by Vernor Vinge
Smith stepped back until she was even with him. “Come with me, Sergeant. I saw someone I’ve been wanting to talk to for a long time.” There would be a vote called later in the day. Before that there could well be follow-up questions for the General. There was plenty of time for political maneuver. He and Downing followed the General to the far end of the proscenium, blocking the exit. A scruffy cobber in extravagant leggings was coming toward them. Pedure. The years had not been kind to her—or maybe the stories about the attempted assassinations were true. She made to sidle around Victory Smith, but the General stepped into her path.
Smith smiled at her. “Hello, Cobblie Killer. So nice to meet you in person.”
The other hissed. “Yes. And if you don’t move from my path, I will be very pleased to kill you.” The words were heavily accented, but the tiny knife on her hand was clear enough.
Smith stretched her arms sideways, an extravagant shrug that would catch notice all across the hall. “In front of all these people, Honored Pedure? I don’t think so. You’re—”
Smith hesitated, raised a pair of hands to her head, and seemed to listen. To her telephone?
Pedure just stared, her entire aspect full of suspicion. Pedure was a small female with galled chitin, and gestures that were just a bit too quick. A totally untrustworthy picture. She must be so used to killing from afar that personal charm and facility with language were long-discarded talents. She was out of her element here, managing things directly. It made Unnerby just a shade more confident.
Something buzzed in Pedure’s jacket. Her little knife disappeared and she grabbed her phone. For a moment, the two spy chiefs looked like old friends, communing with their memories.
“No!” Pedure spasmed; her voice was a scream. She grabbed the phone with her eating hands, all but stuffed it into her maw. “Not here! Not now!” The fact that they were a sudden spectacle did not seem to matter to her.
General Smith turned toward Unnerby. “Everyone’s schemes just went down the toilet, Sergeant. Three ice-launched missiles are coming our way. We’ve got about seven minutes.” For an instant, Unnerby’s gaze caught on the dome above them. It was a thousand feet underground, proof against tactical fission bombs. But he knew the Kindred fleet had progressed to much bigger things. A triple launch would most likely be a deep-penetration strike. Even so…I helped design this place. There were stairs nearby, access to much deeper places. He reached for one of Smith’s arms. “Please, General. Follow me.” They started back across the proscenium.
Villains and good guys, Unnerby had seen courage and cowardice among them all. Pedure…well, Honored Pedure was almost twitching with panic. She twisted this way and that in little hops, screaming Tiefic into her telephone. Abruptly she stopped and turned back to Smith. Terror warred with incredulous surprise. “The missiles. They’re yours! You—” With a shriek, she launched herself toward Smith’s back, her knife a silver extension of her longest arm.
Unnerby slipped between them before Smith could even turn. He gave Honored Pedure the hard of his shoulders, sending her flying off the stage. Around them everything was confused. Pedure’s people swarmed up from the floor, and were met by Smith’s combateers swinging down from the visitors’ gallery. Shock spread across the hall as cobbers lifted their heads from their readers and noticed just who was fighting. Then from high at the back there was a scream. “Look! The network news! The Accord has launched missiles on us!”
Unnerby led the combateers and his General out a side entrance. They raced down stairs toward the hidden shafts that dropped to the security core. Seven minutes to live? Maybe. But suddenly Hrunkner’s heart soared free. What was left was so simple, just as it had been with Victory long ago. Life and death, a few good troops, and a few minutes to decide it all.
FIFTY-FIVE
Belga Underville was senior in the Command and Control Center. That really didn’t count for much; Underville was Domestic Intelligence. What happened here could change her job forever, but she was out of this chain of command, just a link to civil defense and the King’s household forces. Belga watched Elno Coldhaven, the shiny new Director of External Intelligence, the acting CO of the center. Coldhaven knew the firestorm of failures that had ended the career of his predecessor. He knew that Rachner Thract was no dummy and probably no traitor. And now Elno had the same job, and the chief was out of the country. He was operating very much without a safety net. More than once in the last few days he had taken Underville aside and earnestly asked her advice. She suspected that this had been the chief’s reason for having her stay down here rather than return to Princeton.
The CCC was more than a mile inside the promontory headrock of Lands Command, beneath the old Royal Deepness. A decade ago, the Center had been a huge thing, dozens of intelligence techs with the funny little CRT displays of the era. Behind them had been glassed-in meeting rooms and oversight bridges for the presiding officers. But year by year, computer systems and networks improved. Now Accord Intelligence had better eyes and ears and automation, and the CCC itself was scarcely bigger than a conference room. A quiet, strange conference room of outward-sitting perches. The air was fresh, always lightly moving; bright lighting left no shadows. There were data displays, but now the simplest ones were twelve-color-capable. And there were still technicians, but each of them managed a thousand nodes scattered across the continent and into the near-space recon system. Indirectly, each had hundreds of specialists available for interpretation. Eight technicians, four field-rank officers, a commanding officer. Those were all that need be physically present.
The center screen showed the chief being introduced to Parliament. It was the same commercial feed that the rest of the world saw—External Intelligence had decided not to try to sneak special video into Parliament Hall. One of the techs was working with freeze-frames from the video. He popped up a composite of a dozen snippets, fiddled with the lighting. A scruffy-looking character appeared on the screen, the details of her dark clothing vague. Beside Belga, General Coldhaven said softly, “Good. That’s a positive identification. Ol’ Pedure herself…She can’t very well act when her own head is on the line.”
Underville listened with half her attention. There was so much going on…The General’s speech was even more a shock than seeing Pedure. When Smith made the hostage offer, several of the technicians looked from their work, their eating hands frozen in their maws. “God!” she heard Elno Coldhaven mutter.
“Yeah,” Belga whispered back. “But if they go for it, we might have a way out.”
“If they pick the King as hostage. But if they want General Smith—” If Smith had to stay down South, things would get very complicated, especially for Elno Coldhaven. Coldhaven couldn’t quite conceal his stark discomfort. So this is news to him, too.
“We can manage,” said Kred Dugway, the Director of Air Defense. Dugway was the only other general officer present. The AD director had been one of poor Thract’s biggest critics, and Elno Coldhaven’s former superior. And Dugway seemed to think he was still Elno’s boss.
In the video from Southland, General Smith had climbed down from the speaker’s perch. She handed her formal proposal to Tim Downing. The camera followed Smith offstage. “She’s headed for Pedure!”
Dugway chuckled. “Now, this will be interesting.”
“Damn.” The camera had turned back to watch Major Downing hand out copies of the General’s proposal.
“Can you give me anything on the chief? Does she still have audio?”
“Sorry, sir. No.”
Attention colors lit the Air Defense displays. The technician hunched down, hissed something over his voice link. Then, “Sir, I don’t understand quite what is happening, but—”
Dugway jabbed a hand at the composite situation map of Southland. “Those are launches!”
Yes. Even Belga recognized the coding. Crosses marked the estimated launch sites. “A launch of three. Not Southland-based; those are from ice subs. They could be—” The
y couldn’t be anything but Kindred. Accord and Kindred were the only nations with missile-launching ice-tunnelers.
And now the first target estimates had appeared on the display. The three circles were all near the south pole.
Coldhaven made a chopping gesture at the attack-management technicians. “Go to condition Most Bright.” On the main display, the news cameras were still panning around Parliament Hall, soaking up the reactions to General Smith’s speech.
One of the attack-management techs rose from her perch. “Sir! Those missiles are ours. They’re from the Seventh, the Icedug and Crawlunder!”
“Say what?” General Coldhaven’s voice cut through whatever his former boss had been about to say.
“Autologs from the ships themselves. I’m trying to get through to their captains right now, sir—we’re still bidding each other’s crypto.”
Dugway pounced on the report. “And until we talk to them direct, I don’t believe anything. I know those commanders. Something strange is going on here.”
“We have real launches and real targets, sir.” The technician tapped the crosses and circles.
Dugway: “You have nothing but pretty lights!”
“It’s across the secure net, sir, direct from our launch-detection satellites.”
Coldhaven motioned both of them to be quiet. “This seems a bit like the problems my predecessor ran into.”
Dugway glared at his former protégé…and slowly the significance seemed to sink in. “Yes…”
Coldhaven grunted. “It’s not just us. There have been rumors going around on the unswitched analog radio.” There were still people who used such things; Underville had rural agents who resisted all upgrades. The surprise was that anyone at Lands Command would seriously listen to such comm. Coldhaven noticed Belga’s expression. “My wife works in the technical museum out front.” A smile flitted across his aspect. “She says her old-time radio friends aren’t cranks. And now we’re seeing the impossible, too. In the past we could blame the contradictions on someone else’s idiocy. Now…” The arrival time on the shrinking target circles was barely three minutes away. The targeting satellites all agreed on their destination now: Southmost.
Underville boggled for a moment. All Rachner’s paranoia—true? “So maybe the launch is a fake. Anything we see—”
“At least anything we see on the net—”
“—could be a lie.” It was a technophobe’s most extravagant nightmare.
The point was finally getting through to Dugway. A faith built over twenty years was being shattered. “But the encryption, the crosschecking…what can we do, Elno?”
Coldhaven seemed to wilt. His theory was accepted, and that left them with disaster. “We—we can shut down. Disassociate command and comm from the net. I’ve seen it as a war-game option—only that was on the net, too!”
Belga put a hand on his shoulders. “I say do it. We can use analog radio from the museum. And I’ve got people, couriers. It will be slow—” Far too slow, but at least they would discover what they were up against.
There were others a moment away across the net—Nizhnimor, the King himself—and now nothing seemed trustable. Dugway was present, but Elno Coldhaven was the CCC commanding officer. Coldhaven hesitated, but didn’t defer to Dugway. He called to his chief sergeant. “Plan Network Corrupt. I want the notice hand-carried to the museum.”
“Yes, sir!” The tech had been following the conversation, and seemed not quite as dumbfounded as his seniors. The target circles showed two minutes to impact. On the video from Parliament Hall, stark chaos reigned. For an instant, Underville was caught by the horror of the scene. The poor cobbers. Before, war had been an ominous cloud on the horizon; now the Southland Elected found themselves at ground zero with less than two minutes to live. Some sat frozen, staring upward at where megatons would burst. Others were stampeding down the carpeted stairs, searching for some way out, some way downward. And somewhere beyond their view, General Smith was facing the same fate.
By some miracle, the senior sergeant had hardcopies of Plan Network Corrupt. He handed them to his techs and started the procedures for opening the CCC’s blast doors.
But the doors were already opening. Belga stiffened. Nothing was supposed to come in until the shift ended, or Coldhaven gave the release code. A CCC guard entered with a confused backward gait, his rifle held at an uneasy port arms. “I saw your clearance, ma’am, but no one is allowed—”
An almost familiar voice followed him. “Nonsense. We have clearance, and you saw that the doors opened. Please stand aside.” A young lieutenant strode into the room. The plain black uniform, the slender, deadly build. It was as if Victory Smith had not only escaped from the South but had returned as young as the first time Underville had ever seen her. After the lieutenant came a huge corporal and a team of combateers. Most of the intruders carried stubby assault rifles.
General Dugway spouted indignant rage at the young lieutenant. Dugway was a fool. More than anything, this looked like a decapitating strike—but why weren’t they shooting? Elno Coldhaven edged back around his desk, his hands reaching for some unseen drawer. Belga stepped between him and the intruders and said, “You’re Smith’s daughter.”
The lieutenant snapped Underville a salute. “Yes ma’am. Victory Lighthill, and this is my team. We’re authorized by General Smith to make inspections per our best judgment. With all respect, ma’am, that’s what we’re here for now.”
Lighthill sidled past the frothing Director of Air Defense; old Dugway was angry beyond words. Behind Belga, and mostly shielded by her body, Elno Coldhaven was tapping out command codes.
Somehow Lighthill realized what was going on. “Please step away from your console, General Coldhaven.” Her big corporal waggled his assault rifle in Coldhaven’s direction. Now Underville recognized the corporal. Smith’s retarded son. Damn.
Elno Coldhaven stepped back from his desk, his hands raised slightly in the air, acknowledging that they were far beyond any “inspection.” The two techs nearest the door sprinted past the intruders. But these combateers were fast. They turned, pouncing on the techs, dragging them back into the CCC.
The blast doors swung slowly shut.
And Coldhaven made one more try, the most frail of all: “Lieutenant, there’s massive corruption in our signals automation. We have to get our Command and Control off the net.”
Lighthill stepped close to the displays. There was still a picture from Parliament Hall, but no one was behind the camera: the view wandered aimlessly, finally centering on the ceiling. Across the other displays, Most Bright lights had blossomed, queries to the Command Center, launch announcements from the King’s Rocket Offense forces. The world coming to an end.
Finally, Lighthill spoke. “I know, sir. We are here to prevent you from doing that.” Her combateers had spread around the now crowded Command and Control Center. Not a single tech or officer was out of their reach now. The big corporal was pulling open a cargo pannier, setting up additional equipment…game displays?
Dugway finally found his voice. “We suspected a deep-cover agent. I was sure it was Rachner Thract. What fools we were. All along it was Victory Smith working for Pedure and the Kindred.”
A traitor at the heart. It explained everything, but—Belga looked at the displays, the network-massaged reports of Accord launches coming in from all directions. She said, “What of it is really true, Lieutenant? Is it all a lie, even the attack on Southmost?”
For a moment Underville thought the lieutenant wouldn’t answer. The target circles at Southmost had shrunk to points. The news camera view of Parliament Hall dome lasted a second longer. Then Belga had a fleeting impression of the rock bulging downward, of light beyond—and the display went blank. Victory Lighthill flinched, and when she finally answered Belga, her voice was soft and hard. “No. That attack was very real.”
FIFTY-SIX
“You’re sure she’ll be able to see me?”
Marli looked
up from his gadgets. “Yes, sir. And I’ve got a clear-to-talk from her huds.”
You’re on, Podmaster. The greatest performance of your life. “Qiwi! Are you there?”
“Yes, I—” and he heard Qiwi’s quick intake of breath. Heard. There was no video coming back this way; the desperation of this situation was no fake. “Father!”
Nau cradled Ali Lin’s head and shoulders in his arms. The ziphead’s wounds were gouges, oozing a swamp of blood through makeshift bandages. Pest, I hope the guy isn’t dead. But above all, this had to look real; Marli had done his best.
“Tas Vinh, Qiwi. He and Trinli jumped us, killed Kal Omo. They would have killed Ali if…if I hadn’t let them get away.” The words tumbled out, fueled by true rage and fear and guided by the tactical necessities. The savage attack of traitors, timed for when everything was most critical, when an entire civilization stood at risk. The destruction of North Paw. “I saw two of the kittens drown, Qiwi. I’m sorry, we couldn’t get close enough to save them—” Words failed him, but artfully.
He heard small choking sounds from the other end of the connection, the sounds Qiwi made in moments of absolute horror. Damn, that could start a memory cascade. He pushed down his fear and said, “Qiwi, we still have a chance. Have the traitors shown themselves at Benny’s?” Has Pham Nuwen gotten through to the parlor?
“No. But we know something has gone terribly wrong. We lost the video from North Paw, and now it looks like war down on Arachna. This is a private link, but everyone saw me leave Benny’s.”
“Okay. Okay. This is good, Qiwi. Whoever are in this with Vinh and Trinli are still confused. We have a chance, the two of us—”
“But surely we can trust—” Qiwi’s protest trailed off, and she didn’t give him any argument. Good. This soon after a scrubbing, Qiwi was most unsure of herself. “Okay. But I can help. Where are you hiding? One of the sluiceways?”