Waiting for her at Camp David was exactly who she’d expected to see: the Great Father. So she straightened her back, composed herself, put on the face they would need to see from her, and strode out to the waiting motorcade to face them. What were they going to do? How were they going to tell the world? Those needed answering, tonight. She had the question of policy to attend to, and it could not be delayed. The world was going to need their faith in the coming years, and the survivors would need it ever afterward. It was a moment of prerogative, she knew. But for the love of God make provisions on Cimbrean now.” “You won’t have long to get things going. “Secrecy is of utmost importance,” she reminded him urgently. “I…I had better go speak to the apostolic nuncio,” he stammered, quietly. When it did, she watched him go through exactly what she just had. Like with her, the enormity of it took time to hit. Maybe her personal faith was getting in the way. She wouldn’t lay such a terrible secret on him under the Seal of confession. A holy man, a good pastor…but here, anything she said would have consequence. He was a Cardinal of the church, one of the Pope’s favored at that. Respectfully distant but the moment she looked up, he came running to her side. The adoration chapel was empty, or at least there was nobody that she could see. Nobody needed to see the President fall apart. Slowly, she rose and realized that the Secret Service had discreetly made room for her to go through her emotions. Those were the only options, and the latter was no option at all. She could rise to it, or she could fall apart completely and thereby fail everyone. A terrible reason to be who she was, and to hold the office she did. But something within her brushed it aside, suddenly and with grace. Screamed at Him, sitting right before her. Prayed the rosary, fell into the meditation of it. With nowhere else to turn, she’d turned to God in the time available to her while the world’s leaders gathered. She’d sat in the pew, staring at the enthroned Host, until sitting still and agonizing became an agony she couldn’t bear. Of all the duties a President could face…of all the addresses she might have to give to the nation, of all the terrible pieces of news she might have to break to all the world…where was Margaret White to even begin? Saint Patrick’s Catholic Church, Washington DC, USA, Earth. Then, after that, the crew went to their temporary quarters. Re-armed, restocked their drones and expended various stuff. So, he gave the orders and they jumped back to Gao, at the anchorage around Dark Eye. Ian didn’t know if he could even survive sitting idle while there was anything he could do. Ian felt compelled to make a small confession: Everything was classified of course, something like this had to be managed-and there had already been warning orders about that precise problem…īut he knew good and damn well the news would leak quickly.īy the end of the day he had received orders, from Daar personally. Because there was no fucking resting now, not when they had less than a handful of years to try and save as many lives as they possibly could. He had a ship to run, and a crew to look after. The greatest intelligence failure in history, and the Stray Fortune had a hand in that failure. Once the station was built and activated, it was already too late. There wasn’t a fucking thing that could have been done. They would have had to destroy the whole thing, against fields so powerful it was only a countervailing gravity field that kept the whole thing from collapsing into a black hole. Whatever was behind that door either wasn’t damaged or didn’t matter as far as they could tell afterwards, the mechanism itself was the station. Well, whatever remained of the Earth would have no atmosphere, and a molten surface. It could be more than a quarter of a lightyear across by the time it blasted through Sol, yet even then… The beam wasn’t perfectly collimated, but it didn’t fucking need to be. It used some portion of that energy to run the fields, of course…but mostly what it had done was shrivel to a tiny, brilliantly bright point of incalculable density at the very edge of the photosphere, torn the exploding star to pieces, and bent nearly all of the escaping energy in one direction: toward Sol. What it did was disrupt the binding gravity field of the entire star. No, that would have been terrifying enough. The Vengeance Engine hadn’t merely caused Alpha Centauri A to go nova.
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