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Into the Looking Glass

Table of Contents

DEDICATION

EPILOGUE

INTO THE LOOKING GLASS

John Ringo

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-9880-1

Cover Art Kurt Miller

First Hardcover printing, June 2005

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ringo, John.

Into the looking glass / John Ringo.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-7434-9880-1 (hc)

1. Human-alien encounters--Fiction. 2. Explosions--Fiction. 3. Florida--Fiction. I. Title.

PS3618.I545I58 2005

813'.6--dc22

2005005210

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH (www.windhaven.com)

set in Elektra LT, design by Nancy C. Hanger

Printed in the United States of America

Baen Books by JOHN RINGO:

A Hymn Before Battle

Gust Front

When the Devil Dances

Hell's Faire

The Hero (with Michael Z. Williamson)

Cally's War (with Julie Cochrane)

Watch on the Rhine (with Tom Kratman, forthcoming)

There Will Be Dragons

Emerald Sea

Against the Tide

Into the Looking Glass

The Road to Damascus (with Linda Evans)

The Prince Roger Saga

with David Weber:

March Upcountry

March to the Sea

March to the Stars

We Few

DEDICATION

To Doc Travis, one hell of a physicist, without whom this

book

would have made exactly no sense.

Author's Comment

There are a few deliberate mistakes made in the physics in this book (for reasons of security)

and I'm sure there are some that are undeliberated. All mistakes, intentional or unintentional,

should be laid upon my doorstep.

The explosion, later categorized as in the near equivalent of 60 kilotons of TNT and centered on the

University of Central Florida, occurred at 9:28 a.m. on a Saturday in early March, a calm spring day in

Orlando when the sky was clear and the air was cool and, for Florida, reasonably dry. It occurred

entirely without warning and while it originated at the university the effects were felt far outside its

grounds.

The golfers at Fairways Country Club had only a moment to experience the bright flash and heat when

the fireball engulfed them. The two young men on University Boulevard selling "top name brand stereos"

that they "couldn't return or their boss would kill them" didn't even have that long. The fireball spread in

every direction, a white ball of expanding plasma, crisping the numerous suburban communities that had

spread out around the university, homes, families, dogs, children. The plasma wavefront created a

tremendous shockwave of air that blasted like a tornado outwards, destroying everything in its path. The

shockwave spread to the south as far as U.S. 50, where early morning shoppers were blinded and

covered with flaming debris. It enveloped the speeders on the Greenway, tossing cars up to a half a mile

in the clear air. It spread to the north almost to the town of Oviedo, erased the venerable community of

Goldenrod, spread as far as Semoran Boulevard to the west and out to Lake Pickett to the east. The

rumble of the detonation was felt as far away as Tampa, Cocoa and Ocala and the ascending mushroom

cloud, roiling with purple and green light in the early morning air, was visible as far away as Miami.

Flaming debris dropped into Park Avenue in Winter Park, setting the ancient oaks along that pleasant

drive briefly ablaze and crushed the vestibule of St. Paul's Church.

Troopers in the motor pool of Charlie Company, Second Battalion, 53rd Brigade, Florida Army

National Guard, who were pulling post deployment maintenance on their Humvee and Hemet trucks,

looked up at the flash and cringed. Those that remembered their training dropped to the ground and put

their arms over their heads. Others ran into the antiquated armory, seeking shelter in the steel cages that

secured their gear when they were at their civilian jobs or, as seemed much more common these days,

deployed to the Balkans or Ashkanistan or Iraq.

Specialist Bob Crichton was compiling loss lists in his cubicle when he noticed the rumble. The unit had

returned only a week before from a year-long deployment in Iraq and everyone seemed to have "combat

lossed" their protective masks. Unit protective garments were at less than thirty percent of proper

inventory. It was stupid. Everybody knew that sooner or later the riffs were going to hit them with a

WMD attack, chemical, radiological or even nuclear now that Pakistan was giving the Saudis , of all

people, nukes. But nobody liked protective garments or masks and they "lost" them as fast as they could.

Convoy ambush? Damn, the riffs must have grabbed my mask. Firefight? Where'd that protective

garment go?

He looked up to where his diploma from the U.S. Army Chemical Corps Advanced Training Course

hung and saw the glass shatter even before it fell off the wall. He blinked his eyes twice and then dove

under the metal desk and clamped his hands over his ears, opening his mouth to equalize the pressure,

just before the air-pressure shockwave hit. Even over the sound of the explosion, which seemed to

envelope the whole world, he heard the sound of the big windows in the armory crashing to the floor of

the parade hall. There was a sound of tearing metal, probably one of the old girders that held up the roof

of the parade hall, then relative silence except for a distant screaming. He waited a moment, catching

creaking from the old building but figuring it was as safe as it was going to get, then climbed out from

under his desk and headed for the company commander's office.

The first sergeant and the operations sergeant were just pulling themselves out from under their own

desks when Crichton burst through the door without knocking, normally a cardinal offense but he figured

this was as good a time as any to ignore the directive.

"Nobody goes outside for at least thirty minutes, Top," he said, bouncing from one foot to the other in

the doorway. "And I need my survey teams, that's Ramage, Guptill, Casey, Garcia and Lambert. And as

soon as it's clear I need a platoon to start filling sandbags for the Humvees—"

"Slow down," the first sergeant said, sitting down in his chair and then standing up to brush crumbs from

the drop ceiling off of it. The first sergeant was tall and lanky. Up until the last year he'd been the chief

investigator for the Lake County Sheriff's Department. When they got deployed, ignoring the Soldiers

and Sailors' Act, he'd given the sheriff his okay to appoint his deputy to the job. So when they got back

he took a cut in pay and went back to work as a sergeant. Give him a crime scene and he knew where

he was at. He even was pretty good at recovering the company from a mortar attack or a convoy

ambush. He was one of the best guys in the world at training his troops to sniff out hidden explosives,

weapons and other prohibited materials—he thought of it as shaking down a dealer's house. But nuclear

attacks were a new one for him and it was taking him a minute to get his bearings.

"I can't slow down," Crichton replied. "I need to set up a radiological station before anybody can go

outside even after the first thirty minutes."

"What's with the thirty minutes?" Staff Sergeant Wolf asked. The operations sergeant was medium height

and well over what the Army considered acceptable weight for his height. And it wasn't muscle, like the

CO's driver who was a fricking tank, it was fat. But he was pretty sharp. Not unflappable, he was clearly

taking even more time to adjust than the first sergeant, but smart. When he wasn't in one third-world shit

hole or another he was a manager of a Kinko's.

"Falling debris," Crichton asked. "We don't know it's a nuke. It probably was but it could have been an

asteroid hit. They throw chunks of burning rock into the stratosphere and they take a while to come

down."

"Top?" Crichton heard from behind him. The chemical specialist turned around and saw that the mortar

platoon sergeant had come up behind him while he was talking. The platoon sergeant, a staff sergeant

who was a delivery manager for UPS when he was home, showed a physique developed from years of

throwing often quite heavy boxes through the air. It was running to fat now that he worked behind a desk

ten months out of the year, but he still was a big guy you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley.

"Get Crichton his survey teams," the first sergeant said, looking at the suddenly irrelevant papers on his

desk. "Send Sergeant Burell around to get everybody inside until the all clear sounds. Then get with the

rest of the platoon sergeants in the Swamp. Wolf, head over to battalion, see what's up."

"Where's the CO?" Crichton asked, looking at the closed door at the back of the room.

"At breakfast with the platoon leaders and the battalion commander," the first sergeant answered, dryly.

"We can handle this until they get back. Go."

FLASH is the highest priority communication in the military directory, superceding even Operational

Immediate. Satellites in orbit noted the explosion and computers on the ground automatically categorized

it as a nuclear explosion.

"Holy shit!" the Air Force sergeant monitoring the nuclear attack warning console muttered, his stomach

dropping. In the old days he would have picked up a phone. Now he hit three buttons and confirmed

three separate pop-ups sending a FLASH priority message to the National Military Command Center in

the bowels of the Pentagon. Then he picked up the phone as sirens went off in the normally quiet room in

Sunnyvale, California.

The wonder of military communications and computers meant that the President of the United States got

word that a probable nuclear attack had occurred on Central Florida a whole thirty seconds before Fox

broke the news.

"I know we can't say who did it, yet," the President said calmly. He was at Camp David for the

weekend but most of his senior staff was on the phone already. "But I'll make three guesses and only two

of them count."

"Mr. President, let's not jump to conclusions," his national security advisor said. She was a specialist in

nuclear strategy and had been doing makee-learnee on terrorism ever since the attacks of September 11,

2001. And this didn't fit the profile of a terrorist attack. "First of all, nobody thinks that they have access

to nuclear weapons of this sort. Radiological bombs, maybe. But this appears to be a nuclear weapon.

However, the target makes no sense for a terrorist. It has been located precisely as being on the grounds

of the University of Central Florida. Why waste a nuclear weapon on a university when they could use it

on New York or Washington or L.A. or Atlanta?"

"I gotta go with the NSA on this one, Mister President," the secretary of defense said. "This doesn't feel

like an attack. What's the chance it could have been some sort of accident?"

"I don't know that much about UCF," the NSA admitted. She had once been the dean of a major

college but for the last few years she'd been holding down the national security advisor's desk in the

middle of a war. Her stated ambition after leaving government service was to become the commissioner

of the National Football League. "But I don't think they're doing anything in the nuclear program, I'm

pretty sure I'd remember that. And you just don't get accidents with weapons. They're hard enough to get

to go off at all."

"So we're in a holding pattern?" the President asked.

"Yes, sir," the secretary of defense answered.

"We need to get a statement out, fast," the chief of staff said. "Especially if we're pretty sure it wasn't a

terrorist attack."

"Have one made up," the President said. "I'm going to go take a nap. I figure this is gonna be a long

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