Strange New Worlds IX
Page 31
Or rather they had been. Half an hour ago, four old Soviet-built BMP-3 tanks—Alliance favorites, with their distinctive, huge 100mm gun turrets—had advanced and were trying to gain new territory.
And now a school…No one back at HQ knew about the school. It wasn’t on the evac schedule. The problem was that the school lay right between them. If Archer fired on the Alliance with anything substantial, there was a good chance he’d hit the school. His Bradley didn’t have smart bombs that could go around things. Neither did the Alliance BMP-3s…but they didn’t care.
“Okay,” said Archer. “We’re not going to be able to sneak up on that school. And they clearly intend to destroy anything that comes near it…and them. What have we not tried at all? We have to get down to absolute basics.” Archer hated the phrase “thinking outside the box,” but that’s what they needed now.
Bengy said, “If me da were here, he’d say these Augments need a good hide-tanning.”
Archer smiled. “Yeah, my grandfather would say they needed a good—” He stopped. “A good…talking-to…” Yeah. That just might work. He turned to Dixon, the comm officer. “Sergeant, give me a comm frequency that we don’t use much.”
“Sir?”
“We’re about to give it to the enemy, so make a note and don’t ever use it again.” He turned to Bengy. “Okay, I need something big and white.” Bengy started crawling toward the rear of the Bradley.
“Like a flag of surrender?” asked Green.
“Like a flag of truce. I just need them to not shred it with bullets before they read it.”
“Read what?”
“The flag.”
Bengy returned and said, “Here now, how’s this, Captain?” He handed Archer a white handkerchief, which Archer unfolded. It was one square foot.
“Okay,” said the captain. “I’ll need um, one…uh, five more.”
“Good thing they come in boxes of six,” said Bengy, reaching back and producing a little, blue cardboard box. He opened it and pulled out more white handkerchiefs. Green stared at him. “Allergies,” Bengy explained.
“Sergeant, make me a flag,” commanded Archer.
Bengy looked around. “Staples, I think…”
Dixon handed Archer a pad with a frequency written on it.
Green said, “Captain, if you get them, and you can keep them talking, I could take a squad around the back on foot and attack.”
Archer sighed. “Lieutenant, I am trying to negotiate a release. If you pull a sneak attack, the first thing they’re going to do is shell the school in retaliation.”
Green shrugged. Bengy gave Archer the flag.
Archer grabbed a thick pen from a toolbox and wrote the frequency in huge, black letters on both sides of the flag. He pulled out a telescoping antenna and taped it to the flag with dark gray duct tape. It looked exactly like what it was: an amalgam of handkerchiefs, staples, and duct tape. Like so many things in military life, it was crude, but it got the job done.
Archer climbed up into the Bradley’s observation hatch, opened the latch, and shoved the thing out into the air.
“Okay,” Archer muttered to himself. “First we wave it around like crazy to get their attention…maybe a sniper spots it…What’s that?…A truce flag…Cease fire…” Archer paused. “Okay, now we give them a little time…What’s that on the flag?…A little more time for the oldest guy there to recognize it as a comm frequency…a little more time to find the comm unit…someone sets it up…tunes it…” Archer stopped talking and waited.
Buzzz! Bravo’s comm unit went off. Archer pulled his flag back in and stared at the comm. He hadn’t actually expected this to work. He pointed at the device and nodded. Dixon pushed a button.
Archer took a deep breath. “This is Captain Nathan Archer of the United Nations Peace Directorate. Who am I addressing?”
“I am a major in the Alliance.” A man’s voice, deep and sonorous, came over the comm’s speaker. “But my commission is purely honorary…”
Bengy rolled his eyes and muttered, “Who is this airbag?” Green slashed his thumb across his throat, and Bengy bit his lip.
“…I prefer to be addressed by the title I earned: Doctor. This is Doctor Stavos Keniclius.”
In the heat of the desert, and the close quarters of the Bradley, Archer’s blood turned ice cold.
Keniclius! Second-in-command to only Khan himself among those who wanted to remake the world’s population according to their own ideas of superior genetics. Some people were already calling these brushfire conflicts “the Eugenics Wars.”
In his mind, Archer could see Keniclius as he appeared in TV news broadcasts: the same sharp, Roman features as a classical bust; but topped with red-brown hair that he wore long—a fashion that many of the so-called supermen had adopted.
Archer took a deep breath. “Doctor, I need you to do me a favor.”
“A favor?!” Over the comm, Keniclius laughed. “Unless I’m mistaken, weren’t we just shooting at each other?”
“Ah, actually, you are mistaken. You were shooting at me. I didn’t shoot back. And I’m not planning to attack because of the school.”
“Hmmm. Yes, the school. Occupied, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” replied Archer. “I’m here to evacuate it.”
“Well, how about if you just leave them to me. They’ll be fine.”
“I’m not leaving anyone to the Alliance…Doctor.”
Keniclius laughed again. “Oh, Captain, what propaganda have they been feeding you?” His voice was filled with condescension. “Made me out to be the mad scientist of the taped thrillers, have they? Well, consider this, Captain: We are bringing peace and harmony! Look around you, Captain. The world is crumbling. It needs control. It needs a master race—not as conquerors, but as peace-keepers. Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler…they went about it all wrong. Humans have spirit and will not respond to the jackboot.”
“And what do you call the fighting we’re engaged in now, Doctor? You can not use violence to bring about peace. As a doctor, you must know that.”
“As a doctor, I know that you must remove a tumor. You must cut away a cancer before it metastasizes! Oh, Captain, if you could only see that our goals—”
“I’m not here to argue philosophy with you, Doctor.”
“Ah, but you are, Captain: the finer points of war.”
“No, I just need to get those kids out of here.”
“So my army and your army can ‘have at it’ without any collateral damage?” asked Keniclius.
“Yeah…close enough.”
“We don’t want to hurt anyone in a battle, do we? Except that it’s always fine to hurt the evildoer. Oh, wait, you think of me as evil and yourself as good,” the doctor said drily.
“And vice versa.”
“Oh, don’t be a moral relativist, Captain. One of us is right and one is wrong. Only Posterity will tell. Fortunately, Posterity favors the best-equipped.”
“Yeah, that’s definitely one of the rules of war.”
Keniclius chuckled. “‘The Rules of War.’ Oh, I like that. Right along with ‘Never forget that your weapons were made by the lowest bidder,’eh, Captain?”
Archer took a deep breath. “I would say that it’s not okay to the hurt civilians, no matter whose side they’re on. And it’s certainly never okay to hurt children.”
“Children are the future, aren’t they?”
Archer bit his tongue. You heard a lot of rumors in the fog of war, but if even half of what was said about Keniclius was true…Not just cloning—anti-humanistic enough as that was—but some process to grow an adult from an embryo in hours instead of years. What would that do to the child’s mind? If it was even possible.
The thought of the results of the failed experiments sent new chills along Archer’s spine.
“If you kill civilians,” said Archer slowly, “then what’s the purpose of the war? It’s for the civilians. War isn’t about war, it’s about the world after the war.”
“Look, Doctor, all I’m asking is that you hold your fire for a little while. Just a few minutes while I get them out. I’ll send only a couple of men. Unarmed and on foot.”
“How do I know you won’t take the opportunity of getting closer to attack?”
“You could always back up a few blocks. Then you’d be safer,” Archer joked, forcing a smile onto his face and into his voice. Good thing this wasn’t a video phone.
“Not amusing,” said Keniclius coldly.
“Look, Doctor, they won’t have any weapons. No rifles, no sidearms. You’ve got snipers up there. If they see so much as a soup spoon, you can shoot them.”
“ Them, not us? You won’t be part of the group, Captain?”
“Would you like me to be? That’s no problem.”
“Yes, you should be, Captain. You’re negotiating this. A leader should never send his soldiers someplace he would himself never go. That’s a Rule of War too.” Archer heard Keniclius and another voice in a brief, muffled exchange. “You have your wish, Captain. I will cease fire until they are withdrawn. After all, what would I do with a bunch of children?”
“Right,” said Archer. “They’re already born. Not really at their best for genetic manipulation.”
“Watch it, Captain!” said Keniclius. “I don’t suffer fools gladly, and you clearly know nothing about what you speak of. You have fifteen minutes.” There was a click, and the connection went dead.
“Okay, Green,” said Archer. “You and me.” He unbuckled his gun holster and handed it to Bengy. “Leave your forty-five here.”
“You were serious about that?” Green asked.
“Of course. Always tell the absolute truth to your enemies. That’s a good Rule of War too.”
Green nodded. “If only to confuse them.” He put on his sunglasses. “I was just thinking, sir. You know…about removing the bad and keeping the good—what he said. It kinda made sense. I mean I know he’s the enemy and all, but isn’t any of what he says allowed to make sense? If we could turn his ideas—if we could cut away the bad—”
“Whose ‘bad,’ Lieutenant? Your bad? My bad? His bad? The guy down the street’s bad?” Green shrugged. “That’s why we don’t tamper with genetics, Lieutenant. None of us is smart enough to know, in the long run, what humanity will need to survive. So we leave it up to nature. No cloning, no manipulation of genetic traits before children are born…or ‘genetically cleansing’ them after they are.”
He opened the Bradley’s top hatch. “And, speaking of children…Come on, let’s go see what the future looks like.”
The Immortality Blues
Marc Carlson
The saxophone echoed to silence. The man called Lewis Bixby put down his book, kissed the blond woman sleeping next to him on the couch, rose to his feet and strode across the dimly lit living room. Through the large wall-window behind the couch, he could see the beautiful lights of New York City in the distance, a ground-bound starfield, even at this hour of the morning.
The city that never sleeps…
He was considering whether to take his wife to bed as he reached for the stacks of plastic holo-squares beside the stereo when he heard Rayna’s voice in the transceiver implanted behind his right ear.
“Lew…” Rayna was cut off as the player’s face went black, and a hellishly bright pulse flashed behind him. For an instant, his shadow was sharply etched onto the bookshelves in front of him, the leather bindings radiating heat back at him, nearly as hot as the heat on his back, searing the image of the smoldering spines into the edges of his vision as the light faded.
He whirled and looked through the window, his peripheral vision gone, leaving him only a narrow tunnel to see through. Camilla still slept on the couch. Behind her, a mushroom of hellfire-orange-and-black roiling plasma highlighted the slowly collapsing ruins of lower Manhattan. Although he couldn’t see it, he knew that, in that darkness, the silent expanding cloud of superheated wind and debris at the leading edge of the overpressure wave was coming at him faster than the speed of sound.
Oh, this is going to hurt.
The man called Lewis Bixby floated through hazy dreams of Kaliste, the Beautiful Isle, and a lovely bare-breasted woman whose name he’d lost, in rare aromatic silks, fine wool, and linen, and vanishing in a blinding light and a noise so loud it was no longer sound, but a slap from Dzeos Pathair himself blasting his ship into flaming splinters around him. Then the past faded, leaving only the life-consuming spirits of the dead….
Dull pain and itching dragged him back to consciousness. There was pressure on his legs. He saw a cloudy sky above him through a twisted mass of burnt wreckage, dripping with oily black rain. The sweet stench of putrefying flesh cut through the reek of char.
That was certainly unpleasant. I must remember to avoid doing that in the future….
He clicked his tongue. There was no response from Rayna. He started to move, then froze as the glass fragments embedded in his flesh ground and tore through his muscles. He focused, and forced himself into a sitting position. A section of the roof pinned his legs. His clothes were in tatters, and his skin was covered in the worst case of acne he’d seen in some time as his body worked to expel the glass chunks. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he tried lifting himself up into a better position. The debris shifted as he pulled on it, and his leg stuck fast. He jerked hard, and his right leg broke just below the knee. Nearly overwhelming waves of pain and dizziness coursed through him. Grunting in agony, he reached under the roof section and rotated the dangling lower limb. He pulled it free, and was grateful to lose consciousness once more.
It was dark when he came to, and it had stopped raining. Some of the glass shards had been pushed from his skin. He swept those away; the grinding in his muscles told him there was still more in there.
I’m going to be shedding glass for days.
His leg, however, had healed. He squeezed himself up through the tunnel overhead, and started climbing to freedom.
A few feet up, a hand stuck out of the debris. He recognized the wedding ring.
Camilla.
He paused a moment to swallow his emotions, then kept climbing.
I’ll mourn when I have the time.
He soon emerged at the top of the mound. The full moon, shy and intermittent behind the heavy cloud cover, was the only illumination. His apartment had been on the fortieth floor, now it was a pile of ruined steel. It was too dark to even try to climb down the irregular slope, so he sat in the cold, smoky-sweet breeze to wait for morning.
Within a few hours, the first fingers of light slowly emerged in the eastern sky in what ancient peoples had called the wolf’s tail, the lykaugés. The early light showed that his building was lying in the midst of miles of other mounds of shattered buildings stretching as far as he could see. To the southwest, beyond Queens and Brooklyn, he could barely make out the ruins of Manhattan through the pillars of dark smoke, reminiscent of burning Kuwaiti oil fields.
As the valley slowly filled with golden light, he remembered what it looked like that first morning he’d seen it, in 1609, from the helm on the tiny deck of the Halve Maen. He overlaid the image of the past, with its rich verdant forests, sounds of life, and smells of the sea foam blending with the foliage, over the hazy dusty silent ruins around him.
Who’d have thought that the end of civilization would be so untidy?
He rose and carefully climbed off the ruins. When he reached the street level, the first bodies he found were in the overturned wreckage of a police vehicle: two officers, a man and a woman, dead only a few days and swarming with flies. He pulled the man out and stripped him. Peeling away his own tattered clothes, he put on the officer’s uniform and strapped on his weapon and equipment. He started walking. By the time he reached Brooklyn, he barely noticed the stench from his clothes, or the bodies littering the
streets.
As he passed through the ruined city, he saw other survivors, most as devastated as the buildings around them. Some straggled away from the center of the city, while others sat in silence, waiting for a rescue that might never come; an old man, wheeling his belongings in an overloaded cart, wheels squeaking; hordes of looters and scavengers shooting at each other like mad dogs fighting for scraps; an old storefront with the sign YES, WE ARE OPEN—CASH OR TRADE ONLY and a man with a shotgun guarding the door; several government aircraft circling like vultures.
He reached the ruins of the Queensboro Bridge toward late afternoon. From that vantage point, he could see that none of the other bridges had fared any better. Backtracking to the Twenty-first Street–Queensbridge entrance to the subway, he found it was clear. He unclipped the officer’s flashlight, and descended into the tunnel. The ash and dust from the collapsed buildings had blasted down through the tunnels like a pyroclastic flow covering everything. He tore off his sleeve, and wrapped it around his lower face, to keep from inhaling too much dust.
At the foot of the stairs to the platform he found a section of wall that had been cleaned of dust and tagged “StillHere.” A dead man in an evening suit lay at the other end of the platform, covered in dust.
He hopped off the platform to the floor of the tunnel and found that the dust layer covered water a foot deep. After a moment he decided it was more likely from runoff of broken water mains than a crack in the roof of the tunnel. He followed the maglev tracks under the river. It was a nightmarish trip through darkness and sharp shadows in the dim glow of his flashlight. He found a train on the line where it had stopped, a few hundred yards from the Roosevelt Island Station. Even though there were no bodies in the cars, the silence still evoked a bleak horror.