“Face it, you’re too old, General,” Bobby said.
Some of Bayclock’s troops had drawn up as spectators, but they remained oddly subdued and silent, as if they refused to cheer for the general but were afraid to cheer for his opponent. They stepped back, giving the two fighting men room.
Bayclock launched himself forward, moving his legs like pistons and butting Bobby in the stomach. Bobby let out an “oof!” but managed to sidestep part of the attack. As Bayclock crashed into him, Bobby caught the general’s foot with his own and tripped them both. They tumbled to the ground.
Bobby scrambled to get to his feet again, rolling away from Bayclock’s grasping hands. “Can’t fly, can’t fight—what else can’t you do, old man?” he gasped.
Bobby got to his knees, white dust covering his blue Air Force uniform. Bayclock’s nose continued to bleed onto the sand.
Gilbert tore his concentration away from the fight and looked into the sky. He had no way of telling accurate time, but the sun stood at about noon, and the Seven Dwarfs would orbit overhead any moment now.
He lay by the wreckage of the railgun. In the explosion, the capacitors had ruptured and the banks of storage batteries had burned. During the day of waiting and recovery, Arnie had lovingly disconnected and removed the blackened shapes. Given time and resources, they could repair everything—but it did not look like the general would give them the opportunity.
Every day at noon, though, when the Seven Dwarfs passed over the White Sands antenna farm, the solar energy beamed down to the collectors was distributed through the repaired power grid, charging up caches of batteries to run various equipment. A direct power line ran up to the EM launcher to charge the batteries for the railgun, but now those batteries had been destroyed and the ruined capacitors taken off-line.
The solar smallsats didn’t know that, however. They would continue to beam their power, and the electrical lines would run the current up to the railgun facility. Disconnected from any source, the cable would become a live wire for the twenty minutes that the satellites passed overhead transmitting their energy.
A live wire. As everyone watched the fistfight, Gilbert Hertoya took the disconnected cable, praying as he touched it that the deadly current wasn’t already flowing. No guard watched him closely, with both of his legs heavily bandaged.
Gilbert dragged himself to the metal superstructure of the railgun. He jammed the end of the wire into the steel base, then backed away—ignoring the sharp darts of pain jabbing his legs in a thousand places. He collapsed back on the dirt, trying to keep from passing out.
From the other side of the group of buildings, Arnie saw what Gilbert had done, and his eyes widened. Gilbert winked and crossed his fingers. In response, Arnie crossed his fingers, too.
Bayclock attacked Bobby again, and the fight went on.
Seven hundred kilometers overhead, seven satellites flew in a constellation of four planar orbits, inclined at 45 degrees from the equator. Tiny solar-electric thrusters boiled plasma off their electrodes, keeping the satellites positioned in orbit, cancelling perturbations caused by gravitational variations in the Earth’s crust.
The satellites updated their position using the military’s still-functioning Global Positioning Satellites, making necessary corrections. Each smallsat carried a tiny atomic clock, attuned to the energy of a certain fundamental transition frequency to know when they were. Isolated from the events taking place below, the satellites functioned as programmed.
One minute before noon, Mountain Standard Time, the lead satellite swung its gimboled antenna toward the horizon. Energy collected by the array of inflatable solar-cell panels was converted into electricity, which trickled into the transmitter.
The satellites silently began to irradiate the microwave antenna farm at White Sands.
Connor Brooks was within two hundred yards of the edge of the antenna farm when he heard sparks jumping from the metal poles of his backpack. The sound scared him—it was if he had fallen into the middle of a huge popcorn popper.
At the same instant, his head began to grow hot. Very hot. The thermal blanket felt as if it had suddenly turned into napalm. The searing fabric pressed down upon his skull, across the back of his neck. Only seconds earlier, he had enjoyed the relative coolness of being shielded from the sun, but it now felt like molten lead.
Connor screamed and tore at the metal-backed cloth. But already the fabric smoldered. The metal snapped and popped in an inferno of blue sparks; the poles on his backpack burned hot-iron slices into his back. Acidic smoke billowed out; even the metal eyelets on his boots crackled with tiny arcs of flame.
The pain went on and on. Connor fell to his knees, clutching at the melting blanket that spread over his head, over his skin.
In a final effort, Connor tried to pry the covering from his scalp, but his fingers refused to respond, turning into burned, bloody stumps by the boiling metal. Sparks continued to crackle in a cocoon around him. He screamed, and hot arcs lanced from the fillings in his teeth.
The pain… wouldn’t… stop….
Seven hundred kilometers above the Earth, the second satellite locked on and started to beam its microwaves down to the target.
Five others waited patiently behind for their own turns.
Todd and Rita galloped in on either side of the base camp near the burned-out railgun facility, yelling their loudest battle cries. Todd set the spring-loaded timer on his crude grenade canister and lobbed the explosive toward a supply tent.
The Air Force men saw what he had thrown, and they scrambled in the opposite direction. Some ran for their rifles, but most ducked for cover.
Rita Fellenstein headed them off from the other direction, tossing another grenade in among the campfires. Following closely behind, the ranch hands fired their own rifles and shouted.
One colonel stood in the middle of it all, with a wounded arm in a sling, staring at Todd and the other riders. Very carefully, the colonel tossed his own rifle to the ground.
Bayclock’s other troops, as if waiting to surrender, took this as a sign of permission. Other explosions erupted from the citrus-based explosives. Gunfire rattled around the hills, but nobody seemed to be shooting at anything.
Todd had intended only to ride in, cause damage, panic, and confusion, make the troops scatter, then hit the road as fast as possible to hide in an overgrown arroyo.
Rita pulled up beside him, and they stared as more and more of the soldiers either ran or tossed down their weapons.
“Now what do we do?” Todd asked.
“Beats the hell out of me,” Rita shrugged. “We didn’t plan on winning!”
Carrying their white flag like a shield, Spencer and Heather were escorted up to the main buildings of the railgun only moments before the first explosions and gunshots broke out in the camp below them.
Heather gripped his hand hard enough that her nails bit into his skin. Spencer felt himself trembling, knowing he was crazy even to be making this attempt. He tried to keep a straight face, although his guts had tangled into knots.
The first thing he noticed near the control building was the fistfight between Bobby Carron and the general. A small group of Bayclock’s soldiers had formed a ring around the combatants, like gamblers watching a cockfight. But they did not cheer, simply watched the pummelling in silence.
Spencer’s attention was yanked like a metal filing to a magnet when he noticed the noose hanging from the utility pole—and the bloated body of a strangled Lance Nedermyer tied to the creosote-smeared wood.