Лю Цысинь - Of Ants and Dinosaurs

But Professor Joya was having none of it. ‘If we follow the supreme consul’s plan, Earth is doomed,’ she said.

The ants turned to stare at her, incomprehension on every face.

‘This concerns the command-loss timers mentioned by Dodomi and Dadaeus in the recording,’ Joya said. ‘In the beginning, the two dinosaur powers controlled Leviathan and Luna exactly as we’d expect. Signal stations on their own soil were kept on standby, the idea being that the moment one country was attacked, a remote-control signal would go out from the victim’s station, detonating the antimatter in the attacker’s harbour. But both sides soon realised that there was a flaw in this system. Let us consider this hypothetical scenario: Laurasia suddenly launches a conventional nuclear strike against Gondwana – I use the term “conventional” advisedly, as that is what nuclear weapons are nowadays. With lightning speed, the Laurasians bring overwhelming force to bear on the entirety of Gondwana’s territory, with Gondwana’s command-and-control sites particularly hard hit. Before Gondwana can respond, it sinks into a state of paralysis much like the state it finds itself in now. It cannot detonate Leviathan. Furthermore, Laurasia will have anyway taken certain measures to prevent the detonation signal from ever reaching Leviathan – with strong jamming, for instance – thereby increasing the republic’s chance of victory.

‘To stop this sort of pre-emptive-attack scenario from becoming a reality, the two dinosaur powers, almost simultaneously, put Leviathan and Luna into a new standby mode. This was the so-called command-loss timer. From then on, the two signal stations would no longer transmit a detonation command to the antimatter containment vessel. They would do the opposite. The command they now transmitted stopped the vessel from detonating. Each vessel was set to permanently count down to detonation, and only when it received the interrupt signal from its own side would it interrupt the current countdown and start over, until it received the next interrupt signal. And so on. Those interrupt signals were sent in person by the Laurasian president and the Gondwanan emperor. That way, if either side were to be crippled by a pre-emptive strike, the interrupt signal would not be sent, and the container vessel would detonate the antimatter. This standby mode made a pre-emptive strike tantamount to suicide, as the enemy’s continued existence was now a prerequisite for each country’s own survival. The significant drawback, of course, was that this placed the Earth in greater danger than ever. The command-loss timer is the maddest – or in the supreme consul’s words, the most depraved – deterrence strategy ever conceived.’

A suffocating quiet blanketed the room until eventually Kachika responded. There was an unsteady fluctuation in the intensity of her pheromones. ‘In other words, Leviathan and Luna are standing by for the next interrupt signal right now?’

Joya dipped her antennae. ‘Two signals that may never come.’

‘Meaning that the signal stations in Gondwana and Laurasia have already been destroyed by our mine-grains?’ said Jolie.

‘Indeed. Emperor Dadaeus told me the locations of both the Gondwanan station and the Laurasian station. After I returned, I searched for them in the Operation Disconnect database. Because their purpose was unclear to us, we planted only a small number of mines in their communications equipment. Thirty-five mine-grains in the Gondwanan signal station, thirty-six in the Laurasian station, severing a total of seventy-one wires. That number might seem low, but it was enough to completely disable the signal-transmission equipment in both stations.’

‘How long is each countdown?’

‘Sixty-six hours, or about three days. Both the Laurasian and Gondwanan countdown timers begin nearly simultaneously, and the interrupt signal is usually sent about twenty-two hours after the countdown starts. The current countdown started twenty hours ago. We still have two days.’

‘Why is the countdown so long?’ asked Kachika. ‘Surely one or two hours would have been more sensible. In this set-up, if one side launched a crippling strike as soon as the other side reset its timer, they would still have almost three days to dispose of the other antimatter containment vessel by sending it back into space.’

‘The containment vessels and the ships which house them are inextricably linked,’ said Joya. ‘Any attempt to separate the two would result in the shutdown of the confining magnetic field and the detonation of the antimatter. Perhaps with concerted effort over an extended period the vessel could be safely detached from the ship and launched back into space, but two or three days would not be sufficient. Dadaeus did talk to me about the time-lag. Mad as the dinosaurs were, in this matter it seems they were uncharacteristically careful. They designed the countdown so that, in the event of something unforeseen and relatively innocuous preventing the sending of the signal, there would be time to deal with the situation. They were primarily concerned about sabotage by ants, apparently. With due cause, of course.’

‘If we knew the exact content of the interrupt signals, we could build our own transmitter and continually reset Leviathan and Luna’s countdowns.’

‘The problem is that we don’t have that information, and we have no way of finding it out. The dinosaurs did not advise me of the signals’ contents, only that they were long, complicated passwords that changed every time they were sent. The passwords’ algorithms were stored in the signal stations’ computers. I doubt any dinosaur alive knows them.’

‘So the signals can only be sent by the signal stations?’

‘I presume so.’

Kachika’s decision came swiftly. ‘Then we must repair the stations as quickly as possible.’

The station responsible for the transmission of the Gond­wanan Empire’s interrupt signal was located on a barren tract of land on the outskirts of Boulder City. It was a small building with a tangled array of antennae on the roof and looked no more arresting than a weather station.

Security at the station was lax. It was guarded by just one platoon of dinosaurs and they were there mainly to pre­vent the occasional Gondwanan citizen from inadvertently wandering too close. Enemy spies and saboteurs barely figured on their list of concerns. In fact, Laurasia was more interested in the safety measures at the station than Gondwana was; they had lodged numerous protests with Gondwana, demanding that security be tightened. Other than the guards, just five dinosaurs were responsible for the day-to-day running of the station: one engineer, three operators and one maintenance technician. Like the guards, they had no idea as to the station’s purpose.

In the station’s control room was a large screen displaying a sixty-six-hour countdown. The countdown had never passed the forty-four-hour mark. Every time it reached that point (typically in the morning), the image of Emperor Dadaeus would pop up on another blank screen. The emperor only ever uttered one short sentence:

‘I command that the signal be sent.’

The operator on duty would stand to attention and answer, ‘Yes, Your Majesty!’ Then he would move the mouse at his terminal and click once on the ‘Transmit’ button on the computer screen. As soon as he did that, the large screen would display the following information:

– INTERRUPT SIGNAL SENT

– INTERRUPT SUCCESS RETURN SIGNAL RECEIVED

– COUNTDOWN RESET