by Paul Briggs
• Algae can be engineered to convert sunlight and atmospheric carbon into those helpful hydrocarbons. Since people don’t often eat algae and it isn’t grown on arable land, this gets rid of the problem of humans having to compete with their own machines for food.
• Up until now, this technology hasn’t really been able to compete with fossil fuels in terms of the price of the fuel. However, the loss of the ORCS and the petrochemical infrastructure of the Texas-Louisiana area has boosted the price of fuel somewhat. Also, many state governments are willing to subsidize it as much as necessary.
• One good feedstock for algae is sewage.
• Everybody poops.
• Sewage flows downhill.
• A lot of low-lying land on the coast has recently become quite affordable, even near the cities. Where there are millions of people. Every single one of whom, as aforesaid, poops. And pees. That’s useful too.
Most of the cash Marshpower had on hand right now was from the sale of small biodiesel plants to chicken farms around here and to pig farms in North Carolina. Isabel had helped set a few of those up. A lot of manure that might otherwise have been a nuisance to dispose of went into those things. And there were rumors that some large group of investors was trying to buy a controlling share in Marshpower, which might give the company a little more cash to work with.
* * *
What with one thing and another, Isabel didn’t get out of the building until just after six. It was a pleasantly cool April evening… in the middle of January, but people were getting used to this sort of thing by now. When Isabel turned the key on her old first-generation hybrid, the car’s wi-fi started playing “Darkness and Snow,” one of those songs Rodomontade wrote based on an old poem from a century ago, written by T.S. Eliot or W.H. Auden… unless it was W.H. Eliot and T.S. Auden. Isabel wasn’t literary enough to say. Traffic on the Bay Bridge was light, but the surface was hard on the car’s suspension. Money for bridge repairs was another thing in short supply.
Dinner that evening was a rather thin soup made from a half pound of finely chopped beef hearts, whatever vegetables had been in the bargain produce section the last time Hunter had gone shopping, and enough Old Bay to cover a multitude of sins, especially blandness.
“You don’t have to pretend it’s any good,” said Hunter, staring into his own bowl. They were having Quesch with dinner, but it didn’t seem to be cheering him up any.
“Considering what you had to work with, it’s not bad.”
“Thanks… nice to know I can do something right.”
“I’m guessing the job interview didn’t go so great.”
“You could say that. I got there, and they told me they were going out of business at the end of the month.”
“I can see how that would be kind of discouraging… any luck with one of those house-moving companies?” The Eastern Shore was blessed with a great many fine old colonial homes which had been built centuries ago and were good to last for centuries to come, if only they weren’t so close to the waterfront. So if you were a rich guy whose McMansion had been built in the ’00s and was falling apart around your ears, you could do worse than buy one of those old houses cheap and have it moved to higher ground.
“I’ve sent in my résumé, but I don’t think I’ve got the job experience they’re looking for.”
“Have you checked the schools? I know they’ve gotten completely toilet, but there’s got to be an opening for a science teacher.”
“You think they’d hire me?”
“You were a pretty decent student, and you liked the subject,” said Isabel. “You don’t have a teaching degree or anything, but I don’t think the schools are going to care—with this budget crisis going on, at this point they’ll hire pretty much anybody. No offense.”
“Could you really see me as a teacher?”
“As long as you don’t start beating yourself up in front of the students… yes, I could. Of course, you wouldn’t be earning much of any money, but it would be something.”
* * *
Isabel Bradshaw, in her current incarnation as Belle772505, was hanging upside down in the forward ball turret of the airship Unsung Hero, waiting for the centaurs to come into view. Her long white-blond hair whipped behind her as she scanned the western horizon with her spyglass. The wind stirred the mottled-silver fur of her jacket, made from the hide of a Lyncid warrior-mage who’d made the mistake of picking a fight with her during the last big quest.
They can’t have gone far, she thought. It’s not like there’s anywhere to hide. This part of the world was an endless expanse of grassy plains, low hills, and occasional cottonwood-lined creeks.
The Unsung Hero floated in the middle of the formation, between the Trumpeter and the Clockmaker’s Daughter. They were a mile and a half in the air, trying to see as far as possible.
The Republic of Alvar had hired the Hindenburger Guild to help it fight off the centaurs. The war band known as the Stinging Wasps had been seen near Fort MacLaine, westernmost outpost of Alvar. But where were they now, and what were they up to?
There was definitely a fight coming. The game was pretty reliable that way. Victory here would protect not only the people of Alvar, but the investments of their true employer, the Magnatess Astoria Kingsmark. In the long, secret war that defined this world—between steam and magic, between the engineer and the sorcerer—you never knew what might tip the balance.
Belle772505 was ready. The turret was equipped with a Gatling gun and an exquisitely crafted bronze grenade launcher, both fully loaded. In case something jammed, she had a spare oilcan tucked between her breasts—sexual harassment was forbidden by both guild law and the game admins, so she’d seen no reason to stint herself when designing her character. Although she was a lot less well-endowed than Kym_the_Sniper on the Trumpeter, who she suspected was a guy in real life.
There was a line of dark cloud on the horizon. It didn’t quite look like the smoke from a prairie fire, and was the wrong color for a storm.
Then the lookout, Falconer66, gave the traditional cry of “Oh shit!” As Belle772505 looked deeper into the cloud and first caught the low, steady rumble, she understood why.
Thunderbeasts.
Millions of thunderbeasts. The herd stretched for miles to north and south, a sea of shaggy black hair and gray-brown hide, half-hidden by the cloud of dust they were raising. They looked something like bison, except that they each had two pairs of long horns on their heads and short black elephant trunks for noses… and they were the size of the extinct Indricotherium. And on the fringes of the herd were centaurs in full war paint, each one waving a torch.
Now they knew exactly how the Stinging Wasps were going to attack the fort. The problem was how to defend it. Thunderbeasts were afraid of nothing except fire, and in full charge even that wasn’t guaranteed to stop them. This herd would crash right through the stockade of Fort MacLaine and trample it into garden mulch, along with everybody inside it.
Belle772505 looked up—down, from her POV—at the other two airships. The semaphore panels on the decks were signaling… that OnyxFan11, a.k.a. Hunter, and the other airship commanders were squabbling in a way which would have gotten any real-life military unit killed in combat.
Finally, a clear plan emerged. Split the herd. Try to deflect most of it to the north. Hero, Daughter, go five miles south of here and set the grass on fire. Trumpeter, go to the southern edge and start picking off the centaurs.
The Trumpeter carefully stayed above a thousand feet, well out of the vertical range of any rifles the Stinging Wasps were likely to possess. Getting shot down would be very bad. The centaurs of the western plains had been modeled so closely on the 19th-century Comanche that a lot of people found them offensive. You didn’t want to get captured alive by them.
For this to work, the other two airships would have to go a little lower. It was a good thing thunderbeasts didn’t have rifles. And they’d have to work quickly. A charging animal that
weighs fifteen to twenty tons can’t turn on a dime—not if its physics are being properly modeled. They’d have to start the fire well in front of the herd.
Coils of rope and sacks of coal, already on fire, fell from the decks. Isabel loaded the grenade launcher with incendiaries and fired them at the ground. With a sudden inspiration, she took out the spare oilcan, loosened the top and put it in front of the next grenade. The oil spread into the air hundreds of feet below, then erupted into a bloom of fire when the grenade went off.
Just then, Isabel heard the opening bars of “I Won’t Forget” and a voice saying “It’s Kristen.”
Cold, wordless dread ran down her spine and along her nerves. Not only was that her family’s ringtone, but her phone was on Protocol 3 screening—any caller would be sent to voicemail except for a select few, who would be asked to affirm that this was an emergency.
“Sorry, guys,” she said. “RLE. Gotta bail.” Her guildmates were a decent bunch. They understood real-life emergencies. Isabel took off the VR headset and picked up her armphone. Kristen would never say something was an emergency unless it damn well was.
“What’s up?”
“We took Pop-pop to the ER this morning. His breathing is getting worse—he was coughing and wheezing all night.”
Isabel nodded.
“We just got the word,” Kristen continued. “It’s definitely mildew. He’ll live, but he’ll need to be somewhere else for a while. The Comegys have agreed to take him in. I’ll stop by and look after him when I can.”
“I take it their house got cleaned up properly?”
“We think so, yeah,” said Kristen. “And on top of everything else, the doctor said he’d have to report it to the state. Seems HCD is cracking down on houses with mold problems and stuff.” As far as Isabel was concerned, the Department of Housing and Community Development would be welcome to personally spank the entire family if they would just pay to clean the house properly themselves.
“How’s everybody else doing?”
“Nobody else is having any health problems,” said Kristen. “Not yet, anyway.”
All through January, small squads of North Korean soldiers began threading their way through the U.S. and South Korean lines under cover of darkness. Avoiding military outposts, they struck at civilian targets, appearing out of nowhere and vanishing in minutes. It was the oldest form of warfare in human history—the raid for plunder.
But the North Koreans hadn’t come for cattle, or gold, or women. They’d crossed the DMZ for the sole purpose of looting the grocery stores. Last year had been a bad one for agriculture in the Republic of Korea, but what seemed just barely adequate to them looked like endless abundance to their northern cousins.
When these bands encountered units of the South Korean army on patrol, they sometimes fought, but far more often they fled. And thousands of them surrendered without firing a single shot. The South Korean government quickly set up an interment facility at Cheorwon to accommodate this influx of prisoners. There they fed the prisoners as best they could… which again looked good to the soldiers.
Some of the soldiers “escaped” from Cheorwon—the ROK Armed Forces made no effort to stop them—and ran back north to tell their comrades of the good treatment they’d received. But the DPRK government had spies within the ranks of its own army, and they reported what was happening back to Pyongyang.
Somewhere in the capital, somebody panicked.
* * *
Hands clapped next to his ear. “Wake up, sir.”
Pratt never woke up before 7 a.m. unless it was an emergency. It was well before that now. And it was Noreen Baxter, one of his Secret Service agents, clapping her hands. And the voice saying “Wake up, sir,” belonged to John Edmondson, who only Pratt and a few others knew was the man entrusted with the nuclear football.
Edmondson—short, thickset, black, and about fifty—was much more than just a baggage handler for the world’s deadliest carry-on. He was the Pentagon’s emergency liaison with the President. As soon as Pratt was sitting up and had his glasses on, Edmondson handed him a tablet, already turned on.
The news was simple—North Korea had launched one short-range nuclear missile. Cheorwon was gone. No word on casualties, but a thirty-kiloton bomb had exploded right over the barracks two minutes ago.
Pratt hadn’t gotten where he was today by being indecisive. “Open the briefcase,” he said as he sat up. In bed behind him, he heard Claire’s sharp intake of breath. None of this was for her ears, but no help for that. “Hand me the ‘CASSIUS’ envelope.”
Ever since he’d ordered CASSIUS prepared, Pratt had been afraid of one of two things happening. One was that he would receive evidence that North Korea might be about to launch an attack… or might not. Then he’d have to decide whether to execute CASSIUS, and how to explain it to China afterward. The other was that North Korea would attack on a massive scale with no warning at all and the operation, which took several minutes to implement, would be too late.
Compared to that, the deaths of thousands of POWs and an unknown number of civilians was something of a best-case scenario. It was an attack South Korea would survive—but it was unquestionably, inarguably, an attack. No one could doubt that Pratt had the right to do what he was about to do.
He took the manila envelope and broke the seal. Inside the package was a cell phone, a thumb drive, and a smaller envelope.
Pratt switched on the cell phone and pushed SEND. The phone was programmed to dial only one number. A message appeared on the screen:
Pratt hooked the thumb drive up to the phone. A gallery of photos appeared at the bottom. One of them was of a little green bird with a red face. Pratt selected that photo, and a microphone icon appeared on the screen.
The computer at the other end of the line was programmed to recognize his voice. The Pentagon had hired three different voice actors to try to fool it. None of them had succeeded.
He opened the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of paper with four words on it. Pratt held the phone up and, in his best orator’s voice, uttered the words:
“Speak, hands, for me.”
It was done. Now there could be no going back. Pratt got out of bed, pulled a bathrobe off the back of a chair, and slid his feet into a pair of slippers. As he did this, he made a mental note to reread Julius Caesar when this was over and see if it was actually Cassius who had said that. He had a feeling it wasn’t.
By the time he’d reached the Situation Room, the smell of brewing coffee was in the air. Also in the air were many cruise missiles and Nightgaunt drones launched from U.S. subs parked just outside North Korean territorial waters.
* * *
As Carrie was puzzling over how to compose the presentation, the plane whoomphed.
That really was the best word for it. It wasn’t sudden or violent enough to be a thump, and it wasn’t quite long enough to be a shudder. It was just enough disruption to make her glad she didn’t have a glass of water on her tray. It happened a couple more times over the next five seconds.
She sighed. For as long as she could remember, the airlines had responded to every change in technology and the economy by making air travel more unpleasant. Now the flights were longer, more prone to turbulence and passengers had to bring their own food, which was especially annoying on an intercontinental flight like this one, although it did make it easier to stick to her diet. She would have liked to take a private plane, but jet-setting around the world at Symcox’s expense would do her no good come election time, especially if what she was burning was fossil fuels.
Carrie returned her attention to the presentation. She thought she had a pretty good way to begin. This podcast from an Alice Springs blogger, made on January 28 of this year, would certainly set the right tone:
Fifty degrees. Three damn weeks.
One of the little drawbacks to this job was having to re-learn the metric system. Finding out what fifty degrees centigrade was in Fahrenheit had been horrifying.
So anything you have to do, you do at night, on foot. Businesses, city offices… everybody’s changed their hours. I used to be the sort of woman who would build her plans for the day around not having to cross a parking lot alone at night. Now I go shopping at 3 a.m. and think nothing of it. It’s a lot less dangerous with everybody else doing the same thing.
Anyone vulnerable to heatstroke is supposed to be evacuated to Darwin or Adelaide. There’s about an 8-to-10-hour window at night when these people can go outside long enough to do this. Using small planes. Big ones can’t land, because the tarmac at the airport has melted. Forget the train—the tracks are buckled in a dozen places.
Early afternoon is the worst. You’re supposed to be asleep by then. Not lying awake listening to the AC running full blast and thinking “What if it breaks down? What if the power goes out? What if some vital piece of machinery turns out not to have been designed for this kind of heat?”
Once everybody had gotten an earful of this, she’d point out that all these things had happened in one of the less inhabited parts of a fairly rich country—one which could afford to put air conditioning in every home, every business, every public building. In a country where this wasn’t the case, a heat wave like this one could kill millions of people in a few days. There was nothing to stop it from happening. Back in ’03, a much milder heat wave had killed about seventy thousand people in the heart of Europe, simply because at the time they were used to such an even climate that not that many people bothered with AC.