Luna Marine (23 page)

“Government people? CIA? Military Intelligence? That is good. What I have to say, they need to hear.” He glanced back over his shoulder, then pulled himself closer to his PAD's optical pickup. The encryption algorithms in the comm software at both ends of the conversation should keep their talk secure from electronic eavesdroppers, but he was evidently concerned about being overheard by other members of his ship's crew. “David, they have gone mad, back on Earth. Back in Geneva! I have some data for you. See that the right people see it!”

He pressed some keys, out of sight below the image frame, and the amber light on David's PAD indicating a high-speed data transfer began winking. It took only a few seconds, with most of that time taken up by the decryption process at David's end.

“We shouldn't talk longer, my friend,” Cheseaux said.
“It would not be good if I were found out.” His eyes narrowed suddenly, and he seemed to be examining David's image on his PAD's screen. David realized Cheseaux must just now be noticing the dungarees he was wearing, and the number stenciled just above the left breast pocket. “Ah,” Cheseaux said, nodding sadly. “Perhaps you already know the risks involved.”

David glanced at Twiggs, who was sitting nearby, watching intently…but who was too far away to interrupt a message, if it was quick. “I do,” he replied. “Be sure to tell François and the others.
Au revoir, mon ami
.”

He cut the link with a single quick tap to the touch-screen keyboard. Twiggs had not reacted to his warning to Cheseaux, so either the man really didn't care, or he'd missed it. If the little ring of French and German scientists that David had been communicating with knew that he was in prison, though, it would be a lot harder for the US government to reach them with disinformation transferred through him.

Of course, it was always possible that David's transmission was being intercepted somewhere, edited, and sent on its way. That would explain part of a four-second time delay very nicely as well. He didn't let himself dwell on that, however, because there was nothing at all he could do about it.

“So,” he said as Twiggs took the PAD back and began checking on the data transferred from space. “Can I go, now? Home, I mean?”

“I hope so, Dr. Alexander,” Twiggs said. “I really do. But I wouldn't get my hopes up. Carruthers is in charge of your case, and, well, let's just say that he's very goal-driven, very one-track. I don't really know what he has in mind for you. All I can do is promise to talk to my superiors, and see what we can do.”

“I understand.” Carruthers would see a recording of the conversation with Cheseaux, and know that David had warned the other side. He wondered if Carruthers would see his plan as a lost cause and give it up.

Or if he would begin thinking of retribution.

Institute for Exoarcheological
Studies
Chicago, Illinois
1622 hours CDT

“I'd like to speak with Ms. Dutton, please,” Teri said, staring up at the big corporate logo for Smithfield, Klein, and Jorgenson, Attorneys-at-Law.

“Julia Dutton is not in the office,” the genteel voice of an AI replied. “Will you hold while we relay your call?”

“Yes, I'll hold.”

She glanced out the office window as she waited, looking down at the sea of people that by now was a routine part of the afternoon scenery along Lake Shore Drive. The astronut crowds didn't seem to realize yet that David Alexander was no longer here.

Hell, David's on his way to being the astronuts' patron saint
, she thought.
You'd think they'd care what happened to him
.

A chirp brought her attention back to the screen, where the corporate logo winked out and was replaced by the face of an attractive black woman with green-and-scarlet-striped hair. A pattern of glowing stars and moons winked next to her eye. “Julia Dutton.”

“Ms. Dutton? Dr. Theresa Sullivan. Remember me?”

Dutton's dispassionate mien warmed a bit. “Yes, of course, Dr. Sullivan. Good to see you again.”

The camera angle had the face off-center on the screen and was aimed awkwardly up. Teri guessed that the lawyer had her PAD on the seatback tray table of a commuter maglev. “Well? Do you know anything?”

Dutton's eyebrows rose higher on her face. “About what?”

“About David! He's been in prison for a month now! And this past week, they won't even let me in to see him…and a letter I wrote was returned with ‘Addressee unknown' stamped on the envelope! I can't even get through on PAD-vid or v-mail! And no one at the prison I talk to seems to have any idea what I'm talking about! Just what the hell is going on?”

“Dr. Sullivan…”

“Is he dead? Has something happened to him? I want to
know
!…”

“Dr. Sullivan!”

“Sorry…”

“I know what you've been going through. Believe me, I know. I've been getting the same runaround since last Friday, when I came to consult with him and was told he'd been released.”

“Released! Was he?”

“Hell, no. The proper papers hadn't been filed, either here or with the court that issued the original arrest order in Chicago. They were just trying to get rid of me. I can be an
awful
pest when I put my mind to it.”

“Well…what happened, then? Where is he?”

“Depending on who you talk to in the system, David is: a) a free man, already released; b) transferred to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; c) dead.”

“Dead!”

“You'd at least think the sons of bitches would get their cover stories straight!”

“Well, if he's not dead—”

“He's not, honey. If he were, there'd be a record at the Medical Examiner's Office in Chicago and in the penitentiary records office.”

“Okay. Where is he?”

“As near as I can tell, he's still right there in Joliet.” Suddenly, Dutton looked very tired. Her face sagged. “I'm coming home on the Joliet commuter mag now. Been out there all day trying to get someone to talk to me. My guess is they're holding him incommunicado. No outside contacts. They may be trying to pressure him into cooperating with them. Tell me. Do you have any idea what they might be after?”

“I'm not even sure I know who you mean by ‘they.'”

“God knows. I don't. The government. Some agency with alphabet soup initials. Your friend has made some enemies, you know. Enemies in pretty high places.”

“But they can't just arrest him without cause! There's a thing called the Constitution!”

“Yup. There's also a war on, in case you haven't heard. The government has pretty broad powers during wartime. They can censor your newspaper, listen to your v-mail, read your computer files, hold you on suspicion, and draft your ass if they have a mind to. And there's not a whole lot ordinary citizens can do about it.”

Tears burned Teri's eyes. It was so damned
unfair
! “I thought this was a free fucking country!”

“Welcome to the real world, lady.”

“Look. He was supposed to have sent secret files to foreign nationals, right? They still have to put him on trial!”

“They don't
have
to do anything. Look, if it makes you feel better, I'm pretty sure they're just holding this over him, trying to get him to cooperate. Probably some sort of government sting on his foreign friends. Maybe a heavy-handed attempt to make them help the CIA.” Dutton paused, looking thoughtful. “You know, if this is spy stuff, or even if it's just bureaucratic idiocy, we might be able to fight this with publicity.”

“What, call the news services?”

“Hell, no. They'd just say a word in the right editorial ear, and the story would dry up. No, I'm thinking about David's friends. The people he knew and worked with, like you. Get enough of you together and asking uncomfortable questions, the government might have to relax a little. Who did David know that might help? Especially anyone powerful, or well connected.”

“Jesus, I don't know.” Teri sighed. “He's always been so damned apolitical. I don't know if he has
any
friends, outside of the archeological community.”
Or the Marines
, she added to herself. The thought of a Marine regiment assaulting the walls of Joliet Penitentiary was quite appealing…She sighed. Not very realistic, though.

“Doesn't have to be the president of the United States. Damn it, there's
got
to be a way we can work this! I am sick to death of the government doing what it likes to people, and then blaming them for the mess.”

A lawyer with a genuine sense of moral outrage
, Teri thought.
No wonder David likes her
.

“So…you want me to start calling people he knew?”

“It couldn't hurt. Maybe a petition with a few hundred names. Or if he did know some politicians.” Dutton snapped her fingers. “He must have computer files with the names of his business associates, other archeologists, museum directors, whatever. Some of them will be sure to have connections!”

A frightening idea was taking form in Teri's mind. “He does keep pretty extensive files, I know,” she said. “But not at the office. At his home.”

“That's not good,” Dutton said. “I'd have to get a court order to see them. And if I do that, and they decide to charge him with something and take him to court, I'd have to share with the prosecution. If there was anything damaging in there—”

“No. I think I can do it,” Teri said. “I can try, anyway….”

“You don't sound to happy about it, hon.”

“I'm not. I'm not happy about it at all….”

What she would have to do was going to be the hardest thing she'd ever done in her life.

WEDNESDAY
, 2
JULY
2042

US Joint Chiefs' Command/
Control Bunker
The Pentagon, Arlington,
Virginia
0947 hours GMT

General Montgomery Warhurst took his seat next to his boss, five-star Admiral Charles Jordan Gray, in the bunker's main briefing room. The chamber was already crowded with both high-ranking military personnel and civilians, so many that while the main players sat around the huge, oval table at the center, perhaps a hundred more, secretaries, assistants, and aides, took seats in a gallery to one side, connected electronically to their bosses through PADs and console touch screens.

Warhurst looked about, not nervously, but with a distinct sense of being a fish out of water. The commandant of the US Marine Corps was not normally an invitee to meetings of the Joint Chiefs, which consisted of the chiefs of staff of the Army, Navy, and Aerospace Force, and their entourages. In that respect, at least, the Marines were still considered to be an appendage of the Navy, though there'd been talk for a long time now about giving them a seat of their own on the JCS.

The big table was so crowded because a number of other high-powered guests were present as well: Louis Carlton Harrel, the national security advisor; Archibald
Severin, the secretary of defense; Arthur Kinsley, the director of Central Intelligence. All looked worried. The tension, the worry, the
fear
in the room all were palpable.

“Big turnout, CJ,” Warhurst said
sotto voce
as he opened up his PAD on the table in front of him. “All the VIPs are out.”

“Most of 'em. There was talk that President Markham would be here, too,” Gray murmured. “Canceled at the last minute. Harrel, over there, will be briefing him later. This whole session is being recorded for his sake, too, so be sure to put on your best camera smile when you say your piece.”

“Should I bow and say ‘Mr. President'?”

“No, but be sure to keep a rein on that temper of yours. The word is we're going up against the Aerospace Force.”

“They developed a counter, too?”

“Yup. And Harrel and the president are going to have to decide which one to use.”

“Easy. Deploy both. If number one plan fails, we still have number two, and we double our chances of getting out of this alive.”

“We may not have the resources for both.”

“Resources! You mean funding? My God, CJ, the UNdies are dropping a goddamn mountain on top of us, and the bean counters are worried about money?”

“Money is always a problem, Monty, even in war, when everyone pretty much prints what he needs. But there are other assets we're going to be scrambling for, too.”

Warhurst nodded. “The LSCPs.”

“And HLV assets.”

“We've both been saying for years that we needed a bigger permanent presence in space,” Warhurst said. “An orbital military base with its own booster reserve, and at least one Lunar base and manufacturing and fuel-processing facility.”

“And there's always something more urgent on the table,” Gray replied. “The word is we're short of prepped Zeus IIs. That's where the bottleneck is, right now.”

“Damn. We can't kill asteroids if we can't get off the friggin' planet.”

An Aerospace Force colonel called the meeting to order. A moment later, Admiral Gray was standing at his place, addressing the listening personnel.

“Gentlemen and ladies. You've all seen the reports from Langley. The UN has just drastically upped the ante in the war by launching a weapon of unprecedented potential destructive force. Computer simulations confirm that, if nothing is done to alter Asteroid 2034L's present course, it will strike the central United States at precisely 2032 hours EDT on Monday, 15 September. The projectile appears to be aimed at our command/control facilities at Cheyenne Mountain and will strike with an estimated yield of two hundred to three hundred megatons. While we can evacuate the military facilities in the target area well before 1-Day, the infrastructures of our NORAD and Space Command centers will be destroyed, along with the entire state of Colorado and a considerable portion of the west-central United States. Evacuation of civilians from an area stretching from Nevada to Missouri and from Wyoming to Texas is, quite frankly, completely beyond our capabilities. We estimate direct civilian casualties in the range of four to six million. We have no way of estimating civilian casualties caused by the starvation and thirst, disease, lack of medical care, and civil unrest that will certainly follow the strike, but they will certainly run into the tens of millions. In short, the effect will be similar to a massive nuclear strike against the continental United States, lacking only the aftereffects of radiation to make the comparison perfect.

“When news of this impending catastrophe was relayed to the Joint Chiefs last week, I directed the other members of the JCS to submit detailed plans by which we might counter the UN threat. Two plans have been submitted, and we will now hear summaries of both.” Turning, Gray nodded to General Grace Sidney, the Aerospace Force chief of staff. “General Sidney? Would you care to start us off?”

Sidney stood, tapping out a key combination on her
PAD and bringing up an animated graphic on the big board at her back, and on the PAD screens of all of the people present. The room lights dimmed. “Thank you, Admiral.

“Our approach is straightforward and simple…I might even say elegant. On or before Thursday, 24 July—that's just three weeks from tomorrow—a pair of Zeus II heavy-lift boosters will put two SRE-10 Sparrowhawks into deep-space trajectory. That is, they will not be placed into orbit but will be launched essentially straight up, on a high-energy boost that will put them on a direct intercept vector with 2034L. At an altitude of twelve hundred miles, each Sparrowhawk will launch two modified VB-98 Star-burst missiles, each carrying a single GB-8020 thermonuclear warhead with a yield of forty megatons apiece. Each Sparrowhawk will also launch three additional VB-98s, each carrying cluster decoy munitions.”

On the screen, the mission unfolded in animated graphics, as two delta-winged craft climbed straight out from the Earth, then released a total of eight slender missiles before starting the long fall back home.

“The Sparrowhawks will fall back toward the Earth, reenter, and glide to dead-stick landings. The missiles, which will have been modified with solid-fuel boosters to give them a high sustained delta-
v
, will proceed toward the target behind the decoys, on a trajectory that will take seven days. The decoys will detonate at precisely determined points to confuse enemy tracking and scanning. They will also disperse clouds of microchaff, which will scatter any antimissile laser fire from the
Sagittaire
and also make radar tracking of the warheads difficult.

“Both missiles will arrive at the target on Thursday, 31 July. They will be precisely targeted and will employ radar altimeters that will detonate them on this side of the asteroid, within ten to thirty meters of the surface. We will launch two warheads to double our chances of success, just in case the enemy is able to get through our masking cloud. Only one needs to get through.

“The explosion's shock wave, imparted by some six kilograms of vaporized material from the warhead, will be
negligible in vacuum, of course, but the radiant thermal energy will be enormous, sufficient to convert a thin layer of the asteroid's surface, amounting to some fifty metric tons, to vapor. That vapor will escape the asteroid on that side at a velocity of four kilometers per second, imparting a lateral delta-
v
to the body of some ten to fifteen centimeters per second.

“Now, ten centimeters per second doesn't sound like much, but in forty-one days that amounts to a change in vector of just over 397 kilometers…almost 250 miles. If we were trying to prevent a dead-on, center-of-target impact on the Earth, of course, we wouldn't have a chance, since the radius of the Earth is over six thousand kilometers. But—and this is crucial to this problem—we don't need to change 2034L's path by anything near that much. The asteroid's inbound course, remember, deflected by the Moon's gravity and again by Earth's as it comes up from behind, is delicately balanced. Every computer simulation we've run shows that if we can change the path by as little as 125 kilometers away from Earth as it passes from the nightside to the dayside, there will be absolutely no chance of a collision. The asteroid will continue past the Earth and on in its orbit about the sun. There is a remote chance of a collision on another orbit at some date in the remote future, but plenty of time to deal with the possibility before it becomes a danger.

“If both warheads reach their target and detonate, the asteroid's delta-v is increased to something closer to twenty to twenty-five centimeters per second, with a total displacement over forty-one days of almost eight hundred kilometers. One warhead will do the job. Two will simply ice the cake. We will be attempting to intercept and deflect the body while it is still beyond the Moon, which gives us an excellent chance of completely screwing the UN calculations here.” She looked around the table. “That concludes my summary report. Are there any questions?”

Harrel, the national security advisor, tapped his finger rapidly on the tabletop, a quick
tic-tic-tic
of sound in the near-silent chamber. “General Sidney,” he said, “if two
missiles are good, wouldn't four be better? Or ten? Or fifty?”

“We are looking into the possibility of multiple launches. Unfortunately, our assets are badly limited at the moment, and the best we can do within the next three weeks is two launches, as I've just outlined for you. If we can get additional Zeus II boosters on the pad at Vandenberg or Canaveral, we will certainly see about maximizing our chances with as many additional launches as possible. Of course, the closer the asteroid gets to the Earth, the harder it is to change its course enough to do any good.”

When there were no further comments, Admiral Gray stood again. “Thank you, Grace. General Warhurst? What do you have for us?”

“Yes, sir.” Warhurst stood at his place, tapping his own combination into his touch pad. The large wall screen lit up with scrolling columns of data, while an inset window showed a graphic animation of a pair of LSCPs intercepting the asteroid as it tumbled toward Earth. “Gentlemen. Ladies. We do not propose to screw around with this thing. One-SAG, of the US Marine Space Tactical Command, is ready to land a special assault force of fifty Marines on Asteroid 2034L. We project a launch from Vandenberg employing two Zeus II HLVs.” He glanced at General Sidney and wondered what she was thinking. There would be only two heavy-lift vehicles available until mid-August.

“After engaging and destroying any UN forces stationed on the asteroid or in the immediate vicinity,” he continued, “they would land directly on the surface. They would carry with them twelve DS-50 thermonuclear devices, which they would plant…in this pattern.” On the screen, the graphic showed twelve bright green points embracing the slow-tumbling, roughly potato-shaped body in a dodecahedron. The two LSCPs lifted from the asteroid and swung back toward Earth, moments before the twelve points flared up together in a fireball of incandescent fury. As the fireball dissipated, only an expanding cloud of glowing dust motes remained.

“Our information suggests that 2034L is a carbonaceous chondrite, which means its mass is friable, fairly
soft, and not densely packed. Twelve thermonuclear explosions in the five-to-ten-megaton range should serve to vaporize nearly all of the asteroid. Any surviving fragments will be small enough that they will burn up upon entering Earth's atmosphere.”

Kenneth Morrow, the secretary of technology, cleared his throat. “Ah, General Warhurst. I've reviewed your figures, and must say that your people have worked this out in considerable detail. However, there are a few points I'm not clear on. You say that twelve ten-megaton H-bombs should vaporize nearly all of that thing. Can't you guarantee a clean sweep? Disintegrate it? Maybe by using more bombs….”

“With all due respect, sir, there's no such thing as a disintegration ray. Not yet, anyway. That asteroid masses some hundreds of millions of tons. We can transform a very great deal of that mass into gas or droplets of liquid rock, but the mass doesn't just
go away
. It's still there after the blast, and most of it is still heading our way. What we hope to achieve, here, is to disperse that mass, from one big lump into trillions of grains the size of sand and bits of gravel. A hundred million tons of sand will burn up in the atmosphere. A hundred-million-ton mountain will not.

“The plan calls for twelve thermonuclear devices in order to melt and disrupt
all
of 2034L, right down to its heart. More devices would not do a better job.”

“Might there be a possibility of some of the nuclear devices detonating ahead of the others?” Secretary of Defense Severin asked. “Wouldn't that disrupt your dodecahedron?”

“That
is
a possibility, sir. We believe the technology is good enough to guarantee near-simultaneous detonation…within a few thousandths of a second. If we're that close on the mark, all of the warheads would detonate before they could be disrupted by a neighbor. But I would be lying if I said it was a sure thing.”

“And yet the survival of the United States may be riding on this operation, General,” Severin said, thoughtful. “Possibly the survival of the entire world, if our UNdie
friends have miscalculated with this damned thing.”

“How soon could your people be ready to go, General?” Admiral Gray asked.

Warhurst nodded his thanks to his friend. Morrow had interrupted his report and gotten him off the track. Now he was back in the groove. “One-SAG is already on full alert. We need to arrange to borrow a ride to orbit from the Aerospace Force, of course. We would need those two HLVs General Sidney mentioned to boost our LSCPs into an intercept trajectory. We could have the ground-to-orbit transports mated to the boosters by the first week of August. The, ah, Army's setback in May has left us a bit short on deployment vehicles. So we're having to scramble to get the LSCPs.”