Doomsday Warrior 14 - American Death Orbit (3 page)

“Now as I was saying, before being so rudely interrupted,” Wilcox went on, taking advantage of the momentary lull in the noise. “As far as I can see, we can sum up the two main factions that I sense exist here tonight in Council Chambers as follows—those who believe that with the recent nuke bombing of Ice Mountain, and the destruction of so much of its underground power conduits, that all energies should be put into resurrecting and rebuilding as many of our facilities as possible—and getting our factories which produce the Liberator Rifle Series back into full swing so that we may continue to arm the other Freefighting cities—”

Screams of
Yahoo!
and
Right On!

“Versus—” he went on quickly, running his hand over his nearly bald head that had but a few random strands of dark black hair, greased straight across the scalp as if painted on. “Those who feel that defense comes first. That when threats exist to our survival, all other efforts must be stopped and that threat responded to immediately. Is that at least a fair representation of the situation?” Wilcox asked the crowd.

As soon as he had done it, he knew it was a big mistake. For a hundred voices spoke up at once, each objecting to what Wilcox was saying as not including their own special interests.

“If I could,” Rock said without raising his voice. The place quieted down. The Doomsday Warrior was not someone you really thought of trying to shout above. They all let their pounding hearts calm a touch as they listened to his slow and carefully spoken words.

“Now I know I’m usually identified with the military faction of the Council—the hawks as it were, always trying to get more dough for our endless missions out there. And most of the time just what the hell it is we’re doing out there is not all that clear to you back here breaking your backs to make the weapons, the medicines, to grow the food that supports us. And before I go on, I just want to say, that for all the fighting men of C.C. we are aware of and appreciate your efforts. And I mean that sincerely. But tonight in all honesty, after what Dr. Pedersen here showed me earlier, I feel I must speak out with urgency that this effort be funded. I don’t even know how the hell we can do anything about this monstrous weapon in the sky but—”

“Rock, I don’t even know if everyone knows the full situation,” Wilcox said. “The debate began before all the facts had been reported. Dr. Shecter—”

Rock looked down to his right, not having noticed the sudden arrival of the head of the entire science section of Century City, the genius behind their hidden city. C.C. had been little more than a backward cave before he took over the R&D of the place nearly forty years earlier. After that it had been one discovery after another. If there was still a Nobel Prize, which there wasn’t, Shecter would have won several by now.

“Thank you Council President Wilcox,” Shecter began slowly, as he leaned his tall thin figure forward in the chair at the end of the table, gazing out over a blur of faces. “I’m honored to be here tonight to address this meeting of the—” Many of the crowd groaned audibly. The good doctor, as much as he was appreciated by all, had a way of going on far too long in a backwoodsy way that either made you love him or infuriated you no end. But tonight anyway, Shecter got to the good stuff fast.

“Rock is right. The Wheel, which many of you have thus far only heard rumors of, is a danger greater than even he realizes.” Shecter turned around dramatically, pulled a laser-light transmitter from his sleeve and aimed behind himself. He focused it on the stage curtain. A large schematic diagram suddenly fell down from the rafters above where lights and ropes and whatnot were placed.

The audience as well as the Council member looked on wide-eyed. On the huge ten-by twenty-foot piece of stretched synth-canvas was the depiction of the wheel that Rock had just seen. Only it was sectioned out in grids, broken down to the smallest detail. And it looked absolutely filled with firepower, like a porcupine with too many quills. The thing bristled with high tech antennas, domes, barrels, firing tubes . . .

“It’s as mean as it looks,” Shecter went on, as he rose on the bionic legs—his own invention—that had been grafted onto him—the real ones taken out by an artillery shell nearly a year and a half earlier. His slightly bouncing gait as the pneumatic legs rose slightly on their computerized shock absorbers was hardly noticed. He walked the few yards to the hanging diagram and pointed up at it with a sear-light beam that clearly illuminated a six-inch spot of blue light that was clear to all in the chamber.

“This wheel is the most powerful war weapon ever devised by the sick mind of man,” Shecter said, shaking his head with both awe and disgust. “The laser emplacement here,” he pointed with the blue beam, “consists of a dozen batteries with a dozen tubes each. They’re powered to be able to send out billions of solar units in a concentrated beam with an accuracy of nano-inches. And that’s from twenty thousand miles up, mind you.
Here,
is the Particle beam armory, consisting of nearly a hundred units, each capable of firing spits of pure black energy—ten a second—indefinitely. Any one of those streams of antimatter could take out the side of a mountain, e.g., the one that sits above us as we talk.” Heads turned and looked upward. It was hard not to, the unfinished ceiling was nothing but twisted granite. A billion tons of it must have rested right above their shoulders.

“And here,” he went on, “is the atomic missile systems. We’ve counted a hundred and fifty launching tubes, but we have reason to believe these chambers are refillable and that more lie in storage below. Are you all starting to get the picture?” Shecter asked the crowd, moving on with his light beam before any of them could answer. He had the dramatic center and he wasn’t about to relinquish it to anyone. “The Wheel when completed will be five miles in diameter. It can maneuver in space going up and down in orbit, or can geo-synchronize so it’s resting right above one spot and can direct a withering concentration of firepower into a few square miles.”

“Pardon me, Dr. Shecter,” Rockson spoke up as the science boss stepped back. “The thing I saw in the telescope was only half-constructed. What is this diagram of exactly?”

“You’re absolutely right, Rock,” Shecter went on. “This is not the actual Wheel that’s up there. This is the schematic for it. The way it should—and
will
look—when completed. At the rate they’re building the damn thing, it won’t be all that long.”

“But
who
is it?” a man yelled out from the crowd, unable to contain his curiosity.

“Yes,
who?”
Shecter replied, banging one fist into the palm of his other hand. “We can’t figure that one out. Our scope doesn’t get a high enough resolution to identify the markings on the sides of the ships. We’re trying computer imaging—but so far, no go. The technology necessary to be carrying all this out, and the scientific know-how of those involved, I find almost impossible to believe. I wouldn’t have thought there were that many people on the whole planet capable of comprehending the advanced astrophysics, space docking, all that. I can’t imagine who it is. We know President Zhabnov is too stupid, as are his scientists, who spend their time making better food processors and radioactive particle filters for their air conditioners.”

The citizens of the city hooted derisively. The slovenliness and lazy cowardice of the occupying forces was legendary.

“And Premier Vassily back in the Kremlin is too ill and has his hands full of too many other problems to, we believe, be able to finance this whole venture. It’s the not knowing that makes it worse in a way. There’s no way of accurately assessing the danger.”

“Killov,” Rockson said almost in a whisper.

“What was that?” Shecter shouted across the table.

“Col. Killov, I feel it in my bones,” Rock said, addressing them all. “I thought he was dead. I was the man who saw him disappear inside a volcano that exploded. But I must have been wrong—somehow I feel his dark presence in all this. Can see those fingers turning that blasted wheel up there.”

“No man could survive the explosion of the New Mount Fuji volcano, Rock,” Shecter said. “The temperatures in there reach that of melting steel. Even the Skull couldn’t have survived, God rest his filthy soul,” Shecter said, crossing himself like one would for a vampire. He had encountered the KGB colonel only once, and it had affected him like no other event in his life. He prayed the little drug-crazed murderer was dead. He had to be dead.

“Well, ultimately it’s irrelevant who’s doing it,” Council President Wilcox said, taking back the speaker’s role as he saw that the science boss was basically done. “Just that it’s being done. We know it’s none of the Free cities. We would have been contacted. Besides, aside from Eisenhowerville, we’re the most technologically advanced city in the entire country. And we can’t come close to carrying out whatever the hell’s going on up there. Whoever it is, we must assume, until it’s proven otherwise, that they are a threat to us, are our enemies. And I believe, as President of this chamber, it is my profound duty to inform all of you that I believe this is the greatest threat that Century City has ever faced. For there is no defense against such a thing. And once it’s fully functioning, they will very possibly be able to pick up our infrared signals—heat that the city gives up no matter how well we try to disguise it—and target us. It could all be over in the wink of an eye.”

The debate was long and loud even after the show and tell presentation and Shecter’s, as well as Wilcox’s and Rockson’s, strong advocacy of meeting the threat. Times were hard in C.C. People were tired of sleeping on hard beds, eating refried hydroponic beans over and over, filling the subterranean world with scents beyond compare. Tired of living in rags half the time, of having no chance of rest, of cessation of their endless battle. But, in the end, they knew what the vote had to be. If they were just cinders smoking on the ground it would hardly matter what any of them believed.

The vote was 175 to 24 with a single abstention. To fund whatever response the combined scientific and military authorities found appropriate. And to do so
post haste.

Four

“W
ell, we’ve got the commitment for Council funds and man hours,” Dr. Shecter said, addressing six of his top scientists, Rath the Intel chief, and Rockson. They sat around a magnesium-synth table in Shecter’s conference office on one of the lower levels. “Now, I have my own ideas on the subject—but I want you, each of you specialists in your own fields, to give Rock and me the benefit of your opinions. Thatcher, you first. You’ve been in charge of compiling info on all possible existing missile and other space systems still existent in the U.S.”

“If any,”
Rawlings of R&D added in a skeptical whisper.

Rock, too, found it hard to believe, even with the evidence, that men were carrying out such high tech missions in space. But above all things Rockson was a realist, and he would throw any theory of his, no matter how sacred a cow, right out the cavern window when he saw that there was a better way to explain the facts.

Thatcher stated, “Sir, we have located what we believe are six still functioning missile launch sites—and I use those words in the theoretical sense, since much of our info is based on hearsay, captured cannibals, or mountain bandits. Plus, of course, the various tapes and books we’ve recovered from the ruins of several bombed out missile complexes. Four of these places are missile sites themselves, equipped with up to two or three projectiles each. It’s possible that some of these missiles are of the E Class—space missiles made in the last days to be fired right up into the exosphere. Antisatellite missiles. Unmanned of course.”

“And the other two sites?” Rock asked, leaning back in his seat to relax his sore muscles from the judo workout he’d taken with Rona that afternoon. The woman was
tough.

“We believe that there’s a space shuttle rusting in a Colorado Springs Air Force hangar. And the NASA Dynasoar Satellite Killer Space Jet in a hardened protected bunker in southern Montana. Only one was ever built—but it was supposedly the real thing. Big. Spelled D-Y-N-A-S-O-A-R. And by that I mean it made the space shuttle look like a Model T! They learned enough from the disastrous shuttle program to do it right the next time around.

“The thing is, they only got one built before the war put an end to any more of that kind of research. The Dynasoar is state-of-the-art, it is missile- and laser-equipped, supposed to be able to take off on some kind of hidden rail system. Go up halfway to the moon if needs be, and take out anything the Reds had put up there. You might call it the first real Interplanetary Warship. Something out of Buck Rogers, if I can use the analogy.”

Thatcher stopped and looked around the table encountering quite disbelieving eyes.

“Oh, it’s all in our file system, if any of you want to check,” the head of Information Systems said with a thin smile. He had encountered skepticism before in his findings. He didn’t take it personally anymore.

“All right,” Shecter said, directing the meeting firmly as he was used to doing. “What about you Skarvis? You’re the big space artillery man. Anything in that area?”

“As far as land-based weapons like magnetic beams, tractor beams, the sound tubes—all the junk they were experimenting with way back when—no, we haven’t found any real evidence of any working systems. There have been rumors of stuff far out west in the Glowers’ territory, but none of it is mapped to date. If there’s any real chance, I’d say it’s with one of the two ships Thatcher was talking about.”

“Rath, you’re chief of Intel,” Shecter said, taking out his pipe and lightning up the familiar cherry-synth tobacco, actually processed from hydroponically grown lettuce leaves which had been genetically altered to taste like the tobacco of the old world.
Something
like it anyway. “What’s the good word? Are the Reds doing this? Or is it one of our own goddamned Free Cities—in that goddamned Dynosoar What-cha-ma-callit!”

“I don’t think its the Reds,” Rath said, leaning both elbows forward and getting a thoughtful look on his thin face. “You know me, I’m considered one of the most anti-Red people, always screaming that they’re responsible for every earthquake and megacane. But in all honesty, I don’t think it’s them. Not regular Red Army or Air Force anyway. We would have picked something up on the airwaves or from our agents in the occupied cities. That big an operation couldn’t be kept quiet down here on Earth. It’s as if someone had just shown up from some planet in outer space, and is doing their thing. As far as what that thing is—we’re as much in the dark as anyone. Obviously, the weapons systems on the Wheel speak for themselves. And don’t bode well for any of us.”