by Moshe Ben-Or
Two of the missiles found their targets. Almost an entire Zin brigade, wiped out in a pair of nuclear fireballs. Another transport plunged uncontrollably into the atmosphere, riddled by well-aimed laser discharges. The rest fled in a series of jump flashes, still pursued by a few surviving missile warheads. Below them, an entire corps’ worth of men and machines hurtled toward the surface of the planet, mostly unimpeded by weak Mirandan ground fire.
As far as Isabella’s advisors could tell her, this was the enemy’s last spaceborne armored corps in the system. After this drop, any additional major forces the Zin brought to bear against her armies would have to come from outside the theater.
On the battle command display, a fuzzy oval bounded in dashed red line materialized just northwest of Eindhoven. The projected drop zone, perfectly positioned to catch her inexorably advancing armor in the flank as it pierced the enemy’s hastily erected third line of field fortifications. The final piece of targeting data she needed.
The Baroness of Miranda rose from her chair in a fluid display of regal grace. It was all her show now.
“Black Rocket!” she commanded, voice filled with an imperious calm that belied her churning intestines.
The sword. She held it. And now, at her command, it would be unleashed in all of its terrible fury.
Across the situation display, flashing green-edged black dots acknowledged her order as the munitions were launched. The forward edge of battle seemed to pause for a moment. And then the first yellow-and-black striped blotch bloomed just west of Eindhoven. Another, just north of New Amsterdam. Then another, on the outskirts of Zeelundburg this time. And another, and another, and another, black-and-yellow blooms without count, merging into one continuous wave of deadly sunflowers, separating the Mirandans from the Zin.
In the heart of each sunflower reigned a hexagon. The icon denoting its full nature. The three grasping, razor-toothed robotic claws enclosed in a sprocket that denoted a release of war nanites. Ominous skull-and-crossbones signs annotated with letters and numbers that identified deadly chemicals. The weird half-chemical, half-biohazard symbol that denoted sytoxin. And the most terrifying of all terrors – the three-speakers-and-flashbomb bearing a roman numeral and a three-letter designation.
For seven hundred years no object, no symbol, no threat, no thing had terrified men more.
Nuclear weapons and kinetics were devastating, but they killed quickly, cleanly, almost surgically. With luck, one wouldn’t even have time to realize that one was dead.
Radiation and chemicals were insidious, but easily defended against once identified, more a hassle than a true threat to the well-trained, well-equipped warrior.
Biological weapons were terrible, it was true. But against them, at least, there was time to respond, to take measures and fight back as the epidemic built, perhaps even to survive if infected.
The war nanite was an active, adaptive and very lethal threat. It would come after you aggressively, sometimes even chase you as you attempted to flee. It could possibly reproduce and spread; and it could, on some primitive level, think for itself with a collective intelligence not very different from that of a swarm of wasps or a colony of army ants on the march. But against it the friendly defensive nanite, combined with a host of protective machinery, could, in the end, contend.
Ever since its discovery, sytoxin had meant all but certain and painful death even if only a few molecules came into contact with one’s bare skin. But sytoxin was, in the end, just a weird, half-living chemical. Thanks to the great Doctor Freeman and his remarkable anonymous patient, there were now even treatments and antidotes against it; fallen modern mankind’s first achievement to truly best the arts of the Golden Age physician.
But the meme…
It wasn’t even the prospect of death per se that made the meme so terrifying as a weapon of war. It was the way it killed. The things it did to a man.
The first-generation memes, more stumbled upon in the course of neurological research than purposely designed as weapons, weren’t all that scary. True, they could kill, in theory. But they required direct stimulation of the nervous system.
The average victim of a police stunner, an unarmored civilian armed, if at all, with naught more sophisticated than a rock, a stick, or a glass bottle full of flammable liquid, might stand still for a slow-moving pellet designed to render him instantly and safely unconscious. The victim of a humane executioner, strapped helplessly to a gurney, might be unable to resist having needle electrodes shoved into his major nerves. But the well-equipped soldier on the battlefield had little to fear from such toys.
Second-generation memes, basically tweaked first-generation memes designed for dispersal by nanite or chemical carrier, were real weapons of war. But defense against them in essence boiled down to defense against the carriers, the old, familiar standbys that warriors had faced for generations. True, the memes made the carriers more lethal. Alperson’s most infamous poisons could kill a man instantly with just a single molecule because they dispensed second-generation memes. A nanite armed with such a poison was, at least in theory, far more dangerous than one armed with ricin or sarin. But such things didn’t fundamentally alter the face of war.
The third-generation memes were different. No longer was it a matter of stopping a physical object, a complex chemical or a microscopic machine, a thing one could, on some level, touch, feel, somehow destroy as it came near to attack, somehow stop before it came into contact with one’s body.
A weird sound in the fog. A series of strangely pulsating, bright flashes piercing the darkness of a moonless night. A group of odd, impossible shapes flashing suddenly into existence upon a harmless-looking wall. And then, without further warning of any kind…
Paralyzed limbs. Blindness. Madness. Strong, healthy men reduced to quivering balls of despair, weeping helplessly as they curled up on the ground to die. Raving psychopaths running amok, consumed by homicidal rage. Friends, battle-hardened comrades closer than brothers, turning on each other in an instant. Men turned undetectably into slowly ticking timebombs of deadly paranoia. Whole companies and battalions committing mass suicide within minutes, or else falling instantly dead, like puppets whose strings had been cut. Windrows of healthy young corpses with no visible sign of injury, fallen where they stood, still clutching their weapons, still frozen at the controls of their vehicles…
But still there was a defense. If the meme was recognized, interrupted before it had time to fully access the senses, stopped in mid-sound, in mid-flash, in mid-sight…
There were training methods, some dating back millenia, to Buddhist monks and Hindu yogis meditating on windswept mountaintops and beneath leafy trees in search of the self-purification that led to nirvana; others developed laboriously by teams of scientists armed with brain-scanning sensors and biofeedback machines. There were protective devices, special helmets designed to block the eyes and plug the ears, to render the wearer temporarily deaf and blind in an instant, before the human sensory pathways could react to the meme. The most advanced were even able to filter known memes out altogether, preserving sight and hearing in some fashion, however temporarily degraded, even while the meme was actively impacting the wearer.
And still the meme needed a dispenser, a physical device that made sounds, flashed lights, changed shapes somehow. You could find it, attack it, stop it from claiming more victims.
When the flashbomb was marked with a roman three, the blood ran cold, but there was still a defense.
But the memes of the fourth generation…
Adaptable, programmable, self-repairing. Designed to infect minds and electronics with equal fidelity. Almost intelligent, almost sentient in their autonomous, intangible, homicidal viciousness. But worst of all… self-replicating.
No longer was it a question of finding and destroying a group of robots, or a cloud of nanites. Now the victims themselves became dispensers. And it was not just by sound, not just by sight, not just by touch or taste or smell t
hat they attacked.
For there was now a sixth passageway. The impossible. The ultimately insidious. The attack against which there was no defense but a faraday cage.
It would be bad enough to simply need a faraday cage, a layer of foil to wrap around oneself, or a vehicle in which to hide. But there were the already-stricken, one’s erstwhile friends and comrades turned suddenly, without warning, into lethal transmitters of the mind plague. There were the sounds they made. There were the things they did. The things that the meme made them do…
Their names stilled the heart in wordless terror. More even than the nova bomb, they stood as ultimate proof of humanity’s madness. Icons of the Götterdämmerungskrieg.
Zombi. The populations of whole cities turned into herds of shuffling, screeching living corpses wandering randomly around in circles until they dropped dead from dehydration and exhaustion. Maximum telepathic attack range – twenty-five to thirty meters with a freshly-infected human dispenser.
Multera. Raging hordes of homicidal psychopaths rampaging across whole continents, wielding whatever weapons came to hand, from simple clubs to strategic nuclear warheads, in a mad effort to silence the voices screeching for murder from inside their heads. Maximum telepathic attack range with a freshly-infected human brain – up to fifty meters.
Junebug. Row upon row of bodies curled up in the fetal position, forming strange swirls and grids that stretched as far as the eye could see, consuming entire worlds. Maximum telepathic attack range – up to thirty kilometers line of sight with a massed array of six thousand fresh, healthy, young human dispensers working in unison.
Dispersal options for the fourth-generation memes still included the old third-generation standbys, the clouds of nanites, the arrays of miniature robots, the specially-designed cruise missiles working in the audiovisual and radio spectra. These modern artifice could readily replicate, although the resultant copies were markedly inferior to the originals. There was also the most primitive telepathic attack option, a soundproof metal box with a time lock, containing a single infected human, or even a large mammal, pushed out the back of a vehicle or aircraft. Some of Miranda’s Great Houses had kept strains of Zombi and Multera going for centuries, using naught more sophisticated than a series of hapless peasants fetched from the dungeon. There was also the hand-held meme gun, a close-quarters weapon almost as dangerous to the attacker as to the victim, and so used more often as a tool of terror, assassination or last-ditch personal defense than as a weapon of war. And then there were the purpose-built long-range fourth-generation meme dispensers.
Modern engineering could not duplicate them. Modern science did not understand them. Perhaps the Ancients of the Golden Age did not fully understand them either. Or perhaps the secrets of their creation had simply been too closely held and so had perished, like so many other wonders, in the fires of the Götterdämmerungskrieg.
But the modern world could still use them. The treasured, irreplaceable, priceless, deadly relics of an earlier, greater age, preserved carefully for centuries in climate-controlled storage vaults filled with neutral gas. Hoarded against the Day of Need, against the Day of Desperation. Hoarded for today.
There were five of them on Miranda. As the sole surviving offspring of the union of House Zundell with House Rijn, Isabella owned all five. Only Brunhilde still retained the precious telepathic attack circuitry in full working order. The others were just electronic assault cruise missiles now, although far better ones than any such that could be built by modern men.
The two small ones, Gungnir and Mjöllnir, she had given to Otto to launch from the land. Their four-kilometer audiovisual and radioelectronic attack footprints would strike the massed Zin operational reserves outside New Amsterdam, blunting the head of the Zin snake that threatened Miranda’s capital city.
Kara and Rota, with their six-kilometer footprints, would slice across the body of the alien python, dismembering the beast in a series of vicious, scalpel-like zigzags.
And the precious Brunhilde would strike the creature’s brain. She would not cruise back and forth, slowing down to loiter as she dispersed the meme via cumbersome radioelectronic hacking and visual flash, and then speeding up again in order to move to a new area, bobbing and weaving unpredictably as her guiding AI sought to avoid the desperate efforts of every flak laser, cannon and functional small arm in the area to bring her down at all cost. No, Brunhilde would strike last, while the enemy was distracted by her lesser sisters. A single, swift, lethal stroke. A hypersonic pass over the enemy’s primary and secondary army group headquarters, and over the newly-landed spaceborne corps while it was still shaking itself out into pre-battle formations on the drop zone.
Four priceless memory cartridges of Zombi, retrieved from their vault beneath the Purple Palace. And one cartridge of top-grade Multera, the greatest Treasure in all the world, a precious object that never left its secret hiding place inside the Baronial Quarters unless it was carried by a royal hand.
Isabella had personally placed that cartridge into Brunhilde’s waiting receptacle a mere four hours ago, long after the missile boat had put to sea.
No one really knew the extent of Brunhilde’s telepathic footprint, mused the Baroness of Miranda. The data from previous launches were inconclusive, and the surviving documentation was, unfortunately, unclear. But it was at least three kilometers wide.
And there would be no warning. None whatsoever, until the twenty-minute preprogrammed build delay elapsed, and the first wave of homicidal madness manifested itself in its full, horrible fury. And by then it would be too late. As mind after previously infected mind detected the telepathic transmission that signaled the end of the waiting period, the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of unsuspecting enemy soldiers going about their business completely unaware of the monster that had nestled for some minutes inside their brains would, in the blink of an eye, go from disciplined, obedient military automatons to homicidal maniacs screaming and foaming at the mouth as they lashed out at everyone and everything in sight with whatever weapon they had to hand.
From that point forward, any mind, be it human or large mammal, that came within fifty meters of the infected without the protection of a faraday cage would itself succumb to the madness within seconds. Any ear that heard the bizarre, warbling screams without the protection of survey-grade earmuffs, any eye that, without the protection of survey-grade goggles, beheld the mad, shape-shifting, pulsating graffiti that the homicidal lunatics created using any bit of smart paint, smart paper or sophisticated electronics they had to hand, would immediately, inexorably, become the breach in the wall, the passageway whereby the monstrous invader penetrated the fortress of the mind.
The waves of madness and terror would resonate within the body of the alien python, carried along by the very communications links that gave it function, amplified by the very discipline and efficiency that welded a horde of armed individuals into a single, lethal whole. The meme would flash from battle command display to battle command display, from radio net to radio net, enabled by the very passcodes and biometric signatures that protected the Zin communications networks from unauthorized intrusion, spread by the very soldiers charged with the networks’ defense. It would infect the alien python from its brain down to the outermost limits of its grasping reach. Perhaps it would even reach the python’s parent fleet, out there beyond the sky.
Precisely twenty-four hours later, exactly as programmed, the flood of mass madness would crest in a spectacular orgy of murder-suicide, and swiftly ebb away, leaving behind millions of feline corpses strewn amid piles of ruined machinery, and the occasional wandering zombie. It would be glorious.
A quick glance at the battle command display, to verify the integrity and continuity of the WMD barrier that now separated her armies from the enemy. More theater than necessity, really. Behind the wall of protective contaminants, Isabella’s forces were already vanishing back into the mountains and woods of their homeland, like nighttime ghosts diss
olving into the pre-dawn mist.
On the southern edge of enemy-occupied territory she could see the two pencil-thin orange-and-black candystripe lines showing the tracks of Gungnir and Mjöllnir. Electronic intercept reports were already indicating a swift, disciplined enemy response as alerts flashed across the aether and every flak battery, even the few that had heretofore continued to orient their sensors toward the sea, now dropped everything to deal with this terrible new threat.
“You arrogant fools,” thought the mistress of Miranda with gleeful malice, “eighty-two percent of this planet is covered by water. Nine out of ten of us live within twenty kilometers of the sea. Can you really be so stupid as to believe that all we have are cargo ferries and decrepit old police gunboats?”
She was about to rudely disabuse the Zin of their folly.
“Commence our attack run, Herr Oberst,” commanded Isabella, sinking down onto her control chair as if it were a throne, “It is time to teach these creatures precisely why they should have left us at peace.”
“Jawohl, Mein Freifrau!” bowed the detachment commander, clicking his heels.
All night his missile boats had spent sneaking up on the enemy; hiding amid the turbulence made by a chain of geothermal vents; finally drifting silently on the currents, waiting while others fought. Now it was his turn to shine before his Baroness, and he relished every instant of it. Isabella could almost see the glow from the inner fire in his belly as he barked his orders. The voices of the group commanders crackled with excitement as they answered the calls.
“All groups, Black Flag, Black Flag, Black Flag!”
“Group One, ready!”
“Group Two, ready!”
