Excelsior (13 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“Keep that to yourselves for now—and Korbin, start interviewing the rest of the crew for possible suspects. I’m sure Williams isn’t the only one harboring feelings of resentment and latent aggression toward the Alliance because of this mission. You’ve got a little less than twenty-four hours before we’re supposed to enter the G-tanks, so I suggest you get started.”

“That’s not enough time to interview everyone, even if I work around the clock.”

“You have an assistant. Use him. If you both schedule half-hour appointments and only sleep for six hours you should have enough time.”

“Yes, sir,” Korbin replied.

“Let me know when it’s my turn to be interviewed. Until then, if either of you need me, I’ll be on the bridge.”

“You don’t want to speak with Williams before you go, sir?” Stone asked.

Alexander looked into the brightly-lit interrogation room one last time. Williams was still staring at his hands. Alexander grimaced. “No, I’m afraid I won’t be able to control myself if I go in there right now,” he said. “Lock him up.”

“Yes, sir,” Stone replied, heading for the interrogation room.

Alexander nodded to Korbin and turned to leave. The truth was, he didn’t want to see Williams because he was afraid he might end up sympathizing too much with him. Admiral Flores had made a big mistake ensuring that everyone assigned to the Lincoln had strong emotional ties to Earth. No one wanted to be here. Especially not now that they knew how long they’d be gone, and that Earth’s fate was uncertain. President Baker’s insistence that their loved ones were all safe and well just made him more suspicious.

What else could the president say? That they were all dead? That would undermine the crew’s morale and their motivation to come home. Even if Earth was a radioactive ball of ash, no one aboard the Lincoln could be allowed to know that until they came home—add to that the fact that the Alliance wasn’t sending them messages from their loved ones, and it was all far too suspicious. Alexander didn’t buy that line about the enemy intercepting longer messages. More likely it was because getting messages from their loved ones would reveal who was still alive… and who wasn’t.

Alexander shut his eyes as he rode the elevator back down to the bridge, praying to a god he’d long since stopped believing in that Catalina was among the survivors.

Chapter 9

Los Angeles, Eight Hours Earlier

Catalina sat glued to her holoscreen, watching a breaking news story on WANN (World Alliance News Network). A trio of WANN reporters came on, all of them sitting before a table, looking pale and stricken. The woman in the middle of the three spoke first, “We have a very tragic alert for you right now. Live footage of the World Alliance Space Elevator collapsing in what’s believed—speculation at this point—to be a Confederate sneak attack in orbit.”

The scene cut to show cottony white streaks of cloud against an electric blue sky. A large black cylinder was speeding down, wreathed in a blanket of orange flame. The camera zoomed in on the falling object until it snapped into focus. It was a climber car from the Alliance’s Space Elevator. The elevator ribbon was a tangled mess of glinting silver bunching up below the car as it fell.

In the background the woman from WANN went on describing the situation, but Catalina tuned her out. She didn’t need anyone to explain what was happening.

The feed zoomed out and panned down to show the elevator ribbon hitting Anchor Station at high speed, striking sparks from the deck. The ribbon was light, so there wasn’t a lot of damage. The rest of it came crashing down in the ocean, and water splashed up in a snaking line. The camera tracked that line, revealing that the cameraman was standing on the deck of a civilian supply ship a few kilometers away from Anchor Station.

The footage swept back to Anchor Station and tracked up to find the falling elevator car once more. It was moving at a wicked speed, heading for the ocean, just a few seconds from impact. Catalina heard people screaming in the background of the recording. The camera bobbed and weaved as whoever was holding it ran for higher ground.

BOOM!

The elevator car hit with a sound like a thousand thunderclaps. Water roared with deafening fury as it sprayed up in a cone-shaped plume of vapor and liquid tall as any skyscraper. More screaming. The camera shook urgently as the person holding it ran to get away. Then the shock wave hit, and the camera went flying amidst a violent stream of mist and spray. Just before the feed cut out, Catalina glimpsed people tumbling over the side of the ship, screaming as they fell.

The scene cut to a second camera, this one much farther out. From a distance the shock wave looked like a savage storm, a living thing racing across the surface of the ocean, spreading fast in all directions. In all of a second that storm wall hit, roaring and buffeting the camera with gale force winds. A blurry curtain of spray blotted out the camera. The wind died down, and Catalina heard the man cursing about how wet he was as he wiped the lens with his shirt.

The holo feed came clear once more, showing a thick white mist all around. It was suddenly dark, and the blue sky was gray. Nearby ships lay blanketed in mist, disappearing wraith-like into the distance.

Then a black wall of water came raging out of the mist, lifting and capsizing all of those ships in an instant. The cameraman cursed again, and ran for a nearby ladder. He looped an arm through the rungs and went back to recording. People screamed and cried in the background as the wave approached.

The cameraman’s vessel lurched suddenly, turning so it could face the wave head-on. Now the cameraman was alternating between curses and prayers, rambling nonsensically as a black wall of water barreled down on him. The swell loomed so tall that it blotted out the sky. Then it hit, and the ship tipped up suddenly.

The sky was back, then gone again as the ship rode down the back of the swell. The cameraman screamed. It was an impossibly long way down, and the ship was racing too fast into the trough behind the wave.

The cameraman cursed over and over as the ship fell. Then the bow hit and dug in. He lost his grip on the ladder and fell screaming. A tremendous screech of metal drowned out his screams as the ship cracked apart. Black, foaming water and jagged debris swallowed everything in a burst of static.

Back were the trio of WANN reporters.

They looked like Catalina felt. The woman’s mouth was hanging open, as if she’d been about to say something, but the footage had left her unable to speak. She recovered a moment later. “We’ve just received confirmation, Orbital One has been cut free of its tether in a Confederate surprise attack. If you are anywhere near a major city center, you are advised to get to the nearest fallout shelter immediately.”

Catalina heard something then, and she sat suddenly straight in her chair. The news reporters droned on about emergency procedures, but she wasn’t listening anymore. She muted the holoscreen with a wave of her hand, and suddenly the sound snapped into clearer focus.

It was a siren. Catalina recognized the sound from the Alliance’s last civil defense drill.

Heart pounding, Catalina ran from her living room and out the front door of her home. Her palms were cold and sweating. This couldn’t be happening. She reached the front lawn and looked up to the night’s sky just in time to see hundreds of bullet-shaped objects falling, wreathed in orange fire. Missiles. As she watched they blossomed like fireworks, splitting into thousands, of smaller warheads that spiraled and streaked toward the bright urban center of Los Angeles.

Catalina stood frozen with terror and morbid fascination, watching the missiles rain down. Bright blue laser beams snapped up from the city below, detonating countless hundreds of missiles before they could hit the ground. They burst open like fireworks, dazzling her eyes and mesmerizing her.

Those premature detonations weren’t nuclear blasts, but the remaining missiles were just seconds from impact, and they weren’t likely to be so small. An electric jolt of adrenaline spurred her into motion. She turned and ran back inside the house, flying down the stairs to the basement and jumping the last five steps to the ground. Her shoulder slammed painfully into the heavy steel door. She wrenched it open and musty air gushed out. A light flickered on and she hurried in, slamming the door behind her and turning the handle to lock it. She leaned back against the door, gasping greedy lungfuls of the musty air.

The civil defense sirens droned on in the distance, now muffled by the heavy door. Then, suddenly the sirens were drowned out by a terrifying roar. It sounded like an old-fashioned train was barreling down on her. The sound reached a deafening pitch, and then Catalina heard wooden beams creaking and snapping overhead. Heavy thuds shook the basement as debris crashed and fell. A loud bang thundered against the door with such force that the impact felt like a fist between her shoulder blades. Catalina jumped away from the door and turned to look at it, her eyes wide and staring, as if she expected a monster to come crashing in at any moment.

A stampede raged in her living room. Dust trickled down from the concrete ceiling in a steady stream. The overhead lights flickered out and came back on, now dimmer than before, and running on battery backups. Catalina’s legs shook like a newborn calf’s and gave out suddenly. She hit the ground with a jolt and sat with her palms pressed to the cold cement floor, listening as debris settled overhead.

After a few minutes, the noise gave way to a ringing silence. Then the air grew uncomfortably warm, and Catalina realized that what was left of her home was probably burning. The basement was insulated and airtight, so she wouldn’t suffocate, but given how fast she felt the temperature rising, she might still cook like a lobster in its shell.

Waves of heat poured down from the ceiling. Panic gripped her. Catalina stood on shaking legs and walked past row upon row of canned food and bottled water to start up the basement’s hydrogen fuel cell generator. It was at the back of the shelter, right beside the bathroom. Catalina flicked a simple mechanical on/off switch, and the generator started up with a quiet hum of electricity. That done, she turned to a control panel on the wall beside it and activated the basement’s climate control system. The thermostat read 90 degrees… 91 degrees…

No wonder she was so hot!

Fumbling with the controls, she set the system to power cool, and selected an unlikely target of 65 degrees. A welcome whoosh of cool air came rushing out through overhead ducts. Catalina breathed a sigh of relief and went to stand under the nearest vent, letting the air wash over her face and dry her sweat.

As she stood there, she mentally took stock of her situation. From what Alexander had explained about the shelter’s life support systems, the air was all recycled, not circulating in from outside, so there was no threat of radiation creeping in through the vents. As for the heat exchanger responsible for the cool air, it was heat-sinked through an underground tank of water that supplied the shelter’s bathroom, so the system’s cooling capacity would likely outlast any firestorms raging overhead. She probably wouldn’t want to take a shower until the tank cooled down, but otherwise she’d be fine.

Catalina turned from the vent and looked around the basement. Food, water, and liquid hydrogen for the generator lined the walls. The supplies would last for a month, but without Alexander to share them, she could stretch that to two. With rationing maybe two and a half. She wouldn’t be able to run the generator constantly, but since the main power draw was from the heat exchanger, she could afford to turn the generator off just as soon as the fires died down outside. The lights would stay on for days running on battery backups before she’d have to turn the generator on and charge the batteries. The refrigerator was another matter; it would run the batteries down in an hour or less, so she’d have to turn it off and keep it shut whenever the generator wasn’t running.

Two and a half months. Radiation would be down to survivable levels by then. Assuming the basement door wasn’t completely blocked with debris, she would be able to get out and go find help. If there was any help to be found…

Catalina’s mind flashed back to the swarm of missiles raining down over Los Angeles. She saw the city’s defenses flashing up, bright blue beams slashing the sky open and turning incoming missiles to molten clouds of debris. She hadn’t stuck around to see the remaining missiles get through, but it wasn’t hard to imagine what had happened next. That blinding flash of nuclear fire had haunted humanity’s collective nightmares for centuries. That’s what this is— Catalina thought with a sudden desperate hope —a nightmare. She squeezed her eyelids shut, willing herself to wake up.

But when she opened her eyes once more, she wasn’t lying in bed, waking up from a bad dream; she was standing in her basement, alone, and facing months of isolation while waiting for a rescue that might never come.

Nuclear war. How many other cities had been hit? For all she knew the entire planet was one big smoldering cairn, and her two and a half months of emergency supplies were all she would ever get.

Catalina’s thoughts turned to Alexander, and she wondered if he’d already died in the fighting. Her eyes grew hot and blurry. Fat teardrops slid like burning embers down her cheeks.