Whistling Past the Graveyard

by Jonathan Maberry

  The desert at night was usually so quiet. He loved coming out here to think, to work things through. To consider the past and plan for the future. The emptiness and vastness of the Nevada desert was his sanctum, his cloister for years.

  Now it burned with red fire and the silence was torn by the hollow, steady crack of automatic gunfire and the occasional deep-throated boom of missiles. Hellfire missiles, which Prospero thought was a fine irony.

  He waited. Dragonflies flitted around him. They always made him smile. They swirled around him, buzzing on green wings that gave off a faint electric hum. Anyone unfamiliar with the tiny biomimetic machines would think they were really insects. Prospero extended a hand and one of them landed on it, antennae twitching, miniature legs bending and walking in an almost perfect imitation of life.

  “Go play,” he said and shook it off. The words sounded playful, but they keyed the search and observe protocols in their microchips. The dragonflies turned and flew into the darkness, hunting the monsters that hunted him, their beating wings recharging their batteries as they flew. Not quite a perpetual motion machine, but as close as he had been able to manage so far.

  Prospero had also launched a half dozen of the larger but still man-portable SkyLite observation drones. The lithium-polymer batteries on the stealth drones only held a four-hour charge, but it took only a few minutes for them to reach thirty-six thousand feet. The Joes had satellites which could be targeted and destroyed by any number of air-to-space or space-to-space weapons; but Prospero had swarms of tiny machines that were harder to see, harder to catch, disposal and replaceable.

  “Fly, fly, fly,” he said in an almost dreamy voice.

  There were gunships in the blackness above him, running silent and dark; and even though he could not see the wicked mouths of the miniguns pointing at him, he could feel them. At least a dozen of them, each capable of firing six thousand rounds per minute through their rotating six-inch barrels. Enough firepower to wipe out a company.

  Because there was no possibility of escape, Prospero did not care about them.

  There were other monsters in the dark, and he turned his head slowly from side to side, trying to decide the approach vector for the drones. He knew that at least two of the unarmed combat air vehicles would be zeroing him. There was a Phantom Ray II up there, the newest of Boeing’s Phantom Works craft. Armed with the Hellfires and other goodies, some as experimental as the drone that carried them.

  And if that psychopath Hawk had anything to do with planning this attack, then there would be a General Atomics Avenger up there, too, laboring under the weight of Paveway bombs. Hawk’s personal favorite.

  Prospero could try to run, but where could he go? They were drawing a circle around him, closing it tight like the neck of a drawstring bag. With him inside.

  He smiled.

  On his way out here he had carried two large metal cases that looked like dog carriers. Each case had a spring flap keyed to a pedometer built into his exosuit. Every fifty yards the flaps opened and dropped half a dozen Sprawlers. These small hexapedal devices dropped like spiders onto the sand, immediately activated ground sensors, and scuttled off into the dark. They were unarmed, but they were fast and long before the Joes found him he would know where they were.

  Professor Miranda’s soft voice whispered in his ear.

  “They’re coming.”

  “And about time, too,” he replied.

  “Are you ready?”

  He hit a keypad and a hologram of a topographical map appeared in his visor. The map sparkled with blue dots that identified his Sprawlers and Dragonflies and SkyLites, and glowed with larger yellow dots that showed what his mechanical friends had found. “Completely.”

  “Be careful,” she cautioned. “I don’t trust them. I think they’re determined to take you down.”

  Prospero laughed. “They’re welcome to try.”

  “Then watch your back, because they’re going to try right now!”

  The world of darkness turned to blinding noonday brightness as missiles punched into the desert floor and burst. Twin fireballs curled upward and the concussive crossways blast of the shockwave hit the man with bone-crushing force, lifting him, throwing him like a doll into a sandstone wall sixty yards behind him. The force of the impact was enough to splinter bone and rupture muscle tissue, bend steels and shatter hardened polymers.

  Except that none of this happened to the scientist.

  He slammed into the wall and slid down, but only into a crouch. Fire and hot dust swirled around him, but he was safe and whole. And smiling.

  He pushed off the wall and stood, turning left and right to watch for the next attack.

  “Gunships!” cautioned Miranda’s voice, but Prospero did not need the warning as fifty-caliber rounds pounded into his chest, driving him backward against the wall. Hundreds of hits. Thousands.

  Then another salvo of rockets turned the sandstone wall into a rain of jagged debris, knocking him over, burying him to the waist. In the nearly constant muzzle-flash he saw the Blackhawks hovering ten feet above the desert floor, side doors open, miniguns swung out on electric turrets and opened up, their roar louder than thunder.

  The guns hammered him until they fired themselves dry, then they rose slowly, moving upward and sideways, turning to bring their rocket pods to bear.

  Prospero fought his way out of the waist-deep rubble. He grabbed a rock the size of a mailbox, lifted it with a grunt, and threw it to one side. Then he straightened, rising to his full height of nine feet.

  “Night vision,” he said and instantly the world transformed from black and red to green and black and white.

  “SkyLites,” he said, “talk to me.”

  One side of his vision was suddenly filled with images taken from the drones that circled like buzzards over the desert.

  “Thermal overlay.” Dots appeared on the image. He counted four Blackhawks and three fixed-wing drones. Hawk had sent two Avengers to back-up the Phantom Ray. All of the military drones were circling back toward him, their systems apparently ignoring the smaller UAC’s that Prospero had launched. Other signatures showed a phalanx of fast-moving desert patrol vehicles converging.

  It was anyone’s definition of a worst-case scenario. A pair of Abrams tanks couldn’t fight their way out of this. Which is why he’d sold his General Dynamics stock last month. The Caliban exosuit he wore was about to put the tank manufacturer in the antiques business.

  “Are you all right?” asked Professor Miranda, her voice twitchy with stress.

  “I’m perfect,” he said and then laughed. “They’ve shown us what they can do. Now let’s show them what we can do.”

  “Prospero…Allyn…please,” she said urgently, “don’t take any unnecessary risks. You—”

  “Hush, darling. Hush. This is what we wanted. This is what we needed. We’ve been wracking our brains trying to figure a way to give a practical demonstration to our overseas friends. This was handed to us on a silver platter. A full system demonstration, and the government is not only paying for it, but mandating it. What could be more perfect?”

  “I know, but these people, these Joes…just because they’re military don’t fool yourself into thinking their collar size is bigger than their I.Q.”

  He laughed again, and there was a wild quality to it. He even heard it, and didn’t care. It was a time to be wild, to be fully alive!

  “They’re dinosaurs, my dear; they just don’t yet know that they’re extinct. Besides, the Joes will see only what we want them to see.”

  “Don’t underestimate them—”

  “Miranda, hush. Just make sure everything is fed to the secure uplink. I want our friends to see the Joes throw everything they have against us.”

  “Be careful, my love. The Joes are coming in for another run.”

  “Let them come,” said Prospero. Then he switched from external to internal voice mode. “Caliban combat systems to voice control.”

  “System o
n.” Caliban’s computer voice was the only part of this he didn’t like. It was an older computer voice system that manufactured words instead of compiling them from a programmed library. The new voice software package had not been installed yet. He was sorry about that. The voice choices included Morgan Freeman, Mark Hamill, or Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Hamill would have been fun. Luke Skywalker guiding him through this would be fitting. It all seemed like science fiction anyway. Even to him.

  “Laser targeting.”

  “On line.”

  “Uplink to enemy tactical satellite.”

  “Uplink established.”

  He stepped forward. The servos attached to his boot straps lifted the forty-pound foot as easily as if he wore a pair of flip-flops.

  “Skyjack on line,” he said.

  “Booting,” said the computer voice. “Skyjack system on line.”

  The whine of the chopper rotors increased as the Blackhawks tilted for a strafing run. They’d hammer him again, allowing the laser-sighting system of the drones to acquire him for another rocket attack.

  “Initiate Skyjack protocol Prospero One-nineteen.”

  “Initiating.”

  The satellite display board flashed and cleared, removing all of the identified combat craft. Then one by one they popped back on, but this time each dot was surrounded by a white circle. Before they had all re-appeared the circles were overlaid by white crosses.

  Caliban’s dispassionate computer voice began counting it off.

  “Blackhawk one acquired.”

  “Blackhawk two acquired.”

  “Blackhawk three acquired.”

  “Blackhawk four acquired.”

  “General Atomics Avenger one acquired.”

  And on and on until all of the vehicles and aircraft surrounding him were logged.

  Prospero smiled. “Prepare to accept command code.”

  “Ready.”

  “‘Tempest,’” he said. Instantly the computer voice rattled off a stream of command codes.

  “Destroy all enemy warcraft,” said Prospero. He did not need to give that command, and in truth it did nothing to increase the lethality of the Skyjack program. The virus software would now be rerouting the systems of every automated vehicle, on land or in the air. In seconds the machines sent to test him would obliterate each other. All of that was written into the code…but it felt good to speak the order; when the destruction began it would be at his command.

  Pleased, the old scientist sat down on the rock he had thrown and waited.

  There were three seconds of silent darkness.

  All around him the skies blossomed with white light. Gunfire roared. Rockets fired one after the other. Bombs fell.

  The whole desert seemed to explode.

  None of the bullets struck him. None of the missiles flew in his direction.

  He smiled.

  “Destroy them all,” he murmured. “Burn them out of my sky.”

  On his helmet’s monitor the blips indicating the Blackhawks and the drones and the fast attack vehicles flickered and vanished until only one craft was left. Then, it too burst into flame and fell like a meteor through the night. It struck the sandstone eighty feet from where he sat. Prospero didn’t even bother to raise an arm to protect himself from the flaming debris.

  -5-

  The Ice House

  Kaffeklubben Island, 440 miles from the North Pole

  The man sat alone, draped in soft shadows, his shoulder and face etched by yellow firelight. Pine logs hissed and popped in the stone hearth. The air around him was troubled by the almost maniacal complexity of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30, and yet the man in the chair found the music deeply soothing. It was like sailing through the eye of a hurricane—chaos all around and yet deep inside there was perfect stillness. And with stillness came clarity.

  A glass of wine sat forgotten on the table beside his chair.

  The man reclined in the chair, fingers steepled, eyes narrowed, lips pursed as he studied the images that played out on the flatscreen monitor that filled most of one wall. He watched with professional interest as a Phantom Ray veered off course and slammed its eighteen and a half tons into a General Atomics Avenger. Both drones exploded in a massive fireball and fell onto the desert floor far below. Unmanned tanks swung their turrets and laid down continuous fire at fast attack vehicles. Machine guns in remote controlled Black Hawks turned their guns on other helos flying in attack formation. All of it within seconds, all of it in a beautifully coordinated ballet of self-immolation and mutual destruction.

  When the last of the guns fell silent, the man in the chair took a deep breath and let it out through his nostrils, puffing like a contented dragon. In the upper left corner of the screen a smaller pop-up screen showed the face of a beautiful woman with long brunette hair and glasses that hung around her neck on a silver chain.

  “This completes our demonstration, sir,” she said. Her voice trembled and she was clearly nervous. No, almost certainly afraid. Although she did not know the name, or even the code name of the man to whom she spoke, she knew enough about who he was and what he represented to be properly terrified. That pleased the man; it was as it should be.

  The woman stared at him―or at the screen saver of a coiled snake, which was all that she would ever see of him―with expectation in her eyes. Was she waiting for praise?

  Probably. He smiled. The next ice age would come and go before he would spoon out praise to a vendor. And a potential vendor at that.

  “What is your asking price?” he said. There was at least a fragment of tacit approval in that question. Let that be enough for her. Let her suck what juice there was out of that.

  But she was undeterred. She leaned toward the camera, double vertical lines forming between her brows. “Price is secondary,” she said. “Your assurance is paramount.”

  “Of course,” he replied with only the barest hesitation, “and you have it. I respect and endorse your ideals. Ending global conflict is our shared goal. How did Prospero himself phrase it? ‘When no human hand touches a weapon of war, then war will not touch human hearts.’ Elegantly phrased. Much better than my own clumsy ‘Wage a war to end all wars.’ So…rest assured that I will always bear in mind that this is the cornerstone of any arrangement between us.”

  The woman hesitated for a moment, then nodded.

  “Now,” the man said, “I believe we were discussing price—?”

  The woman had enough grace and good taste not to speak the number. Instead she looked down and tapped some keys. A price appeared in a discreet corner of the screen. There were a lot of zeroes. Some might say an absurd amount.

  The man in the chair considered the price.

  “I’ll let you know,” he said, and before she could say anything he disconnected the call.

  He sat in silence for a thoughtful few moments and then turned his head ever so slightly to the other small pop-up screen.

  “You may comment,” he said.

  “That bonnie lass and her auld―and, I might add, quite daft―Frankenstein boyfriend are trying to rob ye blind, and ye damn well know it,” snapped a slender man wearing an ermine-trimmed robe. He wore a mask of polished silver through which intelligent, calculating eyes stared out.

  “Is that your professional assessment of the demonstration?”

  “Oh, aye, I like it well enough. Lots of lovely pyrotechnics. Hooray for the Red, White and Blue…but ah dinnieken why ye want another vendor. Which of my bloody systems have underperformed for ye?”

  “What’s the matter, Lord Destro? Don’t you believe in capitalism?”

  “I believe in loyalty. From vendor to customer as well as from customer to vendor.”

  “Mmm, that’s one view, but it’s self-corrupting. Competition, on the other hand, encourages innovation, shortens time to market, and allows for more rational discussions of price.”

  “Don’t be daft. I’m fair scunnered with these games. There’s a trust iss
ue here as well.”

  “Trust is earned.”

  “And haven’t I earned your trust?”

  “Allow me to modify that statement. Trust needs to be continually earned.”

  The man with the silver face said nothing.

  “Dr. Prospero is offering some exciting new technologies. His hybrid Skyjack/Tempest intrusion software is probably worth the price he’s asking for the whole package. I don’t really need the exosuit, though admittedly there are some members of the Crimson Guard who would enjoy field testing it.” He paused. “Really, Destro, if you had a mobile tactical command unit like Caliban we might not be having this conversation.”

  “I can make one, as ye damn well know.”

  “‘Can make one’ is far less appealing to me than ‘have one now.’ I can have the schematics for Dr. Prospero’s technology ten minutes after a wire transfer to the Caymans. Can you do that for me?”

  Lord Destro’s face was inert steel, and yet it seemed to convey both anger and menace.

  The man in the comfortable chair chuckled. “I thought not.”

  “You know you can’t trust him,” said Destro. “Unless you’re so soft that you believe that he’s doing this all for morality and greater good.”

  “Mmm, and all this time I thought you were an idealist, and yet you are always willing to take my money. What are you saying? That idealism is merely a candy coating over a poisoned apple?”

  “Are you comparing me to that maniac?” demanded Destro.

  “If you’re uncomfortable with the question, then forget I said anything. Contact me when you have something for me to consider.”

  “‘Consider’? In the name of the wee man! What about our agreements?”

  “Free market,” said the man with an airy wave of the hand. “Sadly, it’s become a free market.”

  He disconnected the call and reached for his wine, sipped it. And smiled.

  -6-