Omega Night (Wearing the Cape) Read Free Page B

only works when it affects him personally! ”
     
    “If he guesses wrong and we lose half the country he’ll never forgive himself—how could it get more personal?”
     
    Silence, then “ He says twelve, but we’re not linked into the Gungnir’s targeting telemetry and the Navy’s not going to hand it to us .”
     
    “Can you hack it?”
     
    “ Maybe, but Gungnirs are sub-kiloton nukes and once they’re unlocked they’re set to go off if tampering is detected . You’re tough, but not that tough .”
     
    “How long till target reaches ideal EMP position?”
     
    “ Less than two minutes .”
     
    “Do they have any other ideas?” Please let somebody have an idea.
     
    “ Best-guess target selection from multiplication vectors .”
     
    So, no. “Do it.” If she failed, I’d never have time to know.
     
    “ Hope …”
     
    “Here we come to save the day, right?” That got a snicker; it had been our catchphrase back when we were playing Power Chick and Awesome Girl, before she’d died and I had my breakthrough. Before it had all gotten serious.
     
    “ Working on it—the Navy just lost its telemetry link. Sad malfunction …”
     
    I turned into my new vector, lining up with the new green pip, and felt bad for all the guys on the ground, watching what had looked like a straightforward cape-assisted intercept turn into to a complete FUBAR with nothing they could do about it. I was just an exhausted spectator too, pushing on and watching the Sun “rise” on my right as our height caught us up with the sunset. We were high into the thermosphere now, where the air was so thin I didn’t feel the drag at all and refracted sunlight didn’t wash out the stars anymore—much higher and they could wave at us from the Space Shuttle as we blew by faster than I’d ever flown.
     
    Blackstone was back. “ Stand by. Entering launch range in five, four, three, two, one —” Above me I saw the flares of Watchman’s Gungnirs as their missile drives lit in the silence, burning away to close the distance on his two selected targets. The others were far enough away that even with my super-duper vision their burns looked like dim sparks against the fringe of blue horizon.
     
    “ Astra, Navy tracking shows your Gungnirs have failed to launch. Status? ”
     
    “I’m okay.” So far. “Still closing with targets.”
     
    “ Break away, Astra. Repeat, break away. You will be in the hot-zone .”
     
    “Understood.” I shot past Watchman as he decelerated—breaking as fast as he could to put distance between himself and his missiles—and closed my helmet’s blast shield to fly on instruments.
     
    “ Astra, you’re not breaking .”
     
    “Sorry.”
     
    “ Hope, break away now! Dear God —”
     
    “ Brace yourself ,” Shelly sang. I assumed the position. Arms straight ahead, fists together, back arched, head tucked, ready to dive into the cosmos. Watchman’s Gungnirs fired.
     
    Gungnir had been Odin’s spear, a god’s weapon that struck and killed whatever it was thrown at. The military was still at least a generation away from true nuclear bomb-pumped lasers, but one of their resident Verne-types had lovingly crafted the superscience modifications that made them real enough for us. The original sub-kiloton nuclear warheads were from Cold War infantry weapons—meant to be anti-infantry area weapons fired by tripod mounted recoilless rifles from a couple of kilometers distance (and how crazy was that ?). They’d been remounted on missiles behind their “lens generators”—the Verne-tech gadgets that projected force field bottles that lensed and focused most of the bomb’s energy into a death ray gamma laser with an effective kill range of forty kilometers. Interaction with the force field bottles turned the rest of the liberated energy into photons and kinetic energy.
     
    Yup—a blast front in space. It was like punching through a wall .
     
    When my link came back Shelly was