by Erik Hanberg
“Your super intelligence can’t solve that?”
“We had an eight-second head start, and it helped us to destroy the cartel’s arms. But eventually we ran into the law of large numbers—at some point expanding made us less efficient, so we stopped multiplying. Which is when I had the time to talk to you again,” Ignatius added. “The super intelligence of the cartel’s AI eventually caught up. It was bound to.”
“You’re saying the advantage we had is already gone,” Shaw said. “I’m back to square one?”
“Not square one. You now have a temporary lead in the local arms race, which has bought you some time. How you use that time or your temporary advantage in weaponry before the cartel can resupply is up to you.”
Shaw processed the information he’d just been given. Then he asked, “You said half the cartel’s satellites are moving toward Rome. What about other half?”
There was a beat of silence again, and Shaw suddenly knew what they were going to say.”
“Toward the Walden,” Aquinas answered.
“But they are innocents!” Shaw exclaimed. “Surely you see that?” He leaned forward, nearly knocking over the ancient Chinese tea set in the center of the chat room, that Professor Dao-ming Wu had selected for their call.
Wu nodded. “Of course I can see that. Everyone can see that. But that doesn’t mean the Chinese government is going to barrel in and upset the most powerful companies in the world to save them.”
“I’ve seen the numbers,” Shaw said. “China has plenty of lasers in space. You could take out all the cartel’s lasers in a matter of minutes. You’d stop a civil war in Italy and save my wife and daughter, not to mention the smartest man in the world.”
“Not to mention one of the smartest women in the world!” Wu said hotly. “The one who used her intellect to nearly destroy society.”
Shaw sat back.
“You know I want to help you,” she said with more warmth in her voice. “I helped you when you came to Hefei last year. And when I heard that you were thinking of reaching out to me, I immediately started calling my friends in the government. Not a single one was willing to take your call. They are too afraid of the consequences of crossing the cartel.”
“As we speak, satellites are—”
“Trust me, you don’t have to tell me again. But I’m also hearing that Galway doesn’t actually intend to use them before the deadline. That she’s just trying to get a rise out of you.”
Shaw’s jaw was clenched. “It shouldn’t matter.”
“No, it shouldn’t,” Wu answered. “I’ll keep trying. Perhaps something will change, and they might be more willing to take out the satellites on your behalf.”
“Thank you, Professor,” Shaw said. “I know that’s the best you can do.”
They said their goodbyes and Shaw left the jump.
“Where are we with Yang?” he asked Alberto.
“He has agreed to speak with you, sir,” Alberto said. “But he’s asked for a couple minutes to prepare first.”
“Put him through to my ring the moment he’s ready.”
“Yes, sir.”
Shaw turned his attention to his council of saints. “How many satellites are orbiting with the Walden now?”
“Sixteen,” Ignatius answered.
“That’s a little bit of overkill, isn’t it? It would only take one or two to destroy the Walden.”
“I think that’s the point,” Joan of Arc said. “Galway is doing it to distract you. Knocking you off your game. From what you should be doing right now.”
“This is still part of phase two,” Shaw snapped.
“Phase two was cleaving the Northerners away from the cartel. You’ve already jumped to phase three,” she said. “Now is the time to reach out to the Northerners.”
“After Yang,” Shaw said.
He waited, conspicuously ignoring the AIs.
Finally, Alberto broke the frosty silence. “Tim Yang is waiting,” he said.
Shaw’s hand was already moving toward his temple. Within a second, he was in a jump. He came ready to dive into his request that the U.S. destroy the cartel’s satellites, but the location Yang had chosen for the chat room stopped him cold in his tracks.
The chat room was modeled on the CERN tunnels, as they existed before Shaw and the raiders had destroyed the Geneva Lattice. To Shaw’s right was the metal wall that created the Lattice containment area, which had kept it at temperatures near absolute zero. To his left was the dark tunnel that Wulf had been dragged down after he’d been shot in the stomach. And in front of him was Yang, coming out of the same door that he, Taveena, and Annalise has escaped through—and where they had ultimately left’s Yang’s unconscious body.
Shaw gulped as Yang’s avatar stood in front of him—almost on the exact spot where Yang had broken Shaw’s leg. “Why here?” he choked out.
“Because a not-guilty verdict doesn’t mean not guilty,” Yang said simply. “I know what you came to ask me. And I’ll help. I will do everything I can to convince my superiors that the cartel’s satellites pose a grave threat to national security. But I wanted you to see this—the site of your betrayal.”
“I—”
“Don’t even bother,” Yang spat. “I don’t need to hear it. The look on your face as you saw where we were meeting told me everything I need to know.”
“Why are you helping me?”
Yang shook his head. “I’m helping your wife and your daughter. I’m helping the world by putting a check on five lawless companies that have amassed too much power. You are beside the point.”
“Thank you, nonetheless,” he said. Shaw wasn’t sure, but he thought there had been a slight nod from Yang. He pressed forward, “Do you think you will be able to convince them?”
“It will take some doing. They might need to see that Galway and the cartel are truly willing to commit indiscriminate murder.”
“You’re saying that the best way for the U.S. to shoot down the satellites is for the cartel to murder my family first?”
“I’m saying I’m going to do my best, Shaw,” Yang said.
Shaw took a deep breath. “OK.”
Yang turned to go.
“Wait,” Shaw said.
Yang stopped. “If you’re looking for absolution, I’ve got nothing to say. We’re not going to make up.”
“I know,” Shaw said. “But, perhaps you can still help me. What do you think I should be doing? In Italy, I mean.”
Yang nodded once. “Peace with the North Italians. Phase two.”
Out of the chat room and back in the Raphael Room of the Vatican, Shaw turned to Alberto. “Who do you have for me to talk to from the Northern Italians?”
“Colonnello Fulvio Fassino,” Alberto answered. “He’s standing by.”
“Colonnello… that means he’s a colonel? You couldn’t find anyone higher up the chain of command?”
“He leads their ground forces,” Alberto said.
“Sure, but he can’t negotiate on behalf of the Northerners. I need someone much higher up.”
“I tried, sir. They felt that since you were a colonel in your military, before…” Alberto trailed off.
Now Shaw understood. “Ah. Of course. Even now, they would rather stick to military protocol than get something done.” He shook his head and touched his ring to his temple.
The jump took him to an urban Italian scene. He was seated at a small table in a sidewalk café. A small cup of espresso was in front of him. And on the other side of the table was a rosy-faced man in full military uniform.
“Buon giorno,” the man smiled. “I am Fulvio Fassino.”
Shaw nodded. “It’s good to meet you Colonel Fassino.”
“Likewise. I had no idea when I awoke this morning that I would get to have coffee with the famous Byron Shaw.”
“You picked an excellent location,” Shaw said. He sipped at his espresso. Like anything in a chat room, all the action was happening somewhere in his brain
(or the implant, he never quite understood which). It wasn’t real, but that didn’t stop the espresso from tasting refreshing.
“That I did! I had the opportunity to pick anywhere in the world I could think of for our meeting, and I could think of no better spot than my favorite café in my hometown.”
“Where are we?” Shaw asked.
“Torino. Turin, in your language. The capitol of Italy since Disunification. Even though Il Vittoriano—that’s the old capitol building if you didn’t know—remained in our hands after the walls went up dividing Rome, we didn’t feel it was safe to continue having parliament meet so close to the heart of the papacy. We moved it here.”
Shaw glanced around. He saw a monumental spire framed in the middle of the street, but he didn’t recognize it.
Fassino followed Shaw’s gaze. “Ah, you’ve spotted the Mole Antonelliana. It’s hard to miss. It’s an old synagogue. Then it was converted to a museum. And now it houses Parliament. Or it will, until Parliament returns to its rightful place in Rome, that is. Those of us from Turin have gotten used to having the seat of power in our backyard, but with the end in sight, we are having to get used to the idea that it will leave. At this moment, Presidente Leone is preparing terms of surrender for Pope Clement.”
“Perhaps the government doesn’t have to leave Turin,” Shaw ventured.
Fassino waved the suggestion away with a jovial laugh. “Of course it does. The peninsula must be made whole.”
“Is perpetual war worth the cost?”
“More than two hundred years ago we were unified under King Victor Emmanuel! Much blood was spilled but it was for the greater cause. It was the pope who tore up that peace, not the Italians.”
“Colonel Fassino, I know that there are thirty years of bad blood between the Northern Italians and the Papal States. I’m not trying to paper over that. But I also know that war might be too a high a price to bear. Can you and the pope resolve your differences peacefully?”
The rotund merry man across the table from Shaw seemed to have vanished. Now the red in his face seemed driven by anger, and he was leaning forward with a ferocity in his eyes. “The man of war wants to talk peace? I knew some of the men and women you killed in Sardinia. Don’t lecture me about peace,” he growled.
Shaw felt a pang of guilt as he pictured the explosion. “I truly regret what happened to those soldiers,” he said. “But surely they knew, and you know, that in a time of war—”
Before he could get any farther, the chat room changed around him. The bright and sunny scene of the street café was replaced by dim lightbulbs strung along in a narrow brick corridor with a dirt floor. Shaw didn’t have to let his eyes adjust to know where he was.
A man came around the corner, pushing two young boys forward in front of him. The boys were Shaws—Byron and his younger brother. And the man was their kidnapper, Dioli, the Catholic terrorist who had ripped them from their parents.
Shaw looked away.
“I’m sorry. What were you saying about life in a time of war?” Fassino asked.
“You know this is different,” Shaw whispered.
“I know that the victor writes the history books. If the Catholics win, incidents like what happened today in Sardinia will be swept under the rug. If we win, we will remember the victims of their needless war. You of all people should want that.”
Shaw stood a little straighter. Realization had finally dawned. What he had taken to be military protocol was, in fact, a slight against him. Worse, it was a distraction. He met Fassino’s eyes with his own steely gaze. “You never intended to make peace with me, did you?”
“Of course not,” Fassino laughed. “Just five minutes before we talked, Dvorak Systems and the cartel promised to double the amount of resources they would provide us. We’re mobilizing against you as you speak. There will be some surprises waiting for you when you leave this jump. Maybe you should have offered peace earlier?”
“You attack us and the world will judge you accordingly. Win the battle, lose the war.”
“Hardly. You drew blood in Sardinia. Everything we do will be justified. Go ask your saints if that’s the truth.” Fassino laughed again and suddenly the chat room disappeared. The conversation had ended and Shaw was back in the Raphael Room with the council.
He sat forward in his chair. “What’s happening?”
“They intend to exploit your weakness,” Ignatius answered.
“That I tried to save my family before negotiating peace? If they are holding that against me, they weren’t actually interested in the first place.”
“Not that,” Joan said. “In the chat with Fassino, you felt guilt. Guilt at the deaths of the fifteen who died in the missile attack on Sardinia.”
“Yes. And?”
“They believe you won’t attack other humans,” Aquinas said.
“So what does that mean?” Shaw asked.
“It’s easy to send bots after bots and drones after drones,” Aquinas said. “But will you send an army to meet an army? They mean to find out.”
“They are sending an army to Rome,” Ignatius explained. “Troops. Men and women in the streets coming to kill us. You.”
Shaw closed his eyes. “Tell me. With our remaining bot swarms and drones, we could wipe out their entire army, right? We could slaughter them if we wanted to.”
“As I said, they are exploiting your weakness. They don’t believe that you would do it. And since the missiles we fired destroyed their remaining drones and bot swarms anyway—”
“Why not send people?” Shaw finished. “It’s the same as before. Heads they win, tails I lose. If I attack, then we’ve lost the wider public relations war. And if I don’t, there’s a hostile army in Saint Peter’s Square.”
Ignatius nodded.
Shaw sat back in his chair. He sighed heavily. “They’re right, I guess. I’m not going to send a bot swarm to rain terror down on people who can’t fight back. It is a weakness.”
“Some might say it is your humanity,” Aquinas said quietly.
“Maybe. But my humanity isn’t going to save us. What would you suggest I do?”
“When they fight with bot swarms, we fight with bot swarms. If they send an army, then by the same principle…”
“We raise an army,” Shaw concluded.
“Proportionality is an important foundation for a just war,” Aquinas answered.
“Do we even have an army?”
“We have two hundred and fifty members of the Swiss Guard, one hundred members of the Knights Templar, and two thousand Catholic conscripts, though some of them would need to be ordered back to Rome immediately if you want them to be here in time.”
“Twenty-five hundred all-together. And how many are the Northerners sending?”
“Twice that.”
“When do you project their arrival?”
“Less than four hours.”
There was silence as Shaw processed this new attack. He had spent most of his military life poring over maps and holograms. He had fought raiders from the control room at the Nevada Lattice installation. Then from the Walden, he successfully organized the attack on that same installation, and all from safety of the spaceship.
But in Geneva he had needed to get on the ground to fight. Hand-to-hand combat in the tunnels. He remembered how foreign it had felt, how different from boxing and the rules of the ring. He’d hated it. He hated war. At several points during that fight and during the skirmishes he’d been involved in after the fall of the Lattice, he’d proven that to himself many times over.
But he also realized that in just a few hours’ time, he’d gotten too comfortable running this war from the safe confines of the Vatican. It was too easy, sitting here with holograms while directing missiles and bot swarms. But war was fought on the ground and in the street, not from a palatial room with frescos on the wall.
He wasn’t going to sit in here while he sent others to die for his family. Maybe he wasn’t willing to slaughte
r an army. But he wasn’t afraid to fight them either.
“Prepare for battle,” he directed the saints. “Get all the soldiers you can as fast as you can. We’ll need them to make some… modifications to the battlefield.”
“Yes, Grand Master.”
“A war over the Lattice,” Shaw said, shaking his head in wonder. “And we’re going to fight it with the equivalent of sticks and stones.”
Chapter 7
Shaw stood in front of a hologram of the Earth. The network of new Lattice satellites operated by the cartel were illuminated so he could see their placement in a perfect grid around the planet. He pointed at one satellite at random. “I just don’t see any part that is vulnerable. It’s made from a nitrogen diamond, one of the strongest substances humans have ever created. They take heavy fire to destroy and by the time you are done with the job, another satellite replicates on the other side of the planet,” he said, pointing to another satellite on the other side of the projection. “I speak from experience here.”
Florian nodded. “Yes, the nitrogen diamond is strong. But you skipped over the first part of the story. We see a weakness—no, that’s too definitive—we see a theoretical weakness in the molecular machines that constructed and replicated the nitrogen diamonds.”
“That’s the part that Taveena could create the spheres with,” Shaw clarified.
“Exactly. It’s an atomic-sized machine that can grab other atoms from its environment and build something entirely new around itself. It was years ahead of any technology we had when it was discovered during that first raid on the Nevada Lattice. And it wasn’t until Ada Dillon was able to get her hands on a molecular machine in Buenos Aires that anyone was able to study it closely. Even so, she was able to replicate the molecular machine across the Lattice satellite network. In a very real way, those molecular machines are at the foundation of the new Lattice.”
“Trust me, I remember,” Shaw said. He could easily remember what it was like to sit in a skyscraper being slowly eaten by Tranq’s black sand from below, while waiting for Ada Dillon to reverse engineer the molecular machine.