Ghost of the Gods - 02 (54 page)

Their room had no lock. He carefully crept from their room to stairs that led outside. He was on edge, expecting Noah to intercept him. He reached the outside door and felt the cool desert air through the screened visor of the beekeeper suit. He thought about using the Land Cruiser, but had no idea how to hotwire a car, and inside this suit there would be no assists. He ventured a few paces out onto the sand. He looked around, deciding on a direction to walk. He heard the door open and close softly behind him. His heart was ready to explode. He tightened his grip on the Beretta and slowly turned.

Everything changed for him in that one moment.

Sarah was alone. Tears glistened on her cheeks. She had her M4 slung over her shoulder.

“I knew you were leaving,” she said.

Mark didn’t know what to say.

“I am coming with you,” said Sarah. “If this is a suicide mission, then I am coming with you there too.”

Mark felt tears well up in his eyes. He reached out his hand. Sarah hesitantly came to him and intertwined her fingers with his. He could feel her fingers tighten against his gloved hand. He wished he could feel her warmth.

“I doubt we’ll need these guns where we’re going,” he said.

“Where are we going?” asked Sarah.

“Shhhh… I’ll explain everything soon enough.”

General McKafferty – North Atlantic Ocean – March 21, 0002 A.P.

McKafferty was itching to fight back. He’d taken to pacing the length of his airborne command post. He thought about the e-mail Zuris had sent out an hour ago. The man had suffered a blow. McKafferty found himself feeling sorry for the personal tragedy. The king of Zero-G had discovered his son was working with the communes and had modified Prometheus for them. This confirmed Freedman was right about the perpetrators, but wrong about Prometheus being the only source of the attacks. NSA had also corroborated the story with confirmation that some of the new, sloppier kill-zone signals had emanated from Zero-G.

The e-mail from Zuris had announced to the government, his board of directors, and his family what had happened and that his son had already paid the ultimate price. The king had executed his own blood. McKafferty decided the man did not have steel in his spine. He had ice in his spine. The second part of the e-mail was even more chilling than the news about his son. Zuris had a large contingent of mercenaries, and they were all equipped with zone-jammers suits. He was making it very clear that no matter how the dice landed he would remain in power when this bloodletting was done.

While the destruction of Prometheus had not stopped the kill-zones, it had stopped the cyber-attacks. The military had full command and control restored. With kill-zones hitting American cities hard, McKafferty had run out of good ideas. He needed to find a way to hit the communes so overwhelmingly and so precisely that they did not have time to implement any kind of doomsday attack when they realized their world was coming to an abrupt end. That was no easy feat. The god-machine seemed indestructible and there were far too many communes. That took nukes off the discussion table, which was not such a bad thing. The list of confirmed and likely commune locations in Freedman’s e-mail from the other day read like a Greenpeace manifesto of natural wonders and high population zones. The god-machine would undoubtedly attack to stop wholesale destruction on that scale. These communes were devious sons of bitches. Even if the communes were located out in the middle of uninhabited deserts, the fallout from so many nuclear weapons was unacceptable. That kind of blunt weapon might kill more noncombatants with blast, radiation, and fallout than the communes were planning on murdering with their kill-zones.

McKafferty returned to his cabin, locked the door, and sat down. He picked up his tablet and checked his e-mail. He then picked up a half empty pack of Marlboro nails and lit up. His coffee cup was filled with spent butts. He could see his reflection in the cabin window as he drew in deep breaths of smoke. He stared at his reflection and shook his head. This war was going to get so ugly, there might not be any winners.

McKafferty’s tablet signaled an urgent message had arrived. He stubbed out his nail. The e-mail was from Freedman. As McKafferty read the text, his blood began to flow warm, then hot... son of a bitch. He knocked over his coffee cup ashtray onto the floor and didn’t care. Freedman would be a goddamn hero if this worked. The parts of his plan relayed in his e-mail were bold and unexpected, but solid. It was all or nothing. Every chip would be in the pot. More than anything, McKafferty wanted to draw serious blood and he did not give a rat’s ass about the blowback.

Conventional wisdom was that the American nuclear arsenal employed no warheads larger than one megaton MIRVs. Conventional wisdom was wrong. The arsenal included massive ballistic earth-penetrating weapons, which carried twenty-five megatons of bang and were powerful enough to reach far down into the earth or water with its shockwave. They were engineered to defeat any hardened bunker or nuclear submarine with a single strike. The RNEPs were nicknamed Devastators. McKafferty issued urgent orders to make ready for snap deployment of SIGINT reconnaissance drones once Freedman followed up with targeting coordinates. If the coordinates checked, they had a strategy to win this war with a single blow. Zuris would approve this strike plan and so would the puppet government in Washington. If they didn’t, McKafferty would act on his own. Post plague, the rules and fail-safes had changed. Right now from his Looking Glass command post he could launch a nuclear strike. He might have to shoot a few good men to make it happen, but the survival of the human race demanded it. If he was wrong, the good news was that he would probably be dead and never know it.

Mark Freedman – Near the Arizona safe house – March 22, 0002 A.P.

Mark was sitting with Sarah in a clearing ringed by creosote and other harsh desert shrubbery. He could tell Sarah was confused. He felt so much more human by gauging her feelings in the old ways instead of sharing her emotions as they radiated out across the n-web. They had walked several miles, then stopped by an ancient Indian campsite. Sarah knew her way around this part of this desert from her previous stay at the safe house. She told him about the coyotes that had followed her and Ralph.

“Their behavior was all wrong,” she said. “I had a strange feeling that Noah might be working with them in the same way I work with Ralph.”

The first rays of the sunrise were soon lighting the horizon. The sky was fading from black to dark blue. The barren landscape was coming into clearer focus like a mirage. Mark wished he could take off the beekeeper suit, but not yet. He checked the Droid. The inbox was empty.

“Do you think something made of nanotech can have a soul?” he asked. “Can it reincarnate?”

“You have a soul,” said Sarah.

“Does the goddess have a soul?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then why should we? I’m now as much a machine as the goddess and you’re not far behind.”

“When I had my near-death experience, I crossed over into an afterlife. I have no doubt we continue when our body dies. If my soul had died when I became a hybrid, that experience wouldn’t have happened.”

“You’re far more spiritual than I am,” said Mark.

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?

Mark glanced at his Droid as a message from McKafferty appeared. He stood up and walked off a little ways. He did not want Sarah to accidently see the message. The goddess could be looking though her eyes now or sometime in the next few minutes through timeline recordings of her. Since McKafferty was in an airborne command post, he was completely shielded from the eyes of the goddess.

Mark turned to look back at Sarah and saw his footprints in the sand leading from her. The desert was less covered with n-web pathways than the oceans, but not by much. The sand contained bacteria, insects, and other small creatures that carried COBIC inside them. The sand itself also held raw seeds, which had embedded themselves inside some of the grains when this desert had been an ocean floor. Sunlight was a source of power for seeds, and there was plenty of power in this wasteland for seeds that were on the surface. Everywhere he stepped, the invisible linkages of the n-web radiated out in all directions. Mark looked at the message.

The well-oiled gears of our war machine are turning. A synchronous strike is awaiting targeting intel. Dial *1191957 and you will be patched through directly to me. My friend, you are heroic!
Duty Honor Country, GM

Mark swallowed and felt something caught in his throat. The words
synchronous strike
did not necessarily mean high-yield nuclear weapons, but he knew they would be used. The recommendation had been his. Succeed or fail, this was on his shoulders. His heart was beating fast enough that he thought he might suffer a heart attack. Maybe the beekeeper suit was affecting the regulation of his metabolism. In any event, he wouldn’t need the suit much longer. He feared what was about to happen. It would change their lives forever. He thought about their child and felt ill. He hadn’t allowed himself to think about the personal dimensions of what was going to occur. If he had, he might not have gone through with his plan, and humanity would very likely end up enslaved. There was no guarantee what they were trying would work, but there was also no other sane or insane option.

He dialed the number and spoke softly. The call lasted little more than a minute. One of the strikes would not be far from where he stood. He wondered what it would look and sound like before everything was lost. It would not be long now.

Mark sensed something moving about near his feet and looked down. A giant desert anthill was not far from his boots. The creatures were large, fast, and aggressive. They had captured and killed a praying mantis. Mark thought about the queen ant deep inside her underground empire. She was the mother of all the ants in that hive. She was the insect goddess ruling her world with brutal efficiency, a perfect living machine. Kill the queen and the hive breaks down and dies. There was only one queen and she was irreplaceable.

Mark Freedman – Near the Arizona safe house – March 22, 0002 A.P.

Mark was holding Sarah’s hand when a huge, earth-penetrating thermonuclear weapon detonated belowground about thirty miles away. A shallow subsurface detonation for a missile delivered nuclear weapon was highly unconventional unless what was needed was concentrated ground penetration, instead of wide area destruction. Mark knew the strike was directly over a water rich aquifer. He knew that in the same instant similar strikes were happening all over the globe in areas of deep ocean and other aquifers.

The signature double flash from the nuclear explosion was blinding even though sunrise was approaching and the contours of the land had shielded them from the worst of the detonation’s effects. He could sense free-swimming COBIC going to work on his eyes. Mark felt the flashes were like powerful medical X-ray exposures, but knew at this distance there was no danger from nuclear radiation. Thermal radiation was a different matter. He examined the sides of his hands that had been exposed and saw what looked like sunburn. He knew his face had received the same exposure. The burn was already fading as COBIC began also repairing that damage. They had about two and a half minutes before winds from the blast effect reached them. Sarah looked at Mark with an expression that broke his heart.

“I’m scared,” said Sarah. “I’ve lost my connection to the god-machine.”

Mark shucked off the beekeeper suit. He’d realized after they’d reached the Indian ruins that Sarah was the canary in the coal mine that would tell him if the attacks had worked and it was safe to take off the suit.

“How could an explosion block my connection?” she asked.

“The goddess is gone,” said Mark.

“What do you mean?”

Sarah stopped speaking as a memory capsule from Mark expanded in her mind. Her sunburned face become stern and he wished there could have been some other way. The only option left to them to destroy the hives without provoking the wrath of the goddess was to disconnect all the hives from her. Without their connection they would perish. With his nanotech brain entangled with the goddess, Mark had access to far more information about her than he’d had before. He knew the exact location of every supercolony of seeds that hosted the redundant copies of the goddess. McKafferty and the USAG military following Mark’s instructions had destroyed the goddess with a synchronized rain of thermonuclear weapons. Sarah’s expression grew horrified.

“What about our child?” cried Sarah.

“Hybrids can live without the goddess. I’ve been cut off for days at a time.”

“What about years at a time? What about forever? What about a developing fetus? You don’t know those answers, do you?”

“Murder!” bellowed Noah.

Mark turned to see the huge hybrid advancing on him from the desert undergrowth like a rampaging bull elephant. The ghost was unarmed. Mark stood. Noah shoved him backward, lifting him off his feet. Mark got up and backed away to a safe distance.

“You’ve killed the goddess!” he bellowed. “You’ve condemned us all.”

“We’ve wiped the hives from the earth,” said Mark. “We’ve saved billions of lives.”

“At what cost?” yelled Noah. “I should have killed you days ago.”

Mark had his Beretta out and aimed at Noah’s forehead. He was confident he could stop the man instantly. They stood in a silent standoff.

The blast winds from the detonation reached them. It was like a hurricane force sandstorm. Mark had no choice but to close his eyes as he went down to a kneeling stance. The howling sound was like an animal in terrible pain. He felt clumps of debris striking his back. He knew Sarah’s eyes were also closed and that she was safe. The blast winds died down almost as quickly as they’d arisen. Mark opened his eyes as soon as he could risk it. He was forced to blink as small eddies of wind continued to lift grit into his eyes. Noah had not moved. His eyes were wide open. Mark found himself irrationally wondering if the ghost had kept his eyes open during the sandstorm. His face looked terribly damaged.

“You should shoot me,” said Noah. “There is no purpose, no meaning anymore.”