The Twice and Future Caesar (14 page)

Jose Maria beheld his niece's face on the resonator. AnaLuisa was at the controls of her sky yacht. Jose Maria had given her the yacht for her birthday.

Something was wrong with her face. Even as Jose Maria tried to make out the dark marks on her cheek, they popped and she jerked. In a blink, the dark spots had doubled their size. So did a crusty patch on the front of her shirt.

AnaLuisa blinked tears. Her voice was unsteady. “Tio Jose Maria, I, oh, this is it.”

Jose Maria breathed, “
Corazon
.”

AnaLuisa sobbed. “Do not send medical aid. They—these things—they are not biologic. Do not send anyone. Do not come. Do not let anyone come. Make everyone go. This started ten minutes ago. They are doubling, I think. Every minute. I think this is Jericho.”

There was a white blank instant during which Jose Maria's mind refused to acknowledge the ultimate nightmare. Something that doubled itself every minute, something as small as a gram, could consume the world in eighty minutes. The world would cease to support human life sooner than that.

The Jericho protocol was the procedure for global evacuation in case of an aggressive contagion.

AnaLuisa gave way to a moment of crying, then steadied herself. “I do
not know how it came in. The air filter does not work now. Everything adjacent to a particle turns like this.” She pointed to the crusts on her face. Then gave a squeak. The grey scabs popped on her face and doubled.

Jose Maria heard a cracking noise, of something much larger, breaking. He saw AnaLuisa's hair move, lift.

The sky yacht's windscreen had broken. Fresh air was coming into the pilot's cabin.

Contaminated air was swirling out.

“
Corazon
. Halt your forward progress.”

AnaLuisa brought the sky yacht to a stationary position in the air.

Jose Maria opened another resonator and signaled the Terra Rican Home Guard. “Geometric contagion. Factor 2. Period sixty seconds. On my authority, Jericho.”

“
Don
Cordillera! Are you sure?”

“My sister's child is at point zero. I am sure.” Jose Maria gave the Home Guard the coordinates of the sky yacht.

He watched AnaLuisa gasping. Talked to her. Not sure what he was saying. She fumbled for an oxygen mask. Kicked and collapsed over sideways in her harness.

A tap sounded at Jose Maria's cabin hatch with a tentative voice. “Sorry to disturb you
Don
Cordillera. The captain wishes to inform you of emergency broadcasts from Terra Rica.
Don
Cordillera?”

The hatch edged open. The Marine peered in. Saw that Jose Maria de Cordillera was already aware of the emergency.

Jose Maria kept vigil over his niece. She wasn't moving. The contagion doubled eight more times before the Home Guard got a displacement cordon around the sky yacht.

Survivable displacement required three points of correspondence: the beginning point, the destination, and the thing in transit.

Displacement without a destination was annihilation.

Annihilation was required here.

The visual feed went dark the instant the Home Guard displaced the sky yacht, along with the air around it.

The yacht and its infection, beautiful AnaLuisa, and anyone else on board ceased to exist.

The Home Guard called for a planetwide evacuation as they searched for other points of contagion.

Most Terra Ricans kept displacement disks and collars in their home
First Aid kits. They need only request removal to an orbital shelter and wait their turn.

Air traffic control was routing all air/space craft to exit the atmosphere away from the prevailing winds around the site of the contagion in the northern hemisphere.

More points of contagion were detected as they grew from specks to a distinguishable size. Displacement techs targeted them, along with a wide space around them, and displaced them out.

Captain Carmel invited Jose Maria to the space battleship's command deck.
Merrimack
couldn't go to Terra Rica. This gun platform would not be drawn away from Romulus this close to Earth. But Calli put all of
Merrimack
's resources at
Don
Cordillera's disposal for synthesizing input from Terra Rica's satellite feeds and directing displacement units to sites of contagion in the far star system.

Jose Maria identified hot spots in the planet's atmosphere and relayed the spatial coordinates to the Terra Rican Home Guard for removal.

A satellite located a hot spot on the water—a floating boulder, rolling on the waves. Doubling and splitting. The Home Guard displaced 500 metric tons of water out along with the boulders to make sure they got all of it.

Jose Maria located a cluster in a cloud in the wake of his niece's sky yacht. The Home Guard targeted the cluster and a great volume of cloud around it, and displaced it. A sound like thunder clapped with its vanishing.

Then the emergency channel quieted, except for the minute-by-minute report of negative sightings.

The contagion was possibly eradicated, but the exodus continued. The evacuation mandated by the Jericho protocol was still in effect.

Mathematically, this contagion—it had to be a manufactured nanovirus—could solidify the planet in eighty minutes.

A true calculation of the contagion's progression hinged on more variables, including how many original seeds were present.

To double itself the nanovirus would require contact with an equal mass. A nanite couldn't recreate itself out of nothing.

Another outbreak within a cloud flashed onto the sensors. It was quickly isolated and displaced.

Another mass appeared on the planet surface. It appeared as a great black and silver gray rock. The mass was already large when the Home Guard located it. It lurched, increasing, but not to twice its size. It might
be that the interior mass was cannibalizing itself and only the nanites on the surface of the mass actually increased their numbers.

The Home Guard displaced it out. There would be time to study the recordings and determine the infection's exact progression when the emergency was over.

There followed another lull in the sightings. All watchers remained vigilant for other eruptions.

An orbital monitor reported, “Sighting. Forty-one point twenty north by seventy-three point seventy-four west, elevation two kilometers. Station Omega Nine, you are in range. Take it out.”

Station Omega Nine displaced the airborne mass.

And waited.

Watching.

Fifteen minutes passed. Another outbreak should have shown up by now.

The monitors of the Home Guard dared exchange a few tentative hopeful grins.

On the command deck of the
Merrimack,
Jose Maria de Cordillera quickly reviewed all the scans from the Terra Rican monitoring stations. He became aware that all his input came from surface scans.

He didn't have a deep scan. Of course a nanite would need to pass through the atmosphere to go deep. It would have left a surface trail downward.

Unless it had been inserted deep to begin with.

Jeffrey, on first watch at the tactical station, spoke. “Captain? Mr. Cordillera? Problem, I think.”

Jose Maria saw it. A color change in the northern ocean.

Tactical reported, “I have upward motion.”

Everyone on deck could see it now. Something moved below the ocean swirls. Like a leviathan rising.

The entire ocean floor was lifting up, a vast, pocked, silver-black crust. It broke surface, rocked on the waves.

And doubled.

Air pockets burst and the wide masses cracked.

The Terra Rican Home Guard displaced vast swaths of the continental mass and sent them into the void as fast as they could target them.

It was like shoveling an avalanche.

Fragments tumbled between the waves. Doubled.

More rock masses like lava islands floated up to the surface, broke under internal pressure. Fractured. And doubled.

Satellite surveillance was losing visuals.

The air itself was solidifying.

That was the end of using escape ships. There was no clear path out of the atmosphere. Then there was no atmosphere. Evacuation was all by displacement.

And then there was nothing.

Orbital platforms offered supplies to all ships that made it clear to the vacuum. The supply platforms could send oxygen, food, anything the evacuees needed, as soon as they knew that their ship wasn't contaminated.

They knew quickly.

Merrimack
watched through the lens of a satellite in wide orbit around Terra Rica, beyond the highest reaches of the ionosphere.

The planet contracted.

“
Madre de Dios
,” Jose Maria breathed, horrified.

Jeffrey at Tactical saw what Jose Maria saw. “Those orbitals aren't safe, sir.”

Jose Maria called over the resonator, “Home Guard! All ships, all stations, leave orbit, best speed. Go. If anyone has FTL capability, tell them to jump. Jump now. Get everyone clear of the planet.”

All the satellite feeds went dark.

It took nine minutes for a satellite stationed in close orbit around Terra Rica's sun to relay images of the planet's final contraction and its explosion.

19 April 2448
U.S. Space Battleship
Merrimack
Centauri Star System
Near Space

Rear Admiral John Alexander Farragut took a shuttle from Base Carolina on Earth out to join
Merrimack
in the Centauri system where Jose Maria de Cordillera had taken refuge.

Farragut came to stand by his old friend in his darkest hour. Jose Maria had been sword master on the
Merrimack
back in the days of the Hive threat, when the ship was under John Farragut's command.

Condolences rolled in from all parts of the civilized galaxy.

Like all heads of state, Romulus issued a public statement on the destruction of Terra Rica. He was not a legitimate head of state, and his address was the only one that did not offer solace to the survivors.

Romulus called on the peoples of all the civilized worlds to witness the hubris of the people from the Land of the Rich. The Terra Ricans had created things that ought never be conceived. See them now brought low by their own God-playing.

He said, in epitaph, “Live by the nanite. Die by the nanite.”

Calli watched the broadcast. After several stunned moments she said, “He's implying that Terra Rica did this to itself.”

“He's not implying,” John Farragut said. “He came right out and said it.”

No one had identified the contagion as a nanite before Romulus' statement.

Jose Maria said, “The initial particle that began the holocaust appeared inside the airship I gave to my sister's child for her birthday. How does a nanite get from wherever it was manufactured into a moving vessel in the air without first contaminating everything around it?”

“A patterner with a grudge figured out a delivery system,” Farragut said.

Jose Maria nodded. “This was not a laboratory accident. This contagion did not get loose. It was planted. And it is my fault.”

John Farragut lifted a hand as if stopping a bus. “You had me right up till that last part. Don't get all Catholic on me now, Jose Maria. It's not your fault. Don't you believe it.”

“But I do believe it, young admiral. I delivered the nanites that tortured Romulus and his sister.”

“Those nanites wouldn't've done a damned thing to Romulus if he hadn'ta killed his own daddy. So you go say your Hail Marys and take a bath in holy water and get back in the game. I can't stop this monster without you.
Get up.
I need you.”

Jose Maria bowed his head. Smiled weakly. A tear slid down the side of his nose. “Sir.”

“Good. You can help Targeting get us a lock on Romulus.”

“Is the man then a lawful military target?”

“I'm pushing for it. Make sure we're ready when that call comes down.”

The isolation capsule that contained TR Steele and Doctor Mohsen Shah had been pronounced free of any contagion, nanite, or threat. The Intelligence Officer, Colonel Bradley Zolman refused to allow it into
Merrimack
's dock.

Captain Carmel took her IO discreetly aside. “Z. You're borderline insubordinate. Why?”

“Isn't it obvious, sir?”

“No. That capsule and my men are clean. They've been scanned for every known threat.
You
scanned them. You're thorough.”

“Every
known
threat,” Z repeated back at her. “It has to be that Romulus has created something new. Something we can't detect. Why else would he send Steele and the doctor back if they weren't rigged?”

“Because he
can
. Romulus doesn't have any interest in destroying
Merrimack
. He just wanted to go into the ring and play gladiator against Adamas. Now either find a booby trap on that isolation capsule or let my officers board.”

Colonel TR Steele advanced from the dock and came to stiff attention before his captain. His eyes focused a million miles past her, as if he expected to be shot.