Extinction Machine

Chapter Seventy-eight

VanMeer Castle

Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Sunday, October 20, 12:04 p.m.

Yuina Hoshino called a few minutes after noon.

Howard and Mr. Bones sat down at the Ghost Box console to take the call and immediately they could tell that the nervous little scientist had been crying. Her eyes were red and puffy and there was some white paste at the corners of her mouth.

“I can’t stand it!” she wailed. Almost wailed; her voice broke in the middle. “General Croft called our business office five minutes ago. He’s canceling the air show. Not just for now, but maybe or as long as six months. Between the cyber-attacks and now what happened at Dugway—he said that in the face of a concerted terrorist attack on the industrial-military complex we must exercise prudence and bullshit like that. He kept going on and on about how we had to protect what we have and consider our options.”

“Yuina—” began Howard, but she wasn’t listening.

“I tried to tell him that we had some solutions, that Shelton Aeronautics was ready to respond to these threats, but he didn’t hear me. It was like he was locked into a speech and he couldn’t shake loose. I think he’s really rattled. I think he’s scared because of what happened at Dugway. He’s freaked out and now they’ve canceled the air show. How are we going to get them to listen? It’s all ruined! All this work, it’s over, it’s ruined. The Chinese have—”

“Shut up!” bellowed Howard in a bull voice that struck the weeping scientist into a shocked and sniffling silence. Howard jabbed a finger at her hologram as if it could feel his emphatic pokes. “Listen to me, you silly bitch. We are not beaten and this is definitely not over. Pull yourself together. You’re a governor of Majestic Three for Christ’s sake. Act like it for a change. So the Chinese outplayed us on this round. We are far from done, honey.”

“But … I don’t understand … we are done. They clearly built a working Device and we’re years away from that! Our top-of-the-line is Specter 101, and that can’t do what that ship did at Dugway…”

Howard smiled at her. “It doesn’t have to.”

She frowned, forgetting her tears for a moment. “What?”

“Trust me,” he said.