Empire Games Series, Book 1(83)
She was still boggling at the museum exhibits when the platform light came on.
PART THREE
DARK STATE
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.
—Karl Marx
Extraction
THE COMMONWEALTH, TIME LINE THREE, MAY 2020
Miriam and Erasmus spent a night in the bunker waiting for the bombs to fall, drinking bad coffee and grinding through a crisis agenda inconclusively.
Elsewhere, hundreds of pilots spent the night keyed up and sleepless in the cockpits of their nuclear-armed interceptors, wondering if this time the French were finally coming. And they were not alone, for the Commonwealth War Command responded to the uncertain threat in accordance with the age-old syllogism of the uncertain; something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done.
Petard carriers—bombers—and their escort tankers scrambled, then flew out to orbit their hold-back points in the howling darkness above the Arctic Ocean. They flew armed and ready for the deadly one-way dash to the enemy capitals: to London, Paris, Cairo, Beijing, Bombay, and the heart of the enemy empire itself, Royal St. Petersburg. Across the flat prairies of Lakotaland, flight crews descended into their silos and pumped liquid fuel aboard their bulbous first-generation ICBMs. In the oceans, submarine captains received their low-frequency alert codes and brought their nuclear-powered vessels to periscope depth while the missile teams readied their birds. But it was an exercise in impotence: none of the bombers or ICBMs or SLBMs carried the world-walkers who were a necessity if they were to engage the real threat.
By dawn of the day after this deathwatch, it became clear that the sum of all fears had not come to pass. The high-altitude drone was not the harbinger of Armageddon. Across the New American Commonwealth’s three continents and scattered territories, the unsleeping Air Defense forces saw nothing else unusual. After twelve hours of intense concentration—for, as Dr. Johnson had so memorably observed, nothing concentrates the mind like the knowledge that one is to be hanged—the Commonwealth War Command began to draw down their forces unit by unit, backing slowly away from the brink of a nuclear war with the only adversary they knew how to fight.
All except for JUGGERNAUT, of course. But the JUGGERNAUT superweapon was behind schedule and over budget. It might never be ready. And even if it was viable, it was anyone’s guess whether it would work. After all, the Commonwealth war planners knew that bombers and ICBMs and ballistic missile submarines worked: they’d supped at the fount of dark wisdom supplied by the Ministry of Intertemporal Technological Intelligence. They’d studied the Cuban Missile Crisis, the emergency at the end of the Yom Kippur War, and the ghastly intersection of Operation RYaN and Able Archer 83 that had brought the Soviet Union and the United States to the edge of nuclear annihilation in the mid-1980s. They’d majored in cold war studies: Hiroshima and Nagasaki and New Delhi and Islamabad were on the syllabus of the staff college at Rochester. But nobody in any time line they knew of had ever built anything quite like JUGGERNAUT, much less developed doctrine for using it …
NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, JUNE 2020
“How long has he got?” Miriam asked bluntly.
Dr. Porter, the oncology consultant, looked tired. He’d probably answered the question sixteen times before breakfast already. “It’s anyone’s guess,” he said unhelpfully. “The Lord will know his own.”
Miriam glanced sidelong at her husband. Erasmus appeared to be paying more attention to the writing pad on his lap than to her interrogation of the doctor. It was an old habit of his. “I know cachexia when I see it,” she said. “I also know acute spinal degeneration secondary to metastatic tumors, and peripheral neuropathy—”
Dr. Porter’s eyes widened. “I see ma’am is up to date on the new foreign literature,” he said.
Ma’am is actually very out of date indeed, but Miriam decided not to mention her uncompleted premed to him. She merely smiled tensely. “What’s his prognosis? Days or weeks?”
“Ah, well.” Porter looked faintly relieved. “Well, the First Man may not be as close to death’s door as you believe. You met him at his worst last week. He’s currently responding well to a combination treatment—fluorouracil and cisplatin—and radiation as well. I will not mince words with you: his prognosis is terminal. But while one can never rule out sudden setbacks, he might hang on for as long as six months.”
Fluorouracil and cisplatin were 1970s chemotherapy drugs, but the Commonwealth was nowhere near ready to begin production of monoclonal antibody and epigenetic interference therapies. And Adam himself had refused, point blank, to consider a discreet trip to a private Brazilian clinic in time line two. “It is my duty to stand by my people and, if necessary, to suffer as they do,” he’d pointed out to Erasmus when they’d come to visit his bedside the day before. “If there’s an easy escape for the likes of us, when will we ever develop the indigenous technology”—he’d glanced at Miriam, eyelids fluttering—“to rescue our people?”
Sixteen years ago, Sir Adam had swallowed her two-phase proposal completely—so completely, he was willing to die by it. She’d lobbied to establish a ministry to use world-walkers to import knowledge and ideas and spread the spoils via educational establishments. But it was essential that they use these tools only to develop native infrastructure, from schools and universities to research establishments and factories. The Commonwealth must stand on its own, rather than becoming addicted to a steady drip of illicit imports from another time line, as the Gruinmarkt had. It had seemed like a really good idea at the time, she thought—not without bitterness—until the saintly Father of the Nation decided they were words to live and die by.