Directive 51 (55 page)

Inside the steel sphere, resting on dozens of steel legs, there was a second sphere of thin plastic; no Daybreak biotes had penetrated because the outer sphere had no openings. The space between the two spheres was about a half meter, and in that space were 131 pure fusion devices, each identical to the device that had been destroyed in Air Force Two, and that had detonated inside
Mad Caprice
, weeks before. They were just about a meter apart, from center to center, and each one talked to its six nearest neighbors via a laser relay; the messages they sent each other were simply comparing their clocks, keeping each of them synchronized to the tenth of a nanosecond, such a small interval of time that each bomb, in its quiet every-second calculation, had to measure and compensate for the travel time of the light from all its neighbors a meter away.

Inside the thin plastic sphere was about 220 tons of lithium deuteride, the basic fuel for the H-bomb.

The programmed moment arrived. The sphere of 131 small fusion bombs—each only a twentieth of a kiloton—detonated, so nearly simultaneously that if anyone had been able to observe the gamma rays from each bomb, they would have been seen to meet at the centers of all the equilateral triangles between the bombs.

Radiation exerts pressure; the gamma rays from the fusion, moving at the speed of light, squeezed the lithium deuteride sphere to the density at the core of the sun. Arriving an instant later, the relativistic protons—hydrogen nuclei moving at close to the speed of light—held the immense ball of fusion fuel together, and compressed it even further.

Meanwhile, the protons that had not gone into the fusible mass collided with the tungsten-thorium foil, releasing a shower of hard X-rays, which further compressed the lithium deuteride at its center.

Technically, the material was now so compressed that it was no longer lithium deuteride but a dense soup of lithium and deuterium nuclei, pushed into each other by the terrible force; in a microsecond, a small fraction of the most-compressed fused into beryllium and released enormous energy; the ball of nuclei was further heated by that energy, yet held together by the incoming radiation. The added heat caused more fusion, releasing more heat and bringing on still more fusion.

An instant later, less than the time it would take for light to reach your eyes from a stoplight a mile away, the balance changed; the outward force from the fusion-heating of the sphere was greater than the inward force from the radiation.

The energy released.

The 250-megaton blast scooped out a crater 350 feet deep and nearly four miles across. The fireball was almost twenty-five miles across, and extended into the stratosphere in the first millisecond. President Norcross, his Cabinet, the Congress, the Supreme Court, and every living thing in the city had no time even to sense that anything was amiss; a signal could not cross a single synapse in their brains before they just ceased to be. Washington’s vaporized remains boiled upward so violently that when the cloud of plasma cooled enough for molecules to form again,much of it fell as glassy artificial meteors ranging in size from peaches to BBs, the farthest-flying ones landing in Iceland. The immense ground shock wave in the melted rock created concentric ridges every hundred yards or so for ten miles beyond the crater rim.

The heat radiated by the fireball was effectively far greater than that in a familiar fission-triggered bomb, because the fireball lasted much longer; it charred skin 100 miles away, and set dry treetops on fire as far as 150. The most remote fires it triggered, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in office towers in Richmond, and on some east-facing hillsides in Charles-ton, West Virginia, burned uncontrolled. Weeks after Daybreak, almost nothing and no one was left to fight them; fires spread across that whole vast area.

Blast effects were less than they might have been with an old-school H-Bomb of the same megatonnage, but still, the blast wave toppled office buildings at twenty miles and knocked down houses at sixty.

Every pure fusion weapon is innately a neutron bomb, creating deadly levels of fast neutrons at distances where people under cover can survive the flash and blast—sixty miles away, anyone sheltered from the terrible burning light and the flying rubble received a payment-due from Death, to be collected at leisure after days or weeks of diarrhea, vomiting, hemorrhage, and lesions.

The bomb that burst in a Chicago warehouse at the same moment did many of the same things; the famous skyline was gone. A four-story-high wall of boiling water rolled north on Lake Michigan, and over the next three hours the towns on the shore drowned, and the big wave still had energy enough to cause flooding around Huron and Superior as well. Immediate deaths were fewer, for the great fires in Chicago and Milwaukee had emptied those cities; most of those vaporized, buried, burned, and irradiated were already corpses. Still, the immense plume of neutron-bathed water, silicon, nitrogen, and carbon rained down across the northeastern United States, fell into the ocean even a hundred miles out, and commingled with the ashes of Washington on the Atlantic floor, and for the first few days, it was intensely radioactive, and many humans and many more creatures, especially the mammals and birds, received the dose that would kill them in the coming weeks.

On October 31st, as the world slipped into chaos, a ship had anchored in the North Sea, four long, strong cables securing it to the bottom, at a point carefully located with the GPS systems that were still working at the time, on a line between London and Antwerp. Now, in the early hours of the evening, the black sphere in the abandoned ship detonated; the mass of water it vaporized and converted into a superheated shock wave was about one-quarter the volume of Lake Erie.

London, Dover, Lille, Calais, and the cities of the southern Netherlands burst into widespread flames, great conflagrations that were to burn on for days. Some fires, where particularly flammable objects were facing the fireball, broke out as far away as York, Amsterdam, and Paris, and the mighty artificial tsunami from the blast topped and breached dikes all along the Dutch coast and carried mountains of debris into all the channels of the Rhine; in that instant every chart became obsolete, and for decades the river would be finding new courses.

Because the bomb had detonated in seawater, across the next forty-eight hours, deadly radiosodium and tritium fell in dust-gray salty snow as far east as Moscow. Europe had been freezing, starving, and disintegrating before; radiation poisoning killed millions, and before the spring, millions more, their immune systems weakened by the radiation, died of tuberculosis, cholera, typhus, flu, plague, and every old returning enemy of humanity.

The bomb in Jerusalem took most of the inhabited parts of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, and southern Syria. Detonated on land, like the Chicago bomb but with even less water, it caused a rain of radioactive tektites, some falling as far away as India; in centuries to come, the Monist faith would declare those bits of glass, in which the only remaining relics of several peoples and of shrines sacred to three great faiths were intermingled eternally, to be sacred. There were more than enough so that, no matter how big the Monist Confession grew to be, all Monists could have as many sacred tektites as they wanted.

Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hangzhou formed an equilateral triangle; at the center, the fifth great explosion worked its same monstrous results.

Though it was one of the Earth’s largest cities, with a huge population to feed and care for, the combination of discipline and cooperation, plus the sizable fishing fleet and better-than-average food reserves, had been working in Shanghai, and while there was misery enough for everyone, there had been relatively few deaths, and the civil order, if far from perfect, was functioning. In the last ten days, emissaries from Shanghai had been out to negotiate with the smaller cities that could be reached on foot or on the new oiled-linen-tire bicycles that one entrepreneur had created. Boats had begun to go south along the coast to the other commercial cities, and there had been talk of a Next China, of which Shanghai would be the leading city.

That was over in the blast and flame that smashed the western side of the city and set much of it on fire. The Shanghai city government staggered on for most of a week until deaths from neutron-induced radiation poisoning finally brought everything to a halt; the fires that had been almost controlled by hand pumping and bucket brigades broke out anew, and finished the city off in the next few days.

In Buenos Aires, perhaps the assemblers had been less careful, or the biotes had been luckier. The sixth black sphere had been breached, the enclosing plastic sphere had turned to slime, and the lithium deuteride lay in a heap in its bottom, asymmetric with respect to the nanoswarm-encrusted sphere of 131 pure fusion charges. Less than twenty of them fired. They vaporized the lithium deuteride, fused a very small bit of it, and mostly just scattered it around, creating a dense cloud of poisonous, corrosive gas that drifted into the harbor and out into the great mouth of the Rio Plata, where it killed so many fish that the sea wind stank all that following summer. The blast itself, not much more than a kiloton, leveled ten city blocks around the harbor, killed over two thousand people, broke countless windows, and scared the hell out of everyone, but by morning the next day, as news trickled in from the rest of the world, Argentines thought of themselves as the luckiest people on Earth.

Graham had insistently told her, after the funeral, that he was rising at 5:30 most mornings and it would be all right to knock on his door at any time after 5:45, especially if she needed company. Heather had awakened at 5:35, having slept for almost twelve hours, unable to go back to sleep, lonely, and sad. Annoyed at herself, she had knocked on Graham’s door.

He’d welcomed her in to eggs, toast, and bacon, and had to be talked out of using up his last reserve of instant coffee. Instead, after cups of hot chicory milk, he’d put the kettle on and made tea to put in sip-cups (hers with powdered milk and brown sugar, the way she liked it). “You and I are going for a walk.”

If there is any form of recreation that an Army base usually offers, it is room for people to walk long distances. The day was dawning slow and gray, the sun unable to fight through the thick cover to find the color in the grassy hills; it would only grudgingly brush the pines. They walked in silence, Graham clearly just letting her decide whether there would be conversation or not.

“I guess I’m being dumb about this,” she said.

“Are you saying that because you really think that, or because you feel you’re expected to say it?”

“I guess because I feel I’m expected to say it. I was only with the guy, really, for about a month, but it feels like he was the love of my life.”

“Maybe he was. I haven’t heard there’s a time limit or a legal waiting period on that.”

“Yeah.”

“Love does weird things that don’t always fit in with our self-interest. That was one reason why I told students I’d advise them about everything else, but never their love lives.”

“Probably sensible of you.”

“Or cold-hearted. Take your pick.”

From the crest of the ridge, the evergreen forest in front of them was shrouded in fog; beyond, the few lights in the dark and still town dimly illuminated long tendrils of rising woodsmoke. A distant creak-and-squeak told them the cable-car rig was beginning to run for the day. It was dark from the overcast, and when distant lightning flashed, Heather said, “Maybe we should head back; that looks like it could storm.” They turned and headed back the way they had come. After a couple of minutes, she said, “It might be a while before I know what to do with myself.”

“If you don’t have any use for yourself, your country does,” Weisbrod pointed out, “and eventually you—what’s that?”

Heather knew the way a native Angeleno does. “Earthquake.” There was a second shock moments later. “I didn’t know we even had those around here.”

“I don’t know,” Graham said, “maybe the New Madrid Fault? That’s actually supposed to be the biggest one in the country but it’s up in Missouri or Tennessee, I remember, so if we’re feeling that here, St. Louis must be rubble. We’d better hurry back.”

The lecture hall was packed to the walls. Senior personnel like Heather and Arnie were wedged in uncomfortably down front; Sherry and the other “gofers-general,” as Allie had dubbed them, were jammed shoulder to shoulder up in the back rows.

Not at all like his usual entrance, in which he’d stop to talk with or encourage a few people along the way, Cam strode in swiftly, surrounded by uniforms, straight to the podium.

He nodded at Graham and gestured for him to come down and join him.

The room had fallen terribly silent.

“I must begin by confirming some very bad news,” Cam began. “About an hour and a half ago, nuclear weapons of unprecedented power destroyed Washington, DC, and Chicago. Spectrographic data and some airborne sampling have now confirmed that these were pure fusion devices, as first identified by Jim Browder, who many of you knew as a friend and colleague.

“I am making inquiries into the possible location of anyone in the chain of succession who may have been outside Washington, but I do not think it is likely that I will find anyone; all evidence is that the President and the entire line of succession, except for Dr. Weisbrod, have perished in the attack.”

Heather sat stunned;
maybe I’ve cried so much lately that I don’t have any more in me now.
Around her, she could hear small gasps and sobs.

“Satellite photos, seismographs, and other reconnaissance,” Cameron added, “show similar detonations have occurred in the North Sea, near Shanghai, and in Israel. A so-far unverified military shortwave message, purporting to be from the Argentine Navy, claims that there was an abortive attack on Buenos Aires as well, but it sounds as if either the bomb fizzled or it was a different type of weapon.