“The hell with you, dickbrain,” Savi pressed back on a smile, enjoying the way she’d been designated a necessary pain. He didn’t realize it, but he now included her as part of the team. The only thing he’d suspect now was that she’d screw up. Posting lookouts might be a problem, though.
She composed a message for Misra to send.
Large group activity starting. Distraction protest planned for observation zone 10.45. I am on team assigned to blow the substation on Fountain Street. Explosives pre-set for 10.57 to take out fence. Transformers targeted for 11.03. Location of main target unknown. I’ve seen home-printed semiautomatics handed out to group members.
Good work,
. Do you know nature of main target?
Exact target unknown, but it’s a software attack, assembled by Julisa. The power cut will allow them access. Akkar said Water Desert has all its eggs in one basket. May be up to forty people involved.
Thanks. Analyzing now. Watching you. Tarli.
Savi kept her gaze level as they tramped through Kintore’s backstreets. But it was so tempting to look up at the sky and wave at whatever satellite or drone active ops was using to observe her.
They met up with several of Larik’s team as they made their indirect way to the substation. Larik and Ketchell studied a street map of Kintore on their screen sunglasses and assigned people to various road junctions around Fountain Street. Savi immediately sent their locations to active ops.
By twenty past ten, Kintore itself was practically deserted. Everyone who’d arrived to witness first fall was out at the observation zone, along with every local who was off duty. A news stream playing across Savi’s screen sunglasses showed her the guests, including Ainsley Zangari himself, taking their place on the VIP stand.
Down in the Antarctic, the five Connexion harvester boats closed on V-71. Ex-navy frigates, their prows had undergone a drastic profile alteration during the refit. Instead of a sleek wedge shape, they were now bulging hemispheres ten meters wide, presenting the open maw of a portal to the frozen sea, like the mouth of a giant whale. Below the hull, two extra sets of newly installed propellers turned slowly, their huge electric motors powered from the global power grid via portal. They weren’t designed to give the harvesters extra speed. Rather, their phenomenal torque allowed them to push the vessel forward relentlessly.
At just after ten thirty, the first harvester reached the sheer cliff of blue ice, its captain curving around so the portal rim grazed the surface at a thin angle, but then immediately sliced deeper inward. The propellers spun up, maintaining the ship’s speed and momentum as fractured ice began to fall into the portal. For a brief moment, desert sunlight shone out of the gaping hemisphere, then the front of the harvester was almost completely buried in the cliff. Yet it continued to churn along parallel to the ice, gouging out a nine-meter-wide gash. Behind it, the second harvester struck the cliff at a similar angle, its portal biting deep.
In the desert observation zone, people squinted up into the glaring sapphire sky. The long, dark ovals of the airships maintained their positions a kilometer above the desert’s desiccated white grass and Mars-red soil, five klicks from the front of the VIP stadium. It was close enough to see everything.
Gasps came from the crowd as a slim stream of glittering white splinters began to fall from the belly of an airship. It quickly grew wider, so that by the time the first few boulders of Antarctic ice smashed onto the desert, the flow was nine meters wide as it emerged from the portal slung below the airship. By that time, the second cascade of ice had begun from the neighboring airship.
Cheering and enthusiastic applause filled the dry air. By ten forty, all five airships had solid white cataracts pouring out, catching the sunlight in a dazzling refraction blaze as they tumbled downward. On the ground below, the five ice cones began to grow upward and outward with remarkable speed, their surface a constant avalanche of shattered ice. Subzero vapor churned up out of them, flowing with the viscosity of oil. The wave front of fog obscured the land, billowing upward to thin out and disperse as the heat of the sun finally began to impact.