Stark.”

  “It would also probably cut the Daladier Bill off at the knees,” Valerie said with a nod. “But there are two problems with that. First of all, neither of us has the facilities to get this all on the net without revealing the source.” She grimaced. “I did, but with the heat that I’m under right now
, I can’t use that asset without burning her permanently. And second…” She sighed. “I received a message earlier today, in a special account that was set up years ago just in case General McKay or Colonel Stark had to get in touch with me during an emergency. It’s text only…it had to be, to get through the process that parasites it onto other Instell Comsat traffic unnoticed.”

  “So it’s from the General?” Franks said, eyes brightening with interest.

  “Apparently,” Valerie told them, “Yuri has turned into a problem for Ayrock. He’s a loose cannon and he’s about to launch another strike from an old Protectorate spaceport in Kazakhstan. So, he’s decided to offer Jason the chance to take out Yuri before he makes the attack…he can land in one assault shuttle without any other support.”

  “And he probably doesn’t have any intention of letting any of them leave the place alive, right?” Manning asked hotly, feeling a flush of anger in her face.

  “That’s the safe bet,” Valerie confirmed grimly. “Aside from that, however, my fear is that, if we go on the offensive with the information we have, we could be sabotaging the mission. Ayrock could decide to retaliate by destroying McKay’s shuttle en route.”

  “There’s another side to that,” Franks reminded them. “Something that had been bothering me…why Ayrock hadn’t been waging his own public relations war on us. He hasn’t released to the public that Colonel Stark has been arrested, or that he had the President order General McKay’s arrest for what happened on Novoye Rodina.”

  Manning picked up his point immediately. “He’s waiting for Yuri and General McKay to take each other out,” she realized. “Then he can eliminate Colonel Stark and spin the story any way he wants.” She shook her head. “He’s not stupid…he’s waiting to make sure how things turn out so he can tailor his story to fit the outcome.”

  “We can’t afford to wait, though,” Franks said, looking to Valerie. “We take our orders from the President, ma’am…but Jameson is compromised and we have no idea how much of our chain of command Riordan has his hooks into, much less how many senators he has in his pocket.” He let out a heavy breath. “This one isn’t covered in the regulations. We’re pretty much looking at a choice between ceding the Republic government to a dictator or staging a military coup.”