Live Free or Die-ARC

by John Ringo

  The Iranians were denouncing it while doing distribution which was just confusing as hell. The Sudanese had officially rejected it, inoculated their military and government officials and their allies and denied it to any resident of Darfur. The rebels in Darfur had gotten cases of it from non-governmental organizations and were distributing it as fast as they could.

  Some groups in Iraq were resisting the distribution, mostly Sunni tribes. The Kurds had distribution finished before the US. Turkey was backing the distribution one hundred percent while trying to deny it to the Kurdish regions. Which had finished distribution, smuggled in from the Kurdish regions of Iraq, before the Iraqi Kurds.

  The leadership of every major Islamic terrorist group had stated that any Muslim who took the vaccine was damned in the eyes of Allah. Intel suggested that they had obtained inoculations through black market sources. Cases of it had been stolen from NGOs in Afghanistan and the Tribal Areas of Pakistan. They were turning up, mostly still full, in the markets. Nobody wanted to use them, they were just another form of loot. The most advanced medicine in the world, a shot that would keep a belly-wound from becoming septic and increase healing rates four-fold, was going for ten dollars a case. And mostly they were being bought for the really excellent, vacuum-resistant, water-resistant, plasma-resistant, drop-resistant, cases. The nano-vaccines were being dumped.

  Most of the governments of Asia were solidly behind the distribution. Groups within countries, however, were resisting. Especially areas that were hard-core Islamic. Even then, individuals were getting access. But the local leadership was trying like hell to stop it. 'Unclean! Unclean!'

  In Burma, the government officially restricted it from being distributed to 'rebel' elements which meant virtually every one of the hundred ethnic groups that were scattered through Burma that weren't 'Burmese'. Tyler had taken just enough time out from his work to get one of the Paws to drop bundles of nano-packs to every little village in the back side of beyond in Burma. The Paw had actually taken fire. It turned out that pressor beams and shields were virtually identical. On its way out, it had dropped more in the Ghorkali regions of Nepal which were just on the end of a very long supply line.

  All of the governments of Latin America were behind the distribution, even those that called the US and the West evil incarnate. But in many cases they were 'rationing' the distribution. In Colombia's case, they were mostly trying to keep it out of the hands of the drug lords. And generally failing.

  The Horvath had planned on separating the sheep, as they saw it, from the goats. The international reaction to the Glatun medical support was doing the same thing. If you rejected technology or had a difficult time with reality . . .

  "The death toll is going to be staggering," Gnad said, shaking his head.

  "I've got this thing about death," Tyler said, examining the results of one of Athelkau's models. Using the AI was costing like crazy but it seemed to have worked. "If a person wants to survive and tries to survive and is smart about it, I'm all good. I hope like hell they survive. I feel terrible about all the kids who are about to die. Kids can't make their own choices. I really don't give a damn one way or the other about the idiots."

  "That's very . . . Sartran," Gnad said. "Existentialist even."

  "Say that with a smile, brother," Tyler said. "Heinlein once said that ignorance is its own death penalty. Truth is, the way the world has worked for a long time that's not true. Now . . . it's literally true. Don't know about the plagues or reject the information and it's an automatic and irrevocable death penalty. Besides, one death is a tragedy, a billion is a statistic."

  "Think it will go that high?" Gnad said, his eyes wide.

  "No," Tyler said. "But hundreds of millions? Yes. You want to know the worst part?"

  "What could be worse than hundreds of millions of deaths?" Gnad said.

  "Billions, technically," Tyler said. "But the worst part is I don't think it's going to matter. Except, and this is the really ugly part, in the net positive. Currently, the statistics are that it's mostly taking out people who have reduced capacity for, well, anything. Functional labor if you will. The elderly, people with long-term problems. There were a bunch of pre-disposed to cancer and other factors that weren't caught in time that were . . . gainfully employed and productive members of society? Can I be that unPC? But most in most of the Western countries got the vaccines in time. The rest? South Africa has already had six million deaths. Fifteen percent of its population. It's suffering economically but mostly because of the process of clean-up. And the only reason that we know their death rate is that they're fairly functional. We have no clue about most of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.

  "The plagues, so far, have killed a reported one hundred ninety-six million people world-wide. That's just an enormous number. Thirty million in the US alone and we think that's going to go to about fifty million. Twelve percent of our population. And the full weight hasn't hit, yet. The Brunette Killer package hasn't activated. The pre-disposed package hasn't even run its course. And you know what? There's a lot of grieving and the stock market is down and the financials are a bit of a mess and every projection shows that in six months we're going to be better off. And that is the worst part."

  "How can we be better off?" Gnad asked. "That's . . . insane."

  "That's the bad part," Tyler said, looking at him with a grimace. "That's the really, really horrible part. This is cleaning up some long-term problems related to modern society. The transfer of wealth that's about to take place with virtually everyone over the age of seventy dying is enormous. And the government's going to tax the hell out of it. Social Security just got solvent overnight. People with pre-disposed genetic conditions absorbed ten percent of Medicaid. Old people absorbed over eighty percent and climbing. Medicaid and Medicare and all the other creeping socialized medicine programs were absorbing more and more of our Federal and State budgets. The combination has essentially cleared up the deficit.

  "China and India were in the position of getting old before they got wealthy. Fixed that. If the terrorists keep with their determination to reject the vaccines? Fixed that, too. Hell, the way things are going there's not going to be a Pashtun tribe in another two weeks. Or any of the hard core militants in the world. Or most of the groups which contributed the majority of members of the international jihad like the Algerian Rif tribes. Britain reports that some 30% of their 'ethnic minorities' are rejecting vaccines. Guess which ethnic group? Pakistan is only getting twelve percent takers. There's not going to be a Pakistan when this is done. India might as well absorb it."

  "You're making this sound like a good thing," Gnad said.

  "Congratulations," Tyler said. "Being as coldly rational as a human calculator . . . it is. That's the really, really horrible part. And I don't know if the worst part is the reality or that I'm cold enough to calculate it without flinching."

  "I think . . . that you can calculate it without flinching," Gnad said.

  "It's like the rivets, really," Tyler said, sadly. "Sometimes, you gotta ignore how ugly it is and do the job in front of you. My mom died yesterday. The nannites didn't have enough of an immune system to work with."

  "I'm sorry," the Vice President said. "Both of mine got the vaccine. And it apparently took."

  "Yeah, well," Tyler said, shrugging. "The girls and their mother are in an 'undisclosed location'. Not my fairly well known Lair but . . . similar. And the Horvath are about to get some payback."

  "How come you get a space suit?" Tyler said. "I don't have a space suit."

  "So we'd better not get shot down," Steve said.

  The former astronaut had arrived in the middle of the night and immediately headed over to the hangar. His take on the Fury was about the same as Gnad's. Which didn't mean he wasn't willing to try to fly it. Just that he thought it looked like Frankenstein.

  "Shot down?" Tyler said, wincing. "We better not leak!" All he had was a temperature controlling flight suit. The SR-71 cockpit might be seale
d but it didn't have really good temperature regulation.

  "This is a completely different control interface," Steve said, looking at the system but mostly 'looking' with his plants. "Most of these dials aren't hooked up to anything."

  "All the sensors and stuff are hooked up to something," Tyler said. "They're just not hooked to a joystick and stuff."

  "You're saying 'stuff' a lot," Steve said.

  "Steve, you've seen the estimates," Tyler said. "So let's quit bitching and see if we can get this thing in the air, okay? Just close your damned eyes and use the software."

  With his eyes closed, the plants and the Glatun software started to build a picture of the surroundings. It wasn't sight by any stretch of the imagination. It was more like feeling the surrounding area. And the bird. What the bird felt like was . . .

  "Is this feeling as shot to you as it is to me?" Steve commed.

  "This software is off the shelf Glatun grav control software," Tyler said. "It's probably trying to find a well designed gravity system. The bird feels broken to it so it feels broken to us."

  "This is never going to work," Steve said.

  "Better hope it works," Tyler said. "As I said, quit bitching. Is it working better or worse than the Boeing stuff?"

  "Different," Steve said. "I'm not sure if it's better or . . ."

  The plane lurched to the side and nearly tumbled off its landing gear.

  "Careful!" Tyler snapped. "Can we try to do this together?"

  "Well, quit pulling!"

  "What we have here is a failure to communicate," Tyler said, pulling out of the system. "I hereby rechristen this flying ship The Tub."

  "What we have here is a system that's not designed to work," Steve said. "It's sometimes possible, in an emergency, for two pilots who are both experienced and who have worked together well, to both control a bird. This is completely different. This is impossible!"

  "We have to make it possible," Tyler said. "Think of Apollo Thirteen."

  "Apollo Thirteen was a disaster," Steve pointed out.

  "That made it back to earth because people were willing to do anything to keep it from becoming more of a disaster," Tyler said. "I've got people doing their damnedest to get another terrawatt or two out of SAPL. People who aren't saying it can't be done, they're just doing everything they can. If it works, great. If it doesn't, we're all going to die, anyway."

  "Okay," Steve said. "Okay. We can do this. But I lead."

  "Yes, sir," Tyler said. "What are we doing?"

  "Just pulling straight up. Slowly."

  "This is working . . . better," Steve said. "I'm not sure that it wouldn't have worked better with the original control system and two people but . . ."

  While it was working, it was wearing. And they'd started trying to get the plane to fly before dawn. Since it was approaching noon, local time, Tyler wasn't so much exhausted as past exhaustion.

  "We didn't have a year," Tyler said. "I sort of wish we were side-by side. It feels . . . wrong back here."

  They were, essentially, each taking a set of gravity drivers to manage. Done that way, with the Boeing gravity sensors and I/O controls and some hacked software from the Paw, it was marginally controllable. If they just lifted up and down and moved it a few feet. They'd managed to get it the requisite 'One hundred yards in a figure eight' that was the standard for all sorts of silly little contests. That didn't mean they were ready to soar into the wild black yonder.

  "Still having personnel integration troubles," Steve said.

  "Are you saying I can't dance?" Tyler said. "Because if you are, you're right."

  "No, I'm saying . . ." Steve paused and looked up as one of the ground controllers started waving.

  "I've got an incoming call," Tyler said. "Since I told my plant to restrict . . ."

  "Same here," Steve said. "General?"

  "A Horvath ships has just cleared the gate," the CJCS said.

  "Oh . . . crap," Tyler said. "They just fired."

  "What?" Steve said, closing his eyes.

  The view Tyler was accessing was from the VLA which had devoted a portion of its system to observing the solar system's latest visitor. As they watched, the Horvath cruiser started dumping small objects into space. Objects which quickly accelerated and disappeared.

  "That's a planetary bombardment," Tyler said, softly. "Those are going to go fractional C. And they're going to arrive . . ."

  "Get off the ground," the CJCS said. "Now!"

  "Yes, sir," Steve said. "Goodbye."

  "We still need to load rounds," Tyler said, sending an order to start loading. The rounds had been kept nearby just in case of a worst case scenario. Worst case seemed to have hit. "And that assumes they're going to work."

  "Can SAPL intercept those missiles?"

  "Maybe if we'd engaged them just as they were being dumped," Tyler said. "We don't have the targeting to stop them inbound."

  "We've lost them," Nathan said. "They're maneuvering, they're small and they're black. We lost them nearly as fast as they were being discharged. We got a count. Fourteen."

  "If those are all directed at the US, that's going to pretty well gut us," very recently reactivated Colonel Driver said. "The SAPL groundside offices are bound to be a target. You need to evac."

  "We're shutting down now," Nathan said. "But getting out of Huntsville . . . Tell Ty it was fun if I don't see him again. Bye."

  "Colonel," one of the techs said. "A fractional C KEW will crack us like a walnut."

  "Then we transfer to NMDC," Driver said. "And they transfer to SpaceCom. And if all of us get hit, it goes to the Monkey Business."

  "And if they're willing to take out the Monkey Business?"

  "There won't be anyone left alive to care."

  "The President is on NEACAP," the Secretary of Defense said. "The Vice President is airborne in a helo but headed out of Los Angeles. The chain of succession is assured, at least."

  "Do you think so, sir?" the CJCS said. "The Horvath can probably track both from space. If they get into the orbitals, they'll take them both out."

  "It's times like this I wish we still had Cheyenne," the Secretary said. The base had been shut down only two years before the gate arrived. Since then there had been several suggestions to reactivate it but the money was never there.

  "Too late now," the CJCS said. "But at least we've got this great bunker."

  The Pentagon had been designed, in part, for the express purpose of surviving a nuclear attack. Of course, that was an attack on Washington using a late '40s 10 KT atom bomb. Not a direct attack with six tons of metal screaming down at a fraction of the speed of light. The KEWs headed for earth were going to leave craters deeper than Chesapeake Bay.

  "It's better than what most people have," the Secretary said. "The roads are jammed."

  "And I'm selfishly thinking 'This had to happen on my watch,'" the Chairman said. "Time to impact?"

  "Depends, sir," the colonel from SpaceCom said. "Soonest, thirty-five minutes. Longest is up to them. But if I was them, knowing we basically have nothing to defend ourselves, I'd have staggered them so that they arrive as direct delivery and at high speed. Which means we're probably not going to get hit until sometime after sunset. When you can see Mars high in the sky, that would be the best time. Say three hours."

  "Game of cards, anyone?" the Secretary said.

  "You're trying to lead again," Steve said.

  "I'm just trying to fly!" Tyler replied.

  They were loaded. They were in the air. They were at about a thousand feet, which was a remarkable achievement. But they couldn't steer worth a damn.

  There, fortunately, wasn't any traffic. Every aircraft had been diverted from major airports and those what had the fuel had been ordered to circle until they had to land. That done, most of the air traffic controllers were getting the heck out of dodge. Otherwise, they'd be screaming at the out-of-control space fighter.

  "Calm down and just go with it," Steve said.

&nb
sp; "I started thinking about my happy place and remembered I had to pee," Tyler said. "Really bad."

  "I'm serious," Steve said.

  "Destruction of the planet earth doesn't get much more serious," Tyler said. "I've still got to pee. There . . ."

  "Better," Steve said as the fighter struggled upwards again. "We just have to work together."

  "Like dancing," Tyler said. "Gay dancing, but dancing . . . Dancing. Steve, do you listen to music?"