The problem, however, was that despite the effort that had gone into expanding Kronia’s manufacturing capability, supplies hadn’t been able to keep up with usage over the past several months. More targets were materializing than there were rods available to shoot them with. Complicating matters further, bodies of solid rock could absorb more energy than hollow structures, which often made it prudent to target two or more rods on something that presented a particulary dangerous threat. In the present situation, the computed probability of impacts on the surface of Rhea was greater, while the consequences of letting anything through to Titan, where more Kronian facilities and settlements were concentrated, would be worse. But Titan had a dense atmosphere, while Rhea was unprotected.
These were the factors that Jebsen had to balance. To risk fewer lives with higher probability, or more lives at a lower probability? Which people were the more expendable? The longer he took, the more the odds would tilt. Keene licked his lips, thankful that it wasn’t his responsibility.
Jebsen recited a series of identifications and coordinates in the abbreviated language used for voice input, selecting what he judged to be a compromise of the most menacing situations from both groups. The computers assigned targets and presented a revised fire plan.
“Thirteen minutes to first impact on Rhea,” an operator called.
“Go with it,” Jebsen instructed.
“Designator acknowledges and confirms.”
“Lock-on complete.”
Jebsen nodded. “Auto fire.”
Twenty-three beams of radiation concentrated a trillion times denser than that from a hydrogen bomb lanced across space, each causing a miniature sun to flare briefly in the remote regions of Saturn’s outer moons. Of the incoming objects that remained, two reached Titan to break up in its atmosphere, one of the fragments demolishing a surface dome with twenty-two occupants. On Rhea, the industrial excavation and construction sites suffered relatively minor damage with no casualties this time. However, the military training facility two hundred miles away was devastated under a cluster of impacts. Forty-six individuals were unaccounted for afterward; but the actual death toll probably wouldn’t be known for days, if not weeks.
A supply ship delivered more pods to LORIN 5. Jebsen was back on duty eight hours later.
CHAPTER TWO
Flashback. San Antonio, Texas, in flames from end to end, lighting up an orange roof of smoke and cloud that had become the sky. Streets littered with bodies, debris, and abandoned vehicles, figures fleeing aimlessly amid falling buildings and the ceaseless roaring and crashing of incoming bolides. Tank cars exploding in the railroad sidings. A blood-drenched woman wandering demented, calling a man’s name . . .
It was in the quiet moments, when there were no external distractions, that Keene’s mind would return with a morbid compulsion that he was unable to restrain, to the events of those last weeks on Earth. Just eleven hundred and sixty-two had been brought back to Kronia from shuttles and lifters that had made it up from the surface, or been left stranded in space aboard orbiting structures or vehicles incapable of reaching Saturn. Another sixty-six had been brought from the Mars bases. The number might have been greater if two of the Kronian rescue vessels sent to do what they could hadn’t been destroyed in collisions with the debris orbiting Earth, causing the agonizing decision to be made not to send any more missions until conditions eased.
At the time, a mental defense reaction had numbed Keene to the things going on around him and the knowledge that they were happening everywhere. His mind had refused to take in what it meant. Now, as if effecting some kind of catharsis, it seemed to need to purge itself by finally allowing consciousness to experience the burden of horror that it had accumulated and suppressed. It was happening as he lay weightless in his seat restraint aboard the medium-haul transorbital taking him back to Titan two days after the strike hit Rhea, when his scheduled stay on LORIN 5 was over.
He relived again the days of Athena’s approach after emerging from its tight turn around the Sun, when its thirty-million-mile-long, outward-directed tail had engulfed Earth, darkening the atmosphere with caustic fumes and incendiary vapors, and bringing worldwide rains of fiery hail. Then had come the meteorite bombardment, pulverizing entire regions, while mounting tides inundated the coasts, and hurricanes stirred stratosphere-high palls of dust and smoke into perpetual night. Had he experienced the rest firsthand, he wouldn’t have been here now to reflect on the enormity of it; and whether or not there were any still alive back there who had lived through the final days was unknown. As Athena and Earth, with titanic electrical discharges arcing between them, closed and gyrated about each other inside the Moon’s orbit before separating, he had watched the false-color computer reconstructions of the events unfolding beneath the shroud veiling the stricken world.