The Tin Whistle

by Erik Hanberg

  “I’m not talking about assassinating their CEOs. I’m talking about breaking their grip on the Lattice technologically. What if there was some way to break that stranglehold? What if connecting to the Lattice was absolutely totally free? If the cartel didn’t act as the gatekeeper anymore, then the Lattice would truly belong to everyone. We wouldn’t serve it. Or them. They would serve us.”

  “It’s easy for you to talk about,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean there’s a way to actually do what you’re saying.”

  “Easy for me to talk about? No. Because it’s putting my family at risk. It’s the worst thing I could possibly talk about right now. But it’s also the right thing. You’re right, I don’t know the tech. But I know the companies. I know how they control access to the Lattice. I know what they’ve done to my family. To your friends. To so many people. Write them out of the code. Open it up. If anyone can find the way, you can.”

  Taveena seemed suddenly lost in thought. She sat still for a few moments and then leaned forward and began working furiously at her console. She glanced up at him, as if she’d forgotten he was still there. “I haven’t made my decision yet. But if I do what you suggest and try to take down the companies in the cartels, by definition that means I’m not trying to take down the Lattice. Which will put Ellie and Jane in danger. It’s possible all your work will get you a better Lattice in exchange for a murdered family.”

  Chapter 12

  Nosipho slapped Shaw across the face as hard as she could. “How dare you! After all she’s done for you, and all she’s doing for you right this minute, you sell out Grace?”

  Shaw cupped his burning cheek. “I didn’t sell out Grace. Her company, maybe. But you and Grace already have more money than God. You two will be fine.”

  “Grace is Altair and Altair is Grace. And if you think she’s doing it for the money, you’re dead wrong.”

  “I don’t care why she built her company. Things need to change, even if that means the end of Altair.”

  “Grace will stop you and she’ll stop Taveena. She will do anything to protect her company.”

  “Things like letting Galway and Dillon murder people from the sky? Like getting into bed with the cartel? Like voting to kill me and my family? Trust me, I’m well aware of how far she’ll go.” Shaw walked away.

  Across the Raphael Rooms, he found Alberto and the saints. He looked around the rooms again. “Where is Grace anyway?” Shaw asked under his breath.

  “Arranging another shipment of arms,” Ignatius said. “They will be late, and they may not get through the blockade, but on the off-chance we can hold out, they will be very useful.”

  Shaw grimaced. “Does she know what Taveena’s doing?”

  “Yes,” Ignatius answered. “She nearly pulled her support after your talk with Taveena. But at this point, her fate is likely tied to ours. Northerners and Dvorak mercenaries have totally surrounded the city. They’re shooting down anything that tries to leave the city limits. No one is getting in or out of Rome.”

  “What are we up against?”

  “In round numbers, they have four times the bot swarms, ten times the drones, and twenty times the missiles we do. That’s not even counting ground forces.”

  “And if Grace gets the armaments?”

  Ignatius shrugged. “We narrow the gap in all those categories except troops. But they would still have the advantage. And it will still almost certainly be too late.”

  Shaw shook his head in dismay. “What are they fighting for?”

  “The Northerners—for reunification. Galway and Dvorak Systems—for blood.”

  “Do you have any more rabbits to pull from the hat?” Joan of Arc asked.

  “No. No rabbits. No ace up my sleeve,” he answered. He sighed. “Where’s the pope?”

  In a few moments, Pope Clement XV entered from the archway that led to his private apartments. He wasn’t wearing the miter, just a small white cap.

  Shaw knew what he was about to ask wasn’t going to come easily, so he did his best to project formality. “Your holiness,” he said softly, “I have no choice but to recommend an unconditional surrender to the Northerners.”

  The pope stared at Shaw for several moments. “You’ve failed me. You’ve failed all of us.”

  “We won the day, but it wasn’t enough. With what they are sending our way, there is no hope, your holiness. We won’t survive.”

  “Perhaps if you hadn’t suggested that Taveena Parr change her research focus, she could have found a way to bring down the Lattice.”

  “Bringing down the Lattice would have rendered the drones and bot swarms inoperable, it’s true,” Shaw said. “But they would still have their troops. They still have their missiles. Maybe they couldn’t aim them as precisely as they did before, but that just makes it worse. An indiscriminate bombing of the Vatican helps no one.”

  “Destroying the Lattice would also render most of our defenses inoperable,” Ignatius added.

  The pope turned to his saints.

  “So. Is this what my council of war thinks as well? That we should surrender?”

  “Catholicism didn’t end with the end of the papal states two hundred years ago,” Aquinas said. “Surrendering will keep the faith alive and prevent a mass slaughter.”

  “There is no tactical option that achieves victory,” Ignatius said. “We owe the chance of life to the men and women who have been fighting for us. We should surrender.”

  The pope turned to Joan of Arc. Her bright eyes flashed at Shaw. He caught his breath and wondered what the martyr would say.

  “Your holiness,” she started, “if the Northerners were asking us to renounce our faith or to renounce Christ, you know what my answer would be. I have proven that and I was sainted for it. But they are not asking for that. Forgive me, your holiness, but Disunification was a fool’s errand, born out of the ego of your predecessor. There is nothing to be gained by martyring ourselves for such an earthly cause.”

  Shaw was stunned, but he tried to hide it. After a few moments of silence, the pope faced Shaw. He looked like he’d aged ten years in the last minute. “It’s over,” he said, just now realizing it for himself. Disunification was older than the pope. It would be a sea-change for him, Shaw knew.

  “Yes, your holiness,” he said.

  “I guess I should speak to Zella Galway,” Clement said.

  “No!” Shaw exclaimed, startling everyone. “She has nothing to do with this.”

  “She’s got troops and missiles at our gates,” Ignatius said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Shaw said firmly. “Who was it that Fassino mentioned again?” he wondered aloud. “Right—North Italy’s President Leone. In my chat with him, Fassino said Leone was drafting terms of surrender. That’s the man you need to speak with.”

  “He is standing by,” Aquinas said. “He is ready for peace. With a surrender, he is willing to restore the terms of the Lateran Treaty. The Catholics will keep the Vatican.”

  The pope sighed. “That is generous, given the circumstances. Peace it shall be.”

  “Zella Galway would like your surrender as well,” Ignatius repeated.

  “No,” Shaw countered again. “The papal states are not at war with a company. She was funding the Northerners war, nothing more than that. If the Northerners are accepting peace, she has no leg to stand on for further war.”

  “You know she won’t accept that,” the pope said.

  Shaw was silent.

  “Oh,” the pope said with dawning realization in his voice. “You know she won’t accept that.”

  “Phase two again, hmm?” Aquinas murmured. “Cleave the Northerners away from the cartel.”

  “If the Northerners stand down and we just face off with the cartel, are we still outnumbered?” Shaw asked.

  Ignatius nodded. “Yes. But it’s far closer.”

  “Your holiness, please reach out to President Leone immediately. Tell him that his mercenaries are about to turn on him
and fight an illegal war on Italian soil.”

  “Italian? But—”

  “Rome is no longer a divided city,” Shaw said. “Those troops are in a unified Italy now, not the Papal States. Will he help us?”

  The pope touched his ring to his temple and entered a jump.

  “President Leone will agree,” Aquinas reported. “He never liked how Dvorak took matters into its own hands.”

  “Good,” Shaw said. “How are our odds against Dvorak’s mercenaries if we combine our forces with the Northerners?”

  “They only slightly outnumber us,” Ignatius said with a smile. “I’d call it a coin toss who wins.”

  “We can work with those odds,” Shaw nodded, with evident satisfaction.

  “I thought you didn’t have any more rabbits in the hat,” Joan of Arc said accusingly.

  “I wasn’t sure I did either,” he said. “Otherwise you would have seen it in my thoughts.” He turned back to Ignatius. “Do Galway’s troops still have Rome surrounded?”

  “We were surrounded. With both Northerners and Dvorak mercenaries. Now that the Northern Italians are on our side, though, many ways in and out of the city have opened up.”

  “Tell Grace and Nosipho they are free to leave the city if they so choose.”

  “We could still use them as allies,” Ignatius said.

  “It’s not their fight anymore,” Shaw said firmly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “As for everyone else… get them ready to advance. We’re going to finally take this fight to them.”

  Shaw walked out the immense doors of Saint Peter’s Basilica. The troops under his command were waiting in the square. Shaw didn’t bother with a grand speech. He just kept walking and his soldiers fell into line behind him.

  He jumped the earthen and cobblestone embankment the drones had built and walked down the slope they’d created. The moat was gone, having already soaked back into the earth.

  Ahead of him, Via della Conciliazione was being cleared by his own men and his own plows using the same tactic Fassino had attempted. This time, though, the plows went uninterrupted, and Shaw’s troops were able to walk in formation down the wide boulevard. The streetlamps had been destroyed in the explosions on either side of the street, and Rome was mostly dark. Without the light of the city to interfere, the night sky was vibrant above him. He imagined the Walden was overhead.

  As the column advanced through the boulevard, they began to hear the noises of shouts and gunfire. A quick glance at his wrap confirmed that there was a battle already underway: Dvorak mercenaries had tried to preemptively fire on the Northerners they’d previously served alongside, and now there were skirmishes in a ring all around the city.

  Shaw broke into a jog and followed the sound of battle, his wrap guiding him.

  His wrap beeped at him and he looked again as he ran. It was a rare text message. Not a call or a recording or an invitation to a chat room, but a few lines of text. And from Zella Galway, no less.

  Our satellites are on autopilot. No matter what happens on the ground, you won’t be able to stop them. Your family is dead in an hour.

  Shaw started running.

  Many of the walls surrounding Rome were eighteen hundred years old. But a sequence of newer walls, these less than thirty years old, separated North and South Rome. Built of the same tall brickwork as the Vatican walls, this new barrier only a few minutes ago separated North Italy from the Papal States.

  Now it separated Shaw from the street fighting between the Northerners and the Dvorak mercenaries.

  His wrap was guiding him to the battle, but he could already tell from the map that he was going to arrive on the wrong side of the wall. His wrap calculated that he had a minute of running remaining before he reached the fight, but he still was unsure how he was supposed to cross the twelve-meter high walls.

  Um… guys? he thought as he ran toward the wall, knowing that the saints would pick up his thought in the Lattice.

  As he was thinking about it, three missiles streaked in front of him, and blew a hole into the wall separating North from South Rome. Shaw held his breath as he ran into the dust cloud. The loose bricks and rubble were a hard climb, but by the time he reached the top of the collapsed wall, he had a full view of the fighting.

  Nearly positioned on top of each other as allies, the mercenaries and the regular North Italy army did not have any barriers between them when the order to attack was given. It wasn’t a battle like what Shaw had just fought in Saint Peter’s Square—it was a melee. It would have been impossible to tell who was winning—unless you had the Lattice, which told Shaw before he arrived that the Northerners were slowly losing ground to the Dvorak mercenaries.

  Seeing it with his own eyes now, he saw just how bloody this fight would be. The two sides—though “sides” was a misnomer because they were so heavily intermingled—were using a mix of guerilla and street warfare tactics. Vehicles were overturned and were now being used as shields. Snipers with rifles were perched on rooftops and off fire escapes, trying to find clear shows in the melee beneath them. In situations like this, you were as likely to be killed by friendly fire as you were from an enemy.

  A red bit of laser fire exploded a brick over Shaw’s shoulder and he came to his senses. He had only been there a half-second taking it all in, but standing in the gap of the wall had left him vulnerable to anyone who wanted a piece of him. He crouched low and led his troops into a partial charge, partial skid, and partial stumbling effort down the pile of bricks to the street.

  Instantly they were in the heart of the melee.

  The chaos was nearly overwhelming. Even with the hand-to-hand combat at the end of the battle in Saint Peter’s, there had been some order to it. Most cartel forces were on one side, most Catholics on the other. This was like being inside a killing machine.

  The fighting was ugly. People were dying all around him, often murdered from one of the snipers above. There was no point in dodging—either you were hit or you weren’t. Instead he focused on the people around him. It took him a few seconds to realize that each mercenary had a shoulder patch with a stylized DS of Dvorak Systems’ logo. He kept his focus on them, using his fists as often as his hand laser.

  He kept slowly moving, pushing forward to the other side of the street so as not to trap any of his troops behind him on the uneven brick pile. It also made it harder for any snipers in the building directly above to fire down on his position.

  As he rescued a Northerner from a Dvorak mercenary’s clutches, Shaw sent a specific thought to the saints. They in turn relayed it to any of the troops with Lattice connections who were just now coming through the gap in the wall. From their higher position on the pile of bricks, they knelt and focused their aim at the snipers in the upper windows and on the roofs of the buildings across the street. Within a minute, the fire from above was gone and Shaw could better evaluate the situation on the ground.

  All in all, it was going well. The wave of Catholic soldiers pressed through the blasted opening in the wall, and Shaw saw that it had been enough to turn the tide—at this one point at least. As his troops mopped up here, Shaw sent three platoons in each direction on the wall to continue seeking out Dvorak forces and supporting Northerners that they encountered.

  He took a breath. A woman with the green, white, and red flag on her shoulder helped up a soldier Shaw recognized from his own side, whose yellow and white shoulder patch of the Vatican flag confirmed she had been on the Catholic side. They clasped each other like long-lost sisters, trying to erase thirty years of history and walls that had separated them.

  Shaw risked a glance his wrap. While his side was winning, it was still not totally over. Many people had been killed for mistakes like Disunification. But those people likely hadn’t had a family in orbit they were worried about.

  There was a message on his wrap from Alberto, who had stayed back in the Raphael Rooms with the saints and the pope.

  Something’s going on with the
Walden. It’s losing orbit. And it appears to be disintegrating.

  Shaw looked around. It didn’t matter the risk. He had to see what was happening.

  He put his ring to his temple and jumped.

  When Shaw saw the Walden from space, he realized that Alberto had not been describing some small change in the ship’s course or altitude. The Walden was visibly much closer to Earth than the last time he’d seen it. The last time he’d looked at the Walden in orbit was when Grace had taken over the cartel’s satellites. At the time, Shaw had been able to see not only the big blue planet Earth, but the black of space behind it. But now he felt overwhelmed by Earth’s size. It was everywhere. It filled one entire side of his vision with a brightness that made him squint.

  And the Walden was getting ever nearer, its orbit decaying as if Taveena were preparing for re-entry.

  “What is going on?” Shaw exclaimed, and then realized no one was in the jump with him. His ring clenched, not to summon him, but pulsing to indicate someone wanted to join the jump with him.

  Shaw accepted and Aquinas’s avatar appeared at Shaw’s side, flying comfortably beside him. Together, their avatars tailed the Walden as it rushed across the skies thousands of feet above Siberia.

  “Are Ellie and Jane still aboard?” Shaw asked Aquinas.

  Aquinas nodded. “Unfortunately yes.”

  “What is Taveena doing?” Shaw asked. “Is this intentional? Why is the Walden in a decaying orbit?”

  “We don’t know,” Aquinas said.

  “You don’t know?” Shaw repeated incredulously. Between the all-seeing eye of the Lattice and the super-human processing speeds of the AI saints, Shaw didn’t know how that was possible.

  “Right before the battle in Saint Peter’s Square, when you pointed to the spot you wanted the drones and bots to wait, you didn’t know exactly why you thought that was the right place,” Aquinas answered. “That decision was made at a subconscious level. But you trusted it and the cartel’s AI didn’t understand why you’d done it until it was too late. There are as many neurons in the brain as stars in the Milky Way and looking for a subconscious motivation in there is, even for an AI, very difficult to do.”