Insanity's Children by Rolf Nelson

Author:Rolf Nelson [Nelson, Rolf]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-11-20T22:00:00+00:00

Colonel Fischer hadn’t chewed his fingernails since nearly washing out in Officer’s Academy from accumulated demerits, but the old habit had returned. Too many changes, too many unknowns, players showing up on the field with no warning. The only bright spot since he recognized First Sergeant Reel was that for unknown reasons there was suddenly a lot of unencrypted open channel traffic, and first analysis indicated everyone else was as panicky and in the dark as he was, maybe more so. And that made him even more nervous, because known unknowns could be managed, but unknown unknowns were minefields much harder to navigate. The shelling of the city was utterly unexpected, and a breach of terms, but there was nothing he could do at the moment except let the lawyers on staff with Lieutenant Seven make noise and protest events. The cruiser’s sensors were getting jammed. However, he couldn’t admit that as using them was also a breach, but from the electronic noise on the battlefield he assumed they’d had some sort of major problems. The sketchy reports of mercy ships in the city were confusing, and there were at least three for sure, but they’d found images of no less than six, with only two known, and no inbound flight data on any of the other possible craft because of limits on sensor usage. It, or they, had come out of nowhere and dropped off a lot of injured for sure, then landed in town, maybe, then flew north… perhaps. Had it flown in low from the islands, as one improbable report of it coming in over the beach indicated?

He should have heard from the cruiser by now, but he knew from long experience that rushing ship captains rarely had the desired effect. Finally the empty window he’d been expecting to be filled at least two minutes ago came to life, and the cruiser captain looked unsettled.

“They disappeared,” he reported bluntly. “Lots of jamming, passive and visuals only.” The captain’s image on the screen was replaced by a long-range low-angle camera view with lots of distortion from the many kilometers of atmosphere as the ship came over the horizon. He could make out few details other than the river and an indistinct gray angular form surrounded by a great deal of smoke and dust and steam and vapor. The ship lifted, turned, and headed east, becoming invisible in the cloud. Then the video fast-forwards as the cruiser arrived more directly overhead, and the only two things that were obvious was that the smoke was clearing away, and the ship wasn’t there. But it didn’t fly anywhere unless it was invisible. Flies into smoke, smoke disappears, nothing left. Impossible. “Pretty much the same thing on thermal, except lower res, with lots of airbursts consistent with white phosphorous rounds, and other sources consistent with known munitions, looked like a very faint twin-core drive signature entering the cloud, then nothing as the jamming cut off. Just… nothing. Not a damn thing. What

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