Gregory Benford, William Rotsler by Shiva Descending (epub)

Author:Shiva Descending (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2022-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

12 May: Collision minus 13 days

“Mister President?”

Caleb Knowles looked up from his note-taking. Sometimes it straightened out his thinking to put the main points down in some sort of order, just to see if they looked any better in print, annotated with arrows, boxes, stars, and other doodling. Knowles feared some psychiatrist examining his jottings and had always destroyed them. “More from Vandenberg?”

“Yes, sir,” the military aide said. “The fuel depot fire is under control now.”

Knowles smiled. “Good. Good.” He looked across the alcove of the White House situation room at the Secretary of Defense.

Sam Rogers sat with a cradled phone in his hand. “But the gantry system is derailed, they say.” He tapped one foot nervously and it made a hollow little sound in the carpeted alcove.

The President looked past him at the uniformed men and women around the maps and machines in the main room. “They’re sure the Gabriels outside couldn’t have done it?”

Rogers nodded. “The fuel depot, yes, that could have been a small incendiary rocket. But not the gantry.”

There was a short silence while they all looked at the President. Woods from the CIA, McNellis from State, Dr. Kinney, Mathison, the Senate majority leader, Hopkins from the House, a nervous light colonel from the Signal Corps. They all looked fresh out of advice.

The buck stops here, Knowles thought for the thousandth time. And they expect change.

There was a curiously cold and wet feel to the air, which had little to do with the air-conditioning. It was intangible. Strained. Like the faces that looked at him with concern. Nobody seemed ready to say anything.

“Did they track down that voltage overload?” the President asked.

“So far, no,” Sam Rogers said evenly.

“Those subsystems are vital in the next few launches, aren’t they?”

“Yes, sir, they are.”

“The shuttle on the gantry right now—can it lift?”

“Yes, but—”

“I order them to launch.”

“Sir…” Rogers leaned forward. “Sir, I should advise you that the Vandenberg commander believes that the Gabriels might have other incendiary rockets. They are sweeping the country around there but it’s pretty rugged and empty. Plenty of places to hide. There are reports that an Army unit abandoned equipment in that class three days ago in San Pedro, and there was a theft at the Alameda base…if the Gabriels got something from either, and the fuel depot was a test by them—”

“That’s all supposition, Sam.”

“Yes, sir, it is,” the pudgy Secretary of Defense said. He had a voice that got higher the longer he talked, the President noted. He thought it odd he hadn’t noticed that before. It would almost be comical, if anybody felt like laughing. Rogers took a deep breath and went on. “But…the last few backup systems for the Omega team are on that shuttle. If the Gabriels catch it with a heat-seeker, no matter how small, we’ll lose those components…not to mention the, uh, the personnel.”

“Those are secondary systems.”

“True, sir. But—”

“We can risk them.”

“The components—well, perhaps, sir. But if the shuttle launch vehicle crashes on Vandenberg, we could lose everything.

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