Europa Strike(35)
Rena no longer heard the words, but stared in numb fascination at the grainy images of a star field, fuzzy and indistinct…at the brief pulse of light, a new star that appeared briefly in the scene and then faded away…then repeated with a second, much brighter pulse at the same spot. The announcer was talking about radiation, about the high gamma component in the EM spectrum of the flashes that indicated that both explosions had probably involved matter-antimatter annihilation, and that the Kennedy was an A-M cruiser.
“Cissie…” Kam said, and there was a flutter in her voice. “Robbie’s on the Kennedy!”
“I know, I know, Kam. But we don’t know anything yet. You heard them. These reports are unconfirmed. Right now, they’re just guessing.”
Alan sat slumped on the floor, glassy-eyed, almost unresponsive. Kam took a couple of shy steps closer, then grabbed hold of Rena’s legs, trembling. Rena sat down and let the child snuggle closer into her arms. Both of the kids adored their older brother. Oh, gods…why? Why this?
“Screen off,” she said. When both faces turned and looked up at her, she added, “They’re just repeating the same stuff over and over, now. They don’t know anything.”
“I’d like to keep watching, Rena,” Alan said. “Please? My brother’s out there.”
“Kammie?” she asked. “Do you want to keep watching?”
The girl shook her head, clinging tighter.
“Okay, Alan. Go ahead. Kam and I are going to go make a couple of vid calls. You tell us if they report anything new.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her PAD was in the other room. She could call General Lee from there, and then call Kaitlin in California, unless he wanted to do that himself. Her first duty, though, was to be with the kids, make sure they rode through this all right.
Oh, gods, oh, Gaea, oh, ancient starfaring An, not Robbie!
Suborbital Shuttle, Flight 217
En route, LAX to Dulles
60 km over Colorado
2025 hours MDT
(0225 hours Zulu, 13 October)
Kaitlin leaned back in her seat and tried, desperately, to think. The last three hours were a near-total blur, a whirlwind of voices and images now fragmented in a chaos of broken memories, some recent, some old. Her thoughts kept slipping back to that spectacular graduation ceremony at Marine OCS at Quantico four years ago. There’d been three generations of Marine officers there that day: her dad, a retired colonel; Rob, a general, and Kaitlin, a colonel; and Rob, Jr., the newly commissioned Marine second lieutenant, looking so very smart in his Class As. The party had gone on all night. There’d been so much talk, so much toasting, of the all-Marine family, of the Corps heritage…semper fi!
Of course, all of them had known that the more of them who were in the Corps, the more likely it was that sooner or later something like this would happen. A career in the Marine Corps was not as safe or as predictable as, say, life as a journalist, or a databroker, or a simware designer. But why, dear God, did it have to be Robbie?
Pull yourself together, Marine! She told herself harshly. Order your thoughts! Dad, Rob, and Robbie all would have you centered on the hatch for gear adrift in your head!
The call from Rob at the Marine Space Training Command had come through at 1350 hours, California time, while she was working on regimental requisitions, of all goddamned mundane things. The next call had been from Rena, at home, to tell her that the kids knew and were okay…and the next one after that had been General Talbot, her CO at V-berg.
Very little was known. As usual, Triple-N had known more, sooner, than any of the government agencies, sooner even than Navy Intelligence, and had hit the Net with the story before the president had even been informed that there was a problem. She’d heard that for the past seventy-some years, the president, the CIA, and several other defense intelligence agencies all maintained staffs watching the network news services full time and monitoring their broadcasts, simply because they were more efficient than any government service.
All General Talbot had been able to add was that contact with the Kennedy had been lost at 2035 hours, Zulu, and that the speed-of-light time delay from the Kennedy’s position, 4.2 a.u.s out, meant she’d gone missing at 2007 hours Zulu. There was also the possibility—Talbot had called it a likely possibility—that the Kennedy had been deliberately attacked. The fact that two explosions had been seen suggested that it wasn’t, as Triple-N was suggesting, an accident with her on-board A-M reserves, but that she’d either been hit by two A-M missiles, or she’d been hit by one missile which had triggered an onboard explosion an instant later.