William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

Kazakhs cut in. “What did the Looking Glass tell you?” His voice was urgently curious.

“Oh, Lordy, a male voice. How nice. Had me worried there for a minute. It’s bad enough for the last one to be a flying fuck. But for a while there I thought it was gonna be with another broad. That’s adding insult to injury.”

“The Looking Glass,” Kazakhs repeated.

“Said go for the IP and wait. Orbit and wait until we found you or ran out of gas. So we been waiting.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s it. Haven’t heard a peep since.”

“Seven minutes to IP, two minutes to radar contact,” Moreau cut in. “Estimating arrival zero-eight-four-niner, Zulu.”

“Roger, Polar Bear,” Elsie said. “We got a little housekeeping to do here. Let’s get back together on radar contact. Commander?”

Elsie?” Kazakhs came on.

“We were flying a routine proficiency mission. The Looking Glass also ordered my B-52 to head south.”

“South?” Kazakhs sounded puzzled.

“To pick up armaments, I guess.”

“I’ll be damned,” Kazakhs said absentmindedly. But it made sense. At least the B-52 was aloft and safe, which most of the bomber force almost certainly was not. “Must be figurin’ on a long war.”

“Yeah, twelve, fifteen hours at least.”

Kazakhs stifled a chuckle. He decided he liked Elsie.

“Now, listen, commander.” The tanker pilot’s voice turned deadly serious. “We’re going to stick with you down to the last drop. There’s no way you’re gonna get all the fuel you want. But breakaway means breakaway. Got it? Coitus inter-ruptus, pal. On the first word.”

“Got it, Elsie. Back to teen time.”

“No, this is kiddie time,” the refueler said solemnly. “Anybody who’d let this stuff go is loonier than Captain Kangaroo.”

“Yeah,” Kazakhs said. “See you soon, mate.”

“Propositioned at last. Okay. Elsie out.”

For the next minute no one said a word in Polar Bear One, as each crew member steeled himself in his own private way for minutes of sheer terror. Moreau felt her nerve endings begin to scream beneath the unheard din of the engines. She took her left hand and clenched her right elbow, pulling the hand tightly down toward the wrist as if to force the nerves back down where they belonged. Ironic, she thought, that this moment would produce more palpable fear than the bombs going off. But she could feel the fear in the plane, wisping up out of the basement, spreading to Halupalai and then edging forward into the cockpit. The bombs had come at them out of the blue—theoretical death dancing in unseen particles that might be eating at the marrow of their bones, rolling shock waves that could crush them or massage them, take your pick. But this was no theoretical terror. This was known. And there was no one in the B-52 who wouldn’t admit to being petrified with fright the first time they went through a midair refueling, and few who would deny being scared stiff each time since.

In the Looking Glass, Alice flinched. The white light had suddenly begun blinking at him. He stared at it, mesmerized. The blinking continued insistently.

“General, for Christ’s sake!”

Alice flinched again, turning to look vacantly at Sam. The colonel’s eyes were riveted on the light.

“General!”

Alice shook his ruddy head, as if to clear it. He reached slowly for the persistent phone, lifting it gingerly. “Alice,” he said cautiously into the speaker.

“Harpoon,” a voice crackled instantly back through the void.

Alice slumped over the phone, the tension oozing out of him. “Jesus,” he muttered. “Sweet Jesus.”

“No, old friend, but we might need His help,” the phone voice replied. “Do you have anything working?”

Alice relaxed, and shook his head ruefully. He gazed down the aisle. His eyes stopped on his chief communications officer, a chunky young woman. She was intently prying into the bowels of a teletype machine with a hairpin.

“Harpoon, you old sea dog, we’re patching things together with hairpins.” Alice paused and winked at the communications officer, too roguishly from one officer to another, too blithely for the circumstances. “Had to be some reason for letting women into the Air Force.”

Harpoon chuckled—his first laugh, half-laugh that it was, since 0600 Zulu. His crew was using everything available, too, amid curses and whistles of amazement at the damage a few high-energy pulses could do to the best communications equipment a technological society could produce—and had spent billions to protect. Slowly, very slowly, some of the gear was coming back. “Did you ever dream EMP could be this bad?” the admiral asked his Air Force counterpart.

“I dreamed a lot of things, Harpoon.”

“Yes.”

“You getting anything from the ground?”

“An Arkansas radio station. Some good hillbilly music.”

“Hmmph. We got Kansas. They’re still quoting cattle prices. Did you know on-the-hoof is down to seventy-one bucks a hundred?”

The phone seemed to go dead for a moment, cracks and pops mockingly interrupting the silence of the two men. Then Alice continued. “Crazy, isn’t it? It’s so random. We knew EMP would knock out damn near everything. It musta burned out every power grid in the country. I can’t even find a staff sergeant down there. But I get a goddamn cowboy quoting yesterday’s cattle prices…”

“A tape recording… an alternate generator… some warp in the effect…we didn’t expect to understand it.” Harpoon paused. “But there’s still a helluva lot of people alive down there….”

Alice suddenly banged a beefy hand down on the desk-console in front of him. “Not for long, dammit! Not if we can’t talk to anyone!” Alice thought he heard a sigh over the phone.

“Okay,” Harpoon said. “So what have you been able to do? Can you talk to the bombers?”

“You kidding? Maybe in an hour or so, using the ultra-low-frequency trailing wire. It’s the only thing that seems to be working halfway right. We haven’t exactly got an armada up there anyway.” Alice shook his head at the thought of the I number of B-52’s that had been caught on the ground. He 1 looked questioningly down the aisle at a major. The major nodded affirmatively. “We may have found an eye,” Alice said into the phone. “That’ll help.”

Far to the south of the Looking Glass, Harpoon thought a moment. So some of the camera satellites had survived. That would help. “What about refueling?” he asked.

“A few tankers got off. We had a handful of others up on training missions. We got through to them, and some ground stations, before the EMP explosions. Some of ’em will be able to rendezvous with the bombers. We had to use the by-guess-and-by-golly plan.” Alice swiveled in his seat and stared at a wall map of the Soviet Union. “And what the hell would you suggest I tell the bombers?” Alice asked tensely.

“I’m afraid that’s your job, Alice,” Harpoon said evenly.

The tension erupted. “The hell it is!” he shouted into the phone. “It’s the Commander-in-Chief’s job! And gettin’ him’s your job! What the hell are you doing? Taking the scenic route?”

“I have an appointment in sixty-plus minutes,” Harpoon replied emotionlessly.

“Sixty-fucking-plus minutes!”

“Alice,” Harpoon said, the first sign of irritation creeping into his voice, “the man was out in the boonies. We have people after him. I got the word the same time you did. They said it would take four hours. You want me to put this big bird down on that runway and wait? How long you think I’d last?” Harpoon paused, sympathetically, but for emphasis. “Then you could have the submarines and the bombers.”