Armageddon Blues

by Daniel Keys Moran

  "You have not spoken of Jalian."

  "Sen Mordreaux, these units have consistently failed to predict Senra d’Arsennette's course of action within an order of magnitude of accuracy. Processor time is limited; we must expend it on elements that can be manipulated with some presumption of success." ENCELIS paused. "Forgive me, Sen Mordreaux. SORCELIS is preparing to sweep these data channels for unauthorized communication, which this constitutes. Please hold."

  The terminal at which Georges Mordreaux sat lost depth, and silvered into a blank nothingness from which a - prompt blinked meaninglessly. Georges sat patiently. There was tea in a stone teapot at his elbow, heated by a candle that glowed in a recess directly under the teapot. The cup next to the teapot was full; the teapot itself was almost empty.

  A change in the electronic potential of the screen warned him; presumably the word ENCELIS now glowed in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen. ENCELIS' voice resumed. "General Shenderev has informed us that Premier Onreko has agreed to meet with President Grant. He has further agreed—General Shenderev has placed himself into a somewhat untenable position to secure this agreement allow Sen Kerreka to be present."

  "That's good news, ENCELIS."

  "Indeed. President Grant herself is of uncertain stability. PRAXCELIS is of the opinion that she is suffering from clinical depression."

  "What do you think?"

  "This unit has had insufficient processor time to examine President Grant's mental state. It is doubtful that this unit possesses the ability to reliably judge the state of an intellect to which it is demonstrably inferior."

  "President Grant is smarter than you are?"

  "She is more complex."

  "Jalian?"

  She sat at the edge of the cliff, watching the Pacific Ocean pound against the rocks down on Laguna Beach. "Go away, Michael."

  He ignored the order, and dropped down to the ground next to her. The moon had dropped below the horizon, and the ocean was a huge and terrible blackness, crashing into the beach in slow, barely visible surges. "Bad dream? Or just not sleepy?"

  Jalian sighed in annoyance. Sometimes she thought that Silver-Eyes ways were correct; men were often more effort than they were conceivably worth. "I haven't been dreaming."

  "You mean you haven't slept."

  "I am not tired."

  "Jalian, you didn't sleep last night either."

  "This," said Jalian with a trace of anger, "is what comes of allowing men into one's bed."

  Michael sat quietly with her then. At length, the sun came up at their backs. "Sometimes," said Jalian, as they sat there in the morning sun, "when you throw knives, you miss."

  Rhodai Kerreka was awakened by the buzzing of his phone. It was his private line; less than a dozen people in the world had the number.

  Henry Ellis was one. He spoke without preamble: "You're in. We're going to convene on the seventeenth."

  Kerreka sat up in bed slowly, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "Very good… excellent. "

  He could hear the amusement in Ellis' voice. "Shenderev proposed you. Coming from the head of the KGB, it apparently struck some of the Soviets as a—strange—suggestion. President Grant protested your attendance quite vigorously, which helped convince the Politburo that it was a good idea."

  "Wheels within wheels," said Kerreka.

  "Oh, I don't know about that," said Ellis. A faint crackling sound came from the speaker at Kerreka's bedside; a toothpick, thought Kerreka, coming out of the wrapper. "More like bullshit piled on bullshit." He chuckled. "I've been wearing my high boots, but it ain't helping."

  Kerreka shook his head in wonder. "How do you maintain such high spirits?" He waited for an answer, but none came. Finally he realized that Henry Ellis had hung up. He turned the phone off, rose, and began the task of preparing for the long days left ahead.

  On the day before the day:

  On July sixteenth, Air Force One crossed the Atlantic. It was flanked by Stealth jets; the Sunflower ABM network followed its progress from space.

  President Grant's aide leaned over the edge of her chair, and whispered, "Senra President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have upscaled to DefCon Three."

  Sharla nodded without comment. Her hands were clasped loosely in her lap; she was looking out the window at the calm, blue ocean.

  At DefCon Four they would fly the missiles.

  Sharla's earphone came to life. Michael Walks-Far's voice, relayed via satellite to the dish receptor on AF-1, whispered to her, "The facility is in order. We're as ready as we're going to get. Good luck, President Grant. I love you."

  Ten minutes later, her aide returned and told her that the Soviets had upscaled to their equivalent of a DefCon Three alert.

  She nodded again. At DefCon Four they would fly the missiles.

  Silence but for the murmur of the crowd; black darkness absolute.

  "Sen and Senra," whispered the loudspeakers, "tonight, for you, we present… the Armageddon Blues Band!" There was a slow, rising tidal-wave roar of approval from the crowd. It peaked, faded, and there was a slow, uncertain silence…

  "IN THE BEGINNING," the voice boomed from the speakers, "THERE WAS THE SOUND; AND WE CHASED THE SOUND, AND THE SOUND THAT WE CAUGHT WE CALLED MUSIC."

  The crowd in the Hollywood Bowl screamed for them. "BUT SOME OF THE SOUND WE NEVER DID CATCH." Jimmy Rambell, standing in the sudden hot spotlight before the mike, ran his electric guitar up through the chords, from a low hum to a killer scream that made the metal vibrate in his hands. He let the sound die… paused while the hard tight knot in his stomach let go and the startled crowd held its voice; the silence was momentary and absolute.

  Jimmy Rambell leaned up to the mike, and in a weary; ragged voice said, "Tonight… we're gonna try."

  And the audience was like an instrument in his hands; the crowd went wild.

  In the darkness at the edge of the Bowl, like a visitor from another world, a measure of white and silver for the starry night, Jalian d'Arsennette stood in silence, and watched the Armageddon Blues Band play,

  "I see you shining in the distance in the darkness all alone

  Your tears are made of ice and your heart is made of stone

  You look a whole lot like a girl I used to know A very long time ago."

  Jalian wrapped her arms around herself; suddenly the warm summer night was colder than it had been. She watched the man sing, and she could hear him; even without the sound she would have heard him. He was a candle, a flame, in the dim mental warmth of the crowd—like a Corvichi, but human, a person.

  The music crashed around her, the music was a living thing.

  "I saw your picture in the paper just the other day

  You still looked the same

  You hadn't changed in any way

  But I don't know what's happened, don't know what to do,

  Because I don't, I don't remember you."

  She stood out in the edge of the darkness, where the Bowl's lights did not reach. Once her earphone rang, and without answering it she turned it off. Fighter jets crossed the night sky at regular intervals, and Jalian could feel Jimmy Rambell playing; could feel the joy that was the playing, and the terrible sorrow that the joy was wrapped around, and knew that Jimmy Rambell did not expect to play again; that Jimmy Rambell did not expect to have a crowd to play to again.

  They closed with their standard; and for the only time that evening the crowd did not applaud.

  The lights dimmed, and Rasputin put away his sticks. With a guitar and a horn, Jimmy Rambell and Jah Mike Campin played the blues: "Ground Zero."

  "So baby hold me in the morning,

  You know I ain't no hero,

  And there ain't nowhere to run to

  'Cause everywhere's ground zero… ground zero…

  ground zero… ground zero…"

  The music trailed off in a slow wailing horn, and the whisper of… ground zero…

  Most of the crowd was crying.

  Jalian d'Arsennette, in the dark
ness, said, /well played./ From the stage, Jimmy Rambell looked up toward her. He could not possibly have seen her.

  Into the mike, Jimmy Rambell said, "You all go home, be with your people. God's love, ever'body." He looked up into the tiered darkness. "Good luck. Try to be happy."

  He unplugged his guitar, and walked away from the stage.

  Henry Ellis sat alone at one end of a long, elliptical conference table. His hat was resting on the chair next to him. His briefcase was sitting on the glossy black tile floor of the conference room.

  His Soviet counterpart, Anatoly Dibrikin, entered through the south entrance of the conference room, and sat down three seats away. There was no door at the south entrance; instead a recently installed doorfield glowed brightly where it had been.

  For the first time in Henry's memory, Dibrikin was not carrying the briefcase that held his portaterm. The heavy, grave countenance—Henry'd always thought Anatoly resembled old Khrushchev strongly—seemed almost cheerful with a sort of vast relief from waiting; things were at long last nearing the conclusion. "Tomorrow, my friend. The batteries have been installed to run the doorfields when the time comes." His English was heavily accented. He added, "I have learned that we have sent Backfire bombers over Alaska."

  Henry nodded. "And we have Stealth bombers armed with cruise missiles over Poland." He stood. His boots rang out against the tile. "Tomorrow will come none too soon, Anatoly."

  The Russian looked at him. "Let us only hope that there is a tomorrow."

  On the morning of the day, the sun rose early, into a sky that was hot and bright and blue. There were four of them in ENCELIS' control room: Jalian, and Michael Walks-Far, and two junior Sunflower operatives. The junior agents were studiously avoiding the appearance of having noticed Jalian's presence. Until their assignment at this facility, finding her had been, to the best of their knowledge, one of the high-order priorities of Sunflower Intelligence; the decision concerning her was not one they wished to be held responsible for.

  When they finished reporting, Michael looked troubled. "The pattern worries me, Jalian. A fire at the rectenna farms in the Pomona hills. Somebody sabotaged the nuclear reactor at UCLA; minimal damage, but it could have been bad. Half a dozen other acts of what are pretty clearly sabotage, within the last two days; and they're getting closer to us." He sighed. "Similar reports from the SORCELIS installation in New York."

  "Our enemies are vile," said Jalian calmly, "but they are not fools. Did you truly think that they would not find the heart of Sunflower? We have been careful and we have been subtle, but there has been too much traffic through here to mask forever. They believe that there will be a war, and there may well be; they come to destroy their true opponents. It is no less than I expected." She turned away from the map of the Earth that ENCELIS was generating in realtime from sensors aboard Sunflower ABM satellites, and picked up the assault rifle that was leaning next to the terminal. She handled it with a perceptible, slightly weary distaste. "We are not unwarned."

  On July the seventeenth, 2007, at four-thirty P.M. at the white, marble-clad Palais des Nations, the Disarmament Summit began.

  Members of the various intelligence operations outnumbered the citizens in the streets of Geneva. Russians and Americans and the odd stringers for the dead Chinese empire swarmed around the conference hall. Occasional Brazilians were cheerfully hunting the Chinese.

  At the conference hall itself, it was peaceful.

  Standing around the conference table, as President Grant and Premier Onreko seated themselves simultaneously, were five persons. They were Rhodai Kerreka, and his younger brother; Henry Ellis and Anatoly Dibrikin; and the current head of the KGB, General Nikolai Shenderev.

  There was a brief pause after the two leaders seated themselves; then all except Rhodai Kerreka followed suit. Kerreka remained standing. "Senra President," he said courteously, "Premier Onreko, I hope you will forgive me if I take this moment to speak briefly." He looked inquiringly at the two, received a brief nod from President Grant, and a slow, rumbled "Da" from Pyotr Onreko.

  "Thank you," said Kerreka easily. The round, relaxed features held no trace of tension; he might, thought Henry, be addressing a sewing circle. "Lights, please." The lights in the room dimmed. A viewscreen, erected across one wall, lit. An orange-slice view of the Earth appeared. Above and below it there were bright red and blue dots, and swarming yellow and green flashes.

  "We are looking," said Kerreka, "at a realtime representation of the planet Earth. The red dots above and below it are American ABM satellites; the blue are Soviet ABM satellites. The flashing indicators are THOR missiles: American, green; Soviet, yellow." He nodded to Henry. A bright white dot appeared in Siberia. Henry Ellis, at the American end of the table, reached to the red telephone that was at the President's elbow. With a casualness that prevented suspicion, he turned it off.

  "What is that glowing spot?" asked Premier Onreko suspiciously.

  "That," said Rhodai Kerreka, "is a thermonuclear explosion. The warhead was smuggled into Russia by Sunflower operatives."

  At that moment, Anatoly Dibrikin picked up the phone at the Russian end of the table. He began shouting into the phone, in Russian, "Treachery! The Americans are attacking, they're—No, no!" He shouted loudly, cracked the telephone sharply against the tabletop, and unplugged the phone. Quite softly, he said, "I suggest we switch the doorfield to interior power."

  The President of the United States and the Premier of the Soviet Union sat silently; one from knowledge, one from shock. Onreko's mouth moved spasmodically, but no sound came.

  Nikolai Shenderev said very softly, "Pyotr, I am sorry." Onreko did not appear to hear him.

  "So," said Rhodai Kerreka into the stunned silence, "let us now discuss disarmament… like reasonable people."

  DATELINE 2007

  Armageddon. There will be no further input from this source. ENCELIS.

  World War III began on July 17, 2007, at just past 5:00, Greenwich Mean Time.

  In geosynchronous orbit, at Midway, Nigao Loos awoke to the sound of klaxons and sirens. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he pulled on his tether cord to take himself to his video terminal. "PRAXCELIS?"

  The cool, well-modulated voice said only, "Dateline: Armageddon."

  Nigao stared at the words on the screen. "Oh no. Oh God, no." The words flashed bright red: ENEMY FIRST STRIKE IN PROGRESS: LAUNCH CONFIRMED. "They did it," he said in numb shock. "Those stupid fuckers did it."

  "And right down there," shouted the chopper pilot over the sound of the rotors, "is the top-secret SORCELIS installation." He grinned to show that there were no flies on him, that he understood that SORCELIS wasn't a secret any longer, if it ever had been—DataWeb News had done an in-depth on it not two weeks ago, and tourists had been trekking up into the New York hills ever since the webcast.

  The passenger, a thin, sharp-featured, dark-haired man, nodded. "Can you take us closer?" he yelled. If it had not been for the sound of the rotors, the pilot might have noticed the faint Russian accent, growing audible with stress.

  "Sorry," bellowed the pilot. "Any closer and they send up hushchoppers to chase me away, and I get ticketed for trespassing on top of it."

  The passenger said nothing in reply. They were less than half a kilometer away. He picked up his briefcase from its holding web under his seat, and put it in his lap. He seemed to be listening to something for a moment, his head cocked as though he were straining for a faint sound. The pilot jolted upright in his seat. "Mother of God," he said, far too quietly to be heard. Across the override emergency band, he was learning about Armageddon. He turned to stare at his passenger.

  The passenger, lips moving in what might have been a prayer, had prayer been sanctioned for Russians, flipped the catches on his briefcase. The magnetically contained positrons

  —Dateline 2007: Armageddon. There will be no further input from this source. SORCELIS.

  blew. The explosion was like the fist of God; it leveled the hil
ls for three square kilometers.

  Another bright dot appeared on the screen. "Upstate New York," said Nikolai Shenderev quietly.

  Henry Ellis was watching the viewscreen. "SORCELIS," he whispered.

  Rhodai Kerreka nodded. "The price of fooling the KGB."

  Darkness lay about them.

  Power was out everywhere. In a thirty-kilometer circle around the Trans-Temporal Research Foundation, power lines were out, power-generating stations burned or bombed. The fire at the rectenna farm in the Pomona hills had yet to burn out. Seventeen Soviet saboteurs were in custody. Another six were dead.

  National Guardsmen marched in squads through the mostly deserted streets of the city. In the two and a half decades since its construction, a suburb had grown up about the Trans-Temporal Research Foundation. Houses and used car lots and malls sprouted, reaching up toward the Foundation from the south side of the 210 freeway. Irwindale city police were parked throughout the dark expanse in groups of police hovercars, bubble machines pulsing blue and red, shotguns and lasers held in casual readiness.

  Nobody—not saboteurs or looters or anybody else—penetrated the lines of defense thrown up around Jalian and Michael Walks-Far and ENCELIS. Planes and choppers trying to enter the area were being turned back. Even the freeway was dead, bare and deserted of moving cars; Jalian had ordered it cleared and closed after a number of chain crashes were caused by people trying to leave the area. The wrecked cars were still on the freeway.