“That’ll be twenty bucks, Mister Harris. I’ll have it taken out of your final pay check. You are relieved of your position.” Mackensie steepled his fingers, showing the liver spots on the backs of his hands, and glanced up at his aide. “Please escort the former Secretary of Defense from the Situation Room.”

He watched impassively as Harris was ushered from the room at gunpoint. The other men present watched, pale and drained.

“It is perfectly clear that Petrovitch wishes us dead, and will do or say anything that will delay our own launch until we are no longer in a position to retaliate effectively. I refuse to listen to such counsel. The way ahead is clear: we do this by the book.”

A man with a briefcase stepped up beside Mackensie, and laid it on the table. He opened it up and passed his president a solid plastic rectangle as big as a postcard. Mackensie flexed his fingers and cracked the plastic slab along pre-scored lines. Inside was a long strip of paper, printed with a combination of numbers and letters in a long sequence.

He laid the codes on the table in front of him. “The first and greatest duty a government has is to protect the integrity of the nation it serves. If that has been denied to us, then our last act ought properly be to strike out against a world bent on destroying us, as it has been since our creation. We will not go quietly as they hope, but we will fight even as we die.”

He cleared his throat again and readied himself to read.

35

Admiral Arendt looked at the glowing lines on the wall screens. The first missiles would be hitting the Alaskan airbases in less than thirty seconds. “Get me Elmendorf,” he said to the watch officer.

The officer slid back to his console and with two presses of his touch screen, had the duty desk. “This is the NSC. Ah, sheet three-five yellow. Seven Alpha Foxtrot November Niner Papa Lima Zero.”

The man in the blue uniform riffled through the yellow pad in front of him. “Elmendorf. Romeo Bravo Six Kilo Eight Juliet Tango Six Hotel.”

The watch officer ran his finger along the second line of code. “Admiral? Connection to Elmendorf confirmed. At least, it looks that way.”

Arendt leaned over the younger man’s shoulder. “Hello, son. I need you just to stay on this line as long as you can.”

“Yes sir.”

The screen went blank, then reverted to the previous window. On the main map, Elmendorf winked from blue to gray, followed a moment later by Eielson.

Snatching up the abandoned handset, Arendt spoke through clenched teeth. “Petrovitch, tell me we haven’t just lost the Eleventh Air Force.”

“You haven’t lost the Eleventh Air Force. Neither are you about to lose the western seaboard. Scary though, isn’t it? Can you smell the fear yet?”

“You have to stop this. The president is releasing the launch codes.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Can he launch?” asked Arendt. “If this is fake, then he’s not really giving the codes to NORAD, is he?”

“No,” said Petrovitch, “he’s giving them to me.”

Arendt dropped the phone. “Mister President, stop the sequence.”

Mackensie turned his head slowly toward his military adviser and fixed him with a withering stare. “Malcolm, I think you forget yourself.”

“That’s not NORAD,” said the admiral, his finger wavering toward the screen where a smart air force officer was waiting on the last two digits of the launch code. “That’s the AI. You’re telling the enemy the gold codes.”

The first brief flicker of doubt crossed Mackensie’s serene face. He looked down the table at his advisers and their attendants. Some of them were just kids, who’d grown up knowing nothing but Reconstruction. The middle-aged ones were the generation who’d voted for its institution. Even the old men were two decades his junior.

The sub-launched missiles from the Atlantic reached the eastern seaboard. New York went offline. Miami. Charleston. Some crossed the coast and tracked inland, heading for the industrial cities of the north.

The land-launched intercontinental rockets had ended their boost phase, and were coasting at the edge of space. They’d start to fall in twenty minutes’ time. Every major center of population had been targeted, as had the major military bases. Hawaii was about to succumb. Diego Garcia would be next. Without SkyShield’s protection, they were naked to the oncoming storm.

O’Connell grimaced. “I know it looks like NORAD. But we have to consider the capabilities of who—of what—we’re up against. If Petrovitch’s AI is running a simulated attack, it’s running everything.”

“Well, Frank: you’re my intelligence adviser. I had hoped you of all people would be able to say whether or not the intelligence we are receiving is reliable.”

“Either we use the kill switch, or we wait and see if we die. They’re the only ways.”

“The choice between wiping out our economy or our ability to hit back is not a choice at all.” Mackensie stretched his thin lips out. “I appear to have been badly advised.”

O’Connell started to protest. “Ever since we learned of the New Machine Jihad…”

Mackensie held up his hand. “Enough. You are relieved of your position also.”

After resting his head briefly on the table, O’Connell stood up and walked in a daze to the exit. His deputy licked his lips nervously and scraped his fingers through his hair.

“Does anyone,” asked Mackensie mildly, “have anything constructive to say at this stage, or shall we continue?”

“I think, sir,” said Admiral Arendt, “you should speak with Petrovitch.”

“Do you, Malcolm?”

“Yessir.”

The missiles were edging closer. Two of the sub-launched missiles, one from the east, one from the west, were converging on Colorado.

“And what would be the purpose of that? Why would I waste a moment conversing with the author of our destruction.” Mackensie gestured at the wall screens. “We spent trillions of dollars and millions of man-hours on Project SkyShield, only to have it rendered useless by him and his abomination. We face either nuclear destruction or total economic disaster. Both will leave our great nation a shattered remnant of its former self and our enemies intact. I will not permit that.”

The west coast had gone. The east coast, too. Targets well beyond the continental divide were falling one by one, and still the main attack hadn’t arrived.

The admiral tilted his head slightly as he tried to glean information from the maps, desperately sifting through the layers to sort fact from fabrication. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

“Twenty dollars, if you please, Malcolm. Not like you at all: I appreciate we’re about to meet our maker, but please keep your composure.”

“Why aren’t they targeting DC?” Arendt got to his feet and walked around to the foot of the table. He pointed up at the map with all its lines and markers. “We should have been hit by now. Decapitation strike.”

The watch officer eyed the telephone on his desk, then picked it up. “Petrovitch?” he hissed. “Why aren’t we dead yet?”

“Because if a missile had struck you and you were all still alive, you’d know for certain, wouldn’t you? Even Mackensie couldn’t convince himself you were still under attack. So we thought we’d string this out as long as possible and make you sweat. Not nice, is it, taking away a person’s ability to tell what’s real?”

“As one human being to another, I’m begging you to end this.”

“You’re convinced, then? That none of this is actually happening?”

“Yes. I’m convinced.”

“Then do something to stop Mackensie giving me the complete launch codes. We’ve got most of it: Michael might be able to guess the rest, but it’ll take him a while. Much easier to let your president hand control of your nuclear deterrent to me on a plate. Much more ironic, too.”