“Is everything okay?” Dinah asked. Because clearly everything wasn’t. Her first thought was that the Morse code transmissions had been intercepted and that Dinah was in trouble. But if that were the case, Ivy would not be in here asking to look out her window.
She looked at her friend. Ivy went immediately to the window and then positioned herself to look down at the Earth. By now the terminator had advanced to the point where it had lit up the easternmost bulge of South America. Izzy was about to cross the equator, which was almost directly below them.
“I heard from Cal,” Ivy said. She said it without the usual note of pleasure in her voice.
“That’s good. I thought his boat was underwater.”
“It was until a couple of hours ago.”
“They popped up?”
“They popped up.”
“Where?”
“Down there,” Ivy said.
“How do you know?” Dinah asked. “Surely he’s not beaming you his coordinates.”
“I can tell,” Ivy said. “By putting two and two together.”
“What did he say?”
“He said to prepare for some launches out of Kourou.”
“They’re going to reopen the spaceport?”
Ivy gasped.
Dinah glided over and got right behind Ivy, hugging her and hooking her chin over Ivy’s shoulder so that she could share the same viewing angle.
They knew where Kourou was; they looked at it all the time, and sometimes even saw the bright plumes of rocket engines on the launch pads.
What Ivy had reacted to was a little different. Sparks of light were appearing along the coast, spreading, and fading. A barrage of them, peppered across the interval between the beach and Devil’s Island.
“What the hell are those?” Dinah asked. “Are those nukes?”
“I don’t know,” Ivy said.
Then Dinah’s question was answered by a much brighter light that flared along the coast to the northwest, fading slightly to a luminescent ball that tumbled upward toward space.
“I think that was a nuke,” Ivy said.
“We just nuked . . . Venezuela?”
It took a few moments for their eyes to readjust. That was just as well, since their minds had to do some adjusting as well. Once the light had faded, they could see that the mushroom cloud was actually offshore of the Venezuelan landmass, a few miles out to sea.
“A demonstration shot? Visible from Caracas?” Dinah asked.
“Partly that,” Ivy said. “But yesterday they were saying that the whole Venezuelan navy was headed for Kourou to restore order. I’ll bet that navy no longer exists.”
“The smaller fireballs? Near the spaceport?”
“I’m going to guess fuel-air explosives. They would do almost as much damage as tactical nukes without contaminating the launch site.”
Ivy had shrugged loose from Dinah’s embrace and turned around so that her back was to the window. They were now hovering close to each other.
Dinah finally got it. “You said that Cal’s boat had popped up. That it was on the surface. That he knew something. You think—”
“I know,” Ivy mouthed.
Cal had received the order, direct from J.B.F., and he had launched the nuke. He’d probably launched cruise missiles with fuel-air devices as well.
People assumed that Ivy and Dinah had grown apart in the last year—but then, people had assumed that they were at odds to begin with. There was no point in trying to keep track of what people imagined. Ivy’s loss of her position to Dinah’s boyfriend hadn’t made matters any simpler. But things had never been bad between them. Just complicated.
Ivy was pretty articulate, but there wasn’t a lot about the current situation that could be talked through.
After a few minutes, though, she found a way. “I guess what sucks is that all I’m going to have of him is memories,” Ivy said, “and I was trying to cultivate some good ones to carry with me.” She wasn’t exactly crying, but her voice had gone velvety.
“You know he had no choice,” Dinah said. “The chain of command is still in effect.”
“Of course I understand that,” Ivy said. “Still. It’s just not what I wanted.”
“We knew it was going to get ugly,” Dinah said.
Her radio started beeping.
“Speaking of which . . .”
“Who the hell is that?” Ivy asked.
“Sean Probst,” Dinah said. “He’s back.”
Ivy hung out in Dinah’s shop for a while as Dinah laboriously keyed out the second half of her situation report. By the time South America had passed from view, long trails of black smoke were streaking northeast from the burning wreckage of the People’s Justice Blockade and casting shadows on the wrinkled skin of the Atlantic. Bright sparks had appeared over Kourou again, but now they were the incandescent plumes of solid boosters chucking heavy-lift vehicles into the sky.
“Back in business,” Ivy said. “I guess I better revise those spreadsheets.”
“You think Cal is still on the surface? Still reachable?”