Unknown to her, the man Preeti truly sought was actually watching her. She was regularly updating the AIs with her position when she could so Shahim had known she was coming from miles away. And now here she was. He was also dressed in a Pakistani army uniform, and also speaking either perfect Iranian or Urdu as circumstances required, so he had managed to blend in with the soldiers as they arrived to defend the base. Now he stood with his back to the small lantern that his guard troop was using while manning the inner perimeter not far from the checkpoint. Silhouetted against the lamp, he watched Agent Preeti head to the bunkers and smiled. While the satellites still roamed overhead, he could do nothing. But thanks to him there was now a yawning gap in those satellites and it was fast approaching.
He felt the AI’s call to the Council just as she did. He knew that the gap in the satellites’ coverage was now over the Indian subcontinent and coming his way. The AIs could not hope to get Pei Leong Lam online from China so it must have good reason to be calling a Council meeting when it could not get quorum. Shahim hoped he knew the reason, he knew it should be happening any time now.
He watched as Agent Parikh stepped off the path from the checkpoint and discreetly looked up. She angled her face slightly westward toward where she knew the nearest satellite was even now heading for the horizon. Shahim would not look up to join her in Council. He had no answer to the questions they wanted to ask him, and no intention of making some up. But he listened in on the meeting as he had earlier when the first satellite had been destroyed. Soon the others would join as well.
He saw immediately that it had indeed begun. The AI conveyed images to the Council without emotion as the eyes of its three remaining satellites tracked the launch of two hundred missiles from each of the GBMD sites in Florida and Hawaii. While the remaining Council members argued over the source of this new attack, the AI prepared to begin destroying the projectiles using the multipurpose laser systems on each of its three satellites. But as this went on, Shahim noticed Agent John Hunt go silent and his avatar become perfectly still. Hello, this is going to be interesting, thought Shahim as a new set of alarms went off in the meeting. There was a third launch cluster being detected, this time in the western Pacific. The satellites were tracking forty-six objects in the new launch, but they all seemed to be coming from the HMS
Dauntless
.
“Wait,” said Agent Lana, “the HMS
Dauntless
? Isn’t that your ship, Hunt?” she stared at him, the extent of his betrayal sinking in. Well, no point maintaining pretenses anymore, thought John and Shahim in unison.
As the three banks of missiles drove up through the atmosphere to intercept the orbits of the remaining satellites, John’s avatar smiled. He then raised his virtual middle fingers in a very human gesture at Lana and allowed himself a long, hearty laugh before vanishing from the meeting, disconnecting from the Council for the last time.
Shahim, meanwhile, started to walk toward the Agent standing off the road, walking around behind her and deploying his weapons array. She sensed a person approaching but assumed it was simply another guard and so she disconnected her laser link with the satellite, which was rapidly disappearing over the horizon anyway, and closed her array. She was still in shock over the fact that they were under attack again. Without much thought she turned toward the approaching steps, thinking more about the satellites than the man she could hear coming.
Sorry Preeti, thought Shahim as his hands powered toward her head. Time slowed as he focused on the attack, his systems readied and braced. He had been here before, he thought, but before he had been the one caught off guard. His systems blithely factored in every mistake he had made into his tactical options, and also John’s errors. John had waited a fraction of a second too long, allowing his hope that he might avoid the fight to delay his attack for the millisecond it had taken Shahim to register that there was, in fact, something wrong.
Shahim displayed no such hesitance.
He let Preeti turn into the blow, but no more. It began the instant his systems said it was time. His left hand came up hard and fast at her face, his first and index fingers pointed, his right hand coming up on the other side to grasp the back of her head and hold it in place. By the time she registered an attack, his fingers were microseconds from impact. Her view flashed an alarmist red as tactical came online, but already his thumb was driving into her eye, stabbing with vital force and precision.
Her hands came up to grab at his forearm as his thumb penetrated her eye socket. Shahim pushed inward with all his strength, focusing all his might on crushing the weapons array and grinding it backward, fighting to crack the lobe behind it and get at the substrate and neural cortices that lay in her skull.
As her hands focused on pushing outward against his left arm, Preeti’s right foot came up and over at lightning speed, gathering centrifugal momentum as it went, her high kick connecting with his head like a cannonball. He flinched away, tucking his head down as he saw the blow coming, then felt it resonate through his skull like a struck bell.
He could feel her eye orb breaking, as could she. She bent, shifting her weight and bringing both legs up, hoping to get one between them for leverage. He saw it coming and mirrored the action. For a nanosecond they seemed to hang in midair as their legs all lifted as one, then they were falling, exquisitely slowly, their tactical systems darting and twisting in response to each other as minute, seemingly inconsequential twitches rippled across their bodies. All the while Shahim continued to drive his fingers into her brain, and she fought to gain some purchase against him.
When they hit the ground, they became a writhing mass that seemed to leap this way and that as one limb or another fired outward in their battle, hers ever more frantic, his focused beyond measure. An attempt to lock her foot in between his arms, a parried blow from his sonic punch to deflect her; each sent them skittering in the dust or thumped them both upward to spin and twist in midair.
When he could, Shahim was sending focused sonic needles at her right ear, pounding at the drums there, racking her audio systems and the connected accelerometers that fed her onboard attitude indicators. It would not fool her tactical systems completely, but it gave him microsecond windows when he was working off more accurate information than his opponent.
She knew it too, she knew he was gaining a greater and greater advantage every moment, and she knew her skull would not withstand the punishment much longer. Every time they impacted the ground, she knew her lobe might shatter under the megaton per inch pressure Shahim was still exerting against it.
As alarms continued to blare in her head, she stopped trying to pry his hands free and let her fists go, landing terrific blows even as her options faded. He felt his body register the damage as she pounded his torso and even tried to punch his head with her powerful fists, but he could feel her skull cracking now. It would be over any moment.
He stopped trying to block her feet and fists and instead brought his legs up now to wrap them around her head and neck as well, adding their weight to the pressure his fingers were exerting.
Armed guards were finally converging on them, as if in slow motion, shouting at him and raising their guns. What was he doing? Why was he attacking the general’s daughter? Shahim was tired of all the violence but knew he had to stop them. Even as Preeti still wrenched her powerful body this way and that, he set his deployed laser to wide burn flash.
Keeping the setting low so the effect wouldn’t be permanent, he fired four flashes in quick succession, turning his head as he did so. In the ensuing confusion, the blinded soldiers clawed at their singed eyes. Preeti registered the flashes, she had not hoped for much help from the soldiers, but it had been a small probability option flashing in her tactical list. It went out. There were not many options left, she thought.
And then were none, as the rupture she had feared finally happened and Shahim’s thumb finally penetrated to the infinitely softer substrate within her head. He drove it inward, grinding his thumb around in her skull to crush her synthetic brain.
As her systems started to shut down one by one, she gave in. Her machine consciousness was fazing in and out, shuddering as parts of her mind were torn from her. Deeper within her brain, her personality overlay sent a simple message through her small onboard subspace tweeter to leap the small distance between her and Shahim.
“Why, Lord Mantil, why?”
The Agent did not reply. He might want to try and convert her, as he had been converted, but in the thick of the base’s defenses, he’d had neither the luxury of a prolonged debate nor the prolonged battle it would have taken to subdue her without destroying her.
She went stiff. Her mind no longer registered. It was done. As he pulled his thumb from her eye socket, and pried her rigid dead fingers from his arm, he silently considered her question. I asked the same thing, he thought, as he rolled the now stiff, defunct body of Agent Parikh off him and stood up.
He did not ponder it too long. There was much still to do. Hefting her up and over his shoulder, he set off into the night at a fast run. He had to bury the machine that had been his colleague out of sight of the many prying eyes now converging on the site of their bitter little battle, then he had to go and fight another.
The AIs worked with speed and precision, a thousand stimuli driving smooth calculated reaction. They tracked the approach vectors of each of the missile barrages rising into their paths, determining risk potentials and reaction parameters. With this open declaration of war, their gloves came off and instantaneous programming kicked in. Without emotion or regret, they moved forward with standard response protocols, no longer hindered by the whims and bickering of the politically charged Council.
Their goals were no longer of espionage and subversion. Now their mission was one of oppression and disarmament. Inside the three satellites’ hulls, vast generators churned, yielding massive swarms of power that thrummed into the satellites’ laser systems. Extending the laser mechanisms from their casings, the satellites turned on their own axes, aiming themselves bodily at the incoming missiles.
They selected their targets dispassionately, taking them out in order of approach. While they started picking them off they continuously calculated the chances of destruction and weighed them against other responses. Inside their plated shells they initiated preparation for the launch of the viral pathogens: warming, filling, and prepping the cluster modules and then loading them into their atmospheric entry pods. They had not completed their analysis of the human antigen, and they now surmised correctly that the missile attacks had probably been prompted by the fact that they had discovered the antigen and were planning to counter it.
* * *
On the planet’s surface, Agent Lana Wilson had no intention of continuing business as usual either. If these humans wanted war, she would give it to them. She had been stationed at the Atlantic Fleet Submarine Base in King’s Bay, Georgia for months now and many people had come to know and like her. She had befriended them and worked her way into their trust. They thought they knew her.
But a wholly different beast walked onto the base today, and she gave but cursory salutations to the people who greeted her as she headed to the main Z Berth building. The Z Berths were a long set of large sheds that abutted the heavily guarded harbor waters of the naval base. The long flat buildings were in fact armor plated and frequently patrolled. They were staunchly guarded because they housed the US Atlantic Submarine Fleet, the greatest concentration of nuclear weaponry on earth. In order to keep their movements secret, the big sheds had no approach above water; no surface ship could enter them or see into them. Great doors both above and below the water’s surface guarded the sheds’ entrances, and they only ever opened at night, allowing blackened hulls to slip unseen to and from the great berths.
As Lana walked up to the buildings, she saw a group of people staring mutely at the southern sky. Hundreds of miles to the south lay one of the GBMD launch sites that the conspiracy had chosen to fire from. The whole country, indeed the whole world, was abuzz with the news that a massive barrage of missiles was heading into space. But even more amazing to the billions of people watching was that the missiles were even now starting to detonate in mid-flight. The massive cloud of fire rising into the sky was being steadily whittled down. She smiled. Pesky humans and their pathetic weapons. Even now, even when it was clear that they had discovered the satellites in orbit, they still did not have the courage to launch their nuclear missiles at them. GBMD indeed. Nothing but a bunch of kinetic warheads and tactical oxidizing weapons. That may have been enough to destroy the first satellite, but only because the satellite in question had not been allowed to defend itself.
Well, humans, now you get to see what our satellites are really capable of. Now you will see what happens when we bare
our
claws, you impudent fools. And now that you have shown us your true colors, there is no way I am going to carry on lurking in the shadows. New game, new rules. When this attack fails and you eventually get around to launching your nuclear weapons at my satellites, I intend to see to it that you have several less of them left.
As she approached the Z Berth sheds, she felt a surge of disdain for the personnel who were staring at the missile barrage soaring into the sky. She smiled. Enjoy the show, you plebeians, things are about to heat up.
Inside the huge shed, she walked along one of the long concrete jetties that ran between the behemoth Ohio class submarines. As she did so, she continued to review the data being sent to her by the satellites. It was mostly good news, but not all of it. The missiles fired by the GBMD were being destroyed easily, and every calculation showed that they would all be disabled long before any got within effective weapons distance of the satellites they were targeted at. Good, she thought. But something was different about the missiles coming up from the
Dauntless
. They were proving more resistant than they should be, and the AI was unsure of whether they would all be taken out before they impacted their target.