“Do you want to fly this thing on a patched-up cone? Badly enough that we’re going to manufacture a new one.”
“Fair enough,” Fred said.
“At least they didn’t blow the ring,” Holden said. “If that one hadn’t been a dud —”
Drummer’s face went still. “About that. We were mistaken. The enemy fired a weapon with the hull and drive of a torpedo, but they rigged it with a salvage mech on the end. Ran it into your office, sliced through the exterior decking, and pulled half the wall away with them.”
Fred blinked.
“That was why they needed EVA suits,” Holden said. “I was wondering. But it seems like a pretty weird way to get to you. Peeling your office open like a sardine can.”
“They weren’t after me,” Fred said, then paused and said something obscene.
“What?” Holden said. “What is it?”
Drummer answered. Her voice had the same professional calm she’d used in the firefight. “The enemy took the wall that had Colonel Johnson’s safe. It won’t be easy getting it open, but with enough time and resources, we have to assume they will.”
“But they already compromised your command structure, right? Any sensitive information they get, they probably already had?”
Holden knew even before Fred said it, but he wanted to give the universe a chance to prove him wrong. Make it so that the worst possible thing hadn’t happened.
“They got the sample,” Fred said, making it a reality. “Whoever did this? They now have the protomolecule.”
Chapter Twenty-four: Amos
“Wouldn’t the density figure in?” Clarissa asked. Whatever crap they’d been feeding into her bloodstream, it had run out. She was starting to look a little better. He could still see the veins under her parchment-thin skin, but she was getting some color back in her cheeks.
“Sure, but that’s all energy you’d put in getting the rocks up to speed in the first place. You drop a slug of tungsten out of a ship or a fucking feather pillow, you’ve still got to get the ship going whatever speed you’re aiming for. All that price got paid at the front, energetically speaking.”
“But a pillow would have burned up before it hit ground.”
“Okay, now that’s a fair point.”
On the screen, the newsfeed showed the strikes again and again, looting footage from as many different sources as they could find – terminals, security cameras, high-orbit mapping satellites. The bolt of ionized air glowed like the trail of a rail gun, and North Africa bloomed a massive rose of fire, again and again. Another beam-like trail in the air, and the Atlantic Ocean went from a vast expanse of slate-blue water to an expanding circle of eerie green and then spewed white and black to the sky. It was like the reporters thought if they all just kept looking at it, it would start making sense.
Millions of people were dead, and millions more would be in the next few hours as the tsunamis and flooding hit. Billions would go in the next few weeks and months. The Earth had become a different planet since he’d gone underground. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could make sense of by staring at it, but he couldn’t look away either. All he could do was talk to Peaches about trivia and wait to see what came next.
The man doing the voice-over had a gentle European accent and a sense of calm that probably meant he’d sucked down a lot of pills. Or it might have been tweake
d and enhanced by the sound techs. “The weapons remained undetected by radar until they entered the Terran atmosphere, less than a second before impact.”
The image shifted to an apocalyptic satellite image: five frames in a loop showing the Atlantic impact and the raw shock wave rolling out from it across the ocean. The scale was massive.
“You see,” Amos said, pointing a thumb at the screen, “that’s how you know they were using radar-absorbing coating on the rocks. Burned off and stopped working after they hit atmo, right? Anyway, you figure it went from the ionosphere to sea level in about half a second, so that’s about two hundred klicks per. I’m making this up here, but the kind of bang they’re talking about, you could do it with a block of tungsten carbide maybe three and a half, four meters to a side. That ain’t big.”
“You can figure all that in your head?”
Amos shrugged. “My job has been playing with magnetically contained fusion reactions for a lot of years now. It’s the same kind of math, more or less. You get a feel for it.”
“I can see that,” she said. And then, “You think we’re going to die?”
“Yup.”
“Of this?”
“Maybe.”
On the screen, the newsfeed replayed a five-second clip from a sailing boat. The flash of perfectly straight lightning, the weird deforming lens of the pressure wave bending the air and light, and the image shattered. Whoever had been in the ship, they’d died before they knew what they were looking at. Probably the most common last words that day were going to be Huh, that’s weird. That or Oh shit. Amos was aware in a distant way that his gut hurt, like he’d eaten a little too much food. Probably fear or shock or something. Clarissa made a small sound in the back of her throat. Amos looked over at her.