Fantastic Hope

by Laurell K. Hamilton

“Oh, honey bunny,” she said sweetly, “I’m already driving in that lane and calls are being made. Now get me some samples, and then go shoot some bad guys. I think we’ll all feel better if you do.”

  Top opened the sample kit and we got to work. It did not take long, but it was an ugly task that left us feeling sick and stained and embarrassed to be part of the same species of biped as whoever did this. I glanced at Top, who was taking tissue samples from a little child. Unlike Bunny and me, Top was a parent. He’d already lost one child to war. He knew the pain of that. Just as he knew the fear. I could see a fever brightness in his eyes as he worked, and wondered how deep inside the heads of that child’s parents he’d gone. They all died together, but had the parents watched their little one sicken and die before the disease took them, too? Or had the kid cried out to them for help, for answers, for protection as he crawled to where they lay? In either case it was an abomination.

  Top caught me watching him and for a moment we stared at each other, saying nothing. Saying everything that needed to be said.

  We walked out to where Bunny waited with a pressure can of disinfectant. We stripped out of the hazmat suits, stuffed them in a bag, and emptied the rest of the germ killer into it before burying it. The BAMS unit and samples were wrapped in plastic and sealed with tape. I took a transport drone from the saddlebag of my bike, assembled it quickly, fitted the samples into its undercarriage, and launched it. Our support team would track its transponder and do a pickup while we continued the mission.

  We got onto our bikes and left. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the vultures dropping down again. The temptation to shoot at them was strong, but no matter how unsavory their appetites or grisly their meals, they were not the villains of this piece.

  4.

  THE SAHARA

  TÉNÉRÉ

  SOUTH-CENTRAL SAHARA

  As the miles burned away, I thought about the faces of the Toubou people who lay rotting in the sun. Innocent folks, going about a way of life that probably hadn’t changed substantially in five or six thousand years. Good folks. Hardworking, uncomplicated, innocent of the cultural guile and corruption that was rife in the industrial parts of the world. Snuffed out.

  Why?

  As an experiment for some new kind of bioweapon? That was our leading theory, if this was the Silentium madmen. Had the Toubou lived on mineral-rich lands or good grazing pastures, there would be a different motivation. At least then you could build a plausible—if inexcusable—set of motives based on simple greed. But out here, in the vastness of the Sahara? The killers had to go out of their way to target them, which meant that it was a calculated evil or a specific cultural madness. A cult psychosis, like the Heaven’s Gate group who committed mass suicide in San Diego in 1997, and the People’s Temple nearly twenty years before them in Jonestown. Millenarian groups date back hundreds of years, and not all of them are corrupt or completely insane. My lover, Junie Flynn, believes in what early twentieth-century psychic leader Edgar Cayce called inevitable “earth changes,” and there is a very real earth change movement within the post-hippie, post–New Age spiritual community. They’re very gentle people. Historians, however, lump them in with the more radical millenarians like the jackasses who wanted to kill most of the world.

  If Jiba and Mahao and whoever else was at the Lab were part of that group, and if they were responsible for these murders, then the isolation of this place would come back to bite them hard. There were no witnesses out here. There was no one they could call for help. Not in time. Not once Top and Bunny and I came for them.

  And they could scream as loud as they wanted, but in the end they would give us the answers we wanted. My friends and I are good men, but we are not nice ones.

  Not in places like this.

  “TOC to Outlaw,” came the call in my ear. TOC was the tactical operations center, where Church, Doc, and Bug were gathered to oversee this op. I raised my fist and we all slowed to a stop at the foot of a large dune, our bikes purring quietly.

  “Go for Outlaw,” I responded.

  “We’re tracking two vehicles inbound toward the target,” said Bug.

  “What do we know?”

  “Two Humvees, both with civilian paint jobs. Older models, probably bought from military sell-offs. No visible armament. We don’t have thermal scans, so no intel on number of occupants. ETA to target is twenty-five minutes.”

  Beside me Top cursed. That was going to be close to when we would arrive.

  “What’s the call?” I asked, and Church answered.

  “The play is yours, Outlaw. If you ID them as hostiles, we can have a drone there in forty minutes.”

  “Copy that.” I glanced at my guys and they each nodded. “We’re going in. Soft approach, observe and assess.”

  “Very well. Proceed with caution,” he said and ended the call.

  Bunny looked into the distance, toward where the vehicles would be coming. “More of their team, maybe? Or bringing fuel for the bird?”

  “Or coming to pick up the cocci bioweapon now that it’s been proved,” suggested Top. I nodded, because that sounded reasonable.

  “Let’s go find out,” I said.

  We headed out, pushing the bikes to their limit.

  5.

  THE LAB

  TÉNÉRÉ

  SOUTH-CENTRAL SAHARA

  As we drove we sent a drone ahead to surveil the landscapes, and the feed was sent to the Scout goggles and to the TOC.

  “Hey,” said Doc’s voice, “what are those flat areas you just passed?”

  I tapped the goggles to replay that portion of the video and saw what she meant. Way off to our left there were several areas that I first took for wind-smoothed sand, but when I zoomed in, it was clear that they were huge areas of ground covered with sand-colored tarps. Huge tarps, too. Maybe a quarter acre each, and we passed ten or twelve of them. No idea if there were others out of the drone’s camera range.

  “No idea,” I said. “Not sure we have the time to check them, either. Racing the clock here.”

  “Whatever it is,” said Doc, “I don’t like it. Looks like camouflage for something, but whatever it is, it’s flat. No sign of structures or vehicles under the tarps. Check it on your way back.”

  “I’ll add it to my to-do list,” I said, and kept driving. The Lab was ahead and we’d gained some advantage over the approaching Humvees. We kept going and then stopped two miles from the target.

  Our approach vector had been picked so that the wind blew toward us, thereby carrying a good deal of the muffled engine noises away behind us. Even so, it was worth hiking the last bit to guarantee that no one heard us approach. The vehicles were still a few minutes out, but we had to move fast. The sun was rolling off the edge of the world, which gave us the shroud of twilight. The desert is dry and there isn’t much moisture in the air to refract the fading sun’s glow. It gets dark very fast.

  Lights came on inside the Lab, but there were no perimeter spotlights. That was strange and it sent some minor alarm bells ringing in my head. Mass murderers and terrorists—if that’s what these people were—generally went the extra mile in overall security.

  I tapped Bunny’s shoulder. “Let’s get some birds in the air.”

  He unzipped Top’s pack and they quickly unwrapped and activated a pair of eagle owl drones. They weren’t exactly the right species for the Sahara, but it was night and they were close enough. Besides, we didn’t think we were creeping up on a lair of evil ornithologists. Top and Bunny each tossed a drone into the air, and the little machines deployed their wings, flapped vigorously, and rose into the darkening sky. I pulled back the flap that camouflaged the small computer strapped to my forearm, and brought up the feeds from both birds. The screen split into two and gave me high-def camera feeds, thermal scans, and scans for electronics as the drones soared over the building.

 
; On the first pass the thermals told us that there were eight people inside. No idea who they were, but they all grouped in one room. Electronic heat signatures suggested there were machines in there, and one of them was both hot and cold. A fridge. Then the drones circled and searched for the security setup, hunting for listening devices, infrared triggers, motion sensors, and other security systems.

  Bunny leaned close and studied the display. “Well,” he said sourly, “they got the whole package, don’t they?”

  “Yup.”

  And they did. The whole compound was wired six ways from Sunday, and all of it was networked through a very sophisticated computer system. I tapped my coms unit.

  “Bug, you getting this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “It’s a pretty sweet setup. Absolute cutting edge. Very expensive. Looks like the computers are protected by a one-hundred-twenty-eight-bit cyclical random numerical coder. That’s top of the line.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And we’re in,” he said simply. “Top of the line isn’t ‘us’ now, is it?”

  I heard Top laughing quietly.

  Rogue Team International had the MindReader computer, which is arguably the world’s most sophisticated super-intrusion software system. It’s how we’ve been able to stay a couple of steps ahead of the bad guys—and some of our allies—even though we’re a relatively small group. RTI works because we can spook our way into virtually any computer system, steal data, learn secrets, clone intel, and then sneak out again with no trace. MindReader rewrites the target system’s security software, including time codes, to eliminate all traces of its presence. The next best systems—owned by the NSA, China, and Russia—could sneak in, but they left footprints, scars to mark where they’d been. Nobody ever knows that MindReader was there. It makes our system the most dangerous in the world, which is why Mr. Church doesn’t share it with anyone. That’s a very deep line in the sand. His level of trust for other governments is nonexistent.

  Bug said, “I own the security cameras and recorded a two-minute loop. You can stroll right up anytime you want. No alarms.”

  “Remind me to give you a big sloppy kiss.”

  “Please don’t,” he said.

  We did not stroll up. We ran, quick and light, guns up and out. First thing we did was circle the building, looking for sentries. There were none, which was odd. Even with a couple of hundred thousand dollars’ worth of security gadgets it was an oddly complacent attitude. In the back we checked the jet. The motor was cold, but that didn’t mean much. I took our remaining BAMS unit and swept the mouth of the underwing tanks. The green light wavered and then turned orange.

  “Doc . . . ?” I asked very quietly.

  “You’re weirding me out again, Outlaw,” she said. “Whatever’s in those tanks isn’t cocci. It’s some kind of chemical compound that isn’t ringing any bells as biohazardous. We’ll need samples for analysis.”

  “Can’t do that now.”

  “Outlaw,” called Top via the coms unit, soft and urgent. I turned to see that he had moved to a space to the left of the airstrip. I ran over while Bunny watched the building. He had a FN SCAR-L assault rifle with a sound suppressor in his hands and a drum-fed Atchisson Assault shotgun slung on his back.

  I closed on Top and saw that there was another of the big dun-colored tarps stretching away into the gloom. Top had one corner of it up and raised it further as I knelt beside him.

  Beneath the tarp was grass. Not sure what kind, but it was green and vibrant. Stiff stalks of it.

  We looked at each other.

  “What in the wide blue fuck?” I murmured.

  Before he could even venture an answer there was a flash way off to our right. The vehicles were coming. Miles out, but coming fast.

  We rose and turned and ran toward the house.

  If we had time we’d pick the lock, go in quietly, listen, and learn. That ship had sailed. Bunny, Top, and I all pulled flash-bangs, picked windows where the drone thermals told us the inhabitants were grouped. We threw.

  The grenades flashed and banged.

  And we stormed in.

  6.

  THE LAB

  TÉNÉRÉ

  SOUTH-CENTRAL SAHARA

  We kicked in the doors and rushed through a lobby and a kitchen and into a big room that had to be a kind of rec room or lounge.

  All eight of the inhabitants of the Lab were rolling around on the floor, hands pressed to their ears, eyes squeezed shut, screaming in pain and confusion. I saw the Xhosa woman, Bongani Jiba, and the Sotho guy, Thabo Mahao, right off. They were the only two black people. The other six were a mix of Asian faces—one Japanese, one mixed, and a variety of whites, one of whom had a distinctly French nose. They were all about the same age—mid-to-late twenties. All dressed in casual clothes, jeans, T-shirts. White lab coats were hung on hooks or draped over chairs. Only one of them had a gun—a small-frame 9mm in a Kydex belt holster. The plastic grips were a happy powder-blue color. There were no visible backup magazines, and the woman who wore it hadn’t reached for the weapon. I know a lot of cops and soldiers who would have found a way to draw their guns even during the pain of a flash-bang.

  Bunny took the pistol away and then gave cover, and Top and I searched everyone else. No guns. The only weapon—if you could call it that—was a Swiss Army knife. The one with the spoon. No locking blades.

  Top cut me a look and I shook my head.

  I knelt by Mahao because he was closest. I grabbed his shirt—his fucking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt—and pulled him roughly to a sitting position. He was fighting through the pain to try to see me, to make sense of what was happening. I put the barrel of my Sig Sauer against the bridge of his nose.

  “Thabo Mahao,” I said, “listen to me. Tell me what this place is and what you’re doing here. Lie to me and I will kill you.”

  He stared at me as if I’d stepped through a hole in the dimension. His mouth worked and took on about forty different word shapes before he managed to force out a reply.

  “Who . . . who are you . . . ?” he gasped.

  I tapped him with the gun. Hard. “That’s not an answer to my question. Answer right now or I’ll shoot you and ask someone else.”

  “This is our field lab,” Mahao said quickly, his voice almost a yelp.

  “For developing bioweapons?” I prompted, mindful of the cars on their way here.

  Mahao’s face took on the strangest expression. It’s the kind of look someone gives you if you ask the weirdest or stupidest question ever. He said, “Bio . . . ? Wait . . . what?”

  On the floor near him, Jiba was waving her hand back and forth as if trying to chase my words out of the air. “No . . . no . . .” she kept saying. “Are you crazy people? Bioweapons? Us? Are you mad?”

  Despite being in pain and clearly terrified, Mahao gave me a crooked half smile. “Oh my god,” he said, “you think we’re them!”

  As crazy as it sounds, he laughed. So did Jiba.

  “No,” she said, her streaming eyes going wide. “That’s crazy. Them? You think we’re them? You think we’re those people who are trying to kill the world?”

  “A lot of Toubou families are dead around here,” I said. “Your jet’s been spotted spraying something. Tell me what we’re supposed to think.”

  Several of the people gasped, and two cried out in horror. Not at me, or even at our guns. They were reacting to my words.

  “The Toubou . . .” breathed Mahao. “No . . . god . . . no. How did they die?”

  I glanced at Top, who gave me a small shake of his head. Not a negation, but of confusion. So I said, “Coccidioidomycosis.”

  He stared at me in even deeper confusion and more profound horror. “Cocci? Here? Where?”

  “Finger of God,” I said, and told him th
e other locations as well.

  Mahao seemed to ignore my gun. He touched my chest. And, for some reason, I let him. “Tell me what happened.”

  In my ear I heard Bug. “Incoming vehicles’ ETA two minutes.”

  Bunny moved to the door, unslinging his shotgun. I gave Mahao twenty seconds of it. He was shaking his head the whole time.

  “No, we weren’t spraying the oases. Near there, sure, but not there. God, we would never hurt those people. They’re good people.”

  “And what kind of people are you?” asked Top. “What are you doing with that jet? What are you spraying? And what’s with that grass under the tarp?”

  He actually smiled. “The people—whoever they are—are trying to kill the world because it’s overpopulated. That’s what the news says. But us—just a bunch of us—we’re trying to feed the world.”

  “What?”

  “You said something about grass? You saw it out back or at one of the test fields? That’s not grass.”

  “Looked like it to me,” said Top.

  “It’s not. It’s something much better. Something we’ve bioengineered to grow even here in the desert. Something that is going to change the world. Something that will stop all those wars over natural resources.”

  “Ticktock, boss,” said Bunny.

  “What are you talking about?” I demanded. “What is it you’re growing out here?”

  There was such a light as I’ve never seen in anyone’s eyes. Radiant, luminous, maybe even a little mad, but at the same time . . . there was a purity about it. A joy.

  “It’s wheat,” he said. “We’re growing wheat.”

  I stared at him. “In the fucking desert?”

  “Yes,” he said calmly. “In the fucking desert.”

  Jiba said, “And soon in every desert.”

  Mahao said, “Deserts make up one-third of the earth’s total land mass. We can turn that into millions of square miles of croplands. We can feed everyone. Everyone. And all that green will drink up billions of tons of carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. This project . . . we came up with it in college. All of us. Friends who saw that the world was in trouble. Our parents and their parents broke the world, soiled it, raided the larders. We decided to try and fix it.”