Joe Haldeman: Worlds

What they didn’t have a game plan for was the case where the man ultimately in charge of personnel allocation, a four-star general in the Pentagon, happened to be on the other side. Thus whole regiments, even divisions, were composed entirely of 3R members. They were all dispersed—“night maneuvers”—when the revolution started.

There were also game plans, of course, for retaliation. You could push a button and wipe out Cuba, or France, or the entire Supreme Socialist Union. A short-tempered and prejudiced man, who could only have been overruled by people who were vaporized by the Washington bomb, pushed the button for Worlds.

Nearly two hundred missiles leaped from the sea toward forty-one targets in various orbits. It was bloody murder.

The killer missiles were not nuclear. They were in essence giant shotgun shells, each blasting tonnes of metal shrapnel in east-to-west orbits calculated to intercept each World’s orbit as the World rolled west to east, the shrapnel impacting with meteoric velocity.

The missiles were rather old, dating back to the 2035 SALT XI agreement. But they had been scrupulously maintained, and most of them did their job well.

Most of the smaller Worlds, such as Von Braun and the twins Mazeltov/B’ism’illah Ma’sha’llah, were instantly and utterly destroyed. Devon’s World had a huge chunk torn out of its side, and the ninety percent of the population who were not at that time inside the hub or spokes all died of explosive decompression.

Some of the Worlds had up to thirty minutes’ warning. Three quarters of Tsiolkovski’s population survived, since it was made up of a series of airtight compartments: they’d had enough time to calculate the direction from which the brutal salvo would come and move nearly everyone to the other side. Uchūden braced itself for death, but the cloud of metal missed it by hundreds of kilometers. The nimble Worlds Galileo, OAO, and Bellcom Four were able to dodge in time.

Only one person died in New New York: a shotgun can’t do much against a mountain. A few scraps of metal smashed through the observation dome, and one of them killed a janitor. Air loss was insignificant.

But the fifty missiles aimed at New New York hadn’t been intended to penetrate the hollow rock. What they did do was reduce most of the solar panels to ribbons and disable the heat-exchange mechanism. If it couldn’t be repaired, a quarter of a million people would cook.

It took only three days to fix, though, and the loss of the surface solar panels was no problem. The powersat that had serviced the Eastern Seaboard hadn’t been a target, and it was easily pressed into service.

In the Worlds, fourteen thousand people had died in the first hour. Another five thousand would the over the weeks to follow, because New New was the only large World with its life support systems intact Shuttles brought a constant stream of refugees from Tsiolkovski and Devon’s World, but there were only so many shuttles and they could only move so fast.

Nineteen thousand dead is not a large number in historical context Three times that number died in the first hours of the battle of the Somme, for a scant kilometer of worthless mud; fifty times as many in the battle for the possession of Stalingrad; 2500 times as many during World War II. But the Decimation, as it came to be called, would be more important historically than any of these affairs.

It was not a “catalyst,” for a catalyst emerges from reaction unchanged.

It was not a “pivot,” because the forces had already been in motion for a long time.

It was an excuse.

We made it to Florida, barely. A red FAILSAFE ENGAGED light blinked on and we descended rapidly toward a soft-looking pasture. Jeff steered us past a red barn and silo.

“We’re a little north of Gainesville,” he said. “If we can find a vehicle, we can get to the Cape in a day or two.”

We landed hard. Before I could draw a new breath, Jeff had slid the canopy back, grabbed a weapon from behind the seat, and vaulted out “Get out quick,” he said.

It took me a while to untangle myself from the safety net, and then I just sort of dropped over the edge, lacking commando spirit. It was hard to feel too threatened with the dawn reflecting prettily off the dewy grass, birds cooing, clean country smells.

Jeff was peering over the floater’s stern, looking at a farmhouse about fifty meters away. “Wonder if—”

There was a loud gunshot and, at the same time, the fading whine of a bullet that must have bounced off the floater. I cringed down.

“Not smart!” Jeff shouted. Another shot; no ricochet Jeff aimed toward a tree (curious bell-shaped foliage) and a laser blast stabbed out. The middle of the tree burst into flame.

“That happens to your barn in five seconds,” he shouted,

“and then the silo, and then the house. Come out with your hands over your heads.”

“What the hell do you want?” The shout cracked on “hell.”

“Don’t you worry about what I want,” Jeff said. He fired again and a haystack burst into flame. “Worry about what I’ve got!”

A white-haired man came out of the farmhouse door, followed by two younger men and a young woman. They stood on the porch with their hands in the air.

“Come on up to the floater,” Jeff shouted. “We won’t hurt you.” He made a patting motion to me. “Stay down,” he whispered.

They walked up the incline toward us, having a little trouble on the slippery grass. Jeff didn’t move. When they were in front of us, he said, “Put your hands down. Move together, shoulder-to-shoulder. Now shuffle to the left… there.” They formed a human shield between him and the farmhouse.

He stood up and handed the laser rifle over to me. “Stay down, O’Hara. If there’s a shot, burn everything.” I wasn’t even sure which button to push. Jeff stepped around the end of the floater.

“I have to assume you left someone back there,” he said, drawing the hand laser from its holster. “He better not peep. You want to go back and tell him that?” He kept the laser pointed at the ground.

The farmer stared at Jeff steadily, maliciously. “Ain’t no one down there. We all there is.”

“Sure.” Jeff leaned back against the floater. “This is government business. If you cooperate with us, we’ll forget those two shots. Understandable, the way things are.”

“The way things are” the farmer said, still staring, “is that we got no guv’ments, or maybe two. Which one might you be from?”

“The legitimate one.” He showed his badge. “I’m a field agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

He laughed. “That don’t mean shit. It was you and those goddamn spacers got us into this.”

“Not true. Richard Conklin’s a traitor, but most of the FBI is loyal. We’re trying to straighten things out We need help.”

The man kept looking at him, silently but not as maliciously. “Look at it this way,” Jeff said. “If we’d meant to do you harm, you never would’ve got out the first shot. You’d be roast meat by now, if that’s what we wanted. Isn’t that true?’

That’s right, Pop,” the young woman said.

“You shut up,” the fanner said mildly. “What kind of help is it you want?”

“Food, water, and transportation. We can pay.”

“What we hear on the cube, your dollar ain’t worth bum fodder. Food’s worth plenty.”

“We can pay in gold.”

“Gold.” The farmer took a step forward.

“ Get back.” Jeff raised the weapon halfway.

“Sorry. Just wanted to look at your machine. Never seen a Mercedes before.”

“It’s a special police model. Got us all the way from Denver on fuel cells.”