But looking at the vehicle data, she was no longer certain; some of the vehicles were amphibious or even capable of operating underwater. Others were capable of flight, or at least hopping maneuvers. Still others seemed designed to operate in a vacuum; they carried their own internal atmosphere supplies for weapons and operators. (Even though the Aggregates had machine origins, they still required oxygen and water.)
And the largest vehicles were actually intended to operate in space! They had propulsion and reaction control systems to go with weapons packages that replaced cannon with missiles in addition to the coiled disruptors.
She was forced to one obvious conclusion: This army might not be invading Earth, but some other world.
Carbon-143 wanted to download all of this but had insufficient memory space—or official access. So she continued to flick through different fields.
And somehow wound up down the tree that dealt with the Ring and its operations, specifically the section on First Light. Since that was her immediate mission, she dug into it.
The first thing that struck her was the mention of radiation to be released during First Light and the subsequent Fire Light—the actual launch of the army.
The figures were astonishing: The longer the Ring operated, putting out energy, the steeper the increase in horrific side effects. The units of measurement were Aggregate standards and scaled through a variety of different dimensions, but Carbon-143 performed several quick conversions and came to this conclusion:
If the Ring operated for the optimum twelve hours, it might indeed successfully launch its two-thousand-plus vehicles at its target . . . while subjecting Free Nation U.S. to a level of thermal and ionizing radiation equal to ten thousand standard nuclear weapons.
The rest of the world would not be spared; even on the opposite side of the planet, the radiation would be sufficiently high to end all human life and most animal life.
Ignition of the Ring for Fire Light was the equivalent of crashing an asteroid into planet Earth.
Carbon-143 had noted the lack of rigor and substandard materials used in the construction of the Site A buildings, and now she knew why: The Ring was not meant to be used repeatedly, it was designed to be used once . . . like a nuclear bomb.
And it would leave nothing but a scorched Earth behind.
This was not only tragic for humans . . . it was unhappy news for the Aggregates, too. Though they were more robust than humans and terrestrial animals, they were still vulnerable to destruction from exposure to high heat or radiation.
Carbon-143 could not replicate the reasoning or motivation for the construction of the Site A Ring. It did suggest that the entire formation of formations considered Earth to be, at best, a temporary jumping-off point . . . that its ultimate destination lay across time and space.
ANALYSIS: Aggregate Carbon-143 did not want to remain at Site A or indeed on planet Earth after First Light.
QUERY: Would she share this information with Dehm?
Yahvi Stewart-Radhakrishnan is a remarkable young woman.
It’s not her looks, though they are striking, or her exotic heritage—she is the granddaughter of two pioneering astronauts, including India’s first, General Taj Radhakrishnan.
It’s that she’s the first teenager to visit Earth.
That’s right—Yahvi was born in the human habitat of the Near-Earth Object Keanu, arriving in Bangalore last week with her parents aboard the spaceship Adventure.
Today she is shopping in Shanghai. What has she learned from her week on Earth? “You’ve all got so much stuff here! And everything is so far away!”
The biggest difference between her friends on Keanu and the young women she’s met so far? “Music and clothes! We really don’t have them.”
EXCLUSIVE WEB AND ’CAST FROM EDGAR CHANG
I never said any of this!
YAHVI TO EC
RACHEL
The landing on Guam—which took place late morning, local time, under a clear tropical sky—had been a trial. While the storm-related bounces and jounces had ended, the approach seemed to require a dozen different turns, some wrenching, all of them tedious.
Yahvi was still locked in Zeds’s embrace; Rachel decided to leave her there, since the Sentry could protect her as well as any seat belt.
It was Tea who lost patience first. “Chang, tell us what the fuck we’re doing. I hope this isn’t evasive action because someone wants to shoot us down.”
Hearing that, Rachel sat up straight. But Chang said, “Guam is safe to approach. Steve is just maneuvering to get us in a traffic pattern so we appear to have flown from China.”
During the final minutes, Rachel twisted and looked back at Xavier, who had his head down in his makeshift lab. “What do you suppose he’s doing?” she said to Pav.
“I think he’s made a fresh start,” he said.
“Here? I thought the power was too low or too intermittent or there were too many bumps—”
“Xavier is a resourceful guy. You know . . . he’s the kind of guy where you lock all the doors and he still crawls in through the window.”
When they had glided in and then finally come to a stop at another dismal cargo terminal, Rachel and Pav, Tea, Chang, Edgely, and especially Yahvi and Zeds were eager to get out of the plane.
Xavier chose to remain behind. “I need another hour,” he said.
Pav was going to pursue the argument, but Rachel grabbed his arm. “Let him be,” she said. “We need that transmitter.”
The layover in Guam was much like the one in Darwin, except for daylight, the predominantly Asian Pacific staff, and the more decrepit nature of the buildings. “How long will we be on the ground?” Rachel asked Chang.
The agent already had his face in his datapad. When he raised it to answer, he was more vague than Rachel liked. “Longer than Darwin,” he said. “You can eat, take showers.”
“‘Longer than Darwin’ is fairly imprecise,” Rachel said, unwilling to let Chang evade the question. “It doesn’t take more than an hour to refuel, right?”
Chang and Edgely exchanged a look, which infuriated Rachel. “Goddammit,” she said. “You two better tell me what’s going on or we’re going to have serious problems.”
Her anger was fueled by fatigue, of course, but also frustration at being at the mercy of two people she didn’t really know . . . on a world that was as alien to her as Mars or the Architect home world might be.
Fortunately, Edgely was always eager to share. “We’re waiting on a second plane.”
“To fly us?” Pav said.
“To fly in formation with us,” Chang said.
“Why?” Rachel said.
Chang sighed. “We have almost no hope of entering Free Nation airspace undetected.”
“I thought we were flying into Mexico!”
Edgely slipped into teacher mode, growing almost indecently enthusiastic. “Oh, we are! But we come close to Free Nation airspace. They will track us. As you already know, they have air-, land-, and sea-based military.”
“The other plane is actually a decoy,” Chang said.
Edgely placed his hands in front of him, palms down, right hand half a dozen centimeters above the left. “When we reach Free Nation’s radar range, we will be flying one above the other, at different altitudes.
“The two planes will show as a single blip. As we get close enough to the western coast of North America to be tracked with some fidelity, our plane will descend below tracking altitude and divert into Mexico while the target plane will turn north and fly parallel to the California coast.”
“Are you expecting it to be attacked?” Pav said.