Лю Цысинь - Supernova Era

“A conventional warhead is frightening enough. It’s a Minuteman III. Those were deployed in the 1980s, I think. They can carry three tons of conventional high-explosive warheads. If it lands within two hundred meters we’ll be destroyed!” Zavyalova said.

“And what if it lands right on our heads? We’d be dead even if it wasn’t carrying anything!” a colonel advisor said.

Zavyalova said, “It’s not out of the question. The Minuteman is one of the most accurate ICBMs there are. Hundred-meter precision.”

They heard a low wailing in the air, as if a keen blade were rending the sky in two. “It’s coming!” someone shouted, and everyone held their breath, skin crawling, waiting for the coming impact.

There was a dull thud outside and a gentle tremor in the ground. They poured outside and saw a shower of dirt falling back to the ground about half a kilometer away. Ilyukhin, Zavyalova, and the others jumped into vehicles and hurried over to it. A crowd of soldiers were digging into a crater with shovels, hoes, and a backhoe.

“The warhead apparently released a small drag chute at around ten thousand meters, so it didn’t burrow too deep,” an air force colonel said.

Half an hour later, the bottom part of the buried ICBM’s warhead was exposed, a metal sphere 2.3 meters in diameter with three scorches on the perimeter from blasting bolts. The children inserted a drill rod into a gap they found, and were able to pry apart the metal shell. In wonder they stared at the cornucopia of boxes, all shapes and sizes, lying in a dampening cushion. Then, very carefully, they opened one. Inside were small foil-wrapped objects containing lumps of a brown substance.

“Explosives!” warned one kid.

Zavyalova picked up one of the “explosives” and looked it over. She gave it a sniff, then bit a piece. “Chocolate,” she said.

They opened other boxes, which held not just chocolate but cigars as well. As the other kids were divvying up the chocolate, Ilyukhin took out a fat cigar and lit it, but he’d only taken a few puffs before it blew up in a ball of streamers, and the kids burst out laughing at him standing there stunned with a cigar butt hanging from his lips.

He spat out the cigar butt, and said, “Three days from now, it’ll be our turn to fire on the American kids’ command center.”

“I’ve got a bad premonition,” Specs said during a meeting in the Chinese command center.

“Agreed. We ought to move our command center immediately,” Lü Gang said.

“Is that really necessary?” Huahua asked.

“The American kids attacked the Russian command center in the ICBM game, violating the principle that bases were untouchable. Our base might be hit as a target, and that warhead might contain more than just chocolate and cigars.”

Specs said, “My premonition goes deeper than that. I’ve got a feeling there’s going to be a sudden change in the situation.”

Out the window of the command center, the first white of dawn had appeared on the horizon. The long Antarctic night was coming to an end.

From the desolate plains of northwestern Russia close to the Arctic Circle, a range-extended SS-25 Sickle whooshed into the air from a multifunction missile launcher and crossed the globe in the space of forty minutes. When it reached the sky over Antarctica, the warhead came down in a smooth parabola and hit a patch of snow inside the American base, just 280 meters from the command center. After the launch, American NMD and TMD fired six antiballistic missiles to intercept. The children watched on their screens in breathless anticipation as two glowing dots smacked almost exactly into each other. But each was a letdown, since the intercepting missiles’ suborbital trajectories through the atmosphere passed by each other separated by dozens of meters.

After a moment of shock, the American children went about digging out the warhead, and discovered that what the Russian children had rocketed to them from twenty thousand kilometers away was a copious amount of vodka in shock-resistant bottles, and a pretty box with a note saying it was a gift for Davey. Inside was a Russian doll, and inside that one another one, ten in all, each of them with an uncannily accurate representation of Davey’s face. The outermost was laughing, but farther in the expressions grew less happy and more worried, until the last thumb-sized one had Davey mouth open, bawling.

Enraged, Davey threw the dolls into the snow and seized General Scott with one hand and General Harvey, who was in charge of strategic missile defense, with the other. “You are both relieved of duty! You idiots. You guaranteed that NMD and TMD would work. You—” He broke off and turned to Scott. “Didn’t you say they put us into a strongbox? And you—” He turned to Harvey and shouted, “Where the hell were your prizewinning prodigies? Are they any better than a pack of online hackers?”

“Uh… all six tries only missed by a smidgen,” Scott said, red-faced.

Harvey, who hadn’t slept in three days, pushed Davey aside without regard for presidential dignity and shouted, “You’re the idiot! You think those two systems are there to play around with? The TMD software alone runs to nearly two hundred million lines of code!”

An advisor came over and handed Davey a printout. “This is from Mr. Yagüe. It’s the latest agenda for the Antarctic Talks.”

The children from US High Command stood silently at the edge of the giant crater with a warhead from the other side of the world down at the bottom. Davey was quiet for a moment, and then said, “We have to seize the absolute advantage in the games before negotiations begin.”

Vaughn said, “That’s impossible. The games are practically finished.”

“You know it’s possible. You’re just unwilling to take up that line of thought,” Davey said, jerking around to fix a stare on the secretary of state.

“Surely you don’t mean the new game?”

“That’s right. The new game. That’s exactly it. We should have started earlier!” Scott answered for Davey.

“There’s no way of knowing where it’ll take the Antarctic Games,” Vaughn said. He looked off in the distance, and the depths of his eyes reflected the white light of dawn on the horizon.

“You love to complicate the simplest things in order to show off your knowledge. Even an idiot can see that the new game will give us an absolute advantage throughout the continent, in one stroke. It’ll totally clear up the direction of the games.” Davey took the printout the advisor had just delivered and waved it in Vaughn’s face. “As clear-cut as this memo. There’s nothing that’s unknown about it!”

Vaughn reached out and took the paper from Davey’s hands. “You think this paper is cut-and-dry?”

Davey gave him a puzzled stare, and then looked at the paper. “Of course.”

With his withered hands, Vaughn folded the paper in half, and said, “That’s once.” Then he folded it again. “That’s twice.” Again. “Three times…. Now, Mr. President, do you find this clear-cut? Something easy and predictable?”

“Of course.”

“Well then, I dare you to fold it thirty-five times.” Vaughn held up the thrice-folded printout.

“I don’t get it.”

“Answer me. Do you dare?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Davey went to take the paper from him, but Vaughn caught his hand. At the cold, clammy touch, he felt like a snake was crawling across his back.

“Mr. President, you’re speaking as the supreme decision maker, and every one of your decisions will make history. Think it over again. Do you really dare?”

Davey stared at him in utter confusion.

“You have one last chance. Before you make your decision, wouldn’t you like to predict the outcome, just like you’ve predicted the outcome of the new game?”