Without warning

The surviving civilian authorities of the United States of America were in shock. Perhaps even more traumatised than they had been by the Disappearance. Ritchie wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it had something to do with the completely inexplicable nature of that event. Perhaps they were all still in a sort of denial. Everyone in this room, however, everyone involved in the conference, had grown up with the spectre of nuclear war lurking at the edge of their consciousness. It was not merely explicable, it was familiar.

‘Indirect deaths, in the short term, from radiation poisoning and injuries, are estimated by our modelling to climb as high as another thirty million over the next month.’ He heard somebody curse softly but continued on. ‘Medium-term fatalities, from the collapse of governing and societal systems, may double or triple that again. There may be unquantifiable effects, further afield. Millions of bodies and radioactive debris have been flushed out of the Nile Delta and into the Mediterranean, for instance, where they will contaminate the environment and enter the marine food chain.’

A woman sitting by Governor Lingle covered her mouth and ran from the room.

Jed Culver, who had been standing near the door, waiting to speak, yanked it open to let her through. He was sweating profusely and appeared blotchy and unwell.

‘General Franks reports that coordinated attacks on US forces in the area have ceased,’ said Ritchie. ‘Iraqi forces are requesting ceasefires or surrendering en masse. Iranian forces are withdrawing. Further, there seems to be no evidence of any national command authority in either country having survived the Israeli strike. In the areas of Iraq still under our nominal control as part of Operation Katie, local Iraqi government leaders have requested humanitarian aid. We have had similar requests from the surviving civilian leadership in both Syria and Egypt. Iran has also requested our assistance.’

He paused as a Republican state senator from Alaska swore loudly and colourfully.

‘Uncoordinated attacks by non state actors continue off the coast of Lebanon and in Afghanistan. General Musharraf survived yet another assassination attempt this morning in the aftermath of the attacks. He informed me personally that Pakistan has now gone to full readiness to retaliate against anyone – Israel, India, anyone – who even remotely threatens his country,’ he went on.

Ritchie let his hand drop and looked around the room, taking in the cameras beaming his image across the Pacific to Olympia and Anchorage as well.

‘I have no national command authority to whom I can turn for orders,’ he said. ‘Our own nuclear deterrent is effectively useless without said authority. I can give orders to fire all day and night long, but the commanders of our ballistic-missile subs will not follow them without Presidential authority. That is why we originally scheduled this meeting. I believe that if we had such an authority, if we had a President and even the semblance of an emergency government, that this… holocaust could have been avoided.’

He had spoken the word without forethought, but having done so, did not regret it.

‘This is not your fault,’ he added, with a mounting and voluble anger that seemed to imply just the opposite. ‘You have all had a hell of a time dealing with the impossible demands of our own emergency. But I promise you, if you cannot come to some sort of working arrangement, if you do not leave this room tonight with a plan to immediately rebuild some basic form of national government, then what happened today will happen again and again and again until the only evidence that civilisation ever arose on this planet will be its radioactive ruins.’

And with that, he turned and stormed out of the room.

* * * *

31 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

Suzie was in the lounge room, watching Toy Story with her friend Emma, when Kip heard the news. Emma’s mom had a transit pass and a voucher for the food bank in Bellevue and the chief engineer had spent the morning on the phone to Fort Lewis – another ‘privilege’ of his newly elevated status – making sure that this time all of the security that should have been in place was in place. He was just running through a checklist of the local aid centres with a Lieutenant Somebody-or-other when he heard Barbara cry out from across the kitchen.

‘Just hang on… I’ll call you back,’ he said.

She had the radio on, listening to a news bulletin – which Kipper never put much stock in because of the army’s control of the airwaves. Yesterday’s shootings at Costco, for instance, had been reported as a ‘serious disturbance’, possibly ‘Resistance related’, that had halted food distribution for the day. Nothing more.