Systemic Shock tq-1

by Dean Ing

  "I didn't know men with clout knew how," she lied, watching the advance of his manicured forefinger on her thigh.

  "Men with clout are kinky," he purred, his tongue showing through the smile, deliberate in his choice of feminine nuance.

  "It's a small world," she said huskily, undressing him, " — but I see that some things are larger than others."

  He laughed, letting her set the pace. Later he could study the holotape of this first encounter, the better to consolidate this essential alliance. But it was to be weeks before he focused on something she said while nodding, nodding, nodding above him. "Even with," she said dreamily, "free synthesis, — there should be — ways to — make them — sweat."

  There were: superstition, media, implanted fears both emotional and physical. Mills was expert with emotional implants, and had learned a few things about the physical kind. There was that bunch of brutes attached to Army Intelligence, for instance…

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Once she had tooled up to produce the oral vaccine for keratophagic staph, Canada knew she had won her war. The vaccine was processed from polysaccharide components of the dried S. rosacea organism in factories isolated by permafrost and wilderness. While firmly denying her breakthrough, Canada managed to distribute the vaccine in her antiradiation chelate doses to virtually her entire population.

  Soon, more of the vaccine was secretly dispensed in military rations to Canadian and US troops in Asia. An infantry man who traded every chocolate bar away was trading his immunity, though he could not know it; a confirmed chocoholic who ate too much of it suffered from something similar to influenza. Some Canadian chocolate was distributed to RUS troops, too — but if the wrapper said shukulaht in Cyrillic, it provided no immunity.

  Sooner or later, there would be enough oral vaccine to eradicate Chinese Plague throughout Asia, but Canada took the long view. The RUS would get it later, rather than sooner.

  By the second week in August, 1997, Allied forces in Asia celebrated the war's anniversary in defensive consolidations — their weasel-phrase for a brisk retreat. ANZUS forces in India no longer sought the spearhead that would have met our Fifth Army on the western edge of SinoInd territory; for one thing, the US First and Fifth Armies had largely completed their redeployment north of Manchuria, into Siberia. RUS strategists growled as the Americans moved ever eastward, ever farther from defense of Russian population centers and nearer to the Bering Strait. The RUS were pulling their own armies back, intending to wall off European Russia using the Urals as a buffer, and still had the US Third Army to help.

  Konieff, who still chaired the anxiety-ridden Supreme Council, argued that it was better to have the rest of the Americans in Siberia, for however short a time, than to let the region be overrun immediately by surviving SinoInds. Besides, the Americans had left an entire army, with English and Canadian assault brigades, in Central Asia. Some members of the Council warned of duplicity here. Fearing that the foreign army might turn hostile on the banks of the Volga, the RUS worked out an accommodation. The Americans and their English-speaking friends could retreat through a corridor south of the Caspian Sea toward Turkey. Only the Iranians would protest this, and Iran had long since bled herself powerless with childish purges.

  Konieff did not know that the US Joint Chiefs had placed our Third Army at such risk only after top-level meetings with the Canadians. Canada pledged to protect the escape corridor for our armies in Siberia, if we would lend our battle-wise Third Army to the Turks — who had a bit of a problem.

  Turkey's problem began in 1992 when she contracted with Israel for desalinization plants on the shores of the Tuz Golu, a huge brackish lake in Turkey's central Anatolian plateau. The Israelis had tapped geothermal energy in nearby volcanic highlands by 1994, and knew better than the Turks that the central plateau offered an excellent, if not quite ideal, staging area for a project that would take a decade to complete. Israel envisioned nothing less than a fabrication and launch complex by which Israelis could begin their escape from Earth.

  Not that this scheme had the blessings of every member of the Knesset. The premise had stuck like raw pork in the gullet of many a traditional Zionist. But the odds against Israel's tomorrows mounted every year, and the only thing more unthinkable than an orbital New Israel was an Israel that could survive its present neighbors where it was.

  With the Turkish connection, Israel would gain freedom of movement to build and launch the seed ships to harvest asteroids to build vast habitats in Lagrangian orbits. Turkey would gain a newly fertile highland near Ankara, and rapid industrialization using Israeli and Canadian engineering. Canada would gain from favorable trade with New Israel's space faring factories, and harbored the conviction that this solution would rinse away, once and for all, the trouble spot of old Israel. Canada well knew that worldwide objections would be raised against an orbital New Israel. She also knew that no corporate state on Earth had been in the past, or ever would be in the future, likely to bring such single-minded dedication and ability to the establishment of space colonies.

  Canada found that Egypt, Arabia, Iraq, and other AIR countries would willingly help finance the extraterrestrialization of Israel. In 1995, major powers would have intervened. By 2010, some major power might again intervene. But this odd consortium of Canadians, Islamics, and Israelis saw the next few years as a launch window in time.

  Turkey, nominally a democratic Islamic moderate, had already permitted many Israelis to relocate from Cyprus to the Tuz Golu region, but knew that in transforming her central plateau to an Israeli staging area she would risk opposition from inside and out. Internally, the nomadic Kurds were raiding advance Israeli camps. Externally, Turkey feared that the RUS might retain enough clout to mount an expeditionary force to prevent Israel from developing her orbital habitats.

  Turkey's problem, then, was simply that she needed an army of janissaries for a few years. Canada was the broker for these services. She knew that the US was in no position to withhold our Third Army, now that we depended on Canada for aid.

  Ultimately, White House Deseret viewed the 'Ellfive Solution' with cautious optimism. The Apostles — the ruling committee of the LDS — felt that the official Mormon accounts of world history would, in time, greatly benefit by a general Jewish exodus from the planet. They reasoned (simplistically) that Jews everywhere would clamor for berths on Ellfive shuttle ships, so that Mormon America would be rid of one highly visible religious minority. The truth was that most American Jews had lived urban lives, and died urban deaths, a year before. More Jews survived in Europe than in America. Like Japan, Europe was rich in industry, poor in natural resources. There was good reason to expect that New Israel could have her pick of emigrants to a new industrial frontier.

  The long purposeful retreat of the US Third Army was applauded by Allies and SinoInds alike for varied reasons. Iran and Kurdistan mounted token opposition, but feared contamination by plague more than they feared the passage of the infidel. Thanks to Canadian chocolate, very few cases of plague assailed our troops in Asia and by early September, our Third Army reached Eastern Turkey. The First and Fifth US Armies were streaming toward the Bering Strait while the weather held.

  We had historical precedents in Dunkirk and Cyprus for the massive crossing from the Chukchi Peninsula to Alaska. We believed that the SinoInds, like the Russians, were too weak to mount serious opposition to our crossing. But just in case, the US and Canadian fleets assembled in the Chukchi and Bering Seas.

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  The Bering Shoot was a misnomer coined by media; it should have been called the Chukchi Nukes. Before dawn on Thursday, September 11, a covey of ballistic birds sailed over from the Sea of Okhotsk to pound the Chukchi Peninsula where over one million US troops were staging to cross the strait.

  Most of our naval forces stayed submerged and could not affect the outcome of the SinoInd attack. It was the big delta dirigibles, refitted by the US Navy after their success in the Maldiv
es, that intercepted most of the nukes with particle-beam weapons. Inevitably, shock waves from airbursts blew seven of our fifteen deltas out of the skies over Chukchi. Our few orbital weapons salvoed every warhead they could muster against the SinoInd craft in the Sea of Okhotsk, and no second strike came from that quarter or any other.

  In all, the Bering Shoot accounted for two hundred thousand US casualties. Without the antimissile delta squadron it would have been over a million. In the two weeks after the Bering Shoot, naval and commercial craft shepherded all but the rearguard of our Fifth Army across the strait. The rearguard was, man for man, probably the most heavily armed and mechanized military group ever assembled. Sampling each fuel dump before razing it, chiefly with crews of no more than two to each armored ACV, the rearguard met no strong opposition. In this respect, they fared better than their comrades who had reached Alaskan soil.

  Opposition to the returning US armies came from the last quarter they had expected: White House Deseret.

  One of the most signal failures of American media was its failure to reassure our civilian population on the subject of plague. Everyone knew that any influx from Asia would bring keratophagic staph and blindness — and no facts to the contrary had much effect. When Yale Collier announced an 'overnight, God-sent miracle cure' from Canada, only Mormons and the RUS believed him. The public outcry in the US amounted to an instant plebiscite which Collier dared not ignore. In the face of several resignations by general officers, the President insisted that our First and Fifth Armies hold fast in Alaska — at least until the message optimizers in our media could turn the public from its panic.

  To pragmatic veterans this implied a winter in Alaska and many of them said The Hell With It. While fuel dumps still burned in Chukchi, entire divisions were moving toward the states of Washington and Oregon in open defiance of their Commander-in-Chief. America had never faced such widespread military defection, perhaps because America had never been in such disorder.

  Once again Canada found a compromise, and urged it on our deserters without much concern for Collier's approval. Obviously, she pointed out to the deserters, they did not carry plague — for which they could thank Canadians. Just as obviously, Canada was emerging from the war as one of the few winners. American deserters could apply for Canadian citizenship immediately, so long as they did not continue their headlong rush beyond the regions where Canada's hegemony reached.

  Canadian money was now preferred in most of the US northwest. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and their frequently summary courts were already maintaining order from Portland to Duluth, sanctioned by the US Government which worried more about its southern borders than its north. There was, bluntly, not enough US Government to go around anymore.

  It became clear to the Collier administration that we could keep Alaska and Hawaii but we would — temporarily of course — lose Washington, Oregon, Montana, most of Idaho, North Dakota, and so on to the shrewdly sympathetic Canadians. But there was hope for future reparations because, for one thing, Mormonism had a solid toehold in western Canada.

  It was equally clear to the RUS that the Union of Soviets was dying of Chinese Plague and Canadian neglect. On September 23 the RUS made their demand on Canada: vaccine or war.

  No one — not Canada, not the US, not even Chairman Konieff — knew whether remaining RUS weapons could deal serious blows past Canadian defenses. Canada's Parliament quickly replied that shipments of oral vaccine were being readied for the Russians and, meanwhile, the US Third Army in Turkey could help by sending its stocks of Canadian chocolate to the Ukraine and Azerbaijan, across the Turkish borders.

  The RUS, naturally, wanted distribution to begin in the Urals and the heartlands around Novgorod, Gorkiy, Volgograd. It was transparently clear to the Supreme Council that Canada was more interested in saving rebellious Ukrainians than in protecting the central RUS nervous system.

  Less than fifty hours after acceding to the RUS demand, Canada began her airlift of vaccine-laden chocolate. Ironically, the distribution could have been faster if the vaccine had been by gel capsule, but Russians knew by now that immunity came in shukulaht; so chocolate it must be.

  A few cases of plague had turned up in Leningrad, Grodno, and Baku, cities on the edge of RUS dominion. Tens of thousands of cases were being treated in the heartlands. Naturally, predictably, the Canadian airdrops began in Estonia, Byelorussia, Azerbaijan. Canada wisely asked UN observers to help, and to vouch for the fact that enough vaccine had been dropped onto Russian soil to immunize a hundred million people. All the RUS needed to do was complete the distribution. Any country powerful enough to threaten war on Canada was surely capable of passing out chocolate — and, Canada added, she would not send aircrews of slow transport craft two thousand klicks into the heartlands of a country which had just threatened war against her.

  Boren Mills could not have optimized messages better than the Canadians. Millions of RUS citizens — Russians, Tatars, Bashkirs, all those who heard the news through RUS jamming and feared the plague more than they feared the Supreme Council — made pathetic attempts to reach the vaccine dropsites. Few RUS citizens owned private vehicles, so most of the travelers went by government-owned mass transit, which required faked permits, outright bribes, or stowaway status. The result of the peripheral airdrop by Canada was almost complete clogging of RUS mass transit. This failure of the RUS circulatory system destroyed the remaining confidence Russians had in their leaders — gangrene throughout the body politic.

  Chairman Konieff'slast success, in a stormy session of the Supreme Council, was in preventing Field Marshal Zenkovitch and his faction from countering civilian panic with bullets. Zenkovitch was after all, said Konieff, a Ukrainian who perhaps thought real Russians should not obtain their chocolate immunity.

  Taras Zenkovitch removed his belt with its empty holster and placed it, breathing deeply, on the table. "If that is what you believe," he said to them all, "you leave me no alternative to resignation."

  "I spoke in anger with a troubled soul," said Konieff. "We are not Dzugashvilü, Stalins who would destroy our people to save an idea. Please, comrade Zenkovitch, accept my public apology."

  Second Minister Vyacheslov, a gaunt Byelorussian, patted the trembling arm of Zenkovitch and said in his vodka tenor, "Taras Zenkovitch, your army might serve best by trying to keep the transit system running. At the same time, surely each of us retains enough personal charm to obtain a few cartons of vaccine from local officials."

  "Begging from party hacks in Estonia," growled Zenkovitch; "is that what we are reduced to?"

  "We could be further reduced," said Vyacheslov, placing a hand over his own eyes in a gesture that now signified plague.

  Vyacheslov, a great believer in hands-on charisma, carried the day. Both Zenkovitch and the absent Suslov had been assured by field officers that any orders to a military unit that included forcible removal of vaccine from a dropsite would mean almost certain mutiny, supported by the local officials. Marshal Zenkovitch huddled with his staff to expedite civilian travel while Konieff and others made ready to visit known dropsites. Each committeeman carried a pocketful of small elegant cases, and in each case was a large elegant medal. It was the only coin in which they hoped to pay party hacks.

  Though Vyacheslov and several others returned with vaccine, Konieff'stwo-place jet vanished over the Caspian Sea. It was believed that he fell victim to Iranian or friendly fire. In any case, Konieff would not have returned to find a functioning Supreme Council near Perm; the transportation riots had already begun, and the food riots would not be long in coming.

  China's fragmentation was well advanced, more profoundly than in RUS states because Chang's Central Committee had depended even more on the acceptance of central control. With the unitary breakdown in the CPA came a fast reshuffle into China's ancient standby, the feudal warlord system. The best that could be said for Chang's government was that, until early October, it still controlled Shansi Province with remnants of the
Third CPA manning parapets of the Great Wall against plague-infected deserters returning from the western provinces.

  Then Jung Hsia, Third Army Marshal, discovered that Chang was dickering with Canadians for plague vaccine in a transaction which would amount to surrender. Supposedly, Chang hoped to buy immunity from prosecution with mi-crocoded specifications for some secret device, no doubt a weapon. Jung reflected that Chang's own death squad had removed a number of top technical people during the past fortnight; and Jung further reflected that he knew a few folk whose unpleasant arts might unlock Chang's tongue. But art sometimes fails in its purpose, and Jung did not learn what kind of weapon had been worth so many assassinations. Chang Wei died of multiple injuries in the night, and Jung became a warlord until Chang sympathizers offered Jung Hsia to Canada as 'earnest money' for a transaction they needed urgently.

  India's Casimiro, taken alive near Nagpur by New Zealanders, was released on October 3, disappearing again into Madhya Pradesh with a Turkish delegate from the UN. It took Casimiro two weeks to assemble something that might be called a Parliamentary quorum, with a few members voting arguable proxies. The chaos of India was hardly more chaotic than it had been a decade, or two or three, before.

  In some ways Indians stood to gain; many US troops in western India were to remain as an army of occupation. For the first time in Indian history, hungry Indians had reasonable hopes that surpluses in certain regions would be diverted in the interests of full bellies instead of mountainous bribes.

  Still, angry Moslem tribesmen sniped at the garrisoned infidels and were targeted in turn. It had always been thus. It might always be thus. The winter of 1997-8 would see as many deaths throughout moribund Asia as had been suffered in the opening weeks of the war.