Ill Wind

by Kevin J. Anderson

  * * *

  “Bank’s going hot,” Gilbert Hertoya said at the railgun controls. “Charging capacitors!”

  “Notify Bobby—we’re ready for ranging.”

  Spencer put a finger in his ears to muffle the sound in case one of the capacitors pre-fired and caused a catastrophic failure. It was another weak point in the defense—they were using research apparatus for weapons, and no one seemed concerned but him. Even though this was a full dress rehearsal, things still hadn’t come together. His stomach was sour with worry.

  Gilbert jerked a thumb at Rita by the control blockhouse twenty yards away. She knelt next to Romero, who was relieved to be back from his hours with the catapult team. The two busily worked a makeshift telegraph connected to a severed telephone line. Wires, a small speaker, a battery, and a couple of resistors with a switch completed the apparatus.

  Two days ago, the dead telephone line had run along Route 57, as useless as a magic wand in a science lab. Rita had supervised tearing the wires down from the utility poles, and now one end was connected to Romero’s telegraph machine; the other ran to Bobby Carron’s observation balloon a thousand feet in the air.

  The short scientist dug an elbow in Spencer’s side. “Think she’s worried about Bobby up there?”

  “The way they’ve been acting, you’d think the petroplague removed their libido inhibitors. No wonder the other ranch hands are sulking around and not getting their work done.”

  Gilbert threw Spencer an exaggerated glance. “You aren’t jealous are you?”

  Spencer dropped his hands, totally shocked. “What, jealous about Rita?” He had never even looked at Rita that way. After years of working together, she was just “one of the crew” to him.

  “Whatever,” Gilbert said, “but personally, I think you ‘doth protest too much.’”

  Spencer snorted and looked away. “I’m not even remotely jealous.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m not!”

  Gilbert raised an eyebrow.

  Spencer started to speak, but stood quiet for a long minute. “It’s just that Rita is the last person I’d expect to see getting dopey over someone. I guess I was starting to feel lonely myself.” He smiled wearily. “Looking for that girl with the sunburned nose, I guess. Too many Beach Boys songs.”

  Gilbert smiled. “No problem, old man. I miss my own family, and they’re just in Alamogordo.”

  Arnie yelled from the blockhouse. “Charging complete. Five seconds!” They put fingers in their ears, anticipating the sound.

  A loud crack sizzled through the confined chamber. Spencer tried to follow the five-pound sabot as the railgun accelerated it down the tracks in a blurred streak. He smelled metallic ozone from where the plasma armature ionized the air.

  “There it hits!” Gilbert pointed downrange. Spencer had to squint to see the dust kicked up where the wide-area munition pummelled the desert.

  Rita waved from where she and Romero squatted by the telegraph. She slapped the radio man on the back and straightened, then pointed up in the air to Bobby’s balloon. “From Bobby’s guesstimate the projectile hit five miles away and spread out in an elliptical area fifty by twenty yards. If the metal bearings separated like we think, everything in that area should be shredded like mozzarella cheese on a pizza.”

  Spencer brightened. “Get the results analyzed by tonight’s tech meeting.” He shook his head as Rita threw him a snappy salute. She’s totally lost it, he thought.

  But Gilbert looked dismayed when Spencer returned to the railgun. The small engineer had a foot up on the base of the gun, reaching up to run a hand along the railing. Scorch marks marred the surface of the once-gleaming metal.

  Spencer frowned. “What’s the matter?”

  Gilbert shook his head. “We shorted out some capacitors. Unless we get this whole rail replaced, we’ll be up a creek.”

  “But you’ve got miles of railing to work with.”

  “That’s not the problem,” said Gilbert. “Yeah, we can replace the railing, but we have to take the whole friggin’ railgun apart to do it—and that will take nearly five days.”

  Spencer tried to sound upbeat. “You can do it—”

  Gilbert interrupted irritably, “Don’t you understand? Even if we get the railgun fixed, that doesn’t mean it’ll work again. What’s to prevent the same thing from happening?” Gilbert turned to the blockhouse. “I can’t believe I wasted the last three weeks and damaged our satellite launcher for one shot!”

  Spencer started after the man, but stopped. It had been three weeks, and what did they have to show for it? The railgun worked, but it might have fired its last projectile. The citrus explosives were still not finished; and their only defense besides the Alamogordo townspeople was a medieval catapult!

  It chilled him. Maybe Bayclock would laugh at them after all.

  Chapter 67

  The pregnant girl from Oakland gave birth to a baby boy in the middle of the afternoon. The young father hovered beside her in a panic throughout the ordeal, in deeper shock than the mother herself. He chewed the ends of his fingers and kept asking, “How long is this going to take? How long is it going to be?” The commune’s three self-proclaimed midwives tended the girl.

  When they finally brought forth the baby, everyone began cheering and singing in a way that embarrassed Iris Shikozu. One woman ran out and hammered on the iron triangle that served as their dinner bell, raising such a celebratory alarm that several men came running in from the wind turbines.

  While this baby was certainly not the first to be born in the Altamont settlement, it was the first since the petroplague. The midwives—all of whom had proclaimed the wonders of natural childbirth—used cool, dampened rags to wipe clean the mother and baby. The fifteen-year-old girl lay trembling and exhausted, holding the baby against her as the father stroked her forehead.

  Iris sat down outside the small house and was glad no one had even asked her to boil water. She knew nothing about the birthing process.

  Daphne Harris came up and extended a hand to pull Iris to her feet. “Come on, get off your butt! There’s work to do!”

  “Gee, thanks for cheering me up,” Iris said and brushed dry grass from her pants.

  Daphne looked so healthy and full of restless energy that she practically glowed. Upon first arriving at the commune, Iris had liked Jackson Harris’s wife immediately. Daphne appeared driven, consumed by an ongoing battle inside her; now that she had settled down, she seemed more at peace… but she still required some way to burn her restless energy.

  “We need to clear some spots down by that cluster of live oak, then you can help me set up a few new tents. We got some more people showing up for the concert, even though it’s still a month away.”

  Iris raised her eyebrows. “Musicians this time, or just spectators?”

  Daphne shrugged. “I didn’t interview them, girl! Some of both, I guess.”

  Once the announcement had gone out about their windmill-powered Labor Day rock ‘n roll concert, people started trickling into the Altamont settlement. Jackson Harris let them stay, as long as they were willing to feed themselves and do work.

  And Todd had been gone only a week.

  Harris and Doog and a large group of the commune dwellers worked out at the Altamont Speedway, repairing bleachers, rigging wires, fixing the metal loudspeakers. Another group set about laying cloth-wrapped cable from the windmill substations to the sound system at the racetrack.

  Daphne handed Iris a shovel, then took a long rake for herself. “The new folks will think it’s romantic for about two nights to sleep out under the stars, then they’ll want a tent. We’ll need to dig a few more privies, too, but I’m not doing that. We got plenty of hands around here to help out.”

  Under the live oaks at the far end of the trailers, huts, and reinforced tents, Daphne began attacking the underbrush. She yanked twigs and tore loose grass to clear a firepit and to make flat foundations for new tents. Iris set to wo
rk with her shovel, chopping out heavy roots and removing stones.

  “So, do you miss him?” Daphne said after a few moments.

  Iris’s instinctive reaction was to say “Who?”—but she knew that would be ridiculous. “A little,” she admitted, trying to keep her voice flat and guarded.

  “You gonna wait for him? Do you think he’ll come back?”

  Iris shrugged. She gripped her shovel and looked the other direction. She didn’t want to meet Daphne’s eyes.

  Daphne said, “If you ever think that cowboy of yours ain’t coming back, just let me know. We’ll set you up with somebody. You notice all the other guys staring at you?”

  Iris nodded. “Yes, I’ve noticed—and I don’t think I’ll need your help setting me up. Thanks, anyway.”

  Daphne was silent for a moment, then giggled. “Oh, I almost forgot! I got a message for you. Todd radioed from down in Pasadena. He got on the emergency short-wave network and talked to the Lab in Livermore.”

  Iris turned quickly, trying to hide her reaction, but she was too late. “What did he say?”

  Daphne spoke with agonizing slowness. “Well, he sent a special message to inform you that he made it to LA just fine. They had some trouble with the train, but they’re at the JPL now, making plans to head out with the satellites. He’s gone that far—and personally, I’m surprised.”

  “Was there more?” Iris asked. “Did he say anything else?”

  Daphne shrugged. “Probably, but it was an unspoken hint. He was talking to that Moira Tibbett, you know. That woman wouldn’t know an emotion if it slapped her in the face!”

  Feeling dizzy, her thoughts in turmoil, Iris plunged back into her work with the shovel.

  * * *

  The musicians making their way to the Altamont commune were a mish-mash of drummers, singers, guitarists. Each one had cobbled together musical instruments from pieces that survived the ravages of the petroplague. Many carried wooden flutes, harmonicas, metal autoharps, and expensive classical guitars with ivory instead of plastic tuning pegs and expensive gut strings instead of nylon.

  Several engineers in Livermore had taken the challenge to build functional amplifiers and pickups. Two of them even hoped to build a working electric guitar to really shatter the silence.

  After dark, the musicians sat around the evening fire and jammed. The crowds grew bigger and bigger as the days went by, and people rode in from the surrounding towns just to hear the evening practice sessions.

  Ironically, before the petroplague, most of these people would never have gone to the same bars or the same concerts. Divided into their own little cultural subgroups, cliques had used fine divisions of music to separate themselves: classic rock, folk music, heavy metal, technopop, easy listening, country. Now though, with everything else falling apart, the music itself—regardless of brand or flavor—brought them together and they listened without the scorn or snobbery they would have shown before.

  Satisfied, Iris sat on her lumpy cushion under the stars, sipping strong herb tea from a metal cup. They had stuffed themselves with a delicious stew made in a big pot: vegetables from Tracy, herbs from the gardens planted around the commune, and beef from the local ranchers.

  Iris lounged back and looked at the people, thinking how strange a mix they seemed—Jackson Harris’s inner-city refugees, throwback hippies, herself a Stanford microbiologist, and redneck ranchers, cowboys, and migrant workers.

  Doog started off the singing himself, accompanied by a quiet unobtrusive harmonica. He had a rich, mellow voice, and he closed his eyes as the words came from his lips. The firelight reflected from the circles of his John Lennon glasses. He seemed to be pulling the music out of his soul as he sang.

  It didn’t really matter that Doog’s own taste in music was radically different from what hers had been. Now, as she listened to his voice and thought of her own driving obsession to make the Altamont concert a reality, her need to bring not just music, but Rock ‘n Roll, back to the world.

  Then she thought of Todd’s need to help start the world on the long journey back to civilization—even if it meant a fool’s errand of carrying solar-power satellites across the country.

  What right did she have to step on his dreams?

  Long before the music ended for the night, Iris went off to bed, alone.

  Chapter 68

  Todd Severyn rode high on the buckboard of their commandeered wagon and stared across the landscape of the American southwest.

  Beside him, holding the reins of the three horses pulling the wagon, burly Casey Jones sat hypnotized by the desert terrain. He fixed his big dark eyes on the horizon as if willing it to come closer. Casey pushed at the old shirt wrapped like a turban around his bald head to protect him from sunstroke.

  He and Todd rode together in the comfortable silence of two men who had already spent too much time together and had used up their conversation. In the wagon bed behind them, Henrietta Soo snoozed in the afternoon heat. Lying against the ten smallsats they had hauled from Pasadena, she sweated under the reflective blankets that tried to keep the heat away.

  Todd slouched his cowboy hat over his eyes as the horses plodded along. His arms still ached from days of pumping the railroad handcar across southern California and part of Arizona—but overall he was amazed at how uneventful the journey had been.

  Todd kept tattered old maps in a sack under the buckboard, marking his best guess of where they were on their trek. Once they had abandoned the handcar and took to the roads, Casey’s railroad chart hadn’t been much help. By Todd’s reckoning, they had crossed Arizona into New Mexico, then veered south toward Alamogordo and White Sands. Pushing hard, they might reach Spencer Lockwood’s solar-power farm within the next two days.

  Early that morning, the last settlement they encountered was a Native American village and old trading post. They had refilled their water containers and traded gossip and news for a delicious breakfast of fresh eggs and tortillas. The desert road stretched arrow-straight ahead of them. The three horses trotted along the easy path with a distance-eating gait.

  “People up ahead,” Casey Jones said. His deep voice was gruff and startling in the sleepy afternoon stillness.

  Todd cocked his hat back and squinted at two people walking down the road out in the middle of nowhere. Both were tall, a man and a woman; the woman carried a brilliant neon pink backpack.

  As the wagon approached, the two hikers stepped off to the side of the road and stood, hands on hips, and waited. The man, tall and broad-shouldered with a mane of straw-colored hair and a devil-may-care grin, stuck out his hand in a classic hitchhiker’s pose. He carried a shotgun over one shoulder and a broad hunting knife at his belt.

  Beside him, the woman looked tired, but well-proportioned. She stood like an amazon. She had auburn hair and a strikingly pretty, strong face—nothing dainty about it. She probably hadn’t been much to look at competing in a world of fashion models and heavily applied makeup; but now she was quite memorable.

  Casey reined in the horses, and the wagon came to a stop. In the back, Henrietta Soo sat up blinking; she crinkled the reflective blanket away from her.

  “Hey, can you give us a lift?” the big blond man said.

  The woman smiled at Casey, then flashed a broader grin at Todd, as if she had just seen saviors coming to rescue her. “We’d really appreciate it,” she said. “I’m Heather Dixon.”

  She stretched out her hand, and Todd didn’t know if she meant for him to shake it or just give her a hand up into the wagon. She turned to her companion. “And this is—”

  He cut her off with an almost savage grin. “Clyde,” he said, “you can just call me Clyde.”

  * * *

  By now, Miles Uma had grown accustomed to the assumed name “Casey Jones.” After months by himself, hiding from anyone who might recognize him, Uma had successfully walled himself off from his former existence as the captain of an oil supertanker. He had never told his real name to Rex O’Keefe an
d the Gambotti brothers, now lost somewhere in LA, alive or dead. He had never told Todd.

  The parched scenery around him with its palette of tan, mauve, and rust seemed a million miles from the ocean and the knotted gray clouds he had seen every day on the bridge of the Zoroaster. Uma drove the team of horses, trying not to recall the times he had captained the enormous steel ship.

  He had spent his life on the sea: working on tugs up in Alaska, spending six months on a barge, then working his way up to the supertankers owned by Oilstar. He had served in the merchant marines, spent a few years in the Navy when he was younger, and learned everything he needed to know about ocean-going vessels. The sea was his family, his lover. Ever-changing, the sea was always there.

  But now the air around him smelled of sage and yucca. He couldn’t recall how the ocean smelled—though he could never forget the stench of spilled crude oil.

  Uma extinguished most of those stray thoughts from his mind. He found it easier to forget by latching unto a task, pouring his entire being into accomplishing it. Whether it was fixing up the locomotive Steam Roller, gathering food to bring to the starving masses in Los Angeles, or carrying satellites off to New Mexico.

  He still had nightmares about seeing the towering Golden Gate Bridge in the darkness, breaking through the control room door locked by Connor Brooks. He still felt the millions of barrels of oil gushing out from his fragile tanker, saw the TV footage of the spill crawling across the San Francisco Bay.

  Uma remembered the brutal finality of the swift board of inquiry that had stripped him of his captain’s rank. Oilstar had fired him, of course, and Uma couldn’t argue with their decision. He was the captain of the Zoroaster, he was responsible for the actions of his crew. Anything else was just an excuse… and Miles Uma did not believe in excuses.

  It didn’t matter that Connor Brooks had actually caused the crash of the oil tanker. It didn’t matter that one of Oilstar’s microbiologists had actually spread the Prometheus organism that devoured gasoline and petroleum plastics. It didn’t matter that everyone else had found some way to pass the buck.