“Clever bastards at Hibernity, aren’t they? I’d heard rumors that they’d taken over half the prison.”
“But they still can’t escape. That’s what I’m hoping to help them do.”
Cotton gestured to the device. “Leave it with me. I’ll decode all the data that’s on it.”
Grady hesitated. “We’ll do it tomorrow—after some rest. I don’t want to let this thing out of my sight.” He then put it away beneath his shirt again.
“Suit yourself. Just let me know when you’re ready.”
Grady looked down the corridor. Alexa was nowhere in sight. “You have beds in this place?”
“Sure. Rooms on both sides of the hall. Take any empty one.”
Grady gazed into the dark at the hall’s end. “I should go thank Alexa before I get some sleep. She did save me.”
Cotton looked up from his work. “You really think your thanks is what she wants right now?”
Grady considered this. He finally nodded. “I guess not.”
With that he went to find a bed.
CHAPTER 25
Domestic Dispute
In the predawn stillness the street of downtown Detroit were nearly deserted. The office towers were still mostly dark. Graham Hedrick sat in the command chair of the BTC’s mission control center overlooking the big screens and the specialist workstations in the room below. He could see a large image of North America centered on Detroit and the Great Lakes on the central screen above; several incoming objects were being tracked across the plains and also coming in from central Canada over the Great Lakes.
Alarms were blinking on several screens.
Hedrick nodded to himself. “X-51 WaveRider cruise missiles. I’m impressed by their initiative.” Someone had made a command decision somewhere on the other side. He knew these hypersonic missiles could do thirty-six hundred miles an hour—which meant, at six hundred miles, they were only ten minutes away. Launched from a B-52 bomber, they wouldn’t be mistaken by other global powers for an ICBM launch, but they could do a great deal of damage if they reached their destination—which, according to telemetry reports, was BTC headquarters in downtown Detroit. At that speed, they carried very few explosives. Instead, they were packed with scored tungsten rods. Just before impact, their modest warhead would detonate, showering the target area with thousands of fragments—obliterating anything in a three-thousand-square-foot area in a rain of hypersonic metal.
The BTC had played around with this technology in the ’70s. Retro stuff, but still quite effective.
The annoying thing was that BTC gravity mirror technology wasn’t useful here since the X-51s were driven by ramjet engines; they were already resisting gravity as they powered onward. It was just one of the many reasons Hedrick had been pushing so hard in recent years for gravity amplification. Stopping them dead in the air, or turning them around—now that would be really useful.
“Mr. Director, you have a video call from Site R. It’s General Westerhouse.”
Hedrick nodded. “Put him up.”
A grim-faced, square-shouldered African American four-star U.S. Army general festooned with campaign ribbons appeared on a holographic screen that materialized just to the right of Hedrick’s gaze.
“Graham Hedrick, I am General Gerald Westerhouse. I’m issuing you a formal demand to surrender to lawful authorities and bring this situation to a peaceful resolution.”
Hedrick felt truly annoyed. “I’ve been trying to bring this to a peaceful resolution from the start, General, but Director Monahan seems to have other ideas. Is she the one who put you guys up to this?”
The general kept a poker face. “You assassinated the deputy secretary of Homeland Security, Mr. Hedrick. Surely you realize that the United States government is not going to stand by while one of its federal bureau chiefs foments civil war.”
“Let’s not get melodramatic. The man was meddling. And it’s not like there’s never been any fratricide between agencies before. If anyone should be mad, it’s me. I’m trying to carry out our legal mandate to protect the nation—and by extension that means the world—and the U.S. government keeps getting in my way.”
“Surrender your facility to lawful authorities, or you will be forced to comply with U.S. law.”
“General, for the moment there’s been no public confrontation that could sow mass hysteria and undermine faith in rule of law…” Hedrick glanced to the right to see the WaveRider missiles tracking in, still hundreds of miles out. “We should take our responsibility to safeguard social order seriously. Let’s not make any hasty actions that cannot be undone.”
“Do you refuse to comply with a lawful order to surrender control of your facility?”
Hedrick sighed. “Don’t make me do this.”
“I’m giving you one minute to relinquish your post and to start marching your people into Congress Street.”
Hedrick drummed his fingers on his armrest. “Well, seeing how you’ve already launched hypersonic cruise missiles at us, and they’re not due here yet for another eight minutes, I’d say you’re cheating me on time.”
The general barely hid his surprise that Hedrick knew about the incoming ordnance. Apparently they had expected the stealth surfaces to hide them; however, the AIs observing from satellites in geostationary orbit had no trouble spotting objects moving at three thousand miles an hour against a backdrop of terrain.
“General, let’s prevent this from becoming a major incident…” Hedrick brought up another holographic window displaying the face of a technical operations officer—a young Morrison clone.
“Yes, Mr. Director?”
Hedrick said, “Deploy DPD to eliminate the incoming missiles. Report when complete.”
“Wilco, Mr. Director.”
Hedrick turned back to the general, who was distracted by someone talking into his hidden earpiece. “Give my regards to Madam Director, General. Now, I’m going to chalk this up to institutional youthful enthusiasm, but I want this to be the end of it.”
He looked up at the big map of North America. DPD—or dynamic pulse detonation—had been around a while. BTC teams had harvested it from Russian physicists back when there was still a single BTC. Now all the BTC groups had the technology, and it was the reason why missiles and rocket-propelled grenades were largely obsolete in advanced combat. DPD used short, intense laser pulses to create tiny balls of plasma in the air, which were then struck by a second laser pulse to generate a supersonic shock wave within the plasma itself. This created a bright flash and a powerful bang—tiny plasmoid explosions, up to several hundred of them a second. These would be directed at the nose of an incoming missile, causing its trajectory to rapidly erode as it hit higher-pressure air and eventually causing the missile to tumble, breaking up within a second or two. He knew that even now DPD lasers were firing from orbit, peppering the air in front of the missiles. In moments all six of the incoming trajectories disappeared from the map. He imagined in the predawn sky over these rural locations there was a hell of a light show as the hypersonic missiles broke apart into flaming wreckage.
The Morrison clone reappeared in a hologram projection. “Incoming missiles destroyed, Mr. Director.”
Hedrick turned back to the general. “Your preemptive strike has been canceled, General. I suggest you tell the public there was a meteor shower. Our publicity people will send along some sample press releases and footage to make the messaging convenient.”