Chapter Four
31 December 2075
Dallas, Texas, U.S.A.
Capitol complex perimeter
Extry Captain Jim Coalbridge buttoned his greatcoat against the Texas wind. A dusting of what looked like snow, but what was actually “curd,” neutralized sceeve military nanotech, was falling on the downtown streets, coating them with a fine gray-white powder. The day was mild for December in Dallas, but Coalbridge was used to the regulated temperatures of spacecraft, and he’d been shivering since stepping out of the downtown train platform.
Coalbridge turned up his coat’s collar. He had grown up in Oklahoma, and he knew that Southern prairie weather could be unpredictable. There were no nearby mountain ranges—practically no natural features whatsoever—to direct the huge pressure cells that roamed the plains. Any stray upper level current might mean a thirty or forty degree shift in temperature within hours North Texas summers were unbearably hot. Fall and spring were tolerable—but those seasons were filled with tornados and hurricanes. Now, with global weather patterns thrown into chaos by the sceeve planetary attacks, there were more killer storms than ever.
And winter? Winter was still mostly brown in these parts—with the occasional ice storm to provide a day or so of treacherous beauty.
He had to admit that walking under the sky, any planetary sky, made him uneasy now. After years spent mostly in space, it felt a bit dangerous and wrong to be under all those layers of atmosphere.
Space was better. Space would kill you, true. But the planetary atmosphere you had to expose yourself to because you had to breathe it. Space you could protect against in a reasonable way.
Coalbridge glanced upward reflexively at the empty blue sky, checking for a tell-tale approaching shadow. Stupid. Should have gotten over that behavior years ago. The drop-rods fell at hypersonic speeds. They said you had five seconds from hearing a raid alert until impact. They also said you never heard the one that hit you.
I’m a walking Extry cliché, Coalbridge thought. I’ve lost my land-lubber instincts and spend half my time down here feeling that I’m stuck in permanent airlock failure mode and that they sky is falling.
Of course, on Earth, the sky sometimes did fall. And the effects weren’t pretty.
Take Dallas, for instance. The place was more rubble than city. Much of downtown had been flattened by “drop-rod” titanium rainfalls and a sceeve silicon-eating churn during the first invasion. Although the churn was mostly turned to curd, it had infected and weakened the city’s infrastructure before being deactivated by ground defenses. What skyscrapers remained were brittle and useless. Business, and humanity along with it, had moved underground. Transportation was too expensive and difficult to bury, so it remained on the surface. Big sporting events and concerts still happened topside, as well (and fans took their lives into their hand to attend them).
Political protests also were a surface-based activity. The sceeve invasion, which had abruptly ended eight years before, was about to resume.
Everyone in the Extry knew it. The Xeno division had confirmed it with its startling communiqué from a sceeve source. Everyone in the government should be well aware by now. And anybody else was an idiot who didn’t suspect what was coming. Bad things had once again begun to fall from the sky.
Yet even before the recent precursors to re-invasion, Planet Earth had been a wreck.
Stuck in half-ass gear. That was the way Coalbridge’s great-great-grandfather had once describe the old European city of Prague to Coalbridge when Coalbridge was a kid. Half-ass gear was when you were going too fast for first or second, but not fast enough to shift to the next higher gear.
Aging in humans—at least in the developed world—had been short-circuited around the time Coalbridge’s great-great, who Coalbridge called Paw Paw, was in his sixties. It was ironic that humans had solved the aging problem—well, forestalled it, at least, by a hundred or so years—only to have the unsolvable death problem hit them like a thunderbolt from space when the sceeve attacked.
Paw Paw had lived in Prague for a year in the early 1990s after the twentieth century’s Cold War ended, and he’d described his impressions of the city to young Jimmy on more than one occasion.
He always called it “Praha,” like the natives, Coalbridge thought, and always made it feminine, like a vessel. Well, “Praha” or Prague, the place no longer existed, so it was pretty much a worry for historians now.
“Praha got the shit kicked out of her during World War II, but escaped the worst of the damage. She didn’t get flattened, like, say, Krakow in Poland. But she was busted up enough. And the commies just left her that way for fifty years. Damnedest thing. They didn’t abandon her. Everyone stilled live there. But nobody fixed anything. There was nothing to fix anything with. No money. No materials. No tools.”
Coalbridge remembered his grandfather’s going on about the city while sitting at the battered kitchen table in Oklahoma City, the table’s plasticized woodgrain surface pockmarked with cigarette burns from the older man’s endless train of Marlboro Reds.
“I was having a little thing with this woman, Lenka Justinova—well, she was my Czech teacher at the intelligence station, to tell the truth—this was before your Maw May and me got married—and Lenka lived way up inside one of those gigantic concrete monsters the comms threw up all over Eastern Europe. Called ‘em panelaks in Czech. Twenty thousand poor suckers in a cluster of ‘em, if you can believe it. Made ‘em out of this inferior concrete with too much sand that started to degrade the moment it set. It was nice having a little thing on the side with Lenka, but let me tell you, I’d always go see her with a set of tools and spend half my time fixing her toilet or working on her sink instead of, you know, having fun.”
Except for the mysterious Lenka, his grandfather could’ve been talking about modern day Dallas, Coalbridge thought. All the old buildings were torn to bits and pieces, and all the new stuff was cheap-ass, thrown together with whatever could be easily-manufactured or salvaged.
The center of the downtown streets had become the only reliably clear thoroughfares, and was used by auto, bus and foot traffic. Rubble lined the sidewalks and filled the gutters—rubble coated with the gray-white denuded sceeve curd so that the entire city looked like it had received a thin shellacking with primer and was awaiting a paint job.
There was also sparkle. A fine glass—the grain-sized shards of shattered windows, Coalbridge figured—paved the center of the streets and remained exposed due to steady traffic. The stuff wasn’t sharp. It had long ago been ground to a sand-like fineness, and the roadway glittered like diamonds when the sun shone.
Lining the streets, or overturned on the rubble where there had once been sidewalks, were the battered and rusted remains of cars, trucks and minivans: Fords, Sonys, Apples, Quicks. And for color, here and there some brave soul had attempted a bit of civic improvement. Along Field Street, a line of the burn-out hulks of cars still parallel parked in the places their owners had left them twelve years ago, had been coated on the roof of each car with a layer of potting soil. The soil was, in turn, sprinkled with a hardy strain of nanotech protectant and fertilizer—one of the new varieties of crunch that DARPA and some of the private firms had developed, Coalbridge figured.
Growing on the car roofs of Field Street—flowers. Daffodils, geraniums, chrysanthemums. All were in full bloom. Either nobody had programmed into the crunch the idea of winter, or perhaps whoever engineered this display had thought blossoms made the place look more “Christmasy,” and turned them on for the month.
They looked like zombie daffodils, Coalbridge thought. Undead mums and nasturtiums. Not allowed by the crunch to rest, to wilt, to die off, to proceed through the natural cycle of birth, death and resurrection. Held in stasis by Frankenstein bugs and the human desire to find some way to spruce up even a hellhole of a place.
One car, an Apple Rhombi minivan, was completely roofed in poinsettias. Maybe his Christmas theory had been right. But the Rhombi didn’t really look Christmasy.
Looks like a grave is what, Coalbridge thought. They all do. Like a country graveyard on Decoration Day.
For a moment, Coalbridge considered how many graves, how many pulverized home sites, how many dunes of human-charnel curd, he’d have to visit to properly honor his dead on Decoration day.
Have to be magic like Santa Claus. Need some flying reindeer, too.
The thought of one day retiring to become a stockman with a herd of flying reindeer made Coalbridge smile. He’d long ago found ways to ward off the crushing weight that came from knowing that everyone—every last one of his relatives—was gone.
The sceeve invasion had killed ninety-eight percent of humanity. Coalbridge was part of the two percent remnant that had, by luck or chance, somehow survived. He was his family’s last representative among the living.
Coalbridge’s Christmas had been pretty much a non-event that he’d celebrated alone by cooking himself a complete holiday dinner.
Ah hell, thought Coalbridge, it’s the holidays for one more day. Why not get into the spirit? He found himself liking the weirdly vibrant car-tops. Dallas was still alive. Okay Paw Paw: like you did Praha, I’ll call her she. She was alive. And fighting her way out of sickness and despair. People lived here. This broken, blasted ruin of a metropolis was the home to two million souls, three million if you counted nearby Fort Worth. It was the most populous city on Planet Earth.
Coalbridge turned a corner.
And there they are, he thought. Some of them, at least.
Peepsies.
As he’d seen on the news feed that morning, the anti-war protesters, the Peepsies, were out in force today. Even with reports of fresh drop-rod attacks on Sydney and Nairobi, the organizers had evidently decided the protest must go on. They probably didn’t believe the news anyway.
He’d been warned to start early for his meeting downtown, but hadn’t expect this: the entire Capitol complex was cordoned off by a line of beaten-up school buses stretching from Field to Elm to St. Paul to Commerce, squaring off at Field once more. Paper scraps were plastered on the buses—Coalbrige couldn’t make out what they were, and assumed they might be slogans or announcements. They flapped in the breeze.
Around the buses milled hundreds of Peepsies: students in the new re-training programs out on winter break, the professionally disgruntled, paid “volunteers” working for various anti-war NGO interests, and the hard-core contingent of the permanently deranged and hopelessly bereaved.
The Capital Complex was surrounded.
One hundred eighty million human beings left on the planet—barely enough to keep civilization from collapsing around itself, maybe not enough—an imminent attack by a rapacious enemy on its way, and this was how these people chose to spend their time? It was strange to think that they were some of the people he’d spent the last twelve years defending with his life. Yet—
He couldn’t hate them. He could only feel pity for the Peepsies.
All of these people had lost most or all of their friends and family. Earth’s population hadn’t merely been devastated; it had been treated to an extinction event.
Asia had been the first target. The sceeve were after resources and technology. At least, that was the theory. Their choice of what to take and what they left behind was often bizarre. Entire mountains of limestone taken. The contents of a gypsum mine sucked out. As far as technology went, they went after the most pedestrian means of production—the factories of China, those of the Asian Tigers. After pacification, their “harvesters” would arrive and begin gleaning the landscape, disassembling manufacturing plants, carting them off to space.
There was no attempt to “collect” any human, scientist, innovator or entrepreneur. The sceeve did not seem to care about the human brain trust, the universities and corporate campuses, the industrial park concrete boxes and basement labs, where the ideas came from. These they merely destroyed. They seemed to regard ideas as some sort of epiphenomena, a byproduct of technology, instead of its generator. Every continental coast was devastated, but the tech that was “sceeved” was always a fabrication plant, a car lot, a copper pit. And retail stores. Every Best Buy store up and down both coasts was dismantled and taken away, every Home Depot, Duggers Lifescience, every Amazon and Wal-mart warehouse looted. Humans themselves were inconveniences—but not too lowly to destroy at every opportunity. In the end, only the U.S. managed to put up effective resistance. Earth’s military was now the U.S. military.
Then, after four years of devastation, the sceeve had left. Suddenly. Mysteriously. Left with the Earth only partially “harvested,” as far as anybody could tell.
Oh, the sceeve were still out there. The war continued as humans were hemmed in, cordoned off from systems at a distance greater than twenty-five light-years from Sol, the so-called Fomalhaut Limit.
And now, just as suddenly, they had decided to return. All the signs were there in the heavens. Over the past year, the Fomalhaut Limit had shrunk as the sceeve began to move their blockade inexorably toward Sol System.
The armada had not arrived yet, but it was coming. And as for the Peepsie protestors Coalbridge was now confronted with, all most of them had experienced directly was the fact that they were the inheritors of a destroyed Earth. The ones responsible—the sceeve—had vanished from the planet surface itself eight years ago.
Maybe you couldn’t blame people for thinking it was all a ruse, or believing that the automated attacks that still got through were somehow the creation of the government. People could convince themselves of all manner of things to make some sort of sense of a senseless situation.
Yet I lost everybody I loved, too, but that didn’t turn me into a political idiot.
What the cordon of busses encircled was not physically the U.S. presidential residence and Capitol complex. The buses were at street level, after all, and merely cordoned off the old First National Bank building, now empty. The actual Capitol was many feet underground, ensconced in the intricate system of century-old tunnels that lay beneath downtown Dallas. The bus-fortress was there to screen off exterior access to the First National block, including the main Capitol entrance at Field and Pacific, which was where Coalbridge was headed.
Puffs of smoke suddenly wafted toward him and Coalbridge’s eyes began to water. What was that smell? Something was cooking. The air was thick with a meaty odor. Coalbridge had skipped breakfast for the first time in weeks and was hungry. Although it was plainly too early for anyone to be cooking lunch, in the back of his mind he idly assumed he might be smelling barbecue.
Coalbridge’s main hobby was cooking—and anybody who suggested that this made him somehow less of a warrior wasn’t worth the time to beat the shit out of. Despite the traumatized economy, there were still an amazing number of ingredients and spices still available in Dallas. The human instinct for trade had found a way. He’d spent whatever free time he’d been able to snag while on shore duty cooking up a storm, with usually only himself or a friend or two from work to feed. One thing he hadn’t had time for while planet-side was an old-fashioned night-long grilling session. Barbecue was one of his main indulgences when eating out, however, and he’d been planning on at least hitting his favorite joint, Rudy’s, up in Denton—which he’d heard still existed and which was as close to Oklahoma-style barbecue as you could get in these parts. But so far there had been no time, and it didn’t look like he was going to make it now. Most of the past month he’d spent ground-side had been underground in the New Pentagon’s Extry command.
Coalbridge turned the corner of Elm and Field and all thoughts of eating barbecue disappeared from his mind—perhaps for eternity.
A dozen Peepsies were burning to death in the middle of the Elm Street.
“Aaaaaaaaiaaaaaaaaaah!”
The smell? Human barbecue, thought Coalbridge. Oh God, that’s what it was.
The Peepsies were sitting in meditative fashion—or, as his sister Gretchen, a kindergarten teacher dead in the first wave of the invasion, had called it: sitting crisscross-applesauce.
Something familiar. . .
Then it came to him: they were mimicking the Tovil Exorcism, the group of Buddhist monks and nuns who had set themselves alight in protest of the United States’ occupation of Sri Lanka back in the 2040s. Sri Lanka didn’t exist as a recognizable landmass anymore, much less a country.
Shit. Coalbridge breathed in deeply to tamp down the adrenaline surge he’d just endured, and took a mental moment to stifle his immediate urge—which had been to go and rescue somebody.
He took a longer look at the self-immolators. Looked like three men and three women, from what he could tell. Young. Dressed in Peepsie counterculture garb, now aflame. He took a closer look. Very young. They were teenagers. Aha.
Nobody was dying here.
These kids were protected by dermal churn—called “salt,” after the military version of the same nanotech. Salt itself was not extremely expensive—Coalbridge had a coating—but the charger subscription necessary to make it effective day-in and day-out was not cheap. Coalbridge didn’t know how much such subscriptions cost these days, but he’d bet his captain’s bar that these were rich kids, the children of doctors, lawyers, NGO brass and government bureaucrats probably, whose families could afford the kind of electrostatic subscription and advanced coating that would permit such a display of political theater.
Salt could be set to deliver or to stifle nerve stimuli, pain in particular, through the coating. Yet salt wasn’t magic. Even if the kids had turned off their nerves, salt could hardly prevent the heat damage from a gas flame.
Hence the charming barbecue smell, Coalbridge thought.
But the nanobugs were repairing the damage as fast as it occurred, and probably insulating the inner body parts below the skin from further damage. The kids would suffer from the fire they were applying to their bodies, but in the end they weren’t going to be disfigured. Or burn to death. Or even be terribly inconvenienced.
Which was good, Coalbridge reflected. You did dumb shit when you were a teenager. Unfortunately, the teenagers weren’t doing a very good job at copying the Tovil monks’ calm indifference to pain.
“Aaaaaaaaiaaaaaaaaaah!” Their heads tilted back, agony in their throats, the teen screams continued—loud and annoyingly piercing.
It’s like a goddamn coyote yowl, Coalbridge thought. Haven’t heard one of those in ages.
As Coalbridge looked on, he saw one of the girls break from her position, try to crawl from the street toward the gutter, but another flaming boy reached for her.
For a moment the two tussled on the pavement, both engulfed in flames.
Coalbridge’s impulse to help kicked back in. He took a step toward the two. This was insane. If the girl wanted out, hadn’t realized the pain she was getting herself into, it was his duty to aid her.
But before he could move any farther, the boy succeeded in throwing himself atop the flaming girl and holding her in place.
Coalbridge quickly made his way toward the two—only to pull up short. Now he was close enough to see what was up.
He’d misinterpreted. The two weren’t actually fighting or struggling at all. They were locked in a kiss.
And were they—
Yep.
Coalbridge turned away, amused and disgusted. He chuckled. If this really was the end of the world, what a third rate Apocalypse it had turned out to be.
Another glance toward the sky.
No drop-rod attack seemed imminent. But the longer he lingered outside, the more exposed he felt.
Coalbridge made his way back to the side of the Elm street cleared corridor. As he walked on, any contempt he’d felt dissipated. He felt suddenly tender toward the burnt kids. He’d been an adrenaline junkie when he was that age. He’d strongly considered taking an aviation route when he graduated from Annapolis.
And he’d jumped at the Extry, and spacecraft duty, the minute his transfer had been approved.
Of course, aircraft were now obsolete militarily—at least so far as the war with the sceeve was concerned.
Fate had led him out sea on surface vessels and then driven him in another direction entirely—one in which there was plenty of adrenaline to be had. That was good, because he still jonesed for it. All the time. Kept his mind off things.
Like his mom and dad turned to curd by sceeve churn. His brothers. His sister. Cousins. Friends. Grandparents, greats, great-greats—beaten into the Oklahoma red earth by metal rain.
A fucking lot of things.
Nearby a Peepsie crowd lining the north side of Elm was shouting encouragement and cries of sympathy for the teens. Somewhere an incomprehensible bullhorn blared agitation. Coalbridge rose on tiptoes to his full height—a good six-foot-two—and surveyed the crowd. A sea of dazzed T-shirts scrolling through preassigned messages. A few homemade signs. And a score of placards, most of them on display-changing dazz paper, the signs featuring similar messages to their T-shirts.
“The Real Parasites Are in Dallas!”
“Make Our Solar System a Salt-free Zone!”
“The Sceeve Were Right: We ARE an Unjust Species!” and the even more direct: “Humans: We Got What We Deserved!”
There were even a few vintage signs strewn about. A yellowed “Condi = War-Criminal-in-Chief!” And was that…yes, it was: “Stop Global Warming!” Well, that problem was taken care of, thank you very much. Humanity’s carbon footprint was about the size of a three-week old fetus’s these days.
A few clumps of Peepsies had signs he agreed with: “Reformat Act = Jim Crow!” “Repeal all Expiration Codes!” “Free the servants!” Generally the civil rights folks stood a bit away from the others and were clustered around their own tables of literature and bumper stickers, the material weighed down with rocks and bits of brick against the Texas wind. Servant rights were controversial. The enormous shortage of workers to keep up the basics of civilization had been solved by the introduction of artificial agents, but at a price. Servants had performed too well. They had all but eliminated manufacturing jobs for regular people and had taken over many of the service jobs, as well.
Suddenly: BAM! A stinging blow against his chest and an explosion on the dark black wool of his coat. He looked down.
Red, red, red!
I’m hit. Something somehow got through my shirt.
Coalbridge’s reflexes took over, and he was instantly on his hands and knees scrambling for cover.
He reached into his pocket for the Extry officer’s weapon, his service truncheon—a nasty device that looked like a police baton but was oh-so-much-more. Coalbridge was an expert with it. In fact, he’d personally taken out fifteen sceeve and counting with this very trunch.
He glanced down to survey the damage to himself.
Should be okay, he thought.
He’d taken the hit in his chest, so the crunch, the embedded smart fiber woven into his uniform shirt, probably stopped the main impact of the bullet. But there was blood and sometimes a lucky shot got through the nano activators, so—
Hold on. Don’t shit your pants quite yet, little Jimbo.
Paint. It was red paint.
Christ.
He stood up, dusted himself off.
“The sceeves should kill you for real!” someone screamed nearby.
He looked over. Dungarees and checkered Vanns. A tight Chavez t-shirt topped by a flowing, hand-crocheted sweater vest left open. A red bandana holding back a bundle of curly brown hair. Distressed jeans that looked like they’d been water-boarded multiple times.
She was hot. Total retro-hippie vogue, like Joan Placid in that viral that was going around, the one that every red-blooded exper male had set to permanent repeat on his Palace.
A look which he had to admit he found kind of attractive.
And now he was going to pull of the seduction of the century? Turn his enemy into his lover on the mean streets of Dallas?
God, two months without a woman, Coalbridge thought. It was beginning to tell on him.
Forget all that. On this day of all days, he had to get to work! This situation was ridiculous. He had to find a way through these busses and get into the capital complex.
“Just let me by, dear, and I’ll come back and pass a pipe around the campfire later,” he said. “Hell, I’ll bring the THC. Got sources you wouldn’t believe. Just move aside for now—”
“Fuck you,” said a male voice, close to his ear. He turned to see a pencil-thin guy in his late twenties. He wore an old-fashioned punk get-up, with sewed-on pegged jeans and a black leather motorcycle jacket over a t-shirt. “You think you can go around dressed like that—” he nodded toward Coalbridge’s dress uniform—“and get away with it? Children are dying in Africa because of you fucking Extry baby-killers.”
Coalbridge shook his head and was about to make his way around them in bemusement when the Peepsie punk reached out a quick hand and shoved him into the side of a bus.
His head whacked into the paper-covered sheet metal. Shot of pain through his skull. Yellow-tinged floaters momentarily in front of his eyes.
The Peepsie punk was stronger than he looked.
Reaction and training took over Coalbridge’s body. He had to end this quickly, and he wasn’t going to be able to use reason. Coalbridge reached between his coat buttons, felt the truncheon’s handle, activated it with a twist and spun around to face—
Some other dude.
This one was entirely People’s Front, a real Chavista down to the torn dungarees and paisley shirt. There was something much more authentic about him, too—if it was a him. A mane of curly, tangled hair, and underneath—yeah, it was a guy. Who smelled of patchouli and cheap incense. A chest draped in beads. Dirt—or something grimy—smeared into the wrinkles of his exposed skin.
Was this the Peepsie version of a medicine man or shaman? Did they even have those?
But the Peepsie-shaman was not confronting Coalbridge. Instead he was smiling benignly at the punk guy and Joan Placid, putting a firm hand on the punk’s shoulder.
“Come on, brother, you know better,” said the shaman in a low, calm voice. “Violence won’t solve anything.”
For a moment, the Peepsie punk glared hatred at Coalbridge. But the calming hand of the shaman and Coalbridge’s truncheon, glowing with a pale purple Q-generated fire, gave the punk pause.
“If you go after him, you just prove him right,” said the hippie-shaman. “War is the problem, not the solution.”
The shaman pointed to the bus behind Coalbridge. “This man’s victims see him, don’t worry,” he said.
Coalbridge turned and looked behind him. Nothing but the bus, the poster-like plasterings. Faces. Hundreds of faces, staring out at him. Some smiling, some mysterious, some even sexy. Then he realized what he was seeing.
The Peepsies, or someone, had turned the sides of the bus—all the busses—into remembrance walls. They were plastered with photographs of the dead. Some had a short paragraph, a birth and death date. Some had no lettering at all, but silently, wordlessly attested to the fact that this person had been here, had walked the Earth, and was no more.
The Peepsie punk started to say something else to Coalbridge, but the shaman gave the punk a sharp look. Finally the Peepsie-punk shook his head like an angry, confused bull. “He fucking started it,” he said to the shaman. “His kind started the whole thing. All the fucking suffering. They violated the limit and brought the retribution down on us.”
The Peepsie punk was getting things backward. The sceeve had arrived shortly after the first Q-based FTL drive had been sent to the Centauris. There was talk that humanity had set off a trip wire that alerted the sceeve to come marauding.
“Maybe so, maybe so. But we have to end this, brother,” said the shaman. “Haters only breed more hate.”
Another moment of fuming hesitation from the punk. Another glance at the truncheon. Then the punk turned away. “I guess you’re right...”
“This one will wake up one day and realize that there’s innocent blood on his hands, that he’s collaborated in the greatest fraud in history,” the shaman said, nodding toward Coalbridge while simultaneously leading the Peepsie punk away. “And that’s the day he’ll put a bullet in his own brain.”
“Won’t be soon enough,” the Peepsie punk shouted back at Coalbridge. But he allowed himself to be shepherded away.
Coalbridge powered down his truncheon but did not put it away yet.
Ptupt.
Joan Placid spat in Coalbridge’s general direction, hit the side of the bus beside his head. She glared defiantly at him. Coalbridge looked her straight in the eyes trying to communicate what a very bad idea it would be to fuck with him further. He really didn’t want to hurt her. It was beginning to dawn on him that to do so would have political repercussions. Career repercussions.
Which might mean losing his new command.
Remaining earthbound.
Thankfully, Joan Placid seemed to get the message, for after a moment, she turned and followed the others without taunting him further.
Coalbridge sighed, holstered his truncheon, and glanced at his watch. Oh hell. Late to the most important meeting in his professional life—and delayed by Peepsies!
It wasn’t fair. Today of all days.
Coalbridge ducked back down to prone position and, as fast as he could, scooted under the bus, under the plastered photocopied remembrances of the dead. Greasy street tar. A sheen of skuzzy curd. His coat—a gift from his parents at his long ago graduation—was going to be ruined. No nanotech wonder treatment was going to be able to resurrect it this time.
He rolled out on the underside and looked up—
Oh crap.
—into the flat panel of an unmanned UADS directional emitter.
A hellfryer.
The active denial system was turn-of-the-century tech, a crowd dispersal device used by the Marines since the 1990s. The addition of an a.i. servant had given it a whole new lease on life. He could hear the UADS’s old-school batteries whining softly, building for discharge. Coalbridge raised his hand, rapidly pulled his I.D. lanyard from within his coat, and flashed his Pentagon pass.
Click. The whine died away. The emitter screen lowered its angle to a rest position.
“Captain James Dasein Coalbridge the Third,” said a voice from the UADS.
“Call me ‘Jim.’”
“No, thank you. I am under directive to keep citizen interaction formal. Are you all right, Captain Coalbridge?”
“I’m fine,” Coalbridge pulled himself to his feet. “Hell of a day to come to work.”
“I’ll say, sir,” the UADS replied. It had a remarkably pleasant and wholly uni-gendered voice. Strange choice for a robo-cop. “I see you’re Extry,” the robot continued. “Do you happen to know the servant named DAFNE, by any chance? The servant who participated in the Skyhook Raid?”
Happen to know? Hell, he’d spent almost every second of the past two years wiied to her through the salt. He’d say he knew her about as well as a person could know a servant.
“Of course I do,” Coalbridge said. “One of her iterations was the XO of my last command, and she’s been a friend of mine for years before that.”
“Then tell her we’re all proud of what she’s accomplishing when you speak to her next—that is, if you don’t mind, sir.” The UADS rolled back a couple of feet to clear a path for him. “I speak for the Local MP-38 Class Peacekeeper Network, I mean. She’s really going where no one has gone before.”
“Will do,” Coalbridge said. “And thanks for not cooking my goose.”
“Not a problem, sir,” the UADS replied. “But watch your back.” Suddenly, the UADS’s flat panel shot back up and aimed directly at the undercarriage of the next bus over.
“You, under the bus—remain where you are! Identify yourself!” it called out. This time the voice was most certainly not uni-gendered. More like the voice of a very male, very patriarchal God.
“For Christ sake, let me get out from under here, MP-38,” came the reply. “My name is Leher. We went through this yesterday. And the day before that, as I recall.”
“Rise slowly,” intoned the UADS.
It was the hippie shaman. Even at this distance, the patchouli scent was unmistakable.
The hippie pulled himself slowly out from under the bus and rose shakily to his feet. He held out his hand, flashed an I.D. at the UADS.
“Lieutenant-Commander Leher, it’s nice to see you this morning,” the UADS said.
Holy crap.
“You do this on purpose, MP 38.”
“One can never be sure,” said the UADS. It turned on its treads and made ready to head back down the line of buses. “You gentlemen have a nice day.”
“Thanks,” Coalbridge said. He turned to Leher. “You’re Navy?” he asked.
“No, sir,” Leher replied. “I’m one of you. Extry all the way, Captain. Heart of vacuum and bleed space when I’m cut. Except I’m not too fond of actual space, to tell the truth and actual bleeding is something I normally try to avoid.”
Looking at the man, you would never tell he was Extry. He seemed…not the type. And now that he was no longer pretending to be the Peepsie shaman, he seemed even less military. He was hunched, almost—
Almost cringing, Coalbridge thought.
And his face was not a picture of command and gentle certainty, as it had appeared before, but nervousness. The slightest twitch around his left eye, too.
And anyway, Leher’s hair was utterly, completely nonregulation. Or was it? Leher smiled a crooked smile, reached for the back of his hair, and gave it a hard yank. The hair parted from his scalp in the front as if my magic.
It was a wig. A very convincing hippie wig.
Beneath the wig was a shaggy blonde mop of hair that was, nonetheless, of the required shortness.
“I’ll be damned. And the beard?”
“That’s permanent, I’m afraid.” He ran a hand through the beard and combed out a couple of crumbs. “Got to toast it every morning if you want that ‘eaten in’ look.”
“You toast your beard?”
“Put toast crumbs in it, I mean,” Leher replied with a grin. “Needs to be whole grain, too, or you’ll never fool ‘em. I take it you haven’t had to come to work this way very often?”
“I’m deep space. But they’ve had me stowed at the New Pentagon out in the burbs for the past couple of weeks cooling my heels. I haven’t been down to the Capitol complex since I came back planet-side.”
“Yes, well, let’s just say that around here camouflage is the better part of valor these days.” Leher unslung the green canvas daypack he was carrying, opened it and bid Coalbridge to look inside. “I can only afford so much dry cleaning on GS-6 pay. My uniform’s only got ballistic crunch in it. None of that fancy self-cleaning stuff.” The flat black of a full-dress Extry uniform stared back at Coalbridge.
“I should’ve thought of doing that,” Coalbridge said. And not only that, Coalbridge thought. “Jesus, it was really stupid of me to draw a truncheon on those idiots. I could’ve killed them.”
“It was flashing purple. I saw you had it set on ‘give an interesting time,’ not kill.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Coalbridge. “It was a reflex.”
“Then you’ve got good instincts. A person has to experience this shit to believe the kinds of things they’ll say to you,” Leher said, motioning toward the buses and beyond to the demonstrators. “I don’t think they mean half of it. Not that they don’t have a point at times.”
“I’m a baby-killer?”
“All the conspiracy stuff is bullshit, of course, but the government hasn’t been exactly transparent lately.”
“The War Powers Act is necessary. Hell, it doesn’t go far enough,” Coalbridge said darkly. “You’re Extry. You know it’s about to be rock-and-roll time again.”
“We know that,” Leher replied, “but the Peepsies don’t. And nobody is willing to tell them because then they’d know the even more horrible truth. That the government has been running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off, if you’ll pardon my mixed metaphor, and even the Extry’s split on what to do next.”
“You sound like a Peepsie.”
“I’ve been called worse,” Leher replied. “Sceeve-fucking creepy-crawler springs to mind.” He smiled and held out his hand. “Lieutenant-Commander Griffin Leher, sir. Xeno Division.”
Xeno, thought Coalbridge. That explains it. Worse than a lawyer.
And Leher. Where had he run across that name?
The xenologicals were a strange bunch, even by Extry standards.
“I’m Jim Coalbridge.” He omitted his title because Leher could see he was a captain from the single gold fretting of oak leaves on his hat’s visor. His rank was also indicated by the insignia on the shoulderboards of his planet-side service blacks. “My craft’s the Joshua Humphreys. Or will be, when she’s all fitted out.”
“Patrol vessel?”
“Try a new-christened frigate. Second in her class. She’s after the Jonas Salk.”
Leher smiled, amused at Coalbridge’s pride. “My mistake,” he said. “Coalbridge, huh?” Leher scratched his chin. “You related to the Coalbridge who commanded the Skyhook Raid back in ‘67 by any chance?”
Oh hell. There was that again. His fuck-ups in that operation had gotten people killed. Friends. He’d been twenty-six. He could only plead extreme youth and inexperience, but that was no comfort to the dead, he was certain. To have survived the invasion, only to be killed by some greenhorn lieutenant’s incompetence—he was ashamed of himself.
“Yeah. I know him,” Coalbridge said.
“Well, that guy gave me a career. Tell him thank you when you next see him, will you?”
“He’s me,” Coalbridge said sullenly.
“Figured it might be,” said Leher. “Sore spot, huh?”
Coalbridge nodded, but frowned and indicated with a shrug that he didn’t have the inclination to explain further.
“All right, then. Want to walk with me the rest of the way? I know a short cut that’ll take us around that ten minute line at the First National scanner.”
Coalbridge brightened. Maybe he wasn’t going to be late after all. And he had a pseudo-Peepsie-shaman Extry officer to thank for it.
So Leher was Xeno. A “creep,” as they were called—and called themselves.
The Sceeve experts.
Leher. Shit, of course. Leher of the Poet Communiqué. The very reason he was headed to the presidential office this morning.
“You write that report that’s got them all buzzing, Leher?” he asked.
“Call me Griff,” Leher said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, and if I did, it sounds like that would be classified.” Leher stroked his beard as he spoke and tried to hide his pleased smile.
The blushing author himself, Coalbridge thought. I’ll be damned.
“And you’re the creep behind that Depletion Report that came out last summer, too. The one that made sense of the withdrawal.”
“Again, no idea what you mean.”
“Whoever wrote it made some goddamn bold predictions on sceeve activity for the future. Predictions that are pretty much coming true, if you ask me.”
Coalbridge wanted to talk to this guy. Find out what he knew, all he knew, about the sceeve. But this was not the place for discussing battle plans. Like Leher said, the communiqué was classified. He could mention one thing he’d particularly agreed with, however.
“I liked your recommendation in the Depletion report summary on full officer status for servants,” he said. “Every space-based exper believes in it, but I’ve found out the idea isn’t too popular back here.”
“The data are absolutely convincing,” Leher said. “The more autonomy the servants are given, the more effective they are in battle. We studied hundreds of engagements.” Leher shrugged. “Besides, as far as I’m concerned, they’re people.”
“Hell yeah, they are.”
Leher might make a very useful acquaintance at some point. Coalbridge had done his own study of the sceeve—up close and personal—and he would love to compare notes. Or have some on-the-scene expertise. And Leher had written that report. This guy wasn’t just a creep—he was the creepiest of the creeps.
No doubt, creeps were oddballs. To become one was for all intents and purposes to leave the command track. They were also said to be a bunch of sadists, like the aliens they studied. And all crazy as loons.
As if to confirm Coalbridge’s judgment, Leher took a few steps forward, then came to a dead halt. As far as Coalbridge could see there was nothing blocking the other man’s path. But when Coalbridge came up beside Leher, he saw what had caused the abrupt stop. There was a long crack in the street. The glassy coating abruptly ended and a small fissure stretched across their path. It ran deep into the asphalt under the layer of glass. The crack was less than an inch wide, but it was unbroken.
After a moment’s thought, Coalbridge understood what was going on.
Some sort of OCD that wouldn’t let the guy step over cracks, something like that. This was not an uncommon phenomenon. You saw that a lot in the traumatized, and if you were an officer in the military, you had to deal with similar psychological problems on practically a daily basis. Or maybe it wasn’t trauma. Maybe Leher had come out of the womb a freak. In any case, Coalbridge knew what to do with such nutcase behavior.
Give in, to a degree. Channel, don’t obstruct.
Leher was slapping his pockets and muttering to himself something about a pin or a pen.
“Got the cards,” Leher said. “Should have it, too.”
Coalbridge looked around and found a scrap piece of wood about a foot across and a few feet long—it was detritus from some previous sceeve attack, some fallen structure—and plopped it down over the crack so that it formed a crossing.
“Your bridge, Lieutenant-Commander,” he said to Leher.
Leher blinked, considered, seemed to snap out of whatever daze he’d fallen into, and with a big grin stepped on the wooden crossing Coalbridge had provided.
“Guess it’s a good thing I met you, too,” he said. “Jim, was it?”
Coalbridge shrugged. “That kind of mental shit is pretty common, especially with space-based expers. We’re a superstitious lot out there.” He stepped over the crack and walked beside Leher.
“Say, you don’t have anything to write with, do you?”
“Got my Palace and a blink up keyboard.”
Leher shook his head. “No, that won’t do.” Suddenly, his hand flew up to his breast pocket. He dug around inside it, came up with nothing.
“Is whatever you’re looking for in your uniform pocket?” Coalbridge gently asked.
Leher slapped his forehead. “Of course,” he said. “Had kind of a rotten morning. Weird dreams, that sort of thing. Must’ve forgotten to transfer to my Peepsie costume.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“No problem,” Leher said. “Now I know where it is.”
“What?”
“My pen. Space pen, actually.” He chuckled. “Magically writes when it’s upside down.”
“Wow.”
Leher nodded. “It was a gift. From my kid.”
In that moment, Coalbridge decided he probably liked Leher, even if Leher did come across as slightly insane.
Hell, I’ll even give him the bullshit test, he thought.
“So you really think I have what it takes to blow my own brains out?” Coalbridge asked. “You told that Peepsie son-of-a-bitch I would.” The wind gusted up and for a moment neither man could speak as each huddled in his coat. When he could be heard again, Coalbridge continued. “I mean, lots of guys have blood on their hands, but that doesn’t mean they have what it takes to do something about it, if you know what I mean.”
Leher seemed taken aback for a moment. Then he considered, and a he squinted in a cockeyed fashion, considering. “I’m surprised you haven’t already blown yourself away, seeing as you’re a goddamn starcraft captain,” he replied. “I happen to know your kind thinks this universe is not good enough for the likes of you.”
Coalbridge nodded. “You’ve met a few of us then?”
“You bet,” Leher said.
“I’m not anything like that.”
“I have no choice but to believe you, Jim.”
Coalbridge smiled. “And you’re obviously a creep, through and through. Switchblade in every compliment, they say.”
“I’m the best creep you’ll ever meet, Captain Courageous,” Leher said. “And don’t worry your oversized captain’s head about one thing—your enemy is my enemy. We have different ways of going about killing him, that’s all.”
Was he going to be friends with a creep? Stranger things had happened.
And creep or no, Leher knew the fastest way into the Capitol complex. Which was all that really mattered at the moment to Coalbridge.
“So want to lead the way, you Peepsie-loving creep? I sure would like to get down below and out from under this sky, if you know what I mean,” said Coalbridge.
“That’s one thing we agree on,” said Leher. He chuckled, shook his head, took a step forward—then stopped in his tracks. Coalbridge noticed another street crack running diagonally in front of them. The ground glass on the street outlined its jagged course in splendid sparkles. “On the other hand, I’ll get us there,” Coalbridge said. “You just get us in.”
He kicked another white-coated bridging board over the crack. There was no end of loose material around. Leher didn’t budge. His complexion had changed from ruddy to white as a ghost.
His eyes were still fixed on the crack.
“It doesn’t count if you slide it,” Leher said in a low voice.
Coalbridge glanced at him, but there wasn’t a trace of irony in his face.
Coalbridge picked up the board, and laid it across with his hands.
“That better?”
Leher nodded and stepped across. After he’d reached the other side, he suddenly looked around. “You hear a raid siren?”
“No. You?”
Leher shook his head. He and Coalbridge both gazed up at the sky.
Nothing. Still—
“I’ve got a bad feeling about today, Captain Courageous,” said Leher.
Coalbridge nodded. “Me, too.” Coalbridge glanced over at his companion. So this was really him. The Leher.
“Tell you what,” said Coalbridge. “There’s got to be a story behind that analysis of yours. You give me a little background. I’m top secret cleared. You saw the hellburner identify me. In return, I’ll help you get the hell away from this sky. Deal?”
Leher stopped short, considered Coalbridge with a cold gaze. He tugged at the end of his dirty beard. Once, twice, three times.
Coalbridge shrugged, as if to say: “I’ve got no angle here. We’re both playing on the same team.”
Which they were. In the larger sense.
Then Leher smiled crookedly. “All right,” he said. “I’ll give you a quick backgrounder. But don’t expect a happy ending.”
Coalbridge nodded succinctly, returned the smile. “You’re forgetting one thing, son.”
“What’s that?”
“We are the ending,” said Coalbridge. “And I happen to like my chances.”
Leher shook his head. “Goddamn captains.” But then there was no stopping Leher as he filled in for Coalbridge the background that shored up his report.