Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “Maybe it’s just the deterrent effect he wants,” Callie suggested. “If it were known the family had the weapons and could use them, we wouldn’t need to have an actual target in mind.”

  “A dangerous deterrent … But I have orders from the Patriarch. Can you help?”

  “Thirty years ago, they were smuggling reactor-bred uranium and plutonium out of a facility that reprocessed spent fuel somewhere in Malaysia—which is now part of greater China. You should probably start with the other reprocessing plants, ones in friendlier territory.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Susannah said. “But it’s not going to make us any safer.”

  * * *

  Despite a 7.1-magnitude earthquake fifty years ago and the near-destruction of the city, despite a decade of economic collapse, invasion, and war, despite everything the world could throw at it, the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero—that twenty-story wedge of white concrete on the waterfront, with the soaring interior atrium, glass-enclosed elevators climbing inside it like spiders, and a revolving restaurant on top—was still standing. It was a testament, Kenny Praxis thought, to good foundation work and better structural design. Of course, the company that had built and owned it was no longer in business. The hotel was still called the Hyatt only by those old enough to remember its history. Today it was run by a Japanese conglomerate under the name Hai-Oshi, which roughly translated into something like “yes, push me.” Not a great name for a high-rise hotel, if you thought about it.

  After their third date, with more dancing and dining, Kenny decided it was time to take his relationship with Angela to the next level. He had almost forgotten that this energetic, enigmatic young woman had once been the little girl, Angie, his kitchen-table study companion from all those years ago. And yet something told him to be careful. Something in the forefront of his mind—and nothing to do with the wiring in his brain—was warning him of danger.

  For that reason, he registered with a null identity which he had acquired on the black market, one that matched a fictitious persona the network was prepared to confirm through his cut. He paid in California greenbacks rather than debit one of the PFA accounts, which would have been traceable back to the family.

  When he returned to Angela, who waited beside the artificially babbling brook that ran in a concrete channel through the lobby, he asked, “Are you sure you want this?”

  “Are you getting cold feet, sir?” Her eyes went wide.

  “No, but—I mean—we knew each other as children.”

  “All the more reason, I would think, to do this now.”

  “All right.” He took her hand and led her across to the elevator. Once inside, he drew her close and kissed her, without regard for the glass walls or for anyone below who might be watching.

  They walked down to the room on the seventeenth floor, and he bent to open it with the hotel’s fob. The hallway was really an open balcony, exposed on one side to the whole atrium. When he straightened and turned, Angela was already half out of her high-necked pink dress. She worked the zipper up her back like a contortionist, wrapped her arms around her head, and pulled the whole thing off in one whisper of fabric. She stood there, in the sight of God and everyone, in high-heeled shoes and raspberry-colored bra and panties.

  “Gee,” Kenny said, gulping.

  “Get inside,” she ordered.

  * * *

  After they were done—done for the third time, Angela reminded herself dreamily—she lay back on the rumpled pillows and twisted sheets and let her mind go mostly blank. She was sensing rather than thinking, feeling rather than calculating, absorbed by the experience they had just shared.

  Now Ken lay beside her, face down, and dozing. He deserved it.

  He was a wonderful lover, everything she had imagined he would be. He was gentle, slow-moving, focused on her body’s needs, aware of everything she was feeling just as he felt it. He was strong enough to lift her, raise her, position her for the most intimate touches and sensations. She had feared the electrodes in his head would be a distraction, like having some zombie intelligence looking over his shoulder or, worse, giving him directions from an encyclopedic database of feminine anatomy. But no, their consummation was all Kenneth, all Angela, and nobody else.

  After a long time, during which she replayed in her mind each phase of their lovemaking, he lifted his head.

  “Wow,” he murmured.

  “Wow yourself,” she said.

  “Go again?” he offered.

  “Can you?” she challenged.

  “Um, not really,” he said sadly.

  He lifted himself on an elbow to look into her face. His eyes were troubled, like a little boy who has sudden doubts.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I thought …” and stopped.

  “No, what?” she insisted.

  “Living alone, or living with Antigone and Helen, all those years, I thought you would be, well, less experienced.”

  “Did you think I was a virgin?”

  “I don’t know what I thought.”

  “Would it matter if I wasn’t?”

  “Certainly not,” he protested.

  But it would though, she knew. “I am a virgin—with every other man in the world,” she explained. “But I’ve made love to you every night since I was thirteen years old.”

  His face registered surprise, then shock. “I didn’t know. Thank you!”

  “No, thank you, sir. For making an honest woman of me.”

  * * *

  Without explaining the real reason to anyone, just ordering it as part of her chartered Annual Planning Process, Susannah took a convoy of HUMV-IXs around through the South Bay and up into the hills behind the Stanford University campus. She asked her cousin John Junior and a detachment of his paid regulars to come along for military protection, but she didn’t tell him the purpose of the trip.

  She did confide something of her mission to Benjamin Auchincloss, a physicist on the family payroll who advised her on projects dealing with special materials and technologies. And he brought along, through his cortical array, the intelligence that identified itself as Quandam. Everyone else thought the name was a play on “quantum mechanics,” but it was actually a Latin pronoun, meaning “a certain person” of the female gender. The intelligence must have known that, but he—or more likely she—never explained the joke.

  “You already know what you’re going to find there,” Auchincloss told her. “The place has been deserted for years.”

  “Maybe,” Susannah said. “But you might spot something we could use.”

  “What? To transmute metals? I sincerely doubt that.”

  It was hardly a trip down memory lane for Susannah, who had studied at Stanford. Not having authorization to enter the campus, they skirted to the north of the fifteen-foot wall erected in the Time of Troubles, passing through the derelict shopping mall that had once borne the university’s name, and then up the broken track of Sand Hill Road into the rolling hills. The turnoff into the research complex was not blocked or even gated. The place seemed empty.

  “Turn left on the loop road,” she told the driving intelligence, referring to an old map she held on her lap. When the machine turned, the rest of the convoy followed.

  “You want to find the positron-electron accelerating ring,” Auchincloss said.

  “What will we see there?” Susannah asked.

  “History.”

  They drove over washed-out asphalt roads, passed industrial-style buildings with vacant windows and blockhouses with no windows at all. From the number of parking lots that were slowly turning into tufted meadows, she guessed a few hundred people might once have worked there.

  After they had gone a quarter mile, Auchincloss pointed to a low structure with curved walls on either side. “There,” he said. “That’s the original storage ring.”

  “What did it store?” one of the guards asked.

  “Atomic particles moving at near-light speeds.”

&nb
sp; “Do you think you’re gonna find some now?”

  The physicist laughed. “No, not a chance.”

  Susannah had the convoy stop and dismount. She and Auchincloss went inside the building while the soldiers took up guard positions.

  The ring was an open hall, with sight lines that vanished into the curving distance. Bolt holes in the concrete floor and the torch-cut ends of metal frames showed where once had stood giant magnets that shaped the positron and electron flight paths, RF-generating tubes called klystrons that pumped up the beams, and specialized monitors that traced their energy flows. Susannah supposed that if she gave Auchincloss time enough, he would follow the track of the colliding beams around the building and note where those bits of matter and antimatter had once been brought together and annihilated each other, which was the whole purpose of the experiment.

  “There’s nothing here,” she said.

  “Nope. Everything stolen or moved.”

  “I shouldn’t have expected more, I guess.”

  Thank you, thank you, a voice sang in her head.

  Quandam? she asked. “I hear Quandam,” she said.

  “He’s looking through my eyes,” Auchincloss replied.

  It was in this place that physicists discovered the psi particle and the tau lepton, Quandam said. This room is deep in history. It is an honor to have been here.

  Susannah refrained from commenting that the intelligence wasn’t really in the room—if a computer program could be said to be anywhere at all, other than in circuitry. Instead, she said, “Just an empty shed now.”

  Please, can we examine the other facilities while you’re here?

  “Are we going to find anything more?” she asked Auchincloss.

  “No. If the Chinese didn’t take it for the technology, then vandals took it for the copper and steel. Why did we come here again?”

  They had come because Susannah was desperate. It had taken her only a morning of stealthy online research to establish that, aside from the tailings at uranium mines in southern Nevada and western Arizona, fissionable materials seemed to have disappeared from their world—or at least been put beyond her reach.

  The nuclear processing facility at Rocky Flats in Colorado now lay broken and rusting under the barrage of volcanic stone and ash. The breeder reactors at the Hanford Site in Washington State had been decommissioned and cleaned up long ago. Closer to home, the largest repository of spent fuel rods was to be found in the swimming pool and aboveground storage units at the commercial reactor on Diablo Cove, near San Luis Obispo. But even if she had the means to handle them and extract their enriched components, that site was guarded by a detachment from the California National Guard, the last of their command, pledged to hold the reactor in safe-store against intruders, maintain and monitor the pool and other radiation sources, and safeguard the area in perpetuity.

  Susannah had looked further afield, to France and Japan, the only countries that still used nuclear energy and reprocessed its waste products. But her polite inquiries had soon turned up the fact that theirs was a closed-cycle operation, passing material between government-run reactors and government-owned processing plants, without buyers or sellers of record in any kind of market.

  Which left the stone-cold trail out of Malaysia that Callie’s Italian godson had followed on orders from the mysterious woman in Dublin. Callie had been pressed to tell Susannah the whole story and assured her again that the woman was dead. After thirty years, her smuggling operation would not have left even a ghost trail. But perhaps, Susannah reasoned, the need for unauthorized nuclear fuel and bomb-making materials remained. Perhaps a network of buyers still existed. Perhaps, with diligence and just a touch less secrecy, she might tap into that supply.

  “We’re looking for a ghost,” she told Auchincloss absently.

  “I thought we were looking to transmute heavy metals.”

  “You told me yourself that’s a fairytale, didn’t you?”

  He shrugged. “You wouldn’t listen the first time.”

  * * *

  After her daily workout, Antigone Wells examined herself in the full-length mirrors of her private dojo. Her body was toned and fit. She turned sideways, opened her gi jacket, pulled her shoulders back, and examined the curve of her breasts through the leotard she wore underneath. It provided minimal support with no bra, and still her bustline was tighter and fuller than even before her first surgery.

  Her face was still a disaster, of course. The smooth skin that had been applied in that botched implant so long ago was finally succumbing to the forces of gravity and time. Because she couldn’t smile and didn’t laugh much—or use her facial muscles when she did happen to chuckle wryly—the face itself was unlined and unmarked. No creases about the mouth or wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. But the beautiful surface was beginning to sag. Folds were starting to appear along her jawline. And although she cleaned and moisturized her human mask with a scrubbing ritual and the latest ointments ever night, the skin was changing its texture, becoming softer, less firm, less youthful. In that one place—the place where everyone looked—Antigone Wells was beginning to show her true age.

  As she pulled her jacket back together and retied her black belt around her hips, she felt a pain in her right side. It was low down in the abdomen, just above her hip. She felt there with the palm of her hand, and her normally flat belly seemed stiff.

  She untied the belt again and dropped it to the floor, unfastened the tabs on her jacket and shed it, untied the drawstring of her gi pants, shucked them down, and stepped out of them. She stood before the mirror wearing only the thin, body-hugging spandex of the leotard.

  Yes, her belly was slightly lopsided. The right lower quadrant had a visible bulge, where the left had only the concave smoothness from years of twisting, bending, and stretching exercises, along with careful eating. She pressed on the bulge and felt the pain again. It wasn’t sharp—more of a pressure, an ache—but she dared not press it more deeply. It didn’t feel like muscle pain, more like something going on inside.

  She catalogued what organs might lie in that area. After the loops of small intestine, the ascending colon, and of course the liver, she drew a blank. The kidneys, where she had experienced trouble before and got it fixed with implants, were both around in the back. Nowhere near this bulge.

  It might be something she’d eaten, a buildup of waste matter or gas, waiting to pass. But the pain was unusual. She decided it would bear watching.

  Wells picked up her clothing and went back to her bedroom to change.

  * * *

  Do we have any plans for acquiring nuclear technology? Machiavelli asked Anastasia Praxis out of the blue one morning.

  Stacy paused for a moment before replying. She was marshaling her thoughts and editing them, as she had learned to do when speaking with the intelligences inside her head. I don’t think so. Why do you ask?

  I have a query from the Chinese consulate in San Francisco, the machine voice said. Quan Hui Yan, the All Seeing, who is their guiding intelligence, informs me of reports they have received about an unauthorized expedition to the linear accelerator at Stanford University. They allege that vehicles marked with the sigil of the Praxis Defense Force visited the site last week. They remind us that linacs generate energy by release of subatomic particles, which is a form of power forbidden by the Treaty of Kitsap.

  I wasn’t aware of that, she replied. It was an equivocal statement, one designed to pass the logic-evaluation loops and biometric probes built into every contemporary intelligence to help it test human responses for their truth or falsehood. What Stacy overtly intended was that she didn’t know about the power restrictions in the treaty. What Machiavelli had a fifty-fifty chance of understanding was that she didn’t know about the expedition—and, of course, Jay-Jay had told her all about it the moment he got back.

  They append a copy of the treaty for our inspection, Machiavelli said, allowing her to relax slightly. Further, he went on, the Chinese ha
ve intercepted queries made by Susannah Praxis over the past month regarding spent nuclear fuel, breeder reactors, and fuel reprocessing. Quan Hui Yan assigns thirty-eight percent probability to the proposition that the Praxis Family Association is seeking materials from which to fashion a nuclear device, either for power generation or as a weapon.

  That’s presumptuous of them, Stacy replied.

  How should I respond? the intelligence asked. Quan Hui Yan requires a response for his government.

  Stacy took two deep breaths and held the last one, trying to still her mind. Tell them I know nothing about any of this. Any orders for a change in either our energy supply or our armament posture would have to come down from the Association’s chairman, John Praxis, or from the president, Callista Praxis. I have received no instructions from either of them.

  Those last two statements were certainly true, at least on their face. Stacy hoped that by ending her response with two verifiable truths, back to back, she could rush Machiavelli into ignoring her first statement, which was patently false, as an examination of her pulse, respiration, and galvanic response would suggest. The breath-holding trick didn’t always work.

  Thank you. I will so inform Quan Hui Yan. And with that, Machiavelli’s carrier wave faded from her mind.

  4. Stabbed in the Dark

  “There,” said the doctor as she moved the ultrasound wand back and forth over the patch of cold gel on Antigone Wells’s abdomen. “You can see the liver most clearly now.”

  Wells lifted her head while trying not to move the rest of her body. On the screen, bluish blobs and ghosts wavered and shifted. “What am I looking at?”

  “Right there,” Dr. Ming insisted, nodding at the machine.

  Despite the unpleasantness of the last few decades, Wells had learned to trust Chinese doctors more than their western counterparts. They tended to be cool and dispassionate professionals; they had better training; and they usually had access to the best technology—outside of the closed medical organizations like the one run by the Praxis Family Association. This doctor, Ming Meirong, was an internist who specialized in dealing with westerners. She even introduced herself as “Mary,” to make them feel more at ease.