Stormhaven Rising (Atlas and the Winds Book 1) (56 page)

“I just concluded a meeting with Prime Minister Tashahari,” Kuromori said. “I assure you, we are willing to bear the cost, should this become necessary.” His eyes met Herman’s without a sign of hesitation.

Ice reached out from the screen and gripped the Secretary’s heart. Kuromori wasn’t bluffing.

***

Camp Kryptonite:

The video records of the patrol jet’s demise were distorted for several seconds before the jet came apart, and through the first half-second of the explosion itself. “Can anyone tell me what the hell’s wrong with that camera?” Marquez said.

“Absolutely nothing General,” Schimmel said. “The other camera recorded the exact same thing.” He switched the feed from one camera to the next, and they watched the sequence of events again from a different angle. The jet completed its turn, and then the image blurred as it inexplicably slowed and exploded.

“What causes the image to degrade like that?” Marquez said in frustration. He needed to clearly see the details of the incident.

“It’s on all of our super-high resolution images of their flying vehicles too,” the agent said. “It’s some kind of interference that results from their engines. We’ve got no clue why it happens, but since we can’t tell how their technology works anyway, we’ve got nothing to even start with.”

“Is it some kind of thermal effect?” Marquez asked.

“No sir,” Schimmel said. “We’ve got no heat correlation. It’s like light’s just not behaving correctly. The photons themselves don’t seem to be moving in straight lines.”

“Only gravity can do that to light,” Marquez said. “I doubt they’ve figured out a way ...” He trailed off.

“Excuse me, General,” the pilot from the destroyed jet stepped into the room. “I was told to report here for debriefing.”

“Thank you Lieutenant,” the General pointed at a seat across from his desk. “I’m glad to see you’re ok. I only have a couple questions for you.”

“No problem, sir,” she said, setting her helmet down on the floor beside the chair and sitting stiffly.

“First off, I want you to understand that although we’ll have to go through the usual formal inquiry, I do not believe the loss of the F-35 was your responsibility. Looking over the video, I think it’s pretty obvious that you were attacked.”

“I was?” she said, relief spreading across her features. “I was going to bet on mechanical failure.”

“It probably was, but I’m suspicious that it was induced by some type of energy weapon,” he said. “Did you notice anything strange about what happened immediately before your jet exploded?” he asked.

“Yes sir,” she said. “I started losing power. The instruments all indicated that everything was on the beam, but even when I increased thrust, I continued to lose airspeed. I pushed up to the afterburner limit and the pressure increased, so I know the thrust picked up.”

“This is going to sound strange, but did you feel like you were accelerating even though you were losing speed?” Marquez asked, glancing over at Shapiro like he was getting to some special secret.

“How do you mean that, sir?” the pilot asked. “I wasn’t accelerating. I was about to get out and start pushing on the wing.”

“Did it feel like the engine was kicking you in the butt?” he asked, pushing for a point. “Did you feel the G-forces like you would have if the jet had been performing correctly?”

She tilted her head to the side, considering his question, confused. “You know, it did feel like I was running up. Several G maybe."

“That’s all I need to know for now. You’re dismissed Lieutenant,” Marquez said.

“Thank you sir,” she said, snapping off a clean salute and heading for the door.

“I bet I know what their weapon is, and if so, you’re right. They really might be light-years ahead of us. We’ve still got to get the job done somehow, even if our best hope might be to simply overwhelm their defenses by sheer magnitude.”

“General Marquez,” a voice hollered through the wall. “Secretary Herman needs to speak to you immediately, sir. He says it’s critical.”

“Fricking thin walls,” the General said. “Video or audio?”

“Vidlink sir,” the voice said.

“What the hell’s going on out there?” Secretary Herman said even before his face appeared on the screen. “You’re about to start a war.”

“No sir,” Marquez said. “Right now it’s just a shoving match, but if they keep ramping up, the situation might get a bit messy.”

“Not with them,” the Secretary said, “with Japan. I’ve got Kuromori threatening to obliterate the US economy if you don’t back off.”

“Excuse me Mr. Secretary,” the General said. “I need to remind you that this is an open line. No communications into, or out of, the operations area are considered secure. Please be careful with what you’re saying.”

“I don’t care General,” Herman said. “You’ve got to stop what you’re doing.”

“Please understand, Secretary Herman,” Marquez said. “I’m under direct order of the President to bring this situation to an end. Respectfully sir, I must tell you that I do not take my orders from you.”

“Listen to me, if you attack Stormhaven you’re going to get us into a war with Japan,” the Secretary said, his expression pleading. “I’m certain this isn’t what President Hutton expected.”

“I’ve given Colton Taylor seventy-two hours to surrender,” he said. “I’m confident he’ll back down before it comes to that.”

“He doesn’t back down,” Secretary Herman said.

“He will this time,” Marquez said. “Now if you’ll excuse me Mr. Secretary, I need to get back to work."

***

Washington:

The White House had been closed to the public since Secretary Anderson raised the threat level. As a result, some of the rooms on the ground floor were once again safe for Presidential use. Sylvia had spent some time wandering through those places that she’d only used for ceremonial functions before. When an intern came running into the Map Room, she was startled.

“Madam President,” the young girl said, skidding to a stop just inside the door. “Secretary Herman needs to speak to you. He says you’ve got to stop General Marquez."

“I can’t do that,” she said. “Please tell him I have no intention of stopping the operation.”

“Ma’am,” the aide said. “Please speak to him. He thought you might not want to pull the plug, so he told me to tell you if you don’t, Prime Minister Tashahari is about to take Japan into war.”

“What?” she said. “Get me a hand-link and I’ll talk to him.”

The woman held out an epad, handing it to the President and backing out of the room. John’s face was already displayed on the screen.

“What the hell’s going on?” she asked. “War?”

“Kuromori promised an economic war,” the Secretary said. “I’ve got no doubt he meant it. We’re not talking about a trivial action either. If we let Marquez attack Stormhaven, they’ll call in trillions of dollars in outstanding debt and cut off all economic ties.”

“It’s not their business,” she said. “And how did he find out anyway?”

“I’ve got to assume it’s because there are Japanese citizens inside Stormhaven, but I don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter. The problem is that they’ll do it.”

“They’ve got no right to interfere in America’s internal affairs,” she said, her anger building.

“No, but they do have the right to protect their citizens, even on foreign soil,” John said. “If Marquez goes ahead with this assault, it’ll guarantee that the UN will vote for the Japanese motion to deploy the UN Peacekeepers.”

“We can veto that,” she said.

“And look like the old Soviet Empire? Or China?” he said. “Sure, we could, but if Japan is willing to risk cutting off trade, how long will it be before the EU does the same thing? We’ve already got the ESA on our asses, and they might join Japan if they think they can do it.”

“The economic cost would be immense,” she said, knowing that he might be right in spite of any logical argument she might have. “That’d be insane.”

“I could argue that chancing it might be just as irrational,” he said. “We’ve got to consider that they’d have each other to lean on. We’d be standing alone.”

“I see your point,” she said. “Let me think about it. I’ve still got time to call him off.”

“Kuromori told me Marquez had given them three days, but he made it sound like Japan was ready to start this pissing contest right now.” John said. “If he doesn’t see results, we’re not going to get the courtesy of a warning next time."

***

Chang Er Prefecture, Tycho:

It had been an interesting shift. Almost amusing in fact. Yao Lin-Tzu had known that one of their medium-range landers had been pulled off of regular duty and outfitted with special gear. Even though she hadn’t been told what it was for, she could tell what it was going to be doing.

A spy mission. The only possible target of interest on the lunar surface was the Americans.

She was a good officer, so she kept her mouth closed and her eyes on the ship as it lifted off the pad and shot off due north. She double-checked the heading. The LRS was north-northwest but it was definitely heading straight north.

She called up a map and looked at the possible destinations. Nothing of interest lay in that direction, but she reminded herself, nothing of real interest lay anywhere on the moon. There were exactly three places where there was something worth examining: the two Chinese facilities, and the American outpost. She watched it on her radar arcing low over the hilly terrain in a flat trajectory, wondering what they were after. When it dropped over the horizon she switched to the LaGrange Tracking and Communications Platform and kept an eye on it from there.

After twenty minutes it adjusted its heading to skim eastward. She thought about the strangeness of that maneuver for a minute until she realized that it was staying below the horizon from the perspective of the American base.
Where was it heading?

A few minutes later she got her answer as it hooked abruptly back to the west and nearly stopped over the edge of Plato. That’s where things got interesting.

The Communications Platform bounced a signal down to her console informing her that someone was trying to open a channel to the lander. Whoever it was, undoubtedly wasn’t happy.

After several minutes of polite attempts to talk with the lander, she listened as the woman let loose with a string of colorful expletives that, even with Lin-Tzu’s excellent command of English, left her looking up definitions on their translation program. Fortunately she’d been recording the transmission, otherwise she’d have missed a lot of the rapid-fire swearing. She never passed up a chance to increase her understanding of English, even if it was only some of the coarser uses of the language.

Without warning, a torrent of readings poured in from the lander. She hadn’t been informed that she’d be relaying anything, so she was surprised when Gigabytes of data streamed through her station. She skimmed over the sensor readings, recognizing some of the information was a gas-chromatographic reading, and another section looked like Magnetic Resonance Imaging. She also picked out a radar topographic display that precisely located what it was that they were studying.

In the center of the map she saw what appeared to be a large metallic object. It was the size of a small building but resembled a short train. She knew that the Americans had a huge rover that they’d been planning to launch, but if that was what this was,
what were they looking for out in the middle of nowhere?

Watching the lander begin to head back, retracing its original trajectory, she zipped the file and forwarded it to the Base Commander, her head full of questions that she knew would be answered only if they decided she needed to know.

***

Stormhaven:

“Jesus Christ, Colton,” Viki almost shouted at him in frustration. “Would you pull your head out of your ass, and look around at what’s going on out there?” She swung her arm toward the window. “They’re about to blow us into another reality, and you’re in denial."

“I’m afraid she might be right,” Tom said. He was standing beside Cole as he watched the jets swinging around the outside of their fence line. They were farther away, but there were more of them. “All we did was poke a stick into the hornet’s nest. Now they’re going to come at us ready for a fight.”

“Yeah, the jet was a mistake,” Cole said. His voice felt dead in his throat and his heart had settled through the floor. His eyes followed a group of infantrymen down on the field that had been the stage from where they’d launched the
Dancing Star
only four weeks ago. The realization that so little time had passed surprised him. It felt like a lifetime ago. There were now soldiers walking around in their front yard recovering the debris from the Lightning. Fortunately, the pilot had lived, or it would be a lot worse already.

“Cole, I know you’re not ready to give up,” she said, turning him to face her by grabbing his arm. “If you don’t start negotiating, they’re really going to come in with that artillery."