The Future War t2-3

by S. M. Stirling

  "What are their symptoms?" she asked the mother. She didn't need to be told "fever"; she could feel it burning through the blanket. Ice, she thought, where are we going to get ice?

  "Diarrhea," the mother said, her voice shaking. "It just won't stop."

  It was the symptom Mary had most dreaded hearing. She efficiently stripped and cleaned the little boy and put a Pampers on him. Those aren't going to last long, she thought bitterly.

  She'd have to organize some of the civilians to help out with the laundry. Things were about to get high maintenance around here.

  The thing was, where was the fuel to boil all this water going to come from? They'd have to send men out to cut down trees, then chop the wood, then make the fires and tend them. At least it would keep people busy. Those who stayed healthy. The question was how many of them had the disease already working its way into their systems.

  She listened to the near-panicked mother as she started listing the symptoms all over again. Mary gave the woman a second look, noted the hectic flush, the too-bright eyes. Help! she thought, as short and desperate a prayer as she'd ever prayed.

  Mary brought a chair over and sat the mother down.

  "Conserve your strength," she cautioned. "You're going to need it." Then she went to the supply cabinet and came back with some bottles of water boosted with vitamins and electrolytes.

  "Get them to drink as much of these as possible," she instructed.

  "I know they're sick to their stomachs and won't want it, but they need it, so get it down them." She put a couple of facecloths and a bottle of alcohol down on a bedside table. "When they get too hot, wipe them down with this. I'll be back shortly."

  As she headed down the aisle, the father was coming toward her, all his anxious attention on his wife and children. She and the matron stared at each other for a moment.

  "Go tell Doctor," Matron ordered. "I'll look after things here."

  ALASKA

  Once again Ninel rode her bike up the overgrown driveway to Bale-witch's pleasant cottage. She'd been off-line, except to check her own site, for the last three weeks. There'd been her traps to mend and oil and put away until next winter, skins to see to, and the garden plot to clear of winter debris in preparation for planting. Ninel thought it would be a while before she'd trust the weather enough to put in seeds, though. She had some seedlings started in the cold frame she'd built, but it had been so cold lately that Ninel was sure she'd put them in too soon.

  It was surprising that no one had sent her any e-mail in such a long time. But a brief check had shown that there wasn't much activity anywhere. Still, that happened sometimes, the occasional dry spell that occurred for no known reason. What worried her was that she had expected to hear from Balewitch, or someone she had delegated.

  This was the second time she'd paid an unscheduled visit; Ninel hoped someone would be home. She turned into the curve of the driveway, and through the trees she could see the older woman standing on her steps, clearly waiting for her.

  She doesn't look any too pleased to see me, Ninel thought.

  Maybe she should have tried again to contact Balewitch before coming. But several messages had gone unacknowledged, so there hadn't seemed to be any point to trying again.

  "Do you have any idea what's going on in the world?"

  Bale-witch said by way of greeting.

  "Excuse me?"

  "You don't, do you?" Balewitch descended the steps, then sat down on them. "What have you been doing?"

  Ninel looked at her, trying to figure out what this was about.

  She'd tried to contact the woman. It wasn't like she'd left home with no forwarding address. "I've been busy," she said at last.

  Balewitch looked at her in disbelief, then laughed, long and heartily. "I guess you have been," she said at last.

  Ninel was not even slightly amused by this sort of behavior.

  She wondered if the woman had been laughing at Ninel's expense all along. "I think maybe I've made a mistake." She turned the bike around.

  "Don't get on your high horse, honey," Balewitch said.

  The woman's voice was so unlike the voice she usually used that Ninel whipped round suddenly, almost tripping over her bike. She stared at Balewitch wide-eyed.

  "Thing is, I know you're connected to the Internet, so I'm wondering how you could possibly have missed the event of the millennium," Balewitch said, eying her suspiciously.

  "I only got on to check for e-mail," Ninel said. "I did check a few other places, but there was no activity and nobody answered my queries." She shrugged. "I had work to do."

  Balewitch shook her head. "Sheesh. While you were doing your chores World War Three was going on."

  Ninel gave her a worried frown. "Excuse me?" she said.

  "Armageddon, the Apocalypse, global thermonuclear war?

  You've heard these terms before, yes?" The girl's expression was priceless, her pale eyes were like saucers, it was all Balewitch could do not to laugh at her.

  Ninel stared, then stretched her neck out in an unmistakably questioning manner.

  "No, sleeping beauty, I'm not kidding and I'm not crazy, either." Balewitch shook her head. "Your lack of curiosity astounds me."

  "But… ?" Ninel looked up at the sky. Suddenly its overcast look and the colder weather made an awful sort of sense.

  "How could you not know?" Balewitch raised an eyebrow.

  "Like I said, lack of curiosity." A very useful attribute under certain circumstances. This little girl was looking more useful by the minute. "Can you handle a gun?"

  "Yes."

  "Good, because you shouldn't be without one from this point forward. When people think the cops aren't coming, they tend to do things they ordinarily wouldn't." The poor kid looked stricken.

  "What's going to happen now?" Ninel asked.

  Balewitch considered her. "An associate of mine and I have been doing outreach work with the army," she began. The girl gave her that same, bug-eyed questioning look. "Yeah, ironic, isn't it? When I was your age I was so antimilitary I could hardly sleep for hating them. But we actually need them now." She chuckled. "I guess disaster makes strange bedfellows."

  "But they did this," Ninel said.

  "Nope. Turns out Ron Labane was right. That super-computer of theirs malfunctioned. As soon as they turned everything over to it, it blew up everything in the arsenal. Damn fools!"

  Oh, she was enjoying this, the kid was eating it up.

  Ninel frowned. "Is there anything I can do to help?" she asked.

  Balewitch was nodding. "I don't see why not. I'm getting tired, and so's my friend. We can use some help. If you could be this out of touch even though you're regularly on the computer, then there must be tons of people in the back of beyond who need to be told. Not only told, but escorted to the relocation camps."

  "What?" Ninel actually reared back at that. "Relocation camps? I don't like the sound of that."

  "Neither did I," Balewitch agreed. "But we may not actually get a summer up here this year and winter is gonna be a stone bitch. Essential supplies are already growing scarce; who knows what it will be like by winter. Even the Eskimos will freeze from what they're telling me, and Ron agrees with them." She shook her head. "Like I said, ironic."

  It made sense, sort of. Ninel had heard of the nuclear winter theory. According to what she'd read, the dust and smoke created by the nuclear blasts might render this latitude uninhabitable for as long as three years. She supposed it wasn't something that should be chanced, at least not the first year.

  "What can I do to help?" she asked.

  Balewitch smiled and rose from the step. "Come inside and I'll tell you all about it."

  * * *

  John drove up on his dirt bike to find their recruits packing up. "What's going on?" he asked.

  Paul the vegan came over and handed him a sheet of paper.

  Citizens of Alaska, due to ongoing emergency conditions, the U.S. government is asking for your cooperation. />
  Experts have predicted that Alaska will experience an unparalleled winter this year and possibly for several years to come.

  In order to protect yourselves and your families from these unusually harsh conditions, the U.S. Army has constructed temporary shelter for you in the warmer states below the forty-ninth parallel. This is to allow a more evenhanded and efficient distribution of already scarce supplies.

  Citizens in your area are requested to gather in Delta Junction or Tanacross, where transportation will be provided to take you to a temporary shelter in Canada, run in cooperation with the Canadian government, prior to removing you to the southern states of the U.S.

  Temporary shelters have been erected in these towns in the event that you arrive after a convoy has left. Rest assured that your wait will be short and though the facilities may be rough, they will be better in the U.S. and Canada.

  It was signed by some general. John's muscles tightened in fight-or-flight reflex and he could feel adrenaline coursing into his bloodstream. Calm, he told himself. Be calm or they won't listen to you at all.

  John couldn't believe how fast Skynet had swung into action.

  How many people has it already managed to exterminate? he wondered.

  Of course everything in the broadsheet was so plausible; the suggestion of nuclear winter might even be true. No doubt that was why the army was cooperating. Individual soldiers and isolated commanders had no way of checking this out. They were getting their orders in the usual way, with the usual codes—hell, maybe they were even hearing the right voices. He sensed that a lot of people were going to die before they discovered their mistake.

  "Where did this come from?" John asked.

  "A young woman brought it," Paul told him. "Said she was part of an outreach program working in conjunction with the army. They're looking for survivors in the outback. People like us who are out of communication." He gave John a long, hard look.

  "A young woman," John said slowly.

  "An exotic-looking creature," Paul's wife said. "She looked Eskimo, except she had white-blond hair and pale blue eyes. I've never seen that combination before."

  John looked up from the broadsheet. "I think I might know her," he said. "Name's Ninel."

  "That's her," one of the other men said.

  John chewed on his lip. How to put this? "There have been reports of people being lured into trucks and then taken into the woods and shot," he said. "This Ninel is reported to being one of those involved."

  He suspected that if this was his Ninel, she was being duped into helping with this. But what he had to do now was stop this mass emigration.

  "Well, if we get to the Junction and things don't look right, we'll just come back here," a man said. The others nodded agreement.

  "If you go there, they may force you to go with them," John warned.

  Paul put his hand on John's shoulder. "Look," he said, "we can't tell you how grateful we are to you and your mother and your big friend Dieter for all that you've done for us. But you can't protect us from a winter that never ends."

  "Yeah, this ain't Narnia," one of the women said. "If we can't grow food and those trucks are gone for good, then we'll starve here."

  "That's right," her husband put in. "This program makes sense." He shook his head. "We've got kids, John. We can't afford to take chances."

  But you'll take a chance on this, John thought. "Look," he said, "I'm just saying be careful. Maybe it would be better if you sent a couple of the guys to check it out. You know, stand at a distance and watch what happens, see how people are treated, that kind of thing. Even follow them for a ways, just to be sure."

  The couples looked at one another. "We'll be careful," Paul said. He held out his hand.

  John took it. How could they know? he thought in regret.

  Nothing in their lives could have prepared them for what's going to happen. And there wasn't a thing he could do to stop them. Oh, he could try telling them the truth, but then they'd run, not walk, to Delta Junction and whatever hell Skynet had planned for them.

  "Good luck," he said, and got back on his bike. "Can I keep this?" he asked. Smiling, they nodded and waved happily as he rode away. He could almost weep for the children; in fact, he thought he would, later. But for now, he and Dieter would have to come up with some sort of plan.

  * * *

  "You think you know this girl?" Dieter said.

  "Slightly," John said. "I've played chess with her."

  "So she could be a dupe or she could be one of them."

  "She could be both," John said. "But I didn't get a sense of the kind of fevered lunacy that makes an ecoterrorist from her the one time we interacted. She seemed like an interesting, normal girl."

  Dieter suppressed a smile, thinking, But, John, most of the world thinks that you're an ecoterrorist.

  Aloud he said, "Psychiatrists say that most terrorists aren't insane. In fact, most groups go to some lengths to rid themselves of any psychotic elements. And, of course, they are taught to seem normal, even when they're about to blast themselves and the people around them to kingdom come."

  "Yeah, I know, I've read the literature. But I've also met some of them, Dieter. There's something about them. You know what I mean."

  The Austrian sighed. "The thing is, my friend, when you met them you knew they were terrorists, and they knew that you knew. That gave them permission to let their guard down, to perhaps strut for your benefit. I know they wouldn't be so free in a public place."

  John stared into the distance. "When you're right, you're right," he finally said. "Maybe I'm not as quick on the uptake as I like to think I am."

  "You're a lot quicker than I was at your age. And I was never slow. Your upbringing will be a huge advantage to you in the coming years."

  The younger man's mouth twisted sardonically.

  "Meanwhile…" John said.

  "Meanwhile it's time to do some triage, so to speak. We need to consolidate our allies, to get them in a place where we can do the most good. Because the fact is we're going to have to watch Skynet kill a lot of people before anyone even suspects anything.

  If we told them what was going on, they might actually be more resistant to the truth. I'm afraid that no one will believe this until they see those HKs and Terminators coming for them. Even then a lot of people will just stand there and let themselves be killed rather than believe it's really happening."

  John looked away, frowning. "I hate to just give up on these people. Especially the kids."

  Dieter understood that kind of stubbornness. No doubt John felt that he was losing his first real battle in the war with the machines and it galled him to see innocents suffer. "Try to remember, John, that Alaska is very big and that you're just one man. We need allies to accomplish anything. It's not just the machines against you and your mother now, it's the machines against the human race. You need to adjust your way of thinking, to scale things up enormously. Yes, we may lose a lot of people to the machines. It is tragic, but not your fault, and not your failing.

  "You have to go south. Make contact with those survivalists you and your mother have been cultivating. And there are Sector agents down there who can be of help to you."

  "Assuming they aren't unwittingly helping Skynet," John reminded him.

  Dieter threw up his hands. "Well, you knew the job was hard when you took it."

  "Except I didn't take it; it was shoved down my throat!" John glared at nothing. "Sorry," he said a moment later.

  "I need to get to the coast," Dieter said. "Our old friends Vera and Tricker will have Love's Thrust waiting for me at Dilek in ten days." He watched the younger man, waiting for a reaction.

  "Why did we bother to set up supply dumps here if we were just going to abandon them?" John demanded.

  "To keep in practice and because one day we might need them." He waited, but John seemed disinclined to say more. "It is a hard fact that sometimes you have to retreat to have a chance at winning."

  "
I know."

  "And sometimes a commander must sacrifice a lot of lives in order to achieve victory."

  "Yeah," John said. "Can I hitch a ride down the coast with you guys?'

  Surprised, Dieter nodded.

  "See," John said. "I can be ruthlessly practical."

  CHAPTER NINE

  BLACK RIVER RELOCATION CAMP, MISSOURI

  Mary held the Stratzman baby, Sonya, rocking her gently. The poor little thing was no longer able to drink on her own; the only sound was the tiny labored breathing and the creak of the canvas camp chair beneath her.

  And I don't think the IV is doing any good.

  Sonya's fever was a hundred and six the last time it had been checked and it felt hotter by the moment; her face was withered and thin, like a tiny grandmother's. Mary no longer noticed the smell; it was all-pervasive through the clinic now.

  Sonya's four-year-old brother was doing a bit better than she was, but not much. He lay in the next cot, eyes half-shut; they were dull and sunken in a hollow-cheeked face. The lids barely flickered as one of the volunteers changed the soiled pad under his hips and rolled him to one side to straighten the bedclothes beneath; there were bedsores where the bones of his pelvis and shoulder were wearing through the skin.

  Mrs. Stratzman had labored over her children to the point of exhaustion, leaving her with little in reserve when she came down with cholera. She'd died this morning. Her husband was delirious, but he was the most likely to survive. Though with this kind of fever, there were no guarantees.

  Mary herself was very tired, that limbs-filled-with-wet-sand, burning-eyed, hard-to-talk exhaustion that almost made her want to weep.

  As if I didn't have enough reasons to cry, she thought. And then: You're healthy, you've got no one to lose anymore, you're young enough to probably throw off the infection if you do get it.

  Right now it felt as though she was stealing this time from other patients, but babies responded better if they were held occasionally. And it gave the nurses, both professional and volunteer, a chance to sit down.