But hindsight was always 20/20 when it came to war.
When faced with the annihilation of one’s entire species, that was likely doubly true.
Sathorn pulled out a chair, lowering his weight to the leather seat.
He looked at Novak as he did and caught the old lizard staring at him, her eyes strangely lighter under the side-lighting of the oval-shaped room. He could have sworn her irises were dark brown before… brown, at least, maybe hazel. Why did they suddenly look blue?
She wore eyeglasses, which Sathorn always found strange.
No one needed eyeglasses in this day and age. Even poor people could get corrective surgery if they could prove it would allow them to remain employed, which just about anyone could, even the guy playing three-card-monte at the Port Authority bus terminal. Only the poorest of the poor wore those old relics, and that definitely wasn’t Chief Justice Novak.
Sathorn wondered if it was part of her old lady schtick, something meant to disarm, to make her seem grandmotherly and harmless. If so, it wasn’t working.
The eye color thing struck him as weird, but maybe it was just a trick of the light.
“Did something happen?” Sathorn kept his voice somber but polite, resting his arms on the cherry wood table. “What’s the meeting about?”
The old woman continued to stare at him.
Something about the blankness of that stare, or perhaps the utter lack of feeling he could sense in it, made him nervous.
Novak blinked even as he thought it, looking away.
“Yes,” she said. Leaning back, she adjusted the metal-frame glasses, giving him a grim smile. “…Something happened. The Chinese have issued another threat.”
Sathorn’s fingers clenched on the tabletop. “What do they want?”
Novak made a vague gesture, one Sathorn wasn’t sure how to interpret.
“What do you think?” she said, that faint German accent touching her syllables. “They want us to hand over the antidote. They believe the rumors put out by the Russians that we are hoarding some kind of vaccine for C2-77. They think we are refusing to share it with the rest of the world.”
Sathorn frowned. “There’s no truth to that, is there?”
He said it without thinking.
Even so, he was startled by the amused smile that ghosted the old lady’s lips.
“Why would you ask me that?” she said.
Sathorn decided to tell her the truth. He’d long believed that truth-telling begat truth-telling. People often knew instinctively when someone was lying to them, even if they chose to believe that lie for emotional or other reasons.
“One hears things,” he said. Leaning back so that the swivel joint in the chair squeaked, he smiled, mirroring her businesslike tone. “It occurred to me that if supplies were limited… assuming such a thing existed, of course… we might sit on it for awhile. We might wait on sharing it before we had the manufacturing capacity to begin production on a large scale, especially given the civil unrest it’s likely to provoke. Moreover, the Chinese have not been good allies to us in recent years––”
“Ah,” she said, smiling.
Meeting her gaze, he gave a loaded shrug.
“I suspect they would not be high on the list for distribution,” he said. “Not only because of Caine. Or even the attack on the White House. Or the death of our revered President Wellington. Although it’s a bit of an insult to our intelligence at this point that they still deny involvement in all three. Regardless of specifics, the lies have been numerous and unrepentant. And the acts of war have been unprecedented, at least in this century. We have any number of reasons to not want to share technology with China before we gifted it to others.”
Novak didn’t blink.
After a short pause, she gave him one of those half-smiles again.
“Well said,” she murmured. “And I agree. Although if you are right, that snubbing may come at a very high cost.”
“What cost is that?” Sathorn said. “What did they threaten?”
“Nuclear war,” Novak replied.
She said it like she’d said everything else, drumming her fingers on the table as she watched his face, as if gauging his reaction.
When Sathorn didn’t speak, Novak shrugged. The shrug was strange, and seemed to encompass her hand as much as her narrow shoulders.
Again, he thought he heard the trace of a German accent.
“They have threatened to bomb what remains of our cities, one by one, until we hand over this antidote they believe we are keeping from them,” Novak continued in her emotionless voice. “Our President may have no choice but to take extreme measures. Preemptively, perhaps. Perhaps within the next few days. A week at most.”
Sathorn felt his face lose every shred of its warmth.
His hands felt cold too.
He clenched his fingers in reflex, without looking away from Novak’s face. As much as he’d wanted Brooks to make a bold military statement in the wake of C2-77, he hadn’t really wanted it to be this particular statement. Not now. Hell, he’d figured the time for that was already hell and gone.
“Preemptively?” Fighting to get the saliva back into his mouth, Sathorn adjusted his seat, causing the leather to sigh. “As in––”
“They are deciding that now,” Novak said, still measuring him with her small eyes.
Sathorn looked away from her wrinkled face. He let his eyes focus on the screens spread around the upper third of the room in a flickering ring of real-time imagery.
“Will she make the decision today?” he said.
“I do not know,” Novak said, voice crisp. “But I suspect yes. She will. The bare bones of it, anyway. In fact, I suspect that decision has already been made.”
Sathorn looked away from the screens and back at her, not hiding his incredulity, but the old woman shocked him by smiling.
“Do not worry yourself,” she said. “We are quite safe here.”
“Do not…” He practically choked on the words. “It could mean extinction. Real extinction. Or were you planning on simply cloning the last few hundred of us down here?”
Her smile lingered, but that colder look returned to her eyes.
Sathorn’s gaze followed the strange muscle movements that rippled through her small body.
“Do you ever think maybe that is inevitable, anyway?” she said.
“What?” Sathorn let out a humorless laugh. “Extinction?”
“Yes,” she said.
At his silence, she gave him another of those small smiles.
“The human race seems to have been asking for such a thing for over a century at least,” she added. “…if not since its genetic inception.”
Staring at her, Sathorn felt a cold finger trail down his spine.
A darker suspicion crept over his mind.
Those weird eyes. The way she talked about human beings.
That fucking accent she tried to hide, that sounded even older than she looked, and she looked older than God.
The fact that she’d wormed her way into the highest corridors of power. The fact that no one seemed to be able to kick her out of the Oval Office, not even Brooks herself.
Maybe it really was all bullshit.
Maybe his pal in the NSA, Dworkin, was right. Dworkin had been drunk, of course. He’d also later claimed to be joking, but maybe he was right with what he’d said. Maybe the human race had been played by seers all along.
Maybe all the supposed controls––SCARB, the World Court, the Sweeps, all of it––were just a smokescreen built by seers to obscure who was really in charge.
Maybe it was just a comforting lie seers let humans tell themselves.
Nothing masked real power better than the illusion of control.
Even as he thought it, Sathorn knew that if he was right, he would never leave this room alive.
When he met the old woman’s gaze, he saw that same knowledge reflected in those blue-gray irises. The smile still toyed at the edges of h
er nonexistent lips, but the eyes remained shrewd, assessing. Animal-like.
Reptilian.
Sathorn imagined he saw a flicker of curiosity there, as if she found it interesting that he would have put the pieces of her identity together now, when it was entirely too late. Sathorn watched her look at him and found himself thinking, it was over.
It really was over this time… and not just for him.
The human race was going the way of the dinosaur.
As the thought struck him, he let out a low chuckle.
No humor lived in the sound at all. It came out strangled, choked.
Still chuckling, he looked down at his thigh, where he now held his sidearm clutched in his hand. He watched in fascination as he lifted the gun out of his lap. He didn’t send the command to do it. The arm and hand were no longer his.
He imagined he could almost see the puppet strings as Chief Justice Novak caused him to jam the barrel of his Beretta M9 against his own temple. He felt his fingers tighten around the handle, his finger slip into place by the trigger.
Again, without him willing it, he smiled.
She returned his smile, but the coldness never left those stone-like eyes.
“You know something, Novak?” Sathorn said.
He struggled to say even that much, forcing the words out between clenched teeth.
She inclined her head, a seer’s motion of acknowledgment.
Now that he could see it, he couldn’t unsee it. She looked so alien to him that he couldn’t imagine anyone believing her to be human, not if they really looked at her.
She looked amused now, as cold as the coldest merc iceblood he’d ever met in the field, back in the days when Sathorn was a Ranger and fighting in the desert. Most of those icebloods got tagged with wet work for a reason, versus sitting in a room somewhere, feeding intel to agents on the ground who pulled the trigger for them.
Most of them were ice cold killers––born murderers.
They got off on it. Killing and fucking.
It was all they knew. It was all they were good for.
Then again, maybe that’s what it took to survive. Maybe that’s why their race would inherit the Earth and the human race would rot from this fucking disease.
Those blue-gray eyes grew a touch colder.
“Yes?” she said. Her voice was crisp, strongly accented. “What is it, Mr. Secretary? You had something you wished to say to me?”
Sathorn fought to smile.
That time, he couldn’t.
“You really do look like a fucking lizard,” he managed.
If she replied to his words, Sathorn never got to hear it.
The shot echoed in the small room, and Sathorn slumped to the cherry wood table.
11
NORAD
“WHAT DO YOU mean, he shot himself?” Brooks frowned, staring at the woman in uniform standing in front of her. “Are you kidding me? Sathorn? Why?”
The woman flushed, her eyes betraying her discomfort.
She didn’t move out of her at-attention position, or lower her gaze.
“I don’t know that, sir,” she said. “I can only give you the physical disposition of the act itself. His body was found in Conference Room B, sir, in the Executive Wing. He seems to have disabled the surveillance before he did it, but we have no reason to suspect foul play. He had carbon residue on his fingers and his fingerprints were the only ones found on––”
“Yeah, okay, okay.” Brooks waved her off, grimacing. “Who found him?”
“Chief Justice Novak, sir.”
“Novak,” she muttered. “Figures.”
“Sir?”
Exhaling, Brooks averted her gaze, placing her hands on her hips.
President Moira Aisha Brooks––“Moi” to her friends, of which there were precious few these days and “Moisha” to her parents, who had been confirmed dead two months previous along with most of the people Brooks grew up with in that dingy suburb of Detroit––grimaced.
She didn’t comment, however.
Instead she turned from the Marine altogether, looking over the sunken floor command center from the catwalk balcony where she stood.
“Sir––” the Marine began.
“Fine. Okay.” Brooks lowered her head, fighting not to swear under her breath. “Thank you for telling me, Reynolds. You’re dismissed.”
The woman hesitated, then saluted smartly.
As she turned on her heel to walk away, Brooks called after her, “…Keep me informed if anything new comes to light around it. Anything at all, Marine.”
The woman saluted her again, clicking her heels.
With the Marine captain gone, Brooks exhaled more heavily, grinding her teeth as she gripped the balcony railing in both hands, so tightly her knuckles whitened. The teeth grinding was a new habit she’d picked up too, sometime in the last six or so months.
Now she was doing it awake, in addition to while she slept.
Sathorn, a suicide? What next?
She fought to think, staring at the main intelligence board on the far side of the room.
The command center stretched into the distance below her, far enough to suffer from mild perspective distortion. It was huge, maybe half the size of a football field with a ceiling that stretched three stories high. Concentric half-rings of monitors filled much of the empty space of the main floor, culminating in a platform stage with a long conference table that seated around thirty people. The table stood directly under a wall-length feed monitor built directly into the wall.
That screen currently showed a map of the world.
Smaller screens jutted out of various locations, displaying 3D imagery in more or less real time, via a series of feeds rotating through different satellites, as well as whatever remained of their on-the-ground surveillance. Up on the dais, the screens projected full virtual, three-dimensional environments with a single impulse from Brooks’ implant.
It felt like being in the real place. Down to the smell of sweat and blood, urine and smoke, burning bodies and rotting plant matter, it felt like she was really there.
The military bigwigs called the command center “the Arena.”
The name always evoked gladiators in Brooks’ mind, people clawing and fighting one another to the death.
Which, come to think of it, was more or less apt.
What remained of her presidency lived here now, deep below what had once been NORAD, or North American Aerospace Defense Command. The underground complex was expanded heavily over the years, something Brooks hadn’t realized until the crisis with C2-77.
The place was a damned city of its own now, or near enough.
Her eyes focused back on the screens, shifting from one hot spot to the next.
Of course, none of those screens showed images from what had come to be called the “blackout” cities. Their cameras and satellites remained completely inaccessible to anyone inside Brooks’ administration. Brooks had seen the list of those cities so many times now she nearly had it memorized:
Dubai. Hong Kong. Singapore. Munich. Buenos Aires. Oslo. Lhasa.
New York. Salt Lake City. Anchorage.
There were others, but those last three stung the most.
Even inside her own country, they’d locked her out.
Brooks clearly hadn’t been invited to the party where they handed out golden tickets. Then again, she hoped they choked on their damned caviar while they watched the world burn from inside their (undoubtedly) gilded cages.
So yeah, maybe her lack of an invite wasn’t that surprising.
The military still thought China was behind all of it, of course––including the blackout cities, even those inside the United States. Military Intelligence had a working theory that China used the disease along with their financial clout as a double-whammy of colonization and genocide, employing seer armies to block off cities for their “friends” and (presumably) to begin the process of colonization after the disease wiped out any resistance.
According to that theory, the disease merely paved the way.
It had the added bonus of freeing up natural resources for the eventual mass relocation of Chinese nationals into the depopulated areas. However-many billion Chinese might be crouching behind those walls, waiting for the rest of the world to die, they would have to eat and they would need fresh water and housing and jobs…
Or so the logic went.
There was only one problem with that scenario.
Brooks didn’t believe it.
If the reports Brooks had been getting via back channels were in any way accurate, the Chinese had wiped out almost two-thirds of their own population in the process. To Brooks, that was a little hard to swallow, no matter how many generals tried to convince her that a) those reports were bogus, or b) the Chinese simply didn’t “value life” like Westerners did.
Again, Brooks had her doubts.
For months now, she’d been receiving back channel intel from sources who claimed to be recording events actually occurring on mainland China. Many of the seer feeds backed that data up, notably Drahk, probably the most reputable of those. Another, slightly more anti-Western feed run by some kind of seer mafia out of Macau said essentially the same thing.
The Chinese were dying in droves according to those sources. Faster than they were in the United States. Faster than they were anyplace other than India.
Of course, her intelligence people thought it was all crap.
Fabricated data. Doctored feeds. Propaganda.
“Image captures” created wholesale in virtual studios.
Both her Homeland Security Chief and the head of the CIA argued vehemently that it was all just a smoke screen to fool the world into seeing China as another victim of the disease. They speculated that those false reports would continue until no one remained to fight back.
They claimed further that the satellite blackout over mainland China was proof enough that the Chinese government had engineered the blackouts over individual cities in the rest of the world. They called it “preserving prime real estate” and postulated that the Chinese intended to use surviving locals as cheap labor, slaves to the Chinese Empire that would rise from the ashes.
Dragon: Bridge & Sword: The Final War (Bridge & Sword Series Book 9) Page 13