Greenaway's eyes roved over each man's face again before he answered. "All I know is, it's top secret, and it's research. More egghead shit, but the Mission wants it destroyed. Maybe it's bioweapons research, and maybe it's a cure for cancer, and maybe it's the eternal search for a delicious, non-pants-shitting fat substitute. What I know, and what you now know, is that there are still a few good people in government, who have seen fit to show us where the motherfuckers are going to be, and who have given us the tools to make sure they never leave. They have also seen to it that nothing that happens here will leak—this might as well be Mars.
"The enemy you are going to face is smarter than you, and he has a lot of technology to fuck with your head, your weapons, and your bodies. But we have technology, too. And we have a beautiful mountain on which to fight, and if nobody fucks up, we have the element of surprise. They're not expecting a fight like this, they're just coming up to blow up this building and all the civilians, mostly children, holing up in it. This fight may drag on for days, or it may be over in seconds. God willing, none of you expendable bastards will stub a toe out here, but as God is my witness, if any of you should fall here, know that you gave it all up for the highest cause, against an enemy only we can see. If any of you still have questions, see Staff Sergeant Keller, who has some of the documents I mentioned available for review. Master Sergeant Talley has got the maps of this place, and the deployment assignments, which he'll go over with you squad leaders, directly. I want the trucks unloaded and cleared out of here in ten, the works completed by 0200 hours tomorrow. This company is dismissed."
The formation flew apart and swarmed over the trucks again. Greenaway watched them work for a minute, letting their vigor feed him. He felt strong again, the shit before must've been the altitude, and he was an old man, and this fucking place—
A bell shrilled from the tower, and the children ran for the doors. Recess was over. He watched them racing over the snow like jackrabbits, so preternaturally graceful and vital that he began to feel heavy and weak again. He looked at the tower then, and blinked, looked again, his eyes going wide in disbelief.
A few adult residents came out the front doors and crossed the parking lot towards a big shed Greenaway figured was the motor pool. One man, tall and gangly, split off from the group and headed towards the bridge on foot. He wore the identical black coveralls that everyone else wore, but even at a distance, even after twenty-eight years, he was pretty sure he recognized him.
In '72, his White Star unit was ferrying weapons into Cambodia and heroin out when they encountered a Special Forces deep recon A-team with a whole tribe of Montagnard irregulars. He only saw one of them, a scary, tightly wound redneck scumbag who wore ears around his neck. Bastard demanded tribute for passing through, like a fucking tribal warlord. Greenaway felt snipers all over his caravan and legions of Yards creeping through the undergrowth all around them, so he paid the redneck off in food and ammunition, and went on his way.
He learned later that he had probably been hit up by Spike Team Texas. The legendary lost patrol had vanished two years before in Laos, and were thought to have gone native. Myths wrapped around the hush-hush core of their story—they grew opium, they were cannibals, they radioed for ground reinforcements, then killed the unwary grunts who showed up to "save" them—and they became bogeymen as much to their old outfit as to the NVA. That no such unit was ever acknowledged to have existed by the brass only gave a glint of reality to the legend. After all, White Star didn't exist, either.
The tall, jittery hillbilly walking across the parking lot was the motherfucker who robbed him in 1972. He closed his eyes.
You're losing it, granddad.
He took out his binoculars and peered through them at the man. The lenses were fogged up, and he wiped them off with his gloved fingers while he tried to keep the man in sight as he walked away faster than most people could sprint.
Talley touched his shoulder, making him jump. "Fine pep talk, Mort. Long as nobody stops and thinks about that line of bullshit, we ought to get along swimmingly." He spat between his boots and looked at Greenaway. "What's the rumpus, Mort?"
Still looking through the binoculars, he asked, "Burl, d'you remember the stories about Spike Team Texas?"
Talley chuckled. "The lost patrol? What made you think of that?"
He looked over the eyepieces. The lone figure had dwindled to a black twig on the misty edge of the lot, but he had him. He adjusted the focus ring and handed the binoculars to Talley, who took them and scanned the mountaintop. "You want the Vulcan battery up there, Mort? 'Cos I don't think we're gonna get the Bofors up there, 'less you wanna airlift 'em…"
"No, the man going to the bridge, look at him! He's—"
a ghost
"What're you talkin' about, Mort?" Talley handed the binoculars back to Greenaway, his face looking more worried than ever. A brown string of tobacco juice dangled from his slack lower lip. "That's just a girl, boss." He walked away, shouting at the men off-loading the first light APC off one of the trucks.
Greenaway looked again. He must've lost the man, because there was only the one figure striding across the lot, and Burl was right, like always. A very young, compact girl with short, black hair looked over her shoulder at him as she crossed the bridge. Looking across a half a mile, she looked down the binoculars and into his eyes, and she winked.
Greenaway put away his binoculars and went to look for a trailer where he could have an undisturbed drink, and maybe a long nap.
~18~
They had agreed to meet in the forest at midnight. Beyond that, Major Aranda knew, everything else would be in dispute.
He stood with his command staff in one corner of a triangle in the glade at the center of the Missionary underground forest. He had come expecting a stand-off between the soldiers and scientists, like usual, but was pleased to find that the eggheads' united front had collapsed, and split along predictable lines.
Dr. Calvin Wittrock headed the surviving bomb-makers, the veteran physicists, chemists and engineers who once wielded godlike power at places like Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Pine Ridge. Some of them had worked on the first hydrogen bomb. Others helped to make worse weapons that the world had not yet seen—super bugs, neutron bombs, RADIANT. Horrified at what the world did with their sterile laboratory exercises, they defected and formed the Mission, tried to expiate their sins by dragging the superpowers back from extinction or unilateral hegemony. They were haunted men, their souls etched by the ashes of millions incinerated by their theories, and the nightmares of billions more who lived under the swords they forged. But they were alive, while their military counterparts from the early days of the Mission were all long-dead and forgotten.
Dr. Barrow fronted the Greens, the younger generation of scientists. Most of them had come over too early in their careers, and they were not guilty enough by far. Their righteous rage had made them into a faceless mob, and after years of working side-byside with them, Aranda found it harder every day to tell them apart. They hated themselves, too, but, they hated everyone else more, everyone but poor stricken Gaia, the beleaguered Earth-Mother. Aranda had to admit that Wittrock had been right, back on the plane. He trusted the Greens less than the bomb-makers. If Barrow and his people ever discovered a way to cleanly and quietly remove humankind from the biosphere, he believed they'd simply stop showing up at the meetings.
Aranda had gone first, laying out the plan of attack, walking them through slides of satellite images and computer simulations on a projection screen set up like an altar in the center of the glade. There were few objections to the tactical elements—what little they understood, they had little reason to object to. He would lead the ground teams himself, and it would be his men who'd face death. They'd ground up the least details of the operation and polished them to a glinting state of diamond-readiness. They drilled in the woods, on a mock-up of the approach to the ventilation shaft shed behind the complex, until it became the substance of thei
r dreams. The massive defensive build-up around the complex would come to nothing if the air support delivered, it was decided. His other concerns about the safety of his troops were likewise brushed aside by both egghead factions in their haste to get to their own arguments. He gratefully left them to it.
Now he tuned back in as the voices raised to a shouting pitch. Wittrock was explaining the deployment of his lysing agent, which Aranda's men called NGS, or Nasty Green Shit. Dr. Barrow's reedy, strident voice razored Wittrock's dry monotone as he shouted, "It's an invitation to a massacre, Wittrock, and not theirs, but ours!"
"You've seen the lysing agent in action, Dr. Barrow," Wittrock calmly replied. "If the Major's aerial deployment forces are up to the task—"
Catching Wittrock's pointed pause, Aranda irritably nodded. "Dr. Costello has the software thoroughly tested, and is programming in the terrain data we've collected. He's even more solid on the planes themselves," he added, too quickly, relieved that none of them actually knew Costello.
Wittrock keyed the attack simulation in ultra-high speed, so it ran surgically clean all over his face a dozen times before he spoke. "I have yet to see your team provide a more elegant solution."
"It was never our problem to fix, blanc." Aranda noticed Dr. Chretien Hanley, the black female incarnation of Barrow who stood at the airlock, at the back of the Green faction. A high-ranking civilian virologist at Ft. Detrick, she was dismissed abruptly and only escaped federal jail time by faking international flight and defecting into the Mission. The legend was that she'd been caught trying to synthesize a smallpox strain linked to sickle-cell markers, that would kill only non-blacks. Barrow's right arm and sometime bed-mate, she'd helped him whip the Greens from a ragged pack of bitter left-leaning radical scientists into a cult, of sorts. "You made the monster."
"Not that we've had access to any of the data from repeated exposures," Barrow injected, "but I expect we'd see a marked decrease in dissolution rates over time. The only thing we positively know about the RADIANT offspring is that they adapt. The lysing agent was used to make the bullet that hit Sergeant Storch, but he survived. He escaped. I don't see any strategic allowance for that in Dr. Wittrock's plan, do you?"
Aranda realized the scientist was addressing him directly, though his eyes remained nailed to Wittrock.
The bomb-maker's face was an unpainted latex mask. "Storch is a chimera, produced by anomalous circumstances. His unintended survival was because of his previous inoculation, and the lysing agent still altered him at a molecular level. The tri-helical structure of his DNA was broken. His brainwaves no longer displayed the spike signature of entrainment—"
"But he walked out of here! You order us to believe that the weapon will prove effective on those imprinted by Keogh. But it's already failed. Despite your best efforts, Doctor, we've secured a few specimens of our own. We've learned things, rather extraordinary things, but I doubt we've learned anything you don't already know."
Wittrock turned the projector on Barrow. Electron microscope shots of dying Keogh cells, like a maze of walled cities consuming themselves in divine fire, writhed on the Green's contorted face. "What do I know, Barrow? Enlighten me, if you can keep your spurious religious beliefs out of it."
"They communicate," Barrow said. "They don't just exchange proteins, anymore. Individual cells isolated yet in close proximity to each other are beginning to radiate scalar wave energy, and I think they're trying to communicate. He's in them, down to their every flake of skin, in every protein string, every nucleotide, and he's reaching out. We observed the same sort of energy from the test subject who was destroyed in the cell adjacent to Storch. It was trying to communicate with him telepathically. But none of this is new to either of you, is it? I'm sure you're familiar with Armitage's neural network theory."
Aranda blinked. That name had not been spoken aloud in meetings for quite a while. "I've never heard of it," he said lamely, "but I sure wish somebody would talk straight and tell me."
Wittrock wrung his hands and spoke up over Barrow's shrill attempt to retake the floor. "He was preoccupied with the subtle energy emanations of the brain. The brain as a transceiver, but because each brain is wired uniquely, each sends and receives on a unique subtle energy frequency. It was the basis of all his research on soft-kill technology, but that wasn't his final goal. He believed—towards the end, when he was up against his own mortality, and not really all that lucid—that the energies are our souls, and potentially indestructible. He speculated further that RADIANT could be used to project consciousness along with the genetic data required to remake malignant tissue into a new body."
"What?" Aranda stepped out from his staff and approached Wittrock. "Are you saying he told you that RADIANT-infected people would become Keogh? You knew? Bangs didn't know, did he?"
"It was only a theory," Wittrock retorted, "not even comprehensible to those who didn't work directly on RADIANT."
"But there's more," Barrow cut in. "Armitage wrote us that he thought Keogh was building a neural network out of his clones. Each one is a scalar-wave copy of the original consciousness, so it doesn't matter how many you kill, if there's one left, you lose. But when there are enough of them—"
"Which is precisely why we've got to strike now, with what we've got!" Wittrock barked.
Aranda stood between them. "When there are enough of them, what?"
"They'll become one," Barrow replied. He took over the projector and typed in a file access command on its keyboard. A three-dimensional model of a constellation of dots appeared. As more dots winked into life and the constellation became a galaxy, they began to glow fitfully, like fireflies.
"This is a model we extrapolated from Dr. Armitage's formulae. Notice how, as more and more identically charged individuals are introduced into the system, the resonant energy output of each is magnified."
He tweaked something on the keyboard. The dots winked in unison, a neon jellyfish. "They synchronize, and unify. The sheer mass of the system reaches critical when upwards of a few thousand individuals come into close proximity to each other. That seems to be the threshold for the effect, given what we know about their brain activity."
He stabbed another button. The flashing dots coalesced into a glowing sphere, a tentacled sun that swelled and brightened until everyone was blinded and looked away.
"Your special effects," Wittrock sneered, "prove nothing, except the urgency of acting now. If Darwin's neural net theory is even remotely possible, which I'm far from granting, we must still strike at every center of biomass with the lysing agent before they can adapt to its effects. However, I submit that adaptation would be impossible, given that the agent is impregnated with unstable lysosomes of his own genetic signature."
Aranda wheeled on Wittrock and shut down the projector. "When did you even begin to suspect this? When were you going to tell us? After, if anyone survived?"
"Major, it has no bearing on this operation. Even Barrow's projection shows that they're far from achieving a viable network."
Barrow lunged between them. His white dreadlocks lashed Aranda's face. "There are quite possibly more than five thousand of them in the world, Doctor. We're far from understanding how whole organisms interact, because we've only had single cell cultures to work with. If they didn't reproduce so readily—"
"You idiots have been cloning them?" Aranda turned on Barrow and seized his elbows, lifted him clean off the ground. "That's exactly why I didn't want to give any of them to him!" He dropped the terrorized Green leader, fighting for breath.
All eyes fixed on him. He heard the air recirculators breathing through the pine needles. "And what have you learned from it? Do you have a cure for walking cancers?"
Barrow shrank from him and sucked at an unlabeled inhaler. When he recovered, his voice was three octaves lower, but mellowed with an unsettling calm. "It doesn't matter, Major. This isn't a new development. He was here first. He's only using our technology against us to speed up the process. But very
soon, all the bodies are going to become cells in a single body, and all the minds are going to become one mind. His. There'll be nothing to do, then, though Wittrock and his can-do blackboard mass-murderers will happily provide you with solutions, right up to and including nuking everything and hiding down here for the next ten thousand years. This lysing agent might work in this operation, but I doubt you'll hurt a hair on their heads the second time, even if you don't leave a single survivor. They'll broadcast their death-energy in scalar waves, or viruses—"
"Death energy?" Wittrock scoffed. "Christ, Barrow, you used to be a scientist!"
"Then I saw it. You saw it, too. You've studied the Pnakotic Manuscripts. You read the account of the Dyer Antarctic expedition. You know about the School Of Night's research, their attempts to directly contact the Unbegotten Source. You've seen the Burgess Shale Anomaly in the Smithsonian with your own eyes, and you know as well as I do what it really is! You know what He is!" Barrow stalked Wittrock. Aranda reached out to catch him, but Barrow coiled, ducked under his arms and launched himself at the senior scientist. "You know who he was!"
Wittrock stood fast, glaring wooden defiance at his rival. Barrow stopped just short of knocking heads with Wittrock. His long, bony hands went out and clawed the air around Wittrock's impassive face. "You saw it all, but you can't face it. If you did, you'd lose your mind, and become me."
Enough of this bullshit. Aranda cued Dr. Blount, one of Wittrock's underlings, and a former black ops planner for the National Reconnaissance Office, who took over the projector. "I think, gentlemen," Blount bellowed, modulating his voice once the others died away, "that all of these metaphysical questions may be rendered moot, concurrently with the present operation. At the time of the raid, we will notify the Russians of the orbit path and projected location of RADIANT. As many of you already know, our Russian counterparts have assembled a force package capable of neutralizing the delivery vehicle of the infection, and stand ready to deliver it. The Radiant Dawn squatter community in the shadow of Chernobyl in the Ukraine has been the site of riots, as word has spread among the malignant millions there that Radiant Dawn can cure them. The Ukrainian government and the Russians are eager to be rid of it, and a crackdown will be coordinated to coincide with the destruction of RADIANT. Similar counter-proliferative actions can be expected in Africa and South America, when the various governments involved come into line. So wherever the center of mass might lie, we will drastically reduce its size and remove its means of reproduction in one blow."
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