The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  She didn’t answer, just muttered, “Damned salesbots…,” and disconnected.

  She told the guy she had to “tinkle,” which made him laugh. He was a pilot just out of the Air Force, and she would have gone for him in some other world than this one. She found the back exit—bars like this always had one—and was blocks away before he would even begin to wonder.

  Anchorage slid past unnoticed as she hurried through the broad, deserted streets, planning. Back to the bus, out of costume, into all-weather gear, boots, grab some trail mix and an already-filled backpack. Her thermos of coffee she wore on her hip.

  She cut across Elderberry Park, hurrying to the spot where her briefing said the trains paused before running into the depot. The port and rail lines snugged up against Elmendorf Air Force Base, convenient for them, and for her.

  The freight train was a long, clanking string and she stood in the chill gathering darkness, wondering how she would know where they were. The passing autorack cars had heavy shutters, like big steel Venetian blinds, and she could not see how anybody got into them.

  But as the line clanked and squealed and slowed, a quick laser flash caught her, winked three times. She ran toward it, hauling up onto a slim platform at the foot of a steel sheet.

  It tilted outward as she scrambled aboard, thudding into her thigh, nearly knocking her off. She ducked in and saw by the distant streetlights vague outlines of luxury cars. A Lincoln sedan door swung open. Its interior light came on and she saw two men in the front seats. She got in the back and closed the door. Utter dark.

  “It clear out there?” the cell phone voice asked from the driver’s seat.

  “Yeah. What—”

  “Let’s unload. You got the SUV?”

  “Waiting on the nearest street.”

  “How far?”

  “Hundred meters.”

  The man jigged his door open, glanced back at her. “We can make it in one trip if you can carry twenty kilos.”

  “Sure,” though she had to pause to quickly do the arithmetic, forty-four pounds. She had backpacked about that much for weeks in the Sierras. “Yeah, sure.”

  The missile gear was in the trunks of three other sedans, at the far end of the autorack. As she climbed out of the car the men had inhabited, she saw the debris of their trip—food containers in the back seats, assorted junk, the waste from days spent coming up from Seattle. With a few gallons of gas in each car, so they could be driven on and off, these two had kept warm running the heater. If that ran dry, they could switch to another.

  As she understood it, this degree of mess was acceptable to the railroads and car dealers. If the railroad tried to wrap up the autoracked cars to keep them out, the bums who rode the rails would smash windshields to get in, then shit in the cars, knife the upholstery. So they had struck an equilibrium. That compromise inadvertently produced a good way to ship weapons right by Homeland Security. She wondered what Homeland types would make of a Dart, anyway. Could they even tell what it was?

  The rough-voiced man turned and clicked on a helmet lamp. “I’m Bruckner. This is Gene.”

  Nods. “I’m Elinor.” Nods, smiles. Cut to the chase. “I know their flight schedule.”

  Bruckner smiled thinly. “Let’s get this done.”

  Transporting the parts in via autoracked cars was her idea. Bringing them in by small plane was the original plan, but Homeland might nab them at the airport. She was proud of this slick work-around.

  “Did railroad inspectors get any of you?” Elinor asked.

  Gene said, “Nope. Our two extras dropped off south of here. They’ll fly back out.”

  With the auto freights, the railroad police looked for tramps sleeping in the seats. No one searched in the trunks. So they had put a man on each autorack, and if some got caught, they could distract from the gear. The men would get a fine, be hauled off for a night in jail, and the shipment would go on.

  “Luck is with us,” Elinor said. Bruckner looked at her, looked more closely, opened his mouth, but said nothing.

  They both seemed jumpy by the helmet light. “How’d you guys live this way?” she asked, to get them relaxed.

  “Pretty poorly,” Gene said. “We had to shit in bags.”

  She could faintly smell the stench. “More than I need to know.”

  Using Bruckner’s helmet light they hauled the assemblies out, neatly secured in backpacks. Bruckner moved with strong, graceless efficiency. Gene too. She hoisted hers on, grunting.

  The freight started up, lurching forward. “Damn!” Gene said.

  They hurried. When they opened the steel flap, she hesitated, jumped, stumbled on the gravel, but caught herself. Nobody within view in the velvet cloaking dusk.

  They walked quietly, keeping steady through the shadows. It got cold fast, even in late May. At the Ford they put the gear in the back and got in. She drove them to the old school bus. Nobody talked.

  She stopped them at the steps to the bus. “Here, put these gloves on.”

  They grumbled but they did it. Inside, heater turned to high, Bruckner asked if she had anything to drink. She offered bottles of vitamin water but he waved it away. “Any booze?”

  Gene said, “Cut that out.”

  The two men eyed each other and Elinor thought about how they’d been days in those cars and decided to let it go. Not that she had any liquor, anyway.

  Bruckner was lean, rawboned and self-contained, with minimal movements and a constant, steady gaze in his expressionless face. “I called the pickup boat. They’ll be waiting offshore near Eagle Bay by eight.”

  Elinor nodded. “First flight is 9:00 am. It’ll head due north so we’ll see it from the hills above Eagle Bay.”

  Gene said, “So we get into position…when?”

  “Tonight, just after dawn.”

  Bruckner said, “I do the shoot.”

  “And we handle perimeter and setup, yes.”

  “How much trouble will we have with the Indians?”

  Elinor blinked. “The Inuit settlement is down by the seashore. They shouldn’t know what’s up.”

  Bruckner frowned. “You sure?”

  “That’s what it looks like. Can’t exactly go there and ask, can we?”

  Bruckner sniffed, scowled, looked around the bus. “That’s the trouble with this nickel-and-dime operation. No real security.”

  Elinor said, “You want security, buy a bond.”

  Bruckner’s head jerked around. “Whassat mean?”

  She sat back, took her time. “We can’t be sure the DARPA people haven’t done some serious public relations work with the Natives. Besides, they’re probably all in favor of SkyShield anyway—their entire way of life is melting away with the sea ice. And by the way, they’re not ‘Indians’, they’re ‘Inuit’.”

  “You seem pretty damn sure of yourself.”

  “People say it’s one of my best features.”

  Bruckner squinted and said, “You’re—”

  “A maritime engineering officer. That’s how I got here and that’s how I’m going out.”

  “You’re not going with us?”

  “Nope, I go back out on my ship. I have first engineering watch tomorrow, oh-one-hundred hours.” She gave him a hard flat look. “We go up the inlet, past Birchwood Airport. I get dropped off, steal a car, head south to Anchorage, while you get on the fishing boat, they work you out to the headlands. The bigger ship comes in, picks you up. You’re clear and away.”

  Bruckner shook his head. “I thought we’d—”

  “Look, there’s a budget and—”

  “We’ve been holed up in those damn cars for—”

  “A week, I know. Plans change.”

  “I don’t like changes.”

  “Things change,” Elinor said, trying to make it mild.

  But Bruckner bristled. “I don’t like you cutting out, leaving us—”

  “I’m in charge, remember.” She thought, He travels the fastest who travels alone.

&n
bsp; “I thought we were all in this together.”

  She nodded. “We are. But Command made me responsible, since this was my idea.”

  His mouth twisted. “I’m the shooter, I—”

  “Because I got you into the Ecuador training. Me and Gene, we depend on you.” Calm, level voice. No need to provoke guys like this; they did it enough on their own.

  Silence. She could see him take out his pride, look at it, and decide to wait a while to even the score.

  Bruckner said, “I gotta stretch my legs,” and clumped down the steps and out of the bus.

  Elinor didn’t like the team splitting and thought of going after him. But she knew why Bruckner was antsy—too much energy with no outlet. She decided just to let him go.

  To Gene she said, “You’ve known him longer. He’s been in charge of operations like this before?”

  Gene thought. “There’ve been no operations like this.”

  “Smaller jobs than this?”

  “Plenty.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Surprising.”

  “Why?”

  “He walks around using that mouth, while he’s working?”

  Gene chuckled. “’Fraid so. He gets the job done though.”

  “Still surprising.”

  “That he’s the shooter, or—”

  “That he still has all his teeth.”

  While Gene showered, she considered. Elinor figured Bruckner for an injustice collector, the passive-aggressive loser type. But he had risen quickly in The LifeWorkers, as they called themselves, brought into the inner cadre that had formulated this plan. Probably because he was willing to cross the line, use violence in the cause of justice. Logically, she should sympathize with him, because he was a lot like her.

  But sympathy and liking didn’t work that way.

  There were people who soon would surely yearn to read her obituary, and Bruckner’s too, no doubt. He and she were the cutting edge of environmental activism, and these were desperate times indeed. Sometimes you had to cross the line, and be sure about it.

  Elinor had made a lot of hard choices. She knew she wouldn’t last long on the scalpel’s edge of active environmental justice, and that was fine by her. Her role would soon be to speak for the true cause. Her looks, her brains, her charm—she knew she’d been chosen for this mission, and the public one afterwards, for these attributes, as much as for the plan she had devised. People listen, even to ugly messages, when the face of the messenger is pretty. And once they finished here, she would have to be heard.

  She and Gene carefully unpacked the gear and started to assemble the Dart. The parts connected with a minimum of wiring and socket clasps, as foolproof as possible. They worked steadily, assembling the tube, the small recoilless charge, snapping and clicking the connections.

  Gene said, “The targeting antenna has a rechargeable battery, they tend to drain. I’ll top it up.”

  She nodded, distracted by the intricacies of a process she had trained for a month ago. She set the guidance system. Tracking would first be Infrared only, zeroing in on the target’s exhaust, but once in the air and nearing its goal, it would use multiple targeting modes—laser, IR, advanced visual recognition—to get maximal impact on the main body of the aircraft.

  They got it assembled and stood back to regard the linear elegance of the Dart. It had a deadly, snakelike beauty, its shiny white skin tapered to a snub point.

  “Pretty, yeah,” Gene said. “And way better than any Stinger. Next generation, smarter, near four times the range.”

  She knew guys liked anything that could shoot, but to her it was just a tool. She nodded.

  Gene sniffed, caressed the lean body of the Dart, and smiled.

  Bruckner came clumping up the bus stairs with a fixed smile on his face that looked like it had been delivered to the wrong address. He waved a lit cigarette. Elinor got up, forced herself to smile. “Glad you’re back, we—”

  “Got some ’freshments,” he said, dangling some beers in their six-pack plastic cradle, and she realized he was drunk.

  The smile fell from her face like a picture off a wall.

  She had to get along with these two but this was too much. She stepped forward, snatched the beer bottles and tossed them onto the Victorian love seat. “No more.”

  Bruckner tensed and Gene sucked in a breath. Bruckner made a move to grab the beers and Elinor snatched his hand, twisted the thumb back, turned hard to ward off a blow from his other hand—and they froze, looking into each other’s eyes from a few centimeters away.

  Silence.

  Gene said, “She’s right, y’know.”

  More silence.

  Bruckner sniffed, backed away. “You don’t have to be rough.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  They looked at each other, let it go.

  She figured each of them harbored a dim fantasy of coming to her in the brief hours of darkness. She slept in the lumpy bed and they made do with the furniture. Bruckner got the love seat—ironic victory—and Gene sprawled on a threadbare comforter.

  Bruckner talked some but dozed off fast under booze, so she didn’t have to endure his testosterone-fueled patter. But he snored, which was worse.

  The men napped and tossed and worried. No one bothered her, just as she wanted it. But she kept a small knife in her hand, in case. For her, sleep came easily.

  After eating a cold breakfast, they set out before dawn, 2:30 am, Elinor driving. She had decided to wait till then because they could mingle with early morning Air Force workers driving toward the base. This far north, it started brightening by 3:30, and they’d be in full light before 5:00. Best not to stand out as they did their last reconnaissance. It was so cold she had to run the heater for five minutes to clear the windshield of ice. Scraping with her gloved hands did nothing.

  The men had grumbled about leaving absolutely nothing behind. “No traces,” she said. She wiped down every surface, even though they’d worn medical gloves the whole time in the bus.

  Gene didn’t ask why she stopped and got a gas can filled with gasoline, and she didn’t say.

  She noticed the wind was fairly strong and from the north, and smiled. “Good weather. Prediction’s holding up.”

  Bruckner said sullenly, “Goddamn cold.”

  “The KC Extenders will take off into the wind, head north.” Elinor judged the nearly cloud-free sky. “Just where we want them to be.”

  They drove up a side street in Mountain View, and parked overlooking the fish hatchery and golf course, so she could observe the big tank refuelers lined up at the loading site. She counted five KC-10 Extenders, freshly surplussed by the Air Force. Their big bellies reminded her of pregnant whales.

  From their vantage point, they could see down to the temporarily expanded checkpoint, set up just outside the base. As foreseen, security was stringently tight this near the airfield—all drivers and passengers had to get out, be scanned, IDs checked against global records, briefcases and purses searched. K-9 units inspected car interiors and trunks. Explosives-detecting robots rolled under the vehicles.

  She fished out binoculars and focused on the people waiting to be cleared. Some carried laptops and backpacks and she guessed they were the scientists flying with the dispersal teams. Their body language was clear. Even this early, they were jazzed, eager to go, excited as kids on a field trip. One of the pilots had mentioned there would be some sort of pre-flight ceremony, honoring the teams that had put all this together. The flight crews were studiedly nonchalant—this was an important, high-profile job, sure, but they couldn’t let their cool down in front of so many science nerds. She couldn’t see well enough to pick out Ted, or the friendly woman from the bar.

  In a special treaty deal with the Arctic Council, they would fly from Elmendorf and arc over the North Pole, spreading hydrogen sulfide in their wakes. The tiny molecules of it would mate with water vapor in the stratospheric air, making sulfurics. Those larger, wobbly molecules reflected sunlight well
—a fact learned from studying volcano eruptions back in the TwenCen. Spray megatons of hydrogen sulfide into the stratosphere, let water turn it into a sunlight-bouncing sheet—SkyShield—and they could cool the entire Arctic.

  Or so the theory went. The Arctic Council had agreed to this series of large-scale experiments, run by the USA since they had the in-flight refuelers that could spread the tiny molecules to form the SkyShield. Small-scale experiments—opposed, of course, by many enviros—had seemed to work. Now came the big push, trying to reverse the retreat of sea ice and warming of the tundra.

  Anchorage lay slightly farther north than Oslo, Helsinki, and Stockholm, but not as far north as Reykjavik or Murmansk. Flights from Anchorage to Murmansk would let them refuel and reload hydrogen sulfide at each end, then follow their paths back over the pole. Deploying hydrogen sulfide along their flight paths at 45,000 feet, they would spread a protective layer to reflect summer sunlight. In a few months, the sulfuric droplets would ease down into the lower atmosphere, mix with moist clouds, and come down as rain or snow, a minute, undetectable addition to the acidity already added by industrial pollutants. Experiment over.

  The total mass delivered was far less than that from volcanoes like Pinatubo, which had cooled the whole planet in 1991-92. But volcanoes do messy work, belching most of their vomit into the lower atmosphere. This was to be a designer volcano, a thin skin of aerosols skating high across the stratosphere.

  It might stop the loss of the remaining sea ice, the habitat of the polar bear. Only ten percent of the vast original cooling sheets remained. Equally disruptive changes were beginning to occur in other parts of the world.

  But geoengineered tinkerings would also be a further excuse to delay cutbacks in carbon dioxide emissions. People loved convenience, their air-conditioning and winter heating and big lumbering SUVs. Humanity had already driven the air’s CO2 content to twice what it was before 1800, and with every developing country burning oil and coal as fast as they could extract them, only dire emergency could drive them to abstain. To do what was right.

  The greatest threat to humanity arose not from terror, but error. Time to take the gloves off.