Total War

2028 January 30 13:13 UT
Test Year 1, Day 236
Tau, MIT

The enriched uranium had been scavenged from the reactor as it was being assembled: every twentieth lump in the fuel rods had been covertly replaced by lead. The reactor worked well enough, and no one was going to take it apart and check. Chao had asked about plutonium and tritium and lithium deuteride, but the last would have been impossible to make without getting the tools’ attention. The reactor was an excellent design for safety: a breeder system, so no plutonium was acculumated and it could not be melted down. There was tritium – in all the magic batteries that were backup power. But the Examiners had made those with mono-molecule hulls. No one had tried to break them open, but it would not have been easy and certainly would have detected. Palming slugs of uranium was easier, and the young man who did the job asked to be re-assigned after it was done. That coincided with the reactor being commissioned, and fewer staff being needed, so it did not raise suspicions. Once they had the uranium, Chao felt it safe to disappear himself and avoid any direct attention.

The Failures’ weapons engineers, ex-students of Courses 5 and 10, had stopped producing nerve gas now that one set of canisters was in place. Now they were carefully assembling shaped charges of C4. The uranium had been processed and recast into spheres and encased in tampers of iron. The calculations came from The Curve of Binding Energy, The Los Alamos Primer, and a few hours of laptop simulations. They shaped the explosive lenses with precision, manufactured and tested the detonating circuits. At the end of it all, they had four roughly spherical bombs. If the math was right, and it was the same math that had been used in the design and explosion of so many bombs in the New Mexico desert, they each would detonate with the equivalent of thirty kilotons.

Three of the bombs they merely attached to microcontrollers and encased in thin metal hulls. The last was encased in a carbon-composite oil drum, and rigged with a special controller: if it did not receive an appropriately coded ping from a controller that Chao had made himself every five minutes, it would send pulses of electricity down three dozen wires and detonate a few milliseconds later. Chao could also detonate it whenever he wanted to – the others trusted his vision enough to let there not be a double key. All this took as long as it had to distill out the uranium in the first place.

While the electrical specialists were making the controls that would release atomic fire, the chemists had moved on more conventional arms. The Revere Company might have their helicopters and handguns, but they did not have the need to enforce the right on an uncomprehending population. So they did not have the smaller canisters of gas, the fragmentation grenades, the fuel-air explosive, the napalm, and the homemade magazines of splintering bullets. When the bombs were ready, so were the weapons for the infantry.

At twenty-two thirty on year 1, day 236 of the Test (although they used the Earth calendar), the bomb crew wheeled the drum from the basement where it had been hidden and into a freight elevator. The building it was in was tall enough that the blast would reach ninety percent of residential property by line of sight. Five minutes later, it got to the roof. By then, the distraction, otherwise known as the occupation of the rest of campus, was under weigh. The gas canisters hidden in six out-of-the-way locations detonated. The nerve gas didn’t kill many. The buildings where the canisters had been hidden weren’t heavily occupied at night. They were the physical plant, machine shops, and the fuel reserve.

As the canisters blew, triggering gas alarms and evacuations, fifty of Chao’s troops rushed on pika. Grenades were launched through the windows by crude rockets, followed by flares into the tree house. Gera was inside the building, along with the best fixers of his Organization and a total of thirty-two residents, negotiating with an unknown client. As they rushed into the battle and the residents started to fight back, the new orders came: kill them all.

But pika wasn’t a soft target, not with the trained. Half of them – sixteen in total – did die in the attack, but so did forty of Chao’s force. One flash grenade was tossed back out of a window before it went off. As it flashed and blinded several of the invaders, tear gas cylinders detonated in the open area surrounding the house, choking them and further blocking their view. Thermal-tracking remote guns started shooting from a half-dozen points. The tree and the rest of the tree house’s supports were severed, and it fell outward, further blocking the entrance. Those in the building began to run downstairs, where Gera had opened a door in one wall. He watched a set of monitors on the screen of his phone. Warnings had already gone to Delbert, the other oligarchs, and Caltech. Now he watched thirty-two lights. Sixteen were flagged active, the others negative. When the fifteenth person passed him and got into the tunnel, Gera shot a gas tank in one corner and slammed the door shut. A refrigerator dropped across it and a grenade was tossed down the stairs by an invader as the room started to flame. Ten meters into the tunnel, Gera pulled a switch and the area behind him collapsed.

Fifty meters further, the first pikans had exited the tunnel, which opened at a disguised point that was at one end of a narrow channel in all the pyrotechnics that now surrounded the burning house. They ran along this, and were briefly seen by only one of Chao’s force. He got a rude gesture, and a blow to the side of his neck for his trouble. Carrying their captive, the escapees ran to where they had had long since concealed vehicles and supplies. Torching half the cars as a final misdirection, they headed south.

But Chao had more than just forty fighters. Mere minutes after starting at pika, groups moved on Cruft Labs, the nuclear reactor, the Health Center, the Revere Company headquarters at the old police station, the Screamer Lab, and a couple of the largest dorms. But Elmund’s warning had gotten through. Cruft Labs was empty when the force got there, and their guns exploded in their hands one after another, until they ran in fear. They did not know that Kathryn was already over a kilometer away, but instead they torched the building.

At the Health Center, the medics did not fight, but the Failures’ force found far fewer of them and their patients than should have been there. Every patient who was ambulatory had run. The dorms had not been so lucky, and flash grenades and gas quickly removed any capacity for resistance.

At the Screamer Lab, Sturm and her staff fled through the tunnels, trashing their Earth broadcasting system behind them. The links to Caltech had been safed against electronic warfare. All that was left was a low-resolution video camera and the audio link. Will recorded every second until the camera got shot out. Sturm’s body was found later. She had been struck in the base of the neck by shrapnel during the assault.

The Revere Company had evacuated, in a remarkably orderly fashion. The force sent against them had the heaviest ordinance of any of Chao’s teams, but even that was ineffective against the choppers as they rose carrying every pilot the cadets had, and Berets with their own weapons and better discipline and aim firing dancing shots just in front of the invaders. The air cover kept the enemy back for twenty minutes. The rest of the force moved out with all the supplies that they were able to pile into their trucks. Eventually, they too ran south.

The reactor was the last place of engagement for Chao’s army. Four cadets were on guard there, along with the reactor techs. The breeder fission pile, despite the missing slugs, was one of the monuments of MIT – the first to work on Tau, even without the full-scale turbine. When the warning arrived, the techs set the reactor to scram itself. They would blow the control rods inward and severe internal connections in such a way that it would take a remarkable amount of effort to repair the reactor or extract uranium without it turning into a molten pool of radioactive slag. The only power from the reactor would be a trickle from the thermoelectric blankets.

While the techs and two of the cadets made their escape, on a runabout carrying the small amount of spare uranium, the other two guarded the controls through the countdown. But by the time the control rods blew, they were surrounded. Chao’s orders had been for no survivors if anyone tried to fight to the death. And the cadets were not about to surrender.

By dawn, two-thirds of the remainder of Chao’s forces had formed a perimeter five kilometers in radius around campus. The rest were guarding the bomb, guarding Chao and his lieutenants, and patrolling the dorms. The Failures had taken over the remaining equipment of the MIT Screamers. Nominally, except to a few of the most trusted in his group, Chao was still dead. In his place, one of his lieutenants, Luke Maness, spoke to everyone at MIT, over the public address system Laura had assembled. He spoke to everyone who had escaped him and to Caltech.

“I’m not going to waste any time trying to bargain with you. You will not attempt to ‘liberate’ MIT. I have placed a fifty kiloton impulsion nuke at a position that will kill everyone on campus. I will detonate it if you try to stop us. I will detonate it if you transmit anything about negative matter to Earth and I hear about it. You can tell everyone at home that I’m doing this so that they aren’t going to die and because Andy already died for them. Will, I won’t attack the remnants of your lackeys unless they try to interfere with me. If they do … well, you can figure that one out.”

Now that he was finished conveying Chao’s message, Maness blew out the radio link. And Will could only hear the backup transmitter Delbert had installed at the White Towers.