Eden's War (A Distant Eden) (17 page)

But you said you were bored with this, so I’ll also finish fast. You have twelve hours to begin a total withdrawal of all land and Naval forces. We’ll clean them up anyway if you don’t. But every good turn deserves another, so you have twelve hours to begin withdrawing all troops and your Navy. And let’s say two weeks to get your men off our land and one more day to see your Navy steam home at maximum speed. Twelve hours or I launch.”

The smooth voice came back over the radio without hesitation, “Ha ha ha Adrian. I feel like I’m in one of your western movies, standing in the street bracing another gun fighter. Very entertaining. But your gun is unloaded, and mine isn’t. Coming from a – how shall we say it, lower background? – You may not be aware that your ICBMs are designed to navigate off of satellite signals, and of course the satellites are all dead. We, on the other hand, have redesigned our missile’s navigation systems so that they do not need satellites. But, go ahead and pull the trigger if it makes you feel better. It’ll be amusing to watch your hammer fall on an empty cylinder.”

Adrian replied, “Aw, Xao, you seriously think we didn’t figure that out? We retrofitted ours for astral navigation a long time ago. Like the trebuchet, it’s old-school, but it still works. A small margin of error doesn’t matter in this game, and our margin of error is tried and true… and small. Twelve hours, Xao, twelve hours or look up into the skies.”

Adrian flipped off the connection.

“Jesus Christ, sir! Do we really have all of the missiles retrofitted?” Morgan almost shouted.

“Most of them,” Adrian said with a shrug. “More than enough. We started the first week I had control of the military. My father had been in the Air Force and told me about those old navigation systems. Now, get out orders to evacuate as many people as you can from here and every other potential target, including Fort Brazos; they’re sure to try and hit it. Twelve hours isn’t much, but it may be all we have.”

“You really think they’ll launch, then?”

“There is no mathematical certainty where human actions are concerned. It hinges on whether he believes me about the navigation system… or not. In either case, this is the only action to take. Call his bluff. Part of what I said about targets is true. We have few, they have many. But they can do more damage to us than we can stand. If he believes we can hit him, he’ll withdraw; he has too much to lose, and a closer problem to deal with in Russia.”

Adrian glanced up Morgan. “We’ll know soon enough, won’t we?”

Chapter 23

“M
issiles are ready to launch when you give us the green light sir.” Morgan reported.

“Evacuations?”

“The word is out and people are leaving the target cities; but it’s only been three hours, so it won’t be many at this point, sir.”

“Fort Brazos?”

“I hear it’s emptying out rapidly. They’re an organized community and understand the importance of the target, sir.”

“Good. How’s the mutiny going?”

“Tense sir, it’s very tense.”

“Would it be a good idea for me to address them?”

“An excellent idea, sir, the com is ready to go. Just pick up the microphone and talk, sir.”

Adrian gave the Captain a tight grin, acknowledging his preparations. “Ah, a perfect XO, always one step ahead of the Captain. Okay then…

“If I could have your attention for a few moments?” Adrian spoke into the microphone. “First I want to play a recording of my conversation with the Chinese Emperor; afterwards, I’ll have a few words to say.”

Adrian looked at Morgan with one eyebrow raised. Morgan leaned over and flipped a switch and the recording went over the ships speakers. Adrian nodded at Morgan with another smile of acknowledgement.

Morgan flipped the switch back when the recording ended and pointed at the microphone to signify that it was live again. Adrian picked it up.

Although the hands in the com room remained studiously attentive to their chores Adrian could hear faint sounds of cheering through the open bulkhead hatch. He waited to let it settle down then said, “That was for full disclosure; you now know everything I know – except I wasn’t bluffing. Most of our missiles
have
been retrofitted. If we launch, we will completely destroy China.”

Adrian again paused to allow the new wave of cheering to settle. “And we will take the hits they can certainly deliver. As you are well aware, Corpus Christi is a high-priority target. We will not survive if they launch. Essential personnel will have to stay, but only them. The rest of you have been given your orders to evacuate and it disturbs me deeply that you have mutinied by failing to follow orders and remained on board. Be that as it may, you still have time to clear the area and to receive a presidential pardon for the mutiny. Transport is ready and can get you out of the kill zone. Understand this,
I do not know if they will launch or not. If they do, you will die.
If you leave you’ll leave with a sense of guilt… I get that. Your deaths will accomplish nothing, but your lives will. This country needs you to rebuild it, especially if we get nuked. It does not need you to die. So this is an order. Directly from me to each and every one of you.
Get off this ship and get as far away as you can.
I am ordering every person off this ship except Captain Morgan and myself. I would order him, too, but he would refuse on the tradition that you all know so well. So I won’t order him. All I have to do now is operate this microphone, and if for some reason I can’t, there’s a solid backup plan in place. Your singular efforts have been critical up to this point. Now they’re not. So please get off the ship and out of danger, right now. That’s not a request, it’s an order. Thank you.”

There was no cheering this time, only silence.

Adrian hung up the radio, almost sadly.

Morgan whispered, “Thank you Mr. President. Thank you very much for saving my crew, and not dishonoring me with an order to abandon my ship, sir.”

“I’d go out to shake their hands as they depart, but it would only slow them down, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes sir it would, and I dare say if they saw you in person right now they’d refuse to leave again. It’s bad enough to have one mutiny on my shoulders, two I don’t think I could stand… as much as I agree with them. Sir, I can’t tell you how proud of them I am for refusing to abandon ship. I’ve never been prouder, sir, never. It’s the best mutiny I ever heard of. But they have to go, and God willing we’ll be here for them to come back to.”

“Six hours, Captain. Amazing that we’ve come to be in this time and place isn’t it? The series of little accidents that slightly deflected our lives, putting us on new paths, thousands of little twists and turns that led us up to this. One less deflection – or maybe one more deflection – and we’d not be here. Little things like catching a red light could cause a cascade of consequences making little tiny changes that ripple down our lifetimes. Instead of here I could have been in a thousand different places, even dead. Yet here we are.”

“Sir, there’s still enough time for you to evacuate. I can stay and report in until the end, if that helps. ”

“Morgan, that’s possibly the best offer I’ve never heard. Your offer of sacrifice leaves me
almost
speechless. But, like the town marshal in the old movie
High Noon
, I just can’t. It is not possible.”

“No, sir, I didn’t think so, sir, but I had to try at least once, sir. Duty demands it.”

“Well said Morgan.”

They returned to patiently watching the clock. Eyes focused on the second hand as the clock arms inexorably advanced, silently ticking off the seconds. There was nothing else to watch, nothing else to say, nothing to do but wait.

At two minutes before the eleventh hour the radio crackled and the Admiral said, “Chinese Naval fleets are withdrawing Mr. President – rapidly. And the entirety of the invasion forces have halted in their tracks. Two have already reversed course.”

“Thank you Admiral. Doesn’t mean they won’t, launch though. Give the Chinese safe passage along the most direct routes back to their ships. If they stray from the direct path, have them reminded, will you? And keep me informed?”

The Admiral replied. “Absolutely, sir.”

Morgan said, “You think they might still launch sir?”

“No, not really. But best to play this one safe. Put out the order for everyone to stay away from the targets for the next twenty-four hours. After that they may as well go home.”

Twenty-four hours later, Adrian shook the hand of every returning sailor and Marine. Then he flew, what he hoped was his last flight for a long time, home to Linda and yet another hero’s welcome home.

Eventually, he hoped, he would get used to the public spectacle of welcome wherever he went, but probably not for a long time.

Six months later.

Adrian offered a handful of corn to one of the horses in the corral. Linda standing next to him, scrutinizing his face. “It’s been six months, Adrian, and you still look haunted. Your hair turning white is understandable – you went through horrific conditions, making decisions for millions of people, maybe a billion lives were in your hand, both American and Chinese. But you made the right choices. You did the right things, hard things. The Admiral’s death was another blow, I know you really admired and loved that man and so did I. He went out a victor and on his own ship. He wouldn’t have wanted any more than that darling. The war’s over, and you won it. The Coalition of Sovereign States is gaining new members every week. Even Canadian and Mexican States are joining in.

“Each State a sovereign of its own, with a Constitution like the one created here in Texas. Decentralization is the word of the decade. Small governments that belong to a large mutual defense and trade coalition. People are freer, have more liberty than ever. Even more than in 1776 or 1865. Governments are taking shape in a way to avoid excesses of power, yet be strong enough to hold everything together. It’s unbeatable in more ways than I can express. And it’s all because of you, dear. The people know it, that’s why you’re the President not of just the Republic of Texas, but the Coalition of Sovereign States.”

Adrian began to speak but stopped when Linda put her finger across his lips. “Hush for a moment darling. You’re just going to protest, but let me speak. Allow me to finish. I need to say this. History thrust you into the right time and the right place so many times that it defies your belief – and it’s true you had that greatness thrust upon you, you weren’t born to it, didn’t want it, still don’t want it. But it was
you
that responded to that thrust, though reluctantly. It was
you
that responded with the strength of will and character that make people want to follow you… to the death if necessary, and many of them did die. That’s what weighs on you, that they followed you and that so many died because of it.

“I know that you already know the bigger picture, the reasons they died for, it’s why you made the hard decisions you made. And knowing that still doesn’t assuage that inner guilt, that small voice that maybe you could have done it better and saved more lives. Or that maybe someone else would have done better if only you had let them. Those self-doubts are part of what makes you a great leader… a great man… because it shows you truly care. And even knowing that can’t help you. And that, too, is part of what makes you great, and loved by so many. Because you always want to do better, and you always will want to do better, and you will always think you could’ve done better…it’s your ingrained character.”

Again Adrian started to speak and again Linda shushed him.

“I can only think of one thing that will help, something else for you to focus on.” Taking Adrian’s hand she placed it on her stomach and said, “And this will be just the first of many darling, just the first.”

Epilogue

April 3, Mid-Morning, Two Years Previous

D
uring the night, the effects of the chemical had slowly begun to wear off. Adrian hadn’t realized it was diminishing. He slept, unaware that his eye had closed. He had vivid dreams of a strange future. It was the last time he would dream of it.

Adrian awoke and was immediately overwhelmed by disorientation. He had fallen asleep in the woods near Fort Brazos, but had awakened in what he could only describe as a dimly lit laboratory.

A voice began speaking. Adrian focused and watched the speaker as he spoke. “Welcome to the future Adrian. You’ll be experiencing a wild swing of disorientation that will last a few days, slowly diminishing as this new reality you find yourself in actually becomes real for you, because my friend, it is real. We have snatched you over a thousand years into the future. It’s mind-bending for you, but you’ll soon enough discover it’s not only real, but it’s utterly necessary.”

Adrian grunted and rolled off the platform he was lying on and stood up. Physically he felt fine; better in fact than he had in a long time. “Strange dream I’m having here,” he said, talking to himself and not the tall, somewhat emaciated, white-haired man who had moved to stand in front of him.

The stranger replied. “Good. Perfect reaction. Just what I wanted to see. It could have gone two other ways – hysterics or immediate acceptance. Neither of those would have been optimal. Now, before you have a chance to formulate questions, let me tell you a little about the situation you find yourself in.”

Adrian studied the man’s face closely and found nothing threatening or offensive about it.

“As I said, over a thousand years have passed since your ‘time’ as it were. This world is radically different than yours was. And yet, it is formatted primarily on tenets you put in place during your political career. Self-reliance and decentralization to be a bit more specific. In today’s world everyone provides their own food and energy, although in highly technological ways. There are no cities, no highways, no bureaucracies, no governments. Everyone lives on their own… farm… let’s call it. We’ve learned to modify the weather, and eliminated crime and war. In fact, even the genetic structure of humans in this time is vastly different than yours. Over the centuries since your time, technology bloomed again, but in ways you wouldn’t recognize. I won’t need to explain shortly, we’ll be giving you all that knowledge in an injection.

“We disagreed at first whether we should give you the knowledge before you awoke or not. Eventually I was able to prevail on humanitarian grounds. My suggestion, and the one that carried the day, is that you should awake in your natural state of mind, be given an opportunity to acclimate for a bit, and then have the option of allowing us to infuse the knowledge, or not, depending on your decision. My most heartfelt desire is that you volunteer, and there is a truly compelling reason for that. But, we’ll get to that reason later. Too soon for that now. Oh, manners! I completely forgot. I am Dr. Hunter. I am your direct descendant – you are my Great Grandfather to several powers. I can’t tell you how thrilling this is for me.”

Adrian sat down on the platform and continued to stare at the stranger. ‘Confused’ didn’t begin to cover it. This was an extremely vivid dream, no doubt. Adrian considered that his best response at this point was silence. Then he reconsidered.

“Okay, Dr. Hunter. Let’s just pretend this isn’t a dream or a hallucination. How in the hell will you be able to convince me that it’s real? ”

“Oh that’s fairly easy to answer: duration. Dreams and hallucinations have short lives. As time progresses you’ll slowly become centered again and will realize this is reality. We’ve had some small experience with this, but very little. Messing around with time is extraordinarily dangerous, and we stopped doing it almost immediately, centuries ago, shortly after we learned how and began to recognize the implications. You must understand that, in this instance, we felt there was no choice. But… well never mind, that will all become clear in due course.”

Adrian pondered this for a long minute. “Okay then explain this. Language evolves rapidly. There’s no way you can speak in my ‘time’s’ colloquial. Even though a form of English may still be spoken a thousand years in the future, it would sound completely bizarre to me – and you don’t.”

“That’s brilliant, Grandfather. And would be entirely true, except… how do I explain this…? We can inject any kind of knowledge. We can inject you with the complete, up-to-date, state-of-the-art knowledge of say… what you used to call ‘quantum physics,’ and within seconds you would have that knowledge at your fingertips. Languages are easy by comparison.”

“Don’t call me ‘Grandfather.’ I don’t even have children. Yet.” Adrian shook his head. “This is really messed up,” he said to himself.

“Sorry, Adrian. I’m afraid I presumed. Would you like to go outside for a walk?”

“Explain this to me then,” Adrian said, ignoring the question. “How do you control the weather?”

“Ah, another excellent question! You most certainly have an exceptional mind, picking that out as a way of confirming this isn’t reality. Well it turns out that was quite easy. In layman’s terms, then. The sun is a relatively steady state energy generator. Together with the Earth’s tilted axis and a few other random factors, it’s the sun’s influence that creates weather patterns. Heat from the sun is not uniformly distributed across the earth – we evened those differences out. It took some time, and a great deal of trial and error, but eventually we turned the earth’s weather into a pliable system.

“Basically the entire planet is now a perfect garden. There are no deserts, no tropical zones. We left the poles frozen though, the ice sheets are a necessary part of the overall system. Everywhere else it is moderate, year-round. No freezing winters, no scorching summers. Think of it as an almost continual spring, with only mild autumn so that plant life can function normally. The planet is green and lush and comfortable.

“You didn’t answer my question: How?”

“Sorry, I wandered off didn’t I? You seem to be better focused than I am. Fantastic! To answer the ‘how’ part of your question… we placed large solar screens into orbit, a huge mesh, made of what you would call nanoparticles, although far more advanced. These screens are of various sizes depending on their locations, some only a thousand miles in diameter, some much larger, strategically positioned to cool off the hottest parts of the earth’s surface, or warm up entire geo-areas. Sunlight passes through the screens. Because of their composition, we can move them as needed and alter their position to block or reflect as much light as necessary. It’s fairly crude technology, but then so are hammers and we still occasionally use hammers. The weather is so stable that there hasn’t been a hurricane in centuries. ”

Adrian stared at the Doctor. The dreamlike quality of the experience wasn’t fading. “The burning question is why you brought me here. Assuming of course…”

“Yes, well. I hadn’t thought we’d get to that for a couple of days. Perhaps we underestimated you, even though we thought you would adjust quicker than most. Still… I’m not sure it’s time yet to talk about that.”

“Then we have nothing more to talk about. Until that’s clear to me, nothing else can possibly make any sense.”

The Doctor stared at Adrian, and then smiled. “You are quite something else, Grandfather. I shouldn’t answer you, but you’ve staked a position I can’t see any way of altering. So here goes. In order to eliminate crime and war, we had to go to the source of their impetus – a portion of the human genome. Aggression was once a fundamental necessity for survival and that trait became embedded through natural selection until it actually became competitive with survival of the species. So we had a choice – eliminate technology or eliminate aggression. It was a bitterly-fought battle, with the sides nearly equally drawn. But eventually we decided to eliminate aggression. It took four generations to completely eliminate the aggression genes from the gene pool at large. The world changed radically in those four generations. In place of aggression came cooperation.

“Imagine a world filled only with people cooperating with one another. Wars ceased. Crime disappeared. Soon governments ceased to exist as they were no longer necessary. We have cooperative organizations instead of governments. But, we’ve discovered a downside to this. We became vulnerable to aggression, because we don’t have aggression to use to defend with.”

Dr. Hunter paused for a moment, before continuing.

“Now here’s the part you’re probably going to struggle with the most. We came under attack from a non-earth intelligent species, a very aggressive one. And we lost the war with them – will lose it – overnight. That will happen in twenty-two years from the present date. So we’ve done the unspeakable in order to change a horrific outcome. We brought you to this time to lead us in that coming war, this second chance that time travel provides us. It’s either that or accept that the human race will be eliminated by the invaders. We brought you back not only to lead us in that war, but to also use your genes to create a new warrior class. If you agree that is. If you do, then in twenty-two years you will have an army of millions of… clones.”

“I’m going back to sleep,” Adrian replied. “You be gone when I wake up.” Adrian stretched out on the platform and closed his eyes.

“Perfectly natural reaction, Grandfather, perfectly natural.”