Armageddon Blues

by Daniel Keys Moran

Georges nodded. "I understand. It will cause you problems with Commander Murphy, I am afraid."

  Nigao snorted. "I've been fighting with her ever since I got exiled to this godforsaken dump fifteen years ago. I'll survive." He looked at Georges again, made vague gestures with his hands. "What are you doing here?"

  "First Precept of Semi-Divinity," said Georges Mordreaux, "is Mind Thine Own Business."

  Nigao stared at him. "What?"

  "Improving PRAXCELIS the easy way," said Georges. "it was either PRAXCELIS or SORCELIS, and SORCELIS is too easy for others to reach…" He cocked his head to one side, and grinned. "No matter. You would not understand." He reached for his helmet, on the hook by the airlock, without hesitation. He pulled it back over his head, and locked it. Slowly, with a sensation that Nigao could not have described if his life had depended on it, the figure before him ceased to be Georges Mordreaux, and be… just a man in a pressure suit.

  "Come along," said Georges' voice over the suit radio's outspeaker. "The shuttle that brought me is on a tight schedule. We do not wish people to know that it stopped here."

  Nigao followed Georges into the airlock. His voice was different, somehow, and not just from the suit radio; it had grown… distant.

  Just before they finished cycling, Georges apparently remembered his faceplate; the faceplate polarized black as the door slid aside.

  The two Sunflower agents were waiting in the corridor outside. The corridor was sectioned off as for a meteor puncture, although in this instance it was obviously for security purposes. There was a long pause while Nigao tried to figure out what the agents were discussing. Finally one of the two waiting pressure-suited operatives took Georges by the arm, and escorted him to the north section barrier. They cycled through.

  The remaining figure removed its helmet.

  Midway Commander Celine Murphy, a middle-aged redheaded bitch with the worst temper and the most beautiful blue eyes Nigao could recall having ever encountered in his entire life, who carried the rank of Colonel in Sunflower, stared at Nigao. Questioningly, she said, "Doctor Loos?"

  "Yes?" said Nigao cautiously, waiting for the explosion. "Yes?"

  "You're… different." She seemed about to say something else, but did not.

  Nigao Loos said, "Huh?" He turned, and touched the on switch for the airlock safety mirror. The mirror, which he used regularly to check the exterior telltales on his pressure suit, blinked into existence. God damn it, he thought to himself, and said aloud, "Oh, shit. Not again."

  DATAWEB NEWS, 2003.

  REVOLUTION IN CHINA SUPPRESSED

  Soviet ABMs Undergo Systemic Failure at 72%

  …also present were Henry Ellis, the senior member of the diplomatic corps at the United Nations, and Nigao Loos, the senior technical adviser at Midway… Sen Loos, a remarkably well-preserved sixty-two, was reported to have left with…

  DATELINE 2003 GREGORIAN: MARCH.

  Atop a high and inaccessible mesa in southern Utah there was a small wooden shack. The mesa was perhaps two hundred meters in diameter at its widest. It was shaped like a ragged-edged egg, with the dilapidated shack near the fat lower edge of the egg. There was a modern hushchopper parked in front of the shack.

  The mesa was one of dozens such in the area.

  Jalian d'Arsennette was lying face down on a blanket spread over the mesa-top rock. She was nude. After more than a week in the sharp sun, her skin was exquisitely pale, bleached the color of chalk. There was a glass of water with one rapidly melting cube of ice in it on a small coaster before her face.

  Sitting on a lawn chair before her, with an umbrella protecting him completely from the sun, Michael Walks-Far was wearing blue swimming shorts, a pair of tennis shoes, and holster with a variable laser tucked in it. He was dark brown with exposure, and was sitting beneath the umbrella to avoid possible skin cancer, a worry that Jalian did not have. Silver-Eyes with even slight susceptibility to cancer had died quickly after the Big Crunch; by the time of Jalian's birth, it was a vanishingly rare disease.

  Michael wiped sweat from his eyes with the tee shirt that was hanging over the edge of his lawn chair. "Okay, what next?" He steadied the pointboard on his lap.

  "We need to accelerate the process of placing radardark satellites into high orbit. We do not have enough up yet that're shielded against electromagnetic pulse effects."

  "I've got reports coming in on that this afternoon." Michael tapped into the pointboard. "By four o'clock. I can give you a little more on pulse shielding then. I can tell you now, though, that it's going to be expensive getting them into orbit; the shielding to protect against radiation from nukes is heavy."

  Jalian barely stirred. She did not look up at him. He hardly looked at her; her skin reflected light in a fierce glare. "That's what Midway is there for," she said patiently, "so that we don't have to lift heavy items against the gravity well. Item—" she continued, "check with DataWeb Security about smuggling more portaterms into the USSR. I want Soviet hackers to have an easier time getting access to the web."

  Michael tapped instructions into the pointboard. SORCELIS's voice said, "Accepted."

  Jalian rolled onto her back, eyes closed. Her nipples were the pink of blood near the surface of the skin; her pubic hair was brown, graying. She moved into a sitting position, and took a drink from the glass of warming water. She poured the remains of the glass over her shoulders. "I'll talk to DWS," Michael was saying, "but they're not going to like this. We're already taking the largest percentage of their portaterm production."

  "DataWeb Security," said Jalian, "can eat dead snails."

  "We're going to have to hurry," said Henry Ellis. "I'm supposed to speak at the Artificial Intelligence Symposium in Lyon at three o'clock. If I'm not there, Jalian and WalksFar are going to want to know where I was."

  Georges Mordreaux, sitting in the passenger seat of the bushchopper, said, "Certainly. Tell me, Henry, what does it look like beneath us?"

  "Rugged," said Henry. He glanced down through his side window at the French territory over which they flew. "Hills, mostly, turning into mountains ahead. But it's green, and there are farms everywhere, like a sort of a patchwork over the ground."

  There was a faint smile on Georges Mordreaux's lips. "We're about to cross the Rhone River… we're over it. It's fairly straight where we're crossing, and very blue for a river, at feast from up here. There's a smaller river, I don't know the name of it, off to our right. The Alps are in front of us."

  "Ah…" It was a long, drawn-out sound. Georges Mordreaux said, "I miss it. For all its faults, I miss France." Henry Ellis had no reply.

  "I have not been here in eighty years," said Georges. "I left after the World War, the first one; and before that I had not been there since Napoleon took over the country, that pompous little Corsican." He laughed, and the sound filled the inside of the bushchopper. "What we are flying over now, it is the province of Dauphine in my mind. I think they call it something else these days. And the country itself, it was the Third Republic the last time I was here. What is it now, the seventh or eighth?"

  Henry grinned. "No, I think they're still calling themselves the Fifth Republic, since the German occupation ended."

  "The Germans," said Georges, his smile fading like water into parched ground. "I have no love for Germans. I fought against them once, when they were trying to restore the monarchy."

  Henry looked at him in surprise. "I thought you said you'd been in the first World War, as well? That would be twice."

  Georges turned slightly, and Henry had the oddest feeling that the man was looking at him. Georges turned away. "By the turn of that century, I was almost two hundred years old. I had fought enough. I was in the World War. I did not fight in it."

  Henry asked quizzically, "How could you avoid it? Even with your, what did you call them, Precepts of Semi—"

  "I fired my rifle into the air, and I yelled a lot." Georges shrugged: "Besides… you may have misunderstood me; the two Precepts of Semi-Divi
nity, they are not a joke. Mind Thine Own Business means keep your nose out of the private affairs of others, Henry, it does not mean that you stand by and allow tragedy to occur without intervening if you are able. Similarly, Don't Worry About It does not mean don't do anything about it."

  "Oh." A moment later, Henry said, "I think we've arrived."

  Georges felt the bushchopper dropping. Minutes passed, and he felt a gentle bump; Henry said, "We're down." Georges cracked the hatch on the passenger's side, leaned out slightly, and emitted an ultrasonic tone. Oriented, he got the rest of the way out of the bushchopper, and began walking across the rough earth to the deserted warehouse they had landed near. The scents brought back a swarm of memories, the distinctive smell of the French air in the farming countryside.

  There was already another bushchopper there, parked and waiting.

  "This way," said Henry Ellis. He shifted his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other, nervously. Drawing his poncho more closely about him, he led Georges Mordreaux through the open warehouse gates, into the darkened warehouse. The warehouse smelled faintly of vinegary wine, and strongly of dust and formaldehyde.

  The warehouse was an abandoned wine-storage facility and one of Sunflower's lesser-used resource centers. In the early- to mid-nineties it had been used as a chip distribution point for Sunflower's ongoing Soviet Information Explosion Program; since the Soviets had become aware of the insidious danger of allowing their citizens access to information-processing equipment that could tell them about the West, the warehouse had been effectively shut down, along with half a dozen others like it. SIEP went on, but more subtly; infochips and small inskin datalinks replaced the data terminals and personal computers. And the Soviet populace grew steadily more and more dissatisfied.

  Today the warehouse was a pharmaceuticals laboratory, when it was in use at all, which was rare. It was closed down that Sunday when Georges Mordreaux and Henry Ellis made their way through its darkened interior, between dim, heaping rows of unidentifiable boxes and shelves filled with obsolete instruments and equipment. At a door set into a row of boxlike offices against one wall of the warehouse, Henry Ellis stopped, and put out a hand to hold Georges back.

  -ENCELIS,- he whispered through his inskin datalink, -is it cleared?

  -Affirmative. Satellite observation shows only those parties expected. Room scanners confirm their identities.-

  Henry opened the door, and Georges followed him into the darkness. A voice that Georges did not recognize said, "Lights," in accented English.

  The rows of fluorescent lights in the ceiling flickered on. Three persons were revealed in the sudden illumination: a statuesque woman in middle age, looking at Georges avidly, and two black men. One of the black men was sitting, the only person seated in the room. He was a relatively young man, no more than forty years old, with round features and a complete lack of expression. His skin was extremely dark. The man behind him was truly young, in his late teens or early twenties, lighter skinned, with the thin, spare looks and manner of an ascetic.

  Rhodai Kerreka stood, and inclined his head slowly. "Sen Mordreaux," he said. "if even one fifth of the things I have been told about you are true, then I am most honored to meet you… and more excited than I can possibly say."

  "Oh, wow." Jah Mike Campin, saxophonist for the Armageddon Blues Band, stood in the studio's door, his sax case held loosely in one hand. He blinked. "Jimmy, we gotta talk."

  Jimmy Rambell said, "Welcome to the session, man. Glad you could make it." He struck a chord on his electric guitar, scowled, and made a note on the pad of paper by his side. Try it in an F. At the rear of the studio, Rasputin was putting a beat down on the drums with a soft metal brush; swish, swish, swish; swish, swish, swish.

  The producer's console, on the other side of the huge glass window, was dark, shut down. Jimmy had just fired their last producer, and they hadn't contracted a new one yet.

  Campin sat down on the floor next to the door, abruptly. He looked around the room. Three black men, and Terry, their white piano player: the Armageddon Blues Band. "What are we doing out of bed, Jimmy? We played last night and you partied last night. And I ain't gettin' no younger."

  Jimmy Rambell shrugged. "It's almost eleven, Jah. Rasputin's been here since nine, Terry's been here since nine."

  "Terry don't count," said Campin clearly. "He's white, and all those white people got a terrible fixation on being places on time."

  "I been here since seven."

  "Oh, shit." Campin got laboriously back to his feet, stood swaying in the doorway. "Okay, I'm sorry, it won' happen again." He made it to the plush reclining chair at the mixing boards before crashing again. "It's not all my fault, man. I was at a wake."

  Jimmy Rambell looked up. "No crap?"

  "Nah." Campin shook his head. His hair, bound long with beads at the ends, swung with him. He winced. "Well, not exactly. Me and Randy Jackson got seriously drunk together. You remember his little brother, way back when? You know, the kid, Michael?"

  "Uhm, yeah, vaguely. Got killed, didn't he?"

  Campin popped the latches on his carrying case. "Not exactly. Auto accident, back when. Little bastard's been in a coma ever since, like twenty-five years or something. Like a living vegetable. Anyhow, he died yesterday morning, apparently. Family's almost relieved."

  Jimmy Rambell looked at Campin skeptically, then nodded. "Okay. But you gotta cut down the drinkin', man. It ain't good for you, it ain't good for us."

  Jah Mike Campin grinned at him. "Long as my lips don' forget the notes, you don' worry. Huh?"

  Jimmy Rambell smiled back in spite of himself. "Well, how about trying the piece? Can we do this?"

  "Yo." Campin ran his fingers back and forth in midair. "What is it?"

  " 'Sign of the Wanderer.' "

  "Oh?" Campin shrugged, and picked up his sax. "I hate that song," he muttered, just loud enough to be heard.

  "Biggest problem right now," said Michael, "is the Soviet ABM network. It's growing too fast."

  Jalian did not answer him immediately. Michael was wondering whether she had fallen asleep in the sun. "We want the network to grow," she said finally.

  Michael waved the pointboard in front of his face for the breeze. Sweat was trickling down his chest. "Of course, but we're not ready for the showdown yet. All our current projections show the decision point occurring between mid 2006 and late 2007."

  "2007," said Jalian without inflection. "If our mother Margra's journals spoke truth."

  Michael glanced at her. "Excuse me? Whose journals?" Jalian shook her head silently.

  SORCELIS spoke from the pointboard. "There are an array of options available to this unit. If this unit may submit them for your consideration, they are, first, the accelerated destruction of Soviet ABM satellites. Unit PRAXCELIS is currently programmed to allow a Soviet growth rate, in real numbers, of five point five percent per year. PRAXCELIS is a superior weapons-control system; it can, if necessary, destroy Soviet ABM satellites at a substantially accelerated rate.

  "Second, this unit may submit data to congressional computers such that the rate of construction of Sunflower ABM satellites is likely to be accelerated.

  "Third, this unit may interface with unit ENCELIS to assemble a modified decision-point projection using new parameters based upon an altered Soviet—"

  Jalian interrupted. "Shoot down more Soviet ABMs. Accelerate the deployment of the THOR system. Slow down deployment of the Peacekeeper missiles as long as possible, and input data to the congressional computers indicating that the cost-effectiveness ratio of the ground-to-air nonnuclear interceptor ABM missiles is favorable."

  "Senra," said SORCELIS, "the ratio is favorable."

  "Good," said Jalian. "I hate lying."

  "This is Doctor Emily Demberrie," said Rhodai Kerreka calmly, indicating the woman at his side. The woman smiled widely at Georges, and Henry thought to himself that he would not have liked to have had that smile directed at him. "This"—he i
ndicated the man next to him—"is my half-brother and adviser, Benai." He gestured to the chairs before the scarred, chemical-burned long table that he, Benai, and Doctor Demberrie stood behind. "Please, seat yourselves. Sen Mordreaux, what has Henry told you of me?"

  "Very little," said Georges. Clumsily, without any of the grace that had marked his movements for over two and a half centuries, he pulled a chair back from the table, and sat in it. Henry sat next to him; out of sight beneath his poncho, his hands rested on the butt of a customized .45 magnum with partially autopropelled slugs. He put his hat on the table in front of him.

  Rhodai seated himself, and leaned forward. "Dr. Demberrie is the Sunflower operative in charge of this resource center," he explained to Georges. "She brought me here." He paused, searching Georges' face; the dark sunglasses, the clean, simple features. "I don't, officially, know anything about Sunflower. Unofficially, I know what your Jalian d'Arsennette has chosen to tell me, and what I have guessed from that. I see a group of people dedicated to a world government. I find that admirable; but most of those people are Americans, including all of the Sunflower operatives, bar Jalian herself."

  "I am not an American," said Georges. "And I am interested in two things. Peace, and death."

  Rhodai Kerreka smiled at him. "World peace, and Russian death, my friend? I have heard that…"

  Georges Mordreaux said simply, "World peace, and mine."

  "Deeper than the darkness

  Darker than the night

  We all need to see you

  But the hand plays out of sight."

  "Break." yelled Jimmy Rambell furiously. "God, that sucked," said Terry pleasantly.

  "Mmm-hmm," said Jah Mike Campin. He extracted a pinner joint from his shirt pocket with long, nimble fingers, and snapped a match alight. He pulled a burn a quarter of the way down the joint with one toke, held it, and said in a high-pitched voice, "Maybe we could send down the hall for a drummer who can keep three-four time."