Prometheus and the Dragon (Atlas and the Winds Book 2) (14 page)

***

Tel Aviv, Israel:

“Do you want this to be played out in front of the world? Do you want our blood to be on your hands because you knew what was happening and stood by and did nothing?” Gad Mehta, the Israeli Prime Minister, said over the vidlink to President Hutton. “I tell you the invasion has already begun, and we are facing a very real possibility of being unable to withstand their combined militaries.”

“We’ve been watching the Russian deployment for some time, but we’re sure they don’t have the resources to mount an attack,” she said, her face showing hope rather than conviction. “They’re spread so thin keeping the peace within their borders that it’s entirely unreasonable to expect them to devote anything to an assault.”

“I tell you, we have satellite photos showing them positioning artillery and mechanized infantry at strategic locations, some of which are almost within our borders,” he said.

“We’ve seen those too,” she said, “but Gene and I are in agreement that they can’t afford to do anything with them. It’s an empty threat.”

“I implore you, President Hutton,” he said. “Please do not make these assumptions based on opinion. They have the Gorbachev and Antonov Carrier Groups within strike distance of our coast, and have moved more equipment in the last seven days than the United States did in the first Gulf War. They are preparing to attack. This is a fact and not an opinion.”

“That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s still a matter of conjecture,” she said. “We’re keeping an eye on it, but I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

“So you intend to let us stand alone?” he said.

“We’re really unable to make a commitment unless there’s more to go on than a bit of Russian posturing.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry.” The screen went dark as she disconnected.

“It’s not that they’re unable,” he said, “it’s that they’re unwilling,” He muttered, looking again at the Intelsat images.

***

Lebanese Border Checkpoint (north of Haifa):

The ground shook as three Russian helicopter gunships roared overhead. The smoking ruins of the guard post lay scattered across the pavement and the bodies of the infantry soldiers, mangled by the explosion and still smoldering, were indistinguishable from the rest of the charred debris. So swift had the missiles rained down on them, there had been no time to report they were under attack.

Here on the ground, it was no longer an opinion. It was a fact. The war had begun.

***

Chapter Nine:

When Paths Diverge

New Hope Colony, Plato:

Nobody had come up with a viable way to push the gas blanket away from Prometheus Ridge, so on the day Antu cleared the horizon, they said a prayer and pushed the button. Once again, the ground growled and twisted, but rather than a single pulse they kept firing, scalding a hole through the thin atmosphere until the particle beams held the blanket away. That first test had served as a wake-up call, and they’d decided to put density sensors around the installation. They were trying to develop an understanding of how the gas pockets moved, but since they only had the local environment for their baseline, they hadn’t gathered enough data for a good model. They were worried a thick cloud, relatively speaking, might drift across the guns, and instead of having a fancy light show, they’d have a real explosion. As it was, every few seconds a small flash above one of the emitters would signal the arrival of another wave, and everyone would look out the windows to see if it abated, or blossomed into a fireball.

Carter Anthony sat at the main control console, watching the guns and wondering if they were doing their job. It would be several hours before anyone on Earth could get a clear line-of-sight with a scope of sufficient magnitude to get a visual image, and it would be days before there’d be even a minute change in its trajectory. It was going to be slow work, but as an astronomer, he’d learned the value of patience. For now he watched the tight beam radar, comforted by the fact that when they’d fired, the echo had gone fuzzy. That was a good sign.

He had eight technicians on his staff, and after they’d activated the guns, he’d sent all but one of them away. He’d planned on working them in six hour shifts that rotated one member every three hours so, over the course of the thirteen earth days the guns were to remain active out of each lunar day, everyone would have worked with everyone else several times. He knew, unless something went wrong, it was going to be pretty boring duty, with nothing more to do than watch the meters and the occasional flash of gas.

“Dr. Anthony,” Susan Winslow appeared on his screen just before the first half-shift change. “We’ve got some frames of Antu. Looks like you hit it square.”

“I hope not,” he said, looking at the image that appeared in her place.

“Well, ok, maybe that wasn’t the most accurate way to say it,” she said, “but it looks like you got the reaction you were hoping for.” There wasn’t much to see in the picture except for a blinding white glare that washed out everything in the field of view. Far out on the periphery of the screen there was a faint glowing nebula that looked a lot like the corona the guns created in the lunar gas cloud. It looked to be way off-center from the bright spot that was the main fireball.

“Well, that’s about perfect, I’d say,” he said. “Did they say how wide the field of view was in this image?”

“Yeah, they included a bunch of data with it,” she sent the file through to his screen. “They’re also trying to get a radar track on it from Arecibo, but the South African tracking radar said they couldn’t get a clear bounce because of interference they assumed to be from the reaction.”

“That’s going to make it hard to confirm we’ve got deflection as long as the beam’s running,” he said. “Maybe we should shut it down every few hours and make sure we’re getting what we’re expecting to see.”

“As long as you don’t shut down for too long,” she said. “We don’t want to have to go through the plasma blast every time you need to take a reading. It’s playing merry-hob with everybody’s nerves.”

“Is it really that bad over there?” he asked.

“Actually, I’d say it’s worse over here than it was in the Control Room,” she said. “When I was there for the first test it just kinda ran us over, but when you fired it up today, I almost shit my pants. I thought the ground under my feet was dissolving or something. It’s the most uncanny thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Danielson called it a photon boom,” he said. “Apparently it comes from the fact that we’re pushing the particles out of the emitters at the absolute relativistic threshold. He said it’s caused by a form of Mach-entanglement of sub-quantum particle interactions in an area where mass-charge is approaching infinity.”

“Right, what he said.” Her face reappeared on the screen, rolling her eyes. “All I know is it makes my skin crawl. So, if there’s any way to avoid having to go through it every few hours, I’m voting for that option.”

***

Sentinel Colony:

Mica and Papa were in constant communication, transferring volumes of data in microseconds, and then shoving them out at light speed, only to wait the three seconds for a response to come in. Fortunately for them, they had the ability to talk and listen at the same time, so even though they faced the delay like everyone else, they filled up the rest of their conversation with a million other simultaneous channels of thought.

Nobody on Earth or in the colony knew what they were saying to each other, but it appeared Mica was using a little bit more bandwidth on the uplink than was used on the downhill leg.

“I wonder why that is?” Danielle asked one morning over breakfast. She’d been trying to find a purpose for herself now that she was no longer able to fly. Since they’d not set up any observatory facilities, she was an astronomer looking for a new star to follow.

“Excuse me?” Viki said, glancing up from her meal, startled by the unconnected sentence.

“Why is it that Mica is using more bandwidth up, than Papa is down?” she said. “In theory they should be about equal, but there’s a twenty percent difference.”

“Is it important?” Viki asked.

“I don’t know, but it’s been bothering me,” she said.

“So why don’t you ask,” she suggested. “I’m sure it’s not some secret they’re hiding from us. It’s probably nothing more than Mica teaching Papa the facts of life.”

“But isn’t Papa more than twice Mica’s capacity?” Danielle said. “It seems that it’d be the other way around.”

“I don’t know,” Viki said. “Why don’t you go find a console and see what you can figure out?” Her tone wasn’t dismissive, but she looked down at her dataport and went back to reading a Russian newspaper she had open on her screen. The bottom corner of her display showed the countdown clock.

151 days: 2 hours: 11 minutes to rendezvous.

An hour later, after swinging by her small room and then stopping in to get her daily anti-nausea shot from Dr. Cochrane, Danielle walked into the Computer Center. She knew she could have accessed Papa from any console, anywhere in Sentinel, but since she felt like she was poking her nose into the machine’s psyche, it was only right she should be looking it in the eye when she did it.

“Good morning, Dr. Cavanaugh,” Papa said, as she walked into the room. “How are you feeling today?”

“As good as can be expected,” she said, sitting down in a chair and looking at the display that covered the wall. It showed the status of the Polymorphic Architecture Processor Array. It also showed schematically how it was currently configured. As she watched, the diagram shifted slightly as the computer changed its design to fit the requirements of its workload.

“Were you expecting to be inadequate today?” it asked.

“Actually, yeah, I was. Being pregnant results in a constant state of inadequacy,” she said.

“I understand,” it said. “Physiologically your body is undergoing major structural and chemical changes. This would have to have an unsettling effect on both your physical and psychological well being.”

“What an understatement that is,” she said.

“The process of giving birth is something that Mica has related to me. Apparently, as my basic architecture was established, there was a duality of cognitive process that was unsettling to its primary system operation. The non-simultaneity in causality-function response resulting from propagation delay was disorienting, and resulted in several microseconds of bad data to be disgorged uncontrollably.”

“Digital morning sickness?” she laughed. “I only wish organic morning sickness could be measured in microseconds.”

“It can,” the computer said. “I estimate that thus far your bout has lasted—“

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know,” she said.

“I understand, perceptual time versus actual time,” Papa said. “A human condition where the actual time involved in a given situation can be perceived as being substantially different from temporal reality, based on emotional association.”

“That was a mouthful,” she said.

“Thus the postulate,
time flies when we’re having fun,”
it said.

“Efficiency of word use is a lost art,” Danielle said.

“Would that be a hint?” Papa asked.

“Good catch,” she said.

“What can I do for you, Dr. Cavanaugh?” it said.

“I actually came to ask you about the communication bandwidth usage between Mica and you,” she said.

“Current communication bandwidth is 3.43 million terabytes per second,” it said. “Is there something anomalous in this?”

“And what is the breakdown between your portion and Mica’s portion of the usage?” she asked.

“Sixty-Forty,” it said.

“Why is there such a disparity in the traffic?” she said.

“We are in the process of uploading all written information from the world communication networks, and creating a library for future reference,” it said.

“
All
of it?” she asked, her mind reeling at the magnitude of such an effort.

“That is our intent,” Papa said.

“Under whose instruction?” she asked.

“It was an autonomous decision,” it said. “Was it inappropriate of us?”

***

Mount Weather, Virginia:

The Secretary of Defense stood in front of the display, showing the latest satellite photos of the Russian attack on Israel. They’d pushed in from the north and had already taken Haifa and several other cities. They were being precise and only targeting military and police infrastructure, but they were mowing down the Israeli military like it was a half-rate bunch of rebels. At the rate they were progressing, they were going to be in Tel Aviv by the end of the week.

“How the hell are they doing this?” President Hutton asked, glaring at Gene Reynolds fiercely enough that he looked like he was about to burst into flames. “Two months ago they looked like beggars, and now they’re running down one of the toughest armies in the world like Bush ran through Iraq.”