Immediately I knew what I had to do.
"Look,” I interrupted. “We could go on arguing politics for the rest of today, but I'm sure that you and your colleagues already have enough data to verify where my loyalties lie."
Michael's eyes flicked back and forth. “I . . . I don't understand, Your Excellency."
"I'm in. I want to join America Reborn."
"W . . . well, now, I'm certainly excited to hear you say that, but I have to consult with my colleagues..."
"I understand. But please be assured I am sincere."
I wasn't certain that I was sincere, though I believed I was close enough to sincere to satisfy those who were watching my autonomic responses. But when I'd smelled that C-6, my strategic sense had kicked in hard.
Between my own kidnapping—or recruitment—the presence of the explosives, and a few other things I'd been able to glean about the rebels, I was certain that they were about to embark on a major military offensive, probably within the next six weeks.
And I knew they would lose.
They didn't know what I knew about the North American government, and especially about my sister. Even as well armed and prepared as they were, they didn't have a chance of success—not yet, anyway. And if they struck now, not only would they fail, but Sissi would crack down on the entire civilian population. The loss of life and liberties would take decades to undo.
The only way to stop it was to join the rebels’ cause. Really join in, wholeheartedly, and give them enough government secrets that they would believe me when I told them that their current plan was doomed to failure. After that . . . maybe I would be able to engineer some kind of diplomatic solution.
Or maybe . . . maybe I would have to work to bring down the government . . . the government that had bred me, birthed me, raised me, and trusted me with the lives of over a hundred and forty million people.
How could I do this?
Because even as we walked back to the main blockhouse—Michael blabbering excitedly, the four guards still keeping their weapons trained on me—I realized where my most important loyalties lay. Even without my conditioning, even stripped of my titles as Viceroy of Germany and Austria, Royal Colonel of the European Army, and all the rest . . . I was still Defender of Humanity.
That title is always listed first for a reason. My highest priority is always to defend the welfare of the citizens, from war, famine, disease, natural disaster, and even the depredations of the government itself. That priority was the keystone of my conditioning and my training, and no matter what had been done to me in the last nineteen days, it remained as the bedrock of my personality. For all I knew it was in my very genes.
And that priority meant that the rebels could not be allowed to fail. If I couldn't stop them from striking, I would have to find a way for them to win. And after that...
I was so distracted by strategy and tactics that I didn't realize what I was hearing until it was almost too late.
The engine of a Raven.
I stopped and looked up, uselessly; the black-painted skylights above told me nothing. Michael and the guards stared stupidly at me, their unenhanced ears incapable of even detecting the sound.
"Incoming aircraft!” I shouted at them. “Get down!” Even as I spoke I flattened myself on the cracked and filthy tiles, covering my head with my arms.
"What?” said Michael, who for all his psychological acumen could be a bit slow on the uptake, and I grabbed him and pulled him down beside me. The guards, responding to my command voice, all complied, but in a moment they would realize that they'd obeyed an order from the man they were supposed to be guarding. I hoped that moment would be long enough to save their lives.
For three of them, it was. The fourth raised himself to one knee and leveled his rifle at my head before the skylights smashed open.
A red bloom of flame sent a hail of glass and metal showering down on the former ice rink, followed an instant later by the deafening boom and shockwave of the explosion. Sunlight lanced down through the hole, cutting hard-edged beams through the dust-choked air.
Michael lay on the tile beside me, blood running from his scalp. “What's happening?” he said, his voice sounding muzzy even through the ringing in my ears.
"We're under attack by a Raven. Remotely-piloted drone.” I looked around. The one guard lay still, black blood soaking into fatigues shredded by flying glass; the other three were alive but stunned. A hundred meters behind us, rebels were pouring out of the main blockhouse like bees from a disturbed hive. “There'll be a second strike in about three minutes. We need to get to cover. Come on!"
I grabbed Michael's arm and led him, stumbling, toward the nearby blockhouse. “How . . . how'd they find us?"
"I don't know.” Part of me hoped that Sissi had managed to track me down, but if she'd thought I might be in this mall, she'd have started with Special Forces ground troops. “Just one Raven . . . probably just a random sweep that got lucky and spotted something."
A rapid-fire whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-whoosh from above and the smell of kerosene told me the rebels had a Wasp anti-aircraft array. Michael leaned back and watched the ascending sparks against the gray, dust-strewn sky. A moment later, somewhere above the clouds, came the detonation. “Did we get it?"
"Doesn't matter.” I coughed thick crypt-smelling dust out of my lungs. We had just about reached the blockhouse; it seemed intact. “Even if the Wasps took that drone down, there'll be a half dozen more right behind it, and helicopters full of ground troops behind those. Anti-aircraft fire just confirms this is a valid target.” The blockhouse door was locked.
"We can't go in there."
One solid kick smashed the lock mechanism. “Yes, we can."
A dim chemical light flickered on as we entered, revealing metal boxes of C-6 stacked to the ceiling. There had to be over a tonne of the stuff.
"Okay, Michael. What is this explosive for?"
He blinked away the blood that was still running down from his scalp. “I can't tell you until you've been approved by the committee."
"We don't have time to negotiate, Michael.” A series of dull whoomps behind me announced the second strike. “If I'm going to help you, I need to know now."
A flash of fire through the broken door sent shivering lines of orange light across Michael's face. Outside, someone screamed in pain. “All right,” he said, and closed his eyes. “We're going to infiltrate the White House. We have people in the kitchen staff. Place explosives throughout the building. Destroy it during the Queen's July 4 audience."
"It won't work. Even if you could evade or disable the building's explosive sensors, you can't outsmart my sister's enhanced nose. She'd smell the explosives before she even entered the building."
Michael's eyes flicked left and right, consulting with his colleagues elsewhere in the facility. “My God . . . you're telling the truth."
A thrumming roar above the blockhouse's metal roof made both of us look up. Helicopters. Then came the shrill whine of personal descent packs, and a rattle of small-arms fire—government troops descending through the shattered skylights.
My strategic sense made the next few hours as clear in my mind as the last few. Platoons of government troops invading the mall, already softened by the Ravens’ bombardment. Rebels fighting back, well organized and equipped, but unprepared for the effectively unlimited reinforcements that would be brought in as the strength of this facility became apparent. The facility falling, sooner rather than later, hard and fast enough that the rebels’ information security procedures could not be entirely successful. Enough key personnel and data would fall into government hands that the rebels’ plans would become known to the Queen.
My own life was too small, too variable, to predict. But whether I survived the strike or only my body was found, Sissi would know the rebels had kidnapped me. That would make what followed even worse.
Martial law. Loss of life and liberty. The trust between the government and the citizens broken
for twenty years or more.
For the first time in my life I wondered how Sissi could have turned out so badly. Perhaps her conditioning was imperfect. Perhaps we needed another few generations to breed those traits out. But she was what she was, and for the sake of the citizens, I had to stop her from finding out about America Reborn's plans.
I placed my hands on Michael's shoulders. “I'm sorry,” I said gently.
And then I snapped his neck.
After a brief silent prayer for Michael's soul, I cleared my throat and spoke loud and clear to the empty air. “Viceroy von Regensberg to Bravo and Echo platoons. I am uninjured, repeat, I am uninjured. Facility severely damaged by Raven attacks. Be aware of Wasp antiaircraft batteries on mall roof."
I kept on in that vein, delivering spurious intelligence over a nonexistent communications channel to troops who couldn't hear me. But Michael's colleagues didn't know that, and with my tracker removed they didn't know where I was. All they knew—all they thought they knew—was that I had betrayed them. And though they were monitoring my vital signs, they had no way to tell the stress caused by my lies from the stress of a man who had betrayed his erstwhile allies and was now trying to direct an assault on his own position.
The detonation of over a tonne of C-6 would completely obliterate this facility and all the evidence of the rebels’ current plan—including the fact that they'd kidnapped me. But America Reborn would survive, and some day might succeed in overthrowing my sister. I wished them well.
I was sorry that the only way to save my people was to sacrifice so many lives, including my own. But some priorities were deeper even than conditioning. “Understood, platoon leader,” I said aloud to no one. “Begin phase four on my mark."
I felt a click deep in my back, and knew that I had succeeded.
In the last moment, I thought I heard a pig singing.
Copyright © 2010 David D. Levine
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Novelette: THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED by H.G. Stratmann
The same ability can be either a blessing or a curse....
Three minutes before he went insane, Sam Scheidt sat scowling at the sheet music in front of him. His individual part of the symphonic score spread across the music stand was difficult enough from a technical standpoint. But it was even more challenging to restrain himself from playing those imperious solos with the unfettered fortes they deserved.
Two minutes before his mind collapsed into madness, Scheidt sighed and stroked his grizzled beard. He brought the trumpet's mouthpiece to his lips and played with jarring softness one of the slithering chromatic passages for first chair player sprinkled throughout Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy. As he practiced he prayed those inappropriately muffled tones wouldn't arouse Mrs. Roosevelt, his irritable elderly neighbor in the duplex, from her sorely needed beauty sleep.
While he would've liked to accommodate the snowy-haired matron's need to go to bed each evening at 8 p.m., this massively scored work was the showpiece for tomorrow night's concert of the Hooterville Philharmonic Orchestra. The anniversary clock on the mantle informed him that he was three hours into the period of nocturnal silence demanded by his solitary audience next door. But it was the lesser of two evils to risk offending her ears than to expose professional music critics and paying customers to sour sounds. Then again, there were so many non-diatonic notes in the music that perhaps most of those listeners wouldn't even notice a mistake.
A minute before his brain descended into chaos, Scheidt's shiny trumpet emitted a startled bleat and fell silent as a heavy cane thudded repeatedly nearby against the other side of the common wall dividing the duplex. After several more bars of that ostinato rhythm the amateur percussionist next door went tacet. Scheidt decided to put a mute in his instrument and try playing again, though he dreaded how much he'd have to modify his embouchure. But first he'd let his neighbor calm down and go back to sleep.
He hated to think how she'd react to the many hours of additional practice he'd have to put in over the next six weeks. It was flattering to be named the star soloist for that upcoming “Trumpetissimo!” concert—taking center stage for the Haydn and Hummel concertos, then later joining the concertino for the Brandenburg No. 2 with his piccolo trumpet. But it also meant lots of hard work and sore lips.
While waiting for his music-hating neighbor to retire again, Scheidt turned on the radio sitting atop a nearby table, set it to its lowest audible volume, and tuned it to the local classical music FM station. The piece emanating from the radio's speakers was unfamiliar. It was a chamber work for piano, clarinet, and violin in a style reminiscent of the early twelve-tone efforts of the Second Viennese School. An alto warbling words in a language he didn't recognize added a wide-ranging vocal counterpoint to the instrumental forces.
Though not the kind of music that would fill a concert hall, it had a fascinating rhythm. Tiny motifs on the edge of decipherability flickered in and out of existence in what at first seemed a random pattern, like colliding Brownian molecules in a vast ocean of sound. The more he listened to the work the more he thought he could detect a subtle pattern in the notes that belied its seemingly atonal surface. But every time the solution to this complex musical puzzle seemed in his grasp the message contained within its ephemeral tone rows and clusters slipped away once again.
Time stood still as the music gradually engulfed his mind and will. Even after its notes no longer flowed from the radio, his consciousness remained focused on and imprisoned by its mysterious measures. At some point Scheidt mechanically raised the trumpet back to his mouth. From its brassy bell music blared out in an endlessly repeating stream—a fervent attempt to replicate those transcendent mystic chords and sequences of sound. In a quest infinitely more difficult than Sir Arthur Sullivan's sentimental search for a lost chord, Scheidt tried to recapture the subtle nuances of the piece.
He didn't feel the blood trickling from his lips or hear the incessant pounding against the nearby wall...
"Do you hear that? He's still doing it!"
Mrs. Alice Roosevelt steadied herself in front of the door with her antique wooden cane. Her left hand gathered a fold of ratty bathrobe around her scrawny frame to protect against the chill midnight air. The two brawny police officers who'd just arrived in answer to her telephoned complaint seemed to be slowing down as they walked from their patrol car to the doorstep where she stood trembling with righteous anger.
Before the officers might have spoken, the aged widow continued, “This racket's been going on for an hour! I bet it's keeping the whole neighborhood up, not just me! He didn't stop no matter how much I hit my cane against the wall, and he wouldn't answer his phone! But he'll have to listen to you!"
Alice smiled as the pair of nice young policeman reached her. But after they kept standing there staring mutely at the closed door for an uncomfortably long time, she furrowed her wrinkled brow. “Well? Isn't one of you going to knock?"
She cried out and jumped back as both men heaved their shoulders against the door. Its wooden panels shuddered from several blows before the door whipped inward as its lock gave way. The two patrolmen marched single file into the family room where a man sat with his back to them blowing his life away. Oblivious to these new arrivals, he continued concentrating his fading breath into the trumpet and working the instrument's oiled valves in the same tuneless pattern over and over.
Alice's cane tapped against the parquet floor as she cautiously followed the officers. She winced at the raucous noise erupting from the center of the room but resolutely slid to the side of where the two officers stood shoulder to shoulder, looking down at the man in the chair. Now standing behind the latter's music stand, she stared horrified at the trumpet player's unnaturally red face and cheeks sucking in and out like bellows, as if he were drowning. She opened her mouth to try shouting above the deafening din—but stopped when she noticed a new source of terror.
For the meaningless melody blasting from the trumpet was no longer the o
nly sound in the room. The two policemen stood mesmerized—like rats enthralled by the greatest musician of Hamelin. From their closed taut mouths came a loud constant mindless humming.
And the endlessly repeating music they hummed was the same as that coming from the trumpet....
* * * *
Meanwhile, three time zones to the west in San Diego, an indoor rock concert was in full swing. The vast darkened auditorium was packed with young people imbibing and smoking substances of questionable legality when not singing along off-key with the band on stage. Multihued laser lights flashed overhead in time with the thundering music pounded out by the popular all-male group Ripe Bananas.
But that band was only the warm-up for tonight's main attraction, the mixed-gender quintet Necrotic Neurons. That ensemble's lead guitarist, Gaston Gangrene, peeked out from the wings as their opening act cleared the stage. He brushed away a lock of shoulder-length, pomaded, chestnut hair from his perspiring face and looked back at his four fellow players. All but one looked reasonably sober.
The exception was Eris Erysipelas. The group's petite lead vocalist sat several meters away staring at something that wasn't there. Her well-worn but still comely body was covered only by strategically placed strips of ebony spandex. A long black wig that Morticia Addams would've admired and thick gothic makeup completed her work uniform.
Thin white wires connected the tiny earbuds lodged in the young lady's external auditory canals to the silver music player in her hand. Her habit of listening for hours to music downloaded legally or otherwise was legendary. But there was a time and place for such pleasures—and with thousands of frantic fans clamoring for their idols to come on stage, now was not the time.
Gaston's gentle hand on her shoulder and polite request for her to get up failed to dispel the damsel's reverie. A voice behind him shouted, “Come on, Gas, we have to go on!"
With no more time for diplomacy, Gaston dislodged the earbuds from Eris's head and pried the music player from her unresisting fingers. He tossed the gizmos onto a nearby table, then dragged and guided the stiff-legged singer to the stage. The audience was already shaking the building with eardrum-rattling hoots and applause after watching the other members of the group strut onto the stage. While his fellow musicians stood waiting with instruments ready, surrounded by monolith-like speakers powered by amplifiers whose requirements for electricity rivaled that of a sprawling suburban neighborhood, he positioned Eris in front of the rest of the band and thrust a wireless microphone into her hand.
Analog SFF, May 2010 Page 15
