The Weapon

by Michael Z. Williamson

  Then it was time to gather our remote supplies and bring them in. We had to dig them up or drag them out, bring them back and hide them as well as we could onsite, watching nervously around for any sign of betrayal. We also had to trust everyone else to be as cautious. One discovery would lose us a city's worth of Operatives. Two discoveries would alert them to a larger operation and kill us. We'd take as many of them as we could with us, but it would be death for certain.

  That night, we all sat soberly, Deni feeding and caring for Chelsea while alternately laying out supplies and weapons. She would stay here and make us appear to be doing business as usual, and hold down the fort. The other three of us would do the work. I allowed everyone one drink, and led everyone in the Oath of Blades, despite their insistence that it wasn't necessary. Religious rituals are never "necessary," but are often essential. None of us had real swords or knives with us, so we substituted those crappy little kitchen blades. They were symbolic, they served just fine.

  But that last line of the ritual, of "Our blades, our bodies, our souls. For God, Goddess and the Freehold" had an awful finality to it. I doubt anyone slept. I know I didn't.

  The next day I secured reports up the tree that everyone was ready. There was no message telling us to abort.

  Black Operations was about to enter the war.

  Chapter 25

  Blister agents aren't really that hard to produce, if you don't care about purity and long-term storage. We didn't. Kimbo had brewed us five containers of the stuff. Each container would handle a typical city building of 80 stories or so. That was a good start for what I planned.

  Delivery was only slightly difficult. Tyler drove the truck, he and I swapped off on handling and placement.

  Tyler drove us through town in a rented box van. Since we planned to ditch all our IDs at once, it was no problem at all renting it. She used a credit card, a bogus address and her implant. No questions asked. We loaded the stuff up and went for a late evening trip.

  The streets were quiet, which had nothing to do with driving, since once the destination was selected, Tyler was largely along for the ride. Once we entered the service drive for our first target, the comm chimed a warning and slowed. She switched to manual control and took us up to the loading dock. She backed in like a pro and we jumped out in our basic oversized coveralls, hats low over our faces. It was dark, so there was little to see of us, especially with cheek inserts and scruffy, unshaven faces. By the time the security guard came out to inquire what was going on, we had the first tank, thoughtfully labeled "dry nitrogen," strapped to a dolly.

  He asked, "What's this?"

  I replied, "Nitrogen for the maintenance department." I used a flat, slightly raspy voice.

  "What for?" he asked. Idiot.

  "I think they use it to pressure test the AC. Hey, I'm just the muscle, okay?"

  He frowned. He had the perpetually frowny type of face that goes with the potato sack body. He scratched at his chin and said, "I wasn't told about this."

  "Prolly didn't write it down for you," I said. "Look, can we drop it off out here? Should we take it back? Or take it where the manifest says so?"

  "Where's that?" he asked.

  "Um . . ." I said, pretending to look at a screen in front of me. "Says here to take it to the 57th Floor Equipment Room."

  "Shit," he said. "That's going to take a while, and I have to come along."

  "You're getting paid, aren't you?" I asked reasonably.

  "Yeah, but 'Your Police At Work' is on," he said.

  "New episode?" I asked.

  "Yeah," he said. "And my recorder at home is broken, I can't afford to reserve a showing, and we can't record here," he said.

  "That sucks," I said. "I'm going to catch it later. Any good?" I could chat all night, if it would soften this guy's brain any more than it was already. He wanted to be a real cop and could never qualify, so he watched vid instead. He was soft enough in the head, but likely too squeamish about clubbing people to be a real cop.

  "They're in Lvov, Russia. Lots of drunken Russians and a few riots." He sounded as if he really wanted to get back to it. How ironic. Lvov was on our list.

  "Sounds hilarious," I said. "But you're missing it while we talk."

  "Damn," he said, the candle flickering above his head. Moron. "Look, do you guys know where to go?"

  "Yup, do this every six months or so," I said, figuring that was long enough he either would have forgotten, been on another shift, or not have worked here.

  "Oh, yeah, I remember," he said as he didn't. "Well, if I sign you out a key, can you handle it?"

  "Sure, but I'll use this to bring a safe down with me, and clean the cash out of any jackets I find lying around."

  He snorted. "I don't think you can move a safe, and serve them fricking right." He turned to the service door, reached inside and hit the switch for the bay door, and said, "Hang on, I'll get a key."

  So we went up unescorted. Kimbo hadn't said a word the entire time. The rent-a-fool hadn't looked at him once. No description there for him to give.

  We rode the service elevator silently, faces averted from the camera. At the 57th floor, I rolled the dolly and Kimbo walked quickly ahead. He had the door open by the time I got there. Yes, it was late, but there might be a worker in an office somewhere, and we didn't want to be seen. The fewer witnesses, the better. Once inside, I unfastened the drum and he started rolling it. The rumble of large fans would mask any noise we were making, even assuming anyone was around to check.

  I left twenty minutes later. By then, he had it inside one of the air handlers and I'd helped him hoist it up behind a bend in the ducting where it wouldn't likely be noticed. He finished attaching it with professional mountings, so that even if found it might be mistaken for a storage location for unauthorized excess or illicit goods.

  While he finished, I went downstairs, returned the key and chatted with the guard, who was ignoring his scanners and watching vid. I made a few comments about the show to keep him occupied until Kimbo arrived. Then I said goodnight and we left.

  We managed to get three of our other primary buildings. The guards at the other one insisted they had to verify the delivery. We refused. They demanded a call to our boss. We discovered we had the wrong one, looked embarrassed at the "error" and slunk away to their laughs.

  Then we hit our secondary list and planted it in another building.

  As soon as we got back to our base, we loaded up again. Deni had our weapons and explosives laid out and we went right back to work.

  The effects of our attacks were varied intentionally. We wanted to create in people's minds that nothing was safe—work, home, food, water, transport. Whether large town or small, they were targets. Helping others would expose them to attack. Nowhere to run or hide, no safety. We intended to throw an entire planet into panic. We would be merely a catalyst. They would destroy their civilization for us. Also, we had to use the resources at hand.

  So we all took different approaches, some planned, others improvised. Very few of the preparations would be at all suspicious—commercial gases and vehicles, tools and basic computer gear was all it took, as long as those wielding the tools were human weapons.

  My buddy Warrant Tom Parker had a great idea that was put to use in Melbourne. His few people, their insertion being the team that died, had visited eight buildings over a few days, dressed as maintenance or inspectors. Most buildings' air handlers have access areas for fans and filters big enough to walk into, that are odd-shaped and have dark corners, despite being lighted. In these, they set up gas-burning space heaters with triggers for Zero Hour. The environmental controls adapted for the temperature and increased "air" flow, and the system was designed to balance CO2 and O2 levels, not CO. The CO sensors were a separate circuit in the alarm system and easy to bypass. It was well over an hour after the flames lit before the symptoms—nausea and headaches—registered as a problem, and even longer before anyone realized that everyone in the buildings
was suffering.

  They tried to evacuate through the elevators, which also double as ventilation shafts. The first crowded loads down were unconscious at the bottom, and collapsed bodies jammed the doors open. Then the emergency elevators were disabled the same way. The older buildings with stairwells became clogged the lower one got, as people tried to scramble over piles of corpses-to-be. Some beat themselves to death trying to get through rooftop hatches to fresh air. A few made it out onto vertolpads and outer rooftop gardens, for the time being.

  The treatment for CO poisoning is pure O2 and exercise. Not even every rescue vehicle and crew in the city had enough masks to treat everyone, or could transport people fast enough. They sat weeping in frustrated rage as their patients died by the thousands, cyanotic tinges on their faces. The ones they reached last were the higher-ups on the upper floors, meaning that thousands of key business and government people were dead. I'd thought to destroy the rescue vehicles too, but he'd decided against it. The utter helplessness was a huge psychological weapon.

  Then the power and backup generators to the hospitals failed . . .

  I was impressed at the response overall. Some genius acquired fittings from hardware stores, and split the O2 hoses into manifolds. They were able to treat a few more people that way. New generators were dragged to the hospitals in not too many minutes, but all those who were going to die had already done so. The police, rescue, and military reserves deployed to the downtown area in a hurry . . .

  . . . just in time for the bombs atop the buildings to shower them with rubble with a thousand meters times mass of rubble of potential energy. That also took out the vertolpads and survivors who'd gathered there.

  A couple of subway crashes, a power substation out, and damage to a water treatment plant meant Melbourne would not be a functioning city for the next several days. It was an absolute panic, and people were abandoning vehicles to run on foot. That made it even worse. Sydney and Auckland were no better off.

  * * *

  Chandra Ramirez pulled a related stunt in Mexico City. She used chlorine gas, which had been purchased at a swimming pool supplier's, with a basic chemical license. It was offensive at the least, lethal at worst. The victims hack and cough fluid and retch, while their mucous membranes burn. Tears and snot are disgusting and terrifying when seen on thousands of wheezing, drowning victims. The altitude made it worse. The upper levels of the towers were kept pressurized for comfort. It's not much, but little air is exhausted, mostly being scrubbed of CO2 and reused, and the vertolpads are all reached by airlocks. No rush could get out there. While all that took effect, she staged driveby shootings of several nearby fire/rescue stations, shooting out the tires and engines of the vehicles. Panic ensued when no one responded. It's the nature of the serf to wait for the Master to help, and people on Earth had been discouraged from even considering rendering aid, remember. She managed to drug a breakfast delivery to a police station, and that didn't improve things for the enemy. Her troops created a traffic jam by the simple expedient of having four vehicles slew and park across eight lanes of traffic. Once the flow backed across the first intersection, it snowballed from there. Accidents made it worse, and no one was going anywhere.

  * * *

  We didn't do anything with Oklahoma City. It was a good target, but it was a favorite of terrorists, having been hit six times in five hundred years. We didn't need to bother. As soon as word got out, Oke City residents panicked and did the job themselves.

  * * *

  In Chicago, we went underground. Literally. There are ancient sewers, built 600 years ago for drainage, as deep as three hundred meters underground. They drew rainwater from the massive surface area out to the Sanitary and Ship Canal. Later, water mains were run through them. Some of those still exist, most of them are abandoned. The new water mains run nearby, with those old tunnels used as access. It's dangerous access, as several hundred thousand lurkers, criminals, homeless people and subversives live down there, in dark corners, dug caves and old utility niches.

  Lawrence McGuinn and crew had slowly taken down on hoists and winches material to build a massive thermobaric charge. The first stage was a four component, self-oxidizing powdered solid that filled millions of cubic meters with the second stage, a self-oxidizing liquid slurry. It was not an "explosion," it was a "deflagration burn." The pressure built relatively slowly—about 120 milliseconds. When it was over, the old rock and concrete cracked from the appalling pressure. Everything in that section of shaft was tossed for kilometers, bashing into walls and tumbling along them to be ground into sludge, cooked by the heat. The cavernous water mains were torn open, and trillions of liters flooded into the passages, joined by inflow from Lake Michigan. The city had no drinking water to speak of. It had no way to get people down to effect repairs, unless it could find maintenance workers qualified to work in pressure suits, and find suits for them. The depths under the city were swelling or eroding from the flow, causing upheavals and settling that would destroy buildings.

  The damage wasn't obvious at once, and the "explosion" had been slow enough that it wasn't recognized as a weapon until compared to other events. They thought it a natural phenomenon at first. But when incendiary charges ignited conflagrations in dozens of buildings, it became obvious what was happening. People would burn. People would be thirsty in minutes, dehydrated in hours, dead in days. The other events meant there was no way to get enough water into the city to matter. People would die, or drink contaminated water and sicken and die, or panic and die. Then the shifting tectonic activity would tumble rocks atop them as gravestones.

  * * *

  I mentioned Lvov, Russia. Belinitsky went for brute force and simply started detonating bombs. They were built into vehicles that were parked and abandoned, set atop buildings to blow down the elevator shafts, destroy the elevators and leave people trapped and panicking, and in upper offices to throw glass and shattered bodies onto the street for panic effect. Roaring fires were even easier, simply requiring good oxidation and a sticky flammable liquid. What value a few maintenance pass badges? Those and a few thousand kilograms of nitrates, flammable liquids and explosive gases. She'd picked her locations with exquisite care. The whole downtown and several outlying concentrations were aflame. Her element also hit Murmansk, Moscow, Leningrad and Kaliningrad.

  * * *

  Back out on the street in Minneapolis, we went to work. Our plain white van, with some quick painting, became a maintenance vehicle that covered us while we screwed the traffic control circuits. That would start the inconvenience, we'd start the panic. Right on schedule, the blister agent started to release. The timers on the cylinders ran down, acid ate through a small membrane, and pressurized nitrogen blew it through opened bottle valves. It filled the volume of the air plenums with finely vaporized liquid, which was blown through the buildings in a matter of a few seconds. Casualties would only be about 50% in those buildings, but that was better for us. Panic is what we wanted. The buildings triggered five minutes apart, which we figured was long enough for a panic, short enough for no response to be effective.

  Tyler diddled with some phones and alarms. Kimbo cracked a primary water line from the plant by the river that would deprive people of water and flood a few streets. I tossed a rocket at a major power distribution point atop a shorter building. Several blocks and several hundred thousand people were without power.

  We then brought out the rest of the weapons we'd acquired at Langley.

  Quite honestly, we could do far more damage with vehicles, buildings, and improvised explosives than with basic infantry tools. But we used them for one overpowering reason: it scared people.

  Pull out a gun in the Freehold, and you will be met by one of two reactions, depending on your attitude and body language. 1) People will rush over to see your cool toy, ask how much you paid and if they can handle it, or B) pull out bigger guns (there's always someone with a bigger gun) and kill you. People just aren't impressed by guns.

 
; In societies where people are not familiar with them, however, and Earth is the worst, you become a leper. They've seen all the crap on vid where people get blown backwards with gaping holes from pistols, guns shoot for hours on end on automatic without running out of ammo or jamming, where every shot counts, where they "go off" rather than "being fired," and they are "taken away" from the good guys but somehow never from the bad guys. Crap. Garbage. Utter criminal stupidity from panty-wetting, idiotic freaks (I speak of vidwriters) whose technical educations stopped at six years old. Six Earth years.

  Which made them perfect for us to use. "Familiarity breeds contempt," Aesop taught us 3000 years ago. People have never learned. We were familiar with weapons, they weren't, and they panicked when the shooting started. We hit very few, and only wounded those (screams add so much to a panic, don't you think?), but the cracks, bangs, breaking glass and chipping polymer and concrete had them throwing themselves on the ground or stepping on those who'd thrown themselves on the ground.

  We started in the middle of a crowd outside the old Ventura City Building. There were security guards and cops nearby, of course. They were armed with incap gas and stunners. While there's the occasional punk inaccurately shooting things up to protest society trying his buddy for the minor crime of raping, killing and eating someone, professional shooters are unknown. Or were.

  I pulled a UNPF issue American Small Arms Factory carbine from under my coat and started shooting. Tyler had a pistol. She'd wanted a rifle, but wasn't large enough to hide one. Kimbo had a standard issue antitank launcher as well as a pistol. That doesn't sound like a lot of hardware for three people, but it more than did the job, especially with the suppressors removed to get more noise out of them.

  It was a steely gray sky over dirty gray buildings surrounding drab gray people and streets. The people were as mentally dull as the scene was visually dull and no one noticed when we first pulled the toys. After several seconds, screaming started, but we were already starting to shoot by then. Pity. Had they panicked sooner, we would have had a better crush of people.