by Greg Bear
‘Are we ready?’ Andrews asked from the back of the bomb squad truck.
‘Do it,’ Griff said, then took a breath and held it, hardly aware he was doing so.
Rebecca moved from a crouch to a kneel behind the blast shield and braced her hands on the ground.
Kaczynski walked through the nine-inch opening, quieter than any mouse. At first, the bot’s cameras revealed little more than bouncing splotches and bars of sunlight. Processors adjusted the picture. Details emerged and contrast smoothed.
The barn was big, empty of animals, but most of the stalls and an overhead hayloft were stacked high with containers—bottled water, sacks of sugar and what looked like barrels of wheat, rice and other grains. The Patriarch had been wellprepared for the Endtime.
The three behind the bomb shields listened to the conversation inside the truck. ‘Can you make a bomb out of wheat?’ asked a younger tech, new to the division.
Andrews whuffed. ‘You ever work a grain elevator?’ As he guided the bot, Andrews reminisced about his younger days in Wyoming, when he had witnessed a mishandled load of wheat puff out a dusty fog. A spark from a pump motor had ignited the flour/air mixture and blown the silo cap two hundred feet into the air. Two loaders had been killed and the concrete building had split down its length. ‘Don’t underestimate the calories in a cup of flour, my friend,’ Andrews said.
Griff tapped his gogs again. After a while, he couldn’t see the displays clearly—the problem with aging eyes. With a glance at Rebecca, he whipped off the display glasses and stuck them in his pocket. ‘The hell with this.’ He rose from behind the shield—crouching was playing hell with his knees—and hustled across the short distance to the bomb squad truck. Watson followed.
Rebecca removed her own gogs and joined them. The back of the truck was crowded. Watson grudgingly moved aside for her. They stepped around bomb suits arranged in clear plastic packages on the floor.
‘Welcome to bot central,’ Andrews said. ‘Hope you’re not claustrophobic.’
Griff was, a little.
The small space stank of adrenaline-pumped fear.
‘Don’t you guys use deodorant?’ Watson asked. Griff knew well the sharp, stewy pong. He had become familiar with the smell of frightened men first in combat overseas and later in many tight stateside situations, and he hated it.
They had all learned to work at peak efficiency despite the fear and the smell.
‘Pardon me,’ Andrews said.
The young technician grinned and moved forward, sitting on a steel box.
Inside the Patriarch’s barn, the bot called Kaczynski had paused before what looked like an abstract sculpture—metal tubes welded in bristling clumps on a central steel ball. The bot’s cameras angled down. The whole arrangement was mounted on a wheeled platform. A tow bar stuck out from one end.
‘What in hell is that?’ Griff asked, his voice soft.
‘A calliope?’ Andrews guessed.
Watson pressed her lips together.
Gray cylinders of pressurized gas thrust up behind the wheeled platform. The bot’s camera played over them in up-and-down sweeps. Rebecca was looking for labels. ‘No colorcodes,’ she murmured. ‘Could be anything. We’re going to have to pull his welding license.’
The sensors were negative for acetylene as well as propane and methane. The lack of methane in itself—in a barn—showed that ruminants had not lived there for some time. The bot pulled itself around the abstract metal object and down an aisle between empty stalls. Griff was focused on the display when the image took a jerk. In the corner of their gogs, a red dot blinked.
‘What now?’ Griff asked.
Andrews said, ‘The bot’s located something moving.’ He turned up the sound: harsh breathing, frightened little gasps. Then the dot stopped blinking.
‘Bot’s decided it could be human,’ Andrews said.
The camera image stabilized long enough on the interior of a stall to show a flash of reddish blond hair, then a small, blurred figure. The figure dashed out of view.
‘Did you catch that?’ Griff asked.
‘Looked like a little girl,’ Watson said.
They saw quick blue flashes and heard three distant popping sounds in rapid succession. As they all cringed and hunkered, Kaczynski’s displays blanked.
It took a few seconds for them to relax. The barn had not taken flight.
Andrews fumbled at controls. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Bot’s down.’
‘What, did somebody shoot it?’ Watson asked.
Andrews shook his head. ‘I think we tripped a fryer. I’m getting nothing.’
Fryers were clever little generators of electromagnetic pulses, essentially arrays of hundreds of high-powered, needle-shaped electromagnets that would jam out through a molded lattice of nickel and copper when a small internal ball of explosives went off. In the last few years fryers had been miniaturized for use by terrorists in England, Spain, and Saudi Arabia. They shorted out all solid-state electronics within ten meters. It was difficult to shield bomb robots sufficiently to avoid damage.
Fryers were used by terrorists who wanted to force humans to confront their bombs in person.
Andrews looked around the little trailer and raised his hands from the controls. ‘I can send in another,’ he said, his eyes sad.
‘No need,’ Griff said. ‘We all saw her. There’s a child in there, probably a little girl.’
Rebecca sighed. ‘Did they forget her?’
‘Maybe she didn’t want to go to church,’ Griff said. ‘It happens. Too many kids and you lose track.’ He stood up, shoulders and neck bowed to fit under the roof. His booted toe nudged one of the suits. They were Ang-Sorkin Systems EOD-23 models, made in New Zealand and now standard around the world. EOD referred to Explosive Ordnance Disposal. ‘Time to fit me out with one of these.’
‘No way,’ Andrews said. ‘This isn’t your squad.’ His expression said it all: the FBI agent was older and a bit on the heavy side. Nobody wanted to go in after a guy who’d had a stroke or a heart attack—and if either of these things happened while he was handling a detonator, there would be no need.
‘I’ll go,’ Rebecca said.
‘Well, hell, if you’ll pardon me—’ Andrews began.
Griff put his fingers to his lips, let out a shrill whistle that had them holding their ears. He raised a beefy hand. ‘I’m in charge. And if it means anything, I was once rated a Master Blaster in Navy EOD.’
‘No kidding?’ Andrews said. ‘Crab and laurels? And how old were you then?’
Griff’s lip twitched. ‘I used to teach at Redstone. That’s how I got assigned to the Patriarch. I’m the lead going in, and because I am old and feeble, and may not be up on the hottest new techniques, one of you can come with me.’ He eeny-meeny-miny-moed with a thick finger around the back of the bomb van between Rebecca, Andrews, and Watson.
Griff’s finger stopped at Watson, as he had known it would. He pointed to the suits.
‘Oh, goody,’ Watson said.
Rebecca started to speak but Griff swiveled and cupped his hand over her mouth. She glared over his thick fingers. ‘You can tell me what to look for,’ he said. ‘Tell me what I’m seeing. Okay?’
Rebecca removed his hand with two delicate fingers.
‘Sorry,’ Griff said, brows furrowed.
‘Sorry won’t cut it if we lose our evidence,’ Rebecca said.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Thanks for caring.’
Griff radioed the agents up the road and told them to keep a close watch on the perimeter in case anyone tried to enter or leave. If the girl fled the barn while they were inside they’d pull out and resume robot operations.
Andrews and the tech helped them suit up, a process that took ten minutes. The last step—putting on the aerodynamically curved face-plate and locking it to the chest rig—always made Griff feel like a deep-sea diver. Rip-and-zip could peel them out of the suits in less than twenty seconds if they needed to run away�
�otherwise, they’d be clumping around like big clumsy beetles.
Griff looked through the thick plastic plate at Rebecca Rose. Her quiet anger comforted him.
‘You’re my good luck charm, Becky,’ he said.
‘Screw you,’ Rebecca said, not unkindly.
In the twilight, the bombot approached the barn door, rammed a metal arm against the edge, dug in, and pushed the door back so they could enter. Wheels on the rusty track squealed in protest and the door shivered as it slid open, but that was all.
Through his face-plate, Griff could see nothing in the gap. Just a dark and empty yawn.
‘What if there is no little girl?’ Alice Watson asked as they waddled toward the barn. Her voice came through his earnode like a buzzing fly. ‘Wouldn’t that be a hoot?’
The bomb truck kicked on a floodlight and trained the intense blue beam into the entrance. A row of stalls and the cart with its strange, bundled pipe sculpture stood revealed in the harsh light. Beyond, like serried paper cutouts against velvety blackness, stood workbenches, cylinders, hanging ropes—a hoist and pulley.
Griff turned and surveyed the farmhouse, the yard, the nearly black ridgelines hackled with trees, the deep blue of the dusk sky with cottony rips of yellow and orange cloud. He tried to find the gap where the fire tower now stood revealed. He could not. It was late, and his eyes were not sharp enough.
No doubt he was missing other things as well.
‘Me first,’ he told Watson. ‘Stay out of my spray line.’
Below glossy nested plates and front pads, the Ang-Sorkin suits were jacketed with water-filled micro-piping that networked around the exposed front surfaces and exited through sealed blow holes along the back. The shock front of an explosion, as it met the smooth plastic curves of the front pads, would find little purchase. Particles carried by the blast, including shrapnel, would dimple the plates and possibly even pierce them—but all but the largest and sharpest pieces would be stopped by an underlying layer of monocarbon fiber. What gaseous force—and force from shrapnel—did not flow around the suits and faceplate—still a major proportion of the blast pressure—would compress the micropiping beneath those layers and heat the water to steam, which would then jet from the rear of the suit in hundreds of gaseous needles. Within six or eight inches, those water needles would be sharp enough to cut holes in human skin or pierce another suit. You always stayed out of someone’s spray line.
Bomb suits had become very sophisticated. But entering the barn at a deliberate plod, Griff did not feel much safer. He might as well have wrapped himself in Kleenex like a Halloween mummy. Or faced a howitzer in a brown paper bag.
Suit cameras—two mounted to face fore and aft, and a third focusing exclusively on a point less then a meter in front of their breastplates—conveyed some of what they were seeing back to the bomb squad truck and the bombnet viewers. Gimbaled lamps mounted above their face-plates silently played beams of light wherever their eyes were looking. A small heads-up display mounted below the chin projected data abstracted from the video the bot had captured before being fried. The bomb squad computers in the truck had already used enhancement techniques to outline and identify the objects recorded during the bot’s few minutes inside the barn, and marked them on a floorplan.
Griff found the white and pink map distracting and switched it off using his tongue mouse. Once inside, he could see well enough. The barn had been converted into what looked like a basic engineering shop. A metalworking lathe and drill press covered a wooden workbench behind the pipe sculpture. He was starting to think of the weird shape on its cart as the Calliope, just for reference. ‘We’re passing the Calliope now,’ he said. ‘Looks like it might have been made to disperse powder or water—sort of like a big sprayer or fountain.’ He was thinking of the powder on the trees. ‘Maybe they used it for pesticide.’
‘Pipes are too big,’ Watson said. ‘They’re more like mortars. It could be some sort of hedgehog—a launcher. Could take out a city block if it was lobbing shells.’
Griff made sure to pause before each area. ‘Alice is right. Not a sprayer.’ If he didn’t make it, someone could use the video to figure out what had killed him. They advanced to the workbench, then turned. The bench was littered with tools—wooden and rubber mallets, split tube-shaped molds lying open, tamping implements, scraps of foil and paper, brushes.
‘Not very tidy,’ Watson said.
‘They didn’t get a chance to clean up everything,’ Griff observed. ‘Maybe we moved in faster than they expected.’
But they had been burning trash in barrels all week…
The power outlets had been masked off with duct tape and gummy spark-stop plastic. They would inspect all this in detail later, after they had found the girl. Watson took the lead down the broad aisle between the rows of stalls. She called out, ‘If there’s anyone in here, you need to come out. We got to evacuate this barn, honey. It could be dangerous, you hear me?’
The bot stood frozen in the middle of the aisle. Mounted to posts on each side, at knee level, were two fryers. Watson bent to inspect the bot. Griff put his hands on his knees and stooped to look at the fryer mechanisms. His helmet light played over them. They resembled wind-up toys with burned heads. The posts had been charred by the heat of their small charges. They were home-made, possibly with German or Italian parts. The whole world was mad against authority.
He rose and said, ‘You got that?’
‘Got it,’ said Andrews’ voice in his ear. ‘Are there any more?’
‘I don’t see any.’ Griff nudged the bot with the toe of his boot. It slumped like a freshly killed spider.
Watson stood gingerly, hands pushing on her thickly padded knees. ‘He’s dead, Jim,’ she said.
Griff’s heel scraped aside some straw. Beneath the straw, a thin strip of metal tape had been stretched between the posts. He pushed aside more straw. Not only did the tape connect the posts—and the fryers—but a longer strip almost certainly ran the length of the barn. He continued scraping for a few feet to make sure. The tape took a zig-zag course between the stalls.
‘Got this?’ he asked Andrews.
‘Simple enough,’ Andrews said. ‘Bot crosses the tape, sets off the fryers.’
‘And what else?’ Rebecca asked.
The stalls were the right size for horses, with metal gates that provided good views of the interiors. One contained large bales of straw wrapped in what looked like oil cloth or some sort of rubberized fabric.
Buffers for observing explosives from a safe distance.
‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ Watson asked.
Griff nodded. ‘Tell the boys back home.’
Watson explained what she thought the bales might be.
‘Right,’ Andrews said.
Everything they did here was chancy. If the barn was ‘alive’—if any more devices carried sound or motion sensors—then they were probably already dead, though still walking around.
The possible presence of the little girl lent some small assurance. Unless, of course, she had entered the barn against express orders. Children were capable of that. Griff wondered what sort of punishment the families meted out to their kids. Perhaps they were caring and gentle. He hoped so. Even bigots loved their children.
He could feel his testicles drawing up, his scrotum shrinking as they approached the last of the stalls. They had found little so far. Maybe the Patriarch and his sons had wired things in the hayloft or up in the rafters. High above, birds flew in and out through the beams and struts, their cheeping faint through his helmet.
Maybe the little girl had come to the barn to watch the birds, to spy out nests. Griff scraped aside more straw to confirm that the tape ran the entire length of the building. It did, in slow, loping curves. Very clever.
Griff pictured taking long lines of clever people with many different faces and expressions, and whacking crowbars over their pointy little heads. Oddly, he included Jacob Levine in that lineup, just becaus
e he had ID’d the Patriarch, thereby confirming their suspicions and placing them right here in this barn.
Alice Watson once more called out for the little girl. He could hear Watson’s breath in one ear, slow and steady. ‘I don’t think there’s any little girl,’ she said. She had an odd, appealing accent caused by the stiffness in one side of her face. Funny he hadn’t found it appealing before now. ‘I think we’re chasing spooks.’
‘We’ll see,’ Griff said. He was looking ahead three or four meters to a trap door half-covered with old straw, at the end of the aisle in the back of the barn. To the left was a rustic wooden Dutch door leading into what at one time might have been a feed or tack room. To the right, a vestibule that still held an old tractor. Behind the tractor was another door, shut and padlocked from the inside.
‘Want to start up that tractor, Alice?’ Griff asked.
‘I ain’t going near it,’ she said.
‘They could use the tractor to haul that Calliope outside,’ Griff said. ‘I’m wondering why, though.’
‘Fireworks,’ Watson said. They slowly turned to face each other. ‘Shit,’ she added, grinning.
‘I should have thought of that.’ Griff held up a thickly gloved thumb. ‘Hey, listen up, guys. Alice just set off a little light bulb.’
‘We heard,’ Andrews said. ‘Watch for devices triggered by bright ideas.’
‘Well, why didn’t we think of it earlier?’ Watson asked. ‘Portable fireworks launcher. Atta girl,’ she added quietly. Then, ‘Why?’
‘Any theories, Becky?’ Griff asked.
‘Keep looking,’ Rebecca said.
Griff had reached the trap door. It was off its hinges, if it had ever had hinges, and was pushed to one side, leaving open a knife-shaped triangle. He estimated that the door was light enough he could push it aside with one boot if he had to.
