“Buenos.” He pushed the “on/off” button on the pay phone and looked around the library. This was as good a place as any to wait for the news to break.
News. He hadn’t been keeping up. He sat down at a console and called up The New York Times, and toggled back a couple of days.
That must have been when the president first got a hair up her ass about the orbital weapons. She was evidently a pawn, or a rook anyhow, in the current Defense Department power struggle—a schism between those who wanted to ally with Germany and Russia, and the isolationist/pacifist/Francophile set, who wanted us to sit back and watch.
If we stayed out of it, France and her allies would prevail; the eastern coalition was about to spin apart into impotent factions. But with our killer satellites always within a few minutes of Paris and Lyons, coupled with a commander-in-chief who was pro-East and prone to dramatic gestures, Paris had to stop and think: We could be vaporized.
Washington was thinking, as well. Not talking yet, waiting for the White House’s lead.
It was like watching an ant colony scurry around, oblivious to the larger world around them. The Defense Department seized on the threat of the Coming to justify “weapons of mass destruction” in orbit. Thinking that when the alien hoax petered out, the weapons would still be up there. Pointed down, at Paris and her allies.
One microsecond blast from them, and Paris would be a postmodern Troy. There was a great city once, under the rubble and ash.
He knew it wasn’t going to happen. The Defense Department might have a lunatic at the top, appointed by a fellow lunatic, but that was not going to last.
Poor Brattle. He was not even a liberal, but he was on talkshows and the gallup preps, talking about how futile and dangerous it would be to mount a campaign against these aliens: “If they come in peace, fine. If they come spoiling for a fight, we can’t match their high-tech weapons. But we can resist them on the ground. They’ll find we don’t make good slaves.”
Brattle was an intelligent man, but he was too straight and plainspoken to be undersecretary of defense. He was obviously under fire—under arrest!—because he had stood up to the president and his boss over the satellite scheme.
Pepe knew they wouldn’t get three to orbit, and surely the president and her cabinet did, too. The maser weapon only existed as one demonstration model, and it would take a half-trillion dollars, and a lot of luck, to put three in orbit before the New Year. But even the demo could destroy Paris, and the other two could be dummies.
All of them pointed toward Earth.
“Hello, stranger.” It was his girlfriend, Lisa Marie. “You’ve been awfully busy lately.”
He liked her a lot, pretty and dark and quick, but he had been easing away from her, knowing he’d have to leave soon. “Yeah. Aliens this, aliens that.”