Nyarl was the obvious one to go in Luodine’s place. Besides having the experience, he was resolved as a tribute to finish the work she had begun, in the way she would have finished it. He was already assembling further material to send. In addition to the sensational clips showing the annihilation of Varney’s carrier group, he now had—obtained via Di Milestro’s connection from Sacramento—a shot that a Marine flight had caught of the missiles actually going in at the Hyadean mission. Nyarl asked if Cade and Marie would go too—he seemed to think Cade possessed a proclivity for drawing the right people together to deal with any crisis. Yassem needed to remain in LA to guide the people setting up the link from Cairns. Who else would be flying, and who would form the rest of the base team at the Catacombs, was still to be decided.
* * *
President Jeye’s message went out at nine o’clock and was along the lines that Di Milestro had anticipated. Jeye admitted that Varney’s losses had been “more severe than we were initially led to believe” and included the admiral along with his flagship, but the full extent of the disaster remained undisclosed. But this was not a time to let one setback, however grievous, deter us from pressing home the victory that was already within grasp. The armies in Texas were moving up to leap across the Mississippi to where our Southern brothers and sisters were waiting to greet their liberators. Canada was opening a vast superhighway for supplies and reinforcements. Jeye concluded: “I don’t pretend that this will be a pleasant task. The people of New York and Boston, Atlanta and Pittsburgh are not enemies. But the regime that they have been duped and coerced into serving has become an alien power standing for alien interests. We, in the Western Federation, must defend and preserve the values that have always been America. I call on each one of you to play your part and stand firm until our AANS allies sweep through in their millions to bring this sad episode in our history to a just and honorable close. Out of it will emerge a restored United States, prouder and stronger, ready to take its place alongside the other free nations of this world as a full partner in the planetary community that we are all now, irrevocably, a part of.”
Forty minutes later, the AANS fleet steaming east-southeast from Hawaii suffered the same fate as Varney’s force. It was deployed in several squadrons spread over a greater area, however, and a number of the capital ships presumably not carrying nuclear devices escaped destruction by the induced fission explosions. They were taken out during the next half hour by bombs sent down from orbit. Some of the lesser vessels survived to scatter away across the Pacific. In retaliation, the Chinese used tactical nuclear missiles against the naval force immobilized in the Panama Canal and Gatun Lake, including Hyadean defensive positions. By midnight, Union forces in Mexico were responding in kind against bases that the Chinese airborne units had seized earlier. Meanwhile, the two remaining carrier groups in the Pacific were continuing northward, now unopposed. Guesses were that their commanders had been threatened with similar treatment to the others if they failed to carry out their missions as ordered.
* * *
An exchange of nuclear weapons, even if relatively small ones, in Central America was hardly something that could be concealed from a world wrapped in communications networks. The early hours of the morning brought fear that the escalation would spread to the Midwest and Southern battle areas, and then engulf the whole continent. Emergency plans were set in motion to evacuate local populations from the vicinities of military installations and other likely targets. Indiscriminate destruction of cities was considered improbable, however, for the same reason that nobody in Sacramento felt any great urge to wipe out populaces wholesale in Pennsylvania or New Jersey—but with an imponderable alien element, who could be too sure? As a precaution, key government and military personnel began occupying their long-prepared emergency bunkers, while public announcements called for everyone else to keep calm, stay tuned, and heed the authorities. Even so, the night saw mass exoduses from major metropolitan areas from San Francisco to Minneapolis, burning up gasoline and precipitating clashes with police bent on imposing order before general panic could set in. No doubt similar scenes were occurring between the Mississippi and the East Coast too.