Infinity Wars by Jonathan Strahan

Author:Jonathan Strahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

“WE LOST RAJ,” she told Kripanand that night, her low-energy transmission hopping across thousands of relays to disguise its source. Each relay, the size of a sequin, lasted only a few days; drones were constantly scattering more of them across the battlefield. They were supposed to be biodegradable. “There are just too fucking many Chinese.” She spoke in English; Kripanand’s Tamil was nonexistent, and Hindi was only his third best language.

Kripanand Gurudata sighed. The sound was nearly indistinguishable from the digital noise introduced by the relays and by the satellite link between Tibet and India, but during the four years of their extended and mostly long-distance relationship she’d grown attuned to the little noises he made. “I’m sorry,” he said at last, and they both knew it was inadequate, and they both knew there was nothing more to say. “We are doing all we can here. Not that I can tell you about it.”

“I know.” Kripanand was in military R&D, working at a secret facility buried somewhere in the Himalayas.

“I can tell you that we had a public demo of the G3 today. Went off without a hitch.”

“Yeah, I heard. Not that it’ll do us much good here.”

The United States had revealed the existence of weaponized teleportation technology over twenty years earlier, delivering a fifteen-gram osmium pellet to the headquarters of the Islamic Caliphate. On arrival the pellet had intersected with about one milligram of air molecules, transforming their mass instantly into energy: an explosion equivalent in power to twenty tons of TNT. This was far less than an atomic bomb—the yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki had been twenty thousand tons—but still an impressive bang, especially given that it could be delivered at the speed of light to any point on Earth that could be located with sufficient precision. For a while this technology had returned the US to superpower status.

But that requirement of locating the target proved the weapon’s Achilles heel. After first the Pentagon and then the Kremlin were reduced to smoking holes in the ground—once teleportation had been demonstrated, it had not proved difficult for other nations to work out the theory and practice—all major powers began using secrecy, mobility, decoys, camouflage, and other countermeasures to make their key command and control centers impossible to pin down. Cities, of course, could not be hidden, but that applied to all combatants equally, so any such strike would certainly be met with a comparable response. This led to decades of cold war, with international conflict reduced to espionage and border skirmishes under the threat of mutually assured destruction.

During this time a second-generation teleport technology had been developed, this one capable of swapping an object for an equivalent volume of air at the target location. This eliminated the explosive effect, but the tech still required the power of a city-sized nuclear plant to teleport an object less than ten centimeters on a side, and the payload arrived with a bang that was hard to disguise. It turned out

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