Stone dogs, p.46
Stone Dogs, page 46
Perhaps most important in the long run, it has freed industrial civilization from the constraints of the terrestrial environment. Metals and fossil fuels are nonrenewable, and the ability of Earth to absorb contaminants and by-products was already being strained by our present stable global population of 2,800,000,000. The problem of raising the serf population of the Domination to Alliance standards hardly bears thinking about—if the terms of reference are limited to Earth. They no longer are, and there is no longer an argument from necessity for poverty.
History In a Technological Age
by Andrew Elliot Armstrang, Ph.D.
Department of History
San Diego University
Press, 1995
NEW YORK CITY
HOSPITAL OF THE SACRED HEART
FEDERAL CAPITAL
DISTRICT UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
APRIL, 1998
Nathaniel Stoddard grinned like a death's-head at the shock in Lefarge's eyes.
"Happens to us all, boy," he said slowly. "Ayuh. And never at a convenient time."
Lefarge swallowed and looked away from the wasted figure, the liver-spotted hands that never stopped trembling on the coverlet. I've always hated the way hospitals smelled, he thought. Medicinal, antiseptic, with an underlying tang of misery. The private room was crowded with the medical-monitoring machines, smooth cabinets hooked to the ancient figure on the bed through a dozen tubes and wires; their screens blinked, and he knew that they were pumping data to the central intensive-care computer. Doling out microdoses of chemicals, hormones, enzymes…
"I'd have told them to stop trying two years ago, if I hadn't been needed," Stoddard said. The faded blue eyes looked at him with an infinite weariness, pouched in their loose folds of skin. "But if I'm indispensable, the nation's doomed anyway, son."
Lefarge looked up sharply; that was the first time the old man had ever used the word to him. He reached out and clasped the brittle-boned hand with careful gentleness.
"My only regret is that you couldn't take over my post," Stoddard said. "But what you're doing is more important. Janice and the boy all right?"
Lefarge smiled, an expression that felt as if it would crack his cheeks. "Janice is fine. Nate Junior is a strapping rockjack of thirty now, Uncle Nate. Courting, too, and this time it looks serious. We'll have the Belt full of Stoddards yet.".
The general sighed, and closed his eyes for a moment. "The Project? What do your tame scientists say about the trans-Luna incident?"
Well, at least the information's still getting through, Lefarge thought. I might have known Uncle Nate would arrange to keep a tap into channels.
"They…" He ran a hand through his hair, and caught a glimpse of himself in the polished surface of a cabinet. Goddam. I show more of Maman every year. His cropped hair was as much gray as black, now; no receding hairline, though. "Well, the consensus is that it… mutated. They had to make it so that it could modify itself, anyway. The trigger is multiply redundant, but it's just data, and if something knocks out a crucial piece…"he shrugged and raised his hands. "No estimate on spread, either. Slow. Maybe ten percent penetration by now, if we're lucky. Two years to critical mass. Absolutely no way of telling if there'll be more, ah, mutations. Or if they'll figure it out." He shrugged again. "The Team says de Ribeiro was right; we took a… less than optimum path in computer development, way back when. Too much crash research, too much security. Though they practically end up beating each other over the head about what we should have done! Anyway, even the Project can't redevelop an entire technology. They've pushed the present pretty well to its limits, and what we're using is the product."
Stoddard's eyes opened again. "Fred…" He fought for breath, forced calm on himself and began again. "Fred, don't let them throw it away. We can't… The Militants will win the next Archonal election in the Domination. Coalition… we're pretty sure. War… soon after. Inevitable… fanatics. Think of the damage if they attack… first. Remember… Nelson's eyepatch."
Fred felt the hair crawl on the back of his neck. Admiral Nelson had been signaled to halt an attack; he put the telescope to his blind eye, announced that he had seen no signal, and continued.
A red light began to beep on one of the monitors. Seconds later a nurse burst into the room.
"Brigadier Lefarge!" she said severely, moving quickly to the bedside. "You were allowed to see the patient on condition he not be stressed in any way!"
He leaned over Stoddard, caught the faded blue eyes, nodded. "Don't worry, Uncle Nate," he said softly. "I'll take care of it."
"Brigadier—" the nurse began. Then her tone changed to one he recognized immediately: a good professional faced with an emergency. "Dr. Suharto to room A17! Dr. Suharto to room A17!" Her hands were flying over the controls, and the old man's body jerked. More green-and white-coated figures were rushing into the room; Lefarge stepped back to the angle of the door, saluted quietly, wheeled out.
* * *
The office in Donovan House was much the same, missing only the few keepsakes Nathaniel Stoddard had allowed himself; even the Parrish landscapes were still on the wall. Something indefinable was different, perhaps the smell of pipe tobacco, perhaps… I'm imagining things, Frederick Lefarge thought, as be saluted the new incumbent.
Anton Donatei was holding down Stoddard's desk now. Lefarge had worked with him often over the years; less so since the New America project got well underway and he was seldom on Earth. About his own age, thin and dark and precise, with a mustache that looked as if it had been drawn on. Competent record in the field, even better once he was back at headquarters. But a by-the-book man, a through-channels operator. The other man in the room was a stranger, a civilian in a blue-trimmed gray suit and nattey silver-buckled shoes; the curl-brimmed hat on the stand by the door had a snakeskin band and one peacock feather. A whiff of expensive cologne; just the overall ensemble that a moderately prosperous man-about-town was wearing this season.
"Anton," Lefarge nodded. He continued the gesture to the civilian, raised an eyebrow. His superior caught the unspoken question: Who's the suit?
"Brigadier, this is Operative Edward Forsymmes, Alliance Central Intelligence."
Fucking joy. He is a suit. Still, this was no time to let the rivalry with the newer central-government agency interfere with business. San Francisco was capital of the Alliance, and the Alliance was sovereign. The OSS had been founded as an agency of the old American government; it was only natural that the Grand Senate wanted an intelligence source of its own. And the suits still couldn't find their own arses with both hands on a dark night.
Lefarge extended his; the ACI agent rose and shook with a polished smile. There was strength in the grip; the man had a smooth, even tan, and no spare weight that the American could see; thinning blond hair combed over the bald spot, gray eyes.
"Jolly good to meet you," he said pleasantly. British? Lefarge asked himself. No. Australasian; South Island, at a guess. Possibly Tasmanian. A quarter of the British Isles had moved to the Australasian Federation over the past century, and the accents had not diverged all that much, especially in the Outer Islands. "Shall we proceed?"
The ACI man sat and clicked open his attach case, pulling out a folder. It had an indigo border, Most Secret. An OSS code-group for title; the New America designation. Lefarge shot an unbelieving glance at his commanding officer.
Donatei shrugged, with a very Italian gesture. "The Chairman's Office thought the Agency should be involved," he said in a neutral tone.
Christ, Lefarge thought with well-hidden disgust. Not enough that San Francisco was getting involved, but the Agency and the Chairman's office. The Chairman was an armchair bomb-them- all , and the Agency were a band of would-be Machiavellis, and the two never agreed on anything— except to distrust the OSS.
"Well," he said. "What's the latest on the hijacking incident?"
Donatei waved a hand to the civilian.
"Really, quite unfortunate," the ACI man said. "Your boffins did say that this would be a controllable weapon, did they not?"
Lefarge flicked a cigarette out of his uniform jacket and glanced a question at Donatei. "Sir?"
"Go ahead, Brigadier."
"It's largely controllable," Lefarge explained patiently, thumbing his lighter. "Christ, though, look at what it has to penetrate! We're trying to paralyze the whole Snake defensive system, not just one installation, you know. That means we have to get into the compinstruction sets when they're embedded in the cores of central-brain units; then it has to jump the binary-analogue barrier repeatedly to spread to the other manufacturing centers where they burn-in cores. Talking sets here, not just data. Plus the continual checks they run against just this sort of thing; they're not stupid." He drew on the tobacco, snorted smoke from his nostrils. "One replication went a little off, and responded to a specific-applications attack command instead of the general-emergency one. If we could get more original copies into fabrication plants… What've we got on reaction?"
The Australasian tapped his finger on the file. "The SD are running around chopping off heads," he said thoughtfully. "But rather less than we expected. It seems they had the beginnings of a tussle over those prisoners of ours they took in the hijacking, the usual War-Security thing they amuse themselves with… and then their top politicals stepped in. Closed everything down; shut off all investigation; had the core from the stingfighter they lost, and the prisoners, and the bodies, all shipped to Virunga Biocontrol. We did catch an unfamiliar codegroup; all we could crack was the outer title. Stone Dogs, whatever that means." He smiled at the two OSS officers. "You chappies wouldn't be holding out on us, would you?"
Lefarge and Donatei exchanged a glance.
"We've never gotten a handle on it," Donatei admitted. "The name's cropped up,"—he paused to consult the terminal in the desk—"five times, first time in 1973. Again in '75, '78, '82. Then you, which is the first time in nearly a decade. It's about the most closely-held thing they've got, and all we can say firmly is that it's tied to Virunga… which might mean something biological. Or might not."
"Those damned Luddites!" the ACI man exclaimed. Donatei and Lefarge nodded in a moment of perfect agreement; the anti-biotech movement had crippled Alliance research for a generation. It was understandable, considering the uses to which the Draka had put the capabilities, but a weakness nonetheless.
"Still," he went on musingly. "Why is that involved… when we know that it was our little surprise that caused the incident with the stingfighter?"
"Let's put it this way," Lefarge said grimly. "The Stone Dogs, whatever they are, are as closely held as… the Project. What's the Project? Our ace in the hole. Now, what's wrong with this picture?"
The agent winced slightly. "I say, bad show. Well, not our affair, what? There's no compromise of the Project; they'll go over that stingfighter's core, but their standard search models won't find a thing." He thumbed through the file. "We are getting some interesting data, from the deep-cover agent with the Commandant of Aresopolis." He laughed. "A deep-cover agent between the covers, eh? From the pillow-talk, she must be fantastic—"
Lefarge was dimly aware of Donatei wrestling him to a standstill, of the ACI man scrambling backward snarling, with a hand inside his jacket.
"That's my sister you're talking about, you son of a bitch!" he shouted. Coming back to himself, shuddering, smelling the sudden reek of his own sweat.
Inch by inch, they relaxed. "Look, Fred," Donatei said. "He didn't know, all he saw was a code description, he's got no need to know, he wouldn't know if you hadn't blown up!"
"Right," Lefarge said, shaking off the arm and straightening his jacket. Breathe. In. Out. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and split the package, wiping his face down with the scented cloth and sinking back into his chair.
"I apologize. Brigadier," the ACI agent said.
"Accepted. You had any experience inside, Operative Forsymmes?" The other man shook his head. "Then don't make comments about those who have to operate in the snake farm. For your information, my sister was missing-in-action in India in '75. She contacted the OSS again, on her own initiative. Twenty-four years in there!"
"I apologize again, Brigadier," the man said patiently. "The fact remains, the New America Project is not compromised, as far as we know. Time to saturation remains on-schedule, and then we will be in an unassailable bargaining position."
Lefarge smiled with a carnivore's expression. "Certainly we will. After we've pounded their strategic installations into glowing rubble and destroyed everything they have off Earth—" He paused at something sensed between the other two. "There's been a change of plan?" he said, in an even tone.
Donatei looked down at his linked fingers. The agent spoke in the same smooth tone.
"No, of course not. Your Project will finally give us the top hand, and well use it, never fear. Not in an all-out surprise attack, of course. That was '70s strategy. We'll demonstrate it; with the balls cut off their space defense capacity, they'll have no choice but effectively to surrender. With guarantees for the personal safety of their top people, of course."
"Ah." Lefarge glanced over at the other OSS officer. "General Donatei, is it just this suit, or are they all fucking insane out there on the West Coast?" He glanced back at Forsymmes. "Are you? Completely fucking insane, that is?"
The agent's tone grew slightly frosty. "Brigadier Lefarge, I'm going to charitably assume that your personal… background and losses have made you somewhat unbalanced on this subject. Are you aware, my dear sir, of what even one hypersonic surface-skimmer could do to a major city? Even given the most optimistic possible projections, the Project could only disable eighty percent of their space-based systems, less on Earth. That's primarily the defensive systems, at that. The Project's little photonic bug can't fit into anything smaller than a shipcomp core, and the enemy use more distributed systems than we do, which can be decoupled from their core computers. They would still have some capacity to operate their ships by manual linkage, and their installations. Furthermore, even if we wait three years, some of the older backup cores would be uninfected. They are not, as you pointed out, fools. We will show them they can't win an exchange, and offer terms."
Lefarge shook his head in sheer wonderment. "You… Somebody thinks the Snakes are going to be deterred by casualties? You look old enough to remember the fall of India, even if you haven't read any history. Perhaps you recall them shooting the top fifteen thousand officials of the Indian Republic's government in batches, on the steps of the goddamn Archonal Palace, and broadcasting it worldwide? How many millions more were slaughtered or chemically brain-scrubbed?"
"There's no need to spout propaganda at me, Lefarge!" Forsymmes snapped.
"Oh. Then maybe you've tuned in to their public execution channel? Impalements in living color; I'm told the breaking-on-the-wheel is,—"
The agent sighed with elaborate patience. "Brigadier, I'm fully aware of the enemy's contempt for other people's lives. We are talking about putting their own lives at risk."
"And maybe you think it's a myth their troops commit suicide rather than surrender? What about Fenris?"
"The so-called doomsday bomb? Nobody's ever been able to prove that it's active; self-evidently a bluff."
Donatei intervened. "In any case, we're talking in a vacuum, here," he said mildly. "None of us are exactly at policy-making level, are we?"
"No, that's true," Lefarge said calmly. The discussion became technical.
"Lefarge, do you really want to be taken off the Project?" Donatei asked, turning on his subordinate as the door closed behind Forsymmes.
"No, sir, I do not," Lefarge answered.
