“So, what now, Gunny?” Papaloupoulis called.
“We wait, Marines,” Yates growled in reply. “We wait for the word.”
As far as Kaminski was concerned, the waiting was always the hardest part.
US Joint Chiefs’ Command/
Control Bunker, Arlington,
Virginia
0610 hours GMT (0110 hours
EDT)
The place was a fortress, hollowed out of bedrock two hundred meters beneath the maze of offices and corridors still called the Pentagon, despite changes to its architecture and geometry over the years. Though called the Bunker by the thousands of personnel, military and civilian, who worked there, it was more of a city than a refuge, a very comfortable and high-tech fortress with cool air, pleasant background music, and the latest in AI neural-link processing to link the place with the World Above.
In two years of war, there’d been frequent calls to abandon this site, so close to the vulnerable and tempting target just across the river that was the nation’s capital, but even in the early months of the war, when the continental United States had come under sustained and brutal cruise-missile bombardment, those calls had never been seriously considered. Even if the war—God forbid!—went NBC, the Pentagon’s underground warrens were well shielded, well supplied, and capable of maintaining communications with the nation’s far-flung military assets, and no matter if the city above was reduced to radioactive slag. The Bunker was, above all else, secure.
Colonel David Walker, USAF, was not feeling particularly secure, however, as he stood up in the cool-lit, thick-carpeted briefing room on Sublevel 20, with its waiting circle of generals, aides, and politicians, and walked to the head of the room with its slab of a podium and the array of wall screens behind him and to his right. The US had managed to hold its own during the past two years, since the beginning of what was now being called the UN war, but the news was rarely good. It was the United States, the Russian Federation, and Japan against almost all of the rest of the world, now, and for months they’d been able to do little but hold their own…and in many cases, not even that. The early successes on Mars and in Earth orbit had buoyed hopes, of course, and a lot was riding now on the current Marine op on the Moon, but in most cases, in most places, US forces were just barely hanging on.
The worse the war news got, the edgier the Joint Chiefs and the JCS staff became. This place had a nasty tendency to shoot the messengers bringing bad news, and the news he carried to this middle-of-the-night special meeting was decidedly less than career-enhancing.
“Gentlemen,” Walker said, “and ladies. This report has just come through from Cheyenne. Black Crystal has been destroyed.”
A low murmur of voices sounded around the circular table. He was no more than confirming the rumor that had been spreading throughout the underground complex for the past twenty minutes, he knew, but the shock in that room as he made the announcement was sudden, almost palpable, nonetheless.
Admiral Charles Jordan Gray, head of the Joint Chiefs, fixed Walker with a hard glare. “Who destroyed it? How?”
“We’re…Cheyenne, I mean, is still looking at that, sir. The spacecraft was on the outward leg of its circumlunar parabola, approximately ten thousand kilometers above the Mare Crisium, and about to loop around the farside. We were tracking it, of course, from the ISS. This is what we picked up.”
A flatscreen on the wall behind him switched on, bringing up several windows, each with its own display. The image showing the target in visible light gave little information, a speck of light all but lost in the glare from the nearby silver curve of the Moon. Other windows showed the same picture, but at different wavelengths. The infrared view was clearest. Alphanumerics scrolled up the screen and wrote themselves across various windows, displaying times, camera data and wavelength, magnification factors and uncounted other informational elaborations.
Walker pointed to the IR image, where Black Crystal was visible as a red sliver against background blues and blacks. “We were tracking their IR signature with the big Humasen telescope at the ISS. Watch this, now. Time factor slowed, twenty to one….”
The window expanded, magnifying the red sliver. As a dwindling readout of tenths of seconds reached zero, a white spot flared brilliant against the sliver’s side; the spot grew brighter, expanded…and then engulfed the sliver in a roiling fireball of orange and yellow, a bright disk that expanded, thinned, and faded. Red and orange fragments drifted apart in ragged, frame-by-frame silence.
“My God,” the Aerospace Force JCS member, General Grace Sidney, said. Like Walker, she was wearing the new-style USAF dress uniform, a two-tone pattern in black and light blue, for space and sky. “What have they got up there?”