THE H-BOMB GIRL by Stephen Baxter (beach books txt) 📕

guff. But it won’t matter a red cent.” He chuckled, a noise like an echo in a graveyard.

“The destruction of London will be like a beacon, lit on a hill,” Mort said. “A signal to all those like me, waiting in the bunkers and citadels around the planet. And they will act.”

All over the map of the world, the lights of more capitals flickered out, one by one, green to black. Paris. Rome. Pretoria. Canberra. Washington. Moscow.

“They’ll turn on their own cities,” Bernadette said, horrified.

“Think of it,” the Minuteman whispered. “The civilian leadership of the whole planet, amputated. Sloughed off, as a snake sheds its skin. And the Hegemony will rise up. A new world order established at a stroke.”

Laura was horrified. “You’re talking about destroying major cities with nuclear weapons. Millions will die.”

“Millions more will live in peace,” Miss Wells said.

“The peace of sheep in their fields,” Laura said. “Of cattle in their pens. With no choice, no freedom, no hope.”

The Minuteman started rolling backwards and forwards across the map of the world. When he spoke his spittle flecked the floor. “We don’t have to stop here,” he ranted. “In 1962. Once we’ve established our control of this era, we can go further back. 1940, for instance.”

“Yes,” Miss Wells said. “We could deal with Hitler before he has a chance to wreck Europe.”

“Oh, no,” the Minuteman said. “Recruit him! Those Nazis were a bunch of thugs, but there’s a lot about them to admire. Order. Efficiency. Control.

“And further back still.” He grinned at Mort. “Our surname is Mortinelli. We’ve been Romans from way back. Shall we go back to the Caesars? A Roman Empire with nuclear weapons! Do you think we have the blood of emperors in our veins, boy?”

Even Mort looked a bit uneasy now.

“We have the technology to make it happen. We have the vision. We have the will! We have—ulp.” There was a pop, and a smell of burning insulation, and the wheelchair came to a dead stop in the middle of the Atlantic. The Minuteman rocked his head back and forth, frustrated. “Oh, to heck with this thing. Get me off of here, boy!”

Mort hurried forward and pushed him off the map.

Laura turned to Miss Wells. “But if you change history you won’t be able to go home again, will you? Back to your 2007. Because everything will be different.”

“Oh, no,” Miss Wells said. She was smiling, but it was forced. “We will be stranded, the only survivors of our future. Just as Agatha is the only survivor of her timeline. But that doesn’t matter. My place would be here, to finish what we’ve started. To make the future perfect.”

Bernadette said, “You’re unhappy, so you smash everything up. Is that what it’s all about, Miss Wells?”

Miss Wells turned on her. “You won’t understand me if you live for a century.”

“Time’s up,” the Minuteman said. “It’s now nineteen hundred local. Seven p.m. By twenty-one hundred I want Mort at angels thirty, thirty thousand feet, on his way to London.” He glared at Laura. “Decision time, missy.”

Laura pulled the Key on its chain out of the throat of her coverall, and lifted it off her neck. It was a beautiful object, she thought, finely tooled, exquisitely made for its job. Just like the war machines stacked up around the planet, all waiting to be launched.

“I think I wish Dad had never given this to me,” she said.

“But he did,” Miss Wells said.

The huge room went quiet, save for the chattering of the computers. Laura had the sense that everybody was watching her, even in the other war rooms and bunkers around the world. Everybody waiting for her choice.

“But it’s not much of a choice,” she said. “Between a nuclear desert, Agatha’s world. And a planet that’s a huge prison, Miss Wells’s world. Either way my dad dies in the next few hours, doesn’t he? Well, no bombs have fallen yet. I want to keep it that way.”

She boldly walked over to the nuclear pool and held the Key out over the water.

There was a soft clicking all around the chamber, as weapons were made ready to fire.

“Don’t do it,” Miss Wells said. “It’s only the Key that is keeping you alive, Laura.”

“And you’re out of time, missy,” the Minuteman said.

“Oh, shut your gob.”

It was Nick. He was pointing a revolver at the Minuteman.

Nick had been hiding behind a computer stack. He wore a technician’s NBC suit, which was how he had sneaked around the complex without getting caught. Now he had the hood pulled back, to reveal a bandage wrapped around his forehead. He was deathly pale.

He grinned. “Glad to see me, girls?”

Bernadette said, “You look dog rough. You sure you know what you’re doing with that gun?”

“What gun?… I’m joking! You do fuss, Bern. Well, now, isn’t this nice? What shall we do? I know. I Spy With My Little Eye, something beginning with N.”

“Nutters,” said Bernadette immediately.

“Yeah. Too easy. Your go.”

The Minuteman’s face was twisted with fury. He seemed to be straining to get out of his chair. Mort put a hand on his shoulder. The Minuteman said, “This changes nothing, you little faggot.”

Nick said, “You don’t scare me, Pinky and Perky. Of course that could be the drugs talking.”

The Minuteman yelled at Laura, “Girly, thirty more seconds and I’m going to prise that Key out of your dead fingers. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight.”

For all Nick’s bravado, Laura knew she was running out of bluff. In seconds, they could all be dead, and a nuclear war inevitable.

She reached for Mum’s hand, and grasped it.

Then there was a crashing noise.

Everybody looked around.

It sounded like electric guitars, echoing from beyond the walls.

Chapter 27

That Saturday evening, Joel had broken the teenagers’ curfew.

There had been no posters, no announcements on Radio Luxembourg, no new editions of Mersey Beat. But even in a city under military law, word of mouth still worked. If parents and teachers couldn’t put a stop to it, half-trained scuffers and squaddies certainly wouldn’t.

And Joel