Michael’s gut twisted some more. “Good for her,” he forced himself to say. “The 120th is still in the Velmar Mountains?”
“They are, along with the 443rd and the 22nd. They’ve taken a lot of pressure off the Branxtons and have tied down an entire planetary defense division. The latest intelligence summaries say that those Hammers have been hit so hard that only a handful of their formations are fully combat effective.”
Michael knew he should take some comfort in the fact that Anna was up against second-rate troops, but he couldn’t. Anna being Anna, she’d be in the thick of it. “Good to hear,” he said. ”I just wish she knew I was okay.”
“Shit! I’m so sorry, Michael; I meant to tell you earlier. I know what Admiral Jaruzelska said, but General Cortez overruled her. He’s made sure she knows.”
Relief flooded Michael’s body. “That was good of him.”
“Least we could do.”
“Don’t let me forget to thank him.”
“I won’t,” Hok said, getting to her feet. “Now, I’ve got some things I need to do, and if you’re half as tired as you look, I think you should turn in.”
“You’re right, Major,” Michael said, all of a sudden conscious of just how exhausted he was. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“You will.”
“If you’d like to come this way, gentlemen.”
Trailed by his chief of staff, Polk followed Doctor Ndegwa past a massive blast door and into a tunnel cut through meters of granite. He tried not to think about the billions of tons of rock that lay between him and fresh air. Past a second blast door, the tunnel opened onto a catwalk overlooking a long cavern. The sight took Polk’s breath away. Below a roof studded with massed banks of lights and hung with power cables and air-conditioning ducts, the cavern was packed with a mass of stainless steel pipes and cylinders studded with sensors, valves, and controllers, all hung with thick bundles of cable in a rainbow of colors. It was an enormous three-dimensional puzzle free-to Polk eyes, at least-of logic or structure. How the engineers were able to make sense of it all, he had no idea. His brain ached just looking at it.
“This is Low-Energy Antiproton Facility Number One,” Ndegwa said, waving a hand across the chaos. “LEAF-1 we call it, and it’s the first of the twenty LEAFs we plan to construct.”
“Is it working?” Polk asked, casting a skeptical eye around the cavern. Apart from the rush of the air- conditioning and a myriad of status lights, there was nothing to say that the facility was actually functioning.
“Yes, it is. LEAF-1 came on-stream five weeks ahead of schedule. It’s currently operating at 15 percent of its planned capacity, though we plan to be at 100 percent within six months.”
“Good. I do not want this project to take one day longer than it absolutely has to. The Hammer of Kraa needs its antimatter capability sooner rather than later. Understood?”
Ndegwa nodded. “Yes, sir. And while we’re talking about schedules, there’s something I’d like you to see. This way, please.”
Polk followed the man along the catwalk and into a small meeting room that was empty except for a table on which sat a plasfiber box.
“This,” Ndegwa said, reaching in to pull out an object two-thirds the size of a shoe box, its metallic surface polished to a mirror finish and unbroken except for two ports and a digital readout, “is an antimatter container from our new Mark-5 °C warhead, and it has been charged with antihydrogen produced by the Hendrik Island plant.”
Polk reared back; knowing how close he was to the unimaginable power contained inside the container, he could not help himself. “Kraa’s blood,” he hissed, “are you fucking mad?”
“It’s quite safe, sir,” Ndegwa said, dropping the warhead back into its box with a thud that rattled the table and made Polk flinch.
“I know it is,” Polk said, cursing himself for letting Ndegwa see his fear. “It was just … wait. Did you just say it’s filled with antihydrogen produced here?”
“I did. And we are well ahead of schedule; we plan to have sixteen operational Mark-5 °Cs by the end of this year.”
“Who else knows about this?” Polk asked, his mind flooded all of a sudden with the strategic possibilities sixteen antimatter-armed missiles opened up.
“Apart from the three of us here, only the people in warhead production.”
“What about those Pascanicians scumbags?”
“We do not allow them anywhere near the warheads. They might know all there is to know about magnetic flux engineering, but they have no idea how to weaponize antimatter, and it’s my policy to keep it that way.”
“Good.” Polk turned to Ngaro. “This changes things, Lou,” he said. “Find Admiral Kerouac. I want to see him as soon as we get back to McNair.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, Chief Councillor,” Admiral Kerouac said, “we’ll need to look at this in more detail, but a first strike against the Feds, even with only sixteen Mark-5 °C warheads in our inventory, would destroy most of their warship construction yards and a good percentage of their fleet as well. There would be considerable collateral damage to the civilian population, though. The majority of their yards are in Clarke orbits around inhabited planets or orbital habitats.”
“Like I give a shit about that,” Polk said with a snort of derision. “Put together a brief to present to the next Defense Council meeting. If we’re to do this, we need to start planning now.”
“Yes, sir.”
Admiral Jaruzelska looked up as Michael pushed open the door to her office. “Come in; take a seat.”
“Sir,” Michael replied, mystified by the summons. As Operation Juggernaut’s launch approached-not that there was a definite date for J-Day yet-Jaruzelska had become remote and unapproachable. It had been weeks since Michael had done anything more than pass the time of day with her, and even then not often.
And all the time there was the nagging fear that Hartspring might have done to Anna what he had promised to do, a fear feeding an angry frustration that threatened to spiral out of control.
“Right, let’s get started,” Jaruzelska said. “We’ve just received an intelligence report from the NRA. It seems the Hammers may have gotten wind that we’re up to something. Worse, they know that I am involved. The only good news is that the NRA’s source says the Hammers have no firm idea what we’re planning, though knowing how their minds work, I’d bet my life their money’s on a coup.”
“So what does that mean for us?” Michael asked.
“We’re bringing Juggernaut forward, probably to the last week of July. It’s earlier than we wanted, and we won’t have all the auxiliaries we’d like, but that can’t be helped. Now that the Hammers suspect something, they’ll be pushing hard to find out what we’re doing, and I wouldn’t discount the possibility of the Hammers running interference as well.”
“Interference?”
“They’ll pressure Ferrero into taking preemptive action against people like me. They’ll try to cut the heads off Juggernaut, and I’m one of the heads. There’s a good chance they’ll manufacture a crisis to help them do that.”
“Like an assassination or something?”
“That would do. It’ll be much easier for the Hammers to get Ferrero to move against us if there’s a state of emergency in force.”
“Will any of this stop Juggernaut?”
