Mirsky was terrified. Pushed ahead by the vapor thrusters, periodically trailing a thin and quickly dissipating cloud of hydrogen peroxide, he trailed along the beacon. On every side, ground awaited him; his stomach told him he was falling in all directions. Ahead was a gray-black expanse. Clouds drifted in curving sheaths above, below, behind, before. He could not close his eyes; he had to keep the helmet display centered on the beacon signal.
He caught sight of several fellows, their thruster bursts resembling contrails from the wings of a jet drifting in and out of moist air.
How many? he asked. What countermeasures would the Americans have taken?
He had to cross this beautiful horror, this place without top or bottom, and fly down a. second bore hole. Only in the second chamber would he be able to drop away from the center and unfold his airfoil/shield, following the simple map that would be projected on his helmet display.
Slowly his fear turned into exhilaration. The longest jump he had ever made on Earth had lasted for six minutes, better than lovemaking, better than the day he received his wings.
But here he had been flying steadily, accelerating with each new burst, for ten minutes, fifteen.
If he died upon landing, it would be worth it. To have seen a place where the land was the sky, where he could dive any direction and come to ground. Worth it all. Worth even the nightmare of the bore hole and the drifting, torn bodies of his comrades, faces bloated and livid in the vacuum, eyes protruding beyond their lids and ghastly white.
“Pssolonel Mirsky, is that you?”
“Yes! Identify.”
“Pshlopov. I’ve seen others from our ship—and hundreds more! Pshare like angels, Colonel. PshCHKCHKirst squads have dropped away, look behind PSCKHHolonel.”
He carefully inclined his neck, keeping his eye on the beacon alignment, then looked behind and below. He could see tiny white dots—parachutes—in the bluish haze above the floor of the chamber. He twisted smoothly and saw more at another quadrant—coming down, as planned, to take control of elevator entrances in the first chamber’s southern wall. Pride swelled in him. Who else could have even succeeded this far?
History !
He could see the darker hole in the center of the forward wall.
None of them had more than two hours of air in their suit tanks—how much longer until he could drop away?
In the fourth chamber compound, Carrolson had given up trying to organize the members of the science team. Most of the security team had been deployed, leaving the barracks, cafeteria and grounds to the evacuees.
Patricia sat in the cafeteria, numb, snot crusted under her nose, half-listening to the sporadic radio signals coming over the cafeteria loudspeakers. The signals from the external satellite feed was still being directed down the bore hole to transponders at the entrance of each chamber. Electronic chatter of robots calmly sacrificing themselves in orbit, seeking orbiting outposts and battle stations, or going silent as they reentered the atmosphere to search out a few million more human beings, enacting a deterrence policy now guaranteeing only more and more death.
Out of control, Patricia thought.
Spasm. The motions a dying person makes, or the twitches in a corpse.
San Diego, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara. Spasm.
Farley and Chang wept in each other’s arms. Wu was silent and stolid, sitting on a table like a piece of sculpture.
Rimskaya stood in a corner with a bottle of Scotch, almost certainly contraband, taking a gulp every few seconds until he fell down.
A few ex-defense workers, reverting to the old banter, the old assessments and guesses, conducted a calm analysis of who was winning, who was still capable of fighting, which hardened weapons sites would open next. ”Submarines under the ice caps? ... No—both sides will hold those in reserve for after.”
“What after? ... Who cares? ... What about those trucks—you know, the reverse ground-effect vehicles, hug the ground when the shock wave passes over.”
“Fuck ‘em all.”
Spasm.
She closed her eyes as if to block an image of her home absorbing the sudden burst of light and radiation, becoming a carbon mockery of walls and roof.
And within, slightly protected by the shadow of the house—roasted alive, but not quite carbonized and then being blasted to fine ash by the shock wave—Rita and Ramon.
Farley approached Patricia and tapped her on the shoulder, disrupting her reverie. ”We can’t go back,” she said. ”The engineers say none of the spaceports are left by now. Vandenberg, the cosmodromes—Kennedy Space Center, even Edwards—gone. We can’t get to the Moon, either. Not enough ships or fuel. Nobody will come up for ten, maybe twenty years. That’s what the engineers are saying. We might have a few good fields left in China, but there aren’t going to be any shuttles in orbit to rendezvous with the OTVs even if we could go back.”
Wu joined them. ”Nothing out of China now,” he said. “Russia still throwing things. Every city I live in, gone by now. We used to get civil defense instruction in school. We knew where bombs would drop. Russian bombs and maybe even American bombs. Every city had its bombs.”
“When’s the funeral?” someone asked in the background.
There was no laughter, only silence. It was an extraordinarily insensitive joke. Except that it couldn’t be a joke. There had to be a funeral when somebody died.
But when billions of people were dead or dying?
Carrolson sat down beside Patricia. ”Office ink is all there is,” she said laconically. ”Wayne is gone, and our son. They’re dead by now, I’m sure. You know, in a little while this is going to hurt like hell. Adjusting is going to be ...” Her cheeks twitched, spotted red as if she were breaking out in a rash.
“Rimskaya drank all the booze, the bastard.”
“I’m going to the library,” Patricia said.
“Can’t,” Carrolson said. ”Off limits.”
“I need something to do.”
“Of course.” But she offered no suggestions.
“Hey, we have more pictures from the external cameras!” someone yelled. The wide-screen video was wheeled out and connected to the central cafeteria hookup.
Patricia did not look at the video screen. She had seen satellite and lunar telescope pictures of the conflagration in the Thistledown City library. Somewhere on Earth—in Washington or in Pasadena in Hoffman’s office—copies of those pictures were being embraced by the destruction they depicted, an ouroboros of doom.
Carrolson watched, however, eyes narrowed, lips drawn back.
One by one, the cities blossomed. The atmosphere rippled over each explosion, as if a giant steel ball had been dropped in a pond.
Over the western limb, beyond the Atlantic, a brighter-than-dawn glow was creeping, now yellow, now purple, now green.
The whole world was being swept by a crown fire, with the flames leaping not from tree to tree, but from city to city, continent to continent.
People were no more substantial than pine needles.