The Cresperian Alliance (17 page)

"And according to our observations,” Shelton added, “the cannon will go through atmosphere up to low orbit—say about three hundred klicks or so. Probably farther in space, five or six hundred, MAYBE as much as a thousand, without atmospheric attenuation, I'd estimate, before inverse square laws render it ineffective. But we didn't have occasion to find out, thank God."

Salter, Singletary, and Torres drew deep breaths. “That's nowhere near large enough to cover our bigger cities, let alone the biggest,” Torres pointed out.

"Yeah, but we're working on a way to ‘daisy chain’ the shields,” Washington informed them. “Seems Bill brought back a shitload of reinforcements to our Crispy contingent. We've got about four times as many as we had awhile ago. And every one of ‘em busy helping us get ready. Those guys multitask like an octopus on speed."

"That sounds better,” Singletary decided. “So for a city the size of New York, we'd just..."

"We'd daisy chain about half a dozen shields in the right conformation to cover all the boroughs,” Shelton confirmed. “There are a couple of drawbacks, though."

"The rural areas,” Salter noted.

"Yep,” Torres sighed. “Saw that one comin.’”

"That's one,” Terhune agreed. “But, assuming we don't get nuked by the Chinese in the grain belt or something, we plan on sending out garrisons of troops armed with disintegrator weapons as soon as any hint of Snappers in the area comes down the pipeline."

"What kind of pipeline we got?” Ravenshoe queried in surprise. “I never heard about any pipeline."

"Wups—major oversight there, Jess,” Terhune apologized. “Sorry about that. I thought I got everyone's name on the memo, but things have been moving so fast, I forget my own name half the time. Bill, since you guys first ginned it up, you wanna fill him in?"

Shelton shook his head. “It's not half bad,” he admitted. “Before we split up, the joint scientific crews of the
Zeng Wu
and the
Galactic
pooled their resources and developed a satellite we could drop in quantity throughout the Oort Cloud at the edge of the solar system. They'd be indistiguishable from the comets and other Oort objects, but would detect any incoming objects matching ships of known conformation, then send a signal to Earth. For that matter, they'll notify us of ANYthing incoming, just not with known identity. Then each ship's engineering team built as many as they had material for, and when we passed through on the way home, we dropped ‘em off, sending them into specific orbits.
Zeng Wu
had the receiver. Since the
Galactic
got home, we've made and popped about five dozen more into the area without anyone the wiser. We've got a full detection constellation of around a hundred and fifty, two hundred satellites. Now they're working on a second, inner layer, being deployed around the distance to the asteroid belt, only spherical."

"And did they—” Torres began.

"Yeah, they caught the
Galactic
on return,” Salter filled in. “I got the notification of that, right off. But it's been under wraps until we considered the constellation was good to go and full up."

"Okay, so we've got advance warning,” Singletary mused. “Excellent. And we mobilize troops and activate shields immediately we get a warning."

"Right,” Terhune agreed.

"But you said there were a couple of issues,” Ravenshoe recalled. “'Rural areas’ is only one issue."

"Yeah—the power to run all this hotshot equipment is the second,” Washington pointed out. “Eventually we're going to have a separate infrastructure constructed for powering all this shit. Hardened designs are in development already for that. But the only way we have to do it RIGHT NOW, is to cut power to the cities and divert it to offensive and defensive equipment."

"That means,” Shelton continued, “that the population has to be prepared for blackouts, and essential services like hospitals have to be ready to switch immediately to generator power for an indefinite time. Not to mention stockpiles of things like food and water."

Salter drew a deep breath. “Well, it's doable,” he decided. “If Martin and I get Tom to declare martial law during the attack, and we wait until they're in range before activating shit, it oughta work."

"I always hate declaring martial law, even for things like post-hurricane mop-ups,” Singletary muttered. “But yeah, if we're under attack and possibly invasion, absolutely."

"What about our allies—other countries?” Ravenshoe considered.

"They're having essentially the same meeting we are,” Salter informed them. “Getting the procedures in place, and making sure everyone knows what's possible."

"How much is all of this costing?” Torres asked.

"A lot,” Singletary said. “But at least for the time being, all of the research and development from the Department of Defense has been thrown in with us, and so has NASA—including their budgets."

"You're kidding,” Torres said, eyes wide.

"Nope,” Salter verified. “This Cresperian stuff is the top defense R&D going. Beats anything the regular guys were doing by a couple orders of magnitude, easy. And the NASA Administrator pointed out that they do nobody any good if the planet gets wiped out or taken over. Besides, we're already going where they want to go. And we figured their scientists could probably help fill out our manpower. And brainpower."

"It's in work right now, in fact,” Washington noted. “Has been for a couple weeks now."

"Next question: How long will it take to implement all this?” Torres worried. “If either of our starships got followed..."

"Did we mention the Crispies have replication equipment?” Washington wondered innocently.

"Rep...” Torres broke off, as a wide smile spread slowly across his olive face. “How many cities are already protected?"

"Entire East Coast metroplex,” Salter grinned, “major cities on the West Coast, Colorado Springs, Saint Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Fort Knox, Atlanta, Houston, Huntsville Alabama, and still going. The Enclave, of course. The spaceports. Oh, we've been busy, all right. Our intent is to get every major city and critical center in the country under shielding."

"How long until completion of that goal?” Singletary demanded.

"At the current rate, another two to three weeks,” Washington declared. “The biggest time consumer is actually installation at this point."

"Go ye forth and continue, then,” Singletary declared, extremely pleased. “I'll see the President is informed."

Salter, Singletary, Washington, Shelton, and Terhune stayed behind. “So, guys, how's the classified project progressing?” Salter asked.

"The enhancement? Fast,” Terhune replied, “but not too fast."

"Meaning?” Singletary wondered.

"An instantaneous change is painful and can cause damage rather than enhancements,” Washington explained. “That's how Piki Burroughs fought back against that son of a bitch excuse for a Prime Minister when she was held in Scotland. She just made his... er, ‘family jewels’ disappear. From what she told me, he had about enough left to piss, and that was it."

No one said anything, but every man in the room stiffened, blanching somewhat. Singletary crossed his legs.

"So the Crispies take it slower for this kind of work,” Terhune filled in. “They've got the process fine tuned, too. It takes only about three or four days per person right now, and with Jeri Leverson back, they're continuing to find ways to speed it up. Seems converting humans holds a lot less danger than converting Crispies, as long as we do psych evals first to see who's liable to get off on a psycho ego kick about it. Which is pretty easy with the Crispies using their perceptive senses along with the shrinks. And now that Caleb has so many Crispies, we're turning out a couple of platoons a week."

Salter's eyebrow rose. “And how long before you're complete?

Terhune grinned. “US SPAMCOM,” his grin grew into a smirk despite himself at the acronym, “is still small yet, but we estimate complete enhancement of all psychologically cleared personnel in six months maximum. We're already a quarter of the way there."

"So enough are ready to be the first line if something happens sooner,” Salter noted.

"Yes, sir. That includes all platoons involved in Operation Cavalry, too, sir. The one who risked his life to rescue Piki Burroughs was, in fact, the test subject. Per his own request."

"Excellent. Cream of the crop."

"You know,” Martin Singletary murmured, thinking, “has anyone thought to notify Cresperia of the danger from the Snappers?"

"It's my understanding,” Shelton said, “from talking with Jeri Leverson and some of the other Crispies we brought back, that they feel Cresperia is safe. They already demonstrated their ability to protect themselves against the Snappers, and indicated they intended to do the same thing we're doing, protecting major cities. Now, I'll grant that they don't have nearly as many cities as we do, being more spread out and rural. But they seemed to feel confident about it. Besides, we left a pretty big outpost. And I'm sure by now every one of the humans in it is enhanced, knowing the Crispies."

"Okay,” Singletary nodded. “Just didn't want to leave out our first interstellar allies."

"No, sir,” Shelton averred. “We wouldn't do that."

"Good,” Salter said. “Any more questions? Hop to it, then. Dismissed."

Piki and Bang were strolling back toward Piki's quarters after their latest movie date.
This has been pretty nice,
Bang realized, shooting a sidelong glance at his companion.
I've got a blonde bombshell beside me, with brains like a supercomputer, and gentle and understanding, to boot. I think maybe having a Crispy girlfriend isn't a bad thing at all.

Just then, Piki asked, “Bang-bang? How is the ship building coming? Do you know?"

"Oh, yeah,” Bang replied, jerked from his musings. “We got a briefing about that yesterday.” He glanced around and saw no one in their section of corridor, so he dared continue. “Counting the
Zeng Wu
and the
Galactic
—both of which have made some quick, minimum crew contingent trips to the edge of the solar system since returning—we now have about a dozen starships, with more being built. But they're working on a new one now,” he lowered his voice. “It's a stealth scout ship, and it's a prototype. Seems Dalunith and a couple of the NASA guys put their heads together and came up with some techniques to combine Crispy and Earth technology for it. If it works, they're gonna build at least four more."

"Ooo. Capital. What are they calling it? Do they have a name yet?"

"Working name is the
USSS Clippership
,” Bang said, “which will probably be the name of the line, but I don't know what they'll actually christen it."

"What about your allies? Um, our allies?"

Bang nodded, pleased. “I'm not high up enough in rank to have definite numbers, but figure to double, maybe triple, the number of starships. I'm guessing close to forty, and still building. Earth has a pretty good fleet now, and we're getting there with the shields and armament, too. Scuttlebutt has it a demonstration is being prepared."

"Uhm... ‘scuttlebutt?’”

"Oh. Sorry. Gossip."

"Ah.” A pause. “For... what?"

"To prove to certain countries who neglect and beat our friends that they shouldn't bother trying to retaliate."

"Oooohh."

Bang grinned.
She's this adorable mix of naive and sharp. This mentoring gig is FUN.

"I am glad Dalunith is finally well,” Piki commented. “I felt so badly for him when his head was damaged. He was so upset; we could all feel it."

"I'm glad, too, Piki. How are YOU doing?"

"I'm fine. What do you mean?"

"After... everything that happened to you."

"Oh.” Her voice sounded a little flat. “Well, it was a very bad way of being introduced to sex."

"Yes, it was. I'm sorry."

"Are you enjoying our relationship?” Dark copper eyes gazed at him from a bronzed face framed by platinum hair.

"Yeah, I am,” Bang admitted. “I was just thinking about that. You're fun to be around, pretty to look at, and you don't... you don't pressure me for... things."

Piki sighed. “I don't think either of us wants to rush... it."

"Do you enjoy it?"

"Yes, very much.” Bang got a brilliant smile as a reward. “You, too, are fun, Bang-bang. It is good to finally know what the real meaning of ‘fun’ is. And you are...” she dug in her memory, “handsome. Intelligent. And you help me considerably. I know you did not wish to do this at first, but I am glad you are beside me so much. You are good for me. And... I care about you."

Bang flushed. “Well... I'm glad. And the only reason I was reluctant at first was because I didn't want to feel pushed. But..."

"Because of what happened to me, I do not wish to push,” Piki finished for him. “I remember telling you on the submarine that I wished you to introduce me to nice sex, but I said that in ignorance. Now that I understand the ramifications better, I want to make certain that whatever happens between us is what we both want."

The last reservation melted away between them, and Bang felt himself totally relax in her company. “Then that's the way it'll go,” he declared.

"Okay, we're ready if the Western Test Range is ready,” Admiral Terhune informed General Salter in a SPAMCOM Chiefs meeting. “Got a tiny little atoll in the South Pac, completely uninhabited, just enough life on it to tell if anything gets through. Shield's ready, and so is the cannon."

"We scrambled like hell to do it, though,” Washington grumbled. “Of course the demo needs to occur once we're ready for the Other Guys to test us, which means the bulk of the cities have to be protected first..."

"'Only a couple of weeks’ is damn good, gentlemen,” Salter praised. “Very damn good. All right, we've got two Minuteman missiles, and two backups, armed and ready to go. And I do mean armed. They're packing fifteen megaton warheads. Each."

Terhune and Washington both drew deep breaths, but otherwise said nothing. Salter fixed his stern gaze on them.

"Well?"

"It should be fine, General,” Terhune verified. “Just a little stage jitters."

"We've tried several smaller scale tests, and everything worked gangbusters,” Washington agreed.