The Extinction Switch: Book three of the Kato's War series (7 page)

“I can neither confirm nor deny that suggestion,” the General said, with a glint in his eye.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Kato said. “You’re going with the cluster of nukes we talked about.”

“Correct,” Phillips said.

“How big will it be?” Kato said.

“Nine hundred and fifty megatons.”

“Whew!”

“Whoa!”

“Assuming it works,” Phillips said. “But we can’t just detonate it on the surface. We have to get it deep inside Vesta.” Phillips paused for a second. Then he turned to Kato. “We’ll need your crew to pull off something that to my knowledge has never been done before.”

“What?”

“Coming out of warp
inside
a celestial body.”

“
What?
”

“The spherical caverns your prospectors found in there. We have to get the bomb to the innermost one of them. Two hundred and thirty kilometers below the surface. There’s no way we can tunnel there. Warp ships travel outside spacetime, so the rock isn’t an obstacle to them.”

Kato sat back, and blew air out through his puckered lips. “It’s still not an exact science to control where we come out of warp. We’re only accurate to within a few kilometers. Those caverns are one point two kilometers wide.
Arcadantera
is six hundred meters long. That means the margin for error is only three hundred meters at either end, else she would dewarp inside the rock. Needless to say, the collision of matter would destroy the ship and payload completely.”

“It’s all we’ve got,” Phillips said. “There’s no other weapon powerful enough to wipe the place out, and no other way to deliver it to the interior of Vesta.”

Kato nodded. The room was silent for a few seconds. “Then we’ll do whatever we have to,” he said. “How long until the cluster is ready?”

“With everyone and everything at our disposal working flat out, six weeks,” the General said. “This
has
to work. We won’t get a second chance.”

----

“Why would you ever need to cook anything?” Kassandra asked, eyeing the two-ring electric stove. “You have that food stuff on tap.” She wore black jeans and a black blouse. Vivianne attended to washing dishes. Etienne toddled in, chasing Vlad.

“It’s in case we want something home-cooked instead of NBH-based,” Vivianne said. I for one like to cook sometimes. We’re not far from food stores here.”

“Makes sense.” Kassandra looked at the floor. “I wonder when things will get back to normal.”

Vivianne turned and looked at her. “Your normal is a lot better than our normal,” she snapped. “You can zip to different planets at will, and buy anything you want any time you want. We’re stuck here, because our jobs don’t pay enough to live topside.”

Kassandra looked back, her eyebrows raised. “But… I…”

Vivianne flopped the dishcloth back in the sink and sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for that to come out the way it did. It’s just that… you’ll be able to leave Earth at some point, and escape this whole thing. We’ll be crammed into an even smaller space than we are now, with a growing child and God knows who else. We’ll never be able to go above ground again for fear of the nanovirus. We’ll never see or photograph another tree or bird. It’s not just our passion, it’s our livelihood.” Her eyes began to tear up.

Kassandra averted her gaze, then turned around and left the kitchen. She entered the living room, where Annabelle and Antonio were sitting on the floor playing cards. “I want to get out of here as soon as we can,” Kassandra said.

Annabelle looked up at her. “Out of Lyon or out of this house?”

“Out of this house,” Kassandra said. Antonio nodded.

“So where do you propose that we go?” Annabelle said.

Kassandra sighed, as she shifted her weight onto her left foot. “I don’t know. Maybe just go out for a bit, I guess. We’ve been stuck here for four days.”

“Where should we go?” Antonio said.

“Anywhere.”

“We could go and see the above ground part of the city,” Annabelle said.

Kassandra’s face lit up. “Yeah!”

“Okay,” Antonio said. “I’ll go and get ready.”

“So you’ll spend like an hour powdering your nose?” Annabelle teased. Antonio grunted. He got up and headed to the corner of the room, where he rummaged through his small pile of clothes. “I’m just going in what I have on,” Annabelle said.

“Me too,” Kassandra said.

Half an hour later, Antonio emerged from the bathroom, in his jeans, black pointy-toed shoes, and an expensive-looking white V-neck t-shirt. He smelled of cologne. Annabelle wrinkled her nose. “It’s David’s,” he whispered. “Cheap and nasty, but better than nothing.”

Annabelle announced to Vivianne that they were going out. “Download a map of the city first,” Vivianne said. “It’s a big place. Oh wait, no nets. Well, I’ll draw one then. Hold on.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Invasion

The three friends turned right out of the apartment onto the soulless, gray residential street, and walked in silence down to Rue Borchal. They then turned right. “Whoa!” Annabelle said. They stopped dead, and surveyed the scene. Dotted along the sidewalk on both sides were tents——some pop-up camping tents, and other makeshift ones constructed from cardboard boxes, bed sheets, and the occasional shopping cart. Adults and children alike could be seen inside them, lying down on blankets or sitting in the entrance. Inside were smaller boxes and bags. The nearest structure was a blue pop-up. Two girls, aged perhaps six and eight, played a clapping game on the sidewalk near its entrance. Their hair was blonde and their faces grubby. A boy inside was coloring.

A woman sat on an upturned milk crate near the girls. She turned to her right. “Thank you guys for being so good. Your father should be back soon.”

Annabelle, Antonio and Kassandra just looked at each other, open-mouthed. “I guess people aren’t waiting for the government to move them underground,” Annabelle said.

“Should we still go?” Antonio said.

“It’ll be okay,” Kassandra said. They picked their way along the sidewalk among the dour-faced refugees, until they reached the cross-town elevator station. The sign above the wide brushed metal and glass doors said: Arrival: 4 minutes. The three travelers stood around, arms folded, watching the sign as it counted down. At last, the doors parted.

A dozen people got out, bearing bags, boxes, and a shopping cart. They looked nervously up and down the street. “What now?” one of them asked. Annabelle, Kassandra and Antonio stepped into the two car garage-sized elevator. Its interior was of brushed steel. There were three large windows, and the fourth wall displayed a map of the city. The doors closed. It moved slowly down, then a steady whooshing sound was heard, as it headed rapidly towards the center of Lyon. Vivianne studied the map on the wall. “Everything else goes out from the main station called Centre Ville,” she said, “whether you’re going up, down, or sideways. So, we have to get off there.” The others nodded, as they hung onto the straps.

“Sure wish they’d have put seats in here,” Kassandra said. The red dot representing their location moved steadily across what looked like a spider web of radiating lines and concentric ring roads, towards the center. Various sized dots at the intersections indicated transport hubs.

“How far underground are we?” Annabelle asked. Antonio shrugged.

“Quite a ways, I suppose,” Kassandra said. The car slowed gradually, and then began to ascend. A window inset into the map showed their vertical progress. “Main train station level,” Kassandra said.

“Look at that! I thought the train system was shut down!” Annabelle said, looking out of the panoramic glass side. The station concourse was packed with people jostling and jockeying to get to the elevator banks. The car stopped, and the doors opened. People flooded in, packing the car and pressing the friends against the rear wall. Their conversation was a constant babble of anxious tones. They, too, bore bags and boxes. The car began to ascend once more. The next level contained a giant shopping mall. Annabelle, Antonio and Kassandra turned around, their faces almost squashed against the glass by the weight of bodies, and looked out. The storefronts were smashed to pieces and blackened by smoke. Pieces of glass and steel littered the tiled floor, along with clothing, electronics and the occasional shoe. The place was deserted. “Oh my God,” Annabelle said, quietly. The others just stared. “Look!” she said. A child’s doll could be seen, among the rubble, its head and limbs splayed in impossible directions. Its unblinking eyes stared at the ceiling.

Outside went black again for twenty seconds or so, and then the car came to a stop at the ground level of Lyon. Its doors opened again. The passengers shuffled out. More began to press in, even before Annabelle, Antonio and Kassandra managed to get out. They pushed their way forward a few meters, until they were outside. People were jostling and shouting. The Gendarmes’ distinctive round, dark blue hats dotted the crowd. Ten meters in front of them, soldiers in camouflage stood at regular intervals facing the crowd, wearing green berets. Semi-automatic weapons were slung over their shoulders. Just beyond the soldiers was a handrail. The friends looked at each other, wide eyed. Annabelle shouted, but couldn’t be heard above the noise. She pointed straight forward. The others nodded, and they pushed their way through the crush of people. They were eyed suspiciously by the two closest soldiers as they approached. At last, they reached a handrail, ten meters from the elevator. The view was awe-inspiring. A wall of cobblestones fell away at forty-five degrees, down a hundred meters until it reached the level of the city streets. Long escalators that headed up and down were packed to capacity. The city stretched away into the distance. The Rhine carved a giant S through the cityscape below them. The steep Fourvière hill beyond the river bore the striking spire of the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière. Fire and smoke billowed from many other buildings far below. Jets of water sprayed onto the fires. Smoke hung in the air, blurring the view into the distance and thinning the sunlight. The streets were packed with a surging crowd. The roar of the people and the wail of sirens came from all around.

Marching into the distance was a procession of vast, thick glass pillars, of the clustered column type. They were hundreds of meters tall, and supported Gothic arches of glass. The entire roof of the city, which supported the sky level, was like that of a giant jade-colored cathedral. Elevators could be seen moving up and down inside each convex bulge of the outsides of the pillars. Each pillar stood on an upside down bowl-shaped mound like the one on which they were standing. “Wow…” Annabelle said, gazing into the distance. She was inaudible, due to the noise.

“It’s a beautiful city, but it looks like a war zone,” Kassandra yelled.

Antonio wore his usual stony expression, and remained silent, his eyes tracing the ridge line along the roof as it went out from above them to the next arch. Behind them were escalators that led up another forty meters, to the top level of the mound. From there, a vast pillar, identical to the others, rose into the sky. A fistfight broke out between three men on the escalator, about halfway up. One of them went flying backwards, knocking down people behind. The escalator stopped. The soldiers nearest to it ran upwards, towards the instigators, knocking more people flying. They were promptly handcuffed, and the stairway restarted so they could be transported to the top. Three gunshots echoed from the streets below in rapid succession. Elevator cars disgorged people who had descended through the pillar from the sky level, bearing as many possessions as they could carry. They flooded down the escalators and crammed onto the already packed level on which Antonio and the girls stood, waiting for subway cars to take them underground. The crowd pushed and shoved. Men growled. Women and children cried. A plastic bag split open, spilling its contents, mainly clothes, onto the ground. They were trampled underfoot.

“The voice of the devil is heard in our land!” shouted a bald man in white robes, five meters to their left, straining to be heard above the din. He held a brown Bible aloft in his right hand. It was embossed with a gold cross. “The End Times have come, just as the book of Revelation foretold! Repent now!”

“Let’s get back to the apartment while we still can!” Annabelle yelled. “This is crazy!” They turned back towards the subway doors and tried to push their way through, without success. They moved towards the entrance little by little as new cars arrived and passengers in front of them spilled in. It was then their turn to be crushed by the weight of people behind them. They were only halfway to the doors when Annabelle began to turn beet red. “Help!” she mouthed, wide-eyed at Antonio. The pressure on her chest was such that she couldn’t breathe. Antonio strained against the crush of bodies to make it a meter to his right.

Once there, he put one arm across Annabelle’s chest and one across her back, and slowly forced his arms apart, to relieve the pressure on her. She inhaled deeply. “Stand side-on!” he yelled into her ear. It’ll crush your ribcage less!”

Annabelle worked her way around ninety degrees, until she was facing him, her forehead covered with sweat. Her face was already regaining its normal color. “Thank you!” she yelled. Antonio savored this moment: an embrace, albeit forced by circumstances, with the girl he wanted badly. Being crushed by the crowd had its advantages. Twenty minutes later, they finally made it into a subway car just before the doors closed. Then it was black outside again, as it headed downwards, past the derelict shopping mall and the station that looked like it was full of zombies.