Ill Wind

by Kevin J. Anderson

  The mud flats smelled rancid in the low tide, with spoiled garbage and iridescent scum drying under the sunlight. Gnats buzzed around his face, and the horses’ tails whisked like scratchy brooms to drive the pests away. When they finally rode north, reaching solid ground, the tall grass whispered and shushed beneath the horses’ legs, the only sound except for the wind and a few circling birds over the empty network of highways.

  Iris rode beside him, jarring him into conversation. Although he felt confident on the horse, he didn’t know what to say—he had spent so much time riding down to Stanford to pick her up, he couldn’t for the life of him think up any small talk. He had much bigger things to think about—like their survival. But he was content just to be with her, and she seemed not unwilling to stay with him a while.

  The sun beat down on his cowboy hat and his calloused, tanned hands gripping the reins. He could smell the horses and his own sweat, which made him wonder if Iris liked cologne. Probably not.

  “So,” Iris said, jet black hair blowing around her face, “you haven’t actually agreed yet. Do you think it’s a good idea to make our way to the Altamont and the community up there?”

  Todd nodded, but he had been avoiding the question. He was still surprised that Iris had come along with him. “Sounds like a good idea, especially if they’ve got access to food from the Central Valley, even better if they’ve managed to rig power from the windmills.” He tugged his hat down tighter as a Bay breeze gusted past him. “I’m just a little uncomfortable about living with a bunch of hippies.”

  “What’s the problem? They’ve been living off the land there for years.”

  Todd was quiet for a moment. “What if they’re growing drugs or something?”

  Iris laughed at him. “I’m sure they’d let you have some, if you asked nicely.”

  Todd felt his skin prickle. “That’s not what I meant—”

  “I know, I know. I’m sure they’ll be a lot more concerned now with planting vegetables. Don’t worry about it, Tex.”

  “Stop calling me that,” he growled. “I’m from Wyoming.”

  “Would you rather I called you Wye?”

  Todd kept looking ahead, squinting into the sunlight. “I’d rather you just called me Todd.” Then he added defensively, “Okay, Professor? Or should I say, Little Miss Rock Star?”

  She started to retort, but chuckled instead. “Okay, you made your point.”

  They left the water behind as they headed between grassy hills crowned with dark green live oaks. Iris urged Ren ahead a few steps to parallel Todd. “We should avoid Hayward, Newark, and Fremont as much as possible,” she said, pointing to the wrinkled, flapping map spread on the saddle in front of her. “No telling how bad those cities have gotten. If we keep away from the Interstate, there are plenty of hills, ranches, and grazing land between here and the Altamont. Think we can make it there by nightfall?”

  Todd laughed. “We didn’t leave Stanford until after lunch. Maybe by tomorrow afternoon.”

  Iris looked down at the map again. Her dark eyes flicked back and forth, as if checking directions and distances. “I can drive it in an hour.”

  “You really are an academic type, aren’t you? Horses don’t go quite as fast as cars. And they’re not nearly as comfortable.” Todd finally felt reassured to be talking about a subject he knew. “Anyway, after about twenty miles or so, your butt is going to feel sore enough to fall off. I’d just as soon keep that from happening.” Todd suddenly realized what he had said and he clamped his lips down hard together. His ears burned.

  “Gee, thanks,” Iris said. “Are you willing to give me a massage if I ache too much?”

  It was Todd’s turn to snort; but inwardly, he wondered if she really meant it.

  * * *

  That night they sat around a small campfire. The only thing missing was a pair of wailing coyotes in the hills. He heard a few distant gunshots after dusk, but that wasn’t quite the same.

  Iris removed a can of peaches “in their own natural juice” she had taken from her pantry and opened it with a hand can opener. “Too bad we don’t have any beans for dinner,” she said, scooping the mess into their traveling bowls. “Then we could recreate that scene from Blazing Saddles.”

  Todd laughed. “You think all cowboys are like that?”

  “Aren’t they?”

  “Right. Just like all professors are rock & roll addicts.” Todd ducked when Iris threw a clod of dirt at him. Afterwards, they managed to have a decent conversation over dinner.

  Todd finally began to relax with the fact that he was riding alone across country with a beautiful woman who confused and excited him. It had taken him hours, but he could finally start talking to her without being so self-conscious.

  Darkness spread across the sky. Iris stood up and went to the pile of saddles and blankets they had removed from the horses. Ren and Stimpy blew and whickered from where they were tied under the trees. Todd poked around, securing the campsite.

  Iris returned to the level ground near the dying fire and tossed down both sleeping bags. Todd picked up his bedroll. “You can sleep by the fire. I’ll stand watch over here.”

  “Wait. You want to help me zip these together?” she asked. “You promised me a massage, remember?”

  Todd hesitated, not sure what to say. This didn’t make sense. He turned away, feeling his face flushing bright red.

  Iris giggled at his reaction. “You’re cute, Todd.” She grabbed his bedroll and started unrolling both bags, searching for the zippers. “I can’t tell how much of this Big Lunk routine of yours is an act and how much is real.”

  “What Big Lunk routine?” he asked, genuinely baffled.

  “Oh shut up and get inside the sleeping bag,” Iris said. Her smile seemed to sparkle in the smoky light. “Would it help if I sang Country & Western?” She crooned in a warbling drawl, “Aaahm so lonesome Aaah could craaah!”

  Todd stared doggedly. “You’re teasing me, aren’t you?”

  “Me?” Iris looked shocked. “I’m dead serious about that massage. My butt feels just as sore as you said it would.”

  Confused, Todd snatched his bedroll away from her. “Either that’s the first thing you’ve said that isn’t sarcastic, or I’m missing something. Good night, Professor. We’ve got a long ride tomorrow.” He stomped off without waiting for her reaction.

  Minutes later, as he spread his sleeping bag out across the dry grass, he debated going back to her. He couldn’t figure Iris out. One minute she’d lash out at him, the next she wanted to jump in the sack. Weird.

  He listened for any sound that she might still be up, maybe even waiting for him. But besides the fire crackling and one of the horses snorting, he didn’t hear a thing.

  Chapter 46

  On the equipment table at the microwave farm, Spencer glanced over the components they had outfitted with fiberglass and ceramic: diagnostic sensors, a switching cable, and fiber-optic relays. In the oppressive heat, useless computer monitors stared like lifeless eyes; the hard plastic housings had sloughed aside, leaving heavy glass cathode-ray tubes canted among wires and the debris of circuits.

  At the rate they were going, his small team would have the entire microwave farm fully converted within the next two weeks.

  “Supply wagon’s coming!” Rita Fellenstein shouted from the doorway. She sprinted out into the desert sunlight.

  Spencer watched with amusement as Rita hurried to the wagon, her braided hair dangling beneath her Australian hat. By now her infatuation with the pair of ranch hands was common knowledge.

  He tugged on his own floppy hat and followed her out of the blockhouse. He squinted in the glaring brightness of the desert, but without air conditioning inside the building, the temperature differential wasn’t much of a shock.

  The two young ranch hands guided the horses that pulled the old wooden-bed wagon. From the short-wave radio, Spencer knew that some of the ranches around Alamogordo had donated barrels of water and boxes of
MRE rations from storehouses they had looted from mothballed Holloman AFB. Wiry Juan Romero, sweat dripping down his back, started unloading, stashing boxes of dried beef and aluminum containers in the shade beneath the blockhouse.

  A small Hispanic man with short salt-and-pepper hair and a narrow chin rode in the back of the supply wagon. Spencer didn’t recognize him. “A visitor?” he asked Rita.

  Rita flipped her braids over her shoulder and pushed her lips together like a small wad of paper. “Not sure.”

  Spencer kept his expression neutral as he walked to where the short stranger was getting off the wagon. The man held out a small, narrow hand to him. “Are you Spencer Lockwood?” he said in a way that showed he was accustomed to taking control. “I’m Gilbert Hertoya. Lance Nedermyer insisted that I come see you.”

  Spencer shook the man’s hand, feeling a surprisingly rough and leathery grip, and suppressed a scowl, wishing he could just turn the wagon around and send the man back home. He carried himself with the air of an executive with nothing left to manage. “Yeah, Lance is always looking after our best interests—according to him. How can I help you?”

  Hertoya smiled, apparently without malice. “Actually, I think I can help you.”

  “Oh?” He waited for Hertoya to spring the bad news on him. “I need all the help I can get. I hope you came to lend a hand.”

  “Well, I got tired of sitting on my butt in Alamogordo. I left my family there for now so I could get to work. You know we’ve got the potential here to—” Hertoya hesitated, then raised his dark eyebrows. “I guess I shouldn’t blame you for not recognizing me. I’m from the Sandia Lab in Albuquerque. I head up, or headed up, the electromagnetic launcher up on Oscura Peak.” He let that sink in.

  “The satellite launcher? Now that’s interesting.” Spencer broke into a wide grin. If this guy knew how to run the EM launcher, he might be useful after all.

  “Hey, Rita and Juan!” he called, “you guys finish unloading the wagon—we’ll need it for a trip to Oscura Peak.”

  * * *

  Spencer watched eagerly as Gilbert Hertoya opened the door to the stuffy bowels of the railgun controls. Sunlight pouring through the ceiling windows left pale patches of illumination in the control area. Dust motes settled through the air.

  Spencer looked along the railgun corridor. Parallel steel beams extended to a vanishing point in the distance up the slope of Oscura Peak. He lost all sense of perspective. On either side, blue-painted boxes containing high-energy-density capacitors crowded the rails. Their footsteps echoed on the concrete floor.

  “The EM launcher was a smaller project even than your antenna farm,” Hertoya said. “At least you started out with serious funding—we got zip from DOE, a little from NASA. To keep going we had to beg money from Sandia’s in-house research fund, mostly because we had our roots in the weapons community.”

  “Well, we had to pinch a few pennies ourselves,” Spencer said, trying not to sound defensive. With the world irreparably changed around them, he noted with annoyance that he was still falling into old political patterns.

  Rita squeezed next to him looking down the long rails. “Wow.” She coughed in the dusty air, but didn’t say another word.

  Gilbert ushered them along the corridor. “You can only see the first two miles of the launcher. It extends another three miles up the foothills—for peak performance we need to install another mile and a half of railing. We can launch small payloads to low-Earth orbit with what we have; we need the additional mile and a half to get us up to the higher, useful orbits.

  “My team has been steadily putting this together for the past six years. Before the petroplague, that is. We used mostly grad student labor from New Mexico State—cheap and enthusiastic.” He shook his head sadly. “We’ve got piles of railing and capacitors stored near the top of the peak, more than enough to finish putting it together. If we were funded like other Sandia projects, we could have become a real launch facility years ago.”

  Hertoya stepped under the twin rails and pointed to the first bank of capacitors. Spencer ran a hand along the rail. The steel felt cold and slick. The wheels in his mind spun furiously, trying to figure how they could get the launcher up and running.

  “We place the payload on these rails in a conducting shell called a sabot. We charge the capacitors and fire them off, one after another in a sophisticated timing operation. Each one adds to the total magnetic field that pushes the sabot up the launcher, nudge after nudge after nudge. By the time the payload reaches the end of the rails, it’s traveling over ten klicks a second—more than enough to reach low-Earth orbit.”

  Spencer nodded with continued interest. “The payload weighs what, a couple hundred kilograms, if I remember right?”

  “The entire package can weigh a thousand kilograms. Three hundred of that is pure payload. Most of the rest is the guidance system and a small rocket to insert the payload into orbit.”

  Spencer looked at the blue capacitor boxes, then suddenly felt a sinking at the pit of his stomach. Well, that’s that, he thought. The entire setup was as worthless as a Detroit auto factory now. They had been so close.

  “I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.” Spencer started to turn away. “Capacitors have oil dielectrics. They’re useless.”

  “Oil?” Gilbert made a dismissive gesture. “No, we decided against an oil dielectric in favor of some new insulating technology. These just use distilled water.”

  Spencer froze. “Water-based capacitors?”

  Rita laughed. “Where you been, Spence, on Mars?”

  “If we could use this launcher to get the rest of our satellite constellation in orbit, we’d have practically a continuous ring of smallsats. It would be easy to add other antenna farms on the ground.”

  “Spencer, we have to figure out how to survive the winter!” Rita interrupted. “Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself? It needs another one and a half miles of railing. It’s taken them six years to get this far.” Rita smiled apologetically at Gilbert. “Spencer gets this way sometimes.”

  “There are plenty of people back in Alamogordo who’d break their backs to get this thing working, because it’s one of the only chances we have for the future,” Spencer insisted, “even if it does take several years.”

  As he spoke, he grew more passionate. “They’ve got nothing to do, and they want to help get the world back on its feet. You saw the response we got from the ranchers.”

  “That was for horses and food, Spence, not for… for working on the railroad!” Rita said, exasperated.

  Spencer slung an arm over Hertoya’s shoulder. “Rita can handle the supply details if you oversee finishing the railgun project. The microwave farm doesn’t need any more people for the conversion process—”

  He grew more animated with every step. “We could have limitless energy from the satellites. White Sands can be a new Atlantis, the only place left with the comforts of 20th century life!”

  As they stepped into the sunshine, Rita shook her head. “Sometimes I think his brain is just going to explode.”

  Chapter 47

  The Sandia mountains east of Albuquerque turned a deep pinkish red as light from the setting sun struck them. Desert sunsets were stark and pure, filled with a silent rawness that always reminded him of his days in Gulf combat.

  And that reminded him of the thirty thousand lives under his charge at Kirtland Air Force Base. Thirty thousand souls, he thought. All in his hands, at this time of crisis.

  The first directive from newly sworn president Jeffrey Mayeaux had come down like a hammer on an anvil. All military commanders were to bring cities under strict martial law. They were to enforce curfews, stockpile supplies for orderly distribution among the populace, and enforce a rule of order at all costs. Via shortwave radio the president had ordered local commanders to call up nearby contingents of the National Guard.

  With the radical changes forced by the petroleum plague, society would be like a wild horse try
ing to throw the reins of law and civilization. Bayclock had to ride hard and not let his determination falter for an instant.

  When he had visited Kirtland AFB, Mayeaux had told Bayclock they could work well together whatever might come up—and now Mayeaux was his Commander in Chief. In the petroplague crisis, Mayeaux was shouldering a burden vastly more difficult than Bayclock’s own, and Bayclock vowed to give the new president his fullest support.

  He breathed deeply, scanning the Sandia peaks before turning back to Mayor David Reinski. A squad of fifteen security policemen, all beefy young men over six feet tall, protected them against the anarchistic elements that had already caused so much damage. The MPs faced outward, holding their automatic weapons loosely, ready to snatch them in a second. Bayclock had refused the protection of the few civil police officers still on duty.

  They stood in the center of City Plaza, an island of enforced sanity amidst the turmoil. Shattering glass and sporadic screams peppered the dusk; fires burned from several buildings. Hiding behind a dark window, someone shouted taunts across the plaza.

  In front of the adobe Spanish mission, Bayclock’s horses were tied together and guarded by another group. The scene could have been part of a Mexican showdown in an old Western movie. The citizens would writhe at the enforced discipline—at least at first, but they would get used to it. And one day they would thank him for saving them all.

  Mayor Reinski fidgeted; he looked from side to side, as if uncertain that Bayclock’s MPs could offer sufficient protection. Bayclock let the mayor squirm for a moment before speaking. “Seen enough? Tell me how you could possibly handle this yourself.”

  “I—I don’t know how much longer we’ll be safe out here.”

  Bayclock snorted. “You think we’re safe now? Look up there.” He nodded to the building behind them. “The only reason we haven’t been attacked is because of my snipers stationed on the rooftop. They’ve already shot two would-be assassins.”