Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

Abdi glanced at Bisesa and Emeline, and shrugged. “Where would you like me to begin?”

“Tell me about his armies. And his navies, too. Does he have steamships yet? How soon before he can cross the Atlantic in force?…”

With Rice’s attention occupied by Abdi, Bisesa murmured to her phone again. “What do you think?”

“I need to get to work transferring all this data back to Mars. It will take a long time.”

“But?”

“But I have a feeling, Bisesa, that this is why you were summoned to Mars.”

June 2070

“Since coming through the A-line we aren’t alone with Q any more, Mum. There’s a regular flotilla escorting the thing now, like a navy flag day, all the rock miners and bubble-dwellers coming out to see the beast as it passes. It’s kind of strange for us. After a cruise of fourteen months, we’ve got all this company. But they don’t know we’re here. The Liberator is staying inside her stealth shroud, and there are a couple other navy tubs out here, keeping the sight-seers at a good distance and coordinating the latest assault on Q…”

“Bella,” Thales said softly.

“Pause.” Edna’s talking head froze, a tiny holographic bust suspended over the surface of Bella’s desk. “Can’t it wait, Thales?”

“Cassie Duflot is here.”

“Oh, crap.” Wife of dead hero space-worker, and professional pain in the backside.

“You did ask me to inform you as soon as she arrived.”

“I did.”

The message from Edna was still coming in. Bella was a mother as well as a politician; she had rights too. “Ask her to wait.”

“Of course, Bella.”

“And Thales, while she’s waiting, don’t let her mail, record, comment, blog, explore, analyze, or speculate. Give her coffee and distract her.”

“I understand, Bella. Incidentally—”

“Yes?”

“It’s little more than an hour to the principal strike. The Big Whack. Or rather until the report reaches us.”

She didn’t need reminding of that. The Big Whack, mankind’s last hope against the Q-bomb — and perhaps the end of her daughter’s life. “Okay, Thales, thank you, I’m on it. Resume.”

Edna’s frozen image came alive again.

Edna’s voice, having spent twenty-four minutes crawling across the plane of the solar system, sounded strongly in Bella’s Mount Weather office. And Thales smoothly produced pictures to match the words, images captured by a variety of ships and monitors.

There was the Q-bomb, a ghostly droplet of smeared starlight, hovering over Bella’s desk. It was passing through the asteroid belt right now — the navy’s A-line — and she was shown a distant sprinkling of rocks, magnified and brightened for her benefit. There was something awesome about the image; six years almost to the day since the object had first been spotted swimming past Saturn’s moons, here it was among the asteroids, home to a branch of mankind. The Q-bomb was here, in human space. And in just six more months — at Christmas time in this year of 2070—the Q-bomb was destined to make its rendezvous with Earth itself.

But the bomb’s passage through the belt gave one more chance for an assault.

Edna was talking about the attempts so far. Thales showed images of nuclear weapons blossoming against the bomb’s impassive surface, and ships, manned and robotic, deploying energy weapons, particle beams, and lasers, even a stream of rocks thrown from a major asteroid fitted with a mass driver, an electromagnetic cata-pult.

“Pea shooters against an elephant,” Edna commented. “Except it isn’t quite. Every time we hit that thing it loses a little mass-energy, a loss in proportion to what we throw at it. Just a flea-bite each time, but it’s non-zero. Lyla Neal has been doing some modeling of this; Professor Carel will brief you. In fact we hope one outcome of the Big Whack, assuming we don’t knock the thing off its rails altogether, is to confirm Lyla’s modeling, with a data point orders of magnitude away from what we’ve been able to deploy so far.

Anyhow we’ll find out soon.

“As for the cannonball, the tractor is doing its job so far. All systems are nominal, and the cannonball’s deflection is matching the predictions…” In her quiet, professional voice, Edna summarized the status of the weapon.

When she was done, she smiled. Despite her peaked cap, she looked heartbreakingly young.

“I’m doing fine in myself. After more than a year aboard this tub I need some fresh air, or fresher anyhow. And under a dictio-nary definition of ‘stir crazy’ you could write down ‘John Metternes.’ But at least we haven’t killed each other yet. And if you look at this cruise as an extended shakedown of the Liberator she’s performed fine. I think we have a good new technology here, Mum.

Not that that’s much consolation if we fail to deflect Q, I guess; we’ll all be in deep yogurt then.

“The other crews are doing fine too. I guess this is an operational test for the navy itself. A few veterans of the old wet navy say they feel out of place on board ships where even the rawest nugget has passed out of the USNPG.” That was the U.S. Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey. “Right now, while we’re waiting for the drama to begin, there’s a sort of open-loop church service going on. Those who choose to are saying their prayers to Our Lady of Loreto, the patron saint of aviators.

“As for the Spacers, they are cooperating, mostly, with the cordon and other measures. But we’re ready to take whatever action you see fit for us to take, Mum.

“Sixty minutes to showtime. I’ll speak to you after the Whack, Mum. Love you. Liberator out.”

Bella had time for only a short reply, for it would reach Edna with only minutes left before the strike. “I love you too,” she said.

“And I know you’ll do your duty, as you always do.” She was hor-ribly aware that these might be the last words she ever spoke to Edna, and that in the next hour she might lose her only daughter, as poor, angry Cassie Duflot, waiting outside, had already lost her husband. But she could think of nothing else to add. “Bella out.

Thales, close this down.”

The holographic display popped out of existence, leaving a bare desk, with only a chronometer counting down to the time of the Big Whack assault, and the still more important moment when news of it would reach the Earth.

Bella composed herself. “Show Cassie in.”

Somehow Bella had expected Cassie Duflot to show up in black, as when Bella had last met her when she had handed over her husband’s Tooke medal: still in widow’s weeds, after all this time. But Cassie wore a suit of a bright lilac color, attractive and practical.

And nor, Bella reminded herself, was Cassie going to be sunk in grief as she had been during that visit. It would be easy to under-estimate her.

“It’s good of you to see me,” Cassie said formally, shaking Bella’s hand.

“I’m not sure if I had much choice,” Bella said. “You’ve been making quite a splash since we last met.”

Cassie smiled, a cold expression almost like a politician’s. “I didn’t mean to make any kind of ‘splash,’ or to cause anybody any trouble. All I am is the widow of a navy engineer, who started asking questions about how and why her husband had died.”

“And you didn’t get good enough answers, right? Coffee?”

Bella went to the percolator herself. She used the interval to size up her opponent, for that was how she had to think of Cassie Duflot.

Cassie was a young woman, and a young mother, and a widow; that gave her an immediately sympathetic angle to snag the public’s attention. But Cassie also worked in the public relations department of Thule, Inc., one of the world’s great eco-conservation agencies, specializing in post-sunstorm reconstruction in the Canadian Arctic. Not only that, her mother-in-law, Phillippa, had moved in senior circles in London before the sunstorm, and had no doubt kept up a web of contacts since. Cassie knew how to use the media.