Dark Matter: Star Carrier: Book Five by Ian Douglas

Author:Ian Douglas [Douglas, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

9 March 2425

York Civic Center

Jefferson Government Complex

Toronto, USNA

1345 hours, TFT

The York Civic Center was a sprawling metropolis in its own right, seated on the banks of Lake Ontario and extending on artificial terrain far out over the waters to the south. The Jefferson Tower rose in sweeping curves above the waterfront, offering an unparalleled view of the city and the lake.

It was, Koenig thought, a relief to be back up and in the light, natural light rather than the glowing light panels of the bunker kilometers below. For months, with only occasional respites on ceremonial occasions, President Koenig and his staff had been squirreled away in the Emergency Presidential Complex far beneath the streets of Toronto, sheltering from the possibility of another Confederation nano-D attack like the one that had vaporized a three-kilometer-wide crater into the heart of downtown Columbus, the former capital of the USNA. His security detail could fuss and fidget; he was going to make the most of this, and had arranged for the staff meeting with Gray and his people in a broad, open briefing room in the sky over a third of a kilometer above Toronto’s central business and government center.

There were military units surrounding the city, of course, and on the Atlantic coast, and in orbit, all watching for another attack. If an alarm came through, Koenig and those with him could be in the bunker complex within a few minutes, thanks to dedicated high-velocity mag-rail elevators in the building’s spine.

He didn’t think it was going to happen. There’d been no repeat of the atrocity, and despite President Denoix’s disquieting remarks a few days before—about the possibility of more nano-D attacks—the new Confederation government had been backpedaling on the issue, blaming a cabal or rogue element of some sort within the Confederation military.

Koenig looked down from the Jefferson Building’s 194th floor on the crowded expanse of York Plaza and prayed that the Confederation continued to behave . . . continued to abide by the commonly accepted terms and restrictions of civilized warfare. Despite Denoix’s vague threats, the Confederation seemed to have received enough of a backlash from the rest of the world, even from the nation-states that were still members of the Confederation, to have renounced nano-deconstructor warfare as a weapon.

The whole idea of civilized warfare was a colossal oxymoron, of course. War by its very nature couldn’t be civilized. Centuries ago, the advent of nuclear weapons had forced certain restrictions on warfare, if only to avoid the unthinkable—a nuclear holocaust on a global scale. Certain lines could not be crossed, certain borders could not be violated even when the enemy was operating freely on both sides. The notion of limited warfare had cost lives and even eventual victory in some of those wars. “There is no substitute for victory” had been a quote by General Douglas MacArthur—but in one way, perhaps, MacArthur was wrong. The human species had survived, after all, when the increasingly deadly weapons of modern warfare had threatened Humankind with utter extinction.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.