Endgame

2029 September 12 10:12
Test Year 2, Day 329, 14:00 CST – 23:00 MST
Tau, MIT, Launch Site

At the control hut for the launch site, five hundred meters from the silos, two of Chao’s most trusted aides entered the missiles’ launch codes into their computer. Fifty kilometers away, Chao confirmed by entering his own code. The missiles went on internal control, and all that Chao and the site crew could see were the telemetry streams coming via buried antenna and cable and the clock that showed the countdown.

Six kilometers further to the west, Elmund and Xin crouched at the table in their bunker, with their own computers and controls. A shield wall was between them and the pulsers. The stray radiation that would come when they were fired was not pleasant. The millimeter sensors could see through the camouflage cover and site on the silos without trouble. They waited.

The missiles had gone automatic with forty seconds left in the countdown. In the control hut, the two lieutenants smiled at each other with the conviction that they’d saved the Earth from its own people. One member of the support staff, who had been listening to Marriner’s broadcasts very secretly, edged towards the override panel. He planned to destroy the missiles once they were safely downrange and well before they could reach California. But at twenty-five seconds left, Chao clicked another button on his remote control panel and the hundred kilograms of plastique that lined the hut detonated.

Simultaneously, a total of ten tons of chemical explosives exploded in a rough ring around the launch site. They had been hidden in support posts of the fences, in apparently abandoned crates and supply vehicles, in simulated dead trees and piles of rocks. There wasn’t much smoke, at least at first, but the blasts ignited many fires.

Gera and Zijun had just enough time to see their detectors’ display saturate and then turn to static as the electronics burned out. Then the first shock waves reached them.

Tau, MIT, Greene Building, one hour earlier

Chao was paranoid enough to spend most of his time surrounded by counter-snipers, in a fortified set of windowless rooms that he’d had built on the roof of the building housing the hostage bomb, just west of the old offices of Gravitation and Cosmology, which were now a prison nursery housing the captive children and wet nurses. No one could get within fifty meters of Chao without authorization; no Beret sniper could have gotten line of sight and put a bullet into him without first being hit by the guards. Chao was not going to trust anything to Maness and the decoy headquarters halfway across campus. But he still did not know the last three items Hildenstoy had requested.

She set up on top of the Greene Building, having snuck past the Failure guards for a day and a night to get there. Delbert had had the second chopper fly over the campus at intervals, out of surface-to-air range, to keep recon balloons from going up. Chao had had dinner brought to him and was alone inside his bunker: he was watching the missile countdown on his computer, the trigger for the hostage bomb in front of him.

There were six counter-snipers, one at each corner of the roof and one on each of the buildings to either side, and two guards with home-built automatics at the door to Chao’s bunker, all eleven hundred meters away. They did not see her, and knew that no one could have shot a bullet that distance with Tau-made cartridges. Intelligence placed one more guard inside the bunker itself, four guards and the traps in the top floor, and some less skilled and trusted partisans in the lower levels.

Kathryn had her head-up display on, showing the view in infrared. There were hot dazzler plates across the roof, but Chao didn’t have the electrical power to blanket it to body temperature. She took two pistols from her back and two silencer-sized attachments from pockets and screwed them into place. She put the guns on the mounts she took from her pack – these were of Tau manufacture. She set them on the lip of the roof and flipped a switch. Now she had two remote gun mounts that covered the entire roof of the building, except for the area just behind the bunker. The feed from the sighting cameras went along an Ethernet drop, one of the two dozen private network connections she had hidden around campus in the early days.

An hour and much sneaking later, Kathryn was at the closest connection point to the bunker: inside, two floors down, hidden behind a wall and using radio-silenced touchpad controls. She focused the sights on the guns of two of the snipers, the ones on the buildings to each side. Then she pressed the override that would simulate a power fluctuation and the backups to Chao’s sensors taking a few seconds to adjust, and pushed the trigger. There was no sound. The Examiners had given her pistols that fired UV laser beams, twenty shots per capacitor charge. The attachments were focusers to contract the beam on targets a particular distance away. The snipers’ rifles were blasted out of their hands by the concussive effect as the barrels were flash-melted.

With her very fast reflexes, she realigned the lasers and fired again, and again, and one more time for the guards at the doors, the last two on manual. This all took twelve tenths of a second. At one and half seconds, she’d unplugged from the remotes and started to move. By two seconds, the ten Black Berets had sighted and fired with their tranq guns, each from a hidden geckel-supported perch less than two hundred meters away from their targets. At seven seconds, the last outdoor guard fell and the Berets were ‘running’ up the sides of the building from their hiding places with all speed, or had gotten inside and were starting to take down the remaining guards on the upper level without triggering the traps.

Twelve seconds after she’d fired the first shot; Kathryn was on the roof, following a shaped charged explosive through a previously welded door in the stairwell. By now, Chao would have figured out that the building was under attack. Four Berets would be two minutes behind her, while the others cleared the building. Twenty seconds saw a much larger charge go off as the reinforced door to the bunker blew. At twenty-two seconds, a flash grenade blinded Chao and his last guard. By twenty-four seconds, the guard was sprawled on the floor, hands burned by his gun blasting from his grip, side stinging where his explosive pack had been disabled, and a geckle pad anchored one of Kathryn’s boots both to the back of his neck and the floor. Twenty-five seconds: Kathryn pointed her last laser gun, with seventeen lethal shots left in the clip, at Chao’s head. He’d tried to hide next to the inside of the doorframe of the room, but her sensors told her where he was and he had not been fast enough as she shot the pistol from his left hand. His right held a dead-man switch, and a monitor patch on his chest would send a signal to the second bomb if his heart stopped.

“By order of Cadet Captain Adam Delbert, I place you under arrest.” Kathryn did not allow herself any expression. In her head she was cursing not bringing a tranq pistol herself. They could have made one more, even with the darts in such short supply.

“Go to hell.” Chao spoke with the mania of the successful tyrant. “See that counter.” He waved his free hand in the general direction of the computer display; his eyes were still not clear from the flash. The counter reached zero as the missiles fired up fifty kilometers away. “That means you’ve failed. Epic Fail!” He laughed. “There goes Caltech and Chamer and his groupies, and maybe if you walk away I won’t let this one go too. In fact, you walk away and take Delbert’s goons and leave me a helicopter with a smart autopilot, and a couple of people bound and gagged in the back as insurance, maybe I’ll let you live. Will your exhibitionism for the Examiners let you do that?” He waved the deadman in Hildenstoy’s face.

Tau, Six Kilometers West of Missile Launch Site

The shock waves from the ground-clearing explosions took fifteen seconds to clear from over the launch site. At this point, the covers to the silos opened and the missiles started to warm their engines. It lacked ten seconds to launch.

At the antimissile site, the blasts had shattered the first set of walls, blown the roof to pieces, and smashed the computer controls for the pulse units. Gera’s head had been close to a focal point for the sound. His ear drums had ruptured even though he was still conscious. His left leg had been impaled by a piece of a table leg. Zijun had protected his head with his arms, which were now sliced and bleeding. He could see bone protruding from his left hand.

They did not scream for help, even though the background noise would no longer overwhelm their voices. There was no time. Zijun supported Gera, and they managed to hobble and struggle through the rubble to the pulsers. It took an eternity: a third of a minute. At launch minus five seconds, Gera held the first gamma gun, aiming by hand directly at one of the silo entrances. He pressed the button as he saw plumes of smoke start to climb from the silos. The two slugs of uranium smashed together in a contained and sub-critical reaction. The first missile’s computer and warhead were massively irradiated. The bomb didn’t detonate, but the fouling of the liquid fuel line caused the missile to first fall, then to burn as hydrogen and oxygen started to recombine.

The second missile made it to a height of about two hundred meters before Zijun could drag Gera over and he tilted up the pulser and pressed the button. Now they both started to feel the heat from the metal of the pulsers after they went off. The radiation dose wasn’t going to matter. He saw that this missile had been the decoy – no warhead fell as it detonated. Just one more.

Elmund got to the last pulser, only for the other oligarch to collapse under him as he lifted it. He landed on his back, the pulser facing almost upright, as the last missile reached an altitude of about two kilometers, aligned to fly above almost directly above him. It’s coming this way. He tilted the pulser slightly. He waited just under a second, feeling the burns on his hands and side and the break in his leg and the blood dribbling from his ears. Then he pressed the button.

The missile exploded, a bright orange splotch in the night sky. Gera spotted a single large orange speck falling – the warhead, not detonated and ideally not breached. He twisted his head over and discovered a new pain in his right shoulder blade. But he saw that although Zijun’s eyes were closed the other oligarch still breathed. “We did it. Thank you, Xin.” Gera couldn’t hear, but he could see, and he saw the other’s hand press the transmit button for his radio and his lips move briefly, followed by a smile and tears leaking from his eyelids.

Gera became aware that he himself was weeping. And he thought Thanks for giving me spatial perception, but next time find something less uncomfortable, hey? There was no answer from the Examiners, but he hadn’t expected any. His eyes closed.

Tau, MIT, Adam Delbert’s Squad
Ten Seconds Before Missile Launch

Five Failure guards had been rendered unconscious and the best of the militia guarded the hospital staff that were being held prisoner. The last nuke was buried beneath two meters of dirt and sidewalk and explosive. They only had a rough idea of the bomb’s orientation. They knew where the controls were, but not well enough to use a gamma pulse, which would have been attenuated in any case. So the team brought out the shock hammers.

The triggers and the surrounding explosive were all C4. C4 detonates with an electrical spark, or a combination of extreme pressure and heat. The hammers would only be inflicting pressure. Three hemispherical shell charges went off, and three steel rods were blasted straight through the masonry, followed by sprays of liquid nitrogen to prevent pressure heating of any explosive exposed at the base of hole. Now they fired the pulser and it fried out the bomb.

Now Delbert broke radio silence and called to the other squads. “Second hostage nuke disabled. Status.”

“Sarin isolated and neutralized. Maness in custody.” Cadet Corporal van Allen had led the last of the Berets and a militia squad in an assault on Chao’s public face.

“Novichok secure.” Marriner had taken up arms for the first time, and his squad had shielded the gas canisters behind quick set foam.

The militia helicopter drop teams sent to the nursery and the reactor checked in clear as well.

A weak, pained voice, with Chinese inflection. “Missiles disabled. All personnel down.” Xin went quiet.

Kathryn did not immediately respond.

Tau, MIT, Andrew Chao’s Bunker

Behind him, the monitor slowing the progress of Chao’s missiles suddenly cut to an error message: loss of thrust, loss of altitude, loss of contact. First one, then the second, then the last missile had been shot down. And now Kathryn smiled, straight into the face of the Failure. “Take a little look at your missiles now, Andy, if you can see the numbers.”

Still holding the switch in a clenched fist, aimed at the other like a wand, Chao turned and squinted at the screen through the fading blotches. He turned back, screaming: “Then you burn with me!” and threw the switch at Hildenstoy’s face. She didn’t bother trying to catch it: she ducked and moved inward as far as she could while maintaining her hold on the fallen guard’s neck. As the metal clattered against the outside of the hostage bomb’s case, followed by Chao’s suddenly fearing eyes, she put the business end of the laser gun against his forehead.

“It’s over. On your knees. Hands behind your head.”

His eyes turned towards her. A muscle worked in his jaw. He started to kneel, then began to spasm and foam dribbled from his mouth. Kathryn smelled an odor of almonds and Page’s Folly. In eighty-five seconds the Beret squad medic arrived. But Chao was dead.