Luca murmured, his brow furrowed, “But, sir . . . the best? The best at what?”
Tor’s attention was back on Alia, who was gazing at him as if he were holding open the gate to the Garden of Eden, with a dawning, unsure but growing hope. Tor finished in the same low, caressing tone he’d used before as he spoke to her. “Alia wants to be unconquerable. She wants to fight and to win—which means that she wants to defeat everyone else. Isn’t that right, Alia?”
“Yes . . . yes . . . how do you . . .”
He suddenly leaned over close to her, his face almost touching hers. She was utterly still, not even breathing. “Alia, I cannot die.”
“I know . . .”
“But I do have enemies . . . and Minden and Luca must be protected. For my sake.”
“For your sake,” she said as if in prayer.
“You will win it all, Alia,” he whispered, so low that Minden and Luca couldn’t hear. “You will utterly defeat them all. This I promise you, for your loyalty to me.”
“I will die for you,” she said as if in a dream.
She thought someone was laughing.
But that couldn’t be so.
Tor reached up with his forefinger, and she was blinded . . . by the bright silver of his ring, she thought . . . He touched her lips, ever so lightly.
She fainted dead away.
Fort Knox Near Louisville, Kentucky
It was the most heavily guarded building in the world.
In the first place, it had been built in the Great Depression paranoia of the 1930s on an army base that was now the headquarters of the most deadly heavy infantry in the world: the United States Armored Cavalry. Those ten thousand soldiers, two thousand tanks, and four hundred Bell AH-20 Cobra helicopter gunships weren’t there only as a hopped-up security police force. They were the muscle-bulk of America’s land force. But they ran full-scale mobilization games twice a year, deploying as guardians of the modest white granite building that stood in the middle of their base.
The Armored Cav wasn’t the first line of defense. First and foremost were the nonhuman defenses: the harsh floodlights, the perimeter fortified with solid concrete barriers, the barbed wire, the Cy-II surveillance system with electronic gate sentries.
Next up were the specially trained Justice Department police, half of whom were ace sharpshooters, deployed on the roof of the second story. They patrolled the facility inside the gates.
Outside the barricades an entire squad of army MPs kept a solid twenty-four-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year vigilance.
All that had changed in the last two months.
Naturally the first and most noticeable change was the lack of lights. The building had been bathed in the harsh glare of fifty-six 800-watt lights every single night since 1936. On September 23, the night of the autumnal equinox, it went as dark as the deepest Congo.
The two thousand M1A5 Abrams tanks squatted on the dark plain like prehistoric beasts. They were dead. They couldn’t move; their thermal imaging eyes were closed; their lethal 90 mm electromagnetic rail guns were paralyzed. The tank crews, most of whom regarded their tanks as majestic, roaring live predators, mourned as if they’d lost their families.
The Cobra gunships were dead, too, their pilots and crews distraught, just as Deacon Fong had been devastated when his beloved Apache died.
Like the rest of the army, they all had their MK-20 Techstar rifles. And just like all the rest of the army, they were lost and confused when they didn’t work. All they had left were their decorative Beretta 9 mm personal side arms (PSAs). Most of them did know enough to chamber a round and pull the trigger, but since they’d been trained only with high-tech targeting and guidance systems, they didn’t have a clue how to aim. Their minds, accustomed to vast amounts of information being spoon-fed to them, couldn’t adjust to the instinctive handling of a small pistol. It made no sense to their eyes or their brains.
The sharpshooters of the Treasury police were the worst. They’d been trained on the REM/3000 assault rifle; it had a delicate LOSAP guidance system with a helmet-mounted image display, both of which were utterly useless without the electricity in the power packs. Skilled snipers with only their sharp eyes and quick brain-hand-eye coordination were a curiosity of the last century.
The Mint Police of the Justice Department were the first to go. Unlike the army personnel who were only temporarily stationed on the base, the Mint Police lived in the nearby towns and had families there. As the weeks wore on, fewer and fewer of them reported for duty. Almost all of them had families to take care of. Protection of inanimate objects, no matter how valuable, began to seem an absurd distortion of loyalties.
The Military Police kept up their vigil, however, because they were under orders. They required no emotional reinforcement to follow orders, so they patrolled day and night with their clubs and their 9 mm pistols.
For two months, the loyal guardians had nothing to do except look out over the surrounding empty acres. No one tried to approach the high barbed-wire fences. No tourists came to the gate, taking pictures and asking tiresome questions. No journalists appeared to try to weasel information out of the stern MPs. Not a single person tried to breach the facility’s defenses. Of course, that was not unusual. In the last 114 years, no one had tried to attack, infiltrate, or in any way assault the facility.
The first and only assault ever made on the United States Bullion Depository was supremely successful.
First the snipers came, hiding in the shelter of the grove of old oak and elm trees on the west side of the grounds, about four hundred yards away from the main gate. With their old Steyr Aug automatic assault rifles and their six-month-long training, just completed, on a noncom-puterized weapon, they picked off the fourteen MPs with ease.
Then the Peterbilt Titan twenty-four-wheelers rumbled down Bullion Boulevard in the white night. A light blanket of snow covered the land, gleaming and sparkling. To the fifty-seven massive Peterbilt trucks, the snow was no problem. Their line stretched all the way back toward, and almost reached, Godman Army Air Field. About forty soldiers wandering around the base saw the trucks. Twenty of them were shot before they could run. The others made it to HQ, but by the time the officers had rounded up a hundred men, gotten them dressed and armed, and run on foot all the way to the west side of the base, the snipers had already turned toward them. Not one of them lived; most of them were killed with single shots to the forehead within the first fifteen minutes.
When the first truck reached Gold Vault Road, it smoothly took a wide right turn and growled its way right up to the Depository’s front gate. The MPs guarding it were dead. The titanium-reinforced truck smashed through the steel gate.
The trucks lumbered on to an unnamed road that encircled the Depository, took a right, and went around to the loading platforms in the back. They didn’t know, and wouldn’t have cared if they had, that the circular road was made out of steel plates on hinges that, in a crisis, could be raised hydraulically to create a second internal stockade of steel. The road would not be raised this night.
In the rear of the building klieg lights, generated manually by fittings on the Titans, were set up. Specially made titanium dollies rolled out the back of the Depository, and the loading began.
The Bullion Depository in the year 2050 held 180,449,666 ounces of gold, or roughly 11 million pounds. The Peterbilt Titan was capable of transporting 200,000 pounds, though driving American highways with that weight was illegal. The drivers were not afraid of being arrested, however.
All together, the fifty-seven Titans removed 439,054 gold bars from the Depository. The bullion was worth about $62 billion, almost half the world’s gold supply. America had always owned most of the gold and all of the prestige and power that come with the perception of such unbelievable wealth.
But now it was all gone.
ELEVEN
THE EARTH ALWAYS looked the same in the photographs taken from the NASA space shuttles that ran their regularly scheduled routes
to maintain the myriad satellites spinning in orbit. The pictures made by the shuttle crews, as stunning as they were, were indistinguishable from the pictures taken by the legendary Apollo 11 astronauts almost a century earlier.
Although the shape of the continents and the borders of the oceans and the ridges of the mountains had not changed, the world had altered dramatically in the last century. If cause and effect could be graphically imposed on the photographs, they would look much like the maps that the commercial airlines published to show their flights, with networks of lines radiating from each hub. On earth, America would be the single central hub, with lines radiating out all over the globe.
The United States of America, the last superpower, changed the makeup of the entire world economically, militarily, and culturally, and these three things combined always result in political change. When analyzed to irreducible simplicity, it was all because of two distinct causations.
The first critical event was the attempted nuclear attack on America’s homeland by the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahira in 2006. Only a few months ago, Minden Lauer and then Vice President Luca Therion had discussed this incident and had found inspiration for Project Final Unity, but that had only been the last poisonous fruit from the tree. This episode had had complex, far-reaching, lasting effects.
The fear—and rage—that the American people felt at this narrowly escaped national disaster could not be ignored by anyone. They were well and truly roused. The government listened and complied with the people’s (loudly) expressed wishes.
A top-of-the-line military force was developed, and then was kept at home. Thus America’s military isolationism evolved, and by 2015, there were only token American forces stationed outside the U.S.
But, as Minden and Luca had observed, this event was also an impetus to perfect a defensive system, and so Galaxy Guardian, a space-based laser weapons platform and antimissile defense, was born. American scientists, in unheard-of unity, worked diligently for two years to perfect the technology and upgraded the accuracy of intercontinental ballistic missile kill capability from 72.3 percent to 99.9 percent. This, in effect, became the ultimate countermeasure for any airborne missiles. Galaxy Guardian made it impossible for any kind of hostile weapon to be transported by air into the Western Hemisphere—or Israel.
Out of this critical event came the final bond of alliance between Israel and America. Following the attempted bombing by the Libyan submarine, every country in the world condemned Libya—except the major Arabic nations. In their oil-saturated arrogance, they spoke meaningless platitudes at the United Nations and praised the dead mujahideen in their Arabic newspapers and Cyclops broadcasts. The only country in the Mideast that took a stand for America—and armed its borders to fight, if necessary— was Israel. America repaid her by enclosing her in the protective umbrella of the Galaxy Guardian system.
America repaid the Arab nations, too. A consortium of businessmen— American, German, Chinese, and Indian—delicately contacted key men in the International Man and Biosphere Project, and in the American government. Over the span of ten years, new electric cars were phased in. In the developing co-op cities, where traffic flows were carefully controlled, electric cars were mandated, and the ubiquitous mass transit buses were switched to electrics. Gradually these businessmen and the American government had leveraged out Arab financial interests. When the fall of the Arabic Confederation occurred, they were well cushioned, as were the markets of their countries.
America started using domestic and South American oil, and the Arabic Confederation countries were, once again, poor desert countries, albeit with fabulously wealthy and propertied kings or sheikhs or abdullahs. The only predominantly Muslim country that managed to prosper was Jordan, which finally aligned itself with Israel (and the United States) in exchange for expelling the Palestinians, who, by 2010, comprised 80 percent of the population of Jordan. The Joint Task Forces of the Germanic Union of Nation-States had accomplished that, with an efficient “police assistance action” alongside Jordan’s national security organization.
This U.S. military isolationism caused some wars and lesser conflicts all over the world for a period of about ten years. The European Union stepped in and talked a lot about keeping world peace, but the Germanic Union, with its mighty Joint Task Forces, became the world’s policeman.
By then America had become indisputably the ultimate economic powerhouse. As Americans developed the satellite technology for the Galaxy Guardian systems, and the space shuttle technology for maintenance, they developed the Cyclops system along with all the industry giants of communications technologies. Soon the entire world was obliged to use the Cyclops system, for the simple reason that only America had the highly skilled technicians, the outrageously expensive space shuttles, and the billions of investment dollars needed to develop, launch, and maintain space satellites. Just as every civilized person in the world had once owned a television, a telephone, a facsimile machine, and a personal computer, so now every civilized person in the world was on the Cyclops net—and paid dues to the United States of America for it.
And so it was seen that the effects of that ill-fated submarine attack were not limited to the pollution of the Gulf of Labrador. Eventually this one pathetic attempt to injure America affected global military stances, delicate balances of power, and world finance, and reconfigured the global marketplace. Because of it, America developed Cyclops, which greatly influenced the eddies and currents of social and cultural life. For decades American culture had been its major export in every conceivable form, from clothing styles to religious influences. With Cyclops and its centralized heart in America, all American attitudes and beliefs and opinions and desires became the world’s, in a fateful marriage, for better and for worse.
The second world-altering event was at America’s instigation, too. A major upheaval in the relative power of the world’s economies occurred when America legalized recreational drugs. No country in the world, no culture, and no social institutions were ever the same after the use of drugs became legal and therefore socially acceptable— and that made drug use moral.
America had always been the leader in cutting-edge medical technology. American scientists developed cures for several types of cancers; life-remission programs for diabetes; a cure for Alzheimer’s disease; a cure for Parkinson’s disease; permanent and full remission programs for high cholesterol, heart disease, liver ailments, and kidney ailments. They honed neural electrode implants for many types of brain dysfunctions. They cloned organs, though no one ever cloned a functioning human being. They perfected robotics for surgical devices. They refined genetic engineering, with its accompanying in vitro human embryo analysis. They made a fail-safe abortion pill with no side effects. They made enormous strides in corrective surgeries, including a 97.6 percent preventive of male pattern baldness, a skin renewal program that was 52.9 percent effective, and muscular, tissue, vascular, and bone renewal. All organs, except the brain and skin, were successfully transplanted, some from human donors, some from animal donors, some from cloned materials. Any surgery to make one more beautiful, from fatty cell laser removal to dimple implantation, was readily available.
But one field of medicine that Americans (to the health care field’s chagrin) did not pioneer was that of Serum Courses or, as they came to be commonly termed, SCs. This completely new area of medicine was developed by a team of German scientists in Bolivia. SCs were, to put it simply, antidotes to the negative effects of narcotics on the human body.
Until 2005, Americans were still struggling with the war on drugs, but much of the rhetoric had changed. With the realization that some illegal drugs, such as marijuana, were effective painkillers, that drug was declared a controlled narcotic. People began to question the very nature of controlled narcotics; after all, morphine was a much-used painkiller, and it was a derivative of opium. Hashish was a variation of the marijuana plant. It was the second substance to be declared a legal, albeit controlled, narc
otic.
These were natural substances, after all, gifts from the earth, the mother of us all; they were medicines, much as foxglove had given us digitalis and cinchona bark had given us quinine.
After the German scientists made their findings public, within a year America had declared all narcotics legal and stipulated that with recreational use they were to be combined with the Serum Courses. This legislation proved later to be ineffectual. Drug addicts will faithfully find a way to get and use narcotics, but they are not as conscientious in following protocols of antidotes that do not make them feel good. So, in America, Structured Dependence Zones were created in the co-op cities where the citizens made twice-weekly pilgrimages to the Alterative/SC Clinics to get their poisons and their antidotes.
The countries of South America and Mexico, with their endless fields of marijuana and coca plants, grew fabulously wealthy; India and China, with their millions of little farmers who grew only poppies, prospered; Japan, with its robotlike efficiency, took a huge bite of the processing and packaging business; the European Union took the bulk of shipping; while American and German pharmaceutical companies had great feasts of Serum Course production.
Slowly, over a period of many years, responding to varied forces, the world changed. America was the richest and the most influential country. The European Union, dominated by Germany— which had grown to be the second-richest nation in the world—had the largest standing army and the most influential military force in the balances of power. The Far East prospered; China grew fat and lazy, though it continued to have the menace of a snake asleep in the sun. India had grown in military might, in prosperity, and in sheer population, and it counterbalanced China effectively. The Arabic Confederation was a cipher but, because of the massive populations and the sheer geographical area the members controlled, was still considered one of the Eight Spheres of Influence.
Fallen Stars, Bitter Waters Page 17