Over her years in government, Miriam had developed a bitter hatred for nuclear command bunkers. She’d spent more than her fair share of time holed up in them, taking her turn as Commissioner for Continuity of Government—a euphemism for Queen of the Smoking Aftermath, in her opinion. Bunkers stank of failure. They smelled metallic, their bottled air pumped through particle filters and monitored by Geiger counters. The corridors were unpleasantly narrow and the ceilings low, the walls painted a nauseous mustard yellow and the floors battleship gray. Hard, narrow bunk beds (space being at a premium) and ill-lit, cramped meeting rooms surrounded by men (and, increasingly these days, women) with drawn faces and bags under their eyes, all of them hoping that the axe wouldn’t fall: even if they survived, their families would be left behind on the surface.
The First Man’s Redoubt was larger, but no different in kind. So at nine o’clock, with only a couple of hours’ sleep behind her, Miriam found herself bellied up against a conference table with her back almost touching the wall behind her. She was drinking bitter coffee and reading a steady stream of incoming reports in the vain hope of staying alert, in a meeting room full of People’s Party Commissioners and general staff officers, waiting for Sir Adam to arrive.
The door opened. A woman in the uniform of one of the nursing orders shuffled in backward, pulling a wheeled chair: Miriam blinked her eyes into focus before she recognized the hunched figure within. She glanced sideways, caught Erasmus’s shocked look and rapidly suppressed reaction.
“Good morning, everybody,” husked the First Man as his nurse turned him to face the table. His smile was watery, his skin sallow and drawn tight across the bones of his face. “I see we are all present and correct.”
Miriam forced her hands into immobility to avoid betraying herself by raising them to her mouth in shock. She had last seen Adam four weeks previously. He’d been walking, then: clearly increasingly frail, but not exceptionally so. She’d read the carefully coded memo: The First Man is not currently accepting new public engagements due to nervous exhaustion. He sends his best wishes and urges everyone to carry on regardless. But this wasn’t nervous exhaustion. Sir Adam looked at her, and for a moment his gaze carried its old weight, striking like a rod of iron. But then he faded as she watched.
“General Josephus. Your latest update, please?”
“Certainly, sir,” said Josephus, his delivery polished. “Current prevailing winds are blowing northeasterly off Cape Cod, and as you know the Zeus-IV petard was designed to produce little radiative residue. So the fallout plume is blowing offshore. Unfortunately this means that the French will detect it within four days—possibly sooner if their spy trawlers on the Grand Banks are equipped with detectors. Even if they didn’t spot the first light, this will provide confirmation of an air burst off our coast. We therefore anticipate increased French diplomatic and espionage activity within the week, even in the absence of other engagement.”
“What about the target?” asked Sir Adam. “Is anything known about it?”
“We can’t be certain, sir. There is only a very remote possibility that the French have acquired the capability to build something like this. Coming two weeks after the previous US intrusion—confirmed from the wreckage—we can reasonably assume that they have upped the ante. Published sources suggest that the target matched the profile of a Tier Three unmanned autonomous drone—a long-range, high-altitude strategic reconnaissance probe.”
“Thank you, General. Mrs. Burgeson, do you have any insights?”
Sir Adam stared at her, his head lolling slightly to one side. Weak neck muscles, she noted. Generalized cachexia. Muscle wastage. Looks like stage IV, probably liver or pancreatic cancer. Oh shit.
“Miriam?”
She blinked. “I’m sorry,” she said automatically. “If it isn’t the United States, we’ve had the supreme misfortune to have come to the attention of another Class Two para-time civilization at the worst possible moment. But it’s almost certainly the United States. Their standard protocol seems to be to send over a black box—just to check for atmosphere on the other side—then a medium-altitude mapping drone. Air Defense Command shot down the first, so a week later they sent another. It’s not unknown for them to malfunction or crash. But ADC shot down the next one, and two hull losses on consecutive flights are statistically improbable, so this time they sent a bigger, faster, higher-altitude drone with wide-angle cameras.” She knuckled her tired eyes. “And ADC, bless their little cotton socks, shot it down again. So if they didn’t know we were here before, they certainly do now.”
She looked round at a circle of dismayed faces. “The good news is, we’re still alive,” she said. “Either they’re off-balance, or they’re not on a war footing at all. We have some breathing space—although I have no idea how much.”
Sir Adam opened his mouth. For a moment she was terrified that he would be unable to speak, but after a false start, almost a stutter, he followed through. “I will not order a preemptive strike by means of capital weapons.” He spoke into the sudden silence. “None of the reports I have read from the DPR suggest that their current president is a sociopath. I expect her to behave similarly.” (“Sociopath” was one of the most useful concepts that Miriam’s Memetic Engineering Task Force had imported from the United States: Erasmus’s Propaganda Ministry had been working overtime to raise awareness of it as an Anti-Democratic Problem: “People who think People are Things.” Sometimes she thought that educating the Commonwealth about social psychology and teaching them about cognitive biases, authoritarian personality types, and game theory had done more good than all the STEM research they’d imported. Enlightenment was an uphill struggle, but if it reduced the likelihood of wars and reigns of terror it was well worth the cost.)
Miriam cleared her throat. “They tried it on the Gruinmarkt,” she said. “It didn’t succeed.”
Scott Schroeder, the assistant Commissioner for Defense, snorted. “Obviously they should have tried harder.” Miriam looked at him sharply for a moment, trying to discern any hint of ironic intent. “Just playing devil’s advocate,” he added.
Miriam shook her head. “Imagine if the French dropped a megaton-range capital weapon on this bunker right this second, killing us all—Sir Adam included.” Eyes instinctively turned to the invalid. He watched them right back, calculatingly passive, guarding his remaining vitality. “How exactly would our people respond?”
“They’d—” Schroeder stopped. “I take your point.”