Prometheus and the Dragon (Atlas and the Winds Book 2) (23 page)

“Where am I?” he asked again, feeling frustration building up inside him.

“You’re in the Medical Center at Sentinel,” Dani said, squeezing his hand.

“I am?” he said, turning to look around the room. It did look like a hospital room. “I’ve got to get back to work. Back to Prometheus.”

Dani shot the doctor a strange look, asking him something with her eyes. He nodded slightly. “Carter, Prometheus has been destroyed,” she said softly. “You were almost killed in the attack. You’ve been unconscious for eleven days.”

He shook his head again, refusing to accept what she was saying. “No, that’s not possible.” He tried to push himself up in the bed, but Dani set her palm in the middle of his chest and held him down.

“The Chinese attacked the guns and destroyed most of them before we got them turned back,” she said. “You got crushed under some debris and they almost couldn’t get you out.” She was blinking, holding back tears.

“I remember being face down in the dirt,” he said, fear threatening to choke him. “My legs were caught under something?”

“Yeah,” she said. “They were pinned under the framework of one of the towers.”

He tilted his head up and looked down at the bottom of the bed. Where his feet should have been, the sheets laid perfectly flat. There was no pain, but there was emptiness. He flopped his head back against the pillow, overwhelmed. Tears refused to come.

“They did all they could,” she said, crying for him.

***

Chang Er Prefecture, Tycho:

“The missile is reporting that it has gone active,” Colonel Yao Lin-Tzu reported over the com system. General Wan shook his head, sitting up in bed and flipping on the screen with a slap of his palm.

“What?” he said, her announcement cutting through his sleep-fog like a laser. “Impossible, it has a mass proximity detonator.”

“Twenty-eight seconds ago the missile armed itself,” she said. “It is in the process of finalizing the detonation cycle. It has another ...” she glanced off screen to look at her control board, “thirty-three seconds.”

“Where is it?” he said, knowing it was way too early to be armed.

“Twenty-eight days from the target,” she said.

“Override the command,” he said.

“We cannot do that, General,” Lin-Tzu said, “It will take 791 seconds for our command to reach it.”

“Is there something else nearby?” he asked. “Some other mass?”

“The American vessel is passing very close to the
Zhen-Long
missile,” she said. “Perhaps they have interfered with the arming mechanism?”

“It is programmed to go active only when it is within 3,200 kilometers of the asteroid. Then it should wait precisely sixty-five seconds so that it will be close enough ...” He stopped himself a thought coming to him. “How close did the American ship come?”

“At this range it is difficult to tell, but it appeared to be very close. Perhaps within a few hundred kilometers,” she said.

“If the ship was massive enough, it might have triggered the proximity detector,” he said. “We do not understand those ships well enough to know if there may be some kind of mass effect that is a byproduct of their engines.”

“Yes sir,” she said, glancing at the readouts in front of her. “Ten seconds.”

“Wake the Prefect and have him meet me in Control,” he said. “I will need to tell him myself that our mission has failed.”

As she reached to make the connection to the Prefect’s apartment, the transponder signal from the missile ended.

***

Space Command, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado:

General Marquez sat at the
Nimitz
, watching the main display. There was so much traffic in the near space environment that they’d pretty much given up the warning system and just monitored things. There were only a few things that held their attention. The
Eagle
, Washington DC, and the entirety of Chinese airspace.

So he was reading his email when the voice of the floor officer came over the open com channel, “We’ve just lost telemetry from the
Eagle
.”

Marquez punched into the com, “Say again?”

“The
Eagle
is no longer transmitting telemetry,” he said. “We’ve got a last known position, but there’s no transponder signal.”

“Can we get someone to bounce radar off it?” Marquez asked, running through the list of deep-space tracking dishes in his mind. All the American stations were facing the wrong way. Arecibo would still be a half hour from being able to pick it up, and the Canary Islands dish was too small.

“We’ll put it through channels,” the officer said.

“General Marquez, Joshua Lange from NASA is on video for you,” the switchboard operator interrupted.

“Put him through,” he said.

“We lost contact with the
Eagle
,” Lange said, looking worried. “The AI was giving us continuous updates and shut down without warning.”

“We’ve got no telemetry either,” Marquez said. “But we haven’t got anything that can get it on radar for another ...” he glanced at the clock on his screen, “twenty-seven minutes.”

“Roger on that. We’ve already put in the request to Arecibo,” Lange said, sounding worried.

“It’s probably a radio glitch,” Marquez offered. “We don’t know enough about the ship’s technology. Maybe they got a fart hung crossways and the com went down.”

“Don’t you have separate radio gear on the warheads?” Joshua said. “Could you activate one of the systems to confirm that its telemetry interface is still active?”

“Sure, we can do that, but it’d take the better part of a half hour to get a signal back,” the General said. “We’ll have it on radar before then.”

“Granted, but let’s do it anyway, if you don’t mind,” he said. “It’s possible we’ve got some other type of failure out there. Confirming that the payload is still intact and operational might give us a clue as to the nature of the problem. It might also alert the crew that we’re aware they’re having problems.”

“Good point,” Marquez said. “We’ll light them all up and make sure we have detonation control systems. I’ll get back to you in about thirty minutes.”

***

Houston:

Arecibo didn’t make the call. It came in from Keck on Mauna Kea. A bright flash appeared in the sky near Antu. It lasted for almost two minutes and then faded as suddenly as it had appeared. The telescope had been studying the rotation of the asteroid for NASA and didn’t actually see it. The field of view for the telescope was too narrow, but the technician manning the scope itself actually saw it with his naked eyes.

Joshua took the call, realizing instantly what had happened. Something in the cargo hold must have exploded.
One of the warheads must have gone off.
He’d been riding the emotional rollercoaster of success and failure for so long that he almost took it in stride.

He punched in the number for Space Command, and waited for the General to appear. “It’s blown up,” he said.

“What?” Marquez said, not as numb as Joshua.

“We just got a report from Hawaii. There was a visible flash in the vicinity of Antu, just about the time the
Eagle
disappeared,” he said. “One of the warheads in the hold had to have gone off.”

“Nukes don’t go off accidentally,” the General said. “It takes a lot of effort to get one to detonate.” He looked off-screen for several seconds, and Joshua could hear him tapping on a keyboard. “There’s no record of receiving a confirmation code request from any of the warheads either. None of them were armed. Perhaps it was a malfunction in the ship itself?”

“There’s nothing explosive in the ship. It’s driven purely by electricity,” Lange said, shaking his head.

“You said the explosion was visible to the naked eye?” Marquez asked.

“Yeah, the witness said the flash lasted for almost two minutes,” he said.

“None of the payload warheads could have sustained an explosion for that length of time. Thirty to forty seconds would have been the upward limit,” Marquez said.

The blood drained from Lange’s face, and he felt the room twist around him. “Then it was the Chinese missile,” he whispered, “and the
Eagle
was right on top of it when it went off.”

***

Washington:

It was 6:30, and the President was eating breakfast at her desk. In the days before Antu she would often sit and stare out the windows, watching clouds drift across the sky while she ate, but now she had the drapes pulled closed.
It‘s ok,
she thought, at least there’s a sky out there, not like the tons of rock when she’d been in Mount Weather. Her mood was buoyant, in spite of the fact she was still in hiding.

“Madam President,” Janice interrupted her breakfast, as often happened. “Joshua Lange is holding for you.”

“Put him through,” she said, swallowing hard on a mouthful of English muffin.

“Good morning Joshua,” she said, her voice cheerful.

“It’s over,” he said, his voice falling like boulders onto her mood.

“What’s over?” she asked, feeling the familiar dread return.

“Everything,” he said. “We’ve lost contact with the
Eagle
, and have to assume it’s been destroyed.”

She blinked several times, his proclamation rattling around in her mind. “What? How?” she asked.

“We think it was caught in the fireball when the
Zhen-Long
missile exploded prematurely,” he said. “The
Eagle
was probably within a thousand miles when it happened.”

Her world froze solid. Time stopped. Shock locked her down as she struggled to accept what she was hearing. This couldn’t be happening. She knew, in spite of all the losses they’d suffered, somehow they’d still pull the rabbit out of their hats. But this was it. There were no more miracles.

“How much time do we have?” she mouthed, her voice refusing to manifest.

He read her lips. “170 days, 6 hours, and 48 minutes,” he said. “Ground zero is still sixty miles off the coast of Washington.”

“Five and a half months. That’s still a long time. Isn’t there something we can do?” she asked, forcing her voice by conscious effort.

“No ma’am. The
Eagle
was our last shot. In less than another week it’ll be too close for us to deflect, and we don’t have anywhere near the firepower to blow it up. The Chinese might have been able to do it, but even as huge as their bomb was, that was still debatable.”

“Who’ve you told?” she whispered.

“So far only Marquez. And you,” he said, “but I’m sure the Chinese know about it too.”

“There’s nothing more we can do?” she asked again, pleading with God rather than expecting him to provide an answer.

She laid her head down on her desk and cried. She didn’t care if he saw her as weak. It didn’t matter anymore.

***

Beijing:

Xinhua: “The Chinese National Space Administration has announced that late this evening the
Zhen-Long
Missile detonated after what appears to be a premeditated attack by the United States warship
Eagle
. The missile was still too far from the asteroid Antu, and the asteroid itself was unaffected.

“This apparent attack has clearly threatened the safety of the entire world, however it is important to remember Antu will hit the northwestern United States. Although there will undoubtedly be global environmental effects, the most severe damage will occur within fifteen hundred kilometers of the impact.

“Citizens of the People’s Republic of China are urged to remain calm. Your government is taking immediate action to begin the relocation of populations from areas that are most likely to receive collateral damage from the impact.

“No military response has currently been authorized against the United States, however if the investigation into the destruction of the
Zhen-Long
Missile confirms it was indeed the result of an attack, this situation may change.”

***

Stormhaven:

The announcement came as no shock to Colton, but as the word spread, the community gathered spontaneously in the amphitheater, not talking, simply coming together. The Chinese announcement beat the President by almost two hours, so when she was ready to make her speech, Mica carried it live on the Stormnet. The sound system carried her voice. The crystal-film stage backdrop showed her face, deeply grooved with lines that had appeared in the last few months, her eyes red as if she had been crying.

Even the usual background noises, the birds and the animals that shared the Biome with its human inhabitants died away as she cleared her throat and began. Silence spread between them like a heavy dark sea, each separated into their own islands of understanding.