Omega Night (Wearing the Cape) Read online

  “What’s the missile status?” I felt like I was going to pass out, but it was getting easier as the air thinned. Which was good—we were higher than jets flew and still had a long way to go.

  “The launched missile is a Trident II; its unmodified top speed is 6,000 meters per second—13,000 miles an hour. But it’s already into its third stage and will burn through it in less than a minute. After that it will be ballistic and slowing ‘cause of Earth’s gravity, but we’ll be accelerating all the way.”

  “If I can keep this up,” I gasped. “Will we get close enough for Gungnir?”

  “Maybe. They’re initiating Blackout Protocol, just in case.”

  Looking down, I could see Chicago’s lights winking out below me in huge patches as power grids shut down to protect their transformers from EMP insult. The Emergency Broadcast System would be sending the alert by radio, television stations, even phone texts: get off the road, get out of elevators, get down, get safe. All airplane takeoffs were being canceled, along with any landings that would take more than three minutes; any airplanes caught in the air would be turning away from urban areas. If the worst happened and they went down, they’d go down in open fields, killing no one but their passengers and crews.

  It won’t happen.

  Our vapor halo thinned with the atmosphere as we passed through weather balloon territory and the horizon began to curve. Higher than I’d ever been.

  “Watchman, Astra,” Blackstone broke in. “We have just received word from 2nd Fleet. The missile capture and launch was made by The Overlord. A Navy superSEAL team located his current base on Culebra—part of the Puerto Rico island chain. They got him, but it looks like the robot module was part of his contingency plan.”

  “Got him?” Watchman asked.

  “He’s dead. The fight ended with a crater an hour ago.”

  Great. Scratch one Verne-type supervillain terrorist, but now he couldn’t abort the detonation. At least now we knew what the Navy had been doing down there, like that helped. The knot in my gut, there since the second Rush put his hand on my shoulder, wound tighter. I’d only just turned nineteen—what was I doing in a race to save the world?

  “Shelly?” I whispered, voice sounding unnatural in the close helmet.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mom and Dad?”

  “Your Dad can take care of himself, but Rush promises to get them to the Dome if we don’t make this. Do you want to talk to them?”

  Yes. “No. They’ll worry anyway, but if I call to tell them…”

  “Yeah. This sucks.”

  “You’ll take care of them? Everyone?”

  “Pinky-swear. Acceleration good, Mesosphere coming up.”

  Nearly 100 miles up, it was getting even easier. Lots easier. “Watchman?”

  “Astra? What’s your status?” He sounded like he was asking how an oh-so-routine exercise was going.

  “I’m good and you don’t need to break the air for me anymore.” It was mostly true. “How much more speed have you got?”

  “A bit. Okay, separating.” I clenched my fists and braced as his feet drew away above me. Ten feet. Twenty. Thirty, and suddenly I was making my own bow wave in the thin air.

  “Speed dropping,” Shelly observed.

  “I’ve got it.” Things went fuzzy as I metaphorically leaned in and pushed.

  “Speed steady. Climbing.”

  I focused on Watchman, willing his shrinking dot to stay in sight. “Time to target range?” I gasped.

  “Two minutes to effective Gungnir range, three to optimal range. Remember that summer we— Crap on a cracker! The target has separated! The target has separated!”

  The red triangle at the top of the cone split into five red pips, all flashing. Confusion filled the communications links before Shelly shut it all out.

  “Multiple warheads? Why didn’t anyone say?”

  “It’s not! The missile has a single, one megaton warhead. The robots have been changing it, but they couldn’t have split the bomb!”

  “Decoys?”

  “Have to be,” she agreed, a little calmer. “Five of us, five of them—it’s adapting.”

  “Yippy. So now it’s a shell game.” This was not happening.

  Blackstone entered the Dispatch link again. “Astra, Watchman, vector independently. The Navy is uploading new targeting solutions to your Gungnirs, we’re putting two on each.”

  “Copy, independent vector,” Watchman confirmed and I hastily echoed him. On my helmet screen one of the red pips flashed green and I turned to move it to the center of my cone. Below me the Earth was turning into a ball, lit along half its curve by distant sunset. All systems still green—good thing since we’d never actually space-tested them.

  Okay. Two Gungnirs per “missile.” We could still do this.

  “Targeting range in thirty seconds,” Blackstone reported. “Confirm lock and readiness.” The designation Omega Four flashed on my helmet screen as we went down the roll.

  “Omega One, Argonaut standing by.”

  “Omega Two, ArcLight standing by.”

  “Omega Three, Watchman standing by.”

  “Omega Four, Astra standing by.” I fought and conquered the insane urge to add May the Force be with you.

  “Omega Five, Rook standing by.”

  “Launch in ten, nine, eight, seven, six—hold launch! Target proliferation!” My heart dropped into my stomach as the flashing pip in my target-sights split again into five more. Which meant…

  “Twenty-five confirmed targets, image and pattern analysis indeterminate,” Shelly broke in, tearing into the new data like only she could. “Greater than 40% confidence is impossible to achieve.”

  * * *

  Hurtling into space at hypersonic speeds is not the time or place to lose focus. I listened to the silence as Shelly, the super-intelligent quantum ghost of my BFF, Blackstone, our team leader and intelligence analyst, and what had to be dozens of military wonks on the other end of my radio link came up with nothing. Ten Gungnirs, twenty-five targets, at least 50 million lives riding on worse odds than a coin toss. We couldn’t rely on luck—

  Oh yes, we could. “Shelly, is Seven back in Dispatch?”

  “Yeah. So?” She sounded distracted—probably taking over every CPU available to help her fight some kind of targeting solution out of the data.

  “Tell him to look at the screen and pick a number!”

  “Are you kidding? His luck only works when it affects him personally!”

  “If he guesses wrong and we lose half the country he’ll never forgive himself—how could it get more personal?”

  Silence, then “He says twelve, but we’re not linked into the Gungnir’s targeting telemetry and the Navy’s not going to hand it to us.”

  “Can you hack it?”

  “Maybe, but Gungnirs are sub-kiloton nukes and once they’re unlocked they’re set to go off if tampering is detected. You’re tough, but not that tough.”

  “How long till target reaches ideal EMP position?”

  “Less than two minutes.”

  “Do they have any other ideas?” Please let somebody have an idea.

  “Best-guess target selection from multiplication vectors.”

  So, no. “Do it.” If she failed, I’d never have time to know.

  “Hope…”

  “Here we come to save the day, right?” That got a snicker; it had been our catchphrase back when we were playing Power Chick and Awesome Girl, before she’d died and I had my breakthrough. Before it had all gotten serious.

  “Working on it—the Navy just lost its telemetry link. Sad malfunction…”

  I turned into my new vector, lining up with the new green pip, and felt bad for all the guys on the ground, watching what had looked like a straightforward cape-assisted intercept turn into to a complete FUBAR with nothing they could do about it. I was just an exhausted spectator too, pushing on and watching the Sun “rise” on my right as our height caught us up with the sunse
t. We were high into the thermosphere now, where the air was so thin I didn’t feel the drag at all and refracted sunlight didn’t wash out the stars anymore—much higher and they could wave at us from the Space Shuttle as we blew by faster than I’d ever flown.

  Blackstone was back. “Stand by. Entering launch range in five, four, three, two, one—” Above me I saw the flares of Watchman’s Gungnirs as their missile drives lit in the silence, burning away to close the distance on his two selected targets. The others were far enough away that even with my super-duper vision their burns looked like dim sparks against the fringe of blue horizon.

  “Astra, Navy tracking shows your Gungnirs have failed to launch. Status?”

  “I’m okay.” So far. “Still closing with targets.”

  “Break away, Astra. Repeat, break away. You will be in the hot-zone.”

  “Understood.” I shot past Watchman as he decelerated—breaking as fast as he could to put distance between himself and his missiles—and closed my helmet’s blast shield to fly on instruments.

  “Astra, you’re not breaking.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Hope, break away now! Dear God—”

  “Brace yourself,” Shelly sang. I assumed the position. Arms straight ahead, fists together, back arched, head tucked, ready to dive into the cosmos. Watchman’s Gungnirs fired.

  Gungnir had been Odin’s spear, a god’s weapon that struck and killed whatever it was thrown at. The military was still at least a generation away from true nuclear bomb-pumped lasers, but one of their resident Verne-types had lovingly crafted the superscience modifications that made them real enough for us. The original sub-kiloton nuclear warheads were from Cold War infantry weapons—meant to be anti-infantry area weapons fired by tripod mounted recoilless rifles from a couple of kilometers distance (and how crazy was that?). They’d been remounted on missiles behind their “lens generators”—the Verne-tech gadgets that projected force field bottles that lensed and focused most of the bomb’s energy into a death ray gamma laser with an effective kill range of forty kilometers. Interaction with the force field bottles turned the rest of the liberated energy into photons and kinetic energy.

  Yup—a blast front in space. It was like punching through a wall.

  When my link came back Shelly was babbling. “Hope! Hope! Are you there?”

  “I’m here, Shelly. Still on target.” Was I? Yes. “Suit ruptured but functional, helmet pressure steady.” Our suits used mechanical pressure instead of air pressure to protect us from inflating in the near-vacuum and allow us to breathe (think body-wrapping heavy elastic bands), so I wasn’t losing air. So long as my helmet stayed intact… “Did they get it?”

  “No,” she said disgustedly. “None of the Navy solutions targeted number twelve. It reaches optimal EMP range in forty-seven seconds.”

  “Have you finished retargeting?”

  “Targeted and locked, but we’ll be firing from spitting range! You can’t—” I popped the covers on the manual triggers in my fists and punched them before I could think. The twin launches slammed me back and I turned the kick into a spin that put my boots ahead of my helmet, curled up and wrapped my arms around my head.

  “Fire, Shell!”

  This was going to hurt.

  Would have been nice to finish my pizza.

  But everyone will be okay.

  Michael, defender of man, stand with us in the day of battle. St. Jude, giver of hope, be with us in our desperate hour. St. Christopher, bearer of burdens, lift us when we fall!

  So much closer, this time the impossible blast front smacked into me like a windshield meeting a bug. The wave of energetic photons seared me, light like knives, and the kinetic blast-front flattened and spun me, a hit to every inch of my body. I heard things break, saw stars inside my helmet, and realized I was laughing.

  “Here we come to save the daaaaay!”

  “Astra.” Blackstone’s voice sounded thin, reedy. “Your helmet telemetry shows a leak; are you able to breathe?”

  I nodded, still giggling at being alive. “Affirmative. Stand by.”

  Doing an airflow check, I found the leak in the pressure ring where my helmet met what was left of my suit. Foam and a patch sealed it, and I raised the blast shield so I could see out again, still giddy with relief. I hurt in ways even my fight-training didn’t manage, but nothing was broken (I knew what that felt like). Not bad considering I’d thought I might be explaining myself to Saint Peter now; The Rock might not have considered my setting off a superscience-warped nuclear bomb at close range any different than suicide.

  Sixteen red pips remained on my screen, with our five green triangles, so we’d got Seven’s pick. Please, God… “How long—”

  “The remaining targets are reaching optimal EMP range…now,” Blackstone said.

  Nothing. No flash. No storm of gamma rays plunging for the atmosphere to hit Earth’s electromagnetic field and shower my home in a power-killing wave of free electrons.

  “Yes!” Shelly shouted. She opened the link so I could hear the cheering of everyone up here and on the ground as the remaining decoys continued their flight into space.

  “Blackstone…”

  I could hear him smile. “The Navy does not have direct feed to our links, my dear. So far as they’re concerned, you did a manual launch on your own cognizance and against my orders when remote targeting failed. We’ll never know which target was the actual warhead.”

  I laughed before I could stop myself. Yeah, right. Seven got lucky again, and all was right with the world. I spotted Watchman far below me, a tiny black silhouette against the bowed rim of sunlit blue. Turning for home, I smiled as the lights below us began to come back on, patches springing up and multiplying as the undamaged power grids began to come online. World saved, for now.

  Rush could get me back to the Pizza Cellar, and my slice would still be warm.