“Yeah,” Kelly muttered. “But what are we going to do when something like this comes up when we’re in warp, and we don’t have a panel of old men and generals to tell us how to handle it?”
From the screen Gordo Alonzo coughed theatrically.
“One more thing. About the comet you observed as you were testing your planet-finder gear. Dinosaur Killer Mark II, or not as it turned out. I have some more information about that. As it turns out, it’s no coincidence that thing came wandering in from the dark just as we’re reeling from the flood.” He peered at the camera. “I wonder if Zane Glemp is there. If not, show him this recording later. This relates to testimony from one of your tutors, Magnus Howe-something he remembered Jerzy Glemp said to him before he died…”
In the early years of the flood, Glemp had worked for the Russian government. Russia was hit hard and fast by the flood, losing swathes of territory. As massive refugee populations headed south and east, and war seemed inevitable with China and India over the high land of central Asia, the civilian government struggled to hold the line against hard-line generals.
“Some of the military urged using their surviving nuclear stockpile in an all-out attack against China and the west, while they had the chance. The desperate theory was that Russians might survive in an empty if radioactive world.” Gordo grunted, looking at his notes. “I have a feeling that what they actually did with all those nukes in the end was cooked up by some smart guy in an effort to prevent the generals from making a bad situation even worse.
“In 2024-this was the year Moscow flooded-a significant element of the Russian intercontinental nuclear capability, mostly inherited from the old Soviet regime, was launched, aimed not at any point on the ground but sent off into space. President Peery kindly allowed me to confirm Glemp’s reports about this from old CIA surveillance records. It caused a lot of alarm, you can imagine, but it was immediately clear the birds were not targeted on US territory, possessions or allies. Of course not all of their inventory could be retargeted in this way.
“Then we come to 2036, over a decade later. And we have an anomalous sighting by a telescope in Chile, which by then was dedicated to deep-space planet-finding. This big eye spots a flash, out in deep space. Some time later our surviving interplanetary probes report a trace of anomalous radiation.” He looked into the camera. “You see where I’m coming from. This was the Russian nukes, or those that made it out there, all going off at once. A hell of a bang.
“And we move on to 2043-this year. And you characters detect a comet rushing in toward the sun, all but damn it on a collision course with Earth.
“I think you see that we are drawing a line to connect these three events. We think that the Russians tried to deflect a giant comet nucleus toward the Earth. They actually tried to create an impact.
“There is some logic. In the Earth’s early days, deep global oceans were repeatedly outgassed from the planet’s molten interior, where water had been captured during the world’s formation. But in those days the sky was still full of big rocks. Earth got slammed, and the whole damn ocean was blasted off. This happened time and again, and each time the ocean was refilled by outgassing, or maybe from lesser cometary impacts.
“You see the idea. It’s possible these Russian crazies believed that they could beat the flood by bringing down a comet on all our heads and blasting away the whole global ocean, just like in the good old days of the late bombardment. Maybe they actually thought they were saving the world. The fact that they would have left the Earth a desolate wasteland, devoid of air and water and inhabited only by crusty Russian Strangelove types in deep bunkers, was an unwelcome detail.
“My scientists tell me deflecting a comet is a chancy thing to do. It’s remarkable they managed it at all. Thank God they didn’t get it right.
“So that’s the end of that. What’s next?” He glanced over his shoulder at his team of advisers.
52
March 2044
Not long after dawn Mel’s National Guard detachment was rousted out of its barrack, an abandoned, rat-infested liquor store in Alma’s small town center.
To brisk orders from the sergeants they formed up in the dim morning light, a few dozen men and women in rough but orderly ranks. Then they began their march along Main Street, heading out of the Buckskin Street compound gate and north through the picked-over ruins of the town toward the outer perimeter. The tarmac surface of the highway was rutted and cracked by the passage of tanks and other heavy armored vehicles. It wasn’t so bad to walk on, but you had to watch you didn’t turn your ankle in some pothole. Weeds flourished, green and vigorous, grabbing their opportunity in this short interval between the ending of the dominance of humankind and the coming of the flood.
The air was full of the stink of the night’s smoke. The eye-dees burned shit these days, human excrement dried and compressed, the hillsides long having been stripped of their lumber. And, under all that, there was a faint tang of salt in the air, of ozone, the smell of the global ocean reaching even here to the heights of the Rockies.
The troopers were laden with their packs. This assignment was going to last several days, how long was unspecified. As they walked they checked over their elderly weapons-mostly Kalashnikov AK-47s, probably manufactured before the flood, and many of them liberated from survivalist types during a raid into the higher ground a couple of years back. The troopers were a mixture, everything from veterans with genuine combat experience to healthy-looking rookies plucked out of the eye-dee streams, to relics with a more complex past, like Mel, who had been a USAF cadet before being diverted into the Ark Candidate corps, and then left abandoned on the ground at the last minute. For all their raggedness they were probably as disciplined a military unit as existed anywhere on the planet. But they grumbled as they marched, their voices rising in the still air. Everybody grumbled all the time, about the lousy food and the broken toilets in their billets and the state of their hand-me-down combat gear.
Mel Belbruno felt as uncomfortable as everybody else. His boots were a major problem, misshapen from a dunking in salt water when in the care of some previous unfortunate owner; he had padded them with layers of filthy socks. But this morning he was distracted by the unpleasant possibilities of the new assignment.
Alma was surrounded by a system of concentric fortifications. The best place to serve was inside the Buckskin Street compound itself, at the heart of the old town, a fortress improvised from a triangle of land where three roads intersected, South Main Street, South Pine, and Buckskin Street running down from the gulch to the west. The Ark’s Mission Control had been relocated into the center of this fortified area. Outside the compound there was little left of the quaint old mining town, with its embattled claim to be the highest in America. It had been pretty much dismantled by labor crews, first to provide raw materials for the fortifications, and then to build rafts, big buoyant structures of oil tanks and plastic sheeting and tarpaulin that for now sat ominously on the open ground, ready for the final evacuation.
Failing an assignment inside the compound itself, you were best off running patrols into the hinterland, as the commanders called it, a broad area a few kilometers across centered on Alma, a patchwork of high ground and flooded-out valleys. Here, high ground once colonized by pine trees was stripped of lumber and was being turned into farmland, a thousand tiny, scratched-out farms on the poor soil. They were farming even all the way to the summit of Mount Bross, the highest point hereabouts, breaking the poor land with human muscle, for there was no oil left to run tractors and pull plows, not even any horses left. Mel had once heard Patrick Groundwater say that Americans were having to revive methods of subsistence farming once used in medieval Europe.