Winning Peace 4:
"Alright, that should just about do it." I sighed, fine-tuning the last point-to-point connection, then turned my microphone back on. "Send me a ping for roll call guys; need to make sure we've got everyone."
Immediately, a series of alerts on my hologram began cycling through, some eighty-odd notifications chiming and I nodded to myself in satisfaction. "Good, seems like everyone's receiving and transmitting properly. Now, due to technical limitations, we won't be able to talk with Eos Chasma on Mars or Gagarin Outpost, Leonov Outpost on Vesta, and Tereshkova Outpost on Pallas. We've also got twenty-three craft that are currently in transit orbits, prospecting asteroids and moons, or on research expeditions in the outer solar system. All told, that's about ten thousand people, most of whom are on Mars, who aren't going to have some kind of input about the preliminary decisions being made here today. I'll be recording the minutes and readying a compressed transmission to ensure complete transparency."
I paused to sip water through a straw. Even if I wasn't in micro-g, liquids still behaved a bit strangely on the moon and it was better to keep everything sealed as much as possible.
"The system I've rigged up for this conference has a priority claim built in. If you think what you have to say is important, you can claim priority. Other people in the call will be able to effectively downvote or upvote whatever you say once you've finished or five minutes have passed. Get enough negative feedback because you're effectively verbally shitposting and you lose priority access. For the record, my name is Doctor Ezekiel Horus Lopez and I'll be playing moderator here. Also, there's a private chat that will enable you to invite up to five other people into a separate conversation, but I'd ask that individuals please refrain from using that until we're finished with the first round of meetings. I'll be keeping this system up pretty much twenty-four-seven, so don't feel like it'll disappear or anything."
Immediately, a dozen priority chimes went off, more following every few seconds afterwards and I sighed as I felt a headache coming on already. Impulsively, I grabbed at a few painkillers as I keyed up the first speaker.
"This is Captain Ingrid Kristiansen of the EU-Norwegian Freighter Ellingboe. I think I speak for most of us when I ask, what the hell happened?!" A somewhat weathered voice spoke through the slightly-patchy connection.
"A general summary then, since it would serve us all to be on the same page." I sighed and thought back to three days previously. "Roughly sixty-eight hours ago, a group of terrorists utilized a series of radioactive dirty bombs. They were... are? I don't know the details, but they were a fringe pseudo-religious sect called 'The Last Dogs.' What little I could find seems like they believed an apocalypse was necessary to prevent the destruction of humanity by godlike beings from beyond the stars."
I took another sip of my water. "Anyway, it seems like they hijacked a shipment of radioactive material that was being transferred from the Sinoese Empire to North Korea two years ago and the Empire has been trying to find the stuff ever since, which incidentally was probably the reason for increasing tensions between the Chinese and the UNAS in the south pacific. Keeping in mind I don't know the exact details, it also appears that there was some level of penetration into the Sinoese Empire itself, specifically trafficking in modified bio-weapons that the Chinese stole from old Soviet archives when they invaded back in the twenty-thirties."
"So the new breakouts in the American west coast...?" Captain Kristiansen asked.
"Without access to samples and time to test them, I honestly can't say." I replied shortly. "At any rate, though, the UNAS seemed to believe that the coordinated terrorist attacks were a premeditated first strike to bypass the third-gen Star Wars defense system they'd been showing off for the past decade. President Lombard gave orders for what he believed was a retaliatory strike and when the Sinoese saw ICBMs coming their way, they just launched on everyone they'd ever had a disagreement with. Which meant that India and Pakistan launched on China, too, and the EU retaliated after the first Chinese missile took out Berlin."
"Jesus." The captain quietly swore.
"Alright, there's a lot of other stuff, but I'm trying to give everyone a chance to ask questions, so we're moving on to the next priority. Safe travels, Captain." I hit a few holographic keys and switched the line open. "You've got the mic."
The line was silent for a half-second, then a man cleared his throat. "Ah, this is Keppler Station's Second in Command, Karl Bowler. I wanted to ask if we have casualty figures yet."
I pulled up another file and began compressing it. "Very rough ones, yes. I'm going to send a compressed file across the network, it may cause a bit of lag, but the bad news is that a lot of people are still dying so I can't be too accurate. Most people in major cities, whether they got caught in a dirty bomb or in the fallout of a nuclear weapon are going to be dead over the next week to the next month, depending on their exposure. If they aren't dead already. Given the numbers of bombs used... we're looking at casualties in the high tens of millions to the low hundreds of millions at the moment."
I took a moment to close my eyes and exhaled a desolate sigh. "That number will balloon to ten times that in the next three or four months as supplies of food, potable water, and medicine start running out. We'll see deaths by disease, starvation, and fighting over limited remaining resources surge during and after that. We're also looking at a dramatic climate shift over the next decade at least, very much a nuclear winter. There's... a lot more to go into, but it's a horrible, bloody, sad thing. Bottom line is, even in areas unaffected by the nukes or the fallout carried by winds, the collapse of the global economy, civil unrest, and political instability are going to kill a lot of people in addition to the aforementioned climate and food crises. Current simulations estimate greater than ninety percent of the human population dead in ten years with another five percent dead over the following decade."
I sighed again and rubbed at my eyes.
Tiredly, when the voice on the other end didn't respond, I spoke. "Second-In-Command Bowler, if you'll permit a question in return? Where is your captain?"
The man coughed and audibly hesitated a moment before replying. "Captain Syler... we found him in his quarters. He'd blocked the vents and overridden the alarms. Suffocated in carbon dioxide. He had a wife and kids in New York."
I closed my eyes and nodded to myself. "You have my condolences, but the rest of you will probably want to watch out for that if you haven't already had suicides already. If someone really wants to kill themselves there's not much we can do, but give them as many hurdles to jump as you can. Hopefully they don't take anyone with them, either."
I snapped the channel closed and picked the next one in line.
"This is Commander Garbarov of the EU-Novgorod Republic station Antilla. I know who you are, Ezekiel Lopez, but what standing do you have here to coordinate this conference. This is a place where the fate of those in space must be decided, not where some rich child gets to play forum operator." The angry derision in the man's tone was honest and Thoth's sensors fed me data indicating it would be futile to argue with him. I'd pissed off his gover-former government more than once by refusing to invest in local industry and he probably had an ax to grind over a political injury done to someone in his family.
"I'll let Governor Sanchez answer that for me." I stated, both delegating the task and passing the buck to someone he might be more reasonable with. I flicked the other channel on, put myself on mute and spun up the new instances of the social engineering AI I was constructing.
Until recently, I'd tried to stay 'hands-off' on pushing humanity where I thought it needed to go and I thought I'd had a lot of good reasons for it. I was, at the end of the day, just a single member of my entire species after all. I had outsized influence due to my abilities, intelligence, and monetary assets, but... I'd also never thought that should entitle me to a position directing the course of world civilization. Inasmuch as I'd been 'chosen' by some cosmic fluke or eldritch being to hold my current status in life, I could force my authority on others, but I'd never been chosen by the people of my world. There was also the fact that I was very young, having just turned eighteen. So beyond everything else, most were just disinclined to listen to what I had to say as anything more than lip service to a child celebrity wunderkind.
One could argue that was a natural, if not intentional, outgrowth of the style I'd created for myself, but it was more of a chicken-and-egg issue. No one who'd worked in an industry for fifty years wanted to hear a fifteen year old child rearrange their entire world view, even less-so if they were right. If nothing else, it was just humiliating. Instead of fighting that uphill battle, I'd just cut my losses and made myself a figure of ridicule while I let my money and scientific advancements do the heavy lifting behind the scenes.
I'd contented myself with doling out technological wonders, building up immense wealth, and doing good where I could. Paying for free daycare and preschool programs in the massive slums that wound their ways through the megacities of the early twenty-second century, donating to infrastructure repair projects to give people clean drinking and bathing water, pouring money into the endless void of lobbyists to try and get social welfare and worker protection programs passed.
Looking back on it... it was obvious I hadn't done enough.
I hadn't done everything I could.
The wages of that sin was to watch a world burn in nuclear fire.
"-look, all I'm saying is that whether he's eighteen or eighty and regardless of how much money he has or whatever talk show he was on, he saved the lives of everyone living in Armstrong City!" Governor Sanchez shouted suddenly, drawing me out of my ruminations.
"You admitted yourself that he hacked the city's satellite observation and asteroid defense grids in order to do so!" Garbarov yelled in reply. "He could have just as easily faked all of that information and be trying to capitalize on the clout his lies give him!"
I mean, in the man's defense, he wasn't wrong. I could have faked it. Not easily, mind you, but it could be done. The upside of the entire thing having actually happened, though, was that I had proof that didn't rely on fallible digital records.
I sent a data packet off to one of the ships, let myself back into the conversation, and pinged the ship I'd sent it to while muting both the governor of Armstrong City and Captain Garbarov. "Governor, I'd like to thank you for your impassioned defense of my character and actions, but to resolve this situation, I've sent the coordinates of the sole remaining bomb to the Yonaguni, seeing as it's in lunar orbit and should be able to pick it up soon. Captain... Reichi-Juniper? Did I get that right?"
"Ah... yes." The woman spoke up, still mildly surprised at having been singled out. "I've had my man on sensors locating it and... yes, we can confirm that it's some kind of device coated in lidar-absorbing and heat-dampening tile. I'll have Engineering look at the feed, but as far as I can say from initial observations, the impact damage from the surveyor you rerouted seems to bear out your story. While I have you on the line, though, what population centers are we looking at surviving?"
"Hmm..." I considered the question for a moment. "Initial analysis says that a number of EU nations, specifically Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland weren't specifically targeted in any of the missile launches. They also have extensive and well-maintained shelters and supply systems for some kind of apocalyptic scenario. They'll likely come out best. Australia, New Zealand, and Indonesia weren't priority targets either, though the Philippines, Guam, and several other island chains with UNAS bases took direct hits. Japan... the bad news is that the major cities were all but wiped out, but anyone living in the hills or on the more isolated islands is likely to make it depending on where fallout blows."
I took a long pull from my water again. "The South American and African continents came through almost entirely unscathed, but will almost certainly be severely destabilized in the coming years. The same with the Central American nations as well, honestly. India... well, the Sinoese had a huge grudge from seizing manufacturing opportunities back in the twenty-fifties and their major economic boom after the Three Gorges dam collapsed in the twenty-seventies... every major city got at least one nuclear missile specifically targeting it. As far as the Middle East goes... Iran has the best chances, honestly. They weren't on anyone's shitlist specifically and they still have good petrochemical reserves. If they survive the refugee crisis that's going to hit them, they'll be in good shape."
A heavy sigh came over the line. "I understand. Thank you for the information."
She closed the line without me having to flick it off.
"Anyway, to digress a bit... the main reason I'm the one running this conference is that I'm the only one qualified to ride herd on what's left of the orbital infrastructure Earth has left. After the Sinoese started taking potshots at satellites, the UNAS followed suit and fired kinetic kill weapons at the two Chinese space stations. If my math is right, and it always is, they're the most likely culprits for the nukes launched at Armstrong, likely some kind of experimental rail-gun type device to get them here this fast..." I trailed off, pondering again on the implications. I really hadn't expected the Chinese to have that kind of capacity. The acceleration would have pulped a human, but it was an interesting idea.
I shook myself and tapped the next priority question.
On and on it went, for hours more. We took more than a few breaks, both because there were various crises that still needed everyone's attention and because we were all still very human and completely exhausted by the events of the past few days.
In the end, I got myself assigned the job of traffic control for the foreseeable future, being tasked with maximizing and maintaining communication infrastructure between what remained of humanity on Earth and our various colonies spread across the solar system. Armstrong City was largely self-sufficient by this point, likely why it was targeted for destruction, and outside of some key pharmaceuticals and components, they could make most of what they needed themselves. I volunteered to do what I could to fix those issues and praised every last person who'd ensured there was a two-year supply of anything considered 'mission critical' to the infrastructure.
Most of the people I talked to were skeptical I could do anything to truly fix the problem and wanted to see about contacting the Australian government to use their extremely limited launch capacity to augment limited supplies while a longer-term solution was sourced locally.
There were also hard conversations about many of the current ships needing to be decommissioned to add to the Lunar Gateway Station and give it a boost in docking capacity by adapting current vessels into spars off the main struts. In the end, we'd had two of the oldest ships, the Ganges and the Krishna, that were part of India's initial interstellar efforts, volunteer for the duty. They were far past their operational envelope anyway and only a steady stream of repairs and replacements had allowed them to keep up their service lives. In exchange, the Indian crews wanted preferential placement in Armstrong to start new families.
Which necessitated another round of resource bickering and...
...it just never stopped.
Staring blankly at the infinite sea of stars beyond my lunar bedroom skylight, I realized that even if the long string of events hadn't been in any way my fault... This crisis meant that I'd need to step up far more than I had already. I'd need to be more responsible. I'd need to be more willing to shoulder the burden of leadership.
What had happened was bad enough.
I would not allow it to happen again.
Skill List:
Mathematics: 1-10
Computer Programming: 1-10
Physics: 1-10
Material Sciences: 1-10
Orbital Mechanics: 1-5
Quantum Mechanics: 1-5
Artificial Intelligence: 1-3
Blackboxing: 1-3
Robotics: 1-5
Ruggedization: 1-5
Astrobotany: 1-4
Public Speaking: 1
Speed-Reading: 1
Teaching: 1
Critical Thinking: 1
Logistics: 1
Public Relations: 1
Corporate Espionage: 1
Automation: 1
Business Management: 1-3
Economics: 1-3
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