by Lee Bond
Most importantly, he’d been the only one on the entire planet with access to the orbiting gun-satellites' decryption keys.
Satellites that -for some reason- Barnes had partially primed before being foolish enough to get killed, presumably by Chadsik al-Taryin.
Nickels. All roads led straight back to Garth Nickels.
Alyssa flexed her jaw rhythmically, trying to work out how best to deal with a man that had the protection of the Trinity AI. Nothing. She had nothing. How in the world was she supposed to guarantee to that monstrous thinking machine that a man like Garth –who was a harbinger if there ever was one- wouldn’t simply die one day through misadventure?
“I … see.” Vasily -never on board with the decision to outfit government agents with internal command protocols allowing them to operate the planet’s weapon systems- wasn’t certain how he felt. As a soldier, he naturally believed every gun and weapon in Latelyspace fell under the purview of the military, so he supposed he was temporarily relieved that no one was in control of those gun platforms. The flip side of that coin was that, until very recently, military authority had held no real control within the system. It hadn’t been until Trinity had changed their … agreements … that this had changed. A hundred years later and the Chair was still reluctant to put total control into the hands of men trained in the use of weapons. “I assume, then, that the encryption machine is…”
“Destroyed, yes.” Alyssa interrupted. “How soon can you get some MilInt boys up there to work on the hardware?”
“An hour.” Vasily nodded distractedly at the estimate. This day was all wrong.
Alyssa started cutting orders. “And?”
Vasily read the technical skills of the most qualified men on the planet. It wasn’t pleasing. Without knowing precisely what was wrong, he had to send up a broad-spectrum team. “It’s anyone’s guess for the codebreaking and hardware hacking.”
“Fine.” The Chairwoman settled wearily into her Chair.
Vasily cleared his throat. It was now or never. He could not allow his love to destroy the work of decades because of her personal hatred of Vilmos Gualf.
“I am taking command of this operation, Si Chairwoman.” When the Chairwoman stared at him hard enough to shatter concrete, the OverCommander moved to explain, “It is important that you remain in a positive light, Alyssa. Your relationship with the Trinity representatives is what is keeping them … pliable. Beyond that, the situation here at home is tenuous.”
When Alyssa didn't reply and merely continued to stare at him, Vasily resumed. “If this operation goes anymore pear-shaped, with you identified as the one worth blaming, Vilmos’ actions could very easily prompt another uprising as your actions did. We cannot risk a full-scale civil insurrection, ‘lyssa, not now, not this close. You could die or worse, you could end up in The Peak. Regardless of your internal strengths, in time, they will know all your secrets.
I’ve already proven I can’t talk to the Trinity representatives without threatening to kill them and as resilient as they seem to be towards death threats, it is no way to progress. Every time I open my mouth, I feel as though I’m filling them with suspicions about our true goals. Latelyspace is best served with you at that table.
This Museum Crisis is already out of control and the only way to ensure that any ‘blame’ is shifted to someone with … ahhh … a thicker political skin is if I make myself a target. I’m the OverCommander. I’m a soldier. You know as well as I do that the people are more likely to forgive and forget a hotheaded grunt’s wildly irrational actions than an unflinching politico’s hardhearted decisions. We can weather the coming storm far better than a single woman. We do live in a Regime, yes, and when all is said and done, you could simply Sigma everything into the darkness, but as we’re seeing with Vilmos Gualf, that sort of tactic only works for so long. The fortitude required to find build that list! In order for our …”
“Enough, Vasily.” Alyssa raised a hand to silence the OverCommander and nodded once, very slowly. “What you say … makes sense. I may not like it –I don’t like it- and it will give some people the notion that I’ve lost total control of the military –which will eventually bring its own set of unique problems to the table- but the long-run issues are as you have pointed out. If I am ousted through a full-scale insurrection, not only will our plans die, but millions upon millions of Latelians as well.” She nodded again, decisively. “Very well. Make your statements. Announce your intentions, and above all else, make sure you kill them all. Except, of course, for Garth Nickels.”
“You really believe Trinity’s warnings about this one man and any untimely death he may experience?” Vasily -more than any man in Latelyspace- knew Trinity well enough, but even he found it nearly impossible to believe the AI would seek to protect one lone human so … vindictively.
“I do.” Alyssa stretched her back out, sighing. Her eyes fell on the pile of junk against one wall and she smiled, albeit briefly. She wasn’t the only Chairperson in history to suffer from temper tantrums, but she was definitely the only one to break ancient artifacts. She shook her head ruefully. “I find I am close to deciding that I do not care how important Garth Nickels is to the Trinity AI. Not yet, though. Not just yet.”
Vasily nodded. As with any ‘request’ made by Trinity, it was hard to decipher the machine mind’s true purpose. There was a very real chance that Trinity had made It’s designs for Nickels ‘clear’ for no other reason than to make their lives absolutely miserable; It might not even care when/if Nickels died. It’d done things like this in the past and frankly, no one could do anything one way or the other, except, of course, follow It’s ‘request’ until they failed. Then they would be punished, or not, according to the thirty-thousand year old machine mind’s whimsy.
The OverCommander bent to his new task. Now that Alyssa was stepping back from the front lines, he was going to run the operation properly. The woman he loved was many things, but military tactician would never show up on her resume. Dealing with terrorists was far different than pushing a man out of office.
He sat down at the desk provided for him and set about getting some reliable bloody intelligence on what they were really facing. He was going to have to make himself present at the scene, but he could stretch his time with Alyssa out for a little while longer.
xxx
Chad admired the tenacity of anyone willing to crawl up the side of a wall and onto a fractured glass roof carrying a bundle of electronic gear while being stared at by thousands of people. He was unashamed to admit that he was not the sort of fella who would do something like that, even if there were a damned good reason. It wasn’t the height, because he’d climbed a mountain once to kill someone, so much as it was the pressure of all those people staring. All those tiny little eyes staring into the back of his head, carrying the weight of their thoughts… the Voice wailed miserably at the notion and Chad wished he had more drugs.
Killing Bolo before finding a drug connection might've been something of a mistake, as was his decision to trap himself inside The Museum with The Job and a raving pile of stark nutters. Like the climber. Chad beamed. His thoughts had traveled in a perfect circle. Brilliant.
Personally, Chad thought the Human Fly was at least partially mad to stick pitons into that glass ceiling, especially following the sonic gun attack the God soldiers had perpetrated on the building. In cutting through the blast doors, the assault team had come petrifyingly close to hitting the sympathetic vibration point of The Museum; prior to the mammoth explosion, everything in the vast had wailed, groaned, and shuddered like a drunken whore.
As a result, the meter thick ‘window’ which the man was about to start properly climbing on was laced with a crazed spider web of cracks, some of which were as wide as a hand. All it would take was a single misplaced piton and the world would come crashing down on many people, his own self included.
When the climber pulled out a cutting laser and began patiently slicing his way through to t
he outside world, Chad had had quite enough.
Chad nudged the woman sitting next to him. “Oy … hey, wot… you’re not the bonny lad wot was ‘ere a few minutes ago. Where’d ‘e sod off to?” Chad looked around the room, finding his departed friend a few seconds later. He glared. It was hard enough to make a friend, let alone more than one.
“Don’t talk to me.” The woman whispered, voice full of panic. “You’re getting people killed.”
“I don’t fuckin’ fink so, lass, as I would remember killin’ someone. Most of the time, anyway.” Well, it wasn’t so much that he’d remember killing them. It was more like he’d come to over the body and realize that The Voice had taken control again. It was the same thing, really. Chad watched the climber with sudden interest.
The man –hanging upside perilously high above them- was carefully levering what resembled nothing more than metal baseballs through a hole he’d bored through the thick window. As each of the orbs popped through, they immediately sprouted legs and tottered precariously off and out of sight. Fascinating.
“You don’t kill them. You make people nervous, so they get up and move away, which makes them,” the woman pointed furtively at the terrorists, who were also watching the climber with repulsed interest, “nervous as well. Don’t you remember? The last man ran down the middle of the aisle screaming and got shot?”
Chad played the dream sequence back in his mind, fiddling with an earlobe. “That weren’t a dream?” He scratched the side of his head. “I thought certain it was. Bugger me.” He shrugged. Dismissing the conversation with a flick, Chad turned his attention back to the climber and his antics. “Anyways, my fine and sexy lass, wot in the fuckin’ ‘ell is that bloke doin’, do ya fink? Answer me quick now, luv, else it’ll be suspicious terrororists.”
“I think they’re cambots.” The man from behind answered quietly. “Now please, shut up.”
“Ah.” Chad nodded, pleased. If they were cameras, he could see what was going on outside; he was quite interested in that as his Kiv-crackers had done quite a number on the outer Museum walls. Both the terrorist leader Vilmos Gualf and whoever was sitting outside their doorstep had to be sincerely concerned about that.
Chad set one of the many onboard programs in his brain to scanning the local airwaves and refocused on the climber. “Now that is summink I didn’t expect to see, not in this little spot o’ piss.” He pointed to the man on the ceiling.
Hanging precariously from the middle of the immense glass dome, the climber oriented a cannon he’d carried across his back until it was pointing at a likely location on the lip just under where the glass met the wall. He took a few readings on projected stability before firing. The hiss and crack of the midnight black steel-VI cylinders drew startled gasps from the prisoners, but he kept on working until he’d placed fifteen containers, in a, staggered circle around the center. Then he cut his mooring line and did a neat looking abseil-pirouette around the remaining Sheets, landing with relative grace out of sight.
“What’re those?” The woman asked, forgetting that Chad was -next to an early spot of panic- the leading cause of death in terrorist-held prisoners.
“Hold on a sec, luv. You isn’t wantin’ to miss this next bit.” Chad pointed to the cylinders; the ends were starting to glitter crazily, and if he listened carefully, the sound of wires being prepared inside each canister was unmistakable. A few seconds more …
Forty-five simultaneous cracks filled the large amphitheater, eliciting screams of doubt from some of the older people and outright crying from many young children. To the unprepared viewers, it’d sounded as though the window was finally giving in, but this wasn’t the case.
Far above their heads, the fifteen cylinders had launched three individual inner-core tubes across the gap into the opposite lip. Everyone capable of rational thought after the initial burst of sound gaped at the sight of a vague impression of a net forming before their very eyes. The longer they stared, the more visible the net became.
“What did they do? What is that?” The man behind Chad –also willing to forget the unanimous ban on Chadsik al-Taryin conversations- asked, craning his head around, eyeing the black, shining net nervously.
“Filanet.” Chad proclaimed, his heart warming up to the terrorists. “Er, sorry luv, ‘s prop’ly called ‘monofilament net mesh’ but bugger me backwards if filanet ain’t better soundin’. ‘ s a Trinity ‘weapon’, innit? Wot it does, right, is, well, you’ve sort of seen wot it does, but wot you can’t see is the summink like six thousand meters of monofilament wire now spread out between the mummy,” he indicated the tubes buried half of their length into the wall, “and the daddy cylinders on the uvver side. The bits you can see are the bits where there’s quite a bit of crossover, yeah? Now, there is two fings you orter know about filanet. One is that it’s very, very sharp.”
“And the other?”
“Oh, well, that.” Chad shrugged nonchalantly. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a conversation with a woman where someone wasn’t screaming. It was interesting. “Two is that it’s sharp enough to fillet God soldiers, I reckon.”
Chad’s mad eyes shone brightly at the woman’s reaction. He continued unabated. “Oh yeah, my little missy, if some of your fellas come bouncin’ frough that glass, two fings will happen. One is that the glass will be scissored up nice and fine so us as is down ‘ere won’t necessarily get chopped up into bits our own selfs. Two is that the moment they start lowerin’ themselves down, I expect someone will shoot their wires or wotever, and, as they fall, they will be cut into tiny little pieces of metal and meat. I is very excited. Bound to be gory, yeah?” He clapped his hands. As far as deterrents went, filanet was brutally efficient.
The woman made to speak but just then, Chad’s search program located the frequencies for the cambots. His inner mind flared to life with images of the outside world. He held up a pale hand. “Hold on a mo, there, luv, I is watching summink on television. Crikey.”
Military Engagements are a Bitch
Now that the situation was a proper military endeavor, the God Army –with OverCommander Vasily’s permission- was going to play the game differently.
From their viewpoint, they were -or soon would be- in total command. In light of waning support and appreciation for the massive army that’d kept Latelyspace a Sovereign System for a full five thousand years, they were going to use the unprecedented opportunity of Vilmos Gualf’s terrorist act to shed new light on the God soldier Army. The citizens of Latelyspace, and more specifically the significantly more indulged people of Hospitalis, needed reminding that they owed their freedom from Trinity to them.
The leaders of the Army were planning their reminders in such a way that it would be at least another five millennia before people started forgetting.
While the swing away from military action outside their own system had diminished the need for technological advances in weaponry, Military Research and Development teams had continued forward, using the inventiveness and ingenious thinking inherent in all Latelians to push the envelope further and further, if for no other reason than they had nothing better to do.
Military grandstanding on the books or not, the first order of business was reconnaissance.
With the destruction of the netLINK relays for five solid miles around The Museum, they simply couldn’t dial in to the building’s systems. Even if they could, every square inch of those systems was undoubtedly heavily encrypted with terrorist malware by now, something radicals seemed inherently good at producing.
All they’d accomplish by doing that was gift-wrapping Intel to Vilmos. Nor would they even dream of asking the Chairwoman to gather the data for them. Under calm circumstances asking the Chair to use the Prometheus Device for ‘mundane reasons’ was suicidal. Knowing her mood as he did, Vasily suspected Alyssa would blossom into a full-blown despot right there on the spot.
Better to go quietly until they knew more.
“This,” Tech Specia
list Captain Simpson announced to his commanding officer, “is the perfect time to try the wallEye.” The military science geek held one of the devices out to Vasily, who took it and then started rapping on it with a knuckle.
“How does it work?” Vasily rattled it back and forth. It wasn’t that he was overly concerned about the ‘wallEye’ construction. Well, mostly: Military R&D boys were just as overzealous in their approach to their function as were God soldiers. As a result, they often missed key precautions. The difference between a Goddie forgetting to do something and a scientist skipping a step was usually in the neighborhood of a single plot in a graveyard and a freshly dug cemetery, so it paid to ask the ‘stupid’ question.
“We, er, shoot the wallEye into a … a wall, sa.” Tech Specialist Captain Simpson stammered, petrified at the conciliatory tone in his voice but unable to stop. “And … it … sends pictures back to us?”
Vasily closed his eyes and counted to five in IndoRussian. “It is a very good thing that you kept that at the fifth grade level, Technology Specialist Lieutenant Simpson, else your OverCommander, who authored a paper on military applications of microcellular scanning techniques, might never have understood that it takes ‘pictures’.”
Simpson made an odd noise and saluted, standing so ramrod straight he could feel his spine stretch.
Ignoring his Tech Specialist for the moment, Vasily began drawing a dispersal pattern of wallEyes on the tactical Sheet before him. When he was ready, he looked at Simpson, who was still at attention. “These locations aren’t absolutely precise, but they will do. I want three different types of wEye launched. Thermal, audio, and mineral. Configure the mineral scanner for non-traditional metals and/or alloys, with specific focus on Trinity-used materials.”
