"In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage . . ."—William Shakespeare, King Henry V
It was Monday morning rush hour in Minneapolis' zone +6 and traffic was as bad as it always was. Pedestrians and floaters and vehicles all fought for space. The crowd at the corner were mostly familiar to one another and stared around as they waited for transportation or crossing signals. A white van pulled over to a curb and set out a warning beacon. It broadcast its signal to traffic control and flashed an alert to the controls of any vehicle in the area.
One man got out, levered up a ground panel and reached inside. A subtle snick! indicated success and traffic suddenly halted as the grid control was destroyed. The self-control functions on the vehicles kicked in and began feeding them one at a time, very gingerly, across the intersection. Traffic instantly snarled for blocks around and a second snick! ensured the damage would not be easy to fix. He continued inside, dumping data from cubes into various lines to other parts of the grid. No one paid any attention to the van; it was background.
"What the hell are you doing?" a cop snarled. The terrorist did not recognize his specific uniform, but the thuggish attitude was unmistakable. He stepped forward while smiling and raised a hand to gesture. The gesture turned into a vicious attack that dropped the cop to the pavement and the man departed.
Nearby, a woman dressed as a visiting professional walked into a construction site. She had a protective hat and shield and a comm. She strode through the site, watched occasionally for her young prettiness, but unbothered by questions as to her purpose. It was a matter of seconds to get the attention of the force crane operator, approach and disable him and board his equipment.
There was a girder in the beam and she took advantage of its mass. It made a satisfying hole in the side of a nearby building and dropped lethally onto the frantically gesturing site boss. She slid out while panic reigned and dropped her hat and shield as she left the fence. A quick turn took her inside another office block. She found the maintenance access and a few seconds fiddling with a coder let her inside. A swipe of a deadly toy scrambled tens of data lines, and another access a few meters away crippled the elevators and drop tubes. She turned and left, pulling a manual fire alarm as she did so. Outside, a car swerved across traffic, inexplicably on manual, and bumped another. That one stopped, but the manual operation confused the already snarled local grid. It attempted to correct, failed, and a third vehicle rear-ended the second.
She slipped into the first car, which turned in traffic and fled. The route had been chosen to keep them on the outside of the growing circle of chaos. There was little outgoing traffic this time of the morning and the driver wove rapidly through it, terrifying other operators.
Several bomb threats were called in and two police cars had been set on fire, along with two fire protection units, which were trapped in their garages and roaring with explosive-induced flame. A few real bombs detonated high in skyscrapers, killing workers within and showering the crowds below with rubble and glass. Every building began evacuation to the streets. Illegal firearms were in use, shooting out windows in the finance district. A power transformer went offline, disrupting business in the city building. Toward the outskirts, a substation caught fire. The resulting shift in power flow at a critical time caused fluctuations across the grid, creating numerous secondary problems. Faulty software caused a series of pressure waves to rupture water mains. Fire alarms were sounding in tens of locations. The local police had experience with riots, but not in preventing them. They watched helplessly as the city ground to a halt, one problem after another dominoing into madness. It might be days before order was restored. They would have been shocked to know that four people were responsible for all the mayhem.
The pattern was repeated in Chicago, Milwaukee, Saint Louis and elsewhere, with poison gases, bombs, system failures and attacks. The undersea city of Baja Pacifica had its dome shattered by a tiny nuclear device. Europe and Asia received their own share of abuse. Several well-designed worms and windows created gaps in the comm-nets, bouncing through electronic space like manic grasshoppers. But while politicians at hastily arranged conferences sweated, a far worse danger was brewing, minutes and infinite distance away.
A silent swarm of death snapped into existence near Earth. There was localized interference due to gravitational distortion. Blurred ripples surrounded each dropout, damping almost immediately. The sight would have been fascinating and eerie to any observers, but there were none to see it. Shortly, however, there would be billions of witnesses.
The first wave, oriented, fired powerful retros to position themselves, then triggered. They immediately reentered phase drive in a precisely planned manner. With no destination, their mass converted to pure energy, still within the normal space-time reference. Googolwatt levels of photons streamed forward, only to smash into the obstacles ahead—the cities of Earth. Detroit felt the lead sting by nanoseconds, being directly underneath the first. The wave front vaporized much of the northern industrial sector and the ground beneath it. The shock wave tore outward, shattering everything as far as Windsor and Pontiac. The overpressure could still be felt to slap structures as far away as the Toledo suburb.
Other weapons burned Yokohama, Dallas, Madras, Kuwait, Rio de Janeiro and Djakarta. The carnage was terrifying and from orbit could be seen the incandescent ruins left as signatures. They would glow for days.
The second wave rocketed forward on chemical engines at extreme acceleration. Only seconds after the first wave they detonated in low orbit, blowing clouds of ions and dust in a screen against any possible detection. Some few of them continued down, to hit hardened military targets. These were dirty explosions, designed to trap the occupants until heavy rescue equipment could arrive.
The third wave were large blocks of foamed polymer to confuse sensors. Inside them, precise charges detonated and the warheads within stopped dead in orbit. Another charge accelerated them vertically at over eight-thousand meters per second. They dropped over their targets, glowing red as they passed through the atmosphere in seconds.
The warheads in question were mere bars of metal with simple guidance packages—the weapon Kendra had seen used to cut a pass for a road. They steered straight down for any large mass. At that brutal velocity, they vaporized on impact, blasting holes into buildings. Polymer, concrete and glass rained down in their target cities. Fires erupted, buildings began to slowly topple from structural damage, traffic ground to a halt and deep holes punched into buildings made evacuation awkward.
The dust settling in the atmosphere contained tailored nanos that sought crops in fields and hydroponics factories. They were coded for specific crops. It had been standard practice on Earth for centuries to tailor specific seed and fertilizers, both to improve yield and to ensure "customer loyalty," since the same manufacturer provided both the seed and the necessary nutrients for it. This policy had not changed when those producers were nationalized; the yield was better from such plants than natural ones.
The nanos infiltrating that artificial biome were coded to block some of those catalyzing nutrients. Within days, several important species of grain would wither and die. A percentage of the vat-grown meats would also suffer. If casualties on Earth were as predicted, the shortage would not be too severe, merely enough to keep the industrial base busy feeding the survivors.
If casualties were lighter than expected, this supplemental attack could be thought of as "Plan B."
Earth's and Sol System's defensive net snapped awake. It looked for targets and found none. This was partly due to the scarcity of such targets—a mere twelve small ships scattered throughout the system's volume—partly due to their stealthiness and partly due to a third attack, or second backup. Naumann was known for his thoroughness.
During the raid on Langley Facility, several software agents had been infiltrated into the local net. Each had been individually crafted by experts, all of whom were unaware of their colleagues' efforts. Human skill from Freehold had made them all but undetectable. Human laziness on Earth had salvaged most of the network, rather than building a new one. Those agents had attached themselves, byte by byte, block by block, to any convenient transmission. They were cunningly crafted and deeply hidden and had slumbered silently until certain sequences of code awakened them. They woke now.
Angrily and triumphantly, they tore into the software that had carried and fed them. Various parts of the networks were swamped with alerts, rendered blind or had their information doctored only subtly. With no basis for comparison, the artificial intelligence had to start from nothing, compiling data and attempting to determine what was wrong where. The agents danced maniacally from system to system, occasionally defeated, but more often steps ahead of attempted fixes. It would take days to correct all the errors to an acceptable level for combat and days more to check the results. The system would never regain full efficiency and would eventually have to be abandoned.
None of the attacks were indefensible against. None were particularly state of the art, although the phase drive engines used as directional energy weapons were a new twist. It had simply been thought unthinkable to attack in such a fashion, laying waste to civilian territory so callously. And it would have been unthinkable had not the UN attacked Freehold first with nukes and kinetics and had not "Madman" Naumann been in control of the Freehold military.
Few cities are equipped to handle more than a few hundred deaths per ten million population in any given day. The combination of attack, induced riots and the predictable panic reactions of millions of terrified inhabitants brought the death tolls into the thousands, then the tens of thousands. It became impossible for emergency services to get into the cities. Panic spread even to cities not attacked, rumors of impending doom creating wild disturbances and attempts at evacuation. The UN and regional governments tried to squelch news stories, but the necessities of modern communication made it all but impossible. Those attempts created further panic that either the government had lost control, had been subverted by one of many conspiracy theories floating around or was attempting to eliminate what civil rights were left. All government forces were tied up preventing the trouble from spreading; none could assist the shattered cities. Without power and water, they began to die, rapidly.
With only bare hours of food available in the stores and no water, the fighting escalated to food riots. Young parents gladly killed the elderly to ensure food for their children. Street toughs and organized crime saw profit, as did some storekeepers, until they realized they were trapped themselves. With a virtual ban on any modern weapon, it quickly devolved to contests of sheer brute force with improvised weapons. Fearing the gangs, families grouped together and attacked any gathering of youths preemptively.
Fires, started for heat and light, ignited buildings with poor or substandard attention to codes. Thousands of building custodians who had paid off inspectors began to realize the error of their ways, as apartments and offices became roiling torches to careless desperation. The death toll kept rising. Heat and cold added their own numbers to the count. In the sublevels, ventilation and lights failed. Those trapped below turned into howling beasts, tearing each other apart with their last breaths.
Automated repair equipment swarmed through the tunnels and streets, blocked in every direction. Mindlessly, the machines tried route after route until their power ran out or response circuits overloaded. A few, stressed far beyond the point where a human controller should take over, malfunctioned into orgies of destruction.
Hospitals, denied power, lost all patients in supportive care and most in surgery. Drugs and nanos quickly decayed without refrigeration. In terror, the hospitals locked their doors to keep out the masses of casualties they couldn't care for. Police stations and government offices also barricaded the mob out.
Shortly, the legions of dead would begin to rot. There were no facilities to process them, no transport or handlers. Rats and other vermin would run rampant.
It would be weeks before any semblance of control returned. Even then, the deaths would continue until the infrastructure could be restored. Earth no longer had any resources available for war.