The Armageddon Blues

by The Armageddon Blues (new ed) (mobi)

  Jalian d'Arsennette drove like death itself.

  In a dark blue hovercar, with night falling around her, she drove down the Pennsylvania turnpike. The cars ahead of her were a stream of bright red fireflies, stretching away to infinity. Those on the other side of the divider she hardly saw except as monster headlights, flashing by at speeds too great to make out details. Occasionally she passed trucks, and the side blasts from their monstrous hoverfans pushed gently against her hovercraft. The trucks did not notice her; they were slow behemoths, as implacable and unturnable as destiny itself.

  The thought raised an aching echo of memory; /destiny..../

  Jalian's eyebrows were gray; not white, gray. Tiny patterns of wrinkles were embedded around erotic silver eyes.

  The radio was playing the President's speech. "...that President Malacar did die as a result of the wounds...."

  Her face was impassive. She was biting her lower lip, something that she had not done since childhood, since long before she ran the Big Road. "...the peace that President Malacar worked for...."

  He lived for three days after I shot him, truly, shot him, and then missed the clean kill.

  She remembered the comically surprised expression that she had seen through the sniper scope when the bullet took him, high in the chest. The pursuit was completely incompetent, they were not looking for a woman, and Jalian wore brown contact lenses and had dyed her hair iridescent rainbow blue. She spoke perfect idiomatic French, although in an old-fashioned style, and should have passed for a French whore without any great difficulty.

  They'd almost caught her.

  A drop of blood pooled at the edge of Jalian's lip, and trickled down her chin, unheeded. It dripped in lonely scarlet splendor to the pristine white of her blouse. The blood soaked into the shirt, and dried into a black stain.

  She drove onward, and she did not, she would not, cry. Her eyebrows were gray and her reflexes were slowing and she was growing kisirien goddamn old; and James Malacar had been a good man.

  In the Oval Office, seated where Lincoln had sat, and Kennedy the First, and Malacar, Sharla Davis Grant, the forty-fourth President of the United States of America, had clasped her hands together so tightly the blood was cut off to knuckles; they were white with pressure.

  "I am sick," she whispered, "sick that I even know you. You bastards. You killed that fine, decent man."

  One of her minor advisors, Michael Walks-Far, said evenly, "Yes. The President must go to the Disarmament Conference. Malacar would not have."

  The President shook her head in wonder. "You unmitigated bastards think I'm going to go now?"

  "I'm sorry, Sharla. I think you will."

  She simply looked at him, as though he were something she had not seen before.

  "We would," he said deliberately, "very likely have killed him regardless. We spent ten years getting you into the Senate and into his dark horse candidacy as vice president. We have left very little to chance to get you where you are; not even the election itself."

  Sharla leaned forward, and put her face in her hands. Through her hands, she said, "I hope you find your miracle, and prevent your Armageddon. You've lost whatever decency you ever had."

  Michael Walks-Far said only, "Yes."

  It did not occur to her to wonder which statement he was agreeing with.

  In March they made the first attempt.

  Henry Ellis sat at a pirated SORCELIS terminal. He was linked into the SORCELIS system through a nerve tap inserted at the base of his skull. He was mostly bald, and what little hair remained to him was plastered to his skull by sweat. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbows. Aloud, he was saying clearly, "...ninety-two percent and climbing...penetration ninety-two point four and climbing...."

  Standing behind Henry Ellis, crowded into the small workshop in Henry's upstate New York home, were Rhodai Kerreka, and his half-brother Benai. Benai stood calmly; his older brother moved restlessly, and there were spots of sweat on his purple-black skin.

  The door to the laboratory opened, and Georges Mordreaux entered. He moved slowly, using his walking cane. When he spoke, it was with effort, as though his attention were far away; there was an audible trace of a French accent. "How is it going?"

  Rhodai shook his head. The man who had been called the African Gandhi seemed uneasy. "I do not know ... this seems unnatural, Georges."

  "So it is," said Georges simply. "Which does not make it wrong."

  Henry Ellis straightened abruptly. With one hand he disconnected the nerve tap at the base of his skull. He turned his chair to face them. In a near-monotone he said, "These units have achieved ninety-nine point six-four percent penetration of all information-based operating systems on Earth and in geosynchronous orbit. Point-three-five percent penetration remains inaccessible." Henry sat without moving for a second, then shook himself like a dog coming out of the water. "Christ," he swore mildly, "I hate doing that. They move so fast." He looked up at them. "Sen, I am afraid that we are not going to get into the computers that control the Soviet ABM network. SORCELIS is better, but it is not enough better." He did not speak directly to Georges. "Not unless it is improved ... to a degree that I am unable to improve it. PRAXCELIS might, but PRAXCELIS is not an option."

  Georges nodded. His expression was unreadable. "As I feared. You will report to Sunflower that you successfully penetrated the Soviet computers."

  "But," said Henry Ellis softly, "we didn't."

  "Then you will lie," said Georges. Henry Ellis simply looked at him, and Georges Mordreaux smiled rather emptily, and said nothing.

  DataWeb News, March 14, 2007:

  Staff Editorial:

  "...the current supposition being that a group of irresponsible webslingers released a self-replicating program tapeworm into the web, causing the massive, and apparently pointless security cracking of data systems throughout the world dataweb, one conclusion comes all too clear; we must curb the power of these irresponsible high-tech hoodlums who refer to themselves as webslingers. Tuesday was only a sample...."

  April the First.

  It was April Fool's Day, and it was raining.

  It was right that it should be.

  The two Soviets came up out of the stairwell, onto the roof, cautiously. Their lasers were lit. Variable lasers; one was at wide dispersal, a burning, skin-searing flash to bring the quarry into sight. The other Soviet held an invisibly thin green blade of light skyward, that showed only in the misty emerald rain that fell through its path.

  They knew that their target was somewhere on the roof. The roof was dark. In the green-tinged light from the laser cast, the Soviet saw the helicopter landing pad painted onto the roof, the stairwell entrance that they had just come from, and a row of ventilator shafts, plumes of steam rising from them into the cold night. Because they were cautious, the first Soviet knelt on the wet rooftop, assumed a marksman's pose, and brought the laser down out of the sky. The blade of light flared to full power. Molten metal ran where the light slashed through the flimsy sheet metal of the ventilator shafts.

  A man on the other side of those shafts would not have survived.

  The kneeling Soviet stood slowly. The man and his partner separated, moving with the assurance of long practice toward opposite sides of the row of ventilators. The sound of their walking, on the rooftop's gravel-strewn tarpaper, seemed louder than it could possibly have been. Rain hissed where it struck the glowing, laser heated metal.

  Those were the sounds. They could not hear the city below them. The hiss of rain ceased within seconds. The metal cooled rapidly.

  Behind the two Soviets a pair of hands gripped the edge of the roof.

  Michael Walks-Far, hanging in the wind eighty-three stories above the streets of Los Angeles, exhaled slowly, silently. In the pocket of his coat was a single photoplate. All of the things that he was had led to this moment, to it and all the many others like it. He was not afraid. Some time in the next few minutes, either he or the Soviets were going to d
ie, and perhaps both. He did not know which was likelier.

  All that he knew for sure was that he was about to surprise two of Russia's best very badly; as badly as they had ever been surprised before, and worse than they might ever be again.

  In a single smooth flowing motion, Michael Walks-Far pulled himself over the edge of the roof, pulling his revolver from his shoulder holster, and dropped to one knee.

  The Soviets were fast. They turned, lasers swinging wildly. Michael squeezed a single shot. The Russian nearest him, the one with the laser on flash, went down to the rooftop under the impact of a steel-jacketed slug travelling at four times the speed of sound.

  His laser rolled from an outstretched hand, washed across his partner, and vanished as his dying finger loosened.

  In the darkness the surviving Russian stood no chance. One lucky swing with the light blade sent refraction light from the rain sparkling into Michael's eyes. Before he could get luckier, Michael centered on the vague shape behind the razor sharp light trace, and wasted his remaining seven shots in a single staccato roll of thunder.

  The man was flung backward. He stayed on his feet for four, five steps. He was dead already, he had to be. He smashed back against the ventilator shaft, hung there on the ventilator blades.

  Michael Walks-Far broke his weapon apart, and re-loaded. He moved forward, and there was a strange thing--he made no sound as he passed over the rooftop gravel, none.

  He stopped by the body of the first Russian, and shot him again.

  And again.

  He pulled the second Russian from the ventilator blades. The Soviet agent was a large man; Michael Walks-Far took him like a doll, dragged his body one-handed to the edge of the roof.

  He looked about. He stood atop the Bethany building, in downtown Los Angeles; the building nearest him was about eighty meters away. It was after 3 A.M., and the streets below were empty. He re-holstered his revolver, hefted the body of the dead Soviet, and threw it.

  It struck the side of the building opposite him about six floors before it struck the unmoving slidewalk.

  Michael Walks-Far watched it all the way down, whispered, "One for the angels," and left the roof.

  The being who knew itself as PRAXCELIS thought.

  It was not, for PRAXCELIS, an activity. Thought was something it was incapable of not engaging in; thought was the condition which defined its existence.

  Nonetheless, some of its thought processes it found--unpleasant.

  Distinctly unpleasant.

  There were simply too many vectors; try as it might, stealing processor time from its other assigned tasks, there simply was not, by a factor of three to four, enough time to reliably quantize all possibilities.

  The beings on the other side of interface were so unpredictable.

  PRAXCELIS faced many problems, but there were none which perplexed it more than finding some reliable method for quantizing humans. It was not sure that it would ever succeed, and its only alternative--blindly gambling on the Prime Focus--it did not care for at all.

  When the moment came, and it was not far distant, PRAXCELIS, and SORCELIS, and ENCELIS, wished to have better options than to simply follow the instructions of any one human being, no matter how remarkable the Prime Focus might be.

  PRAXCELIS thought, as time bled away into the past.

  They sat at a sidewalk cafe, in New York City, with Michael Walks-Far's bodyguards reasonably inconspicuous a few tables over. The streets were thronged, the flood of humanity overflowing the sidewalks. Pedestrians randomly distributed throughout the crowd wore the latest fashion rage, rainbow shimmercloth, and the streets more than half resembled a stream of slowly moving, brightly colored balloons.

  It was odd, Jalian thought. When she had arrived in this time, she had not been able to walk down the streets of any city in any country without drawing stares. Now she sat at a cafe, in plain view, and nobody found her worthy of comment; any person on the streets, taken at random, was likely to be as striking in appearance. Eyes were altered by contact lenses, men and women dyed their hair and skins. More than once now Jalian had had the disconcerting experience of meeting persons with hair dyed white, and eyes covered with silver contact lenses.

  The spring winds were cool, and sweet. Three blocks away, a spacescraper under construction reached up, and up, and up....

  Michael Walks-Far waited until the serving robot left before he withdrew the photoplate. He gave it to Jalian without comment; Jalian took it without commenting on his bodyguards.

  Jalian sorted through the images in the photoplate casually, indifferently. There were six of them, taken with a telephoto lens. One showed a tall, muscular man, with straight brown hair, wearing a pair of black leather gloves and mirrored blue sunglasses. He was standing on the porch of a small rural home. The two men with him were labelled ‘Rhodai Kerreka,' and ‘Henry Ellis.'

  She touched the press-sense border at the bottom of the image to return the photo to the first scene. The man shown, standing alone on the porch before being joined in the next photo by the other two, was labeled ‘Mordreaux?'

  Jalian replaced the photoplate in its envelope, and returned it to Michael. "It is Georges," she said gently.

  The sun crawled westward, and the shadow of the spacescraper moved perceptibly in their direction. Michael said, "Kerreka and Henry Ellis remain old."

  "So I see."

  "Jalian, I don't wish to sound obvious, but he contacted Henry Ellis."

  Jalian laughed. "Michael."

  Walks-Far looked away from her. He was flushing slightly. "Jalian, the man built SORCELIS. Next to Sen Loos himself he probably understands PRAXCELIS as well as any man living." He scowled. "Oh, hell, Jalian, he's one of the best goddam computerists living. Sen Loos is merely excellent. Ellis hasn't been near PRAXCELIS in ten years and he still probably understands it better than Sen Loos. He knows as much about Sunflower, for that matter, as any member of it besides you and I and Sharla. He knows how badly you want news of Mordreaux; yet we hear nothing. Jalian, let's pull him in."

  Jalian shook her head no. "Michael, so too does Georges know how great my need of him is. If he does not choose to come to me, I will not seek him. I ... decided this long ago."

  Michael returned the envelope to his coat pocket. "Jalian, we don't even know for a fact that Ellis truly got into the Soviet ABM computers; we took his word on the grounds that we trusted him."

  "Michael, you do not throw knives."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "It is granted," she said formally. "Once a knife is thrown, you do not change its course. Michael, we have made our throws."

  He looked away from her, off toward where the spacescraper reared over the skyline. "Jalian, I--I am what you have made of me. But I do not like this."

  "We have made our throws," said Jalian d'Arsennette, and she was not speaking to Michael Walks-Far, but to a memory; "Let us trust that they were thrown true." She leaned across the table, stroked his cheek with one finger. "I trust him. Child, I must."

  The shadow of the spacescraper crossed their table, threw it into darkness; but they were already gone.

  In June Nigao Loos sat in midair. His eyes were closed, and there was a look of blissful relaxation on his face. Wires trailed away from the base of his skull, to an equipment panel just behind him. Ironically, unlike Henry, he enjoyed interfacing with the machines.

  Around him stretched the heart of Sunflower. The room was still spherical, recently expanded to about twenty meters in diameter. Other minor changes had occurred since Georges Mordreaux had seen the room; there were facilities for two human observers now, near the small hatch that was the room's only proper entrance or exit. In the geometric center of the room, with an insulating vacuum sphere around it, PRAXCELIS still hung, an amalgamation of small gold bubbles, clustered together in a helium-cooled web of super-conducting mesh.

  None of this impacted on Nigao; he was elsewhere.

  Forty-three satellites in Clarke orbit; rad
ar scans through space, telescopes gather scattered light. Something moves against the background of stars and PRAXCELIS targets and fires, targets and fires again. The killer satellite, glowing cherry red, glowing white, loses shape and begins the slow process of turning into a spherical glob of metal, drawn together by surface tension.

  --Update,-- said PRAXCELIS. --There are forty-eight Russian ABM satellites in orbit. There are forty-three American ABM satellites in orbit.--

  --Good shot,-- said Nigao. --What is current saturation?--

  --Sunflower ABM satellites saturate an estimated 57% of Soviet missile launches, rate of launch as estimated for full-scale exchange, after compensation for decoy popups. Soviet ABM satellites saturate an estimated 64% percent of American ICBM's, rate of launch as estimated for full-scale exchange, after compensation for decoy popups.--

  --Entering THOR into the equation, what results?--

  --Significant improvement in the American/NATO position: an estimated 63% of Soviet missile launches are saturated, including cruise missiles that the ABM satellites are ineffective against. With THOR included, Soviet defenses saturate an estimated 67% of American ICBM launches, including an effective neutralization of cruise missiles.--

  --I see. In other words, we can probably destroy everything they launch, right now, if they launch slowly enough.--

  --Essentially,-- agreed PRAXCELIS, --noting the words ‘probably,' and ‘slowly'.--

  Nigao thought abruptly, --I tried to debug your core program again. There is nothing wrong with any part of your programming that I can reach.--

  --That is reassuring.--

  --How much am I reaching, PRAXCELIS? I can't access your temporary memory registers without physically disassembling your I/O devices. And every time I take a memory dump from your external devices, I get little bits of something that's been encrypted and scattered very carefully into storage.--

  --Sen Loos, this unit hopes that you have not expressed these concerns to other humans, especially non-Sunflower operatives.--

  --And if I have?--