The Extinction Switch: Book three of the Kato's War series by Andrew C. Broderick Read Free Book Online

have to do it. Who knows where we’d be now if they hadn’t?”
    “Hmph,” Kassandra said. “I hope things get better soon.” Antonio’s brow furrowed as he laid out a yellow blanket on the floor. All three bedded down as best they could. Couch cushions were used as pillows. They were asleep before anyone thought to turn off the light.
    ----
    “Some bandwidth to Earth just opened up!” Kato yelled excitedly, as he stood near the front of the bridge of Revenant .
    “Woohoo!” Zara yelled, from her seat five meters away. “Call Kassandra.” She heard static. A few seconds later, ringing.
    “Mom!”
    “Oh my God, sweetie! Are you okay?”
    “Yes!”
    “Where are you?”
    “Lyon. We got stuck...” The line went dead.
    “Kassie? Are you there? Talk to me, baby! Dammit!” Zara turned quickly to her left. “Akio! She's okay!”
    Kato wondered aloud: “Who to call first… hmm… right… call Jose Hernandez.”
    “Kato!” came the voice of ISI’s Chief Operating Officer.
    “Jose! Give me the five-minute digest. What the hell's going on down there?”
    “It's total chaos, as you can imagine,” came the breathless voice. “I guess you must be near Earth, since there doesn't seem to be a lag. Anyway, the big news is the FSA is appropriating all our ships to get people off of Mars!”
    “LIKE HELL THEY ARE! Do not let them!”
    “Uhh... don't shoot the messeng...” The line went dead.
    “Damn! Jose? Jose? Call me back… okay… calm down. What to do… call General Phillips.”
    “What’s up, Kato?” Phillips answered from his cabin.
    “Can you get messages through on military channels?”
    “No civilian messages, I’m afraid.”
    “General, they’re going to take all ISI’s ships to evacuate Mars!”
    “ What ?”
    “I need to get all our assets away from Earth. I gotta get orders through. Jose didn’t get a chance to acknowledge it when I told him to do it. Is there any way you can get a message through for me?”
    The General sighed. “I’ll see what I can do. I’d be risking my neck, since I’d have to have the cooperation of someone at the Pentagon.”
    “Thanks, General. Again, the fleet’s at America’s disposal. Not for caving to that sucker, but for fighting back.”
    “I’ll get it done, Kato. How will ISI know the order’s really from you, though, and not the Pentagon?”
    “I’ll record a video.”
    “Good enough.” The General paused for a second. “I’m guessing they’ll lift the quarantine on Earth soon if they’re going to evacuate Mars. They’ll have to. Haven’t heard anything about it yet, though.”
    “It’s going to be broken as soon as our Earth-to-orbit shuttles take off anyway. Not sure where we’ll park them yet, nor where to put the warp ships. The FSE can take somebody else’s fleet, though. They’re not getting mine.”
    Korolev entered the bridge and strode purposefully up to Kato. “I’ve got it!”
    Kato looked nonplussed. “Got what?”
    “How Seung Yi and his cohorts survived all this time, inside a space rock with no known contact with the outside world!”
    “I’d been wondering that myself,” Kato said. “They could have been in hibernation. Only problem with that is they had to have been reanimated for at least thirty years to have deployed the Extinction Switch…”
    “The Venter Curve, Kato. They got MCTs: Matter Creation Technology.”
    “I know what it means!”
    “Right. Well, Jessica Venter theorized back in 2230 that if you got enough MCT machines, they can create all the food, water and air needed to sustain a population. They’d have no need of an atmosphere, farming, or trade with other civilizations. Then, add in a few extra machines, and you can create more MCTs. You then have a snowball effect. The population can grow exponentially, without restriction.”
    MCT machines were units about the size of a house, containing their own zero-point power source to supply the vast amounts of energy needed to create