Mother of Storms Read online

  There are not very many pro-Siberian students here at U of the Az, since the Siberian quarrel is with the Alaska Free State and a lot of people still feel sentimental about the fact that the Ak was once an American state.

  The big quarrel is between the uniters, who back whatever the SecGen does, and the nationalists, who wish the United States had gotten into it directly—the sort of people who complain about “President Grandma,” as if Hardshaw could fart into her own sofa cushions without UN permission these days.

  Then there’s an isolated handful booing because they oppose all censorship, there’s six or seven people who really are pro-Siberian, and probably a few guys who just showed up for a fight. In Jesse’s small-town redneck opinion, it is about to get rough around here, and he’d just as soon Naomi was out of it before anyone sets in to real asskicking.

  He also knows perfectly well that she won’t believe him or take any steps for self-protection. She’s a second-generation Deeper, and “we aren’t raised that way, we’re gentle in our anger,” she has said to him many times. He’s never had the nerve to say that he wasn’t raised that way and knows what a fist or foot does on flesh.

  There’s another shriek of everyone hurrying to finish whatever they were trying to say. It cuts off instantly when Rivera, the SecGen, a handsome young guy from the Dominican Republic, appears on the screen.

  Rivera has that serious expression everyone has seen so many times these past few years—it’s bad news and he’s counting on you to be calm.

  Like most Deepers, Naomi is a uniter, so she cheers along with that side, and Jesse cheers because he’s with her. Besides, Rivera has a way of making you trust him, and Abdulkashim could play Stalin without makeup.

  It seems as if Rivera is waiting for quiet in the Student Union, but crowds calm down about the same speed anywhere in the world, Jesse supposes, so possibly the SecGen is in front of another crowd, somewhere else. More likely, knowing that about half of the world still has to share screens in public places, there is a crowd simulator coming in through his earphone to let him know.

  Just as it becomes possible to hear, Rivera begins, “My friends and citizens of our planet… it is with a sad heart I tell you that tonight the United Nations is forced, for the eighth time, to intervene militarily to preserve and enforce Article Fourteen of its Second Covenant. I quote it to you in full: ‘No nation, whether or not signatory to this covenant, which did not possess and declare itself to be in possession of explosive weapons yielding more than one trillion ergs per gram delivered whether of any current or not yet invented type, by the first minute of June 1, 2008, GMT, shall be permitted to manufacture, possess, purchase, transfer or in any way exercise direct or indirect control over the detonation of such weapons. The Secretary-General shall have power at his sole discretion to enforce this article.’

  “Now, for ten years since the Alaska Free State peacefully separated from the United States, the Siberian Commonwealth has pursued a claim to Alaska based on alleged treaty irregularities in the agreements between the United States and the former Russian Empire. These claims have been found—in four different international fora—to be wholly without merit.

  “Not only has the present Siberian regime reiterated and pressed these claims, it has also pursued an annexation of Alaska by covert violence and overt threat.”

  The screen flashes once, and shadowy shapes, too regular to be natural, show as dark blue on light blue. There are a dozen or so, all roughly proportioned like a pencil, with one end flared like the head of a flashlight and the other rounded and snub. Rivera explains. “Six clusters like this one have been located on the seabed of the Arctic Ocean. These are suppressed trajectory missiles, made by MitsDoug Defense, but microsensors dropped close to them have revealed two critical modifications, both in violation of arms-control agreements. First of all, the range has been extended tremendously by fitting a MitsDoug Cobra air-to-surface missile as a second stage, inside the warhead compartment. Secondly, the Cobra stage has been fitted with a laser-ignited fusion warhead, with a yield far in excess of what is permitted by Article Fourteen.

  “We have also established through Open Data agreements that these weapons do not belong to any power permitted to own them under the Covenant. In any case they lie outside any national territory and are thus de facto illegal under Article Seventeen of the Second UN Covenant.

  “Their positioning within a two-minute flight of Denali, and my description of past bad relations between Alaska and Siberia, should be placed in this context: earlier this evening I notified all three hundred and twenty-four signatory and nonsignatory nations that the UN Space Operations Office would destroy those missiles at the first sign of launch, or at 0830 GMT, whichever came first. I have received the explicit assent of two hundred and eighty-four nations, and no response from the others—except for the Siberian Commonwealth, which has lodged a strong protest at what President Abdulkashim calls a hasty and unwarranted action.

  “This screen is displaying a brief report from General Jamil of UNSOO, showing target configuration before strike. At exactly 0830 GMT, a flight of twenty-five UNSOO space planes fired over one hundred missiles into impact trajectories for those sites. The missiles penetrated the Arctic ice, and delivered antineutron-beryllium warheads—or ‘cram bombs’—onto the sites you see here.”

  Jesse would love to know how anything can go through hundreds of meters of ice at Mach 20 and still come out working on the other side, but he’d have to work for UNSOO a long time before they told him that. If you can trust Scuttlebytes, then maybe each warhead puts out a thin mist of antiprotons from its nose that then flows back around it, but you can’t trust Scuttlebytes much more than you can the Famous People Channel. Look at how many times in the last twelve years Scuttlebytes has claimed to finally know who set off the Flash.

  Then it cuts to some kind of undersea remote sensing. Long white streaks arrow into the seabed missiles, so fast that it’s as if the lines of superheated steam plunging into the Arctic Ocean appear all at once, like the particle paths in a cloud chamber. Where the missile was, at the head of each streak, there’s a bright white ball.

  The view jumps back to Rivera. He nods, as if to say, Powerful, eh? Frightening? There is no trace of a smile.

  He licks his lips once before he speaks. “An attempted launch of the seabed missiles was detected by our monitors a bit under a second before impact. Authorized UN datatrace reveals that signal’s origin to be the Commandant’s palace in Novokuznetsk, Siberia. On the basis of this evidence, I am issuing an interdict and arrest order, effective now, for the seizure of Commandant Abdulkashim and fifty-one other Siberian officials. They are to be taken into UN detention for examination and trial. All armed forces around the world are reminded that armed resistance to UN arrest—or taking military advantage of any situation caused by a UN arrest—is a capital offense at all levels.”

  The SecGen’s eyes suddenly seem harrowed and frightened. When Rivera speaks again, it is very softly. “This has not been an easy decision, but so far as I have vision it has been a just, measured, and appropriate one. Let us all hope it brings us nearer global peace and justice. Good day to you all.”

  The blue and white flag billowing in a soft breeze flashes on the screen, and then the UNIC logo. The screen pops back to a replay of I Love Lucy. There’s an uproar in the room about what to watch next. Jesse gave up on TV back when they stopped making new shows.

  At least ten people are shouting above the crowd, announcing various meetings to support, protest, or discuss the SecGen’s actions.

  Naomi leans back and breathes in his ear. “Oh mighty engineer, this uninitiated one craves to ken your technical wisdom, for damn all if she can understand what just happened. Besides, if there’s any meeting or rally I ought to make, I can find out and join up later. Can we go be alone?”

  Her arm slides around him and he feels the heavy, soft push of her breast against his elbow as he pulls his own arm out to drape o
ver her shoulder.

  It still takes ten minutes to get out of the Student Center, because anyone as active as Naomi has at least twenty people to say hello to. Jesse does as well, but for once he’s glad that most of her friends think he’s a big dumb piece of attractive meat, because that means his part of the ritual can be confined to exchanges of head nods and saying each other’s names. Naomi has to go through a comparison of analyses with everyone.

  Right now she’s explaining it to Gwendy, the girlfriend that Jesse has always privately thought of as “a blonde mop with protruding hardware.” Naomi’s getting very serious, and the tone of passion is drawing more people toward her. This doesn’t look good for an escape.

  “The thing we can’t lose sight of,” Naomi is saying, delicate little hands churning and chopping at the air in front of her, “is that whether Rivera had any options in the situation, or not, isn’t relevant. It’s not our job to make him have options, after all. The point is that of course he had to get rid of the missiles and of course it was wrong to blow them up. They’re just trying to confuse the issue when they ask what else he could have done about it. If he had been doing his job, he would have had a better option. That’s what it’s all about. If he’s willing to live in a situation with only unacceptable options and then willing to take one, well, then, there you have it. We need to get some feelings expressed about all this.”

  Inwardly Jesse groans. Feelings are seldom properly expressed until there’s been a march and a conference at least.

  She goes on, and by now Sibby (who tends to agree with both Gwendy and Naomi about everything, especially when they disagree with each other) is listening intently as well, and clearly the conversation can’t end till she has a chance to agree. The apartment and the homework are looking farther and farther away every minute.

  Gwendy’s guy, a tall skinny bad case of acne whom Jesse normally would remember the name of, tries to get an objection in, but Naomi mows it down before he can open his mouth. “No, listen,” she says. “The point is, people have to take charge of wherever life puts them, and I don’t care if he is the SecGen, he’s still responsible. If you allow your situation to be one where there are no moral options, and then you go and choose between them, you’re still choosing to do something wrong. I mean, otherwise there’s nobody to blame.”

  Sibby tentatively ventures that maybe this applies, too, to Abdulkashim.

  “Oh, sure, right,” Gwendy barks, turning on Sibby. “Blame a guy whose country just lost most of its weapons, a guy who’s probably being thrown into jail right now if the UN cops haven’t already killed him, like he really wanted to have all this happen. That is so simplistic.” Gwendy’s jaw is sticking far enough forward to protrude beyond the heavy blonde curtains of her hair, she’s glaring into Sibby’s eyes (as much as anyone can tell from the side), and she’s doing what old guys like Jesse’s dad call “invading personal space”—standing close to Sibby and moving closer.

  All this is putting a nasty want-to-fight gleam in Naomi’s eye. Jesse knows many people find her obnoxious when she’s like this, but it’s also exactly what gets him horny.

  The first thing he noticed about her in Values and Self class, the one required course at the U of the Az, was that gleam when she started picking on the three bewildered Afropean guys for not being feminist-ecoconscious.

  The second thing was that under all the baggy clothing she had a wonderful body.

  Jesse’s roommate Brian, who moved out when it became clear that Jesse was getting serious about her, had rather casually suggested that since what turned Jesse on was all that fury wrapped up in that male-fantasy body, maybe he should “just rape her and get over it, Jess, wouldn’t that be simpler? It would confirm everything she thinks about you and you’d still get to find out what it’s like.”

  Jesse had been shocked. The next several times he had sex with Naomi he couldn’t stop fantasizing that he was raping her. If there was a Diem Act for fantasies like there is for wedges, he’d be facing the death penalty.

  Does he really like her? He doesn’t know—it seems irrelevant.

  He’s not listening, which is probably just as well, but Gwendy and Sibby are both in tears and Gwendy’s guy seems to be trying to get them pulled out of there. They beat some kind of retreat, and by now anyone who was waiting to talk to Naomi seems to have vanished, so Jesse has her outside almost at once. They walk together quietly in the cool desert dark before Jesse ventures to speak. “Listen,” he says, “don’t give me a speech about it, but I’d really like to take the Lectrajeep out into the desert tonight. We could sit back and look at the stars and I’d listen to whatever you want to talk about.”

  He knows this is likely to start a fight. She doesn’t like the Lectrajeep. Deepers don’t want to disturb the wilderness, so they get it on XV instead. Never mind that with the big soft balloon tires and the QuaDirecDrive, the Lectrajeep doesn’t leave as much track as a hiker in lightweight boots; Naomi’s parents have filled her full of horror stories about what the old four-wheelers of fifty years before did, and that’s what she sees when she looks at Jesse’s Lectrajeep.

  The one time he tried taking her out into the desert, she didn’t know her way around without the XV team there. In XV, the body you ride on is some highly trained athlete, so that you move easily through the wild country, and you have constant back-of-the-mind contact with a wilderness poet, a naturalist, an activist, and a shaman. Without them there to whisper into her mind, she didn’t know what the plants were, she had no phrases to remember or key into the experience with, she didn’t know what the major threats to this part of the ecosystem were or who was responsible for them, and there wasn’t any spiritual significance to anything. Worse yet, she got sweaty and dirty—she’d never gone more than a day unshowered in her life, probably.

  So by suggesting the Lectrajeep, he’s looking for a fight, maybe, if he admits the truth to himself, because if they fight and then fuck to make up, it will be what he really wanted all along, and if they just fight, it will make him that much crazier for the next time. He’s beginning to wonder, a little, just how much crazier he can get.

  He’s stunned numb when she takes his hand and says, “Let’s give it a try. I’ve been thinking maybe I don’t bend enough or try to see anyone else’s point of view.”

  Jesse’s heart is thumping to be let out of his chest. “Great,” he says. “It’s about an hour’s drive out to my favorite spot if we go at a reasonably responsible speed. I’ll call my brother on the way and see if he knows anything about environmental effects yet.”

  She kisses him then, right out where anyone might see it happening. He’s crazier. Definitely crazier.

  In the seabed off the North Slope, things have been happening. There was a lot of kinetic energy in the warheads to begin with, and because Scuttlebytes got it right for once, there was also a plume of antiprotons spraying in ahead of them, and that added some energy as well.

  All that was nothing compared to the warheads themselves. When an antineutron collides with a beryllium nucleus, it annihilates one neutron, and the mutual annihilation releases around nine times the energy of a fissioning uranium atom. It also converts that nucleus to two alpha particles about as close together as you’ll ever see them. Having the same charge, they repel each other and take off in opposite directions, adding a percentage point or so to the total energy. The alpha particles, highly charged, readily “hand over” their energy to the matter they pass through, as heat, as electromagnetic radiation, and as mechanical motion caused by the heat and radiation.

  It is the destiny of all energy, eventually, to end up as heat; that’s the principle of entropy. The energy of the bomb explosions ended up as heat in the ocean bed, much of which is ice, not very far below freezing—in fact if it weren’t at ocean-bottom pressure it wouldn’t be frozen at all.

  This is ice with something more.

  One strange fact about ice, when you think about it, is that it floats. Solid
butter sinks to the bottom of liquid butter, solid iron sinks to the bottom of liquid iron, solid nitrogen sinks to the bottom of liquid nitrogen

  . . but solid water floats on liquid water.

  Imagine a microscope fine enough to show you why. The water molecule is bent at an angle and try as you like, it doesn’t pack neatly. Freeze water, so that the molecules start to line up into crystals, and that sloppy packing leaves a lot of empty space—more empty space than when they were just rolling around on each other.

  Freeze water another way, and there’s so much extra space you can trap other molecules between the water molecules. That’s called a clathrate—Latin for a “cage, trellis, or grating”—and all kinds of things can be held in there.

  As when twenty-three water molecules make a cage around four methane molecules.

  There is lots of methane in the seabed. Everything that sinks down there rots, and there’s not much free oxygen. Many anaerobic decay processes release methane. Dead stuff has been rotting on the seabed for a long time—and since the last few ice ages, it’s been cold enough down there to trap the methane in clathrates. On the Arctic Ocean floor many clathrate beds are tens of meters thick and hundreds of kilometers across.

  So energy from the cram bombs goes into the seabed and warms up ice that’s just below the freezing point, releasing methane. Moreover, as the clathrates dissolve they trigger landslides and collapses under the sea.

  Now, clathrates are delicate molecules. They’re big but there are no strong bonds in them, and it doesn’t take much more than a hard rap to break them up, letting the water molecules regroup into plain ice… and the methane escape.

  Tonight the seabed is alive with avalanches, collapses, and pressure waves. Methane deposited across thousands of years is bubbling up from all over, making its way up to the surface of the Arctic Ocean, finding the countless rents and breaks in the ice. Within eighteen hours, the fifty-footdeep clathrate beds stretching along the outer edge of the North Slope, about sixty-five miles wide and running more than four hundred miles under the sea, are in collapse.