Systemic Shock tq-1

by Dean Ing

  Soon afterward came the flurry of second strikes that sent survivors back underground for weeks. Quantrill read more and watched the holo. And avoided emotional ties more than ever, though Palma had urged him to enroll in the relocation center school, hoping that he would respond to others his own age.

  "Look," he said once to the exasperated Palma; "my strategy is to learn from the library terminal. Geometry, inorganic chem, military history. It's all I have time for, and you said yourself I shouldn't go outside again for another week."

  "You think we can't run an immunology program without you, Ted? Don't flatter yourself." She saw the dull anger in his face. "You've done a lot; nobody denies that. But just between us, they're already in Phase Three in the labs. We're licking the bug! Believe me, Aggie Station can spare one cargo handler. And I can spare you if it means finishing your education." She did not add, and rejoining your peers.

  "Between you and the holo, I'm getting what I want," he said stonily, and changed the subject. "For one thing, I'd like you to help me cut through all the crap I'm getting on the news about local guerrilla gangs. They sound like crazies to me, but you don't see anybody on the news really saying that. I need somebody to brief me, not bullshit me."

  Palma did not like his increasing use of military terms: strategy, briefing, guerrilla came easily to him these days. "Now's as good a time as any," she sighed.

  He took his time phrasing the question, a legacy from taking courses via library holo terminals. "Are they Mormons?"

  "No!" Her knee-jerk response surprised Palma herself. She chuckled, peered guiltily at Quantrill, then back to her work. "Well, actually some of them think they are. I could make the same claim, Ted. I was raised LDS, but after my husband began trying to be a closet polygamist I backslid to a jack-Mormon, and then—" Shrug. "No, you can't be a Mormon and deny the tenets of the Apostles. Or the revelations of the modern Prophets. But a lot of people have their own revelations, and these days a lot of those are nightmarish. That can be a strong divisive force if it happens to a particularly devout man."

  "Or woman."

  "All males may become priests, even blacks," she said. She added with a trace of bitterness, "Females can never attain priesthood. Honor, veneration, service, yes; priest hood, no. You wouldn't believe the underclothes a Mormon woman's supposed to have, and I won't burden you with that. If a woman complains too much, she's put on a sort of probation—'disfellowship', they call it. Nice, hm? Or they just excommunicate you. I didn't wait for that final rejection."

  "Maybe I shouldn't be asking you—"

  "Ask away, whatthehell," she said as if sealing some internal bargain.

  "Why do they raid other people? I thought Mormons had food and stuff all socked away."

  She silenced the labeler, fixed him with a firm gaze. "They do. I repeat, these guerrillas aren't true Mormons. Of course they take terrible chances driving like maniacs through fallout, and some of them will be sorry. Some of them are just banditti, out for loot, but some honestly think they're bringing the gospel. The cars they steal, the churches they burn, are all part of their saintly splinter-group zeal to stamp out heretics. And there are in-betweeners who aren't above collecting some riches on the way to Heaven. Reminds me a little of the devout conquistadors of the Sixteenth Century."

  As the labeler began ticking away again, Quantrill put some other labels — political labels from newscasts — together. "Let me guess; a heretic is anybody who doesn't wear a Collier button."

  "'Pull through with Collier'," she quoted the campaign slogan. "Collier's a good man, for my money; he publicly disavows the cults, but they may intimidate a lot of people from the polls. You can't expect police to control them all. I'm inclined to think Governor Street is fighting an uphill battle, even here in his own home state."

  The ex-Governor of Texas was also an ex-Major General, whose current position as Undersecretary of State bolstered his.claim as potential commander-in-chief of a besieged country. But fairly or not, James Street was saddled and hagridden by blame for a war which had come while his party was in power.

  "At least all the networks seem to like Street," Quantrill said.

  "Of course they do; they don't like censorship, and an LDS Apostle in White House Central will lean in that direction."

  "Who needs holovision? Seems to me if you read the Book of Mormon, you know what's gonna happen anyway." She smiled at what she imagined was a joke. He read her expression, then pulled a thin faxed pamphlet no bigger than a wallet card from his pocket. She glanced at its cover. “Urn. The Church of God In Revealed Context, eh? Yes, they're one of the biggest splinters in the backside of the LDS. Not as violent as some."

  "Just tell me if that's really from the Book of Mormon, Palma. The centerfold. Read it," he urged.

  Wherefore it is an abridgement of the record of the people of Nephi: 1 Nephi, 17.

  He raiseth up a righteous nation, and destroyeth the nations of the wicked. And he did straiten them in the wilderness with his rod; for they hardened their hearts, even as ye have; and the Lord straitened them because of their iniquity. He sent fiery flying serpents among them; the day must surely come that they must be destroyed, save a few only, who shall be led away into captivity. Ye have seen an angel, and he spake unto you; yea, ye have heard his voice from time to time; and he hath spoken unto you in a still small voice, but ye were past feeling, that ye could not feel his words; wherefore, he has spoken unto you like unto the voice of thunder, which did cause the earth to shake as if it were to divide asunder. For God had commanded me that I should build a ship.

  "It's disjunct, as I recall," said Palma. "Junk, hell. Destroying nations with fiery flying serpents is a pretty close description, I'd say. The only thing that doesn't follow is that explanation where they tell you the ship is a ship of state. No kidding, Palma; is it, or isn't it,—"

  "DISJUNCT," she said loudly to silence him, "means separated; disjointed. I don't remember the whole Book of Nephi, but I do know the special wackiness of the Church of God In Revealed Context. They do numerology mumbo-jumbo, like numbering phrases and reading off those that are prime numbers, or something equally arbitrary. And sometimes they come up with passages that fit when they were never intended to. This particular cult doesn't invent any new text — I think. They just combine pieces of what's already there — usually in order, but that piece about building a ship might be pages away."

  He mulled this over. "I guess it'd be easy to check."

  "Yes, but few gentiles do — and Revealed Contexters play strictly by their own rules, so even if their compressed text doesn't match the original, they can claim it's all in the original. They just pull special messages out by numerical revelation." Their steadfastness in their beliefs, she added, made them take great risks at times; and made them in some ways dangerous.

  Again, Quantrill was silent for a time. Then, "You think these religious nuts would hurt a little kid?"

  She thought of the Church of the Blood of the Lamb, a full generation before; of true believers who would shotgun their kin in a quarrel over dogma. "No, Ted; certainly not a little girl who won't cast a vote for years to come." She met his glance and his smile, and wondered if she were right. There seemed little doubt that somehow, the Granges had met with one of the zealot gangs.

  A week later — with all the delays from precincts where ballots were hand-counted, it was on Wednesday afternoon, 6 November, — President-elect Yale Collier delivered his victory speech. Cathy Palma listened morosely, though she had voted for the man. She was more concerned about QuantriU's defection; hadn't known of his delta pass until too late to stop him.

  And what could she have done to stop him? The captain of the delta Schwarz knew about Quantrill anyway; would hardly have denied him free passage. The Schwarz had been the first delta in a month scheduled to College Station via San

  Marcos. With either destination, Quantrill's intent seemed clear. Perversely, Palma hoped the kid would break a leg en route to enl
ist. He was diving headlong, she thought, into the meat grinder that had devoured his family, his friends, his future. To Palma it seemed a popular form of suicide.

  For the dozenth time, she-unfolded the page she'd crumpled after reading it. She had found it, in Quantrill's hasty scrawl, on his bunk atop a neatly folded yellow delta coverall. Palma's heart would have leapt if the yellow flight suit had been missing, for then she might have expected to see him again.

  Palma did not expect to see him again. "These should fit somebody," he'd written. "I can't wear a uniform that reminds me of friends. I don't think that's what uniforms are for. Someday we can argue about it. Good luck. Ted Quantrill."

  No, she thought, staring sightlessly at the page. They wouldn't argue; first because he was probably right.

  And second because he would very probably be dead in sixty days.

  PART II: GUNSELS

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  The winter of 1996-7 was a relatively mild one, but a killer nonetheless. In Syracuse and Worcester, without natural gas, neighbors fought over ownership of trees they should have stacked as cord wood months before. In Roanoke and Knoxville, paranthrax crippled essential services until the cities, gasping in their own filth, welcomed December's refrigeration. The rat population leaped, and typhus was not far behind.

  On the central Siberian plateau millions died of simple starvation, with the removal of countless trainloads of Evenk beef and Yakut wheat to storage near the Black Sea. The aboriginal Evenk and Yakut people fared well enough on the land by returning to their old ways; but city-dwelling Russians in Mirnyy and Tura starved. The RUS needed rations for the armies that were moving south from Archangelsk to vast training areas in the southern Ukraine. Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria had declined the honor of hosting the Allied troops, and the RUS could not persuade where once the USSR had commanded.

  The RUS did not quarter American troops in the south out of kindness. They did it because advanced training of entire armies could be carried out more or less secretly there. And because thirty divisions of Americans wintering in the Urals would have died like thirty divisions of ants on an ice floe. North of the fiftieth parallel in a Russian winter, winter itself is the enemy.

  The SinoInd movement to the west was slowed by the ferocity of Kazakhs, then stopped by the more ferocious ice storms. Only in warmer climes could a war against other men be prosecuted. Chad, for example, was dissuaded by her AIR neighbors from absorbing Libya. If Chad could only wait until the colossi fought to their mutual deaths, an Islamic crescent could become an Islamic world.

  Australians and New Zealanders completed their ANZUS exercises with American marines during a sweltering antipodal summer, making ready for a daring game of transoceanic hopscotch, while Canadian diplomats broached tender topics with Somalia for a bailout procedure, just in case. Canada's defensive game and her natural resources were burnishing her image as a major power. Somalia reflected on the Israeli/Turk agreement and its outcome, and then raised the ante. But at least she kept quiet.

  In Florida, surviving SinoInd irregulars pushed past the Caloosahatchee River, bypassed the Miami ruins, sacked Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach, and advanced on the Tampa Bay cities. Every Chris-Craft and dinghy in the American sports-fishing fleet was now armed: night-scoped AR-18's, heat-seeking SSM, or a self-correcting mortar — anything to interdict the supply hovercraft that hummed across from Cuba. There were still enough Harriers north of Orlando to make a SinoInd air supply route plain suicide. The average Florida cracker was just as irregular as the invader, but he fought for his own turf and knew the inlets and hummocks better. The 'gators fed well. It was thought that Tampa might hold.

  Throughout the Northern Hemisphere and to a lesser degree in the Southern, background radiation was still dangerously high two months after the second-strike nuclear flurries of October. Among the most essential of US industries, suddenly, was the scatter of small processing plants for production of selective chelates.

  Years before, the Lawrence Berkeley Labs had created LICAM- C, the first chemical capable of selectively and safely removing plutonium ions from living tissue. By now, other chelates existed which had special affinities for iodine, cesium, strontium, calcium. Of course, a human body robbed of its stable iodine and calcium isotopes would not function for long. The murky suspension of Keylate that Americans swallowed contained not only the selective chelates, but coated particles of replacement elements which, like tiny timed-release caps, became available to the body only after chelates had removed newly-absorbed elements. There were side effects, but temporary nausea was better than cancer of the spleen.

  Americans listened to local media and took the recommended doses of Keylate. In the Ukraine, Keylate was in short supply. In San Bernardino, missile plant workers took it every four hours through November. In San Marcos Infantry Training School, Recruit Ted Quantrill took it once a day through December.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The big man in the dun uniform barked an order in Chinese, jerking the barrel of his assault rifle as if to goad his prisoner. Quantrill grasped the weapon, thrusting its barrel to the side as he swept one leg behind his captor's knee and wheeled. He fell atop the man, one elbow seeking the vulnerable soft flesh just beneath the sternum's bony mass; jerked his head back as his adversary spat in his face; found his throat hooked by the big man's calf, and was hurled backward.

  The dun-clad man swung his weapon toward Quantrill without rising, a grim smile across his camouflage-painted face. "Zap, Quantrill, you're dogmeat," he growled, then shouted at the circle of onlookers: "When are you ass-breaths gonna learn to follow through? You let go of a Sino's weapon once you snag it, and it's all over!" He waved Quantrill back to the encircling squad of recruits and came to his feet in a practiced backward roll, watching the recruit wipe spittle from his face. The instructor's half-sneer seemed fully permanent. This bunch of green-uniformed recruits, it implied, would always be green until the day they saw hand-to-hand combat; that is to say, the day they died.

  Sergeant Rafael Sabado could afford to sneer. Though garbed for the moment as a Sino, his own forest-green uniform was neatly sewn with small patches that meant more than some campaign ribbons. Airborne training at Benning; special combat school at Ord; languages at Monterey; unconventional warfare at Bliss. Now that most troop transportation was hamstrung and Fort Benning no longer existed, the Army was forced into one-station training with too few specialists. These poor raw recruits, thought Sabado, would be funneled straight from Texas to Russia. All but a very, very few…

  "Sergeant?" The lettering on the fatigues said it was Symons; the concern in the lank intelligent face said he wasn't being a smart-ass. "How can he hold onto a weapon when a bigger man is hauling him away by the neck?"

  Sabado paused, cocking his head, then smiled. "Leverage, Symons. He had it, but he let it go. Come back here, uh, Quantrill; we'll run through it."

  Quantrill, with surprisingly little reluctance for an anglo kid who couldn't be much over sixteen, moved onto the practice mats. The green eyes watched Sabado's moves with flickering interest. He nodded as Sabado showed him how to hook his arms over the weapon, seemed satisfied with the other instructions.

  "Now I want you to spit in my face," Sabado smiled.'I'd castrate you for that ordinarily, but when we're on the mat, be my guest."

  The circle was suddenly silent, the recruits motionless. "Fair's fair, Quantrill," someone joked.

  "Fuck fairness," Sabado said; "Go ahead, recruit. I won't hurt you."

  The Quantrill youth smiled almost shyly, then spat without seeming to pause for spittle. Sabado's eyes flickered, but his head did not move a millimeter. Yet even that instant's involuntary blink hid the beginning of Quantrill's sidelong ducking roll that carried him to the edge of the mats.

  "Very good," Sabado purred. “You don't trust me in this uniform. But what's more important is that I didn't flinch from a little spit." He motioned the recruit back with the others, looked arou
nd him. "In personal combat you can't afford to care about little things. Flood, mud, shit or blood, it's all the same: flinch and you're dead."

  Into the murmur around him, Sabado inserted his calm Tex-Mex voice of command with a tone his recruits had come to dread. This was something Sabado liked, so it was sure as hell gonna hurt. "Choose a partner; don't choose a buddy. I see any asshole buddies, I get to make 'em my partners. Move," he said. Soon, twenty-five pairs of recruits stood toe-to-toe. It was a little exercise their mommies never taught them, Sabado said with relish, though his brother had taught him in a Houston slum. The pairs were to take turns. Every time a man flinched, he lost his turn. If any recruit lost his temper, he'd do laps with a full pack instead of eating chow.

  In a way, it was a very simple exercise requiring stainless steel discipline. All the recruits had to do was spit into each other's faces.

  Sabado halted the drill after two minutes, affecting not to see the bottled rage in the men; judging to a nicety when they had taken enough. "From now on, every day we run a two-minute spit drill," he said, pausing a beat before adding, "just like screwing a schoolteacher. You got to do it and do it, 'til you get it right." Sabado was good at his work; the laughter took the edge off their outrage and, with luck, some of these recruits would master one more small advantage.

  Sabado took them through a few two-on-ones, then some slow practice throws, and lazed watchfully while they continued at it in pairs. He watched the Quantrill kid surreptitiously. A lot of kids, given the order to spit like that, were so scared they could muster no spit at all. Quantrill had tried to sandbag him with that smile — and his side roll had been damned fast. All right then: unbelievably fast. Nobody could be faster than Rafael Sabado, but a very few were almost as fast. The problem was in taking time to hone that natural gift. Sabado knew what the recruits did not: in three weeks they would all be headed past the Canadian border. All but a very, very few…