It was three in the morning, and she was dreaming that she was on a conference call in the Insider’s offices, waiting on the line to speak to a source in a monoclonal antibody start-up while an inexplicable earthquake rumbled. The telephone began to ring, louder and louder. It wasn’t the single long ring of an American phone, but a sequence of three short trills, then a pause, then three more. A Commonwealth telephone, summoning her to—
She rolled over and, barely awake, reached for the handset on the nightstand. “Burgesons. Miriam here.” Beside her Erasmus thrashed and snorted loudly, stopped snoring, and sat up.
“Commissioner? This is Commonwealth Crisis Command, I have General Benn on the line for you. Is Commissioner—the other Commissioner—Burgeson with you? This is an all-ears Cabinet flash.”
The bedside light flickered on. Miriam rolled on her back and pushed herself up against the headboard. Her husband looked at her: “Flash message for both of us,” she said.
Seconds passed as Erasmus untangled the telephone cord on his side of the bed and other Commissioners joined the party line. Miriam waited, heart pounding. The cobwebs of sleep were fading, replaced by bone-deep fatigue and apprehension. Is it the French? she wondered.
“Citizens?” A new voice came on the line: “This is Colonel-General Benn, watch commander at Triple-C. I am calling this Cabinet flash because Air Defense Command has just reported the shoot-down of a high-altitude radar-occult aircraft, sixty nautical miles off the New England coast. A capital weapon was used to complete the interception. Air Defense has had a system-wide alert in force just in case the intruder was French, but observation and backtracking suggests the intruder materialized out of nowhere—it was traveling out to sea when ADC lit it up—and was well within the Capital Defense Zone. In accordance with standing orders, we are declaring War Condition Two. The Continental Bombardment Force is scrambling its petard carriers to their dispersal stations. The Continuity Authority has been activated, and I am now notifying Commissioners and Senators of the crisis. Thank you for your attention.”
The line crackled for a couple of seconds, then a new voice spoke. “Commissioners Burgeson and Burgeson? The First Man is on his way to his designated location. He has asked for you to join him for a meeting at nine.”
Miriam made eye contact with Erasmus. He grimaced and mouthed a quiet obscenity. “We’ll be ready to go in fifteen minutes,” she told the caller.
“Excellent, ma’am. A rotodyne is on its way to collect you. It will touch down on the near end of Soldier’s Field shortly.”
Erasmus was already pulling on yesterday’s trousers as Miriam put the phone down and shoved the bedding aside to stand up. He coughed horribly for a few seconds, then straightened up. “This can’t be good.”
“No.” Feeling shaky, Miriam opened her wardrobe and pulled out her emergency go-bag. There was an appropriate outfit folded neatly in a paper bag atop it, a ladies trouser-suit not unlike a shalwar kameez. She dressed rapidly, then rang the service bell. “Erasmus and I have been called away suddenly,” she spoke into the intercom. “We’ll need help with our luggage.”
“I’ll send Jack up to carry it, ma’am.” It was Jenny the housekeeper; she sounded sleepy and confused. “How long shall you be gone?”
“No idea,” Miriam said tersely. Her knees ached and her hair was a rat’s nest. Even so, Erasmus looked worse, his shirt rumpled and his neckcloth unfastened. “We need to be out at the double, on our way in ten minutes.”
Soldier’s Field public park opened off the far end of the crescent their house faced. It was flat and level and the size of several football fields, surrounded by a border of neatly manicured trees. The huge rotodyne descended onto the grass with a screeching roar from the ramjets on the ends of its rotor blades, landing lights glaring. The rotors kept spinning while it squatted on the field, doubtless waking the dead across a radius of miles. The rotodyne was a triumph of brute-force engineering over subtlety, a heliplane—halfway between a big transport helicopter and a turboprop troop carrier—the product of a road not taken in the US due to noise and fuel-thirst, but effective nonetheless.
Lights were coming on in homes all around as Miriam and Erasmus duck-walked toward it, guided by a pair of airmen. Doubtless radios and televisions were coming on too. The news that the Air Defense Command had just shot down an unidentified intruder nearly seventy miles out past Cape Cod using a corpuscular weapon couldn’t be kept quiet. The distant flare of the two-megaton warshot would have been visible all the way from Boston to Baltimore.
It was too loud to talk inside the aircraft as it spun up to takeoff power, but once they transitioned to level flight and the tip jets throttled back, things were no worse than on any other military turboprop. Miriam managed to make herself heard: “How long are we going to be airborne?”
“Only forty minutes, ma’am; we’re making nearly two hundred knots. We’ll have you inside the designated location within the hour.”
Miriam frowned and glanced at Erasmus. He nodded, his face ashen. The New American Commonwealth didn’t—yet—have anything like the USA’s airborne command posts. The metallurgy for efficient high-bypass turbofans—engines that could keep a drone or a jumbo jet airborne for days on end—was tantalizingly close. In the meantime, the Commonwealth leadership had a radically different protocol for maintaining command during a nuclear war.
“I’m going to dose up,” she told her husband. “They might need me to jump—”
“Not on my watch,” he said firmly. “Not unless the petards are falling. We need you lucid, not moaning from a killer migraine.”
“Thanks.” She squeezed his hand. “Still dosing up, mind.” The small bottle held two gelatin capsules: a devil’s brew of antihypertensives and painkillers. They were the Commonwealth’s best self-administered solution to the effects of world-walking.
The rotodyne screeched on through the night, props and rotors thundering. Fifteen minutes into the flight the radio operator came aft, saluted, and handed Erasmus a teleprinted message. He skimmed it, then passed it wordlessly to Miriam.
INTRUDER DETECTED 0219 HOURS
RADAR CONTACT LAT 41°40′16.92″N LONG 69°24′32.15″W ALTITUDE 64,400 FEET BEARING 066°58′ GROUND SPEED 590 MPH
FLIGHT PLAN ABSENT BREAK FOE IDENTITY FAILED BREAK HAIL UNANSWERED BREAK
MISSILE INTERCEPT PLAN ISSUED AT 0230 HOURS
MISSILE BATTERY ENGAGED TARGET AT 0234 HOURS
INTRUDER PRESUMED DESTROYED BY ZEUS-IV MISSILE AT 0237 HOURS
LAST CONTACT AT LAT 41°43′51.32″N LONG 68°18′9.44″W ALTITUDE 64,800 FEET BEARING 066°58′ GROUND SPEED 582 MPH