A Rage for Revenge watc-3

by David Gerrold

  "But-why? I mean, I can see that there is some value in tracking our own equipment, but it seems such a cumbersome way."

  "Actually, it's all automatic. And you're looking at it from the wrong angle. It wasn't to track our own weaponry as much as it was to track weaponry we'd manufactured or supplied parts for. Do you know that the United States was the number one supplier of military hardware for over sixty years? It's an incredible intelligence advantage to know where all your weapons are."

  "That's unbelievable!"

  She grinned. She looked absolutely delighted. "That's its virtue. The whole idea is too outrageous to believe. The one time we had a security leak, the other side's intelligence refused to accept the validity of the information. They thought it was some kind of ploy, because there was no confirming evidence at all."

  I was a little confused. "But if we had that kind of power, that kind of advantage, why did we still lose the war in Pakistan? The other side was using captured weapons, as well as equipment they'd purchased third- and fourth-party. Didn't the system work?"

  "The system worked perfectly," Lizard said. "We were able to track whole divisions of the enemy by nothing more than routine queries of the field weapons in the hands of the infantry. It was a flawless demonstration." She looked positively cheerful as she recounted. "The problem was, we couldn't use the intelligence without the risk of exposing the whole game. So we never released any of that intelligence except when we had confirmation from an additional source, say a satellite photo. And most of our spy satellites were being knocked down as fast as we were putting them up. So we couldn't use that intelligence. It was too big a secret," Lizard said. "We had to save it for a war that directly endangered the existence of the United States. It was that powerful a strategic advantage."

  "Um," I said. Then, "You said it isn't a secret any more. What happened?"

  "Oh, about three months ago, some of our Fourth World allies tried to land some divisions in the Gulf of Mexico. Near Houston. They called it an army of Economic Liberation."

  "Huh? I never heard about it."

  "Not too many people did. A very funny thing happened. Their rifles blew up. Their boats sank. Their planes came apart in the air. Their missiles exploded. Their tanks melted. Their communications failed. There weren't too many survivors."

  "Huh?"

  "That was the rest of the secret. If you can program a chip to identify itself when it receives a specific signal, you can also program it to destroy itself when it receives another specific signal. We've had the ability for twenty years to disarm or disable at least a third of-the world's military equipment-any individual weapon or any category of weapon, worldwide or limited to a specific area.

  "We didn't dare use the system offensively before, because we couldn't risk damaging our national reputation for zero-defect weaponry. We didn't dare risk our intelligence advantage either. But this was the first time that foreign troops were landing on our shores, and that was what the system had been designed for. It worked perfectly." She looked as proud as if she'd designed it herself. I wondered just how important she really was. Was her rank of colonel just another cover? I didn't know what to believe about the United States government any more. Nothing in it was ever really what it was supposed to be.

  "So my van . . . ?"

  "Right. I had your code all along. We could have blown you up any time."

  I said, "Oh, shit."

  She said, "Uh-huh."

  I said suddenly, "Why didn't you?"

  "We were giving you a chance to surrender peacefully."

  "You knew it was me?"

  "Oh, no; you could have been any jackass. I was going to pick you up for questioning and find out why human beings were delivering weapons to the worms. When I saw it was you, I hit you with the wake-up hypo instead of the sleepytime one."

  "I could have blown you up! I had my finger on the button! I had antiaircraft missiles!"

  "But you didn't fire, did you?"

  "No. I didn't know who you were, but I knew you didn't miss by accident. You could have hit me if you'd wanted to. So I knew those had to be warning shots. You wanted me to stop. My daddy used to say, never argue with a loaded gun. Of course, he was talking about the realities he used to write-there's always a better solution-but the same principle applies in the real world. At least, I hope it does."

  "It does. Your daddy was real smart. It's a good thing you listened to him. If you had returned fire, using any weapon system in that van, you'd have blown yourself up. I'd already sent a coded signal from a hundred kilometers away. You were the trigger. The self-destruct was armed and waiting. Whether you returned fire or not determined if it went off. I've seen three vans blow up that way. I have to admit, I expected to see yours go off too."

  I remembered just how close I'd come to pushing that button. I'd been terrified of that chopper when it buzzed me. For half a second, I'd considered hitting the button and sending a Sidewinder-6 up her tail.

  What I'd told Lizard hadn't been entirely accurate. I hadn't held my fire because of any rational assessment of the situation. There hadn't been time to stop and realize that she'd missed deliberately. I'd held my fire because . . . I'd held my fire. I looked at the memory and all I could see was myself holding back and saying, "No!" I didn't know why I'd held back at all.

  I wondered for a moment if it was that I just didn't have the nerve. Had I been that rattled? Or that scared?

  No, that wasn't it either.

  I could still see the van exploding in a ball of flame, the frame instantly buckling, breaking in half, walls blowing outward, pieces of metal tumbling upward and skittering sideways, hurled by the force of the blast. Then the blossom of flames exploded again as the armaments went off, and the pieces disappeared inside a larger, still-growing fireball-that could have been me!

  I went back to the beginning of the memory: the chopper coming out of the sky behind us, strafing low over the van-me pulling myself into the turret, doing something with the controls, automatically, almost like a machine myself-my finger poised over the fire control-the explosion behind me!-the computer asking, "Shall I return fire?"-"No!". . . .

  I held onto that moment and looked at that "No!" as hard as I could. That was it, there! Why had I shouted no?

  I kept on looking at the moment, recreating it, replaying it over and over in my head, obsessively examining it. This was the answer that I needed, right here-inside this memory.

  And suddenly it popped into focus. I knew why I hadn't fired. I grinned with the surprise of it.

  "What's so funny?" Lizard asked.

  "I am," I said. "Do you know what a jerk I am?"

  "Yes," she said. "But you can tell me anyway."

  "I've been running because I'd thought I'd fallen off the deep end. I'd thought I'd lost all perspective on human life."

  "If you mean that little incident at Family," she said quietly, "I know all about it. No court in the country would convict you. You were very careful. Everything you did was legal." She glanced over at me. "Are you all right?"

  "No," I said. There was a terrible buzzing in the space between my ears. "I don't want to talk about Family. It makes my head hurt. It makes my stomach hurt." The wall between me and my memories was starting to crumble. I was starting to feel the pain again. I ground the heels of my palms into my eyes, trying to rub the visions away.

  She looked at me, curiously.

  "I have this noise going on inside my head." I tried to explain. "It's all mixed up again. As long as I don't think about what happened at . . . as long as I talk about other things, I'm okay."

  "You were telling me why you didn't pull the trigger on the chopper," she prompted.

  "It's all part of the same thing." It was hard to say, and it was easy too. Once I got started, the words babbled out of me as if of their own volition. "I don't know who I am, Lizard. And I'm so afraid that I'm starting to turn into . . . something like somebody I used to know. That's why the incident at . . .
That's why I-I drove out here to die, but I didn't want to die; but at the same time I couldn't think of anything else to do. I was so sure that I'd become someone who's lost all sense of the-the what?-the sacredness of human life.

  "But-this is the good part. What I've just realized is that I didn't fire at the chopper because I couldn't. I mean, I wouldn't. I almost did. For a moment there, all I saw was the chopper, and I almost pressed the button-but I didn't. Somehow, I knew that you really didn't want a firefight. I just knew it. You didn't want to kill me. So you weren't my enemy. That's why I didn't fire. I didn't have to. That's what's so wonderful. If I had really turned into some kind of monster, I'd be dead now. I mean . ." I started giggling. "This is terrific! I feel a thousand years younger! Because I've found out that I'm not quite as bad as I was afraid I was. That's very important for me to know. Really!"

  Lizard was smiling gently. She reached over and patted my knee. It seemed almost an affectionate gesture. "That's quite a thing to learn," she said. "For some of us- " She stopped herself in mid-sentence.

  "No, go on!" I said.

  She shook her head. "It's not important." Then she looked at me. "Just know this, Jim. You're not the only one who has to carry these questions around with him."

  I thought about it. "No, I guess not. I guess I've been kind of stupid, haven't I? I thought it was just me."

  Lizard sighed. For a moment, she sounded tired. "There's a whole operation at Denver aimed at keeping us sane. You can't make the decisions we have to make day after day after day and remain human. But somehow we have to-or we'll lose what we're fighting for. We're just beginning to get a sense of the size of that problem now, Jim. It's the biggest problem we've got. If anything's going to defeat us, it'll be our own failure to take responsibility for what's going on inside our heads."

  "Um," I said.

  "What's that about?" she asked.

  "It's nothing."

  "That was a very loud nothing."

  "It's just that . . . taking responsibility for what's going on inside my head is how I got into this mess."

  Lizard was studying her controls. I thought she hadn't heard me, but abruptly she said, "Well, think about this. How big a mess would it be if you hadn't taken responsibility?"

  Yes. There was that.

  We flew in silence for a while. There was something else, she'd said

  In fact, she'd said it twice! "Wait a minute! You said, 'weapons to the worms.' "

  "Uh-huh." She indicated the map on the screen, tapped one of the color squares on the bottom. "See those blue spots? Those are the locations of United States military equipment-inside known worm infestations."

  "How long has this been going on?"

  "Oh, we've had some scattered cases for over a year, but suddenly in the past two, three months, it's been exploding all over the map. As near as we can tell; there are renegade humans cooperating with the worms. It's as if somebody somehow made a treaty. We want to know how-and why. That's why we want to capture a renegade alive." She frowned. "Maybe next time."

  I studied the map. There were too many blue spots speckling the red swatches. "Why don't you just blow up the weapons?" I asked.

  "Oh, we will," she said. "You'll see in a few minutes." She pointed to the spot of light that indicated the chopper. It was very close to the target. "We're almost there."

  Sally-Jo was exceedingly vexed,

  when they said she was quite oversexed.

  She said, "That's not true,

  I just like to screw.

  Now, please take a number. Who's next?"

  57

  The Colorado Infestation

  "Bad luck is universal. Don't take it personally."

  -SOLOMON SHORT

  Lizard reached overhead and unlocked a red cover marked CAMERA. There were three bars in the panel. She pressed the first one, and something in the belly of the chopper went rrrrr-THUNK! It sounded heavy.

  Lizard pointed to the second bar. "See that? When I tell you to, hit that button."

  "Right. Anything else you want me to do?"

  "Enjoy the ride. I should warn you though, it's going to be a little bumpy."

  "What is all this anyway?" I gestured to indicate the chopper controls and included some of the equipment stashed in the back. "I don't recognize half of this."

  "Okay," she said, "that first cabinet is an industrial memory. We've got four high-speed, high-res stereo cameras hanging from the belly of this ship. We've got enough memory there to store about five minutes of input. We're shooting five times normal speed, so that uses up bytes in a hurry."

  "Oh, "

  "Those two big tanks-those'll release a spray of hot metal shavings to confuse any tracking devices on the ground or in the air. Actually, it's mostly a decoy, because we'll be detonating everything that's carrying a U.S. chip. We're putting out an angled beam. Only those weapons in an arc directly behind and beneath us will go off. That way, any observers will assume it's the result of some direct-action weaponry we're carrying.

  "Those other two tanks are carrying bug spray. It's a pretty potent mix, with a six-day half-life. We still don't know what kind of vectors it'll produce though, so we're limiting its use to heavy infestations like the one we're about to hit.

  "Hanging under the wings and belly, I've got thirty-four cluster missiles. Incendiary warheads. They'll come apart in midair and scatter every which way. Have you ever seen a Madball-VI in operation? No? Well, you will. Those things bounce and skitter like water on a hot griddle, leaving fires everywhere they touch. We're carrying five thousand of them."

  "Sounds like the army isn't missing a trick."

  "You haven't heard it all. That radar chaff we're dropping-it includes all kinds of things that will make this area unpleasant for days. There are these little nerve-gas tipped burrs which will kill anything that steps on them. No matter how they fall, there's always a point sticking up. Really cute. The bug spray-that's laced with isotopes. If the spray doesn't stop 'em, we'll know by the isotope concentrations in any worms we kill later on which sprays didn't work. Oh, yeah; we're also spraying napalm." She pointed at a locked switch on her board. "That's the master fire control. We hit that and it starts the whole party. It knows when to fire or release every single piece of ordinance this ship is carrying. The whole job will take less than thirty seconds. We fly directly across the worm camp only once and we leave a swath of destruction a kilometer wide. At least."

  "That wide? You'll take out the whole encampment."

  "Hmp," she said. "You think so?"

  A warning chime went off, and the computer said quietly, "Three minutes to target."

  She looked at me. "Strap yourself in, Jim."

  I fumbled with the harness, adjusted it, and clipped it shut across my chest. Lizard was looking at me oddly.

  "Is something wrong?"

  "I'm wondering if I can trust you."

  "Huh?"

  "The thought has crossed my mind that you might actually have turned renegade."

  "I haven't," I said.

  "I can take your word for that, huh?"

  "I thought you said you knew what happened at Family."

  "Right. Sorry." She turned back to her controls. "Force of habit. I don't trust anything anymore."

  She didn't say anything after that. Neither did I. I stared out the windshield at the ground rolling beneath us. Almost all the greenery had been replaced by dark patches of purple and occasional blossoms of red. Here and there were clusters of pink fuzzy things. They looked like balls of cotton candy.

  Family was coming back to me again, flooding in like a firestorm. Whatever that pink stuff had been, it was wearing off. The walls were disintegrating fast.

  Or maybe I was deciding that it was all right to hurt again. That wauld be nice.

  Because maybe it meant that I wanted to trust Lizard.

  I looked over at her. She was just letting go of her controls. They continued moving without her, as if they had a mind of t
heir own. The autopilot was running this mission. She reached past the regular controls and unslung a pair of extra joysticks-auxiliary weapon controls. She would be adding her input to the targeting computer, picking out targets she especially wanted to hit.

  She flipped down the goggle plate on her helmet, adjusting it to fit directly against her eyes. Now she had a target disk superimposed on her field of vision. Whatever she was looking at, she could destroy with just the touch of a button. Lizard leaned forward in her seat to scan the ground below, testing her range of vision.

  She pointed at one particularly thick clump of pink cotton candy. "See that?" she said. "Puffballs. We're lucky it's late in the year."

  I remembered the pink snow in California. "Yeah."

  She pointed ahead. "We're coming up on it now. Switch on the cameras." She did things to her console, finishing up by hitting the master fire control. I stretched upward and tapped the middle bar. It beeped and lit up red.

  The ground ahead was rising toward a crest. The grass beneath us had a bluish tinge. Chtorran grass? Probably. Or something tougher than grass. There were black and purple bushes scattered all over the hills. I leaned forward in my chair to follow a large orange Chtorran threading its way through the brush. Three more followed behind it. One of them looked like it had a human rider. But we were past it too fast to see. I'd have to wait and see what the cameras had caught.

  "Get ready," said Lizard.

  We lifted up toward the crest, came over it and-

  "Holy shit!"

  -dropped down the slope of the other side toward the largest Chtorran encampment I had ever seen!