The Weapon

by Michael Z. Williamson

  Some air limo was just landing in front of the building, rather than on the roof. Whoever it was was a civilian, a moderately powerful one to have a chauffeur and aircar here, but not powerful enough for rooftop landing privileges. No matter. It was large, black, sleek and imposing. Two cops were directing the crowd back as the driver brought it down. Kimbo pasted it amidships, it exploded most impressively out the far side as the anti-armor charge slammed through the soft polymer monocoque. That debris caused cars across the street to slew as the onboard systems assumed an accident, and people to scream and duck, while the confetti of shrapnel up close shredded the two cops and damaged another vehicle.

  I was on the left side of broad, flat steps with the carbine, waiting for the inevitable response. And waiting. And waiting. These were really not the brightest or best security goons. It was a full minute and more before thirteen cops came swarming out to grasp at their buddies and try to control the gawking crowd. Note for the record that that's all the crowd did—gawk. No one moved to help, administer aid or even direct traffic. They milled about like sheep. Then they started to run, the threat finally oozing into their molasses-slow brains.

  I caught the cops at leg level with a sustained burst, then changed magazines and picked out specific threats if they tried to target me. Tyler was behind me as backup and I heard the loud, sharp reports of her pistol as she picked off additional targets exiting the building. Kimbo was across the street, shooting at cars and windows. I headed down that way, Tyler following. The denouement was a macabre, psychotic scene of us walking down the street, unmolested, pointing our muzzles at people to terrify them. Occasionally we'd shoot at a vehicle or large window for the sound effect. Without suppression, the muzzle blasts were deafening. Some people afterwards would report we'd been tossing bombs.

  Twice, heroes with guts but no training tried to tackle me. A quick twitch and a squeeze pinged them each in the hip and the leg respectively and they went down screaming. A woman carrying a four-liter container of milk was a great target; it fountained all over her as the slug tore the carton, and she ran screaming. A street vendor was selling chili dogs, and a well-placed burst spewed lumpy dark reddish-brown liquid across several people. It was boiling hot, and the splashes as well as the surprise generated more screams.

  By then we were low on ammo. Ducking into an alley, we dumped the weapons in a side passage and kept walking. There were a few terrified victims fleeing the carnage in with us, but most of them didn't notice. One guy whipped out a phone at that point to report our presence, but Tyler kneed him in the balls and smashed the phone under foot. He'd have a hell of a story for his grandkids, if he survived that long. He wouldn't have a story for the cops in time to matter. We scattered in three directions and dodged into the crowds to disappear.

  Behind us, the firing continued. The Police Weapons Unit had arrived and was "firing back" at threats. I can't think what threats they saw, but I'm certainly glad we don't have fools like that on Grainne. Someone could get hurt.

  Minneapolis was no longer a functioning city, and wouldn't be for days.

  * * *

  Baghdad and Tehran in the Republic of Israel got gassed, too, courtesy of Azweicz Ashe. It was rather appropriate. Before they'd been annexed by Israel, those had been the capitals of warring states. Their favorite weapons against each other had been chemical agents. Water is very critical in the desert, and we anticipated a great return.

  * * *

  Rex Weaver managed to detonate the nuke against the dome shell of Baja Pacifica. The blast took out the outer dome, the resulting cavitation and collapse of water shattered the inner one. Barring a few people out in suits or subs, a million people died just like that, crushed under tons of water. The SeaTrain tunnel was turned into a giant shotgun, the wave forcing trains and debris up to the surface. I don't know if he got away and was killed later, or if he died along with his victims. If the latter, I don't know if it was intentional or not. It seems unlikely he survived, though. I'd never ordered anyone on a planned suicide mission before. It felt odd. Disturbing.

  Agua Azul off the coast of Spain fared marginally better by some accounts. Dean Karnu used conventional explosives to crack four airlocks and let water rush in, but it takes a long time to fill a dome that size. They were able to hold with increased air pressure, and only had a few people drown in the lower levels. But the effect was the same. There were fourteen submarine cities on Earth. In minutes, all thirteen surviving cities were full of panicked animals trying to escape.

  * * *

  New York and London both had their own megascrapers, and both were convenient for the precious few liters of nerve agent we had. A whuff of air and it was all over, with half a million people flopping like fish and rolling in their own shit as their nervous systems shut down. Only the cores of the buildings were affected; the ventilation was run in zones. Still, it was enough. Both cities also run in part on hydrogen power. Lee Finley didn't manage to set off the charge in New York. He was caught in the act. Much of the hydrogen came in on surface ships, and we'd hoped to crack a couple of those for fuel/air effect. Jerry Armentrout fired his in London, though. A few kilos ruptured a major line, and an incendiary ignited the cloud. The blast melted the power station and caused hundreds of hectares of scorched earth. It was enough of a drop in power to create interruptions of service. Not what we'd hoped for, but enough for panic. Nerve agent makes people shit their pants. So does the thought of it. Nasty stuff. But hey, Earth had used chemical weapons on us first, so fuck them. In actuality, only a few hundred died, a few thousand suffering long term effects and the rest needing short-term hospitalization. But in the aftermath, that would be impossible. The real death count was due to their panic reaction. The attack on Paris, Germany was almost totally ineffective. I have no idea why. It didn't matter. People panicked anyway and torched their own city.

  * * *

  Heinrich Kepasur used more thermobarics in Djakarta. Those megascrapers are hard to attack, because they are so huge. But overpressure does wonders.

  He and his people snuck in with assorted IDs and planted drums containing the charges at the bottom of the central elevator shafts of one. The charges were fused from the bottom. The pressure wave propagated straight up the shafts, which contained it just long enough. The rising air pressure above served the same function. The charge burned and continued to do so, the containment increasing the burn rate until it almost reached detonation velocity. According to our calculations, the overpressure at the heart of the burn was over 7 billion gigapascals. That's over 85,000 kg per square centimeter. It takes less than 1 kg per square centimeter instantaneous overpressure to kill.

  It was all over in a fraction of a second. The shafts ruptured, the wave erupted and slammed through the building. Every body was crushed into a dead, hemorrhaged paste. Every interior door blew away to smash like a pneumatic ram into whatever was behind it. Every window powdered into dust and disappeared, to be followed by a shower of debris, pieces of flesh, rubble and vapor. The shock was still lethal as it passed through the skywalks to surrounding buildings. Passersby were crushed like bugs as pieces of the structures collapsed and fell into the streets.

  There was no immediate evacuation citywide. For one thing, those ants lived in them and rarely left. For another, the news from all over didn't hit at once. When it did, most people simply didn't believe it. Vid was at once real, but unbelievable. What happened on screen was The Truth, but also always worked out okay in the end. They stayed glued to their teats.

  A bogus second one in another building, merely a few kilos of HE, triggered twenty minutes later. It created a small panic. Another false alarm followed it. Then a third. Just as people were starting to think it a failure, with only the first one effective, a second real one did fuze. Another building churned like a blender and spewed a giant people smoothie.

  Five minutes later, a mob of forty million people were ripping each other apart to flee the city on foot, in any vehicle, h
owever they could.

  The charges along the transit rails were just icing on the cake. It created the impression there was nowhere safe to go. Panic turned to insanity.

  * * *

  That made twenty-eight large cities in shambled ruins. We took it yet another step. You'll recall twenty-six sleepers I mentioned? They were mostly in small towns. Eric Walden for example, was in Champaign, Illinois, North American Union. He was a contract programmer at the university there, and had been kept employed even after the war started. He'd been searched several times, and had been grudgingly accepted as an apolitical technogeek. After that, they ignored him.

  He spent lunchtime hopping through buildings, hitting cafeterias. He waltzed down Green Street, then south to Florida Avenue, and in each building he left a present in a trashcan. Some time later, they delivered nerve agent, improv napalm, or plain old shrapnel to the bystanders. Shortly, people in classes and dorms were twitching or flaming or perforated and he joined the panicking crowd running in all directions. He even snuck a pressurized canister into a pizza oven, with most impressive results. Then his worms dug into the network and tore it down. His actual casualty count was low, but the secondary effect was staggering.

  Newark, Ohio; West Boudville, California; Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania; Aberdeen, Scotland; Bunbury, Australia, Salzwedel, Germany; Lagunita Salada, South America; Dhorpatan, Nepal; Kolwezi, Africa. A little place called Nowhere, Arizona was begging for it by name alone. Across the globe, small towns joined the larger towns in their panic. Jenny Bak took out the dot on the map called Sinanju, Korea. It was taken by the flock that nowhere was safe for them. Cities we hadn't touched began reporting suspicious people, terrorist acts, panic and evacuations. No pattern could be analyzed, because we'd picked many of them at random. It seemed that the entire planet was being attacked by tens of thousands of terrorists with a master plan. And there were less than two hundred of us.

  One of the keys to all these attacks was that when people panic, they turn to authority figures. Everyone in the areas we hit clogged emergency phone lines, frequencies, saturated public offices and radio and vid stations with calls, swarmed the nets, and generally made it worse. Of course, that's when our worms and moles hit and dragged the comm systems whimpering to their knees before blowing their electronic brains out.

  Being out of contact with friends and family in the thirty different ways technologically dependent people constantly use to chat and reassure each other was as terrifying to them as the disappearance of a chatty voice was to our primitive gatherer ancestors. It screams into the hindbrain, "PREDATOR!" and the response is to seek cover. And they did.

  That increased geometrically the number of people seeking refuge physically at police stations, government buildings, hospitals and the like. The only practical response was for those facilities to lock their doors against what was an unthinking mob. Denied daddy to pat their heads and tell them everything would be alright, that mob howled like five-year-olds and began breaking things in frustration. The only things available to break were their own cities, and they did.

  As it spread, the waves propagated into areas and cities we hadn't even been near. There were also the "FUCK SOCIETY!" anarchists of various political leanings, who mistake the difference between self-government and no government. They began shooting, looting, throwing bombs and starting fires of their own, cheering us on without even knowing nor caring who we were. It oscillated into a seething abattoir of screaming, panicked animals.

  In less than a day, Earth was totally nonfunctional as a political power. Emergency meetings were called, and threats were made. Everyone knew the Freehold was responsible, but no one could prove it. They all hunkered down around the tribal fires in their warpaint to discuss how the gods were malign, and performed primitive rituals and chanted incantations to fix it, as they'd done from time immemorial.

  Chapter 26

  Back in our suburb, we locked the doors as everyone else did and sat down to watch the results. I'd rather have left at once to avoid the mob, but we needed to see if more action was warranted, and we had to be close by to do that. We had more weapons at hand, both small arms and simple bombs. Nothing else would be needed to cause additional fear. We had bags packed ready to evacuate, carrying only enough stuff to look like refugees. Well-prepared ones, granted.

  The comm and vid were almost non-existent, as most of the major stations were in large cities. It was up to the secondary suburban units to fight their way in closer and get what data they could, swimming against the stream of fleeing rabbits. Pardon my mixed metaphor. There really wasn't much to go on, but I had the plans of each element on file, and the after-action estimates from some, and that combined with maps gave me a good basis to assess the incoming reports.

  It was glorious! Scrapers in Washington were collapsing from the after-effects of the pressure waves and from internal fires we'd caused. Roiling fires created howling hurricanes in Chicago and Minneapolis, building the firestorms higher and incinerating everything organic into black, chunky goo. The mindless, panicking rioters were crushing and trampling each other to death. All roads were gridlocked, automatics deadlined and most of the mass unable to drive on manual as it required the ability to think. They were mugging and looting for food and shelter, lighting fires for warmth and light, that would end up torching more buildings, beating and raping to reinforce in their own minds that they were superior to someone, anyone more helpless than themselves. And as the images went out, still more cities not yet damaged collapsed socially into the quagmire. Raw, naked truth was something they'd never been taught to handle, and there wasn't enough government left to filter it. The concept of shutting vid down totally was as alien to them as to us, but in our case it would be an unthinkable violation of right. To them, it was unthinkable to let people think. Vid must go on, no matter how bad it was.

  Jeremy Hausen and Kent Shanks had handled the Moon city of Selene well. Two cargo pods had crashed into the exposed surface structures, a virus was eating the algae in the oxygen tanks, and several bombs had wrecked pressure doors. They'd survive, certainly, but it generated that much more fear. Nowhere was safe. A few cracked greenhouse panels in O'Neill got everyone into secure quarters or vacsuits and shut it down until further notice. I'd hoped to have an assault boat to make a pass for that attack, but it wasn't possible. Still, Burk Smith had done a great job, considering how tight and controlled the Trojan point habitat was. Ships were orbiting or leaving their docks and shuttles in launch stage were aborting to land at the nearest available facilities and going nowhere.

  Baja Pacifica had left a macabre finale: millions of bodies and pieces of same, tossed by concussion waves, crushed by 200 meters of water pressure, bloated by lack of pressure at the surface, all being chewed into mulch by the largest school of swarming sharks ever seen. I didn't think anyone would live in submarine cities in the foreseeable future.

  The next load brought me up short. It was local to Minneapolis, and I ordered up the volume and enlarged the image. They started showing the damage and havoc we'd wrought. I immediately started narrative, written and mental notes for my debriefing, and was quietly impressed by the carnage. This city and the others would not be in shape to do anything for at least a couple of years, and wouldn't fully recover for a decade or more, local clock. It was beautiful. Then the camera flashed across one of the debris-strewn and rubble-blocked streets. They were clearing the rubble and bodies with bulldozers to get access in. It focused for a moment and I dropped my gear. The image framed is still with me, and I'll never forget it. I see it every night in horrific visions. I shot a glance over at Deni, who looked white and reflective herself.

  It was a baby, about three months old, dead in the street, bruised and battered by falling concrete. It must have died from shock, as the physical damage wasn't that great. Then I saw the mother sitting next to the pathetic little corpse, weeping and moaning as she rocked back and forth in anguish.

  There were more pic
tures. A school class on a field trip had been pureed by falling glass. A day care center had been in one of the buildings we'd gassed, and they had laid out a row of helpless, blister-faced little corpses, some still clutching favored toys as talismans. I had known intellectually kids would die, and knew intellectually this was a sympathy grab on the part of the vid crew. But even before Mtali, children had been a sensitive spot for me.

  A school near downtown had been buried under one of the scrapers, with more than 5000 students unaccounted for. I could account for them. They were dead. The Children's Medical Institute had been damaged, and hundreds of kids had died before power came back up. Others were injured or smashed and being dragged out of the rubble. One disgustingly bizarre image showed a young girl holding her crushed and severed right arm in her left hand, confused from shock and stabilizers and staring at it as a nurse tried to help her.

  Congratulations, Captain Kenneth Richard Chinran. You've become a state-sponsored terrorist. I kept hearing it echo in my head.

  "I have to take a walk," I said, and left before anyone could say a word.

  Outside was a scene from Dante. There wasn't much damage in this area yet, but the streets were clogged. I'd seen that, noted it, but hadn't realized in my guts just how bad it was. Cars were bumper to bumper. Some people had managed to override the controls and those with aircars had even attempted to fly, only to crash into building faces and then into the crowds below. It was fucking dangerous here, twelve hours and fifty kilometers from where we'd hit. That was good strategically and bad for us personally.

  I wandered away from the building, no particular route in mind. Any time I saw something disgustingly wrong, I stared in horrified fascination. I saw a family van full of kids. It must have been an attempt to evacuate a building, as it was crammed full and had only a single woman driving. Foolish. Brave. It was to no avail; it had been smashed as an aircar fell on it and the kids were screaming. I didn't want to know if any were hurt. I kept walking. Everywhere I looked, my mind focused on the kids. Killing politicians is a social duty to the race. Killing enemy soldiers may be a necessary evil in time of war. But this . . . was obscene. What had we done? How bad were things back home that this had been the last resort? Were things that bad, or was this a vengeful response? Who the hell had my orders come from? Did they have any idea what they'd asked, and what I'd accomplished for them?