The Fall of the Republic (The Chronoplane Wars Book 2)

by Crawford Kilian

“By noon. The president will sign it by two this afternoon, or he’ll wish he had. This time tomorrow we’ll be in the IF.”

  Jaz was drinking instant coffee on the couch. Her beautiful face was pale.

  “What’s the matter?” Pierce asked.

  “You killed Jonathan, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have to? Did you really have to?”

  “He did,” Wigner said quietly. “Jerry saved my life. They would have killed me by now, Jaz. I had no way out. Jonathan was…crazy. He kept telling Phelan to hurry up and finish me off. I couldn’t make him see reason, couldn’t talk to him. And this was the man who brought me into the Agency, the man I looked up to.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “I did look up to him once. I really did. But he couldn’t learn, couldn’t grow, couldn’t change.”

  Jaz put her hands over her face and began to cry. Pierce squatted beside her and patted her shoulder.

  “We had to, Jaz. To protect all those people out there, all those people who’d suffer and die if we didn’t take care of them.”

  “I’m scared,” she sobbed. “Oh God, I’m so scared. I didn’t want to kill anybody.”

  “You didn’t, Jaz. You didn’t.” Pierce’s voice was gentle. “Don’t blame yourself,”

  “Why not? I could’ve left you in the tunnels. I could’ve stayed home and left you to go rescue Eric on your own. But I had to come and help kill him.”

  “Jaz, it’s all right,” Wigner said. “You know what you did? You saved the world, that’s all. Good Lord, the Wabbies would have won if you hadn’t helped. It’s as simple as that.”

  “It’s never as simple as that.”

  Sunlight, reflecting from some office window across the street, threw yellow diamonds on the spotted carpeting.

  Bill 402 passed in the House and was sent at once to the Senate, where it was ratified in fifteen minutes. Half an hour later the president signed it into law.

  “This marks the end of over three years of emergency,” he said for the cameras. “I am confident that it means we have turned the comer into a new era of peace and hope and unprecedented opportunity. The next step will be to take our rightful place in the International Federation, and then to work for the peaceful and orderly development of the downtime chronoplanes. At the same time we will bend every effort to ascertain the nature of the tragedy that struck the worlds of the future, and we will ensure that our own world escapes that fate.”

  Wigner put down his can of Heineken and laughed. “The old bastard would rather have chewed broken glass than make that speech,” he said.

  Pierce smiled. He had napped for a time and had just wakened. “Where’s Jaz?”

  “Gone home. She says she’s going back to L.A. to visit her family.”

  “Too bad. 1 liked having her around.”

  “She has served her purpose.”

  Early that evening in Mountain Home, Doria was washing dishes and LaMar went to answer a knock at the front door.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Friend of your old buddy Wes McCullough.”

  She heard the latch click, the chain rattle, and then a thump as the door slammed against the wall. The stranger’s voice was deep and loud.

  “You the son of a bitch gave Wes that program.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The virus, the fucking virus. The trap.”

  “What are you talking about?’ LaMar repeated. Doria crept to the doorway into the living room. “Dumb bastard. We got hold of Wes today and he told us everything. Soon as he told us you was drivin’ a gook car, we knew you wasn’t no Brother. Fuckin’ Hyundai, pretending to be loyal Americans. Well, by order of the White American Brotherhood, you are hereby executed, asshole.”

  The crash of the gun was horribly loud, louder than LaMar’s cry of surprise. Doria burst into the living room, seeing LaMar sprawled on the floor with blood gushing from his chest and back, seeing a man in a pea jacket with a watch cap pulled down low over his eyes, seeing the.45 swing toward her and not caring, just running straight for the man with her hands outstretched like futile claws, straight for him, straight for

  CHAPTER XIX

  “This is absurd,” said Wigner. “Here we’ve overthrown the government, changed the course of history, and if we so much as go back to our apartments for a change of clothes and a beer, some stray Agency goon is likely to take a shot at us. Let’s hope the government restores law and order before we starve to death here.”

  West 38th was deserted all day, except for an occasional National Guard patrol and a few furtive pedestrians. Pierce and Wigner napped, woke, drank tea, and heated some canned soup. In the evening, music drifted up from the street, echoing from the buildings. Pierce stood at the window and looked down. Three men playing accordions came casually down the sidewalk: their breaths fluttered white in the chill light of the street lamps.

  “Look,” he said quietly to Wigner.

  As if the music had been a signal, people began to emerge from the buildings. Many, in wrinkled clothes, looked as if they had been holed up for a couple of days. But they walked easily, naturally, and sometimes they even laughed together. A gang of teenagers ran down the street toward Broadway, each in a jacket with a rainbow on the back. Car horns began to sound in the distance, the eager braying of celebration.

  “The end of an era,” Wigner observed. “The fall of the old republic. By God, it was a near thing.”

  Most of the T-Colonel District Commanders had gone over solidly to the new government, and had brought their Civil Emergency staff with them; they would form caretaker governments until elections could be held. A couple of un-Trainable generals had seized Fort Sam Houston and barricaded themselves inside; no one cared. The president had appointed Senator Cooledge as special ambassador to the International Federation.

  A message from the senator came over Wigner’s Polymath: I’ll be in New York tomorrow on my way to Lisbon. Want to come along? D. C.

  “I certainly do,” Wigner said. “If I can get out of the country in one piece, that is. How about you, Jerry? You can be in at the very beginning.”

  “No. Once we’ve got the agency sorted out, I think I’ll go see my mother in Taos. I need a rest.”

  Wigner looked at him with sympathy. “You’ve earned it, old son. And what then, when you’re ready to go again?”

  “I want to go downtime. Do something constructive for a change. Maybe help the endos learn how to cope with us.”

  “They’ll learn on their own, and very quickly. But if you want to be useful downtime, how about doing some recruiting?”

  “Of whom?”

  “Endos. One in eight of their adolescents should be Trainables, and we ought to get our hands on every one of them. Bring them uptime, Train them, and put them to work on the Doomsday problem.”

  “It sounds good.”

  “The biggest windfall we could hope for. Never mind the oil fields, the gold mines, all that — it’s the people we need to exploit. Thousands, millions of Trainables, running things and making sure Doomsday doesn’t happen again.”

  “Like Ulro and Urizen?”

  “No comparison, old son. The uptime societies were convalescent wards. They lost huge numbers of Trainables in the civil wars and famines; the best they could manage with the survivors was high-tech concentration camps. We’ve got all those people that they lost, plus the downtime endos. Give us a few years and we’ll have Utopia.”

  “What about the un-Trainables?”

  Wigner waved a hand dismissively. “We’ll find uses for them. Move a lot of them downtime, get them mining and farming. Give them a chance to get out of the slums, pull themselves together. The old frontier mystique. Your own ranch, with a cave bear rug in front of the fireplace and a sabre-tooth tiger’s head stuffed on the mantel.”

  Pierce smiled, a little absently. “What if they want shopping malls?”

  “Anything their empty little hearts
desire, old son. As long as we can get on with stopping Doomsday and running the world properly.”

  Wigner got up to go to the bathroom. Pierce turned back to the screen of his Polymath.

  “Update Wabbie arrests, Polly.”

  “Sure, Jerry.”

  The mop-up was almost complete. A few prominent Wabbies were still unaccounted for, and a few others were besieged, but most of the leadership and many of the rank and file were now safely jailed. Curious to see what had happened to Wes McCullough, Pierce focused on Mountain Home.

  “Status of Social Security Number 3423-890-4555,” he said.

  The screen gave him three pages in a fifth of a second: the report of a National Guard lieutenant whose men had found the McCullough family tortured and killed in their ranch house; a photograph of Wes McCullough’s headless corpse, sprawled in his barnyard; a list of next of kin.

  Pierce felt himself shiver. “Status of Social Security Number 6779-300-2187,” he whispered.

  Doria’s autopsy report was the first document in the file. Death had been attributable to a single.45 bullet fired at close range into her head. Photographs followed of her and of her husband.

  For what seemed like a long time, Pierce sat motionless. He shut down the screen and looked out the window at the lighted windows opposite. Darkness had fallen without his noticing.

  The toilet flushed and Wigner strode back into the office.

  “Problem?”

  “I have to go to Mountain Home.”

  “Why?”

  “They got Doria and LaMar and the McCullough family.”

  “Good Christ. How could they have — ”

  “Once they saw us roll up their people, they must have realized they’d been had.”

  “Vicious bastards. Well, old son, I’m not sure you need to concern yourself. Leave it to the people on the ground.”

  “They were my responsibility. I’m going.”

  Wigner put a hand on Pierce’s shoulder. “Stop a moment, Jerry. Think. Thousands of people have been killed in the last day. It’s been a crazy time, but we’re out of it now. We’ve got to get back to a more civilized way of dealing with these problems. Are you listening? We can’t just go on knocking off people. Try it and you’ll be nailed. And I can’t afford to lose you. Leave this to the local authorities. Are you listening?”

  Pierce’s blank, unresponsive face seemed to annoy Wigner. “For God’s sake, old son! On Ulro and Uri-zen we tried to knock off the Wabbies to avenge Senator Cooledge, and it got us killed. Here we’re going to have something like normality within a couple of weeks, and people won’t stand for casual murders any more. Are you listening?”

  “I’m going, Eric.”

  “If you get picked up, they’ll trace you straight back to me and the Agency. It could screw up the whole plan.”

  “They won’t pick me up. But I’m going.”

  “Think, old son!”

  Pierce’s eyes met Wigner’s, and Wigner looked away. Pierce stood up and walked away from Wigner’s restraining hand.

  Air travel was hopeless: most airline computers were dead, fuel was scarce, and the new civilian government had reserved the few remaining flights for high-priority passengers. Pierce was not surprised.

  He walked across town, stopping on the way to buy some cheap work clothes in a store on Eighth Avenue where the clerks wore sidearms. Prices had almost doubled since the day before, an indication that the owner did not share the general delight in the new government, and Pierce found himself with little remaining cash. After changing into his new khaki trousers, steel-toed workboots, checked flannel shirt, and quilted jacket, he headed for a Citibank branch at Ninth Avenue and 45th.

  The bank’s computers had been equipped with the defence program, and it was still in business. As a result, the automatic tellers had long lineups; Pierce waited patiently, then cleared out an account under a false name.

  At the bus station, hundreds of people were trying to get out of town. This could be a little dicey, Pierce thought: if Clement’s Agency people were at all organized, they might just be keeping an eye on bus and train stations. More likely they were trying to find their feet in a wildly changed world.

  The huge waiting room was crowded with people, many of them standing in lines in front of closed wickets. A crude sign had been put up on a long strip of computer paper: ALL SEATS BOOKED UNTIL SATURDAY; it was now Wednesday. Pierce was not surprised.

  A couple of casual scans of the waiting room showed no Agency faces he knew, but he recognized several petty criminals whose files he’d scanned among thousands of others. One, sitting alone on a bench, was a fat young man with a bad complexion and a walrus moustache. Pierce sat down next to him.

  “Stan, my man, how are ya?”

  “I don’t know you, pal.”

  “Sure, I bought a little this and that off you, just after you got outa Attica. Hey, West 104th street, right? Yeah. Good to see you.”

  “Oh, yeah, well, I guess I do remember you now. You headed outa town?”

  “Stan, I gotta get outa town. I got certain employees of law enforcement agencies urgently interested in kicking my balls. And here they are, not sellin’ tickets.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I can help you. Happen to have a ticket to Chicago I’m not gonna need after all.”

  “Hey, my guardian angel. When’s it for?”

  “Greyhound convoy leaving tonight at 10.”

  “What’s your price, Stan?”

  “Yeah, well, since we’re old buddies, let’s say five hundred?”

  “Sheesh. Five hundred.” Pierce slapped his thighs. “Well, screw me for showing how bad I gotta have that ticket. Okay, here.” He pulled some bills from a zipped inside pocket of his jacket. Behind a flap of his jacket he counted out five hundred dollars. Stan’s plump hand reached casually in, leaving the ticket in place of the money.

  “You did me a favour, Stan. Thanks, old buddy.”

  “You got twenty minutes before they stop loading, pal.”

  “I’m gone. Say hi to Katy for me.”

  Stan frowned. “I never told you about Katy.”

  Pierce grinned, waved, and disappeared into the crowd.

  The bus convoy left at 10:00 in the evening, five big Greyhounds escorted by two small armoured jeeps. Pierce was in the third bus. The other passengers were quiet, anxious-looking people who peered through the wire mesh over the windows at the approaches to the tunnel. No one talked much, least of all the old man in the seat next to him, and Pierce gratefully went to sleep before they reached New Jersey.

  He was in Chicago at noon next day, bought another ticket from a scalper, and that night was in Omaha. The convoy, now just three buses, rolled on across the autumn plains. Snow whirled out of a white sky, melting as it touched the ground. National Guardsmen at roadblocks looked cold and unhappy, though many wore rainbow badges pinned to their jackets.

  At bus stop cafes where they were the only customers, new and old passengers traded rumours: the president had been arrested, the president had been impeached, the International Federation had rejected the American application for membership, Congress had asked George Washington to come uptime and take over.

  “You sure read that fast,” one of his seatmates observed as they ate doughnuts at a station cafe in Cheyenne.

  Pierce handed the four-page tabloid to the man. “Nothing much to read. Care to see it?”

  As the buses moved west, the look of the towns grew harsher, more like Mountain Home — strip developments whose development had stopped, empty supermarkets, burned-out gas stations, farm machinery dealerships with no farm machinery, and gaunt, angry men standing aimlessly in every public warm place. The republic had fallen, but the millennium had not yet arrived.

  At last he reached Mountain Home, late on a cold afternoon. Fresh snow crunched and squeaked under his boots as he walked from the station to the old house where he and Doria had made love, where Doria and LaMar had lived and died. Lights were on,
just visible through the heavy curtains. Pierce walked to the door and faintly heard the sounds of a family getting ready for dinner: plates clattering on a table, a woman calling in Spanish to a child. He turned away and walked back downtown.

  The old Hometown Mall was still busy, and outside it stood still more RVs and campers. Between two of them hung a professional-looking sign: Beds for Over-nighters. Pierce knocked on the door of a rusty Winnebago.

  “Yo.” The door opened a little; a flashlight glared in Pierce’s eyes.

  “Got a bed?”

  “What you got in trade?”

  “Nothing. Fifty dollars?”

  “Hold’em up. Okay. You from out of town?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t stand any crap. Any crap, you’re out on your ass. It’s the second camper behind you. Here’s the key. Checkout time is eight o’clock in the morning.”

  “Fine. Any chance of getting a meal around here?”

  “Try in the mall.”

  “Thanks.”

  The rotunda of the mall was a little shabbier than it had been when the Jack Mormons had tried to move in. Coleman lanterns burned here and there; in one storefront, a scrawny boy pumped a bicycle generator, keeping a few feeble lights aglow. The air was cold and smoky.

  Halfway down the mall, Pierce found a middle-aged couple sitting beside a hibachi, cooking skewers of meat over charcoal. Pierce recognized their faces from the files and controlled a sudden desire to kill them. He bought a couple of skewers and sat companionably beside the couple while he ate. They chatted for a few minutes: about the weather, the price of black market meat, the end of the Emergency.

  “Just the start of the Emergency, you ask me,” said the man. “Eastern bastards selling us out.”

  “DeWayne — ” his wife said warningly.

  “I don’t care. Still a free country, isn’t it? Long as a man can say what he thinks?”

  “That’s right, sir,” Pierce agreed. “They pulled a real fast one on us.”

  “Passing that bill, you mean?”

  “No, sir, before that. With that computer trap.”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about that.”

  “Lots of good folks got hurt by it. Salt of the earth folks.” He saw the man and wife exchange quick looks. “Take’em a long time to get it back together unless their Mends lend a hand.”