In a battle against a ship their own size, the cruisers would have won easily – but against the Comet they found themselves oddly mismatched. Jules was like a gnat with a deadly stinger fighting two elephants. The enemy vessels were much larger and had marginally better firepower, but they were slow lumbering ships. The Comet flew in close between them, so they could hardly risk firing for fear of hitting one another, while Jules fired at them whenever a clear shot presented itself – and the opponents were so large they were hard to miss.
The cruisers had strong shields, but Jules’s repeated hits took their toll on the enemy defenses. Jules’s pesky actions took the. ships’ commanders’ minds off Nereid as they tried to rid themselves of the annoyance. But Jules d’Alembert was not easily caught.
At last Jules’s persistence paid off as one cruiser’s shields flared out. The failure was only for a few seconds, until the auxiliary field generator could switch on, but that delay was all Jules needed. The touch of a button sent a deadly space torpedo ramming the cruiser directly amidship. There was a brilliant flash of light and a gaping hole in the cruiser’s hull. The ship lay dead in space. The survivors among its crew were too busy trying to save themselves to worry any further about Nereid.
That left but a single cruiser – child’s play for a skilled pilot like Jules d’Alembert. He flew around his opponent until the enemy gunners were dizzy trying to track him – and suddenly he found himself in the perfect position behind the cruiser, staring straight up its jets – the one place the defensive shields couldn’t protect. Jules launched a set of torpedos, and they struck the enemy’s engines with a spectacular blast. The cruiser flared into incandescence and became a glowing cloud of twisted metal fragments.
With Nereid once again safe from bombardment, Jules returned to his original plan. Plotting a course for Earth, he dropped the Comet into subspace and flew full speed toward mankind’s home planet. Though he was worrying about what might be happening to his wife, son, and the rest of his family, chaos was loose in the Galaxy – and as a d’Alembert, he knew that meant his duty was calling him.
CHAPTER 11 Slow Recovery
Still reeling from disaster, the planet Earth spent the next few days painfully gathering its resources. The top priority was to restore power everywhere it had gone out. In most cases the power plants themselves had not been damaged, but power company engineers found that their computers would not distribute the energy where it was supposed to go. Amid much swearing and hard work, the balky computers were taken out of the loop and the systems were routed through much more primitive manual and semi-automatic switches. In those places where power surges had burned out equipment, replacements were jerry-rigged to handle the load. In less than thirty-six hours, power had been restored to all the major metropolitan areas and nearly all their surrounding rural communities.
The second priority, almost as vital, was to restore adequate communications around the world. Again, most of the problem was traced not to destroyed equipment, but to computerized switching systems that refused to function as they were supposed to. In these cases it was much harder to take the computers out of the loop; instead, after much agonizing by the company executives and engineers involved, the entire memory and programming of the computers was erased and new programming was inserted. This eliminated the instructions the PCC had given the computers, and they now worked perfectly – but they’d lost all the data they had carried before.
Fewer than forty-eight hours passed before the major lines of communication were opened. Radio, trivision, and sensable broadcasts were resumed, and there was a lot of news for them to cover. The information services of the vidicom phone networks had all been erased, but if you knew the number of a friend or acquaintance you could usually dial straight through to them. People were calling desperately all over the world to learn whether friends and loved ones were safe after the tragedy. This caused new jams and malfunctions, but over a few days the problems faded once again.
Like the communications computers, the traffic computers were hopelessly snarled and had to be completely reprogrammed. For a couple of days, many people who were unused to driving their own vehicles were forced to perform this unaccustomed task, threading their way through streets filled with other neophyte drivers. The casualties weren’t very much higher than they’d been in the mid-twentieth century, but they appalled modern drivers who were used to near-perfect safety records year after year. Air, sea, and space traffic proceeded at a slow, deliberate pace as human traffic controllers tried their best to guide the multitudes of craft to their respective destinations. Still, even with all the effort being put into them, the traffic programs were so immensely complex that transportation was but a tiny fraction of what it had been before the crash.
Energy, communications, transportation – these were all technological problems with straightforward, if sometimes difficult, solutions. But there were social problems regarding the everyday details of living that could not be solved so neatly – and these problems threatened to linger for months, if not years. People’s lives would be unavoidably changed; some were sure to profit from the chaos, others would be seriously hurt and might never recover.
Empress Stanley Eleven came to the conclusion, after listening to her advisors debate for many hours, that she should tell her subjects the truth about what had happened. They already knew they’d been hit by a tragedy of enormous proportions, and there was no further advantage to be gained by concealing the nature and size of the conspiracy against the throne. Only if people realized the true nature of the problems they faced would they rally around the harsh austerity measures it would take to restore society to its previous affluence. At least, the idealistic Empress prayed they would react that way, and not with greater despair.
As soon as broadcast facilities were reliable again, Edna Stanley gave a lengthy speech that reached billions of people around the world. She began by admitting that the Empire was undergoing a time of grave crisis, a threat to its existence greater than any it had ever endured before. She asked for the people’s help and understanding to hold the Empire together. If they were strong and determined, they would weather the crisis; if not, humanity would sink into a pit of chaos deeper than anyone could imagine.
She explained that somehow, no one knew for certain, the Empire’s Primary Computer Complex had developed a mind of its own and had fostered a hatred of humanity so intense that it wanted to destroy the civilization people had built up. It was this artificially intelligent computer, acting in remote conjunction with other, simpler computers, that had caused the chaos they’d all witnessed in the past few days. The first – and, it was hoped, the worst – wave of damage was now past; there might be other blows to come, but her advisors were of the opinion that the PCC had shot its bolt in one major stroke. Mankind was reeling, but the PCC did not now have the resources to step in completely and take over, as it had hoped to do. This gave the Empire a chance to survive – a chance they would all have to work for as hard as they could.
The Empress then announced a series of measures to deal with the chaotic situation. The first, to make sure this catastrophe could not be repeated, was that every computer must be made independent of all others, regardless of the cost. Even though it made for terrible inefficiency, no computer could have any method of communications access. The only way programs and in formation could go into or out of any computer would be through a human interface. This would be a slow, painstaking procedure, but it would prevent a massive domino crash like the one that had just occurred.
No one, Edna vowed, would be permitted to violate the rights of his or her neighbors in this tragic situation. Profiteering and looting were immediately listed as capital offenses; anyone caught trying to cheat or steal from his fellows would be summarily executed. Earls, counts, and barons were directed to set up special courts to hear these cases; justice was to be speedy and public, to serve as an example to others.
The loss of bank records was a tremendous blow to all human intercourse. Some people had cash on hand, while others had huge life savings wiped out in the blink of an eye and didn’t even have money to buy their daily groceries. The distribution of goods and services was interrupted, and people were threatened with widespread starvation or rioting unless swift and strong actions were taken.