"Now
she talks sense." There was an overhead electric light at the bottom, dangling from the top of the vaulted arch of the ceiling. The stonework grumbled faintly, dislodging a shower of plaster and whitewash dust; shadows rippled as the bulb shivered on the end of its cord. Someone had nailed a poster-sized sheet of laminated paper against the wall, bearing an intricate knotwork design that made her eyes hurt. Helmut stepped forward onto the empty circle chalked on the floor. The guards had already crossed over. "I'll carry your grace," he told her. Then he turned to face the family sigil and focus.
"I'm not your grace anymore," Iris tried to say; but neither of them were there anymore when she finished the sentence.
Sixty miles north of Niejwein, the first wave of B52s finished unloading their rotary dispensers. Their crews breathed a sigh of relief as they threw the levers to close their bomb-bay doors, and the DSOs began the checklist to reactivate their ARMBAND devices for the second and final time. Meanwhile, the second wave of bombers smoothly took their place in the bomb line.
One of them, the plane with the single device in its front bay, flew straight towards the enemy city. With the target confirmed in visual range, her DSO keyed a radio transmitter—a crude, high-powered low-bandwidth signal that would punch through the static hash across the line of sight to the other aircraft in the force. To either side, the formation split, the neighboring aircraft following prearranged courses to give it a wide berth. Twelve miles was an acceptable safety margin for a one-megaton weapon, but not for the device this aircraft carried.
("I'm going to send them a message," the president had said. "Who?" his chief of staff replied, an ironic tilt to his eyebrow. "The Russians." The president smirked. "Who did you think I meant?")
The single huge bomb crammed into the special bomber's bay was a B53; at nine megatons, the largest H-bomb ever fielded by the US military: a stubby cylinder the size of a pickup truck. The bomber rose sharply as the B53 fell away from the bomb bay. A sequence of parachutes burst from its tail, finally expanding into three huge canopies as its carrier aircraft closed its bay doors and the flight crew ran the engines up to full thrust, determined to clear the area as fast as possible.
To either side of the heavyweight, the megaton bursts continued—a raster burn of blowtorch flames chewing away at the edge of the world. Behind the racing bomber force the sky was a wall of darkness pitted with blazing rage, domed clouds expanding and rising and flaring and dimming with monotonous precision every few seconds. The ground behind the nuclear frontal system was blackened and charred, thousands of square miles of forest and field caught in a single vast firestorm as the separate waves of incineration fanning out from each bomb intersected and reinforced each other. The winds rushing into the zone were already strengthening towards hurricane force; the bombers struggled against an unexpected sixty-knot jet stream building from the south.
Beneath its parachutes, the bulbous B53 slowly descended towards the city. The strobing flare of distant apocalypses flashed ruby highlights across its burnished shell as it twisted in the wind, drifting towards the roof of a well-to-do carpenter's house on the Sheepmarket Street to the south of the city. The carpenter and his wife and apprentices were standing outside, staring at the horizon in gape-jawed dismay. "If it be a thunderstorm it's an unseasonal huge one," he told his wife. "Better fetch in your washing—" He whirled at the crashing and crunching from the roof. "Who did that!" Instant rage caught him as he saw the deflating dome of a white parachute descend across the yard. "If that be your idea of a prank, Pitr—"
Niejwein, population just under sixty thousand, two and a half miles by one and a quarter, Niejwein, capital of the Gruinmarktall gone.
Wiped away as if a bullet had slammed through a map pasted across a target.
Niejwein: home to just under sixty thousand artisans and tradesmen and their families, and almost two hundred aristocrats and their servants and hangers-on, and previously home to as many as ninety members of the Clan—of whom only eleven remained at this point—all brought to a laser-bright end by a flash of light from the heart of a star.
The boiling, turbulent fireball resulting from a surface lay-down expanded in a fraction of a second until it was over a mile in diameter. At its periphery, the temperature was over a hundred thousand degrees: Stone boiled, the bodies of man and animal flashed into vapor. A short distance beyond it—out to five miles—the heat was enough to melt iron structures. Castles and palaces only a mile or two beyond the fireball, be their walls made of stone and never so thick as a man's body, slumped and then shattered on the shock wave like a house of cards before a hand grenade.
There would be no survivors in Niejwein. Indeed, there could have been no survivors in the open within fifteen miles, had not the other bombers of the strike force continued to plow their fields with the fires of hell.
It was not the intention of the planners who designed Operation CARTHAGE to leave any survivors, even in subsurface cellars.
The firestorm raged steadily down the coast, marching at the pace of a speeding jet bomber. Behind it, the clouds boiled up into the stratosphere, taking with them tens of millions of tons of radioactive ash and dust. Already the sun was paling behind the funeral pyre.
In the aftermath, the people of the Gruinmarkt might well be the luckiest of all. It was their fate to be gone in a flash or burned in a fire: a brief agony, compared with the chill and starvation that were to follow all around their world.
Huw was in the shed near the far end of the vegetable garden, tightening the straps on his pressure suit, when Brilliana found him.
"What in Sky Father's name do you think you're doing?" she demanded.
She was, Huw realized abstractedly, even more pretty when she was angry: the brilliant beauty of a lightning-edged thundercloud. Not even the weird local fashions she wore in this place could change that. He straightened up. "What does it look like I'm doing?"
Yul chipped in: "He's getting ready to—"
Brill turned on him. "Shut up and get out," she said flatly, her voice dangerously overcontrolled.
"But he needs me to—"
"Out!"
She waved her fist at him.
"Give us some space, bro," Huw added. "Don't worry, she won't shoot me without a trial."
"You think so?" She waited, fists on hips, until Hulius vacated the shed and the door scraped shut behind him. "You're not going to do this, Huw. I forbid it."
"Someone
has to do it," he pointed out. "I've got the equipment and, more importantly, the experience to go into an uncharted world."
"It's
not
an uncharted world, it's
our
world. And you're not going. You don't need to go. That's an order."
"You're not supposed to give me orders—"
"Then it's an order from Helge—"
"—Isn't she busy visiting her special friend in New London right now?" Huw raised an eyebrow.
Brill glared at him. "It
will
be one, as soon as I tell her. Don't think I won't!"
"But if the Americans—"
"Listen
to me!" She stepped in front of him, standing on her toes until he couldn't help but see eye-to-eye with her. "We got a report."
"Oh?" Huw backed down. Heroic reconnaissance into the unknown was one thing, but wasting resources was something else. "Who from? What's happened?"
"Patricia's guards came across. They wired us a report and Brionne's only just decrypted it. They were in the palace when the sky lit up, the entire horizon north of Niejwein. Helmut reported at least thirty thermonuclear detonations lighting up over the horizon, probably many more of them, getting progressively closer over the quarter hour before he issued the order to evacuate. They were carpet-bombing with H-bombs.