Klaus was already twice as high as the “Armstrong Limit,” which is the height at which the barometric pressure is so low that water will boil at room temperature. No human can live above the Armstrong Limit in an unpressurized atmosphere. The suit was his life, and it represented all such systems of human dependency. When man throws his life into the dead hands of the machine and counts on the inanimate to operate as it should, he becomes acutely aware of the tenuous miracle of creation. If the suit developed a rip or tear now, his blood would boil and the capsule would be his airy tomb. In that case (if he failed to complete checklist item seventeen), the Starjump capsule would float along, losing atmosphere, until it fell randomly somewhere, probably into an ocean.
If the suit failed at any time during the fall, traveling at 800 M.P.H. or around Mach 1.2, depending on the altitude, Klaus would either flash freeze, or he would pass out and be dead in seconds. Whether his chute opened or not at that point would be immaterial, because it would just be an instrument for delivering his body back to earth for burial.
Klaus knew that his jump was an historic one. He knew it was being played LIVE on YouTube. He knew that once he stepped off the platform and threw his body into space he would have a limited time to stabilize his fall and straighten out his body before he reached the point of no return where he would either have to pull the cord to his parachute and slow his all too rapid descent or push along in the slip of atmosphere until his body passed the wave field that would produce a sonic boom. He knew that only bullets and missiles and spaceships and meteors had ever achieved what he would now be doing with his own flesh and blood inside the mix of chemical-laced fabrics that contained the technology that would keep him alive like an umbilical cord inside a womb. He knew that over eight million people were watching him go through his egress checks as he slid to the edge of the capsule. Beyond that, he knew very little.
He did not know, for example, that when he engaged the capsule release timer that he was not actually activating the capsule’s controlled descent functions. He did not know that, in fact, when he flipped the switch he would set in motion the genesis event that would signal the end of the world as everyone knew it, and the beginning of a whole new era. He did not know that, by innocently throwing the red switch as he’d been commanded to do through the signal in his helmet from mission control, he would sign the death warrant of over 300 million people in the United States alone, and that of over six billion people worldwide. He could not have known that flipping a toggle switch would rip a tear in the pressurized space suit called “the grid,” an artificial system that was absolutely necessary to keep humans alive in the beginning of the 21st Century.
No, Klaus von Baron was innocent when he flipped the switch that started the timer that in four minutes would silently launch a small ultralight craft, no larger than a breadbox, that carried a miniaturized “super-EMP” warhead, that would glide completely undetected through space to its designated vectors. There, when it detonated, it would change the world forever.
Klaus was innocent. At least… he was as innocent as anyone can be who gives his life and the lives of his fellow humans over to be governed and maintained by the machines.
“Checklist, item seventeen. Check.”
It will take Klaus about eight minutes to complete his historic jump into the record books, and eight minutes hence, when he stands up and raises his hands in victory on the desert of a pink, dusty New Mexico badlands, he still will not know that he has landed on a completely different world than the one he left only that morning, the one he saw from his perch twenty-four miles up in space.
He does not know, and he will not know, that the moment of his greatest triumph is the moment of humankind’s end… at least, an end to the world the way almost everyone alive has ever known it.
Perhaps it is not too much to say that Klaus von Baron’s jump was one small leap for man, but one giant leap backwards for mankind.
In Warwick, the very un-Civil War raged on. While neighbor continued to fight neighbor and ancient rivalries flared back up into contemporary reasons to kill and harm and maim, a search was on.
Sergei Dimitrivich, Vladimir Nikitch, a handful of their Youth Revolutionary Forces, and six Spetznaz soldiers were going door to door in the town looking for Vasily Romanovich Kashparov and whatever other traitors to the Revolution could be found. Truth be told, they wanted Vasily mainly so they could find out what he knew about an escape route out of Warwick.
Frankly, the Spetznaz and their Communist bosses who had sent them to Warwick in the first place could not care less about Vasily Kashparov. They wanted the oldlings, and they wanted all of them. To the Russian Special Forces operatives, capturing the oldlings was the entire reason that they were going through any of this. That was why they had parachuted into Warwick before the planned attacks on the U.S. and the West. Mikail, the Youth Forces, all of them, were just tools—useful idiots—mechanisms used to bring about a necessary end.
Their orders from their commanders in the GRU had been clear. Support and stabilize the town so that the oldlings of Warwick—the ones who had been there since the very beginning—could be intensively interrogated.
The new leaders of the New Soviet Union, after they were done brushing America and the West off the map for eternity, wanted to be able to track down every American Spy in Russia, and Warwick had been the main supplier of authentic Russian American spies since the 1960’s. Every one of those agents of capitalist America would need to be rooted out, and, within the aged minds and feeble memories of Warwick’s oldlings, those names would be stored like they were in a computer databank. Eighty of those oldlings were already being questioned in the locker rooms under the Warwick Gym. There were more out there, at least there ought to be.
Lacking any better options, the Spetznaz troops had thrown their weight behind Mikail in the battle for Warwick. That decision wasn’t turning out well, and they were beginning to have doubts about his ability to deliver on his promises, but for now their primary function took priority over their personal feelings. In addition to the large contingent of troops “manning the walls” so to speak—guarding the village to keep the people in and the rest of the world out—there were specialists involved in the interrogations in the basement of the gymnasium. There were also soldiers still involved in trying to police the town and stop the fighting. These were the units traveling with Vladimir, trying to root out all resistance and end talk of revolution or escape.
To the Russians, if this Vasily Kashparov knew a way out of the Charm School, then he would also know if any of the oldlings had already escaped, or if any more were hidden in the town’s many root cellars and basements. They wanted to find Vasily merely so they could find any oldlings hiding from this new Inquisition.
The search for Vasily, like the revolution itself, was not going well. Two of the Youth Forces, untrained and lacking in military skills and tactics, had already been killed executing the searches. That fact had angered Vladimir to no end. The young man, already a brutal sadist, became doubly efficient and intensive in his application of whatever means he deemed necessary to extract information from the people of Warwick.
A proper search, meant an everywhere search, and that meant a systematic, door-to-door examination, even while a pitched and rolling battle was taking place in the town. Warwick was not a normal, modern village. The people were Russian, and mostly agrarian. They liked to dig, and almost every house had storm cellars and basements and even vegetable larders formed of concrete, or crafted from old freezers buried in the backyards. There were a lot of places to hide and therefore, a lot of places to search, to coax the earth to give up her secrets.