Set Up Us the Bomb

2029 August 5 13:43 UT
Test Year 2, Day 303, 21:30 MST
Tau, MIT, a 12th story crawl space

Kathryn had snuck onto campus, through the guard patrols of the Failures, while one of the choppers made a few high circles as a distraction. Then it had taken ten hours of sneaking and waiting and tricking electronic systems with a few undocumented features to reach her destination. She had climbed the outside of the building while one of the cameras replayed a sequence from a day earlier. With the geckle gear, she’d bypassed ten floors of guards with guns modified with larger magazines and automatic fire, magnesium and thermite flash grenades, laser trips, and assorted other traps. She’d taken off an access panel, moved inside, and closed it again with only ten seconds remaining before a guard scanned the area and the dummy feed to the camera ran itself out.

But now Hildenstoy was underneath the hostage bomb and Chao’s bunker, moving quietly in a narrow space between the ceiling of the room below and the roof where the bomb sat. Her vibe sensors and a radiation imager were feeding data to the mask. The bomb showed as an indistinct mass in her high-energy particle detector. She knew its detailed design: the position of the control computer and the bomb itself inside the casing. She took careful aim. From only two meters away, a bad shot might set off something. The cameras and the guards couldn’t see her here, but if someone heard the vibrations she couldn’t help making, it would be very dicey.

The gamma gun would fry the microcontroller faster than it could possibly detonate. Delbert’s flyovers had been distraction, but also a check for transmissions coming from the bomb. It wasn’t transmitting a telemetry signal on the health of the detonation circuit: that chip was just listening for the pings sent out by Chao’s control system. So no one noticed when it stopped listening. The pulse from the gamma gun went unnoticed. One of the Geiger counters ringing the bomb registered a few more hits than would be expected, but that was it. Kathryn had to risk an active radio scan to confirm that semiconductor no longer connected to the detonator wires, but they were clean.

It took another six hours to get out of the crawlspace, through the buildings, and past the guards, this time by a run through the area guarded by starved pede, and to the pickup point. But by the end of the day, Kathryn was back at the White Towers and presenting her report to the council.

“We can’t move, not yet. He no longer has the main hostage bomb, and doesn’t know it, but that doesn’t matter as long as he has the other three, especially the one beneath the courtyard. And we will only get one chance. If he tries to set off the bomb and it doesn’t go, someone will go examine it and twelve hours later we’ll be in the same situation all over again.”

“But what about the people?” The militia was not yet as disciplined as the cadets had become.

“We have to wait until exactly the right moment: take out the other three nukes without leaving an opportunity to detonate them. That means we move when we learn he is going to launch the missiles, not a moment before: shoot down the missiles and their bombs aren’t a threat. But we can’t wait much after that, because once the missiles are destroyed or reach their destination, he’ll try to trigger the hostage bomb.”

“And if he has more bombs that we don’t know about? More nerve gas? Do you trust your intel?” Marriner was fairly sure of the answers, but asked the questions to calm the audience.

“One of the bugs is in Chao’s own phone. If he’s been using it to talk to people about the transportation of the biggest weapons he’s got, do you think he would be hiding something else? Three months of surveillance say he used everything but the nukes in his takeover, and has built only the cyanide traps and the gas cylinders since then. The cyanide’s been dealt with. The Hazmat team will have to deal with the gas.”

So the monitoring continued. While they waited, the residents of the White Towers carried on with the business of daily life and prepared and practiced for the fight. They made several thousand tranq gun darts and flash grenades and conventional bullets. The choppers and ground vehicles were padded with additional armor from the wrecked cars that Chao’s people would torch and abandon whenever someone tried to escape. The field site network was extended across much of Massachusetts, so that the air force would never be too far out of range of fuel.

The militia kept on drilling under the guidance of the cadets. Hildenstoy found a site halfway across the monolith grove that approximated Chao’s hideout. She and ten Berets practiced all the possible variations of their portion of the assault, knowing that they would only be able to do this once.

Will and the rest of Caltech had promised support. They couldn’t do much from halfway around the world. In California, the dispersion of campus and its population continued: everything that might be useful and could be moved was spread across several hundred kilometers. Shielded installations in the Iron Hills and the Gell-Manns now housed fourteen hundred of seventeen hundred and forty-one Californians. But a hundred and ten of the rest were working day and night to build the California Navy.