At last: “Go to Force Condition Seven, and await further orders, Arch-Strategos.” With a touch of ironic malice: “Service to the State.”
“Glory to the Race, Excellence.”
Chapter Twenty-One
DRAKA FORCES BASE ARESOPOLIS
MARE SERENITATIS, LUNA
NOVEMBER 2, 1998: 0600 HOURS
“Whew.” Yolande collapsed into the chair. For a few minutes she forced herself to sit quietly, breathing, letting the wash of cool air from the vents help her body flush out the hormonal poisons. Then she reached for the communicator.
“Staff conference, immediate,” she said. “Forcecon 7.”
“ . . . And all nonessential traffic between sectors has been closed down,” the civilian administrator was saying.
Yolande looked around the table. “Mark?” she said.
The Aerospace Command Strategos shrugged. “We’ve moved all the available units into sheltered orbits,” he said. If there was one thing that a generation of skirmishing in space had shown, it was that ships were helpless in confined quarters with high-powered energy weapons.
“Move them out further,” Yolande said. “Outer-shell orbits fo’ the Cislunar Command zone. Sannie, start pumpin’ down the bulk water in the dome habitat, fill the reservoirs.”
“That’ll play hell with the Ecology people’s projects,” she warned.
“Don’t matter none.” The other officers around the table glanced sidelong at each other. Yolande saw carefully controlled fear. This was the nightmare that had haunted them all from their births. “And yes, that means I knows somethin’ y’all don’t. Somethin’ bad—and somethin’ good, too.”
“Now, and this is crucial”—she paused for effect—“startin’ immediately, and while you moving to full mobilization, bring you redundant compunits on-net. Then do a physical separation of the main battle units, and run simulations of actual operations—everythin’ but the final connections to the weapons units.” She held up a hand to still the protests. “Y’all will find malfunctions, I guarantee it. Report the make an’ number of the malfunctionin’ cores, immediate, to Merarch Willard here, who’s now Infosystems Officer fo’ Aresopolis. We’ll patch across to maintain capacity. Believe me, it’s necessary.”
CLAESTUM PLANTATION
DISTRICT OF TUSCANY
PROVINCE OF ITALY
NOVEMBER 2, 1998
“Vene, vene, keep movin’!” The serf foreman reached out to stop a field-hand family; one of the children was cradling a kitten. “No livestock in the shelter, drop it.” The girl began to cry in bewildered terror.
The bossboys were as ignorant as the rest of the serfs, but they had caught the master’s nervousness. John Ingolfsson whistled sharply to catch the man’s attention and jerked his head; the foreman’s rubber hose fell, and the line began moving again as he waved the serf girl through with her pet.
Makes no nevermind, the master of Claestum thought, watching the long column disappearing into the hillside. He swallowed to moisten a dry throat, pushed back his floppy-brimmed leather hat, and wiped at the sweat on his forehead. It was a clear fall day, and still a little hot here in the valley below the Great House. The shelter was burrowed under that hill, quite deep; begun in the ’50s, and refined and extended in every year since. This entrance was disguised as a warehouse, but behind the broad door and the facade was a long concrete ramp into the rock. The elevators were freight-type, and the thousand-odd serfs would be in their emergency quarters in another hour or so. Armorplate doors, and thousands of feet of granite—
It should be enough, if we have an hour, he thought. There was hatred in the glance he shot upward. Nothing but the coded messages over the official net, but you could tell . . . I always grudged the money and effort. Full shelter for all the serfs, sustainable if crowded; fuel cells, air filters, water recyclers, and food enough for three years on strait rations.
He had had just time enough to put most of the farming equipment under wraps; the sealed warehouses held seed grain. There was even room for basic breeding stock, on the upper level.
The last of the field hands passed through, and the overseer looked up from the comp screen by the door. “That’s the last of them,” she called. Rumbling sounded within, as thick metal sighed home into slots.
Silence fell, eerie and complete. Nothing but the hot dry wind through the trees, and the tinkle of water from one of the village fountains. He stood in the stirrups and looked around; the land lay sere as it did with autumn, rolling away in slopes of yellow stubble, silver-green olives, dusty-green pasture and the lush foliage of the vineyards. Commonplace infinitely dear. Yesterday his only worry had been the falling price of wheat and the vintage.
“Run one mo’ check,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to leave one of they brats out by mistake.” The overseer was taut-nervous herself, but her fingers were steady on the keyboard.
“All of ’em.”
“Right.” He ran a soothing hand down the neck of his horse as it side-danced with the tension. “Sooo, boy, easy. Now, let’s go jump in a hole and pull it in aftah us.”
DONOVAN HOUSE
NEW YORK CITY
FEDERAL CAPITAL DISTRICT
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
NOVEMBER 3, 1998: 0700 HOURS
“Could it be a drill of some sort?” one of the figures in the screen said.
The Conference Room was nearly empty; just the president, and a few of her chief aides there. The Alliance Chairman was in the center of the holoscreen, with the military chiefs and some of the most crucial administrators. In theory the other Alliance heads of government were coequal, but this was a time for practicalities, and the American head of state was still much more than primus inter pares.
Carmen Hiero forced herself not to sigh in exasperation. “Amigo, they’ve started closing down factories and evacuating the population to the deep shelters,” she said. “Look at the reports; there are abandoned dogs walking through the streets of Alexandria! You think they’re doing this—it must be costing them astronomically—for a drill?”
Allsworthy tapped his fingers together and looked to one side, toward his pickup of the ACI chief. Hiero frowned slightly; she thought the chairman tended to rely on his Intelligence people rather too much. Enough, she thought. Listen.
“Anything congruent? Any reason for it to start now?” the chairman said.
The ACI man licked his lips slightly. “Nothing we can spot on short notice, Mr. Chairman,” he said. His face was calm, but the tendons stood out in the hands that twisted an ivory cigarette-holder. His Australasian accent had turned slightly nasal.
You too, my friend, Hiero thought.
“But . . . ” he continued. “Well, something jolly odd did happen yesterday, up on Luna. The Mamba—that’s the personal yacht of their Commandant of Aresopolis—did an unauthorized takeoff and is running for the Belt. Continuous boost trajectory for Ceres; should be there in about ten days.”
“That quickly?” Johannsen, the Space Force CINC.
“Well, it’s got one of their new fifth-generation pulsedrives,” the ACI commander said. “And whoever’s piloting it isn’t leaving any reserve for deceleration, we think. They’ve got two Imperator-class cruisers trying to catch it, and they’ve been beaming a series of demands that the Mamba stop, and warnings to everyone else to stay clear. We’ve no earthly idea what it’s about, really. The yacht is either unwilling or unable to communicate.”