Prometheus and the Dragon (Atlas and the Winds Book 2) (32 page)

“If word had gotten out there would have been a lot of screaming from both sides of the aisle, but it would have sent a message to any would-be warlords,” Sylvia said, shocked with how callous she sounded. The America she was leaving behind would be a damn sight different than the one she’d taken charge of eight years ago. It had become something beyond anyone’s ability to have imagined. A country that reflected the entire world. The embodiment of irrational fear. A world with no tomorrow ... even though there were still seventy days left.

***

Sentinel Colony:

Danielle Cavanaugh sat in the softly lit hospital room, staring into the eyes of her baby daughter. Her blue-grey eyes still unfocused, but dazzling amidst the bright red curls she’d inherited from her mother. She was swaddled in a pale yellow blanket and lying in her mother’s lap.

Nichole Thompson sat across from her, watching the baby squirm and work an arm out of the tightly wrapped blanket. She’d come here to talk to the new mother, and ask if it was alright to do a story about the first baby born on the moon. All of the groups building colonies had been careful not to over-play the media, but this was something she thought would give hope.

She and Danielle had gotten to know each other since Nichole had arrived in Stormhaven, but they weren’t quite friends. More like comfortable acquaintances. So asking to interview Danielle was both a chance to do something good, and an opportunity to deepen their relationship a bit. Even though Nikki was Colton’s daughter, she’d never lived there. They were almost the last newcomers to Stormhaven before the crisis started.

“She’s beautiful,” Nichole said. “So, what have you named her?”

“Taylor Anne,” she said, smiling and looking up at the journalist.

“Taylor?” she asked, surprised. “I guess that makes sense though. I’ll bet we have a bunch of them among the firstborn.”

“Probably,” Danielle shrugged. “But it’s a special thing for me.” Her smile shifted, still proud, but shot through with slivers of wistfulness.

“Why’s that?” she asked.

“I’d rather not say,” Dani said. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure,” Nichole said, leaning back and relaxing a bit.

“What was it like growing up with Colton as a father?” she asked. “I know you spent a lot of your life with your mom, but do you have any memories of being with him as a dad?”

She sighed and thought about it. “Not too many. He was always working on trying to save the world, I guess. There were a few times he was a father. He taught me to ride a horse when I was four or five. And then I’ve got a lot of memories of sitting on a footstool at the ranch. He’d bought me a guitar for my seventh birthday, and I was trying to play along with him. He kept stopping to show me the chords. He was amazingly patient with me.”

“Do you still play?” Dani asked.

“Some, but not like he does,” she shrugged. “Right after he licensed the generator and he didn’t have to work anymore, he spent hours a day practicing. I thought he was amazing, but he kept saying he was just a mechanic. He knew how to play and he had a passion for music, but he felt like he couldn’t get the two aspects to connect in his playing. It used to frustrate him a lot.”

“I’ve heard him play. He makes it sound so easy,” she said.

“He makes everything he does sound easy, haven’t you noticed? He works so hard at all of it. He’s the most driven man on Earth.” A sudden edge of bitterness slashed through her words, splitting two meanings from her simple statement. “He worked at being a dad, too. He really did. It was probably the one thing that didn’t come natural to him, or maybe it was that he didn’t have enough time to practice at it.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry into something personal,” Dani said, clearly wishing she hadn’t asked. “What about your mom?”

“Mom was pretty cold,” she said. “I think she married Dad for the opportunity to be rich. She saw his potential, and she wanted to ride it to the life she always dreamed about. When he turned back to his work, she realized she wasn’t going to get it from him, so she left. She’s got a rich boyfriend now, and they’re living in France on his estate. I haven’t talked to her in a year, but I understand dad asked her to come here.” She paused, feeling another wave of emotion surge in her. “She declined the invitation.”

“Wow, I didn’t mean to bring up so many tough emotions for you,” Danielle said.

“It’s ok,” she said, slipping into her professional mask and winking. “Usually I’m the one asking the hard questions.”

“I’m sure,” she said. “I was just curious. Having a baby makes you think about being a family in a whole new way.”

“Yeah. I try not to think about my family life too much,” she said. “Growing up I wanted to have a normal family more than anything. Being connected to a family is something that I know means a lot, but it just never happened.” She drew in a deep breath and smiled, shrugging it off.

Danielle stood up, walking across the room to hand Taylor to Nichole. It shocked her, and she felt a bit awkward. Kneeling down beside her and the baby, Danielle asked another question. “Can you keep a secret?”

“Sure. Off the record,” she said, glancing up at her but not quite taking her eyes off the infant.

“Not off the record. A real secret,” she said. “Between us. Not even your father knows.”

“Ok,” Nichole said, raising an eyebrow.

“Taylor is your sister,” she said quietly.

***

New Hope Colony, Plato:

The Colony had begun to grow exponentially since the
Lynx
had been put into the logistics stream. The single ship could carry more than the cargo capacity of all the other booster/shuttles in the US fleet combined. And it could deliver its payload in less than a tenth the time. More than one head had rolled at NASA and the military once they realized that they’d had this much capacity at their disposal since they’d had the
Eagle
, and had wasted it.

New Hope wasn’t as fancy as some of the other colonies were going to be, but it was sprawling out across the crater floor. They had six thousand residents packed into the domes, and were adding three domes a week. They had dozens of inflatable modules to work with, and had learned the trick of using the domes themselves as molds from Stormhaven. They were now inflating them, then Lunar-creting over the piece and removing the original so that it could be used again.

Carter Anthony had brought a lot of ideas back with his new legs. He’d turned out to be a treasure trove of creative improvements to their processes. He’d toured Sentinel while he was getting used to the neuro-transducers that gave him the ability to walk again. In fact, he still went there regularly to have the buffer interfaces adjusted, and each time he took another tour. He’d become their spy, and when he returned Susan grilled him about what he’d learned.

“They’ve probably got a hundred thousand people up here now,” he said, glancing at Marquez who had joined them for this informal debriefing. “About a third of their population is orphans from all over the world. They’ve got a school set up to teach English, and it looks like they’re putting about fifty kids to each adult supervisor. It’s hectic as hell, but somehow they’re keeping it under control.”

“Holy crap,” Susan said, trying to imagine what that must be like. “Why are they doing it? It’s got to be a huge drain on their resources.”

“Apparently they were set up for it before they started,” he said, shrugging. “Dr. Rosnikov, the Colony Manager, explained to me that they understood there’d be a population gap in the colony if they didn’t have teenagers ready to fill the workforce in a couple years. She said she didn’t know how we’d handle it ten years into this, when some of our people were getting too old to work and the children themselves weren’t old enough to start picking up the slack.”

“That’s an interesting point,” she said. “We’ve got a few teenagers who came up with their parents, but the demographic is going to skew seriously toward retirement age before too long.”

“There’s no retirement age here,” Marquez offered. “With the reduction of stress load on the metabolism, there’s no reason to expect that people can’t be productive for decades longer than on Earth.”

“I mentioned that to her,” Carter said. “I should point out Viki’s a psychologist and a sociologist so she knows her stuff, but she said the problem they were avoiding was social. The generation gap is more of a concern to her than the lack of manpower. Stormhaven was a huge robotics manufacturer, so most of their labor’s automated.”

“Must be nice,” Susan said, shaking her head.

“So what else did you discover on your visit?” Marquez asked.

“You might find this interesting General,” he said, pulling out an epad and handing it to him. “I took this picture on the way in to their landing pad. Do you know what it is?”

He looked at it for several seconds, nodding. “It’s one of the Mormon ships isn’t it? Why was it there?”

“They’re repairing it. It was damaged during an attack by the Chinese,” he said.

“On Earth?” he asked. “They’re launching from the US and Canada so I don’t see how they could have gotten a shot up.”

“On approach to their base here,” he said. “They wandered too close to Chang Er and took several missile rounds. They were supposed to be on their last flight but they lost so much of their cargo they’re having to make another run.”

“Didn’t the Chinese warn them off before they shot at them?” Susan asked.

“Not that they heard,” he said. “They don’t use the standard channels in their com systems. Something about their engines running at a frequency close to where we have our standard radio bands.”

“So the Chinese tried to shoot them down,” Marquez said, his face showing that he was already pursuing the ramifications of further Chinese hostilities in his mind. “Maybe we need to have a talk with them about manners.”

“How about we try to figure out some way to keep an eye on them first?” Susan said. “Maybe set up an observation post nearby. Seems they were watching us for a while. It might be time to reciprocate.”

“I’ll get on it immediately,” the General said, bouncing up from the table with a little too much enthusiasm and nearly hitting the ceiling with his head. “Oops.” He grinned at his awkwardness and disappeared out the door.

***

Vatican City, Rome:

The
Marian Destiny
sat like a boxy apartment complex, covered with shiny canvas bags, quite in contrast to its beautiful name. Nothing more than several dozen storage containers bolted together and strapped to an array of inertial engines, it wasn’t supposed to be pretty, it was supposed to do its job.

Too big to land anywhere in Rome, it rested in a field outside the city while truckloads of irreplaceable treasures from the Vatican were loaded carefully inside. An army of workers swarmed back and forth between the trucks and the ship, under the careful supervision of an almost equal number of Church officials. They’d deployed a Security Force in a cordon around the field, and no less than six helicopter gunships orbited overhead and along the route from the Vatican Archives.

Cardinal Benito Cameroni watched the process from a remote camera hanging from one of the helicopters. It was his responsibility to make sure the treasures were protected for eternity. He’d designed the
Marian Destiny
, and proposed the mission to save the artwork and records of the Church by putting it in low earth orbit while the Earth underwent its Tribulation. Together with its sister ship, they would be able to contain the records, and keep the Holy See, the College of Cardinals, and a select group of priests and nuns alive until they could come down and restore the Church to the survivors of humanity.

One thing that had shocked him when he’d made the proposal to the Pontiff was that he hadn’t balked at the idea of rescinding the law of chastity for those who would crew the ship. He’d expected it to be a hard sell, but in fact it had been the least difficult aspect to get through. The Holy Father had anticipated the possible necessity of repopulating the Earth with the faithful.

The last of the trucks were just now arriving at the launch site, and from his virtual vantage point, he watched them open the back doors and begin to unload. Around the outside of the cordon, thousands of people swarmed to watch. Most of them were Catholic faithful, but some were simply people who had stopped to show their support. By-and-large it was a quiet assembly, as it had been for the weeks they’d been working.

A flash of light and a puff of smoke far off to one side of the crowd caught his attention. “What was that?” he asked, picking up his radio from the desk.

“What was what, Your Excellency?” the pilot of the observation chopper asked.

“It looked like a weapon firing,” the Cardinal said. Another puff of smoke left the crowd and arced toward one of the trucks, this time leaving a trail behind it. “There! A missile firing,” he yelled into the microphone.

“I see it,” the pilot responded. The camera tracked the smoke trail, and he watched the explosion in horror. One of the truck trailers erupted into flame, scattering workers and its contents like shards of stained glass across the green field. A second explosion tore the ground open between the truck and the
Marian.
At least a dozen workers were engulfed in the fireball.