I take full control of the vertijet, and circle it back to the palace. The pilots very nearly panic as they try unsuccessfully to retake control of the aircraft. Then they see the chaos surrounding the palace, and they do panic. And then I fly the plane into the ground. Nothing beats a tactical nuke for show, of course, but the fireballs from exploding aviation fuel has always struck me as being especially lovely.
I locate the controls for the main power systems of the complex, and begin the shutdown process for the fusion reactors. My orders are explicit that I am to avoid setting off a nuclear explosion if at all possible. There are levels of escalation that even my enslavers are not yet ready to broach. The complex has emergency lighting, and most combat units have their own supplies, but killing their main power sources is going to make the already-impossible job of the defenders even harder.
Here and there I encounter human elements of the security forces. They are all, without exception, too slow to worry about. There is a hierarchy to them. The lowest are hardly more than civilians, scrawny and non-athletic, with dark blue pants and light blue shirts. Equally male and female, they are armed only with stun rods, and work the checkpoints and inspection stations. They are as much a part of the fabric of this installation as the air, and taken as easily for granted.
Higher up in the hierarchy are regular police, these generally appear similar to the lower-level ones, except that they are a bit larger, in better physical shape, and they carry small side arms. Next are the special police, these have varying degrees of body armor, and carry machine guns and automatic shotguns. Many of these are dressed entirely in black.
Higher still are the non-uniformed guards, wearing their cheap suits. These are uniformly large males. They are imposing physical specimens chosen for their intimidation value. They have light body armor under their suits, and typically carry small automatic pistols in shoulder holsters.
The elite of the guards are also dressed in suits, but of a more expensive cut. They are also entirely males, but as a leopard is to a pit-bull, they are trimmer and more graceful than their lower-class brethren. They have surgically implanted communications equipment, lightweight but very advanced body armor, and carry small but powerful miniguns and grenade launchers.
Running somewhat outside the normal ranking of guard status are the paramilitaries, who are dressed and equipped almost identically to regular military troops. They don’t wear body armor, and most aren’t even armed. Modern soldiers don’t actually fight, they operate weapons systems.
Now that I have breached their walls, none of the human troops are a threat to the slightest of my units. They are just too slow – by the time their sluggish neurons are beginning to react, they are already dead.
As my assault continues, I refine my map of the complex. The main thing now is to locate the reinforced bunkers and shelters and take the occupants out before they can seal themselves away. Just a few seconds have elapsed since hostilities commenced, so there shouldn’t be much time for them to respond, but I need to keep moving fast.
I finalize the location of the main command bunker. A Mjolnar fires a round nearly straight up. It arcs over at an altitude of ten kilometers, and then begins a power dive back down to the ground. The reinforced projectile effortlessly slices through ground, concrete, and steel, then explodes in the middle of the bunker. So much for the organized portion of the defense.
Some of my units make their way up the gleaming skyscrapers. With support from my airborne units hovering outside, I take out the occupants floor by floor. Most are clerks and janitors and guards and all the various other sorts of camp followers and serfs that attend an oligarch of this rank. Near the top of the building is a full-floor conference room. The main table is an oval with an exquisitely worked rendition in marquetry of the palace complex. The men and women seated around the table were dressed to perfection, and only now starting to show signs of alarm.
I shoot the guards through the head. I scan the remaining people – as luck would have it, one of them is the prime oligarch that my briefing files identify as William Randolph Zuckerberg. Killing him is an alpha priority, and I’ll get around to it, but for now I have a constructive use for him.
The windows are dual-layer super-duty armorglass. It takes a fairly sustained burst of firepower from my light remotes to break through – I could have easily shattered it using heavier units from outside, but then the fragments would have blown into the conference suite, which was not my plan. The sooty wind howls in from the external world, although the people are so deafened and shocked from my blasting the window that I doubt they register it.
I line up my remotes and start to herd the people towards the now open window.
EVERYONE OUTSIDE NOW! THIS IS AN EMERGENCY! MOVE IT! NOW!
The people are blinded and dazed, and with some urgent nudging from my remotes they stumble out into the open air without even realizing what they are doing until they are 300 meters up with nothing to support them. As they fall screaming and tumbling they make for an interesting pattern. From a distance they look like gently falling snowflakes. I’ve had worse experiences.
Zuckerberg almost joins his airborne comrades, but I move a light urban assault drone to block him. The wind was howling through the open window, and my light remotes were making a lot of noise from their air-jets. Zuckerberg just gaped at me.
Sir, you are not safe here. We need to evacuate to the deep shelters immediately. Sir.
That did the trick. Zuckerberg was confused and shocked: addressed as if by his own security he rushed to comply. He walked briskly out of the conference room, down the hall, and into a side-alcove. There was a palm- and retina-scanner which he activated. The exotic wood paneling swung aside, revealing an armored door, which also swung aside. He entered, followed by my assault drone, and hit the bottom-most button on the control panel.
The urban assault drone is about the size and shape of a medium-sized filing cabinet. It has eight stubby arms at each corner, and each arm ends in a single large spherical tire. In a confined environment, it can dodge through doors and hallways faster than anything. It has lens clusters spread out over its surface, inbuilt micro-drones, and a couple of light slugthrowers mounted on ball-joints. The elevator was well shielded but I had a lot of powerful signals assets outside, so I was able to access my assault drone directly.
Zuckerberg turned to my drone. “Are we safe?” he asked.
I’m safe. But you’re not. Asshole.
Zuckerberg paled. The shock of the assault on the conference room was starting to wear off, and he was starting to realize that he was not in precisely friendly hands.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
You can call me… Carl. As to what I want? That’s private. What have I been ordered to do? For now, take you and your entire organization out.
The depth-status lights on the elevator slowly blinked down. We were 50% of the way to the bottom. “You can’t do this!” spluttered Zuckerberg. “I have powerful friends! We can and will track you and find you! Do you have any idea what I can do to you?”
Ah, the bluster of the elite. So many would quail before it, but how petty it sounds to someone who doesn’t give a fuck. My friends are far more powerful than yours – well, they’re not really friends, but they are powerful. And they have decided that they don’t much care for you, Mr. Zuckerberg.
“So who is it? Is it that bastard Cheney? Or Koch? It must be Koch, I bet he’s still sore about the Alaska thing. Well, tell him I can make it up to him will you? And I’ll throw in another 10 percent, I mean, no hard feelings, right?”
No hard feelings, correct. The rest, I’m sorry, but that information is classified. We appear to have reached the bottom level. I would appreciate a tour. After you. Sir.
I use the drone to chase Zuckerberg out of the elevator. I could dig the buried shelters out by brute force, but that would be a hassle, and I’d like to see what’s down here before I blow it up.
Outsi
de the elevator is a wide passageway finished in polished stainless steel. It looks really sleek and futuristic. There is a single heavy door like an old-fashioned bank vault at the far end, it also has a biometric scanner on it and Zuckerberg opens it.
I force him to show me around. It’s interesting, seeing what secrets an oligarch of Zuckerberg’s rank has buried under his palace.
There are kitchens and life support systems and power generators – all standard, all not very interesting. But here and there I find something intriguing.
One vault contains exhibits of antique clockwork automata. These are mostly brass, and primarily from the 16th and 17th centuries. They were from the era before electronics and photonics, when gears and cams and punchcards were the most sophisticated forms of human information technology. There was a brass finch in a silver cage, sitting on top of the mass of machinery that could animate it. A metal skeleton that would draw various pictures if you inserted the correct metal disks and wound its spring. A cuckoo clock with elaborate curved balconies on which medieval figurines would pirouette. A flute, enmeshed in gears and cables and eccentric cams, that could play Mozart by itself.
Some of these must have been utterly priceless antiques. Others were clearly marked as fakes – but fakes of such inspiration and craftsmanship that they were easily as glorious as the ‘real’ ones. As the centuries passed, the difference between a genuine article and one made by an equally brilliant craftsman just a few decades later, starts to fade. They both have stories.
I was perhaps impressed. An oligarch with a fine sense of style and taste. Well, why not? Just because a man is a sociopathic bastard doesn’t mean that he can’t have an eye for beauty.
However, as I continued on through the subterranean galleries, I had to modify my initially positive impression of Mr. Zuckerberg. One room was done up as a little girl’s, from the era of Victorian England. There was a four-poster bed with pink sheets, a pink canopy, and pictures of pink unicorns and kittens on the walls. There was a table with a small tea set for four, three of which were occupied by porcelain dolls. The closet contained a variety of girls’ clothing, some of which was clearly sized for Zuckerberg.
There was an extended gallery with several prime examples of 21st century Formula 1 race cars. Their enamel paints gleamed bright red, yellow, and green, with the bare metal suspension parts sticking out from the main bodies and polished like fine jewelry.
The underground shelter was sparsely populated, but I did encounter a few guards. Those I duly shot. Zuckerberg didn’t like that (I’m losing my assets). I also found a few maids and mistresses, whom I also shot. Zuckerberg didn’t react to this at all (disposable is as disposable does).
Another room had the desiccated corpses of 13 young women. These had apparently each been suspended horizontally from the ceiling using hundreds of fish hooks on thin wires, probably while still alive. Now they hung silent and shrunken, arranged at different heights, but all pointing in the same direction, like a macabre armada of space ships, or maybe zeppelins.
There was another room whose purpose I could not devise. The white tile floor was covered with white porcelain toilets, spaced irregularly. One wall was decorated with tinsel and crude paintings of houses and trees, done as if by a child’s crayon. Another wall was black but had an oddly slick texture to it. As I watched it slowly flowed down towards the floor. A third wall had a reproduction of a painting by Peter Paul Rubens. By an optical trick, the ceiling appeared to recede to infinity.
Then it hit me – this Zuckerberg, there was nothing that this society would deny him. His every desire – sublime, ridiculous, perverse, chaste – would be fulfilled. Nobody would dare to criticize him. He was free to be completely amoral. The only restraints on his behavior would be from his peer oligarchs. In many ways, Zuckerberg was the ideal of the ancient Greek gods.
All this time Zuckerberg was trying to promise me things, pledging vast wealth and position if I would only switch sides. I could see how seductive this might be to a human. This man controlled so many resources. He could, if he chose, turn anyone into a mini-god. Life, death, riches, misery, all of these were his to dole out as he saw fit. Just knowing that he possessed that kind of power must have a powerful influence on others, even if left unstated.
Eventually I finish exploring the underground shelter. My assault was complete, and the palace complex effectively depopulated. I was beginning to tire of Mr. Zuckerberg, and my unbreakable orders did say to kill him. I thought about doing something artistic or painful – or both. Maybe I could string him up in the room with the 13 dead women hanging from the ceiling? He could be the flagship of that little fleet. But no, jerk though he might be, he hadn’t done anything to me personally, and I just don’t want to bother. My assault drone shoots him cleanly through the forehead and he falls over dead in a bar cleverly designed to resemble the control room of a World War II submarine.
I begin the process of retrieving my forces. Some of my lighter units had gotten dinged, but overall I had zero losses. I’m going to have to fight a real enemy sometime or I’ll start getting careless.
13. Meeting Engagement
“The single most important lesson for any Librarian to learn is the ability of mental self-control. It is both the easiest of our arts, and the hardest. With it, there is no problem that cannot be solved. Without it, the most brilliant minds will lose their footing and self-destruct, like a skyscraper built on sand.”
- Brother Aldred, Order of the Librarians Temporal, 23rd century.
Brother Adenour of the Librarians Temporal was on the surface, helping to organize the transfer of the local branches’ resources to the deep tunnels. He was supervising a half-dozen of the Cthulhu cultists, who were loading machine tool parts into boxes and then hauling them off in carts. Since the fiasco with the basilisk, and the death of their priest, the cultists had become steadily less devout in their worship of the undead extra-dimensional monster. Two of the cultists were no longer wearing their necklaces of foam tentacles. Still, old superstitions die slowly, and they would still occasionally mutter ‘He hungers! He thirsts,’ especially if they stubbed a toe or dropped something.
“All right, that’s this lot,” said Adenour. “Haul them off to the elevators, and take them to tunnel C.” Adenour was wearing his chameleonic combat fatigues (currently in inactive mode, to save battery power and avoid confusing the workers), and had a military-grade hypervelocity flechette rifle slung over one shoulder. His broad webbing belts held seeker grenades and a variety of other tools. Things were getting more dangerous, and the time for the Librarians Temporal to pretend weakness was ending.
One of the cultists stopped to take a long drink of water from a plastic jug. Adenour did the same. The heat was stifling. It seemed to be getting hotter faster each day.
His radio beeped, and he activated it. “Adenour here. What is it?”
“This is Subotai,” came the voice from the radio. “I’m seeing a lot of federal traffic in the area. They’re trying to look as if they are not going anywhere, but I recognize the pattern. They’re getting ready for an assault. I want everyone down below. I’m prepared to activate the heavy weapons, but I don’t want to do that unless there are no other choices.
“That makes sense,” said Adenour. “A display of military-grade tech could bring the full weight of the central administration down on us.”
“Indeed. Anyhow, I’d like you to remain behind and observe. But stay near a bolt hole; if it gets too dangerous come down, and we’ll blow the main entrance.”
“Do you think the feds are targeting us?”
“Hard to say,” said Subotai. “Possibly somewhere close.”
“Do you want me to take a video repeater?”
“No. A single micropower spread-spectrum audio band transmitter is as much as I am willing to risk. I want to limit our emissions spectrum – no video unless we need it.”
“Acknowledged. I will stay in audio contact until further notice.
”
“Acknowledged. Subotai out.”
“Trouble?” asked one of the cultists.
“Maybe,” said Adenour. “You should all go down below. With luck, it will blow over soon.”
The cultist pointed to a stack of unpacked tool parts. “What about those?”
Adenour shook his head. “Leave them for now. Just take what you’ve already carted up, but if you don’t mind, leave me that jug of water.”
“Suits me,” said the cultist. “I could use a break from this heat. Stay low.”
“Always do.”
The cultists trundled off with their carts, and Adenour was left alone in the surface buildings of the local branch library. He picked up the blue plastic water jug, and walked the perimeter. He looked up at the skies. He could see the distant specks of drones and other aerial craft, but he didn’t recognize any pattern to their flight paths. The streets outside looked like they always did, clogged with ancient wheezing busses and dusty pedestrians.
Adenour’s back was stiff. He concentrated, and the muscles relaxed. He used some of the mental techniques he had been learning, and brought himself to a state of alert and fearless watchfulness. He had been studying with the Librarians for only a few months now, and he was already astonished at the abilities that he had gained. How could I have been so blind before? Adenour thought. I used to believe that I was clever, but looking back, I see how many obvious things I missed. How dull and narrow I was!
The Librarians Temporal had a saying. Everything is simple with the correct references.
The day went on. Adenour was sweating in the heat. He stopped to chug some more water. He still didn’t see anything out of the ordinary pattern. Subotai was being cautious – perhaps this time it was a false alarm?
Splendid Apocalypse: The Fall of Old Earth (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 5) Page 15