"...Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory because it is better to perish than to live as slaves." -- Sir Winston Churchill
West Front, Capitol Building
Washington D.C.
January 20, 2021--Inauguration Day
11:36 AM EST
National Military Command Center, The Pentagon
Arlington, Virginia
January 20, 2021
7:48 PM EST
The President took some comfort in her bad peripheral vision as she walked down the corridor to the NMCC. It meant that she didn't have to stop herself from glancing at the briefcase handcuffed to the wrist of the stonefaced marine at her side.
At her other flank, the lanky towheaded whiz kid who looked like he belonged in a bowtie and lab coat struggled to keep pace with the President's forceful strides.
"Sir, er, Ma'am," he said, squinting at his PDA, "Pardon my asking...but do you know what 'antimatter' is?"
"Just what I've heard on 'Star Trek.'" The President answered, mildly. "Aren't they the ones in the 'Neutral Zone'?"
The perennial National Science Advisor blanched a bit, stifling a stammer with a nervous gulp. "W-well, actually, it's--"
"--'Matter, made of subatomic particles having the same mass, average lifetime and spin of normal particles, but having an opposite sign of electric charge. If it contacts normal matter, the particles and antiparticles will completely annihilate each other, converting the entire rest mass of the particles into energy.'" Daria Morgendorffer said, glancing back the other man. "I understand your asking, Ted, but I didn't exactly get here on my sultry looks." The President allowed herself a trace of a smirk.
Dr. Dewitt-Clinton looked confused for a moment, then brightened. "Oh. Oh! I was really worried for a second...ah, some of your predecessors weren't exactly up to speed on the finer points of--"
"Forgive me, but I believe we're getting off track. What about antimatter?"
"Er, sorry. Well, you see, there's traditionally been a few problems with antimatter research. One is the difficulty of producing it in the first place, the second is the sheer amount of energy required to do so--with perfect efficiency, you'd have to spend as much energy creating it as you could get out of it...which, obviously, is far from achievable. Until a couple of years ago, the world antimatter production rate was 9 nanograms per year. But in '18, CERN made an unexpected breakthrough in..."
"Cadarache, ma'am." Joint Chief Buzcout interrupted, brusquely, handing the President a Mac3 tablet. Daria peered at the old satellite photo of a smoldering crater, helpfully overlaid with range markings and, towards the center, the outlines of a compound labeled 'International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.'
"ITER?" The President said, with a raised eyebrow and a vaguely aghast tone. "You're telling me the ITER disaster was--"
"That's correct. It was determined that during the last fusion experiment, about half a kilogram of matter from the reactor assembly was accidentally phased through a shallow level of fifth-dimensional space. The resulting em-ay annihilation released just under 4500 terajoules of energy..."
"Or jus' under eleven megatons, ma'am." Buzcout finished, his Texan twang now shining through.
"I always thought it odd they could screw it up that badly." Daria groused. "And the story about the 'fusion accident'?"
"The Walsh administration and the European Council came to the agreement that the facts about the accident could potentially...destabilize global security."
Daria hmmed, scrolling quickly past the dense text on the tablet. "I see we didn't want to burden the other ITER partners with the stress of being in on a coverup..."
"No ma'am." Buzcout said. Simply, mildly. "China, however, had their suspicions...which they've since confirmed with their own experiments at Lop Nur--"
"This is a lot to drop in my lap, Chief," the President said, handing back the tablet "Why the hell wasn't I informed before? I've been getting Daily Briefings since last October!"
"I'm sorry ma'am, but this is extremely sensitive information. I understand that vice president Evans wasn't even informed."
Gee, what a surprise. Daria thought. I wonder if they didn't tell him where the big-kid scissors were, either. The President's entourage reached the end of the corridor, where they met an ominous-looking blast door flanked by a pair of soldiers, and sundry Restricted Area signs. One of the guards used a hand reader to scan the barcodes on the group's ID badges--Daria could have sworn she'd seen one put a hand on his pistol when Dewitt-Clinton's badge failed to read, but the situation diffused when the science advisor thought to cover his astronaut pin, which had apparently spoofed the laser--and they were ushered into the War Room proper.
The chamber wasn't huge, but it was certainly impressive enough. In the shadows, the walls and ceilings seemed to merge into a glowing mural of maps, display screens, terminals.
The heart of the War Room was dominated by a massive round tabletop, wrapped level around the dais of a glass hemisphere, perhaps a meter and a half tall from base to top. A demi-holographic projection of the northern half of the planet was being projected against the inside of the glass; the faint blue of oceans framing the continents, themselves crossed by national boundries, cities, transportation lines, and myriad mobile and stationary data notations that the President didn't even try to decipher.
When the blast door closed behind them, Buzcout continued his line of thought."...In any case, it was a moot point...there were no new developments on the subject until last night."
He took position in front of the globe, near an air force technician's workstation jammed into the table's green felt. He lifted his Mac3 again, thumbing in a passcode before handing it to the President.
"At 23:15 Zulu yesterday," Buzcout began, "the Swift 2 space telescope detected a series of gamma-ray bursts from the direction of the Pleiades star cluster."
"Fascinating. Really." Daria replied, eyeing the dense tables of data.
Ted jumped in. "No, it's impossible. The kind of gamma ray emissions of the strength and duration indicated are only generated from a particularly massive hypernova...and never so many at such a close distance!"
"Which, Madam President, leads us to the other problem..."
She frowned. "Which is?"
"Swift 2 doesn't have a view of the Pleiades this time of year...the Earth is in the way."
The chilling realization, already close to the surface of Daria's mind, clicked horribly into place. "The...seismograph results?"
The general nodded, and motioned to the technician in front of the hemisphere. "Triangulation of seismic waves placed the detonations..." a flashing red dot appeared on the globe, roughly in the center of the banana-shaped blotch between Kurdistan and India. "...here, in Balochistan."
"The Khalifah." The President said, her mouth dry. "You think the Mullahs have..."
"The gamma radiation detected is consistant with an antimatter explosion. Now, our intelligence setup on their WMD program is geared around fission and fusion
weapons. With the 'tech embargoes, resource limitations, and 'deniable incursions'--" Pentagonese for "Robomb Strikes," Daria knew "--we know they don't have the capability for more than about a hundred deca-kiloton weapons. And half of those would have been inherited from Pakistan." He glanced up from his notes. "And the five or six detonations recorded yesterday were in the twenty-megaton range."
Quite uncharacteristically, the President let out a long whistle. "Hell...hell of a party they were throwing."
Ted nodded, eagerly. "Our guess is that they were trying to disguise it as an earthquake along the Arabian and Eurasian tectonic plates--thank gosh that Swift was there for us, or it probably would've worked."
"So what can you tell me about these...devices?" She raised an eyebrow. "i've got the oddest feeling that we've done some research on the subject."
Buzcout took his turn. "Wellsir, I can't speak for whatever went off in Balochistan, but Sandia's been able to whittle an M/A Catalyzer down to two-point-five tons, metric." He paused, straightening his collar. "That's not a weaponized design, of course...Lockheed says they think a standard three thousand-pounded EMP bomb could probably be converted for that."
"An E-Bomb? Those things aren't even nuclear--practically just an explosively driven capacitor bank."
There was a pause. Brief, but deathly. The general glanced at Dewitt-Clinton, then back to the president. "Yessir. Now, the lack of any technical infrastructure or substantial power generation capabilities in the area leads us to believe that the Khalifah has moved beyond the laboratory stage--they might even have bypassed it completely."
"Chief..." the President said, sinking slowly down into a vacant chair, "...you're saying...a militant, Islamicalist theocracy...now has the most powerful destructive device ever conceived by man..." she briefly raised her forehead from it's perch on her thin fingers, staring at the two advisors "...which is in the form of a few thousand kilos of inert metal and conventional electronics?"
Ted shifted, fidgeting a bit. "It, ah, probably has silver, or maybe gold as part of the conduction system..." The Science Advisor added, helpfully. The President tried to reply with a proper scowl, but could only sum up a forlorn grimace.
"Make my day--tell me this is the worst news you have for me."
"Madam President, what worries us is the Khalifah's secrecy over the matter. They didn't just not announce it publicly, they tried to hide it from the world. It was a fluke that we caught it at all."
Ted interrupted. "But at the same time, that makes no sense. Why would they not want it known? A deterrent--which they already have--is no good if no one knows about it; there's no sabre-rattling value--such as it is--for them boosting their nuclear capability, or propaganda value in their getting ahold of this new tech despite the west's efforts if they keep quiet..."
"...They don't know." The President said, cutting him off.
Ted blinked. "What?"
"They don't know...that we know about antimatter generation." Daria said, rising from her chair. She started into an ambling, slow pace. "Call it intuition, or a meme whispering to me. And maybe I'm wrong, and maybe they stole or bought the information somehow...but I think the ITER coverup might have worked just fine, but our nuke embargo worked too well. I think they may have come up with the technology by themselves."
The science advisor brightened. "I get it! Simple evolutionary diffusion--it was an idea who's time had come! Heck, we discovered it after a freak magnet accident...and their applied physics programs--"
"Have been pushed into a corner for years. Conventional lines of research blocked, starved of resources..." the President glanced pointedly at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs "...or blown up. So they start looking in unconventional lines, and they stumble across..."
Daria shook her head. "All a good story, but neither here or there. What matters is the Shahanshah Caliph-Imam thinks he's the only man in the world with the 'M/A-Bomb.' A dictator who believes he's the rightful successor to the messenger of God, who has repeatedly called for the downfall of western civilization in general and the United States in particular, has possession of an undetectable superweapon...and he's keeping it a secret..."
She stopped, and turned to Buzcout. "General, 'show me thy thoughts.'"
He paused, brow furrowed for a moment, before answering.
"Ma'am...it hardly needs saying, but; you don't use a secret weapon as a deterrent."
"Do the Euros know, yet?"
"Probably not, ma'am. The Swift data was kept in-house."
"I want them on the hotline."
"Madam President, I respectfully suggest we inform the United Kingdom privately before-"
"This is no time to play favorites. I want the entire E.C., clear?"
"Yes ma'am."
On the other side of the table, an technician rose from her chair, holding half a comm headset to her ear. "Sir, I'm having trouble establishing communications with the European Council..."
Daria frowned. "What, EUROCOM's down? Of all the times..."
The technician cringed. "Sorry, sir. We're trying to go through the Councilmembers' individual state lines at the moment..."
The President's brow furrowed. "How hard could it be? They're even all in the same place for once--" her face froze, and her eyes flared wide before clamping shut. "--oh god."
Buzcout bounded across the War Room, roaring "Git me IMINT of Ankara NOW!"
A tech at a terminal marked with an "NRO" placard, never even looked up, her keyboard was already rattling like a stock sticker. "Retasking orbit...KH-15 will be in range...now. Going up on the big board."
On of the larger screens hanging over the banks of workstations switched from a NORAD map to a flickering satellite view. It, as it turned out, wasn't an overhead view...the satellite was far enough south that it had needed to rotate to catch a profile view of the curvature of the Earth, with the Turkish capital just below the horizon line.
It would have been three A.M., local time, but curiously, the Keyhole spy satellite hadn't automatically switched to infrared to peer past the dark, or the glare of street lights...
...The angry, thunderhead-like shape, blazing as half as bright as the sun as it rose towards the heavens, provided more than enough illumination.
The President stared. "No..."
The image hung, updating in hideous silence for a few moments before the NRO analyst spoke up. "Anan...imagery analysis is consistent with a convection cloud and/or pyrocumulus. Current height; 12 kilometers. With calculated time of detonation, this is consistant with..."
"An 80 megaton yield." the science advisor finished. His eyes were a little glassy, as he did the figures, mentally.
Something chirped under his coatsleve. Ted raised his arm, tugged his sleeve away from his wrist, and flipped the cover off his PDA. "It's NASA...Swift 2 just detected a massive-"
Buzcout cut him short. "DEFCON 2." he shouted, to no one and everyone, before wheeling towards the President's security detail, jerking his thumb towards the door. "Get her outta here."