No matter. He would carry out the instructions humming within his brain to the very best of his robotlike ability.
Descending toward the cluster of domes marking the robotic observation station, he accelerated, ignoring a sudden barrageof radio messages demanding his identity . . . demanding that he stop . . . demanding that—
Ten meters above the basaltic rock, Valdez triggered the 300-megaton nuclear device built into the frame of the vehicle.
White light filled the cavern as Valdez and his aircar vaporized. In seconds, the fireball slammed against the cavern walls,ceiling, and floor, devouring solid rock, pushing up and out.
The top of Cayambe rose in a thundering torrent of rock and ice. . . .
Quito Space Elevator
Port Ecuador
1050 hours, EST
“What the hell was that?” Hinkley asked, startled.
Koenig looked up from his screen. He’d felt a solid thump through the bulkheads of the E-pod, a jolt transmitted, he thought,from the space elevator itself. “I don’t know. Felt like we jumped the rails.”
Several of the passengers screamed. The pod had stopped accelerating, and the passengers were now in free fall.
A screen set into the back of the seat in front of him showed an informational display of the flight: current speed, distancetraveled, G-force, time from liftoff, time to arrival . . . but as he looked at the figures, they winked out, and the displaywent blank.
That was more alarming than the thump.
Koenig’s first impulse was to unstrap and head for the piloting compartment . . . but magnetic E-pods did not have human pilots or a bridge. A fairly simpleminded AI guided the craft up and down the cable, maintaining acceleration, adjusting velocity, and handling the docking with the receiving port. Koenig linked into the control network and brought up a series of external camera views.
“My God . . .”
“What is it, sir?”
“We did derail! That’s the elevator!”
The space elevator cable was meters thick, with inset grooves that gently cupped the pods. It should have looked like a solidwall moving swiftly past the pod’s keel . . . but a camera looking in that direction showed the beanstalk a dozen meters distant,the surface blurred by the pod’s velocity. The pod had been jolted free of the magnetic cradle carrying it upward. It wasstill rising at some 2.3 kilometers per second, the speed it had been traveling when it left the cable, but that velocitywas decreasing now as Earth’s gravity took hold and began dragging the capsule back.
“Mr. President! Are you there?”
The voice, ragged and static-blasted, was Konstantin’s, speaking over the Godstream channel. Propagated up and down the spaceelevator by both radio and laser com, the pods could be linked into the network while they were moving up- or down-E, butKoenig’s craft was now far enough from the stalk that he was having trouble getting a clear signal.
A check of the signal dynamics showed something more disturbing: signals from below, from Port Ecuador, had ceased. Evidently,there was a problem, a very serious problem, with the Cayambe facility.
“The top of Cayambe has just collapsed,” Konstantin told him, as if reading his thoughts. “The collapse took the city withit, and the base of the space elevator has been cut free.”
“Collapsed! How? What happened?”
“We’re not sure, but seismic readings suggest that a fairly large fusion device has been exploded deep within the mountain.”
“A nuke? It’s not a volcanic eruption?”
“Volcanic eruptions do not release radioactivity into the surroundings.”
“Ah . . .”
Koenig switched from the camera showing the blurred image of the beanstalk and took a look aft, straight down the length ofthe space elevator. From nearly two hundred kilometers up, Earth’s surface was a beautiful mosaic of rugged mountains, greenforests and agricultural lands, deep azure ocean, and the swirl and sweep of gleaming white clouds. The elevator itself dwindledto a silver thread lost within that landscape. From here, he could make out the pattern of streets and farmland marking Quito,but he couldn’t make out Cayambe itself.
There was a minute, dark cloud spreading out from where the thread seemed to vanish. Though small, little more than a speck, it wasrapidly growing larger.
He enhanced the image. There . . . A circle rippling out from the base of the elevator . . . The shock wave of a very large blast.
A volcanic eruption? He knew Cayambe was an extinct volcano . . . probably extinct. He also knew there were safeguards in place to anticipate an eruption and allow the elevator to be reconnected elsewhere.An eruption would have given some warning.
Which made him wonder if Port Ecuador had just been annihilated by a very large nuclear detonation.
Who the hell would nuke the space elevator? And why?
Lieutenant Cordell
The Overlook
Quito Synchorbital
1056 hours, FST
Lieutenant Michael Cordell was seated in the Earthview Lounge of the Overlook, a moderately priced bar and restaurant in one of the spin-gravity wheels attached to the Quito Synchorbital complex. Despite the wheel’s slow and steady rotation, providing a constant 0.5 G, the floor-to-ceiling viewall curving across half of the lounge showed a half Earth motionless against the blackness of space.
Obviously the scene was being transmitted by non-rotating cameras, Cordell thought. Except for the lack of motion, it wasimpossible to tell that he was not looking through a transparency.
His companion touched the sleeve of his jumper. “Lost again?” she asked with an evil grin.
Cordell grinned back. Lieutenant Katya Golikova was keenly intelligent, sharp-witted, and fun. She was also very much forbiddenfruit at this point. When he’d met her almost five years ago, Russia and the USNA had been friends and allies, fighting acommon Pan-European enemy. Lately, though, the political situation had changed. She wasn’t an enemy, exactly, but the wordhad come down through the brass hierarchy that fraternizing with Russians was forbidden.
“No,” he told her. “Just woolgathering.”
“And wool,” she said, teasing him, “is that much more interesting than me?”
“Of course not.” He reached out, picked up his wineglass, and raised it. “To us.”
She touched her glass to his. “Na zdorovie.”
He was damned if he was going to report his relationship with her. He might be ordered to
