Rose
April 21st, 2011
T+4 Days
There were few times that Rose preferred interacting with information with her eyes outside the digital environment, but this was one of those days. More than that, they had the beginnings of the inner circle forming, and it was best to keep them on the same page. While she could handle everything herself, it was… boring. Painfully so.
Rose could only tell people to pick up that piece of scrap and bring it to that pile so many times before she was pulling her hair out and directing them around in elaborate circles that screwed efficiency. The control she had was absolute, and she loved it, craved it, but that didn't mean she had to use it. Just knowing that she could order something and it would be done tickled a part of her mind and stroked the spark ego that only grew with time. But micromanaging thousands of people? Maybe millions over time? Annoying, and it stroked the megalomaniac side that she and Miles have been keeping under wraps. It wouldn't take long before her messing with people would turn into live-action dramas, with her pulling the strings for some sick sense of amusement.
She had already snapped once; the stress was too much for her not to delve a little too far. And Rune, Tammi—she was right there, her brain accessible from anywhere. The itch to meddle around sent shivers down Rose's back. She kept it as minor as she could, tweaking rewards for doing some actions and penalizing others. The most major of them was her response to women. Tammi got a little shot of feel-good chemicals every time a woman touched her, and racist thoughts gave her a headache. It wasn't much, but it settled that spot in her head as she watched how things would play out. The big case in point was when Taylor wrapped her arm around Tammi's midsection; she didn't push it away or even grumble.
It made a tiny part of Rose squee, seeing her younger self already set on a course for sampling the other pot. A part of her wanted to see why her younger self even entertained the idea of other women when she didn't, but it was a mystery she loathed to uncover. She wanted to watch, observe, and see how much frustration she could pile on before she broke. Horrible for her to do so, but handling those impulses with an outlet saved the majority.
Rose turned back to the small crowd of people, eyeing them as they sat around a hastily constructed holographic projector. After the detection array ran for a solid twelve hours, they had a decent picture of the situation around the Earth. It wouldn't pick up everything, nor would it do so for at least a few months of data gathering, but it gave them enough to hold this meeting.
One thing that surprised Rose was that Miles opposed it. "Shout loud enough at the heavens, and someone might hear you." However, that argument was nothing but hot air. Blasting the focused signals out into space would only travel at light speed, giving them a decade in the worst-case scenario. A timeframe that didn't much matter when they could be killed years earlier by the moon falling on their heads. They could handle some hypothetical aliens later.
This small corner was the only uncovered area in the vast hangar. Around them, machines worked away with tireless efficiency as they produced parts and simple components for Rose and Miles to assemble into the final product. They still lacked the correct tools to make viable drones without a hefty amount of fudging with their spark and REMODEL in play. The problem was that their progress in pushing down the tool iterations came to a halt as more urgent projects kept popping up, forcing them to sidetrack.
It was funny to call this a crowd with only five people. Danny sat front and center, out of his element, but as the figurehead of the civilians, he paid close attention. Next to him, and a surprising sight at that, was Piggot, not Director Piggot, as she vehemently denied. Miles alluded to her clumping the PRT home branch with the Parahumans that abandoned her to die those years ago. She was a woman of pure, unadulterated resentment. Miles called her a mighty tall dwarf.
Further away, sitting next to each other, were Taylor, Vista, and Dinah. Neither had positions of power, but Rose saw the writing on the wall and knew this wouldn't end soon. They had to have lieutenants—loyal ones—trained from a young age. Vista, for her useful power and determined attitude. Dinah, again for her useful power, and they gave her a minimalist helmet and visor combo because of her insistent nagging.
Now Taylor didn't have a useful power, galling as it was to admit. Rose already surveyed everything around with the tablets they handed out, and bugs wouldn't last long once the ash started falling, and temperatures dropped. The most suitable part of Taylor's power was the multitasking bestowed, and once she was implanted, she'd turn into a managing superstar, much like Rose. Also, Taylor was her, and she'd never let herself wander around in the dark. They offered Tammi a spot, funny enough, but she refused, taking the time to 'watch the world die'. There was another that Rose wished to recruit, but she hadn't shown up yet.
"Let's keep it brief," Miles said. "The detection arrays have categorized over 90 percent of the objects now orbiting Earth."
A rendition of Earth sprung to life, sadly missing precise details without satellites orbiting the planet. Around it was an absolute mess of dots, filling the space between the Earth and the Moon. There were hundreds of thousands of detectable rocks, with the count hitting the tens of millions if they the meter-sized minimum.
At that moment, the moon stood at ten percent less of its total mass. Of that 10 percent, nine of them were locked up in three massive rocks blasted off the opposite side of where the dual impact occurred. But that still left one percent of the moon in loose rubble around the earth, or 730 quadrillion tonnes (219,557,416 km3) of material, enough to fill a sixth of the oceans worldwide.
After Miles' introduction, the dots separated into three categories: green, red, and orange. "The green dots shouldn't ever impact Earth, as our models suggest. Instead, most will escape Earth's influence via the moon and shoot out into the solar system."
The depressing part was how few there were, tallying in at under five percent, and most of them were on the smaller side.
"Next is the orange. These are in a dubious zone of unpredictability that could see them rocketed away from the earth just as likely as towards it."
This selection covered another ten percent, with most being in highly erratic orbits.
"That leaves us with red. These will hit the Earth; it's only a matter of time."
The hologram lit up as the other colors faded away, and distressingly, the three large chunks of the moon were red. It would only take one of those to wipe Earth clean of life. From there, the dots adopted a shade ranging from white to a deep, angry red. One of these dots slid in and impacted Earth as they watched.
"The deep red will hit within the next month."
Everything else faded away and only left the most pressing dots on the screen.
"From there, we remove everything under six hundred meters in diameter if set to strike outside a hundred kilometers of Brockton Bay."
The mass of dots disappeared from the display but still left an inordinate amount. Rose saw Piggot raise a finger, and she pointed to her. "Yes?"
"Why?"
"The effect will be localized and lose most of its potential energy on atmospheric entry. Even if they hit the Atlantic, the resulting wave shouldn't reach above the seawall."
Piggot sniffed, "How do you propose to handle climate change? The remaining eggheads agree that it will freeze Earth. Even those smaller impacts will throw up ash and dust."
Rose gave Piggot a tight smile. "We can't. Earth is going to freeze over. What we can do is prepare and try to intercept the large meteors. The ones that will threaten to crack the Earth in half."
Miles took over. "Of those remaining, we have over two thousand impactors. Then we reduce it again based on the estimated impact site and size, only leaving those that will immediately devastate the area."
This reduced the number again, down to three hundred and sixteen dots. Many of them set to hit the Atlantic Ocean, causing a tsunami great enough to wash away everything. Not much could stand in the way of a wall of water traveling just under the speed of sound.
"Why not deal with them all? Isn't that going to kill a lot of people?" Vista blurted it out.
Piggot tsked but said nothing.
"Vista-" Rose started
"Missy!"
"Missy, then, we'll be lucky enough to survive with enough people to save humanity. We can blow up meteors of all sizes with preparation and even the moon given enough time, but we can't handle so many so quickly. That also doesn't consider that destroying a meteor doesn't remove the mass. In a week, the sun won't shine again for hundreds of years."
"So this meeting is all gloom and doom? Should we just give up and die?" Piggot spat out.
Miles laughed at that, and Rose could only smile. They tugged at each other mentally before Rose answered. "If anything, we'll leave. We could launch a spaceship and leave Earth within a week. The problem is the number of people we could bring and if they'd even survive space travel before we build something sustainable."
"How benevolent of you to slum it with the lowly normals."
"So, what are you going to do about those big chunks?" Taylor asked, talking about the three parts of the moon.
Rose took over then. "We have some time before they become a worry. The first isn't set to hit for fifty years. By then, we should be able to fix its orbit." That was nothing but the truth. Just a matter of producing enough energy over a period.
"Um, what are those streaks?" Taylor asked, pointing up at the displayed image.
Miles turned his head, letting Rose see without moving, and an unknown dot broke the horizon, coming over West Africa, high in the sky. Rose turned in confusion as a second appeared soon after. She used her mental connection to the computer and analyzed the information coming in before enhancing the image generated by the return data.
On-screen, a mockup of a missile appeared, burning hard on a trajectory away from the earth. The computer didn't take long to latch on and set a projected course before cross-referencing anything in its potential path.
"Is that what I think it is?" Piggot said.
"Yes."
Piggot swore, grabbing her radio after refusing to use one of Rose's tablets earlier. She ran out of the room, barking orders. On the track, the ICBM was on course for one of the larger asteroids they ruled out because of the projected impact site in China. This asteroid had a diameter of six kilometers.
As the minutes went on, another ICBM appeared, then another every fifteen seconds. They watched in mute silence as the stream of missiles, most likely armed with nukes, hurtled over their heads. Rose and Miles calculated the results in their heads, aided by the computer. They didn't know the yield or the asteroid composition, but that didn't stop them from trying to predict the results.
"Dinah, can you get a read on it?" Miles asked.
"Uh- no." Disappointing.
Rose and Miles knew one thing for sure: Scion wouldn't do anything. There might be people out there unworried about the big one because Scion was still wandering around saving kittens in trees, but the missiles flying through the sky told a different story. He never allowed nukes before, but now that the cat was out of the bag. They could expect other nations to put theirs back together and try to use them for defense, complicating everything.
By the end of the deliberation, those twenty nukes would slow the asteroid by a scant ten meters per second at best. It was almost nothing when compared to the six kilometers per second it was currently moving, but as they projected its new path, it was no longer set for hitting the CUI but the Atlantic Ocean four orbits later, six less than before. Some twelve thousand kilometers away from the original impact site, now a direct threat to them.
They spent the next few minutes watching the ICBM train heading skyward to intercept the asteroid far out in its eccentric orbit. Privately, Rose was skeptical that they would even make it that far through the debris cloud or even reach that height. They were only ICBMs, not dedicated lift vehicles. Though there was no telling what various tinkers made modifications to them.
Miles turned to the still-present people. "Does anyone want to watch?"
"No, no, thank you," Danny said, pushing himself up and leaving them without a second look.
Rose understood and was the reason they kept this to only a few people. Hearing exactly how screwed the world was and the chances of surviving would strain anyone. Watching nukes explode would only hammer it in. A part of her hoped he would step up and be the man she once wished for, but it was clear that he couldn't handle the strain. Already he was sliding back into the cloud of depression, focusing everything on working even while Taylor made her overtures. So she marked him off as staying as a low-level relations manager at one of the apartment bunkers and no longer being pulled into meetings like this one.
That reminded her to send out a warning and a quick briefing to everyone with a tablet to head indoors and not look at the sky. Even though the air was full of dust and ash, that didn't mean they'd be safe from having their retinas burned out. Miles could fix it, but that'd be a waste of time.
"What are we watching?" Missy asked, her young mind far too innocent to grasp the worldwide extinction happening for how much she claimed to be mature.
"Nukes," Dinah said; while the same age, she was far more exposed to the shitside of life than a kid should've been.
"I thought Scion took care of them?"
Rose stopped Miles from saying that Scion wasn't mentally around anymore. "He hasn't stopped the meteors from hitting, has he?" Rose asked instead.
"No… I guess not." Missy admitted, slinking down in her chair as much as her armor would let her.
Rose and Miles went over to a bay door and opened it up. Gusts of dust-filled air swept in as they all hurried out into the gloomy morning. Despite being ten A.M., only a slight haze of light made it through. Even If not a single further meteor descended, humanity would have been screwed anyway.
"Helmets on," Rose said, instructing the computer to relay positional data to an overlay.
While they watched the stream of missiles separate, each one set to intercept a decent distance away from the last, Rose and Miles formed a plan to destroy it in a way that wouldn't wash away the East Coast.
The first idea was simple, a nuke of their own, scaled up to half a gigaton. Enough to vaporize half the rock and shatter the rest, but it would also destroy electronics worldwide and give everyone a good radiation dose. They crossed that off not because of collateral damage but because of the unsustainability. Their fusible material stockpile was barely a kilogram and wasn't enriched.
Next came a kinetic impactor, but they tossed that quick enough. Again, it's unfeasible to construct in the eight hours left before the potential impact. Plus, like direct energy weapons, the atmosphere was the most significant factor in holding back the effectiveness. There was not much point in putting effort into a weapon where only a fraction of the energy reached the target.
That left them with missiles of a more conventional load, and they had just the thing. Each drone they made used a plasma bottle as a battery that was refilled at the fusion generator. Using a plasma bottle or multiple bottles wouldn't be a significant departure to power the missile engine and provide the detonation load. It would be cheap, effective, and easy to make. The worst part would be the hardening of the missile to penetrate within the asteroid before detonating deep within to split the rock into many smaller chunks that would fare far worse moving through the air.
They could try their hand at producing a fusion bomb, but that was just a plasma bomb with a few more steps, complications, and, ah, safety. It would be the right call if they were storing them for any period of time, but targets had no end. Because once they finished filling the plasma bottles, they began losing energy, necessitating their immediate use. Not that she was comfortable keeping a megaton of TNT equivalent near them; one wrong hit could have melted them into nothingness. The opposite of a nuke, any failure condition would result in the potential energy being released.
It was another reason they kept the drones to a smaller size instead of scaling them up to monstrosities. Blinding people and melting everything within thirty meters was far more palatable than leveling the entire city. Fusion reactors also required far more precious materials than they had access to.
Rose turned back to watching the ICBMs as the first one winked out. The debris that expanded away painted a picture of it being hit by a small chunk of rock. Anything larger than a grain of dust would rip apart an ICBM, and it was crowded up there. Even their sensors pumping out gigawatts of energy every hour couldn't pick up everything.
Taylor, Missy, and Dinah were all mumbling to themselves, watching the sky. It was nice seeing her younger self socializing, even if it was a constructed situation deliberately made to force her to interact. Well, not the ICBMs or the potential death of everyone within a hundred kilometers of the ocean.
In rapid succession, ICBMs 7-15 winked out one after another. Rose pursed her lips, recalculating its new re-entry path, but gave up because so much was still up to chance. Then, as the trajectories met, ICBM-2 detonated, and a second hazy sun illuminated the world. She felt the slight warmth of ionized particles hitting her bare skin even at this distance, not enough to cause issues with ordinary people, but it would fry unprotected eyes. Over the next two minutes, ICBMs 3-6 detonated.
Rose leaned against Miles as he wrapped an arm around her while they waited for number sixteen. She was quite aware of the glare Taylor kept sending her, so doing what they always did, Rose had Miles pinch her ass. Through the connection she and Taylor shared, the girl yelped before clanging her armored hands against her backside. That made Dinah and Missy ask her increasingly probing questions.
'You should give her some slack.'
'Ha, no, she needs to lighten up a little.'
Miles rolled his eyes at her; he shouldn't even bother. Rose knew what was best for herself!
The show began again, with only the eighteenth failing to detonate, slamming into the glowing red asteroid. Then the last two followed.
Rose clapped her hands as soon as the last artificial sun faded away. "Alright, back to work! Dinah, go do whatever it is that you do." She gave Rose a sloppy salute before pulling out her tablet. "Taylor, get Tammi and start working on your team. Missy, you're with her."
Taylor squinted at Rose before grabbing Missy's hand and pulling her along without a word.
"Queenie.""Sam."
The spider dropped from the hangar roof, landing with a slight puff of settled dust. Sam wandered over from the open door, explicitly not sitting on the ground and keeping her hands off it.
"Queenie, I want you to remove disruptive elements from the board. Capes and normals. If they kill, destroy, and do anything else that negatively affects people, kill them. Use your judgment, but bad actors need to be removed."
"Sam, gather the most vulnerable yet useful people. Thirty and under are the top priority. Once we have space, convoys will range out and pick them up. Label all capes and remove subversive elements." Miles said.
"It's murdering time!" Queenie said, launching herself to the top of the hangar before bounding away.
Rose rolled her eyes, turning to Sam before she left. "Here is a list of people. Please gather them and bring them here or to a safe spot."
Sam grabbed the list from Rose's and gave it a quick scan before handing it back with a chitter and walking away.
"I guess it's time to get back to work," Miles sighed.
Rose worked to make them feel more authoritative by not wearing regular clothes. Instead, they'd be wearing armor suits. Horribly decadent suits made from the best alloys they could produce. Sensors and other useful tools filled them, and even a micro jetpack would allow them to fly for brief periods. Most of all, the armor stood beyond what their bodies could take so that the next time Miles punched an immovable woman, his arm wouldn't turn into an accordion.
Meanwhile, Miles worked on the experimental plasma missile, ensuring that it would be durable, carry a large enough load, and be, most of all, cheap to produce time-wise. Really, it was a metal tube with a nozzle on the end. That was horrifyingly simplifying, but it was simple compared to a drone expected to accomplish any number of objectives. The struggle was to make enough of them so that a meteor wouldn't crack the earth, setting off a cascading geological chain reaction. Or hit an ocean, causing a tsunami that would circle the globe. Or, well, the list was never-ending.
An internal beep pulled Rose away from her project. She looked up at Miles across the hangar floor to see him flicking her the bird, making her sigh. It seemed he saw through her fostering off annoying situations in the name of getting them on the same level.
Miles grabbed a gleaming silver circlet and threw it at her. The ring cracked the sound barrier as she snagged it out of the air, sighing in annoyance. She flicked him off, too, but he smiled before returning to building the plasma missile. Annoying.
'Love you too.'
Rose took a minute to climb into the metal coffin as miniature motors whirled and cinched armored panels together and locked her inside. The addition of synthetic muscle tempted her at first, but without specialized tools, the suit would either turn out far too bulky and ruin their images. Or it would take her days to make instead of hours. It wasn't an enormous loss, with their bodies far beyond synthetic muscles, even myomers powered by fusion reactors. It was a decent stopgap.
Once everything clinched together, it turned into a second skin, and with the transmitter connected to her nervous system, Rose could feel mute sensations through it. At long last, she pulled the solid metal helmet over her head as the outer plate projected her face to appear as a person instead of a monolithic robot. She ran her armor-clad hand down her stomach. Interlocking metal plates rippled together, imparting unimpeded mobility.
Rose grabbed the metal circlet, placing it against her hip where it clamped down. Her steps out of the hangar were no longer feather-light; the armor weighed too much for her to hold back every movement, and a tonne made noise no matter how she tried.
She leaned against the wall beside the door, giving a sharp nod to the two armed guards, Scott and Kyle, by the gate leading to the hangar. It was less for protection and more to keep people away and not bother them. They pulled the rolling fence open, letting a Mercedes drive through with a confused, mousy woman driving. The windshield wipers squawked as they pushed off the falling dust. She pulled up to the hangar and parked just as Rose had the guard instruct the woman. Once the car turned off, Rose made her move, crossing the distance in a few steps and knocking on the car window.
The woman startled in the driver's seat before she took a deep breath and rolled down the window. In the passenger seat was a long-old acquaintance, and in the back was a regret.
"Kayden Anders, come with me," Rose said, not leaving the option of refusing.
Kayden shivered, giving Theo a look before turning to her daughter, strapped into a car seat. "Mommy's going to be right back." She paused for a moment. "Theo, watch over her if... you know."
Theo nodded, "I will." His tone was serious, filled with conviction.
Rose stepped back as Kayden opened her car door, standing up in high heels and a designer tan coat belted tight. She looked up to meet Rose's eyes as she towered over the woman, at least a half meter shorter.
"Who are you?" Kayden asked.
"I'm Empress, Purity," Rose answered, smiling at how Kayden tensed up before deflating.
"Oh… okay." Kayden sagged, losing what spine she had left, accepting whatever fate was given.
"Nothing will happen to your children."
"Ah, thank you."
"Follow me."
Rose led Kayden back into the hangar and to the vacant dining area. She sat down, gesturing to the empty chair opposite of her. Kayden hesitated before sitting down, setting her purse on the floor.
"Now, Purity, what brought you here? Don't lie, and don't bother trying to fight back."
Even though Kayden didn't pose a threat to Rose, she could just pop Kayden's head like a zit before she could fire a beam, but it was best to head off any futile resistance.
"My children. I wanted them to be safe, and this is the safest place in Brockton Bay, no matter what happens to me."
Miles laughed in Rose's head as he found it hilarious that Kayden sought them out to protect Aster when Rose killed her the last time around. But it allowed Rose to make up for past actions. While it did not enthuse her about having someone as powerful as Purity hanging around, her children were adequate leverage to keep her behaving.
Rose pulled the silver circlet off her hip and placed it on the table. "You have two options, three, but I don't believe you'd take it. First, put the armband around your wrist, and you can stay. It will monitor you at all times, and the second you try to betray us, it will either shock you unconscious or explode. The second, say goodbye to Theo and Aster and never come back. Or third, get back in your car and leave. What will it be?"
Kayden picked up the armband with shaking hands, examining its featureless exterior. "What... what do you expect of me?"
"Nothing for now, but we expect you to rise to the camp's defense. That includes fighting against your former team. Besides that, keep your views to yourself and don't interact with Rune."
"Wait, Rune's still alive?" Kayden straightened out as a bit of hope returned to her.
"Yes, thanks to Emperor."
"Thank goodness. So, where do I put this?"
"On your arm, wrist, or anywhere will do, and it will resize itself once in place and won't come off until we allow it."
Kayden pulled the armband onto her arm, leaving it just past her wrist as it whirled and cinched tight, locking it in place. She gave Rose a sad smile. "I guess that's that. Please don't blame my children."