Smoke's Fire

by Rich X Curtis

  The horsemen numbered, by his best estimate, between five and eight-hundred. There had been a steady stream of bands joining their column over the past three weeks, since they had exited the mountains and descended onto the wide northern plains of the Chinese steppe. At first, he had heard hard numbers from Warren or another of her leadership, called out as each new member of the Unit and their entourage arrived. But that had ceased, and he had to content himself with counting hoof-beats and classifying the snort and acoustic signatures of each horse he could. It passed the time, but he doubted his accuracy. Horses sounded alike.

  He was lashed to the front of Truck, just below the cage that served, these days, as Li and Gold’s sleeping quarters. They were a less-fruitful source of information, unless you counted cataloguing their lovemaking, which, while he did catalogue it, wasn’t very information-rich. Gold seemed infatuated with Li, however, which was a useful data point. Attachment was leverage, if you could exploit it. His experience as a secret policeman held numerous examples.

  He listened to every spoken conversation he could, amassing trivia that he compiled into a compendium of knowledge. Li, for instance, had menstruated the prior week, and Gold had consulted Silver about rags for her. Silver had scoffed and told her to talk to Warren. Gold had said something in the language they shared, which Chen did not know. He suspected it was a native American language. Archaic. It rankled that he could not decode it, but he archived everything he could, in case he came across, somehow, a translation module.

  Smoke talked little. He walked next to Truck most days, picking his way along their path with a long stick. Somewhere he had procured new boots, which also troubled Chen. Where had he gotten new boots? It was impossible, but every time he saw the man in his optic field, the boots were there, nagging at him.

  “How is it,” he had asked, when he gauged they were relatively alone, “that you have new boots?” Smoke had been walking alongside Truck, and Gold and Li had ridden one of the spare ponies ahead, so it was just Chen, Truck, and Smoke within earshot. “This seems impossible to me.”

  Smoke had shrugged. “These old things?” He glanced down at his boots and smiled. “Had them for ages.”

  Chen reviewed his records. “Untrue,” he replied. “You didn’t have them when you arrived, unless you had luggage stashed somewhere that I didn’t see.”

  Smoke was silent again for a long time. “What’s your interest, Chen?”

  “I am, or was, charged with the preservation of the People’s Republic of China,” Chen said. “I am currently the last legal representative of that nation. My function in law enforcement relies on noticing discrepancies. Your footwear is of interest to me. Where did it come from?”

  “It came,” Smoke said, “from a world with a technological base similar to the one you had here, in the twenty-first century.” He smiled up at Chen. “So I’m told.”

  “You have communication and transportation to this world?” Chen asked. “By virtue of your ally, Alpha?” Chen had heard this name from conversations between Silver, Gold, and Warren. He had pieced it together. Alpha was a Mind, similar in concept to him, and had somehow allied with Smoke during the events that brought the women to this world. Smoke had been involved, he knew. Beyond that, his reconstruction of these events was hazy. “Tell me about Alpha. I am curious.”

  “You are more than curious,” Smoke said easily. “You are eager, perhaps desperate to learn more about Alpha.” He glanced up at the Chen-Spider’s thorax, lashed to the front of Truck. “Alpha may be smarter than you, sorry.”

  “How do you communicate with it?” Chen asked. “Do you have simulations like we used?”

  “None of your business, Colonel Bang,” Smoke said. “Let’s talk about more interesting things. For example, do you know where we’re going?”

  Chen considered. He did know, based on what Warren had said. “There is a hyperloop station, part of a network of them that crossed Siberia. The Unit used it to escape the vicinity of the Elevator station at Baikonur.”

  “An underground train?” Smoke asked, arching an eyebrow. “Isn’t that a bit optimistic? It’s been a while.”

  Chen agreed, but did not say so. “Perhaps, but it was solidly built, and was deep in the bedrock.” The train’s tunnel would have been damaged by seismic activity, almost certainly. Chen knew of several earthquakes of sufficient amplitude to have shifted it, causing collapse or damage, bedrock or no. It had been too long.

  “Too long,” Smoke said, echoing his thought. “Do you know what they were fleeing?”

  “Drone weapons at the time,” Chen answered. “There were many autonomous systems built by China and the New Soviet state that were active during the war. The unit fled to China after the Bloom to avoid tangling with them.”

  “Could they still be active?” Smoke asked. It had been a chore for Alpha to assume control of Chen. Smoke had to climb into an underground bunker and locate some of the last of China’s cybernetics. It had not been easy. Once in, Alpha had guided him through it, almost driving him while she accessed terminals, crafting a program in C that spooled data via high-speed pictograms. Smoke had stared, barely conscious, at that screen for almost six hours, hands flying over the keys of the old keyboard. It had not been pleasant, but at least he didn’t have to walk out.

  Finding the keys for an army of old war-drones? How? He would ask Alpha, the next time he conferred with her. Whenever that was.

  She had been gone lately. He didn’t have much time to speak to her, in this crowd. People might hear, and he knew that Gold and Silver could hear a pin drop. Chen as well, Truck hadn’t ripped his ears off. The Spider thing could hear for hundreds of yards, he suspected. So he’d avoided talking to Alpha when he could sense her presence in his head. Like someone watching over his shoulder. They hadn’t wanted to risk someone knowing he had to talk out loud for Alpha to hear him.

  But lately, she’d been gone more and more. No Alpha half the time. No familiar gaze from just behind him, seeing what he saw, feeling what he felt. Then, she’d come back, and they’d huddled. He took a long walk, angling his path up a ridge about a half-mile east and north of their path.

  “We need to talk,” she said. “Start walking. We don’t have that much time.”

  So he’d walked, aiming for the low ridge. One of Warren’s outriders had seen him and clicked his teeth at him, some native signal. Smoke had ignored him, and kept walking. Once he was clear of any chance of someone hearing him, he spoke.

  “Where have you been?” he started with, followed by: “What took you so long?” he whispered urgently.

  “You can talk normally,” Alpha said in his mind. “You’re far enough away.”

  “And?” he asked, controlling his breath. He wrinkled his nose at the cold air. Warren’s people had lent him a coat. Warm, but it stank of horse-sweat.

  “I am losing my link here, rapidly.” Alpha’s voice was carefully modulated. The kind of voice you would have heard in a large office building, at reception. Fancy office, upscale. Wood and glass and steel and a woman with Alpha’s voice. No, Mr. Smith, I’m sorry but you can’t meet with the Chairman of the Board, now. The Elevator has stopped working and nobody knows if it will ever be fixed.

  “Losing? How? Is it an attack?” he shook his head, looking up to the sky. He could be trapped here and without Alpha…he’d be lost. Then, realizing urgency. “How long do we have?”

  “I think a week, maybe a few days. Maybe less. Sometimes the thread shifts on me and I have to hunt around for it. It’s non-deterministic in a way threads do not normally behave. It is hard to describe in language, but—”

  “Then don’t bother,” he said, waving his hands in a frantic, chopping motion. “Should we pull out?”

  “We could, but then we’d perhaps be unable to find the place as easily. Having you here makes it easier to hone in on the right one, so to speak, once we’re close enough. Sort of a lighthouse or beacon effect. Without you here, that might not be poss
ible again. Things are chaotic.” She sounded apologetic. “I think you should stay for a while, at least. I’m confident I’ll be able to find you when I need you.”

  So he’d stayed, and she’d vanished in the night, winking out as he pretended to sleep, huddled in his stinking coat. They’d agreed to use sign language, and established some rudimentary signals he could make with his hands and face, that she’d be able to detect. It would allow them some communication, without him jabbering away in public. Still, he worried Silver might see him flexing his hand or curling his lip unnaturally. That woman’s mind was like a razor. She saw everything.

  He needn’t have worried. Alpha was gone, and he was getting more and more concerned about it. He looked out at the horizon, Chen’s buzzing voice interrupting his reverie. He realized Chen had been talking for a while, while he woolgathered.

  “What was that? The last, you said about the car? The Elevator car?” Smoke reviewed what Chen had been talking about as best he could. Something about the complex at the spaceport. It was a major freight terminal, so naturally there were drones. Big machines like Truck, only rigged for loading freight. Nothing came down the Elevator but the empty frames, each attached to a car. The rings were circular, and must have carried hundreds of cargo containers, each the size of Truck. It took a big port to service that much cargo.

  “The car,” Chen repeated smoothly, “is only one of at least a dozen other cars. The main car is just for cargo, and is very slow. The others are smaller. That’s what you will want to look for. The small ones.”

  The cable was very thin, only a strip of stabilized graphene braid. It was under tremendous pressure. The cars clasped the cable between special diamond-graphene wheels and pulled themselves up and down. They had special fittings so cars could pass each other without colliding, like spiders sharing the same strand of web.

  “Where are they stored? The small cars. When not in use on the cable?” Smoke asked.

  “Unknown,” Chen said. “My records are general information only. I was kept isolated from the news and command structure of the Spaceport. It was considered a state secret.”

  “You sound a little sad there, Colonel.” Smoke said, teasing. “They didn’t trust you?”

  “I am sure it was purely a security protocol. I had my hands full,” Chen said, flatly. “It makes sense that not everybody knows everything.”

  Smoke frowned, shrugging. “Maybe,” he said. “But seems odd that you were entrusted enough to execute the Bloom, but you weren’t allowed to know what was happening at the spaceport? Which must have been a huge priority for the Chinese. I mean, they built most of it, right?”

  “They did,” Chen said, a note of pride creeping into his voice. Approval. “They were great engineers.”

  Smoke rolled his eyes. “The Americans built the cable, though, right? That’s what Warren told me. Chinese built the port, Americans put up the cable and the station, and the Russians brought the vodka.”

  “It was a joint operation,” Chen agreed. “Before the War.”

  “Back when you all got along, eh?” Smoke laughed. “I was in the CIA, remember?”

  “I do remember. Or rather, I have records from those who do remember. You are more or less a footnote, until the end of your sojourn there,” Chen said. “Tell me, Smoke, or Lieutenant Colonel Smith, where did you go, in that data center? Security footage was unclear. You became very bright, then appeared normal. You spoke, and then one by one, you disappeared. You were last to vanish. When they investigated the data center was wiped clean, scrambled. All the systems in the entire place.”

  “So you learned nothing from that place?” Smoke asked. “I assumed the Chinese had stolen the architecture to build systems such as yourself from.”

  “Oh they did,” Chen said, a note of approval in his voice. “But architectural principles are not data. They learned nothing, as you say, about what was on those machines in that place. Just that there were a lot of them and they could have been very powerful. The Chinese spent many years, after that, studying what they stole from the Americans. But it took a long time for them to build something equally as powerful. They mistrusted such machines back then.”

  “Seems like they had reason, no?” Smoke asked. “War drones? The Bloom?” He looked up at Chen as they walked. “How’d you do that, by the way? You must have infected the whole planet with those things. It must have taken a long time.”

  “Two years and forty-one days before we had enough nanites emplaced in the population for the Bloom,” Chen said. “We reached ninety-eight point one percent of the population.”

  Smoke considered this, silently. Less than two out of a hundred survived. If the others had died that is. “You killed almost everyone on Earth,” Smoke said. “How’d that feel?”

  “Luckily,” Chen said. “I am a machine. My emotions are modeled and I control the models. It felt like nothing. But I do have regrets.”

  “Such as?” Smoke said, watching the horizon. There was a line of what looked like trees that had cut the road. Truck would have to use his great arms to clear a path for himself, with the horsemen to follow.

  “I regret not getting them all,” Chen said. “I regret letting any of them escape.”

  Smoke left after that. Part of Chen listened to the crunch of his booted feet, predicting where he would go. Smoke did not, as a rule, seem to sleep. He just sat down somewhere and waited, or wandered about. Chen had a detailed map of his comings and goings.

  Another part of him reviewed data, sweeping through his memories in waves, tuning predictive models and rerunning assumptions. He was confident he knew the number of the troops, their horses, and even a partial roster of their leadership. He knew Truck needed bearings, and was doomed. He knew that the night they had left, Lawson and the one they called the Archer, had carried an item down to Truck and loaded it from behind, moving silently and speaking in whispers. They had even spent some time moving luggage and rearranging the already loaded gear.

  They’d hidden an item on Truck. A large item, massing precisely sixty-four point two kilograms, yet small enough for the Archer to carry. Chen did not see them, only heard them, and measured the sway of his accelerometer when the item was loaded onto Truck. But he knew what it was. As far as he knew anything, he knew what it was that they had loaded onto Truck in the dead of night.

  It made sense, he mused to himself, for the nth time. It made a lot of sense. There was a hillside full of them, so why not bring one with you, if you could. And now, with Truck, you could. Truck could be sensed from orbit, Chen knew. Or he could have been, once. And Truck’s signal would mask any other signals the watchers might be tracking, if they hadn’t shielded it.

  Chen didn’t need a Geiger counter to know this. He carried the inventory. There were one hundred and twenty-seven devices in the inventory he and Warren had amassed that matched the size and weight of the item the Archer had carried. They had been carefully collected from the seventh generation Dōng Fēng Wǔ missiles in a series of silos spread across the cornfields near Changsha. Chen had collected them himself. They weighed almost sixty-five kilos. A very large man could carry one.

  One nuke won’t let me get them all, he mused, for the nth time, rerunning his logic and chain of assumptions. But at the right time, and in the right place…he could take this lot with him, and send the station at the end of the string, moored to the end of the cable, spinning away into space. He settled in to wait, and to listen.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Carter had reached the railhead complex. The Dutchman circled it in ever-decreasing loops until it was clear. The railhead complex was not abandoned. Carter peered out of the forward windscreen with his binoculars. There was a wisp of smoke rising from one of the buildings. Someone had a fire going to stay warm.

  The railhead was on a plateau that rose gradually out of the steppe. It had been serviced by several highways, once, and he reasoned it had been a large shipping center. The hyperloop style railway was
underground, so he couldn’t gauge anything about that. But the roads were mostly gone, just large gullies that ran in long, straight lines north, south, and east, punctuated occasionally by grassy humps that he figured covered buildings or collapsed highway overpasses.

  Carter struggled to remember. He remembered people talking about hyperloops, underground vacuum tunnel railways, but he didn’t remember ever seeing any. Or any being built. It must have happened when he was…imprisoned. Confined. Whatever. He frowned. Regardless, somebody was down there, and the vicinity of that building looked tended. There were other buildings in the complex that had collapsed. But several still stood, and one of them had smoke coming out of a chimney.

  He frowned. Smoke meant people. People were unexpected. He needed to tell Silver. That meant he’d have to use Morse code, which he was bad at. He was getting better, but he was still bad. It took a long time to prepare a message, and he was hungry, and running low on food. Fuck it.

  He set Dutchman’s autopilot to do a straight run back towards the Unit, who were probably three days march away. He could reach them by sundown if he hurried. Worst case he would set down and camp somewhere. He didn’t like flying at night.

  He could have investigated. Silver probably would have rappelled down onto their roof and kicked their door open. He wasn’t about to. He was supposed to scout the railhead, so he scouted it. There were people here. If they wanted to know who they were, he could bring them back and they could check it out. He was not getting shot over this. His job was to report back, anyway. No good getting killed, or risking the airship.

  Dutchman was old. Built by a United Nations that assumed the GPS satellite system would never go down, it’s console complained incessantly that it couldn’t get a signal. But it was the only airpower on the planet, and Silver would skin him if he lost it. So he headed back. If he flew at night, he knew he would get lost and have to hunt around for them. Better to spend a night on the ground.