The room was hesitant, the risks of either scenario being equally profound. But Agent Lana spoke up, “This is too much, first the incident in India, then the discovery of the antigen in the human’s blood. Now we have lost contact with one of our own and are faced with this thinly veiled attack.
“Enough of this. It is clear to me that they must know we are here. I do not know how, but there are simply too many signs that they do. In light of that fact I move that we release the virus immediately. Even with the antigen in some of the humans it should still take a significant toll on them, and we can release the updated pathogen when it is ready in a few days and finish the job.”
The room was even more shocked by this blatant overreaction than it had been by the news the AI had delivered. The conversation was, as always, being conducted at machine speed, so even if they discussed their options for what seemed like several minutes, it would still only use a few seconds of the time left before the satellite entered the kill zone.
But as much as Lana may have finally seen through the counter conspiracy, her colleagues were not so keen to admit that they had been discovered by the humans. The debate went on. Without support for her more drastic response, Lana decided to at least second the AI’s motion that it be allowed to defend itself. Even if the room was not with her in her suspicions of the humans’ awareness, surely they were not ready to sacrifice one of their satellites to the increasingly unlikely position that their arrival on Earth remained a secret.
She was, in the end, very persuasive, and the room voted eventually to allow the satellite to defend itself. Except one. As the room came to what it thought was a consensus, Agent John Hunt’s avatar waited placidly, biding his time.
The room looked at John’s avatar. He waited a moment longer, debating whether he should even maintain the pretence any longer, but he needed his cover for a few hours more, however thin it was about to come.
“Umm, no. My vote is definitely no. We have four satellites and only one chance at success at our mission here on Earth. I believe the satellite should not defend itself.”
The room was stunned and Lana responded immediately, “Agent John Hunt, this is not acceptable. The rest of the Council has voted that the satellite destroy the missiles before they detonate. That is six to one. Who do you think you are to vote against the will of rest of the Council?”
John considered this point a moment, a smug smile spreading across his avatar’s lips as he replied, “Well, I guess that’s the problem with consensus votes, isn’t it Princess Lamati? You need to get
all
of the votes to move forward. You ask who am I to vote against the rest of the Council, well I’m the one person you don’t have any influence over, Princess. The one person who doesn’t care what you think. And in votes where unanimity is required that means I am the man who decides that this isn’t worth the risk. Let the satellite die, I do not intend to bring about the failure of this mission so that you can have one more pretty little satellite in orbit.”
The group stared at him, Lana with fierce anger, and several of their colleagues glanced at her to see what she would do. For John’s part, he held her stare with equanimity. Though they were miles apart both of them knew that she had figured it out, that she knew who was behind their building troubles. She looked at her nemesis and she fumed.
“Traitor!” she screamed, but he only smiled in return. She had nothing. She couldn’t prove a thing. Not yet. And by the time she did have the proof she would need to override him, it would hopefully be too late for all four of the satellites. Though Shahim wasn’t here, he had clearly succeeded, and if all else went to plan, the world might soon have a temporary reprieve from the machinations of the Mobiliei.
“You did this.” Lana said with infinite venom, “You … you … Nomadi
scum
. You did this. You were never one of us, just as your pathetic tribe had never been one with the great Empires of Mobilius.” She stared at him but he replied only with quiet complacence. Realizing there was no way he was going to be baited into a response, she turned to her colleagues. “Can you not see? Is it not obvious? This trader scum never had any intentions of supporting our claim to Earth. He has conspired against us from the start. He probably had Shahim killed in Pakistan somehow and then he initiated the attack on the satellite.” She stared wildly from person to person and some of the faces even began to show signs of acquiescence.
Sensing that she might sway the room before he had time to complete the last of his plan, John spoke up, feigning anger and incredulity at Lana’s comments, “Enough, Lamati! Your hateful prejudices against my people are well known, as is your vaunted pride and the disdain you have openly showed for the other nations represented in this room.” He noted with satisfaction as his comments hit home, several of the other Agents’ anger turning back on Lana as she festered and boiled with rage.
“Silence, scum!” she shouted in return, “I will not stand for that tone from the likes of you.”
“And so we see it.” sneered John in reply, “So the truth comes out. You have always thought you were better than us, haven’t you, Princess? You’ve never thought of us as true equals. Well, shout all you want, your precious title means nothing here and it’s time you started respecting us for what we are … your equals.
The princess’s face flamed red and started to twitch as her personality raged at the limits of their virtual conference. She wanted to tear into her opponent. To rip out his eyes. To pound her foot into his balls until they were crushed to a pulp. Images reeled through her mind, her machine brain feeding her scenarios like a pusher in response to her rabid lust for vengeance. She was silent a moment as she reveled in the perfectly rendered image of smashing his accursed skull under foot and jumping up and down on its mangled remains until they were but a red smear across the world.
But such violent acts were not within the parameters of the virtual construct they were meeting in, so as her avatar tried to interpret and relay the ultra-violence she craved, her body seemed to convulse and spasm in its place. The rest of the room recoiled from the spectacle.
While this confrontation boiled impotently, the AI remained aloof. It was not part of any emotional contest. With infinite patience and calm it awaited any further resolution from the Council while maintaining its vigil on the progress of the munitions heading toward one of its own. Though the argument raged on, the vote was over and the AI was not interested in or capable of mourning the impending loss of a quarter of its very self. Instead it focused on what preparations it could make for the now inevitable amputation. It attempted to back up some measure of the swathes of data stored in the doomed hub; the behemoth hammers of its huge subspace tweeters thundering across the subspace void with exabytes and zettabytes of data, like the drums of the satellite’s death knell.
In front of the orbiting satellite’s path, the six missiles hove up into range from the south as the thirty-two flaming fires of the Russian Gorgon missiles came in from the north, coming together like the hands of a giant, to collide in the most thunderous clap the world had ever felt.
As the final seconds ticked down, the Agents fell silent and watched the images coming from the satellite in disbelief. Lana’s avatar was suddenly mute and unmoving. Its emotions essentially disconnected from the conference, leaving the remaining Agents to watch in silence.
John smiled inside himself. Well done, Shahim, he thought, you have proven yourself beyond any possible doubt. You have given these people a chance, and may have saved more innocent souls than we can imagine.
Many miles below, deep in a bunker in the smoldering army base in Peshawar, the Agent once known as Shahim Al Khazar lay, dressed in the uniform of a dead Pakistani soldier, waiting, unmoving, as the Pakistani army arrived and began to clean up the destruction he had wrought. So many dead, he thought.
Though Shahim was not talking to the satellites himself, he was still receiving the images they were broadcasting to the other Agents. He had seen John vote against allowing the satellite to defend itself, and even now he watched as the orbiting platform soared inextricably into the trap they had set. In a moment, he hoped, the world would reap some small reward for the death he had brought to this unsuspecting place.
Lana and John’s avatars locked eyes one last time. She looked like she was still contemplating attacking him and John wished it was that easy, he would love nothing more than to fight her. To rip her limb from limb. But they were, in reality, thousands of miles apart. She would have to wait, she thought.
But she knew that if another attack on the satellites came she would not have to rely on his sullied vote. No one would believe that this could happen twice by accident, and once the satellites were allowed to defend themselves, the humans’ pathetic arsenal would be crushed. Either way, she would win in the end. And when the Armada arrived she would upload this copy of her personality via the chain of relays they were laying in their path to the real Princess Lamati back on Mobilius. Then she would find and fucking eradicate the traitorous bastard John Hunt: his real self, his family, his name, and anything he had ever held dear.
She smiled at the other Agent’s avatar and John shuddered at the site. Oh, go ahead and plot away, you bitch, make your plans. You’ll get yours soon enough, he thought.
When the two converging groups of missiles were half a mile and a quarter of a second apart, the Russian interceptors decided with computer precision that the time was at hand, and thirty-two kinetic warheads simultaneously detonated, firing an unholy storm of tiny titanium needles forward into the path of the Pakistani missiles. Like grenades lobbed by a god, the massive munitions exploded and created a hurricane of destruction designed to consume and eradicate the oncoming missiles … and anything else unfortunate enough to get in their way.
The satellite’s systems registered the blast, documented every impact in the thousandth of a second before its shielding started to fragment, noted as it was flayed, nano-second by nano-second, its huge internal systems disintegrating and vanishing as the kinetic cyclone eviscerated it, until its very core was penetrated and the giant subspace hammer, magnificent even as it was delicate, sublimed in the combustive tempest.
* * *
From Earth’s surface, the explosion could clearly be seen as a wall of white fire in the sky that spread quickly south into the path of the six missiles. Under orders from US STRATCOM, the nuclear submarine USS
Achilles
had broken protocol and surfaced while on station in the Black Sea, pointing its phenomenally acute SLBM guidance systems skyward to watch the explosion.
While the captain of the ship believed he was there to make sure that all six HATF missiles were destroyed, he was actually there to capture proof of something vastly more clandestine. As the admiral and his coconspirators had predicted, the images of the kinetic storm showed an object amidst the destruction. Something very big and very black that was clearly caught in the cross fire. An object that had not shown on any radar before that moment.
As the object was consumed by the furious cloud, along with the six HATF-VI missiles, the USS
Achilles
sent the series of images, per their orders, directly to the Pentagon, without comment.
Four of the Agents that had been attending the virtual Council meeting had been connected to rest of the group via the now destroyed satellite. Back in the virtual meeting room of the Council, those four Agents’ images suddenly vanished. The Council was left with three disquieted members. Pei Leong-Lam, Lana Wilson, and John Hunt stared at each other in silence. The AI spoke without emotion.
For the key players in the events unfolding across the globe, the next five hours were very strange. For the time being, they stood in something like a calm between storms, the sunny pupil of the hurricane’s angry eye. The conspirators had to wait for all their systems to be brought online, their approvals confirmed by the now all-too-aware president. Then the three remaining satellites had to be allowed to complete another circumnavigation until they were in place.
The first part of the plan had relied on surprise and subterfuge. The unshielded Russian missiles would not have been able to penetrate the defensive lasers of the satellite if it had been allowed to defend itself. But no amount of subterfuge and misdirection would make the remaining satellites sit idly by when they were launched upon. As the next phase of the plan could not rely on surprise, it would rely instead on overwhelming force. And in order for it to work, it needed to be executed at precisely the right moment. That moment was five long hours after the first satellite had been brought down.
For the US joint chiefs, it was a time of impatience. The White House Situation Room was, by the admiral’s recommendation and then the president’s order, on lockdown. No one could be allowed to leave who knew the full scope of what was about to happen. The admiral had now fully briefed them on the situation. A briefing that had been starkly reinforced by the shadow of the huge satellite in the images from the USS
Achilles
.
For some present it had been nothing more than a strange phenomenon at best, but the team’s earlier meeting with the president and his chief of staff had planted the seed they had required. The admiral had watched both men as the images had come back from the Black Sea. The satellite was there, exactly as the admiral and his colleagues had said it would be. Its existence could no longer be argued, and according to the supporting evidence of the admiral and his team, it was not alone.