She ordered the satellite to stop protecting itself and redirect its laser to take out the gun placements around her. If it was doomed, at least it could save her. But it was not taking orders from Council members any more. Its protocols were set. Now that the humans clearly knew that the satellites were there, it had a new mission protocol and Lana saw the view from above as it initiated the viral deployment. As the upper atmosphere over Florida, Hawaii, and Singapore burned with the explosive fury of the approaching missile barrages, the satellites were already firing tiny missile pods out to their left and right, sowing the seeds of viral death onto the humans below.
Fucking machine, Princess Lamati thought, not noticing the irony, and she looked at her tactical options once more. As another set of high-power rounds hit her back, she crouched into the fetal position and protected her face. Her metal ribs were cracking, her skull was dented in two places, her left shoulder had been hit by three bullets at once and it was dislocated. She was dying.
But her hatred for the filthy race she had been sent to exterminate gave her options no sane person would have considered. OK, you little fuckers, she thought. You think you have me? You think I am down? Well, ask yourselves this: what, exactly, do you think I was doing at the base in the first place? And with that she reached out with her internal subspace tweeter and found the two tiny disks she had planted inside the Ohio Class submarines behind her.
Why don’t we see … how you like … this, she thought, and she sent the kill code.
To the Navy Seals arranged around her, the dull thuds of the initial explosions could not be heard above the barrage of fire they were laying into the seemingly indestructible woman on the ground. But those seismic rumbles were but a precursor. Each disk had each been placed inside of one of the submarines’ many massive ballistic missiles. When their white heat encountered the chemical fuel stored in the missiles’ engines, it triggered an exponential chain reaction. The fire ripped through the reinforced steel plating of the huge ships like paper, engulfing their hulls in less than a second and igniting the remaining twenty-three missiles’ chemical boosters on each submarine as it went. From overhead, the huge shed suddenly ballooned at two points, the roof expanding outward even as it was absorbed by the two expanding balls of fire coming from the submarines’ missile tubes.
Sixty years of perfecting missile design meant that not one of the nuclear warheads on board actually went thermonuclear, but the sheer volume of explosive material on each submarine created a blast radius over three hundred meters wide. This solid wall of flame washed outward from the submarines like a wave of death, covering the area around the sheds in a matter of seconds. The team that had been firing on Agent Lana Wilson was instantly baked at a thousand degrees as the fire engulfed them.
Within two more seconds, two thousand men and women in the surrounding buildings were dead.
And in the middle of the hellish cyclone, the Agent lay, curled in a ball, her skin flayed from her body, the midnight black of her core exposed to the nightmare. She remained crouched for a moment as the shockwave passed, protecting her relatively fragile eyes from the blast.
All her touch sensors had been built into the fake skin that had coated her and so she watched the scene using the satellite’s doomed eyes. She saw the explosion clearly from space as the shockwave washed outward. No doubt they would report that one of the submarines had suffered an accident. Either way, the combined nuclear material from two nuclear submarines would soon irradiate all of Georgia and northern Florida before it started its path northward.
In its last few moments, the AI informed Agent Lana Wilson that by deliberately setting off nuclear weapons she had violated the mission parameters. It was a pointless accusation, but the AI did not understand such things. Even as it counted down to its own destruction, and that of its two remaining cohorts, it still diligently logged and categorized the information in a database that would be obliterated within moments.
The final missiles closed in, and at the last moment the surviving rockets detonated. As if in response to the huge fireball that Lana had set off, the upper atmosphere answered with three silent but massive explosive clusters around the globe, each consuming the last of the Mobiliei’s satellites.
Lana lay alone. The silent aftermath of the submarine eruptions matched by the eerie silence of the now extinguished satellites’ data feeds. Her view from space was gone. She felt the loss of their vast databanks and aerial weaponry like the loss of a parent and mourned.
Carefully she uncovered one eye. Her calculations told her that the initial blast should be washing upward now, creating a small mushroom cloud above her. With her eye’s sensors reporting that the fire had dissipated, she stood and surveyed the scene. The black of her body matched the charred remnants of the base. A huge steam cloud rose from where the shed and its two wards had been, but bar that the base was flattened for about a quarter of a mile. An eerie silence lay over everything, matched by the deafness of her collapsed eardrums.
A lone black figure in a circle of obliteration, she stood. Hairless, skin burned off, deaf and lame she alone had survived the blast. She stepped forward gingerly, balancing her good leg against her broken limb, and she felt vulnerable for the first time in her life.
She needed to get away from here. They would be coming with everything they had and she could not survive that again. Soon they would be evacuating Jacksonville and the surrounding area and she needed to get out before they set up radiation checkpoints.
Limping away, she came to the edge of the blast radius and found the first of the explosion’s survivors. The man was moaning and crawling away, as if to escape his own charred, mangled legs. She ignored his cries for help and limped onward until she spotted a Humvee. The base was slowly responding, variously running toward the disaster or away from the aftermath, depending on how much they understood about the radioactive cloud that was even now bathing them all with certain death. Jumping into the Hummer, she ignored the lack of keys and tried to use the sheathed wires in her finger to start the vehicle, but like so many of her systems, it was unresponsive. She accessed her memory banks and quickly retrieved information on how to boost a car.
A minute later she was driving away from the base at speed, running down anyone who got in her way. Her machine mind estimated that she was going to need approximately three weeks to reconstruct the systems that the attack had destroyed. Princess Lamati had never had to run from anything in her life. But now she needed to hide. She needed to repair and regroup. And then she needed to decide how best to punish the humans for what they had done.
The large Situation Room under the White House echoed with cheers. Gone were the doubts of the past hours. Gone was the skepticism of the last few nonbelievers. Neal and Barrett shook hands. Neal was laughing. They had done it. Barrett looked him in the eye.
“Enjoy it, Neal. It’s our first victory. We can relax for a bit. We are safe … for now.”
Neal’s smile faded a little but remained strong, his eyes becoming pensive at his friend’s proviso. He nodded slightly, repeating his coconspirator’s words, “For now.” Then after glancing around the room, Neal asked in a quiet voice, “Any news of Jack and Martin?”
The colonel shook his head almost imperceptibly and took a sip from his glass of water, his eyes telling Neal to leave the subject alone. Barrett noticed something across the room and Neal picked up on his sudden consternation and followed his stare. Admiral Hamilton was talking on one of the room’s many secure phones and he looked deeply concerned. Neal and Barrett glanced at each other and then turned as one to make their way over and see what was happening.
Halfway across the room, they were intercepted by an excited Jim Hacker, all smiles and pats on the back.
“Gentlemen,” he said, stopping them in their tracks, “wow, I must admit, I had my doubts. But when those missiles started to get picked off. Holy shit!” he laughed, “Half a million bucks a pop and those bastards were swatting them like flies. But then they came to your bad boys in the rear and no more easy takedowns for them, huh? Slam! No more, huh? Bam! Wow, what a thing. I tell you, I would love to have seen their faces when they realized we had that advanced shielding, right?”
Barrett looked at the man and smiled, as did Neal, his infectious enthusiasm warming them. The colonel replied pleasantly, “Yes, Jim, hell of a thing.”
Then Jim became suddenly serious again, his expression changing with an ease only politicians and actors are capable of, and in a businesslike tone he went on, “Listen, Colonel, Neal, I know you’ve told us this is just the beginning, and I think I can speak for the president when I say that this effort is going to enjoy the administration’s full support from now on. We’re going to need to start a task force to handle this, and I know the president will want you and your team involved.”
Vindicated by explosive proof, Neal listened to the man’s words and knew he was no longer the outsider trying to be politically sensitive in order to be accepted. He had been proven right beyond all reasonable measure. And now the president, this man, and this entire room all knew it. Something in him gave a little and his smile changed minutely from an ingratiating one to one bordering on patronizing. He no longer needed to bend to these people; they needed to bend to him. Placing his hand on the chief of staff’s forearm, he looked the politico in the eye and interrupted the man’s calculated overture.
“Jim, you don’t mind if I call you Jim, right? Listen, I think that we should get something very clear. My team and I have been working on this for nearly a year now. We have had direct contact with the Agents, we know who they are, where they are, and what they are capable of. Now, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate your sentiment, goodness knows having the support of the government, and hopefully of other world leaders as well, in time, will be essential as we start hunting down the remaining Agents and preparing for whatever is coming next.”
Jim nodded and was about to reply but Neal pressed on, getting to the crux of his point, “But as we enter the next stage, Jim, I think it is very important you remember that you’re involved in this solely because we needed something from you. Now that this first step is complete, you are absolutely right to say that we are going to need a task force. But I think you are a bit off the mark about our level of involvement.”
Jim looked at Neal and raised his hands placatingly, “Neal, my friend, whoa. I’m not trying to say you aren’t the sole reason we were successful here today. Goodness knows I am sure I speak for the president when I say you have our deepest gratitude. There’s no reason to be defensive, Neal. Make no mistake, we’re going to need you for the next phase. You have …”
“Jim … Jim,” said Neal, his smile becoming even more patrician, “please, stop, listen to me, Jim, listen. I’m not saying for one second that we won’t be involved in the next stage. You couldn’t stop us if you tried.” Neal glanced at the colonel who was staring at him agog and fought the urge to smile as he said, “What I am trying to say, Jim, is that you were mistaken in saying we would be merely ‘involved’ with your ‘task force.’ Jim, right now you are talking to the people who are going to be
in charge
of that task force.”
Light dawned on the chief of staff’s face as Neal finished his point, and Neal’s voice became deadly serious, “Over the past year, my friends and I have successfully planned and executed a massive military operation right under the noses of both the American government and the very satellites we have just destroyed. If you think we are now going to become some ancillary part of this ‘task force’ of yours, you are sorely mistaken.”
Neal held the man’s stare a moment and then his smile returned like sun from behind a cloud. He patted Jim on the back once more and said, “Now, Jim, I am sure you will have lots of questions, and we can get started on those soon enough, but for now I want you to listen very carefully to the colonel here. As head of the air force branch of the new task force, he has a detailed list of the key people we are going to need on the team, and a plan for our initial projects. For my part, I am going to leave you in his inordinately capable hands as I have some other matters to attend to.” And with that, he nodded, grinned broadly at the colonel, and walked off to check in with the obviously distressed admiral still talking on the phone.
In the wake of Neal’s newfound confidence, Jim looked at the colonel as if searching for some sanity in a world gone mad. Jim Hacker was a political puppeteer of the highest order. He got people to do what the president needed them to do by any means necessary. And he realized now that being told his business by a political nobody was actually harder for him to swallow than the events of the last few hours had been.
For the colonel’s part, he was only slightly less shocked. It was a side of his scientist friend that Barrett hadn’t seen since they had first met back at the Array so long ago. Now he was seeing it with the weight of a hard-won reputation behind it and he had to admit that it was good to see the old Neal Danielson again. He was surprised only because Neal had been absolutely right when he said that Barrett had a plan. Ever the organizer, Barrett did indeed have a list of the people the task force would need, a preliminary one at least, and some initial action items that they should be working on.
He allowed himself a brief smile and then returned his thoughts to the stunned Jim Hacker, placing a conciliatory hand on the chief of staff’s shoulder, “Jim,” Barrett smiled in spite of himself, “don’t look so distraught. Look at it this way. The man who just saved humanity has offered you the opportunity to approach the president with a comprehensive list of action items for his new task force, and a strong recommendation for its leader. Something tells me you can find a way to make that work for you?”