by John Barnes
A space opened around the armored personnel carrier as people drifted back into alleys, or behind cars, a mob that all wanted to be bystanders—out of the situation but not so far they couldn’t see it.
The DN-7 looked like most APCs since World War II; the triple auto-turrets on top, only ten centimeters high, were remote-controlled, so that the operator watched through cameras and aimed and fired without being exposed to enemy fire. Fly-eye bubbles in the center of the roof and on all the corners meant there would be no blind spots, and the turrets were far enough out to sweep anywhere from next to the wheels to dead overhead. The black and brown glop on the road showed where the DN-7’s foam-cored tires, invulnerable to bullets, had succumbed to the biotes.
“Bold Hammer One, this is Bold Hammer Four, I have you visually and I’m approaching behind the crowd surrounding you,” Carlucci said. I guess we’re Operation Bold Hammer, Bambi thought.
“Bold Hammer Four, this is Bold Hammer One, I copy.” The accent was slight; federales in Sinaloa worked so often with their American counterparts that most were fluently bilingual.
“How you doing in there, Lieutenant?” Carlucci asked.
“Not bad. No injuries. If we could move we’d be fine.”
“What’s the situation with Bold Hammer Two and Three?”
“Could be an hour till they get here.”
“Does the passenger understand that if she tries to run in any direction except into our vehicle, that mob will kill her?”
“Yes, Bold Hammer Four, she understands that. She’s terrified. Let me see if she’s willing to try the transfer.” During the long pause, Carlucci worked the loudspeaker, telling people to go home, explaining that he was the FBI, that they were going to take the prisoner into custody, that it was vital for her to be captured alive and unharmed for interrogation. He reminded everyone that Mexico had been hit hard by Daybreak, too, and that “on this issue we are allies and shoulder to shoulder; this is no way to treat a friend and an ally.” Over and over, he urged everyone to head for home.
The DN-7 had armored extensions around its main troop door that could reach out to the Hummer, but Murphy’s Law dictated that the door would be on the far side. Making a virtue out of necessity, Carlucci drove the Hummer in a slow circle around the DN-7, twice, as if just trying to clear the crowd; more of them faded away, leaving the street almost empty except for a few stragglers.
“Not much of a mob, now,” Bolton observed. “Back to being pain-in-the-ass civilians.”
“That’s the way I prefer them,” Mensche said.
As he finished the second circuit, Carlucci said, “Mensche, I’m going to match your door up to their troop door; the extensions will slam out at you, then you open. Drag Roth in if she isn’t moving fast enough. Castro, try to look friendly and welcoming—as freaked as Roth must be by now, she might bolt in the direction of a woman who looks sympathetic.”
As the armored extensions thudded against the body of the Hummer, Mensche flung the doors outward, and the troop door retracted vertically. Two masked GAFEs in uniform threw a small woman in a baggy green coverall forward; Mensche caught her and turned in his seat, dragging her across his lap. Bambi pulled her the rest of the way in by the shoulders; Mensche slammed the door and shouted “Go!”
They had covered four blocks when the left front tire blew; Carlucci said, “Sniper, hardware store—” before a hole appeared in the windshield and he barked as a slug hit him on the Kevlar vest. He crouched low and zagged into a side street to the left; Bolton and Mensche had lowered their windows and returned fire; Bambi was lying across Roth to protect her.
Another shot clanged harshly off the rear fender.
“Just one shooter I think,” Bolton reported, “and he’s running. Give it a block and hope the rims hold out.”
“They’re supposed to.”
In a residential street, they stopped and Bolton and Bambi jumped out to look at the situation.
The spare was dripping off its rim; it looked like lumpy chocolate pudding. “It was exposed to the biotes and it wasn’t being sprayed with antiseptic.”
“Yeah, the spray for the tires was so the car wouldn’t spread germs—not because anyone ever thought anything would eat it.” Bolton folded out a spray gadget from the roof, sprayed the pavement, stood on it, and wetted himself all over.
Bambi followed his example. “I’d just like someone to know that I’m probably destroying the last good Italian suit I’m ever going to wear.”
Bolton snorted. “I started out in fire and bombs, where you buy the cheapest suit you can ’cause you’re always buying new ones. This thing’s all poly; it’ll probably rot off me by nightfall.”
Every tire on the cars on the street was rotted and flat, but knocking on doors, Bambi found an older lady willing to donate the apparently unharmed spare from a pickup parked in her garage.
They finally returned to the FBI office on Aero Drive four hours after setting out; the Mexican troops got there almost immediately after, having walked the whole way. Only two more of the ten expected observers for the interrogation had arrived; both were local.
Carlucci said, “I vote for showers and food all around; there’s lunchmeat and bread in the fridge, and we might as well eat it since god knows how long the power will stay on. Ms. Roth?”
The girl looked up, dazed; she had said nothing other than that she wasn’t in pain and didn’t need water, on the whole trip in. “Yeah,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“What I wanted to ask,” he said gently, “is if you’d like to clean up. I understand you’re a vegetarian; I’m afraid all we have is a tub of coleslaw and some bottled water, and every shop I’ve seen on the trip had a sign saying ‘No more food.’ But you might feel better if you ate something. You do realize you’re safer here than you would be anywhere else?”
“Yeah.” She drew a deep breath. “Look, I…” She appeared to be trying to pull her mind together. “Um. Okay, here’s the thing. I know this will sound like I’m trying to fake insanity or something, you know? I’m sure it will. But… I feel like I just woke up from some weird, godawful dream, and I remember doing it but I can’t believe it. It just doesn’t make any sense to me, ’kay? ” She looked around. “I’m just think—” Roth went limp. Bambi barely caught her before she hit the floor, and lowered her gently.
Roth’s muscles were cramping hard enough to be visible through her clothing, and her breath was irregular and violent. It was plainly some kind of seizure, but not one Bambi had ever seen, or heard about in any first aid class.
ABOUT FORTY MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 1:00 P.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.
Norcross was on time, though just barely—one small advantage of Daybreak was that media were having a hard time communicating with home offices, so the spectacular almost-crash-landing at Reagan National had not created a media barricade to force his way through. For the moment, cars continued to run in Washington, and his limo got right through to St. Elizabeth’s, though the blown tires on the Low on Taxes, High on Jesus Express—despite an immediate scouring of the runway with steam and acid—had probably brought the tire-destroying biotes to the city, if they hadn’t already arrived with someone sneaking past the military checkpoints via back roads.
Norcross immediately set about learning everyone’s name and position, and freely admitted it when he didn’t know what a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Technology did. This guy not only wants the job, he’s determined to do it, Heather thought. I guess I wish I didn’t feel like I’ d have to take a shower after voting for him. She glanced sideways at Lenny, who looked like he wasn’t quite sure what was wrong with a bite of pickle.
“Definitely knows how to work a room,” she whispered.
“Shhh. I’m trying hard not to like him.”
Shaunsen arrived fifteen minutes late, cheerfully apologizing. He told them all he had a couple of vital meetings on the Hill, so they would still have to finish on time.
Dwight Ferein, the Secretary for Homeland Security, did everything he was supposed to do: He was dignified, concerned, warm, and very brief. “He wears a suit well,” Lenny muttered.
“Cam wears his better.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t have huge silver hair and a red tie. Who’s gonna trust a skinny young Asian guy when there’s a photogenic old white poop available?” Lenny added, very softly, “Hey, one benefit coming up. Won’t matter anymore how people look on TV. We could elect Abe Lincoln again.”
Cameron cleared his throat; the muttering in the room died; and Cam raced through the foreign-enemy versus system-artifact issue. Shaunsen asked no questions; Norcross made up for it with focused, did-his-homework probes for details, systematically setting appointments between DHS and Norcross staff. That didn’t take much time.
That brought them to Jim Browder’s side of the presentation. “Cameron flatters me that I’m good at pulling the basic science together for this; I’d like to thank Dr. Tyson, Dr. Puller, Dr. Chin, and Dr. Kayan for explaining it to me and for sitting here waiting to pounce on my first error.” Nervous laughter died quickly.
“We had a mystery from Air Force Two, about the plumes of smoke right after the explosion and crash.” His bulldog glare stabbed out between his thick single brow and the reading glasses that perched on his nose like a doll’s glasses on a bear. “They were carrying about twelve tons of pure sodium. There are far better chemical weapons and incendiaries than that and we know they had access to most of the modern arsenal. The only conceivable use for so much sodium was if they were trying to enhance the fallout from a thermonuclear weapon.
“Furthermore, we did find traces of deuterium—heavy hydrogen, the raw material for hydrogen bombs. But instead of the tritium that is usually used to enhance and catalyze the fusion reaction, we found traces of helium-3; a preliminary model shows they might have had as much as a kilogram of helium-3 on that plane, which is superficially insane—any college senior in physics can make tritium with some standard industrial equipment, but helium-3 is hard to extract, hard to work with, much more expensive and scarce—”
Shaunsen nodded. “I know helium-3 is fusible, and I’ve looked at projects to get it from deep ocean vents or the moon’s surface. I’m guessing that if it’s worth going to the moon for, they don’t sell it at the corner store.”
Norcross nodded and said, “Tell us what’s interesting about this.”
“Well,” Browder said, “it’s nonradioactive, so it would be hard to detect, and it’s so scarce and expensive we don’t look for it at all. And a helium-3/ deuterium H-bomb would put out a lot of energy and a lot of neutrons, the neutrons would have transmuted the sodium-23 into sodium-24, and you’d have had a real horror weapon there. But normally a hydrogen bomb needs a regular fission bomb, with uranium or plutonium, as its trigger, and there should have been a lot of fissionable material in the smoke plume or the wreckage or both.”
Norcross nodded. “So your mystery is, why would they use the most difficult to obtain, expensive stuff? And then neglect to have a trigger?”
“Exactly what we’re saying, Mr. Norcross. We think the enemy has a helium-3 source somewhere—a deep ocean vent, a gas well that happens to be rich in it, or maybe a volcano, or just possibly the Iranian-Chinese moon expedition last year did some unannounced experiments with lunar regolith and extracted some helium-3. As for why it looks like they built a pretty good little hydrogen bomb, and then forgot to put a trigger on it, the pieces we found look like they may have at least believed they had a working ‘pure fusion’ bomb.”
“Didn’t we have a treaty to deal with those?” Shaunsen demanded.
“An executive agreement because they didn’t think they could get it through the Senate. The Obama Administration halted our research, and most of the world’s governments agreed not to work on it, because from a peace and weapons-control standpoint a pure fusion bomb is about as bad as it gets: made out of common or nonradioactive materials, so it’s hard to detect; most of what’s in it is off-the-rack industrial stuff. Can be made arbitrarily small—I don’t mean the space one fits into, though that might be very small, I mean that unlike a regular atom bomb, it doesn’t have a minimum blast equivalent to a thousand tons or more of TNT; theoretically they could miniaturize it and use it as freely as gunpowder, but the temperature it creates, right where it goes off, would still be hotter than the face of the sun. So it would erase the line between nuclear and conventional. And it doesn’t require any testing that anyone could detect—you could do little tabletop lab experiments to find out most of what you had to, with no big flashes visible from orbit, or seismograph signatures or messy craters to inform anyone what you were up to. And not least, a lot of little pure fusion bombs would be much more effective at setting a big city on fire than one big ordinary H-bomb. From the standpoint of keeping atomic energy away from human skin, the pure fusion bomb is a complete nightmare—undetectable, mostly made of cheap stuff, scalable, didn’t require testing, probably more effective, what’s not to be afraid of?”
“That was a good agreement,” Shaunsen said. “Too bad the Republicans kept us from making it a treaty, and now we’re stuck with these gadgets.”
“Well, here’s our concern for right now. The only thing that kept pure fusion bombs from making the whole world worse was that we didn’t have the right mix of knowledge and materials till recently. And with Daybreak, we probably won’t have the materials for much longer. But if they managed to build one at all—and with determination and enough computing capacity, it’s just conceivable that they did—there’s no reason to think that Daybreak, or il’Alb, or whoever would have built just one. I’ve been over what we know about the technical skills and resources of the cells and AGs that still have not done their thing, and seven of them might have pure fusion—”
Shaunsen rose. “I just looked at the time. I’ve got a major reconstruction bill to review at the Senate; the country needs to get moving and fixing things. I leave the defense decisions in your capable hands.”
The Secret Service closed ranks around him, and he was gone.
“Well,” Will Norcross said, “I’m free.”
THE EASTERN PACIFIC, SOUTHWEST OF LOS ANGELES. ABOUT 11:00 A.M. PST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.
When Grady and Tracy finally arose, they carefully removed one of their shortwave radios from its sealed glass jar. The few news broadcasts they could find all told the same story. Grady snarled, “Fuckers. They’re hunting us down.” A whole commune had been massacred near Santa Fe.
“Then we want to be at sea for as long as we can,” Tracy said. “Southwest for the next few weeks; there’ll be somewhere in the South Pacific for us.” They crowded on sail in the fresh breeze and turned their backs on North America. “We’ll come back when it’s on sale again,” she said. “We’re full up on supplies; let’s not go home and be hanged from a phone pole.”
They were still idly talking about the cool new world to come when a phone rang, and they both jumped. Grady went below and found it, ringing away just as if the Big System were not gone. Apparently there was less nanoswarm down here than up on the deck.
Caller ID just showed that it was coming in from an overhead satellite; of course the nanoswarm couldn’t get at the satellites and not all the ground stations would be out yet. Could be anyone with direct satellite on any of the worldnets, even just a wrong number or a solicitation call from a charity. Curiosity overpowered Grady—what if it’s the last phone call I ever receive? “Hello?”
“Hello, Mr. Barbour. This is Nautical Specialties.”
The name was familiar, but Grady couldn’t remember from where.
“Uh, is this a sales call?”
“Customer service. We are calling you to ask about the specialty work you had us do in the hull of your vessel, the Mad Caprice. We wanted to make sure that the secret vault in the false hull is still satisfactory.”
“Uh, yeah, I looked there just before we l
eft on this, uh, vacation, and it was, you know, cool. Everything was dry and everything was there that was supposed to be.” Like hell was he going to talk about that half ton of gold on the phone.
“And just to make sure, you remember the sealed part of the vault, that was to be accessed by our technicians only—you remember that it contains our patented moisture-control equipment, and that it would void the warranty if you were to enter that sealed area?”
“We haven’t touched it, really.”
“We had sort of hoped to inspect it when you came in to Los Angeles in a few days, if you remember—”
“We won’t be—” What the hell? This guy seemed to know too much. Tracy would be all over his case if he told them anything about where he was going, but it couldn’t hurt to tell them where they weren’t. “Uh, look, we changed our minds, sorry, but we’re not going to LA, so if—”
“Well, in that case, we just have one more question and then we’ll be done with you.”
“Oh, okay, sure.”
“Does your snotty, stupid wife still have big tits, and do you still have a tiny brain to match your tiny dick?”
“I—hey, what the—”
During Grady Barbour’s last instant of existence, his brain was signaling his mouth to form the word fuck, but the signal never arrived. Mad Caprice, Grady, Tracy, and several million liters of water vanished in a ball of solar-temperature plasma; across the next few minutes, the fireball rose and cooled, the steam condensed, and the mushroom cloud formed.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. A CAVE IN EASTERN AFGHANISTAN. 12:05 A.M. LOCAL TIME. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.
The men watched the screen in some amazement; even from low orbit, a smallish nuclear detonation is still impressive. “The last bit was just at the behest of the Daybreak AG that built the gold vault for him,” the man who had been on the phone explained, in English; the five men at the table had nineteen languages among them, but English was the only one they all had fluently. “The carpenter must’ve guessed something of what I had given him to install behind the vault, and he asked me to give him that message just before I ‘used that thing,’ as he put it. Since the test shot on Air Force Two didn’t happen, we had to use this as an alternate test, so I had to contact them by direct satellite phone to run down their position and buy the time on an orbital camera to watch the test. I had to talk to them anyway, so it didn’t hurt me to do a favor for a friend.”
