Harman quit swimming and let his feet sink to the deckplates when he realized he was in the middle of the command and control center.
There was less marine growth here, more bare metal. From just the warhead AI’s cartoon schematic, he could make out the torpedo launch and weapons’ control centers—vertical metal columns that would have projected a myriad of holographic virtual controls when the ship was in combat. Harman moved around the space, touching metal and plastic with his thermskinned palm, allowing the dead quantum brains embedded in the material to speak to him.
There was no chair, seat, or throne for the captain. That man had stood here, near the central holgraphic chart table, directly in front of a display console—virtual under the proper conditions, projected from within LCD plastic panels if the virtual system were damaged—into which every one of the ship’s many systems and functions were channeled and shown.
Harman moved his gloved hand through the green murk and imagined sonar displays appearing… here. Tactical displays to his left… there. Several yards back the way from which he’d come, gray-glob mushrooms were the stools where the crewman had crouched in front of constantly changing virtual displays controlling and reporting on ballast and trim, radar, sonar, GPS relay, drone controls, torpedo readiness and launch controls, physical wheels for controlling the diving planes….
He jerked his hand away. Harman didn’t need to know any of this crap. He needed only to know…
There.
It was a black metal monolith just aft of the captain’s station. No barnacles, mollusks, coral, or slime had attached themselves to it. The thing was so black that Harman’s lamps had not reflected back from it on his first several passes through that part of the command center.
This was the boat’s central AI, built to interface in a hundred ways with the submarine’s captain and crew. Harman knew that a quantum computer, even from this lost age, even one dead for more than two millennia, would be more alive at one percent capacity than most living things on the planet. Quantum artificial minds died hard and died slowly.
Harman knew that he would not have the codes to access the central AI’s banks, perhaps not even the language to understand the codes he did not know, but he also knew that it didn’t matter. His functions were developed and nanogenetically programmed into his DNA long after this machine had died. It would have no secrets from him.
The thought terrified him.
Harman wanted out of this flooded crypt. He wanted to get away from the radiation that must be pinging through his skin, brain, balls, guts, and eyes even as he stood here, frozen in indecision.
But he had to know.
Harman set his palm atop the black metal monolith.
The submarine was named The Sword of Allah. It had left its port on….
Harman skipped the log entries, dates, reasons for the ancient war—he lingered only long enough to confirm it was after the rubicon release, during the Dementia years when the Global Caliphate was near its end, the democracies of the West and Europe were already dead, the New European Union a fiction of gasping vassal states under the rising Khanate….
None of that mattered. What was in the belly of this submarine, as real as the fetus growing in the womb of his wife Ada, was what mattered.
Harman did pause long enough to listen to a fast-forward of the last testament of The Sword of Allah’s twenty-six crew members. The Mohammed-class ballistic-missile submarine was so automated that it required a crew of only eight, but there had been so many volunteers that twenty-six of the Chosen had been allowed to go on its last mission.
They were all men. They were all devout. They all surrendered their souls to Allah as their doom approached—a cordon of Khanate attack submarines, aircraft, spacecraft, and surface ships as far as Harman could tell. The men knew that they had only minutes to live—that the Earth had only minutes before its destruction.
The captain had given the launch command. The primary AI had seconded it and relayed it.
Why hadn’t the missiles launched? Harman searched the AI to its quantum guts and could find no reason why the missiles had not launched. The human command had been given, the four sets of physical keys had been turned, the AI target-package coordinates and individual launch commands had been confirmed and relayed, the missiles had been denoted in the proper launch sequence, the switches—both virtual and literal—had closed. All of the massive-metal missile hatches had been successively opened by redundant hydraulics—only a thin, blue, fiberglass dome had separated the missile tubes from the ocean, and each of these launch tubes had been filled with nitrogen to equalize the pressure to keep that ocean from rushing in until the actual instant of launch. The forty-eight missiles should have been propelled out of their crèches by the nitrogen gas generators, a twenty-five-hundred-volt charge igniting the nitrogen discharge. The gas itself would have produced more than eighty-six thousand pounds per square inch of pressure in less than a second, sending the missiles hurtling upward within their own rising bubbles of nitrogen until they popped out of the sea like rising corks, and then the solid rocket propellant in each missile would have been ignited the second the missiles hit open air above. There were redundant and double-redundant launch and ignition initiators. The missiles should have roared and flown to their targets. The AI’s launch indicators were all red. In each of the forty-eight missile silos back in the pregnant belly of The Sword of Allah, the sequence had proceeded properly from HOLD to DENOTE to LAUNCH to SUCCESSFULLY LAUNCHED.
But the missiles were all still sitting in their tubes. The dead and decaying AI knew that and communicated something like shame and chagrin through Harman’s tingling palm.
Harman’s heart was pounding so fiercely and he was breathing so raggedly that the osmosis mask had to lower the oxygen input so he wouldn’t hyperventilate.
Forty-eight missiles. Forty-eight warhead-platforms. Each warhead was MRVed and carried sixteen separate reentry vehicles. Seven hundred sixty-eight actual warheads, all armed, primed, safeties off, set to go. They had been targeted at seven hundred and sixty-eight of the world’s remaining cities, ancient monuments, and dwindling rubicon-survivors’ population centers.
But these were no mere thermonuclear warheads such as carried in The Sword of Allah’s torpedoes.
Each of the seven hundred sixty-eight actual warheads still aboard this sub carried a tenuously contained black hole. The human race’s and the Global Caliphate’s ultimate weapon at that point in time—its ultimate detergent, thought Harman with a noise that was part sob, part giggle.
The black holes in themselves were small. Each not much larger than what one of the dead crewmen had described in his urgent and religious farewell speech as “the soccer ball I grew up kicking around the ruins of Karachi.” But when they escaped their containment spheres and dropped on their targets, the result would be much more dramatic than a mere thermonuclear weapon.
The black hole would plunge into the earth, creating a soccer-ball-sized hole in the center of whatever target city it arrived at. But the second it was exposed there would be a plasma implosion a thousand times worse than a thermonuclear explosion. The descending black hole, turning all earth, rock, water, and magma ahead of it into a rising cloud of steam and plasma, would also suck in behind it the people, buildings, vehicles, trees, and actual molecular structure of its target city and hundreds of square miles around it.