John Barnes - Mother of Storms

He lets his arm slide a little farther into her back, and, amazingly, she leans into it and brushes his face with that marvelous hair, her warm sweet breath on his neck. “This is so stupid, Jesse. Half of these people don’t want to hear Abdulkashim and are cheering for UNIC, half of them do and are cheering for Abdulkashim. How are they going to get a sense of the meeting if they don’t at least start trying to want the same things?”

“They didn’t come here for a meeting,” Jesse reminds her. “They’re here to catch the news or see the bombs go off or because they saw the crowd on their way back from dinner, or something.”

She gives him the little smile that always reminds him how unplugged he was before she got into his life. “But what matters is they’re here and they’re talking to each other. So it’s a meeting—but no one is seeking unity.”

The babble of voices in the PolAc Room rises rapidly and then dies, leaving only a faint ring in the air; it looks like the sense of the meeting is that they want to hear whatever is on. It looks like UNIC has given up. There’s a clear image of Abdulkashim, and the flattened translator voice comes through: “—completely unprovoked and utterly outside the Charter or the Second Covenant to issue such threats to a free, sovereign, and independent state, let alone to claim to be carrying out such actions against military installations whose existence is wholly unproven—”

The image flickers and vanishes. Pandemonium breaks loose. Jesse hears the telltale thud of punches or kicks connecting.

There are not very many pro-Siberian students here at U of the Az, since the Siberian quarrel is with the Alaska Free State and a lot of people still feel sentimental about the fact that the Ak was once an American state.

The big quarrel is between the uniters, who back whatever the SecGen does, and the nationalists, who wish the United States had gotten into it directly—the sort of people who complain about “President Grandma,” as if Hardshaw could fart into her own sofa cushions without UN permission these days.

Then there’s an isolated handful booing because they oppose all censorship, there’s six or seven people who really are pro-Siberian, and probably a few guys who just showed up for a fight. In Jesse’s small-town redneck opinion, it is about to get rough around here, and he’d just as soon Naomi was out of it before anyone sets in to real asskicking.

He also knows perfectly well that she won’t believe him or take any steps for self-protection. She’s a second-generation Deeper, and “we aren’t raised that way, we’re gentle in our anger,” she has said to him many times. He’s never had the nerve to say that he wasn’t raised that way and knows what a fist or foot does on flesh.

There’s another shriek of everyone hurrying to finish whatever they were trying to say. It cuts off instantly when Rivera, the SecGen, a handsome young guy from the Dominican Republic, appears on the screen.

Rivera has that serious expression everyone has seen so many times these past few years—it’s bad news and he’s counting on you to be calm.

Like most Deepers, Naomi is a uniter, so she cheers along with that side, and Jesse cheers because he’s with her. Besides, Rivera has a way of making you trust him, and Abdulkashim could play Stalin without makeup.

It seems as if Rivera is waiting for quiet in the Student Union, but crowds calm down about the same speed anywhere in the world, Jesse supposes, so possibly the SecGen is in front of another crowd, somewhere else. More likely, knowing that about half of the world still has to share screens in public places, there is a crowd simulator coming in through his earphone to let him know.

Just as it becomes possible to hear, Rivera begins, “My friends and citizens of our planet… it is with a sad heart I tell you that tonight the United Nations is forced, for the eighth time, to intervene militarily to preserve and enforce Article Fourteen of its Second Covenant. I quote it to you in full: ‘No nation, whether or not signatory to this covenant, which did not possess and declare itself to be in possession of explosive weapons yielding more than one trillion ergs per gram delivered whether of any current or not yet invented type, by the first minute of June 1, 2008, GMT, shall be permitted to manufacture, possess, purchase, transfer or in any way exercise direct or indirect control over the detonation of such weapons. The Secretary-General shall have power at his sole discretion to enforce this article.’

“Now, for ten years since the Alaska Free State peacefully separated from the United States, the Siberian Commonwealth has pursued a claim to Alaska based on alleged treaty irregularities in the agreements between the United States and the former Russian Empire. These claims have been found—in four different international fora—to be wholly without merit.

“Not only has the present Siberian regime reiterated and pressed these claims, it has also pursued an annexation of Alaska by covert violence and overt threat.”

The screen flashes once, and shadowy shapes, too regular to be natural, show as dark blue on light blue. There are a dozen or so, all roughly proportioned like a pencil, with one end flared like the head of a flashlight and the other rounded and snub. Rivera explains. “Six clusters like this one have been located on the seabed of the Arctic Ocean. These are suppressed trajectory missiles, made by MitsDoug Defense, but microsensors dropped close to them have revealed two critical modifications, both in violation of arms-control agreements. First of all, the range has been extended tremendously by fitting a MitsDoug Cobra air-to-surface missile as a second stage, inside the warhead compartment. Secondly, the Cobra stage has been fitted with a laser-ignited fusion warhead, with a yield far in excess of what is permitted by Article Fourteen.

“We have also established through Open Data agreements that these weapons do not belong to any power permitted to own them under the Covenant. In any case they lie outside any national territory and are thus de facto illegal under Article Seventeen of the Second UN Covenant.

“Their positioning within a two-minute flight of Denali, and my description of past bad relations between Alaska and Siberia, should be placed in this context: earlier this evening I notified all three hundred and twenty-four signatory and nonsignatory nations that the UN Space Operations Office would destroy those missiles at the first sign of launch, or at 0830 GMT, whichever came first. I have received the explicit assent of two hundred and eighty-four nations, and no response from the others—except for the Siberian Commonwealth, which has lodged a strong protest at what President Abdulkashim calls a hasty and unwarranted action.

“This screen is displaying a brief report from General Jamil of UNSOO, showing target configuration before strike. At exactly 0830 GMT, a flight of twenty-five UNSOO space planes fired over one hundred missiles into impact trajectories for those sites. The missiles penetrated the Arctic ice, and delivered antineutron-beryllium warheads—or ‘cram bombs’—onto the sites you see here.”

Jesse would love to know how anything can go through hundreds of meters of ice at Mach 20 and still come out working on the other side, but he’d have to work for UNSOO a long time before they told him that. If you can trust Scuttlebytes , then maybe each warhead puts out a thin mist of antiprotons from its nose that then flows back around it, but you can’t trust Scuttlebytes much more than you can the Famous People Channel. Look at how many times in the last twelve years Scuttlebytes has claimed to finally know who set off the Flash.