S. Stirling - Shadows of Falling Night

The children had taken theirs off to their bedroom to watch the third Ender movie. It was all eerily calm, considering the business and the risk that they might all get vaporized in the next day or two. Though she supposed that getting excited wouldn’t help.

Adrian prodded at the map with a finger. “Harvey carefully gave Farmer and Guha no idea of precisely where he planned to put it, but it must be reasonably close. Within miles, not tens of miles.”

“Does it have to be close?” Cheba said. “It is a nuclear bomb !”

“Okay, thing is, nukes aren’t magic,” Eric said, hunched over the map, tracing distances with a piece of string and a pencil.

“Which is a change from dealing with Shadowspawn,” Peter said. Then he raised a hand to Adrian: “Yes, I know the Power isn’t magic. But it feels like magic. You talk to water in a special language and it flows uphill.”

“Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, who gives a fuck if it’s not a duck?” Eric agreed. “Back to nukes. I did a course on the effects of nukes when I made sergeant, it’s sort of academic now but you still do it, Cold War hangover I guess. They’re real powerful explosives and the radiation’s bad news, but guys have survived within less than two miles of a fusion bomb’s ground zero just by sitting in a slit trench. And that’s a multi-megatonner we’re talking about, one of those big mothers they made in the 50s. Forty times the size of the plutonium job we’re facing, or more.”

Peter nodded. “Eric’s right.”

Cheba looked a little dubious; Ellen felt that way, she’d always thought of nuclear weapons as a one-per-city apocalypse, but between them the two men didn’t make mistakes about that sort of thing. Peter went on:

“I’m not an expert, but I studied the effects a bit at Los Alamos-you really can’t avoid it there unless you do that deliberately, like Victorians hoping sex would go away if they didn’t talk about it. Earth or stone stops the immediate pulse of radiation pretty quickly. Then there’s the blast, overpressure and shock waves and the flash heat. The flash heat can vaporize you close up or give you bad burns quite a ways away, but any solid barrier will give you a high degree of protection.”

“You don’t want to be underneath the fallout plume either,” Eric pointed out. “That’s a longer-term problem, though. Short form, you’re close, you’re toast. It’ll kill you with the blast wave, or get you with the radiation, or fry you to a fajita, or pulverize you with high-velocity bits of everything, or you get caught in a firestorm when the buildings go up. But even a little farther away, and some pretty basic protection can get you through, though it’s a good idea to keep upwind and run fast.”

“Harvey will take no chances. This is his one opportunity,” Adrian said.

Eric nodded: “So if you want to be sure…with a twenty-five-k bomb, put it no more than a mile away, and even then not with any terrain features in between.”

“Shadowspawn are more vulnerable to the radiation, aren’t they?” Ellen said. “I’ve heard you say that.”

Adrian tapped his fingers together, leaning back in the chair. “Yes. Especially the aetheric body, nightwalking or post-corporeal. About…roughly, about as vulnerable as unshielded electronics are to EMP. That is not the mechanism, you understand, but the effect, in range and so forth, is about the same.”

Peter nodded. “I think the actual mechanism that randomizes things is-”

He started to lapse into mathematics, then stopped as everyone groaned. Adrian smiled slightly as he went on:

“It tracks very closely. The Council did some experiments…using Shadowspawn under sentence of death…in the 1950s, around the Soviet nuclear tests. It was simpler to hide in the middle of a continent, and the Soviet government made secrecy easy, with the Council in control.”

“I’ll bet,” Peter said. “The Soviets used to set off nuclear tests upwind of cities like Semipalatinsk to see what fallout did to civilians, and that was without evil sorcerers sticking the Power in. So the effect on aetheric bodies is like EMP?”

“Closely similar.”

“Ah,” Eric and Peter said together. “After you, professor,” Eric went on.

“Okay, that limits it too,” Peter said. “EMP is short-range when the explosion is low-altitude.”

He went into details that flowed over Ellen’s head; Adrian apparently had the same problem:

“Just the results, Peter.”

“Ah…three miles maximum. Less if there’s a building in the way. Really, the EMP for a ground burst is about the same radius as the blast effects.”

“That simplifies matters a little,” Adrian said. “And Shadowspawn who are corporeal are only slightly more vulnerable to radiation than normal humans, but they could not escape in aetheric form if they feared a nuclear weapon had gone off nearby. So it will be close, to kill the corporeals with blast and heat and the post-corporeals with the gamma radiation. Not more than half a mile from the Rustaveli Theatre, I would say.”

“And we know the target is this Rustaveli place?” Eric said, tapping a pencil on the little cultural landmark symbol.

“Rustaveli National Theater, yes. That is the only location where all the adepts will ever be in one place. You understand, Shadowspawn do not like being concentrated so, it makes our prescience much less effective. Think of it as being in a dark room with plugs in your ears, a lot of background noise and a large group of your worst enemies. They will keep it to a minimum. There need be little debate; the fix is in .”

“So a mile around here ,” Eric said, tapping the spot on Rustaveli Avenue…which was right in Tbilisi’s historic downtown. “Above ground location…top floor, if possible. But the thing weighs what, a hair under two tons? Bulky, hard to handle on your own.”

“If that bomb goes off there, a hundred thousand humans will die, minimum,” Adrian said grimly.

“Yeah, it’s bad,” Eric said. “The way the hills surround that area, that’ll focus it. Whooosh!”

He made a welling-up gesture. Ellen winced. She didn’t like the clinical way he was talking about it…but it wasn’t that he didn’t care. It was a technical area he knew something about, the way she did the evolution of perspective, and that was how he discussed it.

“I thought you said there were simple ways to protect yourself?” she said.

He shrugged his thick shoulders. “Simple if you know ’em and you’ve got the stuff you need and you’ve got warning. If you don’t, you die. Or if you’re just too damned close. That’s right in a city center. Lots of people just too damned close.”

“And we’ve got too many places to look,” Peter said, peering at the map and then dancing his fingers across his tablet. “I mean, jeez, look at the number of buildings!”

Adrian shook his head. “If the bomb were not shielded…but then, it wouldn’t be here.”

He frowned. “Let us first eliminate the obviously unlikely ones. Then…I think you should search, and I will try a search for the right people . Harvey is very skilled, but lacks the raw power to compel large numbers to forget. He cannot take the bomb with him when he deals with them, and must be outside its influence. He can hide himself, but not the ripple effects of his interactions. Someone may notice something.”

“Yeah, there are a couple of angles. Like, construction companies-did anyone rent a crane last day or two? Pain in the ass investigating without knowing the local language, but I can try.”

“Me?” Cheba said.

“I need you to guard the children,” Adrian said.