"Project Hope?" Kyle echoed. He didn't remember hearing the name before.
She waved away his question. "Doesn't matter, long story. The point is that the UCAS government knew about the Brotherhood, and what they really were. That meant we had to work quickly, about eight months ahead of our plan, to deal with them."
Surprised, Kyle said, "Wait, the UCAS government knew about the Brotherhood, about the bugs, before this happened."
She nodded. "Chip-truth. Did they do anything except argue about what they should do? No. Were they working under a deadline now that the Brotherhood knew their secret was out? You bet your fraggin' hide they were. The best the government could agree to do was shut the Brotherhood down as a fiscal entity. Sure, they staged some raids, but they couldn't be convinced this wasn't a small, easily manageable problem."
"But if you people at Ares knew, why didn't you brief them earlier?" Kyle could barely control his anger.
Ravenheart's eyes hardened. "Do you really think their response would have been different? Please. With a wonderfully blind eye to its own history, the UCAS government barely acknowledges the fact that there's magic in the world, let alone that it's a real threat to national security on this kind of scale. Plus, if we'd told them, they'd have probably started taking steps to prevent us from dealing with the problem. You know how touchy they are about multinational strike teams hitting civilian targets."
"So now it's all gone to slot," Kyle said. "The bugs have torn this city apart and in less than two days everything in it is going to die. Why the frag didn't you at least tell them when you found the nest? And why the frag didn't you just roll in a couple trillion liters of that nerve agent instead of going in guns blazing?"
Ravenheart paused, visibly trying to calm herself. Kyle knew he was provoking her, but he didn't care. The bulldrek and the games that her company had been playing for years had cost untold thousands of lives, two of which were potentially more important to him than anything else in this world.
"I didn't know about the effectiveness of the pesticides until a few hours ago," she said in measured tones. "I presume our people were thinking like you had been, that chemicals wouldn't be a direct against spirits. As for why we didn't alert the government about the presence of a huge nest in a major urban center…" Ravenheart stopped, seeming to reflect for a moment. "I couldn't say. I've wondered myself, but you'd have to ask Roger Soaring Owl or Damien Knight. All I know is I had my orders then, and god help us all, I have my orders now."
Kyle glanced at Seeks-the-Moon, who returned the look with a tilt of me head. "And those orders are?"
She looked away and said nothing, but Kyle could see she was thinking. Her orders were probably confidential and she was debating whether to reveal them.
"Look," he said. "Something has to be done. If we're going to-"
She nodded vigorously and waved her hand at him. "I know. I know. I agree." She sighed and shook her head. "The pleasures of field command," she said half under her breath, and then shifted in her seat to more directly face Kyle.
"Soaring Owl believes, as we've discussed, that if this was the main nest, it will re-form for the same reasons that brought it into being in the first place. He wants us to find it and do something about it before the deadline."
"How the frag are we supposed to find it?" Kyle asked her, and then the answer hit him. “The garnering spots,” he said slowly.
She nodded. "We've been disrupting them as we find them, but if we watch them instead, we can follow a group as they're taken for investiture. That should lead us to the main hive."
"You're betting a lot on the hope that one of the spots you're watching will be tapped before time runs out."
She nodded again. "Yes, we are. But while you were gone we added two more sites to our list, and one of those is pretty much overloaded. I think that one will go next."
"Then what?"
"Then," she said, "then we deal with the fraggin' nest."
"How?" Kyle asked. "You had a small army before, and failed. How can you expect to take them on again with less man two dozen people?"
She tensed slightly. "We have a weapon…"
"Damocles?" Kyle asked, a numbness beginning in his stomach.
Her eyes widened and he saw her arm flinch toward her pistol. "How the frag do you know-"
"I was in the command van, remember?" he said. "Soaring Owl activated it just before the van got torn apart."
She looked away, nodding. "I thought it looked like it had been prepping for launch."
"I take it the drone was in a truck a few blocks away from the main trucks?"
She nodded again. "Yes. We recovered it and the launch system when we moved to the first safehouse."
"It's operational?"
"The payload is, and I've been ordered to use it," Ravenheart said. "I've been ordered to find the new main hive and nuke the thing straight to hell."
28
"Give me some other choice," Anne Ravenheart said. "Anything at all-I'll take it. By all the gods I swear I'll take it." She was agitated, pacing before the gathered troopers. Kyle and Seeks-the-Moon had convinced her that this was a situation that went beyond corporate loyalty, beyond chains of command and "eyes-only" orders. Reluctantly, she'd agreed.
Kyle had been startled by the reaction of the group once the full situation, in all its terrible details, was presented to them. Most of the Ares troopers seemed not to question the need to use a nuclear weapon against the main hive.
A few seemed nervous and not so sure after Kyle pointed out that a nuclear weapon had been detonated only five times in anger since its invention over a century ago-the two dropped on Japan in 1945 and the three on Libya by the Israelis in 2004. Then the ork trooper, Douglas, brought up another disturbing point. Ever since the Great Ghost Dance that had broken the back of the old United States and forced the return of most of western North America to Native American control, there was no guarantee a nuclear weapon would detonate at all.
"What about, what was it, the Lone Eagle?” the ork asked, looking about the group for confirmation. "Those Indian terrorists launched a nuclear missile at Russia, but it didn't go off. How do we know this one will?"
Kyle turned toward Ravenheart. "I heard other rumors too when I was with the government. More recent stuff. Any ideas?"
She shrugged, but didn't answer right away. "Not really. All I can say for sure is that test nuclear weapons have been successfully detonated since the Ghost Dance, and I can only presume that Ares wouldn't have built a last-ditch defense around an untried weapon."
"It'll blow," said the Asian trooper, Lim. "I don't mink even magic can selectively dampen a subatomic reaction based on whether or not it came from a weapon."
"But we don't know for sure," said Douglas, looking directly at Ravenheart. Kyle could see that the thought of using a nuke frightened the ork as much as it did him. They seemed to be in the minority, however, which was not too surprising, considering the nature of the group.
"How much damage are we talking about?" he asked Ravenheart.
She sighed. "It's just about the smallest yield you can achieve, half a kiloton. Significantly smaller than what was dropped on Hiroshima, fourteen kilotons, or what the Israelis used on Libya, about a hundred kilotons per warhead."
"How much damage?" he asked again.