Mother of Storms (23 page)
Authors: John Barnes
“Flat with me,” he says, and she reaches out and takes his hand. More than anything else what surprises him is how shy she is about doing that.
President Hardshaw was up most of the night, and when she then comes in early, Harris Diem knows something is up. He keeps right on working at his desk. The buzz in the back of his head is louder than ever, but last night he
managed to resist going down to the basement. He derives no pleasure from his resistance.
managed to resist going down to the basement. He derives no pleasure from his resistance.
She has been in the New Oval Office twenty minutes, with no communication with anyone else, when there’s a faint ring. He takes the phone from his belt and plugs it into his screen as he notes the call is coming from Hardshaw.
“Yeah, boss?”
She looks a bit disheveled; what the hell could the President be keeping from him?
“Drop by the office shortly, Harris, we’ve got some big work to do.”
“I’ll bring coffee,” he says, and cues his staff to have the usual pot with two cups waiting for him. He’s not sure why he and the President have kept this ritual all these years, of him bringing the coffee or the food, but he takes a strange comfort in it.
The comfort vanishes utterly when Hardshaw accepts the cup, motions him into a chair, and says, “I did it this morning, Harris, so there’s now no point in arguing. I thought about hundreds of millions dead, I thought about the whole species—and I thought about the fact that America has to live in the world.”
He feels a chill in his stomach. He takes a long sip of the coffee. “Then you spilled the beans to Rivera and the UN? They know the real numbers?”
“And they know that we could have sat on them, and they know that the original NOAA report was intended as a fake. They know it all.”
The buzz in his skull is so loud it feels strange that other people can’t hear it. He thinks for one instant of going down to his basement, selecting one of those wedges … but he fights the thought down. “Then, er—if you’ve already done it, why did you call me here? You must have known I would be opposed to it.”
“Because I need you here, and therefore the country needs you here, when Rivera calls. Which he should be doing any time now.”
As if to agree with her, the phone rings; when Hardshaw answers, the secretary announces, “Secretary-General Rivera, Ms. President.”
“Put him through.”
Rivera’s image pops up on the screen, and he says, “Ms. President, I must first congratulate you on a game well played, and thank you for deciding not to play it against us, for you surely would have succeeded.”
Exactly the thought that’s bothering me
, Diem thinks.
, Diem thinks.
Hardshaw nods. “Then you understand all the implications.”
“I do indeed. And I think we have been very fortunate. Not just the UN, but all of us. You have created an important opportunity.”
Hardshaw raises an eyebrow. “I don’t quite see how.”
“The opportunity to prevent Global Riot Two. And then, when the
truth is revealed—as it will surely be, for your operation is bound to leak at some point—well, what is more credible than a leak, eh? Far more trustworthy than what any government says.” The Secretary-General is handsome and dapper even at this hour; what Diem had never noticed before was the strange gleam of humor. “You see, when my experts plugged this into our world model, we came up with a chance of around ten percent that there will be no sovereignty at all in the Northern Hemisphere by next year. If so, we want people to have fled the coasts and taken care of themselves. And to have the news believed—that is going to be a very difficult part. People will believe all sorts of absurdities, but not necessarily even the most rational truth if it demands they abandon their homes.”
truth is revealed—as it will surely be, for your operation is bound to leak at some point—well, what is more credible than a leak, eh? Far more trustworthy than what any government says.” The Secretary-General is handsome and dapper even at this hour; what Diem had never noticed before was the strange gleam of humor. “You see, when my experts plugged this into our world model, we came up with a chance of around ten percent that there will be no sovereignty at all in the Northern Hemisphere by next year. If so, we want people to have fled the coasts and taken care of themselves. And to have the news believed—that is going to be a very difficult part. People will believe all sorts of absurdities, but not necessarily even the most rational truth if it demands they abandon their homes.”
Diem thinks for a moment, and sees the Sec-Gen’s point. “You believe, then, we should make this a semi-gray operation—try to keep it secret but let it slip out?”
“Exactly.”
Diem glances sideways at the President; she is nodding.
“Well, then,” he says, “perhaps I should just go and get started.”
Eight minutes later, back at his desk, he reflects that she’s done it again, and that his memoirs are getting harder to believe. Someone has to chronicle all this, but he’s not sure it will ever be him.
And the buzz in the back of his head is louder than ever.
The funny thing is, the Austin records are exactly what Randy needed, but they are not doing him any good at all. He’s found five men whose names he didn’t know before, all arrests who were clearly parts of the network that distributed the XV of Kimbie Dee’s murder, all high-level people not more than one or two people from the one he is after. The reason he had not linked them in before was that they didn’t happen to have the wedge of Kimbie Dee in possession at the time of arrest.
But now that he knows and has back-checked, it’s plain as day. They were all connected with at least seven or eight known distributors; they were the ones who sold the copies in bulk. Every one of them helped to finance the people who sent that deformed maniac, dying of cancer, to violate Randy’s little girl, alone in the locker room because she was too shy to shower with the others, and then to hang her from the shower head.
And the only little catch is, they’re all dead. All of them were executed for violations of the Diem Act.
He draws grim satisfaction from it, but for the first time he sees an argument against the death penalty—he’s so close, but he needs one associate of those men who can still talk.
It takes him days to finally come up with a name: Jerren Anders.
Currently reprieved from execution, in a hospital for the criminally insane—will you look at this? Back in Boise. Back where it all started. Not ten miles from where Randy’s mobile home used to be.
Currently reprieved from execution, in a hospital for the criminally insane—will you look at this? Back in Boise. Back where it all started. Not ten miles from where Randy’s mobile home used to be.
The old car turns onto the interstate, and Randy is surprised and touched to find he has many more messages than usual—not information, but congratulations. The only ones he answers, just now, are the ones from other parents, brothers, sisters, husbands, boyfriends, wondering about the Austin connection; he sends those everything he has.
During the long night, as the car climbs up out of Colorado and into Wyoming to join I-80, he dreams of Kimbie Dee. She looks like she did in the morgue, but she sits next to him and tosses her blonde ponytail the way she did when she was alive, and says, “Daddy, Daddy, you be careful. You be careful. It might be worse than you think.”
“I’m going to find him,” he tells her.
“It might be worse than you think.” She gives him a little warm peck on the cheek, like she did every morning on her way out the door to school, but he feels that her lips are cold as the morgue’s cooler.
He wakes up shuddering, fixes coffee, sits in the backseat drinking it till the sun comes up as the car pulls into Salt Lake City. He decides to get breakfast and a shower, and have the car freshened, at the next available stop for it. The smell that builds up in these things can get unbelievable.
Later that day he heads up I-15. It’s been a couple of years since he’s been this way. He’s surprised how glad he is to see Idaho again.
Kingman Reef is almost an island; at low tide there’s land, at high tide, shallow water and a few patches of exposed rock; at very high tides, nothing. The steel and concrete towers that rise there now, the North American Orbital Services space-launch facility, have made the place an island indeed, and the population these days is clear up to a thousand people, including about a dozen children.
On Friday, June 16, about six P.M. local time, no one stirs outside the station. The sky is a frightening shade of gray-green, the sea a dirty black with whitish scum, churned into a frenzy. Beside the most distant tower, far out off the reef proper, the Monster sits half-fueled, only its uppermost quarter showing above the water. If it were fully fueled, it would be completely invisible—at launch, the great rockets take off from thirty meters under the sea surface.
In fact, with Hurricane Clem running in at them and the sun close to the horizon already, this close to the equator, Gunnar Redalsen, the Chief of Launch Operations, could not see the Monster, and isn’t looking out the window anyway, but it is there in his mind’s eye. At the moment he is
talking to the four people he finds it most unpleasant to talk to on Earth, as a general rule, one of them sitting beside him and three via a communication link.
talking to the four people he finds it most unpleasant to talk to on Earth, as a general rule, one of them sitting beside him and three via a communication link.
At his left is Akiri Crandall, who is almost an all-right guy, in Redalsen’s opinion. Crandall likes to be addressed as “Captain Crandall,” just as if this place were not tied down by long columns of reinforced concrete sunk into the reef below, but that pompous insistence on his own dignity is really the worst of it; Redalsen can understand that Crandall, coming up from the ghetto and then rising from enlisted ranks in the Navy, has a big chip on his shoulder and wants it acknowledged. What annoys him more than anything is that Crandall constantly forgets that this place exists to send up big rockets; Crandall wants every person-hour thrown into base construction and base ops, and if it were up to him there’d never be a launch. Every so often Redalsen wonders if Crandall doesn’t perhaps see him as the missile officer on this inexplicably slow-moving vessel.
Just at the moment, however, Crandall is the other voice of common sense, besides himself, that Redalsen can count on, and he’s feeling a bit fond of the pompous petty Napoleon, next to whom Redalsen himself sounds so reasonable.
“The base will live through it for sure if it is not blown up,” Crandall is saying, firmly. “And if we cast off the Monster now, or even launch it on a disposal trajectory as Mr. Redalsen suggests, then the Monster cannot blow us up. But if we leave it sitting less than three kilometers from Main Base, we have no guarantee it will not find its way here.”
The woman who sits listening intently to them, her face carefully composed for the phone screen, is Edna Wheatstone, who is mainly noted for being the only candidate for CEO that none of the board actively opposed. As Crandall is finishing and Redalsen is nodding vigorously, she speaks very carefully, as if she had something in her mouth she didn’t want them to catch a glimpse of. “But I thought that the launch tower was built to the southwest of the station so that if a rocket broke loose, the hurricane would carry it away from the station.”
Now, the fact is that she damned well knows the answer to that, and this is wasting time, but this way she can replay the tape of the conversation for the board.
“I have been through two hurricanes at sea,” Crandall says, “and I am about to be through another one, and in fact I helped write the chapter on all this for the Academy, and the first sentence in that chapter is ‘Hurricanes have regularities when considered as a population, but no predictability at all individually.’ This particular hurricane is veering all over the radar screen like a cat with its tail on fire, and it may strike us from any quadrant at its nearest approach, or even loop around and hit us twice. It is perhaps slightly
more likely that the half-fueled Monster will float away from us than toward us … but only slightly. Not what I would want to bet a thousand lives on, Ms. Wheatstone.”
more likely that the half-fueled Monster will float away from us than toward us … but only slightly. Not what I would want to bet a thousand lives on, Ms. Wheatstone.”
She sits tapping the arm of her chair and trying to look simultaneously concerned and as if she has gotten very close to the people responsible for the problem. Redalsen realizes that she is in this conversation entirely to make sure that whatever is done, it will not harm her career, and while he can understand and appreciate that, he also wants very much to get on with the real business of the meeting.
The government man has one of those names like Collins or Smith that you forget all the time, and all he wants to say is that the government will understand a launch delay, despite the problems that it might bring with fulfilling President Hardshaw’s commitments, but of course if there is to be a launch delay the government will expect to be compensated for the trouble, and that certainly the government is not going to buy two rockets to put up one satellite with the taxpayers’ money, so if this rocket is to be destroyed and another put in its place, then there is going to be compensation from somewhere, and in any case there is not going to be further money from the government until their satellite goes up.
And now the only important person is sitting there, thinking hard, looking down at the table as he tends to do. Redalsen knows that this guy has been with the insurance company now for more than sixty years, and was turning down retirement before some of the current crop of retirees joined the company. Like most people with his job, he is widely believed to be too mean to die. Redalsen has had a beer or two with him, and gradually came to realize that here was a man who had spent most of an ordinary lifetime thinking about ways things could go dreadfully wrong, and trying to figure out how to make them go only a little less wrong.
“Are there any qualified probabilities?” the insurance man asks, chewing on his lip and tugging on one mangled-looking ear.
“Nothing you can measure,” Redalsen says. “I know enough about the rocket to say that, if it is adrift in high seas and runs into anything, it is very likely to detonate, and we cannot safely de-fuel it in the time we have remaining.”
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