by Crucible
One of them was Jake who, since his last stroke, was now apparently installed permanently in her apartment with a strong male nurse. At least it might be permanently; Alex wasn’t home much Siddalee had grudgingly supplemented the cot in Alex’s office wit a shower. Tonight, however, Jake’s nurse had moved into Jake’s bedroom, and Alex had slept at her “evacuation drill home point.”
As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw that Jake sat at the table in his wheelchair. The snores of the deep-sleeping young came through the bedroom doorway.
“Have some tea, Alex.”
She poured herself a cup, first using her sleeve to wipe the cup clean of yesterday’s dregs. “Why are you awake already?”
“Why are you? Actually, it might give you time to comb your hair for once.”
Even at his age, Jake appreciated female beauty. Alex, who seldom thought about her appearance, grinned at him. She sometimes wondered what women had decorated his younger life, but never asked. “Ready for the drill, Jake?”
“Yes.” His eyes gleamed; Julian had planned well. “I just wish I weren’t in the evac group with that idiot Duncan Martin.”
“Is he an idiot?” Alex said. She hadn’t been able to attend any of Duncan’s theater pieces—too busy with the stepped-up defenses. But most people raved about Duncan as both performer and impressario, a term Alex had never heard of before he arrived.
“He’s a wonderful actor,” Jake said grudgingly. “His Prospero was first-rate. And he’s found acting talent among young people and got them doing amazing things, not to mention working like beavers.”
“What’s a’beaver’?”
“It’s a … never mind, it’s not important. I called him an idiot because he won’t stop doing just what I did, and of course none of us can tolerate our own faults in anybody else. Duncan refers constantly to Earth. Only he berates us all for ’criminal neglect of our artistic past.’ He doesn’t seem to understand that we’ve been busy surviving.”
“So make him understand.” She sipped the hot tea gratefully.
“You cannot argue with dogmatism.”
“Sure you can. Look at Julian, arguing with Lau-Wah.”
Jake blinked at her from his old eyes. “You know, that’s the first time I’ve heard you make a joke about that situation.”
Alex scowled over the rim of her cup. She didn’t know why she’d joked like that; it wasn’t funny. Since the council meeting in which Julian had laid out his defense plans, Lau-Wah and Julian had continued to be quietly, courteously, lethally at each other’s throats. And Alex, as tray-o, was caught in the middle.
“To have the city act together to survive,” Lau-Wah had said to her, “it must, by definition, act together. We are not doing that. It should be our first priority.”
“All men act in self-interest,” Julian had said to her, “and that’s good. Selfinterest, as opposed to fanatic idealism, leaves room for compromise. Governor Mah is trying to advance the prosperity of his Chinese constituency. But he will have to compromise that temporarily for the good of Greentrees as a whole.”
Was Lau-Wah putting the good of his Chinese over the good of Mira? The question troubled Alex. But as the weeks wore on, and Lau-Wah and Julian argued over everything—mining priorities, weapons construction, emergency taxes for defense costs, degree of permissible disruption of Mira’s infrastructure—she found herself siding more and more with Julian. Ashraf Shanti, pliable and nervous, had also been swayed by Julian’s calm logic and ferocious intelligence. But Lau-Wah had grown increasingly remote, politely curt in a way that made Alex uncomfortable. Politics on Greentrees had been more open before now.
They had not prepared for war before now.
No, that wasn’t true. Jake told her that thirty-nine years before, Mira had prepared lavishly for a war that hadn’t happened. Alex didn’t remember much about that; she’d been a small child. But those who did remember tended to side with Lau-Wah, except for Jake himself.
He was still grumbling about Duncan. “The trouble with actors is that they can’t stop acting once they step off the stage. That man is nothing but layers of roles he’s played, tattered into intermingled ribbons. One minute he’s Falstaff, then Faust, then Don Quixote, then Jerome O’Dell…”
The names meant nothing to Alex.
“… and if I have to hear one more time about the ’pleasant primitive naivete of colonies’ I’m going to… oh God, here he comes.”
Alex leaned forward and wiped a thread of drool off Jake’s face. Duncan passed the window and opened the unlocked door without knocking. “Are we ready?” he asked in that thrilling voice whose musical doubleness, harmonizing with itself, was indeed genemod. Julian had told Alex so. ” ’Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war.’ ”
“Not war quite yet,” Jake said dryly. Next to Duncan’s robust health, Jake looked even older and more tired. The last tiny stroke had partially paralyzed one side of Jake’s face, increasing the drooling, although the stroke did not seem to have affected his thinking much or slowed down his speech. Tenderness swelled Alex’s heart. The old man was very dear to her.
“Oh, but we must have war or Julian will be so disappointed,” Duncan said blithely. “Now don’t look shocked, Alex, you know it’s true. He is a soldier, and why do men soldier except to war?”
“Julian doesn’t want war,” Jake snapped. “None of us do. Don’t talk obscenities, Martin.”
“As you say. Do I have time for a cup of tea before the festivities begin? What, no clean glasses? My dear, you are a deplorable housekeeper.”
“She’s not a housekeeper, she’s a leader of a city-state!”
Alex stepped into the bickering. “Duncan, did you ever hold a position in Julian’s command on Earth? Besides acting, I mean?”
“Of course not,” Duncan said. “My brother is far too astute to let me control anything. Most artists barely control themselves. I see that there is no hope of hot tea, after all… ah, there’s the siren!”
Alex hadn’t expected it to be so loud. The sound tore through the air, and for a moment the horror of her nightmare rushed over her. She pushed it back, and shouted, “Jake, Duncan, you know what to do … see you later!”
“ ’No one dast blame this man,’” Duncan said, which made no sense but Alex had no time to question him. She ran out the door toward the transport inflatable.
All four rovers were gone.
It actually took her a moment to remember. Julian had devised evacuation plans, contingency plans, backups for the contingencies. He’d worked day and night—literally, sleeping only for his own necessary hour in each twenty-four—to create the plans and broadcast them on MiraNet. Then he’d sent volunteers door-to-door to make sure everyone understood exactly what to do and where to go. He’d taken into account the elderly Arab women who would not leave the medina with men unrelated to them, the scientists and engineers who might be away from the city, the old and the infants and the sick and the recalcitrant. He tried to think of everything. The rovers were missing because in a worst-case scenario they might all be out in the bush.
“I forgot my tram number!” a young girl cried, running up to Alex. The girl shivered in a thin nightdress. Her eyes looked huge with fear, or possibly excitement. “Is it a real attack?”
“Act as if it is! Where are your parents?”
“I was sleeping at my friend Aleya’s and when the siren came I ran home but my family already left and—”
“Children are supposed to stay with the family they’re with when the alarm sounds! And where’s your emergency pac?”
“I forgot it. Oh, Ms. Cutler, is it a real attack?” And this time there was no doubting her expression: the child was thrilled.
“Go back to your friend’s family,” Alex snapped, “and leave with them. Now!”
“What if they already left, too?”
“Oh, for … come with me!” This was not going as planned.
“I’ll… look! There’s Aimee’s father!” She ran o
ff.
Glad to be rid of her, Alex ran toward the tram tracks. Getting fifteen thousand people out of a city and as far away as possible, in groups as small as possible, had required construction and ingenuity. Tracks had been built leading thirty miles out in five different directions. Basic flatbed trams ferried groups of people to the end points, from which each group had a designated destination based on how far and how fast they could travel. Some ended up in the ubiquitous caves to the north of the city, across the river. Some traveled to remote valleys. Some robust groups had no end point at all; after a real attack, they would travel across the continent, if necessary. Barges on the river served the same purposes as the trams.
“They won’t all escape,” Julian had said somberly, “and some who do will be caught later. But this at least gives us a chance to keep humanity alive on Greentrees. And to fight back.”
Alex caught the next tram, climbing up front with the driver. She was a priority red, able to take whatever transportation she needed. A potential fighter rather than a potential hider. At the moment, adrenaline pumping, she was glad.
This tram was full of people who had mostly remembered their evac pacs and who huddled quietly together in the predawn dark. Mostly Anglos, some Chinese. A few people recognized Alex and nodded. No one asked her if the attack was real, and no one looked either outraged or terrified. Maybe this would work, after all.
“You don’t need a full-scale drill,” Lau-Wah had argued. “You can test the plans without forcing the old and sick to stand up to evacuation. And without emptying the city of all essential services. And especially without the EMP. Getting everything running again—”
“The city gets emptied completely,” Julian had answered.
Ashraf said, “What if, for instance, a woman is having a baby?”
“Then she’ll have it in transit,” Julian said. “I’m sure she would prefer that to having a newborn child captured by Furs.”
Ashraf had said no more.
Alex jumped off the tram at the skimmer inflatable. Julian had not, thank heavens, also removed them as a contingency test. She’d comlinked for the skimmer to wait for her. The seats were all filled with scientists and engineers; Alex squatted on the floor for the short trip to the number three command bunker. Beside her squatted her tech, Natalie Bernstein, who was also supposed to have been in the rover.
“Here we go, Alex,” Natalie said. Alex merely nodded back. Natalie was no more than twenty-two, and her head of short, wiry black curls looked as uncombed as Alex’s. But her broad face shone with the same excitement as the voidbrained teenage girl at the tram stop. However, Natalie was anything but voidbrained. Smart and steady, she had been Alex’s first choice for bunker tech, despite Natalie’s youth.
Their bunker lay sixty miles northeast of Mira City. The site had been carefully chosen. Wild and heavily forested, close to a small tributary of the river, the terrain was nonetheless not too mountainous to reach by rover or to land a skimmer. Six such underground bunkers, deep enough and heavily enough shielded to withstand an alpha beam, were scattered within a three-hundred-mile radius. Ashraf, Lau-Wah, Alex, and Julian were all assigned to different bunkers to minimize leadership loss if the Furs attacked from orbit.
The four command bunkers, plus the two housing essential scientists, were linked by computer and by comlink. When Alex ran down the short flight of steps, Natalie’s backup, Ben Stoller, was already there; someone stayed in each command post at all times. Ben, a muscular and quiet young man whose ears reddened when he was embarrassed, silently gave up his seat in front of the displays to Natalie and stood in the back of the tiny bunker.
Julian was already comming from his bunker. “Alex? How does it look in Mira?”
She peered over Natalie’s shoulder. “Moving smoothly, from what I can see.”
“That’s what the reports say. Major Helf?”
“The ship is three hundred million clicks out,” said the voice of Julian’s physicist, Lucia Helf. Alex, staring at the back of Natalie’s black curls, thought for a moment that Lucia Helf meant “ship” literally. But of course that was part of the drill. They were tracking a hypothetical Fur vessel bent on attack.
A Fur ship equipped with their version of a McAndrew Drive could come in decelerating at a hundred gees. It then needed time to cruise into orbit, perhaps reconnoiter, perhaps send down a shuttle… or perhaps not. No one knew exactiy what the Furs would do. Whatever it was, however much time it took would equal the time available to evacuate Mira City. Maybe six hours from the time the orbital probes picked up the ship. Maybe six days. Maybe sixty days. The drill used the least possible time.
Paul Ramdi, an energy engineer, said over the open link, “All class red facilities shielded.”
“Good,” Julian said. “Mr. Ching?”
“I just heard from the mayor—bunker number two is sealed. Captain Quiles reports that Mira City is about half-empty.”
Alex said, “Have the mines reported yet? And the water-treatment plant?”
“Not yet,” Andy Ching said. She heard the excitement in his voice, so like the young girl in her nightgown. Andy, too, was very young. Julian had quietly insisted that the youthful generation of Chinese be represented in each command bunker.
Alex watched over Natalie’s shoulder and her face darkened. “Julian—Lau-Wah isn’t in his bunker.”
Julian’s voice said sharply, “Where is he?”
“They don’t know. He didn’t take a rover—well, they weren’t there, you know that—Natalie says he’s not answering his comlink.”
“Two hundred fifty million clicks out,” Lucia Helf said.
“Mines shielded now,” Andy said.
Alex said to Natalie, “Tell them not to seal the bunker yet. Lau-Wah must have stopped to deal with some problem.”
“Then why hasn’t he reported in?” Julian said.
“I don’t know.”
They waited. The water-treatment plant reported in: shielding complete. Lau-Wah did not join his bunker.
When the hypothetical ship had reached orbit, Ashraf ordered Lau-Wah’s bunker sealed. Alex heard his voice quaver and she thought of Jake. By now Jake should have reached his end point, a small hospital cave beside the tram track’s termination, not very hard for the old and sick to get to. Not very safe, either. Duncan Martin had been assigned there by lottery as an able-bodied orderly, a military attack not having much need for the usual skills of actors. Alex wondered if, during an actual attack, Duncan would stay at the cave or would try to join a group running farther away.
“Shuttle descending,” Lucia Helf said.
Julian had worked out strategies for attacking a Fur ship in orbit, using the Beta Vine or his own ship, the Crucible. Those strategies could not be tested. Nor could the plans for attacking a Fur shuttle. Depending on where a shuttle descended from orbit, Mira would deploy the solar array, lasers, mining explosives, all the meager resources (Julian said they were meager) of destruction that Greentrees would offer. If the shuttle headed directly for Mira City, Julian would execute the maneuver he was about to test now.
“The biggest problem is these ’force walls’ you describe,” Julian had said, and Alex had noted his phrasing. No one on Greentrees could produce an example of the force fields that could be created and dismantled with the flick of a curved stick, walling captives in and danger out as the Furs chose. So Julian believed in them only provisionally. That didn’t stop him from defending against the fields, in the only way he could think of.
“Shuttle one hundred fifty meters above Mira,” said Lucia Helf, with as much tension in her voice as if the thing had actually existed.
“Deploy EMP!” Julian said. “Now!”
Everything on Alex’s display went dark.
The electro-magnetic pulse knocked out electricity, radio waves, microwaves, X-rays—everything from io- nanometers to nearly a kilometer. It wiped computers clean. That was why days had been spent moving as much equipment as possibl
e out of Mira City, beyond range, for this drill. Personal equipment, at least small items, was supposed to move out with the populace. The big equipment—mining, water treatment, all the infrastructure of civilization—had been
shielded with lead and foamcast and stone and dirt. “We don’t know what they have,” Julian had said, “so we’re going to remove as much as we can from Mira.”
Gazing at the bunker displays, Alex saw that he had.
The command bunkers, now like most of the inhabitants, were beyond the EMP range. Immediately reports began flooding in from Ashraf and the others. “It worked, I think!”
“Nothing coming from Mira.”
“Those bastards are now unarmed and vulnerable.”
“Wait—here comes the comlink from the water-treatment plant, Suval Tremaine just walked outside to link… no problems! The shield held, all equipment functioning!”
“Mira Corp Mining Consortium report… all functioning fine.”
Alex listened intently to the comlink chatter while watching Natalie’s displays. She could hear Julian’s half smile in his voice. “Security Chief Davenport reports the city down. We’ll have to replace a lot of lighting and pumping chips, I’m afraid.”
Alex, Natalie, and Ben grinned at one another. The chips had been removed, building by building, leaving only enough to indicate the range of the EMP. Also sacrificed had been some old, nearly obsolete but sophisticated machinery. The sacrifice was worth it.
And yet a shiver ran over Alex. Grins, congratulations, a fine celebratory glow… because they had succeeded, hypothetically at least, in rendering other beings helpless. Was that what war did?
She realized, dimly, that she didn’t know anything about what war did. Not real, visceral knowledge. Well, how should she? How should any of them except Julian and his Terrans?
By now Guy Davenport’s security force was moving back toward Mira City, carrying comlinks and reporting as they went. A skeleton force had been left in the city to prevent looting, if any Greentrees inhabitants had decided to risk remaining behind. Security’s weapons wouldn’t work, of course, but then neither would the looters’. Nobody had anticipated any real trouble.
