“Not this time, but the fact someone was trying to bust them out is worrying. There’s only one reason you want those files, and that’s if you’re planning to obliterate New York.”
“I don’t get it. There are enough freak-jobs in the solar system who can probably build their own nukes if they want to. But then you’d just bring the components in through hubs one chunk at a time and rebuild it on the ground. Shields are practically an anachronism.”
“Not entirely,” Tansan said. “Pulau Manipa.”
Alik winced. Pulau Manipa used to be an Indonesian island. Then, in 2073, a reasonably sized chunk of space rock hit the atmosphere above it. Earth’s atmosphere had provided a good level of natural protection against cosmic impacts since the end of the dinosaurs, with just a few little blips in its safety record, such as Tunguska in Siberia and Meteor Crater in Arizona. It even broke up the 2073 rock, which basically put Pulau Manipa directly under a cosmic shotgun blast rather than a single-shot impact. Astrophysicists and weapons techs were still arguing which kind of strike was worse: air burst or solid smackdown. Nobody on Pulau Manipa could be asked for their opinion. Between the multiple physical strikes, the overlapping blast waves, and the firestorms, none of them were left alive.
Up until that incident, countries had been fairly halfhearted about building shields. They were the tail end of big military spending, and nobody was enthusiastic. There were plenty of political and religious fanatics still waging insurgency campaigns against governments and society in general, but they were slowly and quietly being dumped on Zagreus. The era of national wars and standing armies with nuclear-tipped missiles was long over.
Shields were an artificially generated field that enhanced atomic bonds—a technology that emerged from molecular fabrication. Although air was a tenuous material even at sea level, if the bonds were enhanced within a thick enough section, it produced what was essentially a force field. Enhance a wall of air twenty meters thick, and it would be able to resist a hellbuster blast. But apply that same enforcement to a couple of kilometers of air, and you could set off a nuke outside a city, and all it would do is provide the residents with a grandiose light show.
Had there been a shield over Pulau Manipa, the rock wouldn’t have made it through. So governments shifted shield construction contracts to civil authorities, and the old armaments companies got a last gulp of public Big Cash. Most large urban areas on the planet were equipped with fully operational nuke-proof shields. Of course, no wild-orbit asteroid would ever make it to within ten million kilometers of Earth now. The astro-engineering companies had so many people and so much ultra-sophisticated hardware up there that any approaching asteroid would be mined down to the last speck of gravel before it got inside lunar orbit. But no politician wanted to be responsible for a budget cut that would strip a layer of defense off their voters. City shields remained intact and alert. In the last ninety-nine years since Pulau Manipa, they’d mainly been used to ward off hurricanes.
“But rocks falling on our heads can’t happen anymore,” Alik insisted. “We’re not fucking dumbasses like the dinosaurs; we’re here to stay. It’s Darwin.”
“So why did Cancer try and bust the files out?”
Alik ran his hand back through his hair, but not even an imagination pumped by playing innumerable Hong Kong fantasy drama games could give him a viable suggestion on that. “We’re going to get some answers on the multiple homicide soon; that’ll point me in the right direction,” he told Tansan. “But I might need some of those dark funds to finish the case.”
—
It turned out the South African Coast Guard did still have some aircraft, a couple of squadrons of Boeing TV88s. They weren’t drones, though they could deploy swarms of airborne and underwater drone clusters kitted out with all kinds of high-grade sensors. They even had actual humans in the cockpit telling the G6Turing pilot what to do. Two of them had zoomed out to the area where the
The TV88s had a portal door on board, so as soon as the families had been winched up, they were brought into the twentieth precinct—seventy minutes after the South African Coast Guard had officially been asked to help. Alik was impressed.
The two families arrived like refugees from some disaster area, hunched up, hair and clothes sodden with seawater, a silver blanket around their shoulders, clinging to water bottles and candy bars. It wasn’t rescue workers triumphantly bringing the six of them in, but a trio of pissed-off cops.