Jim grinned back, then shook his head, the grin fading. “Did a lot of praying. Though I never did believe in God, not the Bible kind, anyway.”
“Guided by a divine hand? Born again, are you now?”
“Probably not. There was a … well, a ghost. Showed me the way, Stel. Showed me the way.”
She slowly blinked, her dark eyes on his; then she simply nodded.
Jim took another mouthful of beer.
“That’s gotta taste like piss by now.”
“Yep.”
“Let me get you another one.”
“Sure.”
She rose. “Then we can decide.”
“Decide what?”
“Whether we’re gonna do what William asks us to do, once he comes round.”
“That’s an easy one, Stel.”
“Glad to hear you say that, old man. Damned glad.”
He watched her ample hips swaying as she made her way to the bar. Oh, Stel, you’ve fallen for the boy, haven’t you? Shoulda guessed that, when I saw you bathing his feet.
* * *
He opened his eyes. A sensor beeped. He saw Jenine MacAlister turn from the window, watched her cross over to stand beside the bed. Her eyes were flat.
“You look like hell, William.”
And I can still see your bones, Jenine.
“You really lost yourself out there, didn’t you?” She stared down at him a moment longer, then dragged over a chair and sat, sighing. “I pulled out all the stops, brought the best medical team I could find. They’ve worked on you for days. Long-term prognosis isn’t good, but it could’ve been worse. Believe me. You’ll need more marrow, more flushing, more stem injections, more everything. No promises beyond ten years. It was a manufactured match, by the way, that marrow. Any idea what that costs? Don’t worry about any of that, it’s taken care of, William.”
She looked tired. She looked like she’d been holding back all her cards for one single, sweeping play. Waiting for him to wake up, making certain she’d be there when he did. Alone, when she was at her deadliest.
“I’d forgotten,” he said stiffly.
“What?”
He smiled at her frown. “What you looked like. Funny, that. Sometimes I’d just walked out of your office, after an hour trapped under you, and I’d be unable to picture your face. Just the eyes, the look in them—that never went away.”
“It’s what kept bringing you back.”
“I suppose so.”
She seemed to hesitate, then asked, “How are you feeling?”
“Not that well, Jenine.”
“Too bad. Assuming you’d like a reprise, that is.”
“No. Those days are done.”
“I kind of figured as much,” she said with a faint smile. She settled back in the chair. “Would you like a sit rep?”
“Wouldn’t that be a breach in security, Jenine?”
“You must be kidding. What security? There’s more holes in the dam than we can count. It’s all pouring out, William. Do you realize there is going to be a major conflict on the North American continent for the first time since Mexico imploded?”
“I take it you’re not counting the Haitian invasion.”
She wrinkled her nose. “A million half-drowned refugees don’t really rate, especially since none of them reached shore.”
“Fine, the first in a long time. What about it?”
“Only that you are right in the middle of it. Charges are being brought up on you. Sedition, treason, conspiring under the dictates of Homeland Security prohibitions. I don’t think I can help you, either. There’s always been two camps in government, and right now the hawks are circling high. The situation hasn’t been this unstable since the last decade of the United States. You would not believe the paranoia at NOAC Mount.”
“It’s the legacy of a world power that isn’t a world power anymore, Jenine.”
“I know that very well, William. American flags are flying off the shelves. They want it like it used to be, with them dictating to everyone else on everything.”
“Ironic, isn’t it?”
“You find this amusing?”
“In a detached sort of way. Even without the Midwest Hole opening up, the Yanks couldn’t have survived without Canadian resources. That pill’s still bitter to them, you know. But the fact remains, the Lakota Nation is sovereign. NOAC will be invading contrary to every international law there is, and the rest of the world is watching.”
Her eyes were hard as she said, “They don’t give a fuck.”
“Just like in the old days, huh?”
“Just like, William.”
“Let’s talk science for a bit, Jenine. What’s this I’ve been reading about the Mars Excavations?”
“Fits the Restitution, as far as we can tell.”
William managed a smile. “The Restitution—another forbidden subject.”
“Any idea how many careers went up in flames with that, William? The Mars Project made one thing brutally plain. We had a shared heritage. DNA sequences, the works. The question remains, were we seeded at the same time, or did one planet’s life precede the other, and which came first? The evidence is pointing to Mars in one area, at least.”
“The hominid line.”
She nodded. “It was a crowded tree, on both worlds, although the gracile elements seem to begin on Mars—low gravity and all that. Likely both erectus and Neanderthal are indigenous branches, terrestrial, I mean. Maybe even ergaster. I can’t see ergaster having the technical wherewithal to build colony ships, since all we’re finding with them are stone, antler, and bone tools. Besides, as the Restitution acknowledged, there is plenty of evidence of fully modern forms throughout our geologic history, the oldest confirmed date sits at twenty-one million years right now.”
“There,” William said, “now isn’t this better? A kinder, gentler subject.”
“Only by virtue of it being essentially irrelevant.”
“Really? I don’t think it is. Look, Mars is a depleted planet. Beyond the spill from impact detritus, the mineral yield is a pittance. How many old mines and diggings were found?”
“The evidence of that is minimal—”
“Of course it is. There’s sixty or seventy million years of erosion and meteoric and asteroid impact mitigating it. It’s all dust now, not surprising, given the atmosphere’s virtually stripped away. What are the rad readings on deep subsurface strata? Residual, I’d guess. Plenty of half-life’s done and gone by now. Even so, it all seems bloody obvious to me. We’ve done it before, Jenine. Destroyed a world, although it seems some of us managed to escape it before it was too late. Escape to Earth.”
“Way too much supposition, William.”
“Common sense. Look, the Cassini and Hugyens missions found primitive carbon-based protolife on Titan, a seed reservoir, sealed under ice. Identical building blocks. Someone made a stash, Jenine. Probably us, back when we were Martians.”
“So what is your point?”
“Just that. We’ve fucked up before. Then conveniently forgot that fact, and now we’re doing it again. We had our second chance, and instead of doing it right this time, we’ve just repeated the old follies. Resource depletion, atmosphere stripping. I don’t think it was an accident there were once so many hominid lines coexisting. It was a damned experiment, hunting for the best option. Only it failed yet again, because our species—the one that won out—remains as shortsighted as it ever was. They played with punctuated equilibrium, but it didn’t work, because it’s a game with random rules and immeasurable victories. But now, finally…”
“Finally, it’s happened,” she said. “Peripheral peoples.”
“Pressured populations. Biologically desperate populations.”
“We need those stem cells, William.”
“We don’t deserve them.”
“You presume to pass judgment on all of us?”
“Not me. Nature does. It has already. We’re done, Jenine. We’re Homo e
rectus looking across the gulf at Homo ergaster, we’re Neanderthals scowling at Moderns.”
“No, we’re not. Because we possess the technology to partake of those new survival mechanisms. For our children’s sake, if not for us.”
“You are telling me you haven’t acquired subjects yet? Spec Ops incursions have been occurring everywhere.”
“One of the problems with cheap armaments is that they level the playing field. Worse, Ladon Inc. has been a major supplier of state-of-the-art defense systems. Clearly, the Lady and her cronies expect to tag along for the ride up and away.”
“Do they? Are you sure of that?”
Her face filled with disbelief, then derision. “An act of self-sacrifice? Get real, William. She’s got a biotech team on it, guaranteed. Probably part of the deal.”
“If so, isn’t that what libertarian competition is all about?”
“Competition stops being a virtue as soon as we lose.”
“I cannot believe that such hypocrisy exists among the political and economic powers that be, Jenine. This isn’t the old US of A anymore, you know.”
“Irony. I appreciate your sense of humor, William. I always have.”
“But you never laugh.”
“Your sense of humor does not invite laughter. You’re looking tired. Rest now. We’ll talk again later.”
Entry: Lakota Nation, July 19, A.C. 14
Abandoned and lost, the remote mobile communication device squatted turtle-like on the hillock. Its screen was smeared with an arcane message, but its optics functioned just fine. Its brain was small but compactly organized, able to call on discriminating logic processors and copious memory, since it was capable of other, less peaceful functions.
But the storms had untethered it; the weather had damaged it. No longer one of MacAlister’s drones, no longer NOAC’s eyes and ears, the turtle wandered with its own designs, recording events it found intrinsically interesting. Or so it seemed. The truth was, it had been hijacked, and now fed its visuals directly into the Net’s Swamp.
On the plain below was a sprawl of structures, a concrete and metallic fist surrounded by oil-extraction devices, pipelines, storage containers, motionless vehicles.
Overhead, the sky flickered, a visual symphony of sheet lightning and ground-launched systemic EMP bursts. Up where the first-wave Insertion Drones flew supersonic and blind, dead and dumb—their brains fried. The Lakota-held installation, tactically termed a Dark Presence, remained so. On its hill, the turtle monitored and recorded the subsurface extrusion mortars, launching their EMP caches skyward on puffs of smoke quickly whipped away in the wind. Joining in the fun, at least six Lakota warriors—each armored and with every modern weapon at their disposal—were positioned in and around the installation, waiting for the next intrusion.
In classic NOAC procedure—and regardless of the failure of the advance drones—a wing of unmanned fighter bombers dipped down under the clouds and fanned out for the first pass. This would be a reconnaissance flyover, target-fixing for the follow-up strike. The elimination of serviceable sats had necessitated this direct method. NOAC didn’t want the installation damaged, didn’t want another Kuwait, another Iraq. Armed with supersmart self-guided bombs, the sleek, stealthed jets hunted for the counterinsertion squad—the Lakota.
Hornet stingers radar-equipped for stealthed targets rose to meet them. The air thundered; the sky ignited two kilometers from the installation. Wreckage spun burning through the night air. The fighter bombers were gone.
As the Lakota changed positions—their Lizard-back armor blind to all but close-proximity line of sight—the turtle extended its sensors. Seismic tracers were the first indications, one signal laid overtop another. The turtle employed a filter and did some discriminating, then identifying. Stealthed helishuttles, eight kilometers to the north and closing fast; but closer, now almost within sight, a dozen unmanned tanks—Ladybugs.
The Dark Presence was ready for them. A perimeter picket of fast-traversing mines—Ants in military jargon—closed in. The tanks responded with enfilade fire and cluster path-makers, which took care of those Ants in front of them, but did nothing for the sleepers that activated after the tanks passed, and now came up from behind. Barking explosions immobilized two, six, ten, then all twelve Ladybugs. More Ants swarmed the tanks, many dying as the vehicles expended all their defensive weaponry, but within a few more seconds, each Ladybug burned, poured smoke into the cold wind.
The helishuttles landed beyond a ridge, disgorging their Immediate Response Teams, then lifting and banking and racing northward. Subsurface eardrums, which had tracked them all the way, now activated their own SAMs, and the night sky was bright once again.
There were eight teams, each consisting of six highly trained soldiers fully armored in rad- and biochem-proof servo suits, thoroughly armed, each soldier alone capable of conducting death and destruction on a massive scale. The Ants got most of them, a subspecies arriving nicknamed Fireants for their immolating qualities, cooking one soldier after another in their armor, via acids, incendiary chemicals, nanoinfiltrators, and so on.
The eleven soldiers who survived to penetrate the perimeter were each damaged in some manner, bleeding heat emissions and making fine targets for the Lizard-backs. In moments, the NOAC insertion was over, and the installation remained.…
A Dark Presence.
The turtle’s sensors detected another subsurface tremble. Its optics detected and followed the rapid departure of the Lakota. Its brain organized this data; then it, too, made a hasty exit.
Thirty-one minutes later, the Alberta Tar Sands went up. The sky lit bright; the wind withdrew for a long moment, then returned to strip the grass from the hilltops, to send the turtle tumbling from its anchored tracks.
Then there was smoke.
* * *
Old Jim turned off the television set. There hadn’t been much of a picture, but since the satellite feed was from far across the Atlantic, that was no surprise. He went to the window and looked at the distant horizon. Nothing to mark the burning firestorm that now raged hundreds of kilometers to the northwest. Come the morning, he knew, there would be smoke, and the sun would turn coppery as it traversed the sky.
“Now, that’s what I call a fuckup,” Stel said from the sofa.
Jim grunted.
“Cheer up,” Stel said. “She’s got to leave his room sometime.”
He turned to her. Stel’s ample legs were crossed, the denim of her jeans taut. She had a cigarette in one hand, a mug of coffee in the other. There were lines bracketing her mouth, her still-full lips pale and set in a half smile. A face of the modern age—one look into those seen-it-all eyes—the face of history. A face needing tender hands.
She must have seen something in his expression, for she said quietly, “I’ve had my eyes on you for years. But you were lusting after someone else.”
“I was?”
“Grief, I think she’s called.”
He squinted, blinked, then turned back to the window.
“Wrong guess?” she asked behind him.
“Wrong guess,” he answered. A moment passed. “Hate’s the lady, Stel. You should’ve seen me. I pored over books, I learned all there was, every magazine, every goddamned article.”
“About what?”
“Cancer. Diseases. Pesticides, herbicides. Did you know cancer was the unmentioned epidemic as far back as the Eighties? Cigarettes were outlawed virtually everywhere and the number of smokers went way down, but still the stats climbed. No change. No change at all. It was all lies. What killed us was in the air, in the water, in the packaging for our foods. Then, later, in GMO and irradiation and microwaving. Cancer viruses, prions, systemic rejection so bad, people became allergic to being alive. It was all going down, Stel, all going down.” His eyes slowly lost their focus, seeing nothing beyond the glass. “Remember Regina in ’06? A quarter million head incinerated in two weeks—you could see the glow from Saskatoon. Funny, isn’t it. Before Regina
was called Regina, it was called Pile of Bones, only then it was a mountain of buffalo bones.” He paused, rubbed the bristle on his chin. “Round and round. A quarter million head every two weeks. And then there were none. And then all the young people, shaking like leaves, going senile—like some bad science-fiction movie. It wasn’t fair, how they died. Not fair.”
“Still hating, Jim?”
He shrugged, focus returning, close this time, to his own face reflected in the windowpane. “The passion goes. I’d kind of expected it to eat me up from the inside, but it didn’t.”
“It’s the ones left behind,” Stel said. “I lived nearly twenty years in the city, did you know that? When I was young. Never was a country girl, now ain’t that a joke.”
He faced her again, wondering at the sudden jump in her thoughts, catching the slight shift in her tone. Her eyes were on the table. She leaned forward and fished another cigarette from the pack, lit it, then leaned back again. “I lived with a woman in the city. Twelve years.” She looked up, grinned. “I go both ways, you know.”
“Lucky you.”
Her gaze returned to the table, seeing back years and years. “She died. Reaction to tear gas. Oh, we were hell on wheels. What a life. No tomorrow. We knew it, we pushed all the way, every damn minute. We flew high. We screamed at the State, fought every surrender. And it was all for nothing. I should’ve died with her, I should never have lived on, so long, all these years. Wasn’t just her dying that broke my heart, it was everything, it was losing all the battles, never winning—they took it all away, called it efficiency, streamlining. Said the global economy was to blame, but that was all bullshit. Excuses for cold hearts—” She looked up. “What a laugh. We thought we were fighting policies, but we weren’t. We were fighting cold hearts, cruel thoughts, blood like ice. You can’t beat that, because you can’t get in, can’t get past that wall. Me, I wanted to go out hot, white hot. Burning fierce. Now look at me.” She smiled. “Old and soft and hiding here in this dying town.”
Jim walked over and sat beside her, close enough so that their thighs pressed together. “What a pair we are, eh?”