At 18:31 CST on March 13, 2029, the world started to end. First Lieutenant Jessica Marinakis was driving back from dinner, returning to her Army base to chisel away at a stack of paperwork. She stopped at the gate and dug in her pocket for her Common Access Card. As she did, a light in the rear view mirror caught her eye. Tilting it up, she saw a star rising in the crepuscular North Dakota skies, arcing up from the southwest and generating a ragged condensation trail.
She rolled down her window and held her CAC out. The gate guard was staring. He only paid attention to her CAC when she waved it a little.
“Sorry, Lieutenant.”
“Don’t worry about it. What was that, a test?”
“Must be. Those Global Strike guys don’t tell us anything.” He scanned the card. “Hey check it out…”
Marinakis turned in her seat. Another star was rising, nearly perpendicular to the previous light’s window-blown zigzag trail. “Seems like a big test for us not to be informed.”
The guard shrugged, opened the gate, and ushered her through. The car’s wheels crunched over the asphalt. The parking lots were already emptying out, soldiers returning to their homes in the sleepy Grand Forks suburbs. Making a mental note to check with her captain about the test, maybe even file a complaint with the Air Force about the lack of interbranch communication, she parked and began walking across the tarmac to her office.
Somebody yelled “Look up!” Marinakis did.
At the zenith, a cone of light was expanding, the apex pointing east, the base haloing a cloud of fire. What in the… A glowing, moving ball materialized next to the cone. Though sluggish from her reference frame, it was moving hypersonically. It crossed the zenith, descended to the southwest, and disappeared behind the tree line.
And then there was a flash. Her face prickled. A cloud appeared on the horizon, elliptical and climbing, toruses of white vapors forming around it. As it reached for the stratosphere, the cloud narrowed to an ugly black and brown neck.
Some animal instinct within her recoiled. A scream from the parking lot was drowned by the shriek of every base alarm lighting off. All hell broke loose.
Everybody on base emerged into the open air at once. They ran this way and that. They carried guns or equipment. They seemed to have no idea what they were doing. Screams and cries. Alarm wails. Gunshots. Some into the open sky, some not.
Marinakis was rooted where she stood, staring straight up into the sky as the base swirled around her. Glowing lights tore the firmament apart. She now understood that they were descending nuclear warheads. Parabolic streaks curved up to meet them. Spheres and cones exploded outwards where the warheads and defensive interceptors met, up above the atmosphere. Many of the incomings got through. They all went west at first, but then started going north, south, and east, criss crossing the sky. Flashes lit her peripheral vision. She felt sick then excited; terrified then resigned. The lights were mesmerizing. They were hideous. Her family was in the Twin Cities.
Someone grabbed her arm. She shook herself. The first minutes of nuclear war, and she was standing still.
It was radio-telephone operator Zain McAiden, a private in her platoon. “Captain wants to see you!” he yelled.
“Why?” she asked.
McAiden held his hands up in confusion. She couldn’t make sense of the gesture. Shells of electromagnetic radiation were spreading across the globe. The base lights flickered. “Lead the way.”
They ran through clumps of people; scattered, disorganized, and stunned. Suddenly First Lieutenant Jessica Marinakis found herself in company HQ, face-to-face with Captain Sean Waechter.
“I’m going to tell you this once, Lieutenant,” he barked, “snap the fuck out of it.”
That worked. She hadn’t realized how dazed she was. Her sense of self started shutting down, for the better. “Yessir, what’re my orders?”
“Long range comms just dropped out. I got a handful of orders before that and I plan to execute them. You’re on deck.” The room was oddly calm. Up above, strategic theory was materializing in metal and rocket fuel. On the ground, a perfect hypostatic union; statistical analysis melded to flesh and blood in roiling nuclear fireballs. Branches of the future human tree were being pruned, whole networks of possibility blasted away in microseconds.
“What do you need me to do?” she asked.
Waechter produced a map of North America, pointed at a bay in Nunavut. “We’ve lost much of our radar coverage. We need to reinitialize it. There’s an old DEW line radar base that was abandoned in the Cold War drawdown, we need it up and running to win this war. CAM-3. Should be power still there, the weather service was using it as an automated station.” He handed over a photograph. A long shed. The brilliant white radome of the primary search radar.
The Cold War, she thought, wasn’t this supposed to happen then? With a lurch she realized she had been sleep walking; had been targeted from the cradle onwards. She had always been in danger, her teachers just forgot to tell her. They talked about nukes in history class. Basic’s radiation training had felt perfunctory.
“This war? Sir?” It seemed like an absurd word to use. Did they actually have a name for this? Consensual annihilation, maybe.
Waechter was not amused, “Yes Lieutenant, this war. Now, if you don’t mind keeping your questions confined to the realm of mission relevance, please.”
She reached down to the map and used her finger as a scale marker to estimate the straightline distance from Grand Forks to CAM-3. The ceiling vibrated. Dust fell. “That’s something like fourteen hundred miles.” The lights flickered again. Throughout the world the computers were following their software logic, finding targets, dispersing weapons, watching for results and doing that again and again and again. Abstraction had built the system; a technofractal of decentralized decisions that had combined to form an edifice of death that was falling—now, finally, irreconcilably, with mathematical precision—onto the human race, or the end thereof.
“How fast can you do it?”
She calculated, “The CATVs can make forty miles-per-hour, so that gives us something like thirty-six hours of driving. Factor in time to rest and sleep and…sixty-ish hours, accounting for not driving at top speed the whole time.”
“Sleep in shifts on the road. Make it forty-eight. How many men do you need?” Wasn’t deterrence supposed to prevent this? Was that something old, from a time before?
“Give me ten, counting me and my sergeant, and we’ll take three vehicles. We’ll need to take a lot of extra fuel.” The building shook. A nearby hit. She wondered whether the cities were getting targeted. Presumably they were. It was impossible to guess what that looked like, all she had for an image was the old grainy footage of a test house getting blown down by overpressure. “Captain, how am I supposed to report on my mission outcomes if the comm system is down?”
“You’re going to have to stay put until we can get that up and running. CAM-3 should have enough supplies. Get that radar back up, don’t worry about the information interlinks. It’s above your pay grade.”
She gathered the map from the table and saluted. “Anything else?”
“On your way, Lieutenant.”
The compartmentalizing was almost complete, but she still stopped at the door and turned. “Sir, who launched first?”
“Does it matter?”
Apparently not.
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