Strange New Worlds IX

by Dean Wesley Smith

  He changed tunnels at Lexington Avenue, working his way south to Grand Central. The upper levels of Grand Central were blocked by fallen debris, but the access stairs to the deeper levels were clear. That was fine with him. He descended to the deepest levels, and the century-old military vault beneath what had once been the Graybar Building. During a blackout in the seventies, these levels had flooded, but the precautions taken then to avoid similar subsequent flooding had apparently worked.

  The doorway he wanted was intact and not blocked. He cleared the dust from a lock pad. The pulse shielding down here had worked, and the steel door opened. The light from inside hurt his eyes for a moment as he stepped out of darkness and into his “workshop.” It was a large, carpeted room, decorated in dark woods and comfortable furniture, walls lined with leather-bound books, weapons, paintings, and knickknacks from the history of human civilization.

  “Rayna,” he called out.

  The computer was still active. “Hello, Lewis, you have several messages…Are you all right?” a woman’s voice came from the computer panel which rotated out from a hidden recess. The AI was a violation of the Cumberland Acts, but laws of mortals didn’t concern him. Many of Rayna’s components had been harvested from an apartment on East Sixty-eighth Street that had once belonged to an alien sent to Earth to protect humanity in the late twentieth century. It had taken months to fix the voice systems and years to reprogram the system.

  “I was afraid that you had been killed,” she said.

  He smiled bitterly. “Lewis Bixby is dead, certainly. Who’s next in the queue?”

  “I suppose the next best candidate is Jerome Drexel.” Rayna maintained a stock of artificial identities, keeping their records and paperwork up to date until they were needed. “We’ll lose a lot of capital in such a rapid transition…”

  “I expect we’ll lose a lot of capital regardless. Drexel should be fine.” He went into the living area and started some coffee. While that was brewing, he showered and changed clothes. After a half hour, carrying a mug of coffee, a pad of paper, and a pen, he eased himself into a stuffed leather Queen Anne chair in front of the computer console.

  “Very well, then. List messages…” There were several messages from his wife’s relatives and others from family friends worried about whether or not anyone had survived the blast. He deleted those, perfunctorily negating the past twelve years of Lewis Bixby’s life.

  “Tell me, Rayna, what has happened?”

  “It’s impossible to be accurate, as the Interface Netlinks are only operating sporadically.” The monitor flicked onto different newscasts, most broadcasting under the roughest conditions. “I’ve had to route through some of the deep military nodes just to get out of the city and into the main backbone. I’ve only been able to route to the satellite links in the past few hours. My eye-in-the-sky network is active but contact with it is…fuzzy at present. I expect it to clear up in a few days as the EM chaos overhead fades.”

  He waited for her to continue.

  “However, what I have been able to determine is that three days ago, 1 May 2053, at 0230.26, local time, there was a first strike with simultaneous Interface viral assault in coordination with nuclear detonations in several western New United Nations cities…”

  “What cities?”

  “New York City, Chicago, Dallas, Toronto, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, London, Berlin, Moscow, and Tel Aviv. Undetonated or otherwise failed explosive devices have been located in Washington, D.C., Denver, Paris, Madrid, Rome, and Istanbul. The military is working under the assumption that the first strike was made by E-Con.”

  “Not surprising, considering the posturing both sides have been making for the past few months over the Taklamakan and Antarctic oil fields.” The Eastern Coalition of Nations was predominantly comprised of nations first united under the Grand Khanate of Noonien Singh. Even after his disappearance, they had continued to work together against the western powers. “Missiles?”

  “Unlikely. Probably handheld devices or small aircraft on suicide runs: hence the relatively low-yield explosions. The Alliance nations made an immediate retaliatory launch of missiles, bombers, and satellite-based weapons. Conventional forces were already moving into position for invasion. The First, Eighth, and Sixteenth NUN fleets were already carrying troops into the Bay of Bengal. Current intelligence indicates multiple-megaton detonations over Samarkand, Riyadh, Islamabad, New Delhi, and Singapore; smaller partial detonations over Hong Kong, Beijing, and Ho Chi Minh City. There were failed missile detonations over nearly seventy Asian cities.”

  He sat watching the screen, clicking a pen absently as he read reports and watched the few available reporters’ panicked blathering. Commentary suggested that E-Con hadn’t really anticipated any sort of response. President Mendoza was expected to speak to the nation soon. There were clips of her spouting the stock jingoistic presidential nonsense “We will punish these evil monsters,” “The forces of freedom will prevail,” and so on.

  “Casualties?” he asked the computer.

  “Best estimates suggest a death toll in the initial exchange ranging from fifty to one hundred million people.”

  “Not more? That’s surprising.” He thought for a few moments. “Access post-Holocaust protocols. What are the most realistic outcomes?”

  “It’s too early to tell. Military sources suggest the EM pulses and viruses have rendered the delivery systems unreliable. Of the hundreds of missiles and bombers the NUN launched, only one in five made it into the air. Of those, only a fraction detonated properly.”

  “What are the probable secondary casualties?”

  “If all goes well, they could be as low as half a billion, but it is far more likely that there will be only half a billion left in six months due to infrastructure and ecological collapse. The nuclear fireballshave critically damaged the ozone layer. The firestorms have generated dust and smoke plumes from the cities, which are carrying tons of radioactive debris and a large volume of toxic gases released by the firestorms…” Rayna began reeling off horror after horror, each a nail in humanity’s coffin.

  He sat quietly for a long time, considering. A die-off as dramatic as ninety-six percent of the human race would be hard, but not unexpected. And it might be best for the species in the long run. Then he thought of the storekeeper in Brooklyn and “StillHere.” Could he stand back and ignore that sort of tenacity? No, the worse the die-off, the harder the recovery. The insanity was going to be bad enough no matter what could be managed.

  “I suppose we’ll have to do something. Work on opening communications channels. Then take a look in the directories ‘Wintergreen’ and ‘Parmen.’ We may have to go public about the weather-control technology, but we have to minimize the ozone damage as soon as possible and keep the skies clear. If we can wash the skies somewhat, that might reduce the fallout. Also, I will need to talk to anyone currently still alive and listed in the following files: Bilderberger, Cabal, Golden Dawn, Grandmasters, and Phoenix. Tell them to expect a call from Al-Akharin.” The Last.

  The man called Jerome Drexel sat in the dark room, his hands bound to the metal frame chair by strips of plastic quicktape. The chair was bolted to the hex-tiled floor. The only light came from some semi-opaque windows along the ceiling, above the row of sinks along one wall. He’d been beaten repeatedly, and there were burns on his shoulders and chest. Water drizzled from an exposed ceiling pipe. Any other fixtures had been removed—recently, by the glint of shiny metal along the pipe fittings. The room barely resembled anything that might be expected at Montana State University, and smelled like an abattoir, a moldy abattoir, even with the chilly breeze of the air handler.

  He knew he was being watched. He knew he should feel at least nervous, but after millennia, torture just wasn’t as threatening as it once was. Much of what made torture effective was fear: of death, and of pain. He’d long since ceased to fear death, and he knew just what pain could and couldn’t do to him and was far more concerned abo
ut things that had nothing to do with being strapped to a chair in some postapocalyptic idea of a torture chamber.

  It had been hard to maintain contact across the entire country, much less the entire planet, with only intermittent communications. Thinking back over the past three years, he wondered if he shouldn’t have done more to fix that. As it was, activating the weather satellites had been a far more public action than he preferred. Even with his best efforts, most regions had still been reduced to local reliance on limited resources for food and water. Without federal resources to fall back on, most local governments had been hard-pressed to keep order, much less grow and protect enough food to feed their own; but after some initial struggles, people had been generally willing to work together and help when they could. Busy days had passed, filled with hard physical work; and, for Drexel, the harder task of trying to get influential people to work toward the same goals while the world gently teetered above the Abyss. Thankfully there had been other people here to help him, and Rayna.

  Speaking of which…He clicked his tongue.

  “I’m here,” Rayna said through the transceiver. “The transmitter’s fine. Placing it inside an inert bone plug in the skull seems to have slowed your body’s rejection process.”

  Footsteps and a scraping noise behind him caught his attention. He looked up to see a man in red overalls pulling a chair around him and sitting down about three feet away. He was a little shy of six feet tall, about 1.8 meters, with dark brown/black curly hair, dark eyes, and a vaguely hard set to his mouth, although otherwise his expression seemed rather friendly. His overalls had unit flashes on the shoulders, a radiation counter and a communication transmitter on his left shoulder, and truly kitschy braid around the collar. An outfit designed to be worn beneath an outer garment, such as the ballistic battle dress that Drexel suspected the soldiers standing behind him were wearing.

  The two men looked at each other in silence. Finally the soldier spoke. “Your UHD card says that you’re Jerome Drexel and before the war you were quite the industrialist.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “Except as we both know, Mister Drexel, that’s not the truth.” The soldier grinned.

  “It isn’t?”

  “No.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Yes, if I say so.” The soldier paused. “You do know who I am, right?”

  Drexel considered for a moment denying it, but decided against it. He locked his eyes onto the other man’s and stared as he spoke. “Aaron Jenkins, also known as ‘Colonel Green,’ in much the same way that Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili called himself ‘Stalin.’”

  “So you have heard of me? Excellent.”

  “I’ve even read your books. Optimal Purity and the Human Animal, and Emerald Watch on the Twilight Line, were pure nihilistic twaddle, blending the worst of Nietzsche and Rand, with a solid dose of White Supremacy in the mix. I have to admit, though—you have a way with words. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that in centuries to come, Necessary Sacrifice is still a classic philosophy text among those looking for a rationalization for mass slaughter.”

  “I believe you have completely misunderstood me.” Green tried to look open and innocent.

  “I don’t think so.” Drexel sounded bored.

  The truly superior human doesn’t need to flaunt it, tell people about it, or write about it seeking validation.

  “It was reported that your Brigade was cut off in Kashmiristan a few weeks into the war,” Drexel continued.

  “Those bastards at Central Command abandoned us there.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps they didn’t have a way to get you all home again. Be that as it may, like the White Company after the Hundred Years War, you were cut adrift, far from home, and you did what any self-respecting condotierre would do. You abandoned your post.”

  Green looked at him quizzically. “There are still a lot of our troops back there. I understand that most of them have hired on with the local warlords as mercenaries.”

  Drexel ignored him. “A year later, you surprised everyone by appearing in Alaska at the head of an army comprised of both NUN and former Coalition soldiers. The president ordered you to stand down. You declined.”

  “Mendoza isn’t president of anything. The NUN is gone, the United States is little more than a burnt-out husk with no authority. Hell, you’ve seen it out there. There are a few enclaves of order surrounded by barbarism. If you don’t starve, the marauding hordes will get you. The dark ages are back.”

  Drexel continued as if the other man hadn’t spoken. “You unrolled your red eagle banner, burning and slaughtering your way across the Pacific Northwest to bring order?”

  “I do what I have to.”

  “I daresay. Over the past two years you’ve been conquering and consolidating your way across the country, slaughtering the ‘unpure’—those you deemed too diseased, too mutated, who weren’t your shade of white, or those people who just happened to disagree with you. Your speech outside the Seattle Arena before your soldiers slaughtered thousands of civilians was memorable: ‘This is not the time for timidity and second-guessing—we can not afford to doubt ourselves.’ As I said, a way with words. Several months ago you crossed the Rockies into Montana, and by all accounts have been cheerfully continuing your culling here.”

  Green stared back at him. “You just aren’t afraid of me, are you?”

  “I have no real reason to be.”

  Green smiled broadly. “We’ll have to see about that. You see, I know about you too, Mister Drexel. In fact, I’ve wanted to meet you for some time.”

  “And why would that be?”

  “I’ve been hearing about your own efforts at bringing order to this once great nation. You invented the weather control technology, didn’t you? You didn’t really think that I would stop in to visit just anyone we catch violating our borders, did you? I think we have a lot we can do for one another.”

  “Honestly, I was expecting to see that pimple-faced posturer of a subaltern who’s been trying to question me.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant Paxton, he’s still a little…” Green hesitated.

  “Green?”

  “I was going to say inexperienced. So tell me, what were you doing? Driving a car across the countryside in the middle of the night? A car with a box of biotech papers and equipment in the trunk. I can’t imagine that someone like you is the sort to partake in mundane espionage.”

  “We’d sent in several convoys of medical supplies, food, and materiel that had gone missing recently. I felt that needed to be followed up, trying to find out why; and we’re stretched a little thin right now.”

  “We being who?”

  “We being a loose alliance of like-minded organizations trying to help people recover from the Late Unpleasantness,” Drexel answered.

  “I’ll accept that for now. So what were the papers and equipment for?” Green continued the interrogation.

  Drexel was surprised at the question. “Papers and equipment?”

  “Yes, the papers and equipment in the trunk relating to bioweapons research.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. The car’s previous owner had died. I think he was some sort of university wonk. I never even looked in the trunk.”

  “You know, I could almost believe you. Academics are a tricky, worthless lot of rabble. Almost as useless as those silly lawyers whining about rights. You know, the universities all shut down with the war, except that these damned academics and their minions just keep on finding worthless things to ‘research’ and waste time and resources on.”

  Drexel sighed sympathetically. “I can’t say that I mind the lack of academic pretentiousness and politics slowing things down.”

  “Tell you what, though. I have a cure for that. Honest labor.”

  “Such as?”

  “When we came driving up, the educated dummies here tried to negotiate. At least it made them easy to round up. We shipped all of them off to work at the coal mines
in the mountains.” Green laughed.

  “All of them?” That was just what Drexel wanted to hear. He relayed the code he knew Rayna was waiting for. “God in Heaven, that must have been a sight to see.”

  “It was. More trouble than they are worth.”

  “How much trouble is the secret missile complex off in the foothills worth?”

  Green froze, then laughed. “You’re very good, sir. Yes, I have those missiles. It wasn’t hard to repair the circuitry.”

  “Giving you what, fifty, two-hundred-megaton fusion weapons? Each with a heavy booster capable of reaching the antipodes.”

  “Beautiful, isn’t it? I always wanted to be my own superpower.”

  “It would be quite lovely, except for two crucial things,” Drexel commented.

  “And what would those be?”

  Outside the building there was a distant rumbling of thunder, growing louder.

  “The first is that I have other plans for those missiles…”

  The thunder roll had deepened, and then vanished into a thunderclap loud enough to vibrate the floor. Green looked around, startled. Drexel flexed his arms and snapped his bonds.

  “The second thing is that you’ve just had a horrible accident in your bioweapons lab, and you and every human within a mile radius are now either dying or soon will be from a particularly virulent mutated version of weapons-grade Ebola. The stuff smells horrible.” Drexel wrinkled his nose at the odor coming through the air conditioner.

  “What are you talking about? I don’t have a bioweapons lab. Bioweapons are too dangerous; they can backfire on you too easily.”

  “Which is why I had to have the virus dropped from orbit.” Drexel smiled. “Rest assured, though, that when your people arrive to investigate, they’ll find out what you’ve been up to…all the evidence you’ve left.”

  Green looked at him, horrified, and started coughing.

  “You wanted to know why I’m here? I’m here to make sure that you go down as one of the biggest monsters in history. That you were preparing to use an uncontrollable disease on your enemies.”