Worlds

44. What Happened Behind Their Backs (2)

The U.S. military had game plans for everything, even revolution. They even had plans for what to do in case parts of the military were on the other side.

What they didn’t have a game plan for was the case where the man ultimately in charge of personnel allocation, a four-star general in the Pentagon, happened to be on the other side. Thus whole regiments, even divisions, were composed entirely of 3R members. They were all dispersed—“night maneuvers”—when the revolution started.

There were also game plans, of course, for retaliation. You could push a button and wipe out Cuba, or France, or the entire Supreme Socialist Union. A short-tempered and prejudiced man, who could only have been overruled by people who were vaporized by the Washington bomb, pushed the button for Worlds.

Nearly two hundred missiles leaped from the sea toward forty-one targets in various orbits. It was bloody murder.

The killer missiles were not nuclear. They were in essence giant shotgun shells, each blasting tonnes of metal shrapnel in east-to-west orbits calculated to intercept each World’s orbit as the World rolled west to east, the shrapnel impacting with meteoric velocity.

The missiles were rather old, dating back to the 2035 SALT XI agreement. But they had been scrupulously maintained, and most of them did their job well.

Most of the smaller Worlds, such as Von Braun and the twins Mazeltov/B’ism’illah Ma’sha’llah, were instantly and utterly destroyed. Devon’s World had a huge chunk torn out of its side, and the ninety percent of the population who were not at that time inside the hub or spokes all died of explosive decompression.

Some of the Worlds had up to thirty minutes’ warning. Three quarters of Tsiolkovski’s population survived, since it was made up of a series of airtight compartments: they’d had enough time to calculate the direction from which the brutal salvo would come and move nearly everyone to the other side. Uchūden braced itself for death, but the cloud of metal missed it by hundreds of kilometers. The nimble Worlds Galileo, OAO, and Bellcom Four were able to dodge in time.

Only one person died in New New York: a shotgun can’t do much against a mountain. A few scraps of metal smashed through the observation dome, and one of them killed a janitor. Air loss was insignificant.

But the fifty missiles aimed at New New York hadn’t been intended to penetrate the hollow rock. What they did do was reduce most of the solar panels to ribbons and disable the heat-exchange mechanism. If it couldn’t be repaired, a quarter of a million people would cook.

It took only three days to fix, though, and the loss of the surface solar panels was no problem. The powersat that had serviced the Eastern Seaboard hadn’t been a target, and it was easily pressed into service.

In the Worlds, fourteen thousand people had died in the first hour. Another five thousand would the over the weeks to follow, because New New was the only large World with its life support systems intact Shuttles brought a constant stream of refugees from Tsiolkovski and Devon’s World, but there were only so many shuttles and they could only move so fast.

Nineteen thousand dead is not a large number in historical context Three times that number died in the first hours of the battle of the Somme, for a scant kilometer of worthless mud; fifty times as many in the battle for the possession of Stalingrad; 2500 times as many during World War II. But the Decimation, as it came to be called, would be more important historically than any of these affairs.

It was not a “catalyst,” for a catalyst emerges from reaction unchanged.

It was not a “pivot,” because the forces had already been in motion for a long time.

It was an excuse.