Fear the Survivors

by Stephen Moss

  The race went on through the streets, stunned pedestrians and car drivers frightened by the explosion across town ducking out of the way of the inhumanly fast Agents. Soon they would be out of the city, thought John with relief, not wanting to fight Raz in the densely populated streets. He deliberately did not try to overtake her, precisely so she would leave the tight confines of the sleeping city. A new line flickered on his tactical screen as he landed on another building. The next building was one Raz had visited earlier that day.

  His machine mind calculated the risk a moment too late. He had just launched himself onto the roof of the building when it seemed to tremble. A fireball emerged from within, engulfing the building as it expanded outward, sucking plaster and furniture into its gaping maw along with its two hundred fifty inhabitants. John saw himself falling into the flame and knew there was nothing he could do about it. This was not going to be pretty.

  Quavoce witnessed his friend’s plummet into the fireball as if he was experiencing it himself, and his mind started a new computation. Raz knew she was still being followed. She had just run John into a trap, and no doubt she would try the same thing with Quavoce. She would try to lead him into another explosion. He called up the sights of her day’s visits and anticipated her course. The nearest was half a mile ahead. Bracing his legs, he set his trajectory and leapt.

  Raz ran on, knowing that she had just consumed one of her pursuers. He would, no doubt, survive it, but even he couldn’t leap out of a disintegrating building with ease. She assumed her other pursuer was still on her tail. She did not turn. She stayed en route. She slowed a little to make sure he was keeping up. She knew he was running parallel to her but no doubt he would try to converge now that his cohort was detained. He needed a fix on her. She ran on toward her next site. This would be just as fun, she told herself.

  The full weight of a sonic punch hit her in the head from above, and what was left of her clothing flamed orange red as she was bathed in laser. She spun on her attacker but he had timed it to perfection. As her head turned to him, his fist crashed into it with all his weight, driving her neck-first into the street’s rough tarmac. Her feet came bursting up to meet him, flinging him from her as her battered head flexed with the tremendous blow. His fist had cracked a little on her skull, but multiple systems were down on her side. Her right eye was not working and her positioning systems were malfunctioning. Her world seemed to warp as her machine mind tried to get a handle on it all, but her left eye was still undamaged and she unleashed it, firing wildly.

  Lasers and sonic blasts ripped up the building facades around them as she tumbled along the street, curtains flaming to life in windows even as wide patches of wall shook under the blows. Quavoce tried to right himself and turn back to face Raz as he slid along the street behind her, and his feet and hands began to grip the concrete as he started to drive himself forward into her once more. She met him full on and they came together like a thunderclap. Lasers burning into each other and sonic punches pounding their frames as they clung to each other, not willing to let the other fall away again as they pounded their rage into their nemeses. The two goliaths flung from one side of the street to another, pounding into walls as the terrible power of their fight propelled them about. A truck parked ahead of them crumpled and exploded as they crashed into its cab, a dodged fist from Quavoce crushing the engine block and igniting the remnant fuel within.

  The fight was destroying them both, and Quavoce was perfectly happy with that. His rage at another slew of needless deaths that night driving him to ruin. He coldheartedly selected the most brutal tactical options one after the other regardless of the cost. She must die.

  But Raz was, if she was realistic, happy with that as well. This machine version of her had no more need to live than Quavoce did, and she knew that while there were only two of the traitors, there were four of her true brethren left. One-for-one attrition would favor her side very well indeed.

  A signal penetrated Quavoce’s bloody rage. A simple request and with it he simply released his hold on Raz. She flew away from him with the force of a blow she had just landed on his torso. As she spun through the air, she considered her sudden release. Maybe she had damaged him irrevocably, hit some vital system.

  She did not pause to consider this too long but began to twist in the air so that when she landed she could propel herself back at her foe. But as she span, a powerful fist connected with the back of her neck and she felt herself propelled to the ground with phenomenal force. As she tried to turn on her new attacker, she was greeted by a boot crashing into her head with the force of a jackhammer. Her already damaged cranial shielding buckled further from the blow as her head was ground into the street, the black asphalt cracking under the pressure.

  She felt her wrists being gripped from behind by two hands. Strong hands. Hands unfettered by the pounding of fists into machine bodies. And these fresh, undamaged hands wrenched her arms behind her, while a well-placed boot in the small of her back gave her second attacker an unbreakable purchase. As her arms were pulled behind her, she felt her shoulders cracking. The closing vice behind her snapping her arms as immense power was applied on the fulcrum boot in her back. She knew it was John. It could only be John. He had managed to free himself from the inferno trap she had sprung on him and now he was trying to snap her in half.

  She writhed under the pressure, but his grip was too sure, and her body already too damaged from the fight with Lord Mantil. She tried to turn her head to the traitor she knew was John Hunt, fresh from the fiery trap she had set for him, but two new hands suddenly grasped her turning head while John’s continued their bone snapping pressure.

  She felt the twist as a blanking of systems. Her tactical options flashed off as her brain went to some auxiliary power. Her mind cut off from its main power source as her head was brutally ripped from her body. Her weapons devoid of real power, her body gone, she looked her killers in the eye as, eviscerated, Quavoce held her head up to his furious stare.

  John at Quavoce: ‘Can she still send the kill command?’

  Said John, as Quavoce began to sear out her brain with his laser. She could not actually hear John, but the thought had already occurred to her. As Quavoce’s laser dug into her, routing her out, she summoned up her final reserves of power and in a last act of spite, expended her life sending out a signal across the city.

  Thirty different boxes and bags of skillfully crafted explosives placed around the city clicked in response, and the town shook with a violent deathblow: thousands of Gaza City’s residents consumed in fire in a final flare of genocidal malice.

  Chapter 12: Real Estate

  On the other side of the planet, still unaware of the events unfolding in Palestine, a far more peaceful, but no less important, meeting was occurring.

  They had settled on the Oval Office for the location, because of its unquestionable cache. The president sat at his chair behind his famous desk and awaited their guest. The president had asked his chief of staff to go and greet the foreign head of state visiting him, but had noted, as he had many times recently, that Jim Hacker deferred to the ever more strident Neal Danielson before agreeing to be involved. The president knew that he should be angry at his chief of staff for plainly courting the other man’s approval, but like so many before him, the president saw only the seemingly harmless scientist, and not the capable mind beneath.

  Jim Hacker saw something else, he saw Neal for the acutely sharp man he was. Jim was not alone in this, devoted as the rest of Neal’s team was from their long time as an underground operation, but Jim was among the growing cadre of extremely capable allies that was starting to look to Neal for leadership every day.

  For his part, Neal sat, relaxed, to one side. His part in this meeting would be limited. He was there to make sure his team got what he needed, he was not here to get involved in negotiations. That he would leave to Jim Hacker, the president, the secretary of state, and the British Foreign Secretary, who was also present
to give his country’s blessing and support to the negotiation.

  They were meeting a man who had something they needed, a particular spot of land.

  As you span the globe there are various nations, territories, and protectorates that fall directly on the equator. The line sweeps through the nations of Ecuador, Columbia, and Brazil in South America, swamped by the oppressive heat of the Amazon River along the way. It touches a small island off the coast of Cameroon, and then drives east through the ironically named Democratic Republic of Congo, to Uganda and Kenya, before passing into the Indian Ocean. It slips between two tiny atolls of the Maldives archipelago, then heads to Indonesia, the nation most touched by this forty-thousand-kilometer circumference of the globe. Sumatra, Borneo, and a host of smaller islands are then skipped over before the long journey across the Pacific to the Galapagos, and so back to the appropriately named Ecuador once more.

  As Madeline’s already large Research Team started to bring to fruition a concept that had fueled the visions of space’s most ambitious dreamers for decades, a plan was forming to actually build an elevator to space. But there were only a few places this tenuous but spectacular structure could be rooted. The elevator would rely on Earth’s own centrifugal momentum to hold its massive length stretched taut, and so it must be tethered to somewhere on Earth’s portly waistline. It must be anchored in one of those nations, protectorates, territories, or atolls that fall on that line.

  So many considerations factored into the choice that Neal, Barrett, and Jim Hacker had spent days arguing over it. Calling upon a throng of political experts from the CIA and NSA, they had plumbed through the options.

  It was clear that the place would need to be incredibly well guarded. A carbon strip into space provided a phenomenally tempting target for every terrorist, insurgent, freedom fighter, and other assorted nut job that claimed some random cause as justification for enforced societal atrophy. This meant an island would be best, which catapulted the Galapagos to the top of the list. But taking over one of the most famous and well-protected nature reserves in the world and building the huge port, airport, military structures, and plethora of ancillary buildings that would be necessary would be far from ideal.

  There were several islands at the mouth of the Amazon that fell along the line, but this was one of the most inhospitable places on earth, and none were far enough from the mainland to provide much protection anyway. Indonesia had a host of islands that would fit the bill, but they were all densely populated and tightly squeezed. And the population in question was not famed for hospitality to foreigners, the pirate raids in this region falling second only to the famous pirate alley off the coast of Somalia.

  So that left one small, rocky island, little more than a vacation resort, off the coast of the African island nation of Sao Tome e Principe.

  And that brought them to this man:

  “Good Afternoon, Mr. President,” said the president of the United States, and the comment was quickly translated into the native Portuguese of their guest’s home.

  The man being escorted into the auspicious office had a solid look of calm on his face, glued there by a strong paste of confusion and concern at the sudden overtures his office had received to visit the US. Though he was in theory the head of sovereign nation, the president of Sao Tome e Principe held sway over the second smallest nation in Africa, with only the tiny and dispersed nation of the Seychelles having a smaller population.

  Not that the people of Fradique de Menezes’ country were not proud, and prosperous even. But with a smaller population than the Upper West Side of Manhattan, one could see why the president did not often consider himself a member of the world’s political elite.

  Formalities were exchanged, introductions were made, pleasantries bandied. As the toothy smiles faded, Jim Hacker took his cue and, through a translator, began to delicately guide the meeting down its winding path. He did not immediately start with financial statements or overtures of support for the various aspects of Menezes’s burgeoning economy, but they got there relatively quickly. As the conversation veered down this avenue, it soon became clear to all that this was not simply an opening of relations between these wildly different nations.

  The Sao Tome premier started to suspect something of the true nature of the meeting when the secretary of state stepped in and reiterated a point about a ‘mutually beneficial relationship;’ but still he did not really understand the full scale of the discussion until they started to talk about what they could ‘offer.’

  When numbers in excess of his nation’s GDP started being discussed, his mind began to swim, searching for some source or reason in the sudden outpouring of generosity. Words like ‘cooperative facilities’ and ‘base of operations’ were being used, and he sensed that here lay the true price for the help being offered. But mentions of a national highway and an international port and allusions to new schools and a modernized telephone network were so far beyond the normal talk of subsidies and loosely termed loans that he was caught up in the heady promise of it all.

  After a while, though, he held up his hands and stopped the conversation. The men stopped talking, and waited with polite smiles, these men with untold power and influence waiting on his opinion with bated breath.

  In his native Portuguese, Fradique asked the first completely direct and honest question of the day, “Gentlemen, Mr. President, your talk is enticing indeed, but I cannot help the feeling that maybe we are skirting the real conversation here. I think, perhaps, that you do not talk of exactly what you desire from us. May I ask, please, that someone clearly describes what, precisely, you would like in return for all this very generous support?”

  The room was silent a moment, and then the British Foreign Secretary thought of a parallel that could help their cause. Sitting forward, he took the lead. With a nod and a hesitant look from his American colleagues, he said, “Mr. President, how much do you know of the history of the island of Hong Kong?”

  The man’s blank look at the translation which he then received prompted the British man to continue, “Years ago, the Chinese and British came to an agreement. The British wanted a port in the Far East, and the Chinese wanted a way of opening up relations with the West without giving up too much of their sovereignty.

  “So Great Britain ‘leased’ an unused patch of land on the coast near a deserted island, from which to maintain their growing and prosperous relationship with the nation of China. A relationship that thrives even to this day, to the great advantage of both parties. Even after the lease ended, China continued to benefit from the massive investment the British empire had made in the tiny plot of land.

  “So,” the British minister adjusted himself so he could look directly into the eyes of the foreign premier, then went on, “what we would like to explore is the possibility of an arrangement not nearly as widespread, but just as profitable to Sao Tome e Principe as that relationship. We want the rights to develop a small, almost uninhabited island off your coast, and a small portion of the nearby mainland, into a small but modern commercial port that will employ many members of the nearby community and bring significant and ongoing income to your nation. The port would be divided into two sections, one for commercial use by the influx of companies that will come with the surge of investment, and another for military use to supply the small island with what it needs to function.”

  The president of Sao Tome sat back and crossed his fingers. Once upon a time there had been frequent talks with many European, American, and even Russian envoys about establishing military bases on Sao Tome island or its less inhabited sister island Principe. But adverse political pressure had always stifled the plans, and in the end most countries had always been more interested in stopping others from establishing a base than actually building one themselves.

  But since the end of the cold war interest had flagged, and with it economic support, and even at its height nothing of this scale had ever been proposed. The president considered his options. His time
in office had been filled with propaganda and demagoguery, just like his predecessors’. There was rarely anything a person could do in four years that would appreciably improve the lives of his constituents, at least not in comparison with the preposterous campaign claims they were all forced to make. But this. This was different. This was very appreciable indeed, and it would no doubt be very beneficial for his constituents, if it was done correctly. But he kept his face placid, trying to maintain his bargaining position. He would try to take these wealthy Westerners for all he could get.

  Jim, Neal, and the various powerful politicians in the room watched the other man think. They all looked pensive and humble, but every one of them saw the moment they had him. He started to tell them his conditions, and how he would not compromise the needs of his people. But the very fact that numbers were starting to be discussed told them it was no longer a question of if, but how much.

  On the small island in question there was actually only a lone resort, until recently owned by the only residents of Ilhéu das Rolas. A resort that, coincidentally, had just been purchased by a CIA cover company operating out of Nigeria. And so a slice of the compensation they were discussing would end up coming back to them anyway, after President Menezes and his cronies had taken their share, of course.

  And so it went. The United States and Great Britain entered negotiations proper for the first operational site of an equatorial space elevator and the massive infrastructure that would be needed to support it.

  Chapter 13: Calling Card

  It would take another two days for all of her systems to come to full power, but Lana decided it was time. She had reached a point where she was capable of beginning her new mission. As dusk fell on Slocomb, Alabama, Lana Wilson counted the minutes, then the seconds, until the moonless night would be dark enough.