by Vernor Vinge
Alfred stepped out of the room, and proceeded down the hallway. There was lots of area lighting, the sort of thing you’d expect in a major system failure. Ah! The marines had finally detected his network. They had killed his stealthed aerobot. He still had contact with half a dozen mobiles scattered in the brush to the north. They were hunkered low, mainly trying to be very quiet and still maintain a net. The American assault grid was sweeping the area, destroying them one by one. The USMC mechs drifted down like a kind of black snow, unnoticed by the crowds, and visible to his robots only in the last instant before their destruction.
He came out of the stairway, onto the first floor. Ahead was the main entrance.
Five seconds till UP/Ex launch! He could imagine the chaos on the American side, losing their top analyst right at the crisis point. This was sniper warfare, brought into modern times, and three more seconds’ delay would—
His milspec contacts lost transparency and he felt a flash of heat on his face. Alfred dived for the floor. When the shock hit, the building swayed, barely stable in its uncommunicating configuration. He lay still for a moment, watching.
That had been a High Energy Infra-Red laser, punching straight through the roof of the GenGen lab some two thousand meters away. He had a single direct view, a glimpse of trees silhouetted against a pearly glow, a rising cloud of steam and fog. Part of the haze was zapped vegetation. Most was damage-suppression mist, designed to soak up the knife edges of reflected death. The Americans had fired thirty times in less than a second. Glints from those blasts would have splattered kilometers in all directions, invisible to the naked eye, but potentially blinding and blistering those same eyes.
A second viewpoint came online. The target hillside looked like a miniature Mauna Loa, a river of flowing rock that slumped down into the hillside. Flashes of light marked the ongoing work of thermal flechettes. Thunder pounded.
So the American response had been prompt and decisive, cauterizing and sealing the launcher area, with minimum collateral damage. And all my dreams are ashes.
His contacts had transparency again. Alfred came to his feet and ran out of Pilchner Hall.
Ahead of him people swirled in panic, first stunned by network failure, now dazzled by HEIR laser glints. Get into the crowd. Even though he was shoulder-to-shoulder with humanity, for the first time this evening Alfred felt really alone. Some people around him stared upward; some were temporarily blinded. People were crying. Others were counseling the sensible thing: get under cover, keep your gaze down and away from reflectors. In the midst of network failure, these people were reduced to literal word of mouth. But that word was spreading. More and more people realized that for only the third or fourth time in recent history, their own country was under a military assault. So far none of them had guessed that it was their own military’s doing.
Alfred kept his head down, his face covered. It wasn’t a suspicious posture; hundreds of others were cowering similarly. He shrank his communications down to a fuzzy static that conveyed only a few bits per second and that routed chaotically through his mechs. His ops gear was heavily shielded; to the USMC probes it would seem like just another Epiphany unit struggling to cope with the sudden failure of the public nets.
All that might buy him ten more minutes. Long before then, the DHS analyst pool should recover from Alice’s collapse and run a retrospective surveillance of the local video streams. Analysts obsessing on a dataset that small were deadly effective. He could imagine their gleeful pursuit: See how the enemy mechs are clumped across from Pilchner Hall? Scan back to early in the evening; who-all has been near that building? Why, there’s Gu’s daughter going in, and a few minutes earlier, an Indian-looking fellow doing the same. Scan forward; no action till a minute ago, when that same Indian-looking fellow comes running out. Track him forward to the present—and my, my, there he is, trying his damnedest to seem an innocent bystander.
In any case, tonight’s Indo-European operation was beyond all deniability. And that was the minor disaster. For a few seconds, Alfred Vaz drifted in uncharacteristic despair. What about all my years of planning? What about saving the world? He had heard enough to know that Rabbit’s accusations were in the pdf sent to Parker’s laptop. Alfred would never complete his research program. Indeed, Rabbit had been the Next Very Bad Thing. The carrot greens in Mumbai had made the point, but I willfully ignored the evidence, so hoping I was to win with my plan.
And yet…what of Rabbit now? Quite possibly its substantive evidence was indecipherable garbage. Conceivably the minds behind Rabbit were reduced to ignorance. Then maybe, maybe, with all my leverage at External Intelligence, I can survive to try again.
Alfred moved back to the edge of the crowd and cautiously reached out to his network. He’d lost his link into the labs. For half a minute there was nothing except a deadly snick and snack that sounded privately in his ears, marking the steady extermination of his little army.
There. A route through his surviving devices, back into Pilchner Hall. Tiny windows popped up and…he found a viewpoint, a single lab camera that had survived the HEIR attack and looked down upon the Mus array cabinet. The camera had suffered glitter damage, swaths of stuck pixels, but he could see enough.
Collateral damage could be your friend; there might be nothing here to prove Rabbit’s accusations! The blast from the Americans’ attack on the launcher had knocked over his very special cabinet. The last group of mice had fallen along with it. Best of all, the Yanks’ thermal bombs had flooded the area around the launcher with molten overburden. The lava had closed off the hole created by the attack, just as intended, but it had not stopped there. The glowing, tarry tide had pushed out along the aisles and piled almost two meters deep in places. Its farthest extent lapped the fallen cabinet and covered all but a corner of that final batch of mouse boxes.
There was no sign of the Gus. Before the laser attack, they had been standing just beyond the current destruction. If he’d had more viewpoints, he might have tracked them down—but would that matter? Their jumbled memories were a still a threat, but that was now beyond his control. Suddenly, Alfred realized he was smiling. Strange how in the midst of disaster, he could be pleased that his two most persistent antagonists—not counting Rabbit, may he burn in hell—had probably survived.
He was closer to the library now. Civilian rescue workers were in evidence, though the network support was probably provided by the marines. Interrogation teams were not yet in action. And he’d found a backup aerobot to relay through! He got one fresh message before it was lost:
Mitsuri --> Vaz:
Alfred took a final check all around himself. He walked a few paces through the trees…and he was in midst of his Bollywood crew.
“Mr. Ramachandran! We have lost all connectivity.” The video tech’s eyes were wide. “Everything was fine, but now it is so very terrible!” The crew were experts on the spectacular, but not the real.
Alfred shifted into the persona of harried cinema exec. “You have your cached videos, do you not? You forwarded the earlier contexts back home, did you not?”
“Yes, but—” They wanted to rush out from the trees, to help the injured down by the library. That was for the best; in moments, Vaz would be one of the group again. Perhaps the DHS analysts were still in chaos. It would be amusing (and amazing, too) if this cover got him past the USMC cordon and out of California. As he followed his cinema crew out into the open space around the library, he had only one remaining link to his milnet. It was past time to drop that bit of incrimination.
But there was still intelligence streaming in.
Terrible, chilling words that Alfred would never have been burdened with if he hadn’t still been linked.
“Please. Please don’t do this to her. She’s just a little girl.”
Gu. Alfred searched wildly in his only remaining view. Back in his physical person, he stumbled.
The video tech grabbed his elbow, steadying him. “Mr. Ramachandran! Are you quite well? Were you blinded in the attack?”
Alfred had the presence of mind not to shake her off. “I’m sorry, it’s just all this destruction. We must help these poor people.”
“Yes! But you must stay safe yourself.” The tech guided him down to where the rest of the Bollywood crew was already helping the emergency workers. Her aid gave him cover to look carefully out from his underground viewpoint. The damage to the camera had partially healed; some of the stuck pixels were flickering, and now he could see a little beyond the left of the fallen cabinet…The elder Gu was pinned beneath. Lord, where was the other one?
I didn’t mean for this. He should say nothing, but his body betrayed him:
Anonymous --> Robert Gu:
“Who is this?” the voice screamed in his ear, then continued more quietly, more desperately. “She’s right here. Unconscious. And I can’t move her out of the way.”
Anonymous --> Robert Gu:
“Please. Just tell the police. Don’t let her burn.”
MORE SPIKES OF overpressure, the sound of a thousand fragile things breaking, of heavy plastic tearing, bones being crushed. Robert didn’t really hear it all. The bones getting crushed, that was distracting. Even the follow-up explosions and the heat went more or less unnoticed.
Robert surfaced from introspection that might as well have been unconsciousness, except that it hurt a lot more. Miri was on her hands and knees. She was wailing. “Grandpa! Grandpa! Say something, please. Grandpa!”
He twitched a hand, and she grabbed it. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to knock things over. Are you hurt?”
It was one of those questions that had an easy answer. Agony the size of an elephant was sitting on his right leg. “Yes,” but the rest of a clever answer was lost in the pain.
Miri was crying, choking, very un-Miri-like. She turned and pushed at the cabinet that had him pinned.
Robert took a deep breath, but that mainly made him dizzy. “The cabinet’s too heavy, Miri. Stay back from it.” Why was the air so hot? The steady light was gone. Something like an open furnace glowed beyond the fallen equipment, where the sounds were all of popping and hissing.
“Cara—Miri!—come back from there!”
The little girl hesitated. Under the cabinet were the crushed remains of the mouse array that had been about to load. It wasn’t going anywhere now. Miri reached down into the broken glass. Robert cricked his neck and saw a tiny face peering back into his, a mouse loose from its suction trap in the array.
“Oo,” Miri’s voice squeaked. “Hi, little guy.” A laugh mixed with a sob. “And you, too. You each get a free pass.” Robert saw more tiny faces as she freed other mice. The heads bobbed this way and that. They didn’t seem to see him, and after a moment, they found something that was much more important in the mousely order of things: freedom. They ran around the girl’s hands and away from the heat.
Now Robert could see what caused the heat. A glowing white gob of syrup dripped over the wreckage, hissed into redness as it oozed down the side of the fallen cabinet.
Cara gave a panicked cry and came back to him. “What is that?”
The hissing and spattering. If it could make it over that barrier, it must be dammed up several feet deep. “I don’t know, but you’ve got to get away.”
“Yes! Come on!” The girl pulled at his shoulders. He pushed with her, ignoring the tearing pain in his leg. That moved him four or five inches; then he was stuck more solidly than before. And now the heat was even more distracting than the crushed leg. Robert’s mind hopped from one horror to the other, trying to keep its sanity.
He looked across at his crying sister. “I’m sorry I made you cry, Cara.” She just cried harder. “You’ve got to run now.”
She didn’t reply, but the crying stopped. She looked at him, uncomprehending, then slid back from the furnace heat. Go! Go! But then she said, “I don’t feel good,” and lay down just beyond his reach.
Robert looked back at the oozing rock. It had swamped the bottom of the cabinet. Another inch or two and it would slop onto his little sister. He reached out, snagged a long shard of—ceramic?—and wedged it against the glowing tide.
There were more explosions, but not so loud. Up close there was just the smell and sound of things cooking. He tried to remember how he had come to be here. Someone had done this to him and Cara, and surely they must be listening now.
“Please,” he said into the glowing dark. “Please don’t do this to her. She’s just a little girl.”
No reply, just the terrible sounds, and the pain. And then the strangest thing, letters scrolling across his gaze:
Anonymous --> Robert Gu:
“Who is this? She’s right here. Unconscious. And I can’t move her out of the way.”
Anonymous --> Robert Gu:
He waited, saw nothing more.
“Please. Just tell the police. Don’t let her burn.”
But the silent watcher was gone. Cara lay unmoving. Can’t she feel the heat? It took everything he had to hold the shard in place.
Then: “Professor Gu? Is that you?”
It was some pestering student! There were so many afterimages, he couldn’t be sure, but someone was there, partly submerged in the molten ooze.
“It’s me, Zulfi Sharif, Sir.”
That name was familiar, a weaselly arrogant student. But now his skin wasn’t green. That meant something, didn’t it?
“I’ve been trying for some hours to call you, Sir. It’s never been this bad before. I…I fear I may have been truly hijacked. I’m so sorry.” He was mostly submerged in the glowing rock. A ghost.
“You’re injured!” said the ghost.
“Call the police,” said Robert.
“Yes, Sir! But where are you? Never mind, I see! I’ll get help straight—”
The glowing rock dribbled over Robert’s makeshift dam, onto his arm. He descended into a pit of mindless pain.
33
FREEDOM ON A VERY LONG LEASH
The New Annex to Crick’s Clinic was less than five years old, but the spirit of the place was straight out of the last century, when hospitals were great imposing places where people had to go for a chance at survival. There was still some need for such places: the most extreme intensive-care units were not something you could pack into a first-aid box and sell to home users. And of course, there were always tragic cases of incurable, debilitating diseases; some small portion of humanity might always end up in extended-care nursing homes.
The New Annex satisfied certain other needs. Those occurred to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gu, Jr., every day when he drove onto the hospital grounds. Every day since the debacle at UCSD, he’d pull into the Crick’s traffic circle, get out, and look down along the cliffs and beaches toward La Jolla. The clinic was just a short hike up the hill from some of the most fashionable resort properties in the world. Just a few miles inland were the biotech labs that ringed UCSD, perhaps the most prestigious source of medical magic in the world. Of course, those labs could have been on the other side of the world for all that their location made any real difference. But psychologically and traditionally, this joint nearness to resort luxury and magical cure was a lure for the very richest of the very ill.
Bob Gu’s wife, daughter, and fat
her were not stuck here because they were rich. Once you walked past the imposing—and totally real—main entrance, you had privacy. In this case, the privacy was a combination of the clinic’s basic design and the fact that Uncle Sam had taken a special interest in certain patients.
What better place to keep sensitive cases hidden from contact than in a resort hospital. The press flitted around beyond the walls and speculated—without having grounds for a civil-liberties complaint. It could be a very good cover.
Bob hesitated just outside the main entrance.
Oh Alice! For years, he had lived in fear that JITT would take her. For years, he and she had fought about the limits of duty and honor, and the meaning of Chicago. Now the long-imagined worst had happened…and he found himself quite unprepared. He visited her every day. The doctors were not encouraging. Alice Gu was stuck under more layers of JITT than these guys had ever seen. So what did they know? Alice was conscious. She talked to him, desperate gibberish. He held her in his arms and begged her to come back. For unlike Dad and Miri, Alice was not a federal detainee. Alice was a prisoner in her own mind.
TODAY BOB HAD an official assignment at Crick’s. The last of the detainee interrogations—that is, the last of the debriefings—were complete. Dad was scheduled to be awake by noon, Miri an hour later. Bob could spend some time with them, in the virtual company of Eve Mallory, a DHS officer who fronted for the investigation teams.
At 1200 hours, Bob was standing in front of a very old-fashioned-looking wooden door. By now he knew that such things were never faked at Crick’s. And he’d have to turn the doorknob if he wanted to go in.
Eve --> Bob:
Bob nodded. For a moment he didn’t know who he was most angry at, his father or the jerks from DHS. He contented himself with pulling the door open without knocking, and stepping abruptly into the hospital suite.