The Armageddon Blues

by The Armageddon Blues (new ed) (mobi)

  I saw your picture in the paper just the other day

  You still looked the same

  You hadn't changed in any way

  But I don't know what's happened,

  don't know what to do,

  Because I don't, I don't remember you

  She stood out in the edge of the darkness, where the Bowl's lights did not reach. Once her earphone rang, and without answering it she turned it off. Fighter jets crossed the night sky at regular intervals, and Jalian could feel Jimmy Rambell playing; could feel the joy that was the playing, and the terrible sorrow that the joy was wrapped around, and knew that Jimmy Rambell did not expect to play again; that Jimmy Rambell did not expect to have a crowd to play to again.

  They closed with their standard; and for the only time that evening the crowd did not applaud.

  The lights dimmed, and Rasputin put away his sticks. With a guitar and a horn, Jimmy Rambell and Jah Mike Campin played the blues; Ground Zero.

  So baby hold me in the morning,

  You know I ain't no hero,

  And there ain't nowhere to run to

  ‘Cause everywhere's ground zero....

  ground zero....

  ground zero....

  ground zero....

  The music trailed off in a slow wailing horn, and the whisper of ... ground zero ....

  Most of the crowd was crying.

  Jalian d'Arsennette, in the darkness, said, /well played./

  From the stage, Jimmy Rambell looked up toward her. He could not possibly have seen her.

  Into the mike, Jimmy Rambell said, "You all go home, be with your people. God's love, ever'body." He looked up into the tiered darkness. "Good luck. Try to be happy."

  He unplugged his guitar, and walked away from the stage.

  Henry Ellis sat alone at one end of a long, elliptical conference table. His hat was resting on the chair next to him. His briefcase was sitting on the glossy black tile floor of the conference room.

  His Soviet counterpart, Anatoly Dibrikin, entered through the south entrance of the conference room, and sat down three seats away. There was no door at the south entrance; instead a recently-installed doorfield glowed brightly where it had been.

  For the first time in Henry's memory, Dibrikin was not carrying the briefcase that held his notebook. The heavy, gravid countenance--Henry'd always thought Anatoly resembled old Kruschev strongly--seemed almost cheerful with a sort of vast relief from waiting; things were at long last nearing the conclusion. "Tomorrow, my friend. The batteries have been installed to run the doorfields when the time comes." His English was heavily accented. He added, "I have learned that we have sent backfire bombers over Alaska."

  Henry nodded. "And we have stealth bombers armed with cruise missiles over Poland." He stood. His boots rang out against the tile. "Tomorrow will come none too soon, Anatoly."

  The Russian looked at him. "Let us only hope that there is a tomorrow."

  On the morning of the day the sun rose early, into a sky that was hot and bright and blue. There were four of them in ENCELIS' control room; Jalian, and Michael Walks-Far, and two junior Sunflower operatives. The junior agents were studiously avoiding the appearance of having noticed Jalian's presence. Until their assignment at this facility, finding her had been, to the best of their knowledge, one of the high-order priorities of Sunflower Intelligence; the decision concerning her was not one they wished to be held responsible for.

  When they finished reporting, Michael looked troubled. "The pattern worries me, Jalian. A fire at the rectenna farms in the Pomona hills. Somebody sabotaged the nuclear reactor at UCLA; minimal damage, but it could have been bad. Half a dozen other acts of what are pretty clearly sabotage, within the last two days; and they're getting closer to us." He sighed. "Similar reports from the SORCELIS installation in New York."

  "Our enemies are vile," said Jalian calmly, "but they are not fools. Did you truly think that they would not find the heart of Sunflower? We have been careful and we have been subtle, but there has been too much traffic through here to mask forever. They believe that there will be a war, and there may well be; they come to destroy their true opponents. It is no less than I expected." She turned away from the map of the Earth that ENCELIS was generating in realtime from sensors aboard Sunflower ABM satellites, and picked up the assault rifle she had carried into the room. She handled it with a perceptible, slightly weary distaste. "We are not unwarned."

  On July Seventeenth, 2007, at four-thirty p.m. at the white, marble-clad Palais des Nations, the Disarmament Summit began.

  Members of the various intelligence operations outnumbered the citizens in the streets of Geneva. Russians and Americans and the odd stringers for the dead Chinese empire swarmed around the conference hall. Occasional Brazilians were cheerfully hunting the Chinese.

  At the conference hall itself it was peaceful.

  Standing around the conference table, as President Grant and Premier Onreko seated themselves simultaneously, were six persons. They were Rhodai Kerreka, and his younger brother; Henry Ellis and Anatoly Dibrikin; and the current head of the KGB, General Nikolai Shenderev.

  There was a brief pause after the two leaders seated themselves; then all except Rhodai Kerreka followed suit. Kerreka remained standing. "Senra President," he said courteously, "Premier Onreko, I hope you will forgive me if I take this moment to speak briefly." He looked inquiringly at the two, received a brief nod from President Grant, and a slow, rumbled "Da," from Pyotr Onreko.

  "Thank you," said Kerreka easily. The round, relaxed features held no trace of tension; he might, thought Henry, be addressing a sewing circle. "Lights, please." The lights in the room dimmed. A viewscreen, erected across one wall, lit. An orange-slice view of the Earth appeared. Above and below it there were bright red and blue dots, and swarming yellow and green flashes.

  "We are looking," said Kerreka, "at a realtime representation of the planet Earth. The red dots above and below it are American ABM satellites; the blue are Soviet ABM satellites. The flashing indicators are THOR missiles; American, green, Soviet, yellow." He nodded to Henry. A bright white dot appeared in Siberia. Henry Ellis, at the American end of the table, reached to the red telephone that was at the President's elbow, and turned it off.

  "What is that glowing spot?" asked Premier Onreko suspiciously.

  "That," said Rhodai Kerreka, "is a thermonuclear explosion. Of a warhead smuggled into Russia by Sunflower operatives."

  At that moment, Anatoly Dibrikin picked up the phone at the Russian end of the table. He began shouting into the phone, in Russian, "Treachery! The Americans are attacking, they're--no, no!" He shouted loudly, cracked the telephone sharply against the table top, and unplugged the phone. Quite softly, he said, "I suggest we switch the doorfield to interior power."

  The President of the United States and the Soviet Premier sat silently; one from knowledge, one from shock. Onreko's mouth moved spasmodically, but no sound came.

  Nikolai Shenderev said very softly, "Ah, Pyotr, I am sorry." Onreko did not appear to hear him.

  "So," said Rhodai Kerreka into the stunned silence, "let us now discuss disarmament ... like reasonable people."

  --Dateline 2007: Armageddon. There will be no further input from this source. ENCELIS.--

  World War III began on July 17, 2007, at just past 5:00, Greenwich Mean Time.

  In geosynchronous orbit, at Midway, Nigao Loos awoke to the sound of klaxons and sirens. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he pulled on his tether cord to take himself to his terminal. "PRAXCELIS?"

  The cool, well-modulated voice said only, "Dateline: Armageddon."

  Nigao stared at the words on the screen. "Oh no. Oh no." The words flashed bright red: ENEMY FIRST STRIKE IN PROGRESS: LAUNCH CONFIRMED. "They did it," he said in numb shock. "Those stupid fuckers did it."

  "And right down there," shouted the chopper pilot over the sound of the rotors, "is the top-secret SORCELIS installation." He grinned to show that there were no flies on h
im; that he understood that SORCELIS wasn't a secret any longer, if it ever had been--DataWeb News had done an in-depth on it not two weeks ago, and tourists had been trekking up into the New York hills ever since the webcast.

  The passenger, a thin, sharp-featured, dark haired man, nodded. "Can you take us closer?" he yelled. If it had not been for the sound of the rotors, the pilot might have noticed the faint Russian accent, growing audible with stress.

  "Sorry," bellowed the pilot. "Any closer and they send up hushchoppers to chase me away, and I get ticketed for trespassing on top of it."

  The passenger said nothing in reply. They were less than half a kilometer away. He picked up his briefcase from its holding web under his seat, and put it in his lap. He seemed to be listening to something for a moment; his head cocked as though he were straining for a faint sound.

  The pilot jolted upright in his seat. "Mother of God," he said, far too quietly to be heard. Across the override emergency band, he was learning about Armageddon. He turned to stare at his passenger.

  The passenger, lips moving in what might have been a prayer, had prayer been sanctioned for Russians, flipped the catches on his briefcase. The magnetically contained positrons

  --Dateline 2007: Armageddon. There will be no further input from this source. SORCELIS.--

  blew. The explosion was like the fist of God; it leveled the hills for three square kilometers.

  Another bright dot appeared on the screen. "Upstate New York," said Nikolai Shenderev quietly.

  Henry Ellis was watching the viewscreen. "SORCELIS," he whispered.

  Rhodai Kerreka nodded. "The price of fooling the KGB."

  Darkness lay about them.

  Power was out everywhere. In a thirty kilometer circle around the Trans-Temporal Research Foundation, power lines were out, power generating stations burned or bombed. The fire at the rectenna farm in the Pomona hills had yet to burn out. Seventeen Soviet saboteurs were in custody. Another six were dead.

  National guardsmen marched in squads through the mostly deserted streets of the city. In the two and a half decades since its construction, a suburb had grown up about the Trans-Temporal Research Foundation. Houses and used-car lots and malls sprouted, reaching up toward the Foundation from the south side of the 210 Freeway. Irwindale City Police were parked throughout the dark expanse in groups of police hovercars, bubble machines pulsing blue and red, shotguns and lasers held in casual readiness.

  Nobody--not saboteurs or looters or anybody else--had penetrated the lines of defense thrown up around Jalian and Michael Walks-Far and ENCELIS. Planes and choppers trying to enter the area were being turned back. Even the freeway was dead, bare and deserted of moving cars; Jalian had ordered it cleared and closed after a number of chain crashes were caused by people trying to leave the area. The wrecked cars were still on the freeway.

  At the Foundation itself there was light, running off the laboratory's emergency generator. Jalian stood outside the main entrance, waiting patiently. The assault rifle was in her hand. Everything that she could do, she had done; all that she had left was trust, trust in Georges and Henry Ellis and the machines.

  Michael came out after her. "Launch is confirmed," he said quietly. "PRAXCELIS has the first group of missiles, from air and sea, under control. None of those should get through. The later launches will saturate our defenses." He paused, and added irrelevantly, "We lost touch with the Guardsmen down at the east barrier on the freeway."

  Jalian was staring intently into the darkness, off toward the freeway.

  Michael touched her, tentatively. "Jalian?"

  She slapped his hand away savagely and took an involuntary step forward. "Listen!"

  "I ... I hear nothing."

  "Listen," she snapped. Michael stared at her, and then understood. He closed his eyes:

  /...a dim brightness grows and kindles..../

  It pulsed and became

  /warmth/

  It pulsed and became

  /power/

  and Jalian d'Arsennette y ken Selvren said, "Georges."

  Georges Mordreaux walked down the freeway. Light followed him. In a circle that moved with him, light blazed from the powerless freeway lamps. For two hundred meters on all sides of him the night air glowed, from the overhead lamps and from the houses to the south of the freeway and from the occasional abandoned groups of vehicles on the freeway itself. The vehicles, left because they were ruined in crashes, idled into easy life at his approach. Bent metal flowed like water. The hovercars lifted, and hung forty centimeters over the pavement, like sentinels at attention.

  He approached the off-ramp to the Foundation.

  Jalian dropped her rifle to the ground. She walked up the ramp, onto the freeway. From her shoulder holster she took a .45 revolver, and dropped it as well. She knelt, pulled her knives from her boots, and stowed them in the knife sheathes she still wore.

  She left Michael at the base of the ramp.

  Jalian came up out of the darkness, into the light that surrounded Georges. The dark, blind eyes regarded her, and the years slipped away from her like old skin from a snake. Georges said, "Hello, Jalian."

  Jalian had no idea what she intended to say. At the end, all she could say was /why?/

  His smile held pain that tore at her unbearably. "You did not follow when you were able to; and when I returned, I was ... changed." He walked to her, paused a step away, and said in gentle mindtalk, /where i have gone, you cannot follow. what i am you could not comprehend; i would not have you follow if you could./ His crippled hand stroked her cheek, and she had to fight to master the tremble that touched her, and threatened to become uncontrollable shaking.

  "Georges," she whispered, "I have trusted you, beyond hope, and beyond reason, and beyond love. But I will know why." Georges was motionless. There was little time left. Then he banished away his pain, and took Jalian's hand. Her hand seemed cold even through his glove. "Come," he said with a lover's softness, "and I will explain."

  He led her down to ENCELIS, to her betrayal.

  Their gazes were riveted to the viewscreen.

  "You will note," said Kerreka calmly, "that PRAXCELIS has made no attempt to destroy the final forty percent of the Soviet missiles. It is concentrating largely on cruise missiles and submarines that the THOR projectiles missed.

  "As I understand it," continued Kerreka, "the problem with the ABM's is that their firepower is insufficient and their reaction time too slow. Obviously we needed to increase one or the other.

  "Preferably both."

  They reached the base of the off-ramp. The National Guardsmen were staring at them. Georges reached out:

  /Remember./

  Michael Walks-Far felt the awesome, controlled power readying itself. Reflexes that Jalian had instilled in him for over twenty years moved into place. The command brushed by him; he staggered and went to his knees.

  Across the length of the Foundation guards, technicians, and Sunflower operatives dropped like flies. Memories swarmed up out of vastly improved memory retrieval systems, and all those within range of the command were lost within a past that no longer existed.

  Georges walked past the spot where Michael knelt, stunned, without pausing. He walked through the parking lot, and the cars leapt into life. He entered the building itself, and the lights already lit flared with a supernatural brilliance.

  --Dateline Armageddon, July 17 2007 Gregorian. This unit is experiencing upward of a fifty percent increase in operational efficiency.

  --The Prime Focus has arrived. ENCELIS.--

  He entered the central computer room. The barriers Master Po had helped him learn melted away. The Enemy of Entropy flared into life.

  Jalian came in after him. It was like entering an inferno; the air crackled with ionization. Georges stood at the ENCELIS terminal, with his back to her. Sheets of blue flame ran over him at irregular intervals. Jalian had to squint to make him out through the blinding light; her pupils were dark pin-pricks in the midst of wh
ite. "Georges! What are you doing?"

  He answered her calmly. "I am increasing ENCELIS' operational efficiency. It is becoming both smarter and faster. Shortly it will penetrate the Soviet ABM computers." There was a low rumble of sound that nearly covered his words; the air itself vibrating as energy poured out of the singularity in its midst.

  Jalian had to scream even to make herself heard now. "You need not have waited until now for that!"

  /no,/ he said silently, and the words were irons burned onto the surface of her mind, /i need not have. had i done this earlier, however, the bombs would not have fallen here./

  She did not even breathe, lost in the enormity of realization. All of this, only so that Georges could be free. She moved without thinking, brushed by him and bent over the terminal. She keyed in her authorization sequence, and then something slow and ponderous struck her. Incredible strength imprisoned her wrists, withdrew them from the keyboard. /no, Jalian. it is necessary; the missiles must fall./

  Jalian d'Arsennette moved, stepped slightly to the side, and brought her right foot up, swinging loosely from the knee, into his groin with all the force she could muster. The grip on her wrists lessened and she broke free. She turned swiftly, brought her palm flashing up to impact at the base of his nose. The bone jumped up under her palm, into the brain. She brought her hands down and pushed lightly. He stumbled backward, and she went after him savagely, bringing steel into hand, slashing upward. She left her first knife in his solar plexus, slashed his throat open with the second. Her third and fourth knives she brought upward into his brain through the sides of his neck.

  She turned away from him without further thought, left him kneeling there with steel in him. She had barely begun the authorization sequence again to input the instructions to fire on all missiles when she heard the sound of steel hitting tile. She turned, blurringly fast, but she was not fast enough.

  He was backing away blindly, and she was reaching for him, and he struck with the full force of which he was capable.

  /Remember./

  She was fourteen, and ghess'Rith was trying to teach the males of Clan Silver-Eyes to read and write, and she was nineteen, and ghess'Rith was leaving, leaving her, and she was seven, and in the dark fire lit Clan House the alien gods were telling stories of other worlds, and she was nineteen, and she ran the Big Road backward through time and appeared on a freeway in Southern California and she was twenty-six and her mother made the trip after her and died in her arms with Jalian's knives in her stomach and Jalian vowed to herself that she would never let herself love again and she was twenty-five and telling Georges that she did love him, and she was fifty years old and Georges Mordreaux vanished and left her and she was sixty-one and Michael Walks-Far told her that he loved her during a long night on the beach in Hawaii, it was raining and the rainshimmer on the water danced, and danced, and she had no answer for him.