The light died like a blown-out birthday candle. He dropped one massive arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “You think it'll make a difference, babe?”
Indigo had a pretty good eye for explosions. She craned her head for the possibility of a sudden brief report like a gigantic cannon shot, counting to judge how far away it might have hit.
“No,” she answered, when the light that followed was silent and white as a pillar of fire, then red through the blood in her tight-closed eyelids. She squeezed him back. What the hell. “No. I don't think it will make a difference at all.”
2300 Hours
Thursday 21 December, 2062
PPCASS Huang Di
Under way
The Huang Di pressed Min-xue's skin like a wet suit, moving with every stretch, flexing with every twist. He floated in the dark confines of a wiring locker, the door wedged from the inside, the cut-free crash webbing from an unused bunk holding him immobile so the interface pins — improvised from spare parts — in his neck wouldn't jar loose. He'd been feeding speed and trajectory information to the AI through his physical links to the machine, wondering the whole time what the captain had intended him to do.
If Captain Wu had meant for Min-xue to somehow sabotage the launch, wouldn't he have seen to it that Min-xue was piloting during the attack? Wouldn't he have told him more?
No, Min-xue decided, as he felt the projectile fall away, a faint shudder along the Huang Di's spine and through its metal hide. Captain Wu would protect his family. He would see that the attack was impeccably planned and executed. He would drop hints to Min-xue, and he would hope that Min-xue would take the risk of sabotage.
The first pilot and the captain were tracking the rock's trajectory in terms of fractions of centimeters. Min-xue tapped into the feed and rode it like a ghost over their shoulders, relaying the information to an AI who barely acknowledged his words except to ask the occasional question. One final flurry of questions, and then silence that stretched around the tick of Min-xue's heart. He wondered how long he could stay hidden in the locker, wired into the machine before they found him.
Richard would hide him.
The Huang Di was long as an old-fashioned freight train: measured in kilometers, a fragile-looking stick-insect construct carrying 150 souls. It could take days to ferret Min-xue out. He had water. Could live for a while without food, although toilet facilities would be a problem. With Richard's help and enough time to hack security, he could take control of the starship instead of just riding its impulses. He could stop the captain from trying again until the threat of the Montreal, alive and well and ready to retaliate despite the sabotage attempts, was made manifest. The Montreal, Min-xue hoped, with her command structure intact and her pilots safely aboard, should be enough to quell Beijing.
If Canada retaliated, no one was safe. Captain Wu's family. The girl Min-xue might have married, who was probably married to somebody else by now. His mother. His home.
Richard, he said, holding a slow-drawn breath. Did you catch it?
He wasn't used to silence from the Canadian AI, but Richard let the wordlessness stretch until Min-xue knew the answer, and his hope fell away. He remembered a poem, and he reached for it.
Flying lights, flying lights
I toast you with wine.
I know not if the blue heavens soar high
Yellow earth plunges fertile.
I see only cold moon, fevered sun
Rise to afflict us.
“No,” Richard said, then. “No, I didn't.”
D=0.07Cf (ge/g)1/6 (W pa/pt)1/3.4, where Cf = the collapse factor of the crater walls; ge = the gravitational acceleration of the surface of the Earth (9.8 meters per second per second squared). Richard quite frankly guessed at pa, the density of the impacting body (~7.3 g/cm3); and pt, the density of the (~3.0 g/cm3) target rock. He knew the velocity of the rock and its approximate mass, which gave him W, the kinetic energy expressed by the impacting body — in kilotons TNT equivalent. Which led inexorably to—
D, the diameter of the crater that would be formed when a third of the original asteroid, diverted a few hundred kilometers from its intended target, struck Lake Ontario and leveled everything within roughly thirty kilometers of the epicenter. The impact would create a seismic event equivalent to the worst the San Andreas fault had to offer, lift the inland sea into a tsunami that would scour its shores like a hungry tongue, and rain molten rock across Ontario, Ohio, Michigan, New York, and environs. The immediate climatic effects could lower global temperatures by as much as two degrees Celsius for a period of weeks or months, followed by a greenhouse spike as the particulate matter drifted out of the atmosphere.
Nothing to compare to the impact at Chicxulub that probably contributed to the mass extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous, of course.
But it would serve. It would serve.
If he had eyes to close, Richard Feynman would have closed them then. Elspeth.
I'm sorry.
Trevor hit the console again, because it felt good. He would have hit it a third time, but the Castaign girl flinched at the sound, so he lowered his hands and leaned back in his chair, letting the Leonard Cohen drift. “Damn it,” he muttered. “If Casey didn't have to prove every second that she's better than everybody else—”
“The shuttle couldn't have done it.” The girl's voice was level and oddly adult over the tinny suit mike. She leaned her helmet against the reinforced crystal of the view port, one glove pressed alongside, and watched the green-gold trail of the asteroid descend. Her shoulders lifted with a sigh. “Too close. Too fast.”
Trevor nodded, although she couldn't have seen it. “We should get to the Calgary. Montreal might need help. We should go after the Huang Di.”
“We shou—” Her voice didn't so much drop off as fail her utterly. “My sister's down there, Trevor.”
“Oh.”
The searing green light from below died suddenly as a heartbeat. Trevor swore and slapped the thrusters on, grabbed the yoke in both hands. “Stupid!”
“What?”
“Debris.”
“This high?” She squeaked and leaned back into her seat as the shuttle lurched under his expert touch.
A moment later, chaos bloomed like a flower under the shuttle's wings, ejecta and atmospheric blowout rising in a streak of inferno off her bow. Trevor spun the little ship around and took her up—relative to Earth — out to nearer Clarke's orbit. Richard, is this far enough?
“Should be.”
What about the beanstalks?
“This will be little stuff.” The AI's voice sounded distanced again: cool and professional. “The antimeteor protocols should handle it. Head for the Calgary. Trevor—”
Yeah?
“Thanks for trying.”
Thanks for nothing, you mean.
4:29 AM
Friday 22 December, 2062
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner