Dean Ing - Quantrill 1

by Systemic Shock(lit)

  "Not today, I 'm afraid," said the woman. "It ain't fit for company. It pains me not to be a good neighbor, but-" She wrung thin hands together, beseeching him to understand without words.

  "Time I was going anyhow," he said, and smiled. He waved to the girl as he put the van in motion. As long as she was visible in the rearview, he could see Sandy waving. He saw that his hands were clenched on the steering wheel, and cursed sickness. And friendship. Sandys jurnal Sep 9 Man.

  Ted came again today, brout me a real tea set for my hope chest. Ive hid it here with my kemlamp in church. Well 1 call it church. The rocks in my cave are like carvd trees, they make it look like the bigest church in the world. You can get here from the hole by swimming. My dady would have a hissyflt if he knew how I found out but he coudnt spank me I wish he coud. Mom and my dady talk a lot. She takes notes and he has to wisper things over sinse her crying drouns him out. Im sorry Im getting this page wet. Im waiting for my dady to get better like he says he will. Mom says you have to beleive God will make my dady well. There must be a airshaftfrom the hole to my church sinse I just heard somthing like like moms voise but it sounded more like a booger. I will stop for now and go see.

  Sandys jurnal Sep. 10 Tus. god is a dam lie.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  The Libyan burrow-bombs may have played hell with the ELF grid, thought Boren Mills, but the concussion had blown him off the Baffin Island listings. Mills and others recovered in a spacious modern hospital in Thunder Bay, just across Lake Superior from the US, and Mills was secretly amused to learn that he now qualified for a foreign service medal. He complained of blurred vision for a week after his eyesight returned to normal, certain that the longer his recuperation, the more likely he would be posted to a reasonable duty station. In his own mind Mills was not malingering. He was studying the war's progress, the better to discover how he might get himself posted to some spot where he would be most effective. Boren Mills had been victimized by an explosion, and knew that he would never be effective in battle.

  Thanks to attrition in the Navy, Mills became a full lieutenant upon his return to active duty. His foreign service and purple heart ribbons lent dash to his uniform. A new sparkle invaded his eyes the day they spied a classified bulletin on Israel's new gift to the US.

  The Ghost Armada, as it was dubbed, had brought Israelis safely to Cyprus by fooling every extant electronic device. Though chafing at the delay, America was glad to have the new system which could throw false blips on enemy acquisition radar while it kept genuine bogies off the scopes. Mills indulged in a brief brainstorm, concluding that Israel's weapon was nothing like the old Stealth program which had been leaked by the US for political purposes a generation before. The Ghost Armada would have to focus on the sensors, not on the target to be sensed. Its application for US purposes would require the best possible protection. Anybody remotely connected with the program would be nonexpendable, pampered, defended.

  Lieutenant Boren Mills spent two days on his letter, updating and modifying his own assessment of his special talents. The self-assessment always formed part of the core of a computer's file on anyone. If he was not identified by a records search as a man ideally suited to help develop a remote-coding microwave system, Boren Mills would be sadly mistaken.

  Boren Mills made fewer mistakes than most.

  SPL order 251, 23 SEP 96 E X T R A C T

  PARA 16. FOL NAM NAV OFCR is REL from ASG W/PREV duty STN EFF this date and W/REP for PPTY ASG to Kikepa STN, Nhau NAV FAC ASAP by MIL TRANS Priority A RPT A to ARR NLT 1 OCT 96 Kikepa STN, Nhau.

  Permanent party posting to Kikepa Point was not quite what Mills had in mind. He considered a relapse, researched the island of Nhau, then concluded that he would be as secure there as anywhere. Certainly a posting to a naval research facility on a privately-owned island in the Hawaiian chain was better than Baffin Island. If you were going to live one step from the end of the world, it might as well be the warm tropical end.

  Mills could have been on a military transport the next day, but wisely spent his next four days in a transient BOQ cramming his head and his personal floppy cassettes with everything he could learn on remote electronic query and input modules. He was a very quick study; by the time he landed on Oahu for the Nhau hovercraft, Lieutenant Boren Mills would bear some surface similarity to the experience profile he had claimed to the Navy's central computer.

  His only worry was the seclusion of Nhau. There would be no large population there, no finishing schools or sophisticated high schools with their breathtaking arrays of pre-collegiate beauties. Mills's sexual preferences were kinky only in the narrowness of the age group he preferred, i.e., early post-Lolita. Physical ripening, that first delectable flowering of maturity, fascinated Mills; captured his lusts. He did not maltreat or embitter the girls he knew; preferred, in fact, a sixteen-year-old who already knew her way around. There had been plenty of those in the cities, Mills reflected; but it might be different at Kikepa Point.

  He would cope somehow. As he packed, Mills was smiling on the inside. His posting to the Naval R & D facility suggested that he was already on the way to success. In a trivial way, he had already proven that he could remotely stuff an electronic system with balderdash.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Just when the optimists were clearing their throats to gloat over the 'modest' levels of global fallout, the second paroxysm of nukes came in October. The first group emerged from the sand seas of eastern Libya to take out Schwyz (an error; it was meant for Zurich), Lucerne, Berne, Lausanne, Zurich (if at first you don't succeed.), and in a shocker, Rome. It amounted to a simple refusal by Libya to take any more guff from the UN, from which she had withdrawn. Libya did not know whether she was united with Syria at the moment, or not. Syria said not. Libya's ruling junta, more willing than their venerated Khaddafi to follow bombast with bombs, unilaterally chose to break through the stalemate with Israel. Other countries of the AIR might permit the UN to mediate the newly vexed Jewish Question, but not Libya. To her junta it seemed clear that Christians and Jews had turned the UN into one enormous Swiss-based conspiracy. Ergo, Switzerland delenda est.

  Libya did not target Cyprus or Israel itself, convinced that the Jewish Ghost Armada would somehow deflect her medium-range missiles harmlessly. Libya did not have enough Indian nukes to waste a single one.

  Within a day, Libya's Mediterranean coast was a beach of radioactive glass, her junta atomized, her southern borders invaded by neighboring Chad, her existence as a political entity erased by a rain of missiles from a still-functioning Europe.

  Strategists on all sides blanched, then, when missiles streaked up from a site near Ras Lanuf on the Libyan coast two days later. No one had suspected that Libya had a nuclear second-strike capability, let alone a delivery system that could reach the port cities of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba.

  It seemed to Latin-American Marxists almost as if a maddened Libya, in her death throes, had responded on behalf of the US in retaliation for the Florida invasion. But the US submarine-based Trident missiles threw many smaller warheads, and did not throw them so far. Sinolnd leaders insisted that the Libyan second-strike had really been a Yanqui stroke, but no one could prove it. No one except the crew of the USS Kamehameha, whose Mediterranean armament included eight Tridents of extended range with warheads that did not fit the known Trident signatures. The Tridents had emerged from very near Libyan soil. Flummoxed by American use of Israel's new weapon, every electronic watcher pinpointed the launch site fifteen klicks inland. Latin American governments took the body blows as a probable hint by an injured colossus that no further unfriendly acts would be tolerated. If any fresh Sinolnd troops entered Florida, they'd better not speak Spanish.

  As if to prove they were as capable as anyone of further contaminating the globe, Chinese subs launched waves of nukes against RUS industrial centers in Western Siberia, and US centers in Colorado and Wyoming. In both cases, fossil fuels were the targets. The RUS
machine still depended on petroleum, though America had made headway in converting western shale and coal into fuel. Too many of the warheads got through, and some were ground-pounders.

  The immediate US/RUS answer was nuclear, chiefly from subs that pounded Sinolnd oil reserves in Rajasthan and Sinkiang. As if in afterthought, a flurry of RUS warheads detonated underwater in Japan's inland sea north of Kyushu, where shoreline debris eventually proved that Chinese submersibles had been hiding there. Japan's leaders could hardly have been ignorant of the Chinese presence, as Japanese media were quick to allege. The Japanese dead numbered only in thousands, chiefly from inundations by great waves. But the inland sea was squarely between Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and Japan was virtually one great urban clot. Thereafter, Japan took her neutrality seriously.

  The delayed US/RUS response began quietly in places like Vorkuta, San Marcos, Izhevsk, Klamath Falls: basic training sites. Green US troops began their passage through Ontario to Hudson Bay. Canada had developed her submersible cargo fleet to carry ore and petroleum under pack ice through a wintry Northwest Passage, but with round-the-clock refitting the sluggish vessels soon carried troops past Peary Land and Spitzbergen to Archangelsk. It was hoped that lurking Sinolnd attack vessels could be decoyed by surface applications of the Ghost Armada. Meanwhile, so many US/RUS all-weather stealth aircraft were spanning the Bering Strait that visual-contact air engagements with Sinolnd swing-wings were becoming the rule there.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  It had been over a month since Cathy Palma had ridden with Quantrill to the Grange cave. They'd found the entrance dynamited, the survivors gone without trace. The single wooden cross that stood in the rubble had been carefully carved:

  Wayland F. Grange 1955-

  For a time, Quantrill hoped Louise and Sandy Grange would turn up in Sonora, or among the thousands in the relocation center. Then in early October, Grange's Blazer was found abandoned and stripped, evidently by one of the religious zealot groups that seemed to be flowering as suddenly as desert plants. Quantrill accepted the news without comment.

  Soon afterward came the flurry of second strikes that sent survivors back underground for weeks. Quantrill read more and watched the holo. And avoided emotional ties more than ever, though Palma had urged him to enroll in the relocation center school, hoping that he would respond to others his own age.

  "Look," he said once to the exasperated Palma; "my strategy is to learn from the library terminal. Geometry, inorganic chem, military history. It's all I have time for, and you said yourself I shouldn't go outside again for another week."

  "You think we can't run an immunology program without you, Ted? Don't flatter yourself." She saw the dull anger in his face. "You've done a lot; nobody denies that. But just between us, they're already in Phase Three in the labs. We're licking the bug! Believe me, Aggie Station can spare one cargo handler. And I can spare you if it means finishing your education." She did not add, and rejoining your peers.

  "Between you and the holo, I'm getting what I want," he said stonily, and changed the subject. "For one thing, I'd like you to help me cut through all the crap I'm getting on the news about local guerrilla gangs. They sound like crazies to me, but you don't see anybody on the news really saying that. I need somebody to brief me, not bullshit me."

  Palma did not like his increasing use of military terms: strategy, briefing, guerrilla came easily to him these days. "Now's as good a time as any," she sighed.

  He took his time phrasing the question, a legacy from taking courses via library holo terminals. "Are they Mormons?"

  "No!" Her knee-jerk response surprised Palma herself. She chuckled, peered guiltily at Quantrill, then back to her work. "Well, actually some of them think they are. I could make the same claim, Ted. I was raised LDS, but after my husband began trying to be a closet polygamist I backslid to a jack-Mormon, and then-" Shrug. "No, you can't be a Mormon and deny the tenets of the Apostles. Or the revelations of the modern Prophets. But a lot of people have their own revelations, and these days a lot of those are nightmarish. That can be a strong divisive force if it happens to a particularly devout man."

  "Or woman."

  "All males may become priests, even blacks," she said. She added with a trace of bitterness, "Females can never attain priesthood. Honor, veneration, service, yes; priest hood, no. You wouldn't believe the underclothes a Mormon woman's supposed to have, and I won't burden you with that. If a woman complains too much, she's put on a sort of probation-'disfellowship', they call it. Nice, hm? Or they just excommunicate you. I didn't wait for that final rejection."

  "Maybe I shouldn't be asking you-"

  "Ask away, whatthehell," she said as if sealing some internal bargain.

  "Why do they raid other people? I thought Mormons had food and stuff all socked away."

  She silenced the labeler, fixed him with a firm gaze. "They do. I repeat, these guerrillas aren't true Mormons. Of course they take terrible chances driving like maniacs through fallout, and some of them will be sorry. Some of them are just banditti, out for loot, but some honestly think they're bringing the gospel. The cars they steal, the churches they burn, are all part of their saintly splinter-group zeal to stamp out heretics. And there are in-betweeners who aren't above collecting some riches on the way to Heaven. Reminds me a little of the devout conquistadors of the Sixteenth Century."

  As the labeler began ticking away again, Quantrill put some other labels-political labels from newscasts-together. "Let me guess; a heretic is anybody who doesn't wear a Collier button."

  "'Pull through with Collier'," she quoted the campaign slogan. "Collier's a good man, for my money; he publicly disavows the cults, but they may intimidate a lot of people from the polls. You can't expect police to control them all. I'm inclined to think Governor Street is fighting an uphill battle, even here in his own home state."

  The ex-Governor of Texas was also an ex-Major General, whose current position as Undersecretary of State bolstered his.claim as potential commander-in-chief of a besieged country. But fairly or not, James Street was saddled and hagridden by blame for a war which had come while his party was in power.

  "At least all the networks seem to like Street," Quantrill said.

  "Of course they do; they don't like censorship, and an LDS Apostle in White House Central will lean in that direction."

  "Who needs holovision? Seems to me if you read the Book of Mormon, you know what's gonna happen anyway." She smiled at what she imagined was a joke. He read her expression, then pulled a thin faxed pamphlet no bigger than a wallet card from his pocket. She glanced at its cover. "Urn. The Church of God In Revealed Context, eh? Yes, they're one of the biggest splinters in the backside of the LDS. Not as violent as some."

  "Just tell me if that's really from the Book of Mormon, Palma. The centerfold. Read it," he urged.

  Wherefore it is an abridgement of the record of the people of Nephi: 1 Nephi, 17.

  He raiseth up a righteous nation, and destroyeth the nations of the wicked. And he did straiten them in the wilderness with his rod; for they hardened their hearts, even as ye have; and the Lord straitened them because of their iniquity. He sent fiery flying serpents among them; the day must surely come that they must be destroyed, save a few only, who shall be led away into captivity. Ye have seen an angel, and he spake unto you; yea, ye have heard his voice from time to time; and he hath spoken unto you in a still small voice, but ye were past feeling, that ye could not feel his words; wherefore, he has spoken unto you like unto the voice of thunder, which did cause the earth to shake as if it were to divide asunder. For God had commanded me that I should build a ship. "It's disjunct, as I recall," said Palma. "Junk, hell. Destroying nations with fiery flying serpents is a pretty close description, I'd say. The only thing that doesn't follow is that explanation where they tell you the ship is a ship of state. No kidding, Palma; is it, or isn't it,-"

  "DISJUNCT," she said loudly to silence him, "means separated; disjointed. I don't re
member the whole Book of Nephi, but I do know the special wackiness of the Church of God In Revealed Context. They do numerology mumbo-jumbo, like numbering phrases and reading off those that are prime numbers, or something equally arbitrary. And sometimes they come up with passages that fit when they were never intended to. This particular cult doesn't invent any new text-I think. They just combine pieces of what's already there-usually in order, but that piece about building a ship might be pages away."

  He mulled this over. "I guess it'd be easy to check."

  "Yes, but few gentiles do-and Revealed Contexters play strictly by their own rules, so even if their compressed text doesn't match the original, they can claim it's all in the original. They just pull special messages out by numerical revelation." Their steadfastness in their beliefs, she added, made them take great risks at times; and made them in some ways dangerous.

  Again, Quantrill was silent for a time. Then, "You think these religious nuts would hurt a little kid?"

  She thought of the Church of the Blood of the Lamb, a full generation before; of true believers who would shotgun their kin in a quarrel over dogma. "No, Ted; certainly not a little girl who won't cast a vote for years to come." She met his glance and his smile, and wondered if she were right. There seemed little doubt that somehow, the Granges had met with one of the zealot gangs.