Ode To Defiance Chapter 13

8

Seeing Red

The threat of mutual suicide is a very uninspiring concept, no matter how logical it may seem.

—Herman Kahn,

On Thermonuclear War

Khalid poured over the results of his latest tests and the accompanying extrapolations of the resulting pandemic. The door behind him opened, and Sabaah came in from a short venture into the out of doors to incinerate the bodies of the mice used in the most recent experiments.

Sabaah wore blue jeans as usual since the mice had all been confined in a Class III biosafety cabinet. He’d removed the mice by wrangling a pair of bots to take them up and out of the tunnels. Now he stood on tip-toes to peer over Khalid’s shoulder at the death projections. “Am I missing something, or is this one only about as lethal as the last one?”

Khalid shrugged. “If anything, this one is a little less lethal, but not much.”

Uwais joined them. “Don’t we want higher lethality? I’m confused.”

Sabaah piped in, “Yeah, I know you were disappointed with the mortality rates from the last one. What was it? You projected twenty percent, but only got ten.”

Uwais continued, “And then they came out with that wretched vaccine. How’d they figure it out so fast, anyway?”

Khalid sighed. “I’m still experimenting.” He pointed to a far cabinet filled with test tubes filled with nearly-fluorescent orange powder that practically screamed death. “That one is far more lethal, but I’m holding it for our most critical target.”

He pointed at the near cabinet housing the cherry-red cysts of the virus currently under examination. “This one is designed for more effective proliferation. It’s even more contagious, and the amount of time when the virus is communicable before becoming symptomatic has been extended.”

Sabaah shook his head impatiently. “OK, I guess, but is it really useful to run this test? Can we really achieve our goals with these low death rates?”

Khalid laughed. “Oh, trust me, this one will sow plenty of death.” He reached into a cabinet adjacent to the cherry-red virus and pulled out a vial of clear liquid. With quick movements, he loaded hypodermics and injected his compatriots.

Sabaah, who hated needles, grumbled, “And this. Is this even necessary? We won’t be exposed, will we?” He closed his eyes as the needle went in.

Uwais laughed. “Better safe than sorry.”

Khalid answered their earlier question indirectly. “Are you two familiar with the inner workings of an H-bomb?”

While Uwais waved his hands in a so-so gesture, Sabaah shrugged. “More or less.”

Khalid continued. “Well, it’s a two-step process. First you blow a normal atomic bomb, powerful enough to shatter the heart of a city like Hiroshima. But that’s merely the trigger. The purpose of the A-bomb is to activate the fusion of hydrogen atoms in its core. That fusion, the second stage, produces the signature H-bomb explosion, which is up to a thousand times more powerful.”

He pulled one of the red test tubes from the cabinet. “Our little bioweapon here is stage one. The real carnage will be unleashed by the stage two it activates.”

He shifted closer to the computer monitors and pointed at the map where the simulation ran. “You see where we’re going to release it? You understand the consequences?”

Uwais and Sabaah studied the map for a moment, then smiled. Uwais answered reverently, “Glorious.”

As Dash approached the Red Planet biocabinet area, she heard angry, loud voices. Even before she could make out the words, she could identify the speaker. She sighed. Velma again, undoubtedly fighting with Simon. She wondered who else was involved in this battle. There was always at least one other person involved, the person who’d come up with an idea that needed to be pursued who needed a biosafety cabinet for that pursuit. Or a CRISPIER. Or another specialist who was currently assigned to another experiment.

Even here on the BrainTrust, resources were not unlimited. Even if they had unbound room with unbound equipment, there were not enough people to investigate every avenue of attack.

There weren’t even enough people to investigate all the avenues of attack Velma came up with. And Dash had saddled Simon with the management position, i.e., the responsibility for allocating those resources and determining which experiments would live and which would die. She felt not the least bit guilty about giving Simon that duty; it was after all, similar to the job he had held at the CDC. Still, the prioritization and allocation process was wearisome. It needed to be improved upon.

Velma started yelling again.

Dash straightened her shoulders. She hated yelling matches; she hated confrontation of all kinds. No more. Today she would solve this problem.

As she headed in the direction of Velma’s voice, she saw that today’s third disputant was Chance. Watching them with an eye that had become expert at such assessments, it seemed clear that Chance was giving as good as she got, although in a softer voice.

Dash marched up to them and waited to get a word in edgewise. Chance saw her and held up a hand, not quite shoving it in Velma’s face. “Dash needs a word.”

Velma turned to accost her. “Yeah?”

Dash smiled pleasantly. “It is time to bring this bickering to an end. I have made it so.” She turned to Simon. “If you would gather everyone into the auditorium, I have a new technology with which everyone needs to familiarize themselves.”

Velma put her hands on her hips. “What? We’re having a very important discussion here.”

“After I show you CEREBRUM, you may change your mind. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go prepare.”

Fifteen minutes later, everyone reassembled in the auditorium. Dash filled the main wallscreen with a list of predictions for what would happen with all the experiments currently underway. Experiments that had had to be postponed, having been judged less likely to produce valuable results, were also listed.

Dash started her presentation. “This is going to be an interactive demonstration. Please pull out your tablets and get an account link as you see on the screen.

As the audience entered the system, someone muttered too loudly, “It looks like I have a thousand dollars in my account. Is this real money, or is it SmartCoin?”

That got a twitter of laughter from the audience.

Velma continued to study the screen. “So we’re starting a betting pool?”

Dash considered the merits of having Chance gag Velma for the duration of the discussion but reluctantly decided against it. “In a word, yes. If more words are allowed, no.” She wrinkled her nose as she once again tried to decide where to begin. “Some of you may have heard of a technology known as a prediction market. In such a market, forecasts of future events are presented, and the participants may buy Yes and No positions on each forecast. Research suggests that such prediction markets integrate human knowledge and insight more effectively than any other known approach.”

Simon interrupted this time. “So, we’re going to run a prediction market to choose which experiments to run next?”

Dash nodded, then shook her head. “Not exactly. To work successfully, a prediction market must have large numbers of participants, what is known as a ‘thick market.’ Without a thick market, the system is prone to many types of failures, not the least of which is groupthink.”

Chance glared at Velma. “No risk of groupthink here, with a group of people who couldn’t agree where to go for lunch.”

This got another twitter of laughter from the crowd, but Dash shook her head. “You’d be surprised at just how terrible the groupthink can become among people who argue incessantly.” She flipped the screen to the view of a questionnaire. “However, back in the ‘90s, a team of researchers at HP Labs developed an offshoot of the prediction market, the Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information in Networks system known as BRAIN. By using a set of psychological analyses to assess each individual participant’s relevant personality characteristics, such as appetite for risk, the experimental economists at HP were able to create a market with just a few people—often just a small team of experts—that had the positive properties of a thick market.”

Another anonymous voice offered, “So you’re going to determine which of us belong in the loony bin and weight the outcome to disregard them?”

Several people responded to this, suggesting that the fellow who asked the question should be the first into the bin.

Dash struggled to regain control of the meeting. “Not exactly, but more or less yes. Lenora and her researchers at the Accel Corporation have developed an enhancement of BRAIN that, among other things, enables conditional predictions: if we do X but not Y, can we still get to Z?”

Velma voiced her skepticism. “I still don’t see how this is different from a gambling pool. And I still don’t believe it’ll work.”

Dash was pretty sure that Velma’s definition of “working” was, “all Velma’s ideas will be the top priority.” She sighed. “If you think it’s a gambling pool, you’re in good company. The American Gaming Control Board outlawed all serious large-scale prediction markets decades ago since they concluded it was a form of gambling.”

Chance knew how to get Velma’s goat at this point. “So, Velma, do you agree with the government? I know you’re always eager to support them.”

Velma glared.

Dash shook her head. “As for whether it works or not, HP Labs got some remarkable results from their work. Teams of experts were able, with BRAIN, to make better forecasts than they had made working as a team in the usual fashion. The results saved millions of dollars.”

Velma crossed her arms. “What kind of results?”

Dash continued as if she hadn’t heard. “Colin was unable to tell me anymore. He regretfully told me it was still confidential even today.”

Simon requested confirmation. “So, this is Colin’s idea?”

Dash nodded. “Colin’s, Lenora’s, and mine.” She reconsidered. “Really, it was mostly Colin and Lenora.”

Dash’s main contribution had simply been to ask if there was any way to do the resource allocation so there wouldn’t be any more yelling on the deck.

After the meeting, Simon expressed his pleasure with the new system. “I’m so glad to be off the hook.”

Dash laughed. “Off the hook? Not hardly. The system will help, but you’ll still have work to do. Suppose the highest-rated experiment requires resources needed for both the second and third best choices. CEREBRUM isn’t quite smart enough to decide whether to run number one or both numbers two and three unless you carefully strategize and formulate the predictions. That’s all up to you.”

“I guess I’m glad I’ll have you to help me then.”

Dash shook her head. “Work with Colin. He knows this stuff better than I do. And besides, I’m going to be gone for a while.”

Simon stared at her. “Gone? Where?”

Dash smiled mischievously for a moment before turning sober. “There are even worse things that can happen than a plague, you know.”

Simon was going to say, no, he didn’t know, but she was already hurrying away.

The first couple of days of the new system created more yelling than the old one when Velma found that some of her proposals did not make the top of the list. And of course most of the researchers, in those first two days, bought For positions mostly on their own work. But some of them lost much of their original thousand dollars—it was real money, Dash had explained, and when the crisis was over everyone got to keep anything they’d won—while others accumulated some serious cash.

By the third day, people were buying For and Against positions with the cold impartiality of financial analyst on the GS

Prime

. Dash even had Keenan give a brief presentation on how this sort of thing worked with commodity futures, which were also similar to CEREBRUM forecasts.

By the fifth day, the predicted outcomes for experiments were aligning more correctly with the actual outcomes of those experiments than anyone had ever seen before. Criticism of the new system faded away as everyone realized they could now pick their projects with more precision and develop the vaccine faster than would have seemed possible before Dash had put them all to work this way.

That same day, as Chance entered a conference room to meet with Simon, she found Velma peering intently at her tablet. Chance, who always moved rather more silently than most, slid sideways to peer over Velma’s shoulder. She failed to muffle a gasp of surprise.

Velma looked up at her. “Chance. See anything interesting?”

Chance looked her in the eyes. “Am I confused? Are you buying a For position on a proposal that was made by one of the scientists you call a moron? And you’re taking an Against position on one of your own proposals?”

Velma looked away. “Yeah, well. The moron had a good idea. Gotta go with the best ideas, you know, even if they come from morons.”

Chance studied Velma for a moment, more charitably than ever before. She decided to offer to do a good deed, understanding that such deeds rarely went unpunished. “While you’re in a learning mood, there’re some things I’d like to show you if you’re interested. Whenever you feel like taking a break. I promise it’ll be worth your while.”

Velma shrugged, distracted. “Whatever.” She returned to the topic that was bugging her. “What I don’t understand about the moron’s proposal is, it’s so obvious. Why didn’t I think of it in the first place?”

Technically, the small city where Khalid met Uwais and Sabaah was not the closest city to their training camp/laboratory/home, but it was a fitting location. This city housed thousands of ancient documents, and Khalid was personally quite fond of the Ahmed Baba Center for Documentation and Research. It was worth traveling a little farther to get here.

Their home was still far away from this parched desert spot, which was ironic since English dictionaries used this city as a metaphor for the concept of a “faraway place.” So his team lived far away from the place considered by western civilization to be far away. How fitting. How well-suited to their needs.

Sabaah and Uwais approached him as he sat in a streetside cafe beneath a table umbrella that kept the worst glare at bay. He smiled at them. “Trouble?”

Sabaah shook his head. “None at all.”

Uwais shrugged. “As expected.”

They were at the edge of the town. He scanned the whole thing, the endless low mudbrick buildings and their tenants going about their daily lives.

Starting over five years earlier, key elements of the history of this town had been written by himself. Once this city had attracted tourists, but then Islamic jihadists had decided to turn it into a playground for kidnapping and murder.

The last thing Khalid wanted was either the French or the Americans trudging through this desert in search of terrorists, so he and his two brothers-in-arms had used the jihadists as practice. Khalid gave quiet presentations to both the local people and the militants, telling earnest stories of the end of times and how the Western Christians would themselves create the tools that would create the great plague, wiping the world clean. He demonstrated his credentials as a scholar in religious, practical, and scientific matters, and gently suggested he knew how to accelerate the process of preparing the way for the Mahdi. With uncomfortable speed, the townsfolk, like his brothers in arms, started whispering of him as the Herald.

He then suggested he could use their help. He didn’t need their money, but he needed their faith and commitment. Many joined him, and passed word to others in distant places to come listen to the Herald. His people grew in numbers.

Many of the jihadists had joined him. The ones who insisted that petty atrocities against tourists offered a more beneficial contribution to the cause ceased to be targets of Khalid’s persuasion. They became targets upon which Uwais and Sabaah could practice their skills in assassination.

Eventually the tourism trade returned.

Khalid twisted in his chair to look out beyond the city, over the dunes heaped just beyond the edge of this desperate outpost of civilization. He remembered the despair he had felt coming here the first time.

This desert had been here for several million years, but it had not always been this desolate. Trade routes had run here; this city of antiquity stood as a testament to that flow of commerce.

But in the end, the humans had supplied the straw that broke this camel’s back. The rudimentary social institutions long ago had enabled a “tragedy of the commons” in which the grazing land was freely available but the cattle herds were privately owned. The person with the most cattle, who consumed the most of the limited grasses, “won.” But all too quickly this led to vast swaths of land stripped bare of vegetation, where the wind could whip up vast storms of sand to pile upon and destroy the places where vegetation yet survived. In the end, as desertification swept the habitable areas, everyone had lost.

He knew how to restore this land. It would take both time and money, but those were easy. He’d already started working on the problem, down closer to home.

But just as important as the need for time and money was the need for a lot fewer humans trampling the process while he worked. That would require…the very holy jihad he was now unleashing. He muttered to himself in wry self-mockery, “Behold, I am become the world’s first Islamic jihadi eco-terrorist.”

Sabaah looked at him from ordering

alabadjia

, the traditional nomad dish of meat, butter, and rice. “What was that?”

Khalid stretched. “Just considering the past and its impact on the future.”

Uwais observed, “Sounds very philosophical.”

Sabaah pursed his lips. “Impractical.”

Khalid nodded. “All of the above. But also amusing.”

In 2019 in eastern Iran, a bus loaded with elite Revolutionary Guard soldiers found itself faced with a swift and brutal ambush. Most of the soldiers died.

The Supreme Leader knew instantly who was behind the attack and denounced with all his vigor the Israelis who had perpetrated the attack and the Americans who had backed them.

It made no difference that the Israelis had never in the past bothered with random attacks on random soldiers. It made no difference that the Israeli

modus operandi

focused solely on high-value targets such as scientists developing nuclear weapons. It made no difference that an action team of zealous Sunnis operated in the region where the assault took place. Any time anything terrible happened, the Supreme Leader, the government, and indeed all the people, knew who was responsible.

The power of this comfortable certainty held firm when the first cases of vaccine-immune measles arrived at the hospitals in Tehran.

When the patients started dying at a startling rate, the doctors turned from the measles diagnosis to Blue Rubola. But the color of the rash was different—a red so light in hue that it was almost pink. Suspicion that this was something entirely new grew to certainty when hastily-imported Blue Rubola vaccine had no more effect than the measles vaccine.

By the time the new disease had received a new popular name, Red Rubola, the Supreme Leader had already achieved certainty as to who had instigated the attack.

Toni Shatski accompanied the Prime Minister of Israel to the meeting with the Iranian ambassador. Toni wore her F35 flight suit, a silent warning to the ambassador that Israel knew whom the Iranians would blame and Israel would defend itself with every resource, including the Prime Minister’s own daughter.

The ambassador’s demand was simple. “Give us the vaccine for Red Rubola and pay reparations for the dead. Our nuclear missile silos are already on high alert, and if you refuse to meet our demand, we will bring the Holocaust to all your people.”

Toni’s father tried to be reasonable. “You have our sincerest sympathies, but you have to believe we didn’t do this, and we have no more idea how to make a vaccine than you do. Frankly, what we’d like to do is form a joint taskforce—all your best medical people and all ours, together—to try to figure what’s happened and who’s behind this.”

The ambassador spluttered with rage. “We know

you’re

behind it! Who else would care this much about destroying us, and who else has the technology base? Surely you’re not suggesting the Americans undertook this heinous assault without consulting you!”

Toni took a half-step to stand between her father and the crazed ambassador, then got control of herself. “You can’t be serious. Don’t you see, the Americans were the first victims. Red Rubola was clearly developed by the same people who developed Blue Rubola.” She licked her lips. “Whoever attacked you hates all of us.”

The ambassador waved the assertion away. “Bah, no one hates all of us. Either they don’t care, or they’re committed to one side or the other.”

The Prime Minister interrupted with two words. “Saudi Arabia.”

The ambassador stood as if struck for a moment; if Israel and Iran disappeared in twin hellfires of plague and nuclear holocaust, the Saudis would achieve supremacy as the leaders across the Arab world.

Finally the ambassador waved it away. “As for the assertion that the Americans suffered first, the attack on the coastal cities was clearly an experimental deployment using the President for Life’s enemies as test subjects. Not only did the deaths help the President in the upcoming congressional elections, but it was only half as lethal as the Red Rubola now sweeping my nation. Clearly a test run.”

The Prime Minister rolled his eyes. “You must listen to me! If we had a vaccine, we’d give it to you! We don’t! If there is any way we can help, we’ll help you, but we don’t have what you want!”

The ambassador guffawed. “You’d help us? That’s ridiculous on its face.”

Toni interrupted again despite her father’s glare. “Please think about it. This plague, whoever did it, may have started it in Tehran, but it’s not going to stay there. Eventually it will spread everywhere, including Israel. The sooner we stop it, the safer everyone is.”

The ambassador looked back and forth between them. “So that’s your answer?” He sighed and looked at his watch. “I’ll give you two hours to reconsider. If you refuse our simple request, you’ll have only yourselves to blame for the consequences.” With a final slap of the table, he departed.

Toni’s father turned to her grimly. “Join your squadron. Looks like the war we’ve always dreaded is upon us.”

Toni gave the Prime Minister a crisp salute. “Yes, sir!”

He took a deep breath. “I know your plane is designed for air-to-ground combat, but I know you’ve flown air-to-air quite successfully.” He smiled. “Even with a medical scientist as your Weapons Officer.”

Toni looked at him in puzzlement. “But we’ll be attacking ground targets, right? Why not load me up with the weapons my plane is designed for?”

The Prime Minister’s face softened; at this moment he was just a father. “Because I don’t want you to carry the lifelong burden of knowing you wiped out a whole city with a nuclear bomb,” he explained.

As Toni hurried to her airbase to oversee the prepping of her plane and made sure her Weapons Officer—an Israeli professional, not a medical scientist this time—would be there when she arrived, she realized they had one last chance of averting war. She called Dash to see if, by some miracle, she already had a vaccine.

Dash answered on the first ring. Her voice sounded urgent. “Toni. I was just about to call you. Colin has a plan. I’m on my way.”

Toni shook her head, disoriented. “Colin what? You’re where?”

“Colin has a plan. We’re going to see if Jam and I can help.” Dash paused, and Toni heard a rough noise in the background, like the sound of the wind across the top deck of an isle ship.

Dash continued, “I’m about to board one of Matt’s Global Express ships. I’ll be landing in the Negev Desert.”

There were so many things wrong with this that Toni had trouble deciding where to start. “I thought those ships needed to land on a spaceport isle ship?” She thought back to the previous year. “Though I guess Matt landed one in Baotong, right?”

Dash chuckled. “And he swore he’d never do it again. But when Colin explained the stakes and I offered him a big enough premium, he relented.” She hesitated. “I’m going to need you to get a team of engineers together, however, to work the problem of refueling the ship.”

Toni responded to this with puzzlement. “Ping got into and out of Baotong without refueling, didn’t she?”

She could almost hear Dash nodding. “Yes, but this trip will not be a simple in-and-out. If things go as Colin hopes, the ship will be making another stop. Heavily laden. It will be a little complicated.”

When Dash said it would be a little complicated, Toni became sure she didn’t want to know.

Toni’s car swerved around a pedestrian walking blithely into the street. “Hey, you idiot, we’re in the middle of the end of the world here, don’t you know? Get out of the way!”

Dash asked softly, “Was that for me?”

Toni laughed. “What else did you want?”

Dash sounded sheepish. “Well, it would be good if you could get me permission to land. I’ll be in a standard Global Express ship, so it’ll look like an incoming missile on your radar. I’d appreciate it if your military didn’t blow me up on re-entry.”

Again Toni expressed puzzlement. “I’d have expected you to come in the Black Titan.” The Black Titan was a Global Express prototype ship, complete with a stealth coating. The Israeli Missile Command wouldn’t know about it until it landed. “Matt’s still got that one, doesn’t he?”

Dash sighed. “Jam needs that one.”

Toni realized there was a much bigger problem than getting landing authorization. “Hold it. You said you’d be here in two hours?”

“About that.”

Toni exhaled sharply. “Dash, you must not leave yet. Do not leave until I call you back. You got me? Do not leave yet.”

Dash grunted. “The longer it takes me to get there, the more risk that this situation will get out of hand.”

“Trust me, girl. If waiting four hours is too late, getting here in two hours will be too early. Please.”

After Dash agreed to Toni’s terms and hung up, Toni sat back, trembling.

If Dash had landed in two hours, she would have arrived just in time to be killed by the first flight of Iranian missiles.

Over the course of the millennia, the act of combat had evolved into a generally more compressed affair. Wars became shorter, almost in inverse proportion to the number of casualties. Sure, there continued to be engagements euphemistically referred to as Low-Intensity Combat that could go on and on, but the days of the Hundred Years War and the Thirty Years War had been left behind. They had yielded to a brutal future of encounters such as the Six-Day War.

Under many circumstances, nuclear missiles had flight times under twenty minutes. If one’s goal was to use a demonstration attack to persuade the enemy to acquiesce to terms, there might be a preliminary demonstration attack followed by an all-out response, then a final full-force counterattack, so one would achieve a new level of compaction. Call it a sixty-minute war.

When the stipulated two-hour period of reflection ended, the Israelis made one last effort to dissuade the Iranians, repeating the offer to work together. Five minutes after the Iranians rejected this plea, satellites from every major nation in the world detected the infrared blooms of three missile signatures from Iranian silos.

Why three? Both American and Israeli analysts found the number unsurprising. Over the course of decades of testing, in which the Iranians routinely accused the Americans of sabotage (quite possibly correctly), the Iranian long-range Hoveiseh missile still had a sixty-six percent failure rate during testing. They fired three because this was the only way they could be confident of landing one.

Given their goal, it turned out the Iranians had made a wise decision. Israel’s infrared satellites detected, seconds after the launch bloom, an additional bloom much larger than any of the launches as one of the missiles exploded over its silo.

Israeli battle management switched from satellites to ground-based radar as the other two missiles ended their boost phase and faded from infrared detection. All too soon, the nuclear warheads showed up on radar, and the Israelis watched helplessly as the warheads ballistically fell back into the atmosphere on a clear and implacable trajectory for Tel Aviv.

Moments later, one of the warheads flickered on the radar screens and disappeared; the capsule holding nuclear destruction had started to tumble and the ablative bottom heat shield spun out of position, thereby exposing the unprotected surfaces of the small craft to the plasma of high-speed re-entry. The capsule disintegrated, taking its payload with it.

The third missile fell straight and true until it came within range of Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile defense.

The Iron Dome, despite numerous enhancements through the years to counter an ever-increasing missile threat, was not really up to dealing with this attack. Taking out a warhead moving at many times the speed of sound with an antimissile warhead was akin to stopping a bullet by biting it with your teeth.

Remarkably, the Iron Dome had plucked missiles with only moderately less difficult attack profiles from the sky from time to time. It was worth trying.

Three, then four, then five antimissiles shot into the air in a last desperate attempt to save the city.

None of them hit.

But one blew up in close enough proximity to bash in the side of the capsule and dislocate some of the explosive elements needed to create the tremendous implosion needed to compress the plutonium core and light the hellfire.

The explosion diverted the Iranian missile miles off course, to dig a large impact crater in the desert where it landed. The crater was large by the standards of plummeting meteorites but negligible compared to the size of a crater left by a nuclear explosion.

The Israelis drew a shuddering breath. When the Iranians did not follow up, the Israelis concluded the Iranians too were holding their breaths, with no follow-up plan except to hope that the Israelis would reconsider and send them the vaccine.

For just a moment, nobody seemed to want the sixty-minute war that had just begun.

Toni called her dad, then called Dash. “Get your butt over here, and hurry. We may have a chance to fix this, but it won’t last long.”

As Dash agreed, Toni remembered an extra proviso and said urgently. “Wait one. There’s another important thing you need to know.”

“Yes?”

“You need to move your landing zone. The place you were planning to come down is no longer as level as it used to be.”

“What happened?”

Toni answered reluctantly. “There’s a big crater there. It may be radioactive. Best to avoid it.”

“Radioactive. Got it. OK, then.”