Across Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  More likely the air above them would soon be filled with screaming metal. The end of a generation of peace.

  Big Al gave a short laugh. When Wil looked at him questioningly, the small-town cop shrugged. "I was just thinking. This whole police business is something like a lending bank. Instead of gold, MSP backs its promises with force. This invasion is like a run on your 'bank of violence.' You got enough backing to handle normal demands, but when it al! comes due at once... "

  ... You wind up dead or enslaved. Wil's mind shied away from the analogy. "Maybe so, but like a lot of banks, we have agreements with others. I'll bet Portland Security and the Mormons will loan us some aircraft. In any case, the Republic can never hold this land. You run a no-right-to bear-arms service; but a lot of people around here are armed to the teeth."

  "Sure. My biggest competitor is justice, Inc. They encourage their customers to invest in handguns and heavy home security. Sure. The Republic will get their asses kicked eventually. But we'll be dead and bankrupt by then-and so will a few thousand other innocents."

  Al's driver glanced back at them. "Hey, Lieutenant, why doesn't MSP pay one of the big power companies to retaliate -bobble places way inside the Republic?"

  Wil shook his head. "The New Mexico government is sure to have all its important sites protected by Wachendon suppressors."

  Suddenly Kiki broke off her broadcast monolog and let out a whoop. "Bandits! Bandits!" She handed a display flat over the seat to Al. The format was familiar, but the bouncing, jostling ride made it hard to read. The picture was base on a sidelooking radar view from orbit, with a lot of date added. Green denoted vegetation and pastel overlay, showed cloud cover. It was a jumble till he noticed that Manhattan and the Kansas River were labeled. Kiki zoomed up the magnification. Three red dots were visibly accelerating from a growing pockwork of red dots to the south. The three brightened, still accelerating. "They just broke cloud cover," she explained. Beside each of the dots a moving legend gave what must be altitude and speed.

  "Is this going out over your loudmouth channel?"

  She grinned happily. "Sure is! But not for long." She reached back to point at the display. "We got about two minutes before Al's stationhouse goes boom. I don't want to risk a direct satellite link from the car, and anything else would be even more dangerous."

  Point certain, thought Wil.

  "Geez, this is incredible, just incredible. For two years the Warmongers - that's my club, you know - been watching the Water Wars. We got software, hardware, cryptics everything to follow what's going on. We could predict, and bet against other clubs, but we could never actually participate. And now we have a real roar, right here!" She lapsed into awed silence, and Wil wondered fleetingly if she might be psychopathic, and not merely young and naive.

  "Do you have outside cameras at the police station?" He was asking Kiki as much as Al. "We should broadcast the actual attack."

  The girl nodded. "I grabbed two channels. I got the camera on the comm mast pointing southwest. We'll have public opinion completely nailed on this."

  "Let's see it."

  She made a moue. "Okay. Not much content to it, though." She flopped back onto the front seat. Over her shoulder, Wil could see she had an outsized display flat on her lap. It was another composite picture, but this one was overlaid with cryptic legends. They looked vaguely familiar. Then he recognized them from the movies: They were the old, old shorthand for describing military units and capabilities. The Warmongers Club must have software for translating multispec satellite observations into such displays. Hell, they might even be able to listen in on military communications. And what the girl had said about public opinion -the club seemed to play war in a very universal way. They were crazy, but they might also be damned useful.

  Kiki mumbled something into her command mike, and the flat Al was holding split down the middle: on the left they could follow the enemy's approach with the map, on the right they saw blue sky and farmland and the parking lot by the stationhouse. Wil saw his gunship gleaming in the morning sunlight, just a few meters below the camera's viewpoint.

  "Fifteen seconds. They might be visible if you look south."

  The car swerved toward the shoulder as Jim pointed out the window: "I see 'em!"

  Then Wil did, too. A triple of black insects, silent because of distance and speed. They drifted westwards, disappeared behind trees. But to the camera on the comm mast, they did not drift: they seemed to hang in the sky above the parking lot, death seen straight on. Smoke puffed from just beneath them and things small and black detached from the bodies of the attack craft - which now pulled up. The planes were so close that Wil he could see shape to them, could see sun glint from canopies. Then the bombs hit.

  Strangely, the camera scarcely jolted, but started slowly to pan downward. Fire and debris roiled up around the viewpoint. A rotor section from his flier flashed past - and then the display went gray. He realized that the panning had not been deliberate: The high comm mast had been severed and was toppling.

  Seconds passed and sharp thunder swept over the car, followed by the fast-dying scream of the bombers climbing back into the sky.

  "So much for the loudmouth channels," said Kiki. "I'm for keeping quiet till we get underground."

  Jim was driving faster now. He hadn't seen the display, but the sounds of the explosions were enough to make all but the least imaginative run like hell. The road had been bumpy, but now seemed like washboard. Wil gripped the seat ahead of him. If the enemy connected them with the broadcasts...

  "How far, AI?"

  "Nearest entrance is about four kilometers as the crow flies, but we gotta go all around the Schwartz farm to get to it." He waved at the high, barbed-wire fence along the right side of the road. Corn fields stretched away north of it. In the distance, Wil saw something a harvester? - amidst the green. "It'll take us fifteen minutes='

  "Ten!" claimed Jim emphatically, and the ride became still wilder.

  "- to make it around the farm."

  They crested a low hill. Not more than three hundred meters distant, Wil could see a side road going directly north. "But we could take that."

  "Not a chance. That's on Schwartz land." Big Al glanced at the state trooper. "And I ain't just being law-abiding, Lieutenant. We'd be as good as dead to do that. Jake Schwartz went armadillo about three years ago. See that hulk out there in the field?" He tried to point, but his arm waved wildly.

  "The harvester?"

  "That's no harvester. It's armor. Robot, I think. If you look careful you may see the gun tracking us." Wil looked again. What he had thought was a chaff exhaust now looked more like a high velocity catapult.

  Their car zipped past the T -intersection with the Schwartz road and Wil had a glimpse of a gate, and keep-out signs sur- mounted by what looked like human skulls. The farm west of the side road seemed undeveloped. A copse at the top of a near hill might have hid farm buildings.

  "The expense. Even if it's mostly bluff..."

  "It's no bluff. Poor Jake. He always was self-righteous and a bit of a bully. His police contract was with justice, Inc and he claimed even they were too bleedin'-heart for him. Then one night his kid - who's even stupider than Jake got pig drunk and killed another idiot. Unfortunately for Jake's boy, the victim was one of my customers. There are no amelioration clauses in the Midwest/Justice Inc agreements. Reparations aside, the kid will be locked up for a long time. Jake swore he'd never contract his rights to a court again. He has a rich farm, and since then he's spent every gAu from it on more guns, more traps, more detectors. I hate to think how they live in there. There are rumors he's brought in deathdust from the Hanford ruins, just in case anybody succeeds in getting past everything else."

  Oh boy. Even the armadillos up north rarely went that far.

  The last few minutes Kiki had ignored them, all her attention on the strategy flat on her lap. She wore a tiny headset and was mumbling constantly into her command mike. Suddenly she spoke up. "Oops. We
're not going to make it, Big Al." She began folding the displays, stuffing them back into her equipment boxes. "I monitored. They just told their chopper crews to pick us up. They got us spotted easy. Two, three minutes is all we have."

  Jim slowed, shouted over his shoulder. "How about if I drop you and keep going? I might be kilometers gone before they stop me." Brierson had never noticed any lack of guts among the unarmed police services.

  "Good idea! Bye!" Kiki flung open her door and rolled off into the deep and apparently soft vegetation that edged the road.

  "Kiki!" screamed Big Al, turning to look back down the road. They had a brief glimpse of comm and processor boxes bouncing wildly through the brush. Then Kiki's blond form appeared for an instant as she dragged the equipment deeper into the green.

  From the trees behind them they could hear the thupthupthup of rotors. Two minutes had been an overstatement. Wil leaned forward. "No, Jim. Drive like hell. And remember: there were only three of us."

  The other nodded. The car squealed out toward the center of the road, and accelerated up past eighty. The roar and thump of their progress momentarily drowned out the sound of pursuit. Thirty seconds passed, and three helicopters appeared over the tree line behind them. Do we get what they gave the stationhouse? An instant later white flashed from their belly guns. The road ahead erupted in a geyser of dirt and rock. Jim stepped on the brakes and the car swerved to a halt, dipping and bobbing among the craters left by the shells. The car's engine died and the thumping of rotors was a loud, almost physical pressure around them. The largest craft settled to earth amidst its own dust devil. The other two circled, their autocannons locked on Big Al's Lincoln.

  The passenger hatch on the grounded chopper slid back and two men in body armor hopped out. One waved his submachine gun at them, motioning them out of the car. Brierson and the others were hustled across the road, while the second soldier went to pick up the equipment they had in the car. Wil looked back at the scene, feeling the dust in his mouth and on his sweating face- the ashes of humiliation.

  270

  His pistol was pulled from its holster. All aboard, gentlemen." The words were spoken with a clipped, Down West accent.

  Wil was turning when it happened: A flash of fire and a muffled thud came from one of the hovering choppers. Its tail rotor disappeared in a shower of debris. The craft spun uncontrollably on its main rotor and fell onto the roadway behind them. Pale flame spread along fuel lines, sputtering in small explosions. Wil could see injured crew trying to crawl out.

  "I said get aboard." The gunman had stepped back from them, his attention and the muzzle of his gun still on his captives. Wil guessed the man was a veteran of the Water Wars - that institutionalized violence which New Mexico and Aztlan called "warfare between nations." Once given a mission, he would not be distracted by incidental catastrophes.

  The three "prisoners of war" stumbled into the relative darkness of the helicopter's interior. Wil saw the soldier still standing outside look back toward the wreck, and speak emphatically into his helmet mike. Then he hopped on and pulled the hatch to. The helicopter slid into the air, hanging close to the ground as it gradually picked up speed. They were moving westwards from the wreck, and there was no way they could look back through the tiny windows.

  An accident? Who could have been equipped to shoot down an armored warcraft in the middle of Kansas fields? Then Wil remembered: Just before it lost its tail, the chopper had drifted north of the roadway, past the high fence that marked Armadillo Schwartz's land. He looked at Big Al, who nodded slightly. Brierson sat back in the canvas webbing and suppressed a smile. It was a small thing on the scale of the invasion, but he thanked God for armadillos. Now it was up to organizations like the Michigan State Police to convince the enemy that this was just the beginning, that every kilometer into the ungoverned lands would cost them similarly.

  One hundred and eighty kilometers in six hours. Republican casualties: one motorcycle/truck collision, and one helicopter crash that probably a mechanical failure, Edward Strong, Special Advisor to the President, felt a satin fled smile come to his lips every time he glanced at the situation board. He had seen more casualties on a Freedom. Day parade through downtown Albuquerque. His own analysis for the President - as well as the larger, less imaginative analysis from JCS -had predicted that extending the Republic through Kansas to the Mississippi would be almost trivial. Nevertheless, after having fought meter by bloody meter with the fanatics of Aztlan, it was a strange feeling to be advancing hundreds of kilometers each day.

  Strong paced down the narrow aisle of the Command and Control van, past the analysts and clerks. He stood for a moment by the rear door, feeling the air-conditioning billow chill around his head. Camouflage netting had been laid over the van, but he could see through it without difficulty: green leaves played tag with shadows across pale yellow limestone. They were parked in a wooded creek bed on the land Intelligence had bought several years earlier. Somewhere to the north were the barracks which now confined the people Intelligence had imported, allegedly to work the farms. Those laborers had provided whatever legal justification was needed for this move into the ungoverned lands. Strong wondered if any of them realized their role - and realized that in a few months they would be free of poverty, realized that they would own farms in a land that could be made infinitely more hospitable than the deserts of the Southwest.

  Sixteen kilometers to the northeast lay Manhattan. It was a minor goal, but the Republic's forces were cautious. It would be an important - though small - test of their analysis. There were Tinkers in that town and in the countryside beyond. The precision electronics and related weapons that came out of the Tinkers' shops were worthy of respect and caution. Privately, Strong considered them to be the only real threat to the success of the invasion he had proposed to the President three years earlier. (Three years. Of planning, of cajoling resources from other departments, of trying to inject imagination into minds that had been closed for decades. By far the easiest part had been the operations here in Kansas.)

  The results of the move on Manhattan would be relayed from here to General Crick at the head of the armor driving east along Old 70. Later in the afternoon, Crick's tank carriers should reach the outskirts of Topeka. The Old US highway system provided a mode of armored operations previously unknown to warfare. If the taking of Manhattan went as planned, then Crick might have Topeka by nightfall and be moving the remainder of his forces on to the Mississippi.

  Strong looked down the van at the time posted on the situation board. The President would be calling in twenty minutes to witness the move against Manhattan. Till then a lull gapped in Strong's schedule. Perhaps there was time for one last bit of caution. He turned to the bird colonel who was his military liaison. "Bill, those three locals you picked up you know, the protection racket people - I'd like to talk to them before the Chief calls in."

  "Here?"

  "If possible."

  "Okay." There was faint disapproval in the officer's voice. Strong imagined that the Bill Alvarez couldn't quite see bringing enemy agents into the C&C van. But what the hell, they were clean - and there was no way that they could report what they saw here. Besides, he had to stay in the van in case the Old Man showed up early.

  Minutes later, the three shuffled into the conference area at the front of the van. Restraints glinted at their hands and ankles. They stood in momentary blindess in the darkness of the van, and Strong had a chance to look them over: three rather ordinary human beings, dressed in relatively extraordinary ways. The big black wore a recognizable uniform, complete with badges, side-arm holster and what appeared to be riding boots. He looked the model fascist. Strong recognized the Michigan State "Police" insignia on his sleeve. MSP was one of the most powerful gangster combines in the ungoverned lands. Intelligence reported they had some modern weapons - enough to keep their "clients" in line, anyway.

  Sit down, gentlemen." Amidst a clanking of shackles, the three sat, sullen. Be
hind them an armed guard remained standing. Strong glanced at the intelligence summary he had punched up. "Mr., uh, Lieutenant Brierson, you may be interested to know that the troops and aircraft you asked your bosses for this morning have not materialized. Our intelligence people haven't changed their estimate that you were making a rather weak bluff:"

  The northerner just shrugged, but the blond fellow in the outrageously striped shirt -Alvin Swensen, the report named him - leaned forward and almost hissed. "Maybe, maybe not, asshole! But it doesn't matter. You're going to kill a lot of people, but in the end you'll be dragging your bloody tail back south."

  Figuratively speaking, Strong's ears perked up. "How is that, Mr. Swensen?"

  "Read your history. You're stealing from a free people now -not a bunch of Aztlan serfs. Every single farm, every single family is against you, and these are educated people, many with weapons. It may take a while. It may destroy a lot of things we value. But every day you stay here, you'll bleed. And when you've bled enough to see this, then you'll go home."

  Strong glanced at the casualty report on the situation board, and felt laughter stealing up. "You poor fool. What free people? We get your video, your propaganda. But what does it amount to? There hasn't been a government in this part of the continent for more than eighty years. You petty gangsters have the guns and have divided up the territory. Most of you don't even allow your `clients' firearms. I'll wager that the majority of your victims will welcome a government where there is a franchise to be exercised, where ballots and not MSP bullets decide issues.