swore under his breath. This was the next-to-ultimate nightmare scenario—four cruise missiles with cluster bombs set to launch and take out civilian targets—as he heard ground control telling him what he already knew.
The two of them were on their own.
Do something!
For all the four-digit Einstein IQ between them—there was nothing Eagle Nebula could do on its end. Short of blowing them out of the sky with a SAM—and he wouldn’t put it past them—there was one other option, he knew, waiting now for those three dreaded words.
Initiate Fatal Abort.
From the beginning, no ejector seats, no self-destruct button had been designed for Lightning Bat. There was good reason for that, he knew, fully accepting from the onset the twisted reasoning that IFA meant finding a vast and wide-open stretch of nothing and slamming Lightning Bat to Earth. A suicide ditching, a fireball spewing radiation, but hopefully nowhere close to a populated area. Or, at worst, only a few souls hopefully still wandering around outside Ground Zero, until Eagle Nebula could ferry in the hazmat platoons while soldiers quarantined God only knew how many square miles around the compass.
Holloran switched his HUD to the inside of the cockpit shield, wondering why some systems worked and others were—well, acting on their own, rebelling, as if they had willpower, defiantly commandeering the vessel. He grabbed the side-arm controller, hoping to God if he could throw the wings to a quick dip, forty-five degrees, port and starboard, the missiles might impact on what was empty prairie. Provided, of course, he got the timing right, but with everything else unraveling…
The stick was jammed!
And the blue lightning came back, leaping from the instrument panel, as Holloran found their own retractable cameras lower from each side of the hull’s underbelly amidships, zooming in on the two robotic arms lowering their payloads.
Targets Engaged freeze-framed on the shield.
Holloran cursed, rechecking the new calibrations, locked in still, he discovered, ground control screaming in his ear as the payloads fanned out into crossbars on their monitors.
Covering north, south, east and west, two on an arm, one frame hung a few meters lower than the other, and for the sake of what was now doomsday clearance. Just as they pulled the damn things up on their computers, he knew, they were held for the moment by titanium clamps, talons that would release them at any second as he watched the numbers fall to single digits on his readout.
Holloran stared at the vast prairie, looked to a long, sweeping horizon that seemed to run straight into the setting sun. They were still some fifty miles from the Badlands, Holloran certain, or rather praying, they were as empty as the lunar landscape he knew them to be.
“They’re going to fire, Major!”
And Holloran watched in helpless rage and disbelief as four cones of flame shot out beyond the stabilizing fins. The missiles released and went streaking away on four points of the compass.
GROUND CONTROL, Horn knew, was an obscene misnomer, and by galactic degrees in this case. There were no command guidance systems, at least for this initial outing, to depend on laser beams to pin down the targets to within a few meters, steer and keep the missiles locked in to impact. No passive system, either, meaning they homed in specifically on infrared radiation, as in heat-seeking the likes of auto or jet engines—or warm bodies. The Four Points were their own Alpha and Omega, relying solely on active systems, which was radar already engineered into the missiles, their guidance computers flying them on, unstoppable and untouchable, to vaporize the targets. Keitel was in the process of pointing this out to Colonel Jeffreys, they were little more than limp baggage on this end.
“Sweet Holy Virgin Mother of…”
“I’m afraid we are way past any hand of God, Colonel.”
“Don’t get smart on me, Keitel! Where are those missiles fixed to strike, mister?” the colonel rasped, clear to all now he realized he had become a master of the obvious by rattling off questions he already had the answers to from double-digit briefs.
The good Major Holloran seemingly all but forgotten for the moment, Horn watched as Keitel slammed in a series of numbers on one of his readouts, then hit his computer keyboard, informing the colonel he would bring up the targets on the wall. Looking past the workstation, Horn stared at the project’s emblem, thirty feet by twenty, painted on the stark white wall, dead ahead. The Eagle Nebula, he recalled, was a bright cluster of young evolving stars, but a massive gas formation, still condensing though not nearly thermonuclear enough to shine like Earth’s sun. Imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope only as recently as 1995, the dark nebulosity was more widely known among the deep space stargazers as “the Pillars of Creation.”
Keitel flashed the digital wall map of North Dakota over the emblem, framing four red circles, then enlarging the targets with a few taps on his keyboard.
With one ear, chain-smoking now that all the PC air was cleared, Horn listened to the colonel shout a litany of questions laced with orders, but he was more intent, fascinated, in fact, by the sight of the gun cameras framing in real-time the prairie sweeping below. Again, Jeffreys demanded to know the new targets, what might be the number of projected civilian casualties, railing next at Keitel to initiate some sort of abort action.
“It’s too late for that, Colonel! The damage is already done!”
“The hell you say. You people created it, do something to uncreate it! Or we are all in a world of hurt none of us can begin to even fathom!”
Horn smiled around his smoke, enjoying their sweat and panic, these pompous asses who often looked down their noses at him, a wolf among sheep who held the power of life and death. The snooty broads, too, often thinking they needed some R and R with a real man who could launch them into some deep space they couldn’t begin to get from their wonder toys. Maybe soon, figure the ladies might need a comforting shoulder to lay their distress on. Hope sprang eternal, and now on more fronts, he knew, than in his loins.
The gathered herd here didn’t know it, but he had his own plans.
He listened to Keitel’s ominous report. It looked like the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation was slated for one big bang, Jeffreys groaning as he heard the guesstimate for dead and maimed Native Americans. If there was any good news to be grabbed from this vision of hell, it appeared the westbound warhead would detonate on some rancher’s spread near the eastern leading edge of the Badlands. On that front, Jeffreys barked for numbers on family members, Horn now sensing the colonel was on the verge of fainting as the virtual reality of the body count kept on piling up in his churning desk-lifer mind, higher, he imagined with a puff and grin, than every piece of shredded document or deleted CDROM he was probably the first blast away from racing to. Another ranch on the Four Points’ feeding frenzy, but far larger in terms of cattle as imaged by a satellite parked over the state, was up for some more cluster dusting. Finally, there was a town, population twenty-six, but one of the geeks informed them at that hour the saloon was a big-ticket draw, Horn filing the man’s name away, wondering how he came by that information. When Horn caught the town’s name, another grin tugged at the corner of his lip.
Little Big Horn.
It was most definitely cover-the-assets time before some twenty-first-century scalping got in full swing, he knew, perfectly albeit horribly understandable, given that more than careers were at stake.
Talk about Black Holes.
Already,
