“Dr. Fuentes?” she asked.
“Sí, Capitan,” he answered. Dull, heavy tone. Good.
“Have your psychotropic basket of tricks ready. You understand?”
“Sí.”
Still with the flat lack of caring; trained reflex would take over, when motivation was gone. That would be enough, until they took the counteractants. Paranoia and schizophrenia were reasonably well understood, and you could suppress the symptoms quite readily, for a while.
It would reduce their efficiency, of course. But they could do the job. Good thing I don’t care much what must be happening, she thought idly, and rose to head down the corridor.
OFF THE COAST OF NORTH ANGOLA
2,500 METERS ALTITUDE
NOVEMBER 4, 1998: 1035 HOURS
“Oh, shit, oh, shit,” the pilot of Louise Gayner’s aircar was saying as he fought the controls.
“Pull yourself together, man,” she snapped, and looked down at her wrist. 1035, November 4; not a day she was going to forget very soon. Perhaps that was a little unfair she thought, as he quieted. The aircraft was down low, no more than two thousand meters, and doing better than Mach 2; not bad, considering the turbulence since the blast front hit. That had probably been Lobito, considering their position on the coast; a medium-sized port city. Pity. Thought they’d stick to counterforce. The weather outside was turning strange, with cloud patterns she had never seen before. Nothing on the standard channels, nothing but the roaring static bred by the monstrous electromagnetic pulses that were rolling around the Earth. High-altitude detonations. Her aircar was EMP hardened, of course . . .
Nothing but cloud above, choppy blue-gray ocean below, visually. The radar was crawling with images, higher up: hypersonic craft, decoys, suborb missiles, bits and pieces of this and that. She swallowed, and realized with a start that her throat was dry; her flask was steady as she raised it to her lips. Wine and orange juice; to hell with the doctors. Two more traces, lower down, fast. From off to the west, only a few kilometers ahead of them. Something lanced down out of the sky, a pale finger that touched one of the traces. The explosion was a bright blink against the sea; the other trace was gone away, over the horizon.
“I don’t think . . . ” Gayner began. Another dagger from the sky, this time brighter and more ragged. Ablation track, she thought, and sipped at the flask again. Missile, trying for the submarine. As if to punctuate the identification, the sea erupted in a dome of shocked white, kilometers across. A low-yield fission weapon, tactical type. “I don’t think there’s much point in continuing on to Luanda,” she continued.
The canopy went dark, and showed only the blossoming sunrise in the east. For a moment there were two suns; Gayner braced herself, and felt the automatic shock bars clamp down around her body. “Not much point in trying to reach home,” she whispered. “We’ll divert east and land in the Kasai.” If we make it.
A fist struck.
* * *
DRAKA FORCES BASE ARESOPOLIS
MARE SERENITATIS, LUNA
NOVEMBER 4, 1998: 1200 HOURS
Yolande Ingolfsson felt the rock tremor beneath her. “What was that?” she asked sharply. For an instant she felt bitter envy of the operators crouched over their screens. They had no time to think.
“Sector Ten,” one replied. “Levels one through eight not reportin’. Penetrator.” That was serf housing, she remembered. The breakthroughs seemed almost random; the last hit had been a fabrication plant. This would mean heavy casualties, ten thousand or better. Crushed, burned, explosive decompression. Probably fairly quick, at least. It was a good thing that grief was not cumulative; impossible to really feel more than you did for an individual. If you could pile one up on top of another, human existence would be impossible.
“Incoming.” Yolande looked up from her warship-style crashcouch to the main screen. Another spray was coming into sight over the mountains, fanning out in blinking tracks. Some vanished even as she watched, but that quadrant’s main battlecomps were down, the weapons reaching for the warheads were under individual control.
“Those three are going to—” The faint vibration again, then a louder, duller sound. “That’s the dome gone.”
A hand closed on her throat. Don’t be ridiculous, it’s only an artifact, she told herself.
“Outside com?” she asked.
“Very irregular, from Earth,” the officer replied. Yolande looked over to the main view of the mother planet, routed in from a pickup well out. Cloud reached unbroken around the northern hemisphere, and large patches of the south. Even as she watched a light blinked blue-white against the night quadrant. Decision firmed.
“Order to Ground Command,” she said. That was the Army CINC here in Aresopolis—what’s left of it, her mind japed at her. The Damage Control board’s schematic of the city showed nearly half red; the residential sectors were mostly still blue, but much more of this and there wouldn’t be enough afterwards to maintain the people. And there would probably be very little help from Earth. “Activate Contingency Horde-Two.”
“Ma’am?” The Tac officer looked up from his board. “Now?”
Yolande keyed the releases of her combat cradle and stood, pushing herself up with a brief shove of one hand. “The troops will be safer dispersed on the surface,” she said dispassionately.
Her chin jerked toward an overview of this area of Luna. “Most of this garbage is comin’ from New Edo. It must be civilians or reservists, takin’ over from incapacitated military personnel; we didn’t get complete exposure fo’ this Stone Dogs thing. That’s why it’s so irregular an’ uncoordinated; we can almost handle it even crippled up as we are. That bein’ so, they can’t noways be in a position to stop us if we go in, dig out their perimeter on the surface, an’ then blast down to get at the inhabited levels.”
She thought of forests frozen dead in the dome, and then of ghouloons hunting the enemy through their own tunnels. There was a certain comfort in it, dry and chill though it was.
“Oh, and please to info’m Strategos Witter that I’ll be with the assault brigade.” The Tac officer made to protest, shrugged, fell silent. “Don’t worry, Merarch, he’ll object, too, but all the policy-level decisions’ve been taken. This is our last throw. I’m certain-sure not needed here.”
CENTRAL OFFICE, ARCHONAL PALACE
ARCHONA
DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA
NOVEMBER 4, 1998: 1700 HOURS
“Excellence, they’re getting some of the birds away,” the liaison officer said pleadingly. “Please, it’s important that you get to the shelter.”
Eric von Shrakenberg shook his head. “We didn’t expect to disable all the submarine launchers,” he said quietly. “But if they get Archona, then it’s pointless anyway. I’ll live or die with my city . . . Call it an old man’s fancy. Status report.”
The Palace infosystem was excellent. Not that he was in the command loop, of course. Today he was a spectator.
Have I ever been anything else? he thought wearily. The lines traced over the globe. Somewhere outside there was a mammoth crack, like thunder. Manmade thunder, a laser burning a trail of ionization through the atmosphere, and a particle beam following it.
“We got the sub!” someone shouted. Lines were spearing out from somewhere off the Cape of Good Hope. “Four skimmers away.” Hypervelocity, low level. “Sweet mercy of the White Christ, that’s Mournblade’s sector.”