Hidden Empire

by Orson Scott Card

  I will not be president when the whole system is complete—neither was Eisenhower when the interstate highway system finally reached every important destination. But within the next six months, you will be reading and watching videos about Railway One, the presidential train, the rolling White House, which I will use instead of an airplane for all my travel within the lower forty-eight states.

  I will still fly to Alaska and Hawaii.

  Cole lived in a boardinghouse behind the Library of Congress. It wasn't a particularly secure location, but he made up for the easy-pick lock on his room by never bringing anything home that contained any secrets. Even his telephone was discardable, and instead of saving numbers in the phone, he kept the ones he needed in his head.

  He also didn't own a car. He kept a narrow-tired street bicycle and used it to get around D.C.—it helped keep him fit. Even though he hadn't run as many operations as the rest of Reuben's old jeesh in the years since they fought their way into Aldo Verus's subterranean stronghold in the mountains of Washington, he had worked hard to stay fit. At thirty-one, he wasn't going to give his superiors any excuse to shift him away from combat assignments.

  Most days, the bike was as fast as any car—it was mostly downhill from where he lived to the White House and the Pentagon, and he could scoot through blocked-up traffic. Going home was when he got the exercise, uphill all the way. But he took pride in never leaving top gear all the way home.

  Cessy Malich asked him once, when he rode the Metro out to see her and the kids, why he didn't buy a house. "You make enough money, I know you do," she said.

  "Spying on me?" he asked.

  "I've spent my whole life living on officers' pay, and I know what a colonel makes."

  "I don't need a house," he told her.

  "If you have a house, though, you're more likely to be attractive to women."

  "I have buns of steel, Mrs. Malich. I don't need a house."

  What he couldn't tell her was: He knew what a home was, because he had been so often in hers. It was a fatherless house, just like the one Cole had grown up in. He had been nine when his father died of cancer, only a year younger than Mark Malich was when Reuben was assassinated. Reuben's kids knew he had loved them and was proud of them, so in a way he was still in their lives, but that wasn't enough. Cole wasn't going to marry and then leave his children fatherless. Only when he knew combat was over forever would he start thinking about a home with wife and children. And if he was fifty and couldn't find a good woman who wasn't a widow or divorcee and well past childbearing, that would still be better than having children of his own and leaving them fatherless.

  If he had children, it would make him timid.

  Not that it had slowed Reuben down—but that was just the point, Reuben should have slowed down, should have gotten out of the military and taken a job as a consultant somewhere, so he wouldn't die.

  Then again, he might have gotten cancer, like Cole's father did. Or been run over by a bus. You never knew what was going to happen in this life. Which was why it was better to own nothing, to have no one waiting for him to come home, to live without any extraneous responsibilities, not a dog, not a goldfish, not even a houseplant that needed him to come home.

  I could die and nobody's life would change, thought Cole fairly often, and with satisfaction. He was doing this right.

  So when he got home after eleven at night, running up the three flights of stairs with his bike on his shoulder, he didn't have to walk softly inside his room, or be careful not to turn on the wrong light. He just grabbed his toothbrush and face towel and trotted down the half-flight of stairs to the shared bathroom on the landing.

  All the bathrooms in this ancient D.C. townhouse were afterthoughts. No doubt when the place was first built, toilets were chamber pots under the bed and you had to pay the maid extra to fill a tub with hot water for you. Once a month, probably, and you used cologne and pomade the rest of the time and reeked and scratched your lice and fleas like everybody else.

  With that perspective, having a full modern bathroom only half a flight down from his room was the height of luxury.

  His cellphone rang while he was washing his face, but he toweled off at once, enough to flip the phone open and hold it to his face without shorting it out. Hardly anybody had his number, and they only used it when it mattered.

  "Mingo here," said the faint, tinny voice on the other end. Domingo Camacho was a civil engineer who specialized in bridges. He was also part of Reuben's old special ops team, which Cole had sort of inherited after Rube was killed. These guys had followed Rube into combat again and again in several theaters of war. Even though they had also fought with and under Cole on plenty of missions since then, nobody had any illusions—they were still Rube's jeesh. They liked Cole. He even imagined that he had earned their respect. But they were not friends, not deep-core friends, not like they had been with Rube.

  The only person in Cole's life that he thought of as a true friend, a friend of his, was Cessy Malich, and he made damn sure she had no idea how important she was in his life, for fear she might get the wrong idea and think he wanted to take somebody else's place.

  "So what's up?" asked Cole.

  "Got a bridge I want you to look at, Cole."

  "Highway bridge? Railroad? Dental? I won't even know what I'm looking at, Mingo, I'm not the engineering type."

  "You'll like this bridge," said Mingo.

  "It's like flights that end with a landing you walk away from—if it gets me to the other side without falling down under or on me, it's a good bridge."

  "Ride your little Schwinn down to the railroad station and I'll pick you up in my big, ugly, outdated, soon-to-be-illegal internal-combustion nonhybrid gas-guzzling SUV."

  "To see a bridge," said Cole.

  "Okay, not the whole bridge, just a particularly fine truss."

  "If this is some ploy to get me to come to a surprise party, it won't be my birthday for eight months."

  "That's why it's a surprise, bonehead. Do you have a headlamp on your Schwinn? Or will you be carrying a flashlight?"

  "Aw, Mingo, you want me to be safe!"

  "I want you to see my bridge. Wear your bike helmet. All the smart kids do."

  Of course it wouldn't be a bridge. It would be some damn thing Mingo had thought up for special ops and he wanted Cole to see it because he had the President's ear, and any military procurement process that began with an inquiry from the President was put on the fast track. Usually the fast track to rejection, but that was true of practically everything. You just hoped you could make a little money during the prototyping and testing phase before Congress stepped in and made some political hay out of refusing to fund such a ridiculous item in the military budget. Hey, they had to put something in those budgets for Congress to eliminate.

  Cole thought of his bed with momentary longing; he knew he wouldn't get back to it until way late tonight—if not tomorrow morning. And he had a nine o'clock meeting. There was once a time when he could skip a night's sleep and be no worse off, mentally, than a staffer who'd had a martini at lunch. Now, though, in his debilitating postthirty condition, he would spend the day in a fog.

  Better be worth it, Mingo.

  Back down the stairs with the bike over his shoulder. At least he had had the chance to empty himself into his fine, modern toilet. Bicycling with a full bladder over rutty D.C. roads was almost as bad as doing crunches with dysentery.

  Naturally, Mingo would not pick him up where he had said over the phone. After all that had happened during the Progressive War, they didn't trust any phone to be secure. Cole assumed that Mingo would be watching his alleyway, and he came out of it in the opposite direction from the railroad station, then began riding east on Independence Avenue, heading toward the hospital.

  To his surprise, Mingo didn't pick him up on Independence. Maybe it was too busy a thoroughfare for him, even at night. So Cole swung south on Eighth Street toward the Eastern Market, which was deserted,
except for whatever criminals might have chosen this spot for their rendezvous. Cole didn't expect to reach the market, and he was right. A black SUV turned right directly in front of him, forcing him to swerve west on a nub of C Street. Mingo had the back of the SUV open and waiting for his bike by the time he caught up.

  "We bike riders think drivers like you are evil," said Cole.

  "We SUV drivers think you Lycra-wearing bike riders are sissy boys."

  "I'm not wearing Lycra," Cole pointed out, as he walked around to the passenger door.

  "That's the only reason you're making it out of this neighborhood alive," said Mingo.

  It took half an hour, and Cole dozed a little during the drive. He woke when the road changed—rougher, sharper turns. When Mingo pulled up next to three other cars in a makeshift parking lot, there was a bridge looming over them. But it was an old bridge, a narrow one, and not very high.

  "Wow," said Cole. "This bridge is one step up from a culvert."

  "There are lots of reasons why a bridge might be special. For instance, this bridge is part of a country lane called—are you ready?—'Lonesome Road.'"

  "Is there a girl in a prom dress who hitchhikes near here?"

  "Just watch," said Mingo. "It's even better than that."

  Cole was already watching. He had spotted the three guys on top of the bridge before they even came to a stop. In the light of a thin moon, he couldn't see much, but he knew they were carrying weapons, and he recognized Load Arnsbrach and Arty Wu from their posture and movement. He assumed the third guy must also be a member of Rube's jeesh. So this was definitely not about the bridge. It was about war.

  It was for these guys—and Cole—that President Torrent had persuaded Congress to give him the power to override the time-in-grade laws, and promote Cole to colonel and the other guys to captain in recognition of their expertise and accomplishments during the Progressive Restoration rebellion. Each one of them now commanded forces of varying size on special missions, but between missions they continued to train together. It was gratifying to Cole that they were still including him in whatever it was they were doing out here in the middle of nowhere—even if they brought him in last.

  The three men on the bridge hopped up onto the rail and then jumped.

  They weren't rappelling—no ropes, and they came down way too fast. But when they hit bottom, they didn't fall and roll like parachuters, either. They just … landed. And stood there.

  Now they were close enough that even in the weak light, he could see they were wearing something over their shoulders. And down along the outsides of their legs. Cole recognized the general lines of the HULC combat exoskeleton developed by Lockheed-Martin to help soldiers carry heavier burdens for greater distances.

  "What have you done, added shock absorbers to a HULC so you can jump off bridges?"

  Mingo answered gleefully. "By the time Lockheed announced the HULC to the general public, they were two generations beyond that."

  "Let me guess—this is the great-great-grandchild."

  "More like a nephew," said Mingo.

  The third guy was Cat Black, the man who had come with Cole in the first penetration of Aldo Verus's fortress. "You ain't seen nothin' yet," said Cat. Then he squatted and jumped straight up. No run-up, nothing. Just a single bound, and he landed on top of the bridge.

  It was only about a twelve-foot jump, but since no living person could jump that high and land on his feet without a pole or one hell of a pogo stick, Cole was impressed. "Leaps small bridges with a single bound."

  "And not vulnerable to kryptonite," said Mingo.

  "So it's not just for load-bearing anymore," said Cole.

  "When they run cross-country with these things, it looks like they're running on the moon. Feels like that, too—lower gravity. Like bounding down a shale slope. Practically flying."

  "And then you run out of batteries and fall flat."

  Arty and Load were standing close by, ready to demonstrate. "Run out of juice or something breaks down, you do this," said Arty. He pushed the chest bar forward and said, in a sharp whisper, "De-vest."

  Immediately the whole exoskeleton collapsed, as if it suddenly discovered it had half a dozen knees and elbows built into it. There it was on the ground, in two neat piles, and Arty was completely free of it.

  "But it doesn't run out very soon," said Load. "When Young Potus announced that we were going to research a fast-charging, lightweight, high-capacity battery, he knew perfectly well that we already had this.'" Load was now showing Cole the hip assembly of the exoskeleton. Cole flipped up the lid that Load had unlatched for him, and saw a power supply amounting to the bulk of four lantern batteries.

  "That's all?" asked Cole. "What is it good for, ten minutes? Fifteen?"

  "Two hours," said Mingo triumphantly.

  Cat was back down from the bridge now. "I've field-tested it, Cole," he said. "Two hours of running, jumping—cross-country, urban, all around a stadium in the middle of the night. Two solid hours. And if I only walk with it, then it's good for four."

  "Plus," said Load, "it recharges itself in direct sunlight."

  "If you pee your pants, does it absorb it and turn it back into drinkable water?" asked Cole.

  "Wrong sci-fi story," said Mingo. "This one turns it into beer."

  "What if you step wrong?" asked Cole. "Does it keep you from breaking a leg?"

  "It offers some protection when you walk at normal speeds," said Mingo. "When you run and jump and leap, then you have to be as careful as you normally would doing that stuff. Only you're leaping four times as far, mile after mile. So yeah, it's protecting you some."

  Cole looked around from one to another. "So whose baby is this?"

  Mingo grinned.

  "You invented it yourself?"

  "I'm on the team. Combat consultant. I got them to make these three prototypes and let me field-test them with the best soldiers that I knew."

  "I'm hurt that I wasn't in the A-team," said Cole.

  "Well, see, you are—for the new stuff," said Mingo. "What you just saw, we've been doing that for a year now. It takes a long time to get through the learning curve—when you first start out doing anything other than trudging along, you tend to fall over a lot. Now we've added something new that makes it even harder to learn. Only now it's brains, not skills, so we thought of you."

  "I'm flattered," said Cole. "I think."

  "There's your problem," said Mingo. "Second-guessing everything." He led Cole over to one of the other cars—a Honda Accord, which was probably Arty's, since he always talked about how you couldn't kill one with a tornado. The trunk popped open and there were a bunch of helmets.

  "I get it," said Cole. "You do all the same stuff, only now you do it on your head."

  Mingo handed out helmets to all of them.

  "One size fits all?" asked Cole.

  "It sizes itself. If you feel a slight tingle as it adjusts, don't mind it. It's synching to your brain waves."

  Cole laughed.

  "He laughs, but it's no joke," said Arty. "It's calibrating your eye movements and then finding what part of your brain is controlling them. It learns to recognize your eye movements from the brain waves alone."

  "So train it," said Mingo. "When you've got it on. Like this." Mingo stood close to Cole, so he could see, in the darkness, everything Mingo did.

  "Mode. Adapt," he said. "Command. Go." And then he clicked his tongue. "Okay, what I just did was put it into the mode to learn a new soldier's pattern. Then I told it that the 'go' command—like pressing enter on a keyboard—was that click. So watch my eyes now."

  Mingo clicked his tongue twice, then a pause, then twice again. He looked up and to the right, then down to the right, then up to the left, down to the right, down to the left, down to the right.

  "See, you don't use straight up or straight down for commands, or straight left or right," said Arty, "because you've got to do that all the time in combat. And if you do look up to the right
, for instance, but you do it slowly, with your head following the movement, it knows not to obey it as a command, because you're just looking up and to the right. See?"

  "No," said Cole, "but I have a feeling that I will."

  With his own helmet on, Cole got the training pattern right the first try. Then, with the helmet active, he began to see what these commands did.

  Up right brought up a display in front of his eyes showing vital statistics on eight different soldiers. "The first one is yourself," Mingo explained.

  "I'm happy to report that I have full health. If it ever falls too low, can I replenish it by inserting another couple of quarters?"

  "In combat," said Mingo, "it also monitors the number of shots you've fired and tells you when you're going to need to reload soon."

  "Does it tell me when I need to pee?" asked Cole.

  "Only if you're wearing a catheter," said Mingo.

  "Or a condom," said Load.

  Cole tried the up-left command. This one was really disconcerting—it put a circular picture in the middle of his vision. After a moment, he realized that what he was seeing was himself—from Load's point of view.

  "You can cycle through the field of vision of all seven members of your team," said Mingo. "But we don't use the click command. It's jaw movement—sharp downward movement, but without opening the mouth. So as commander, at any time you can see exactly what each man on your team is seeing."

  "Meanwhile, I get shot because I'm not watching out for myself."

  "Like I said, there's a learning curve," said Mingo. "But it doesn't take long before your brain lets you watch both things at once. Like focused vision and peripheral vision."

  Cole passed his hand through the air in front of his face. The other guys laughed. "Come on," Cole said, "where's the display I'm seeing?"

  Mingo reached up and touched the two flexible rods that extended forward from the helmet at cheekbone level. Instantly the display disappeared. When Mingo removed his fingers, the display returned.