Systemic Shock (20 page)

He swore it had been a legitimate purchase, his heart full of her reflected joy. She beckoned to him then, and for the first time he eased into the little cavern. Wire-strung blankets defined the room.

The smell was overpowering. A man lay in the single patch of sunlight, only his face showing over hand-stitched quilts. Skin stretched tightly over his white fleshless face, eyes sunken, no hair—not even eyebrows—to relieve his skeletal appearance. The eyes snapped open; the lips formed words. Quantrill wondered how the girl could steel herself to kneel so near the stench of corruption; to smile into the face of death. Quantrill shifted position to hide his shudder.

"It's the boy I met the other day," Sandy murmured brightly. "He brought me a tea set." She watched the gray lips, then nodded. "We'll go outside before mom gets back, daddy."

"As soon as possible, Quantrill moved outside and reveled in the clean dry air, admitted that he might have time for a mock tea party. “I snuck away; don't you tell," he said in an effort at the local dialect. "Have to get back right soon."

They were sipping cups full of air when Louise Grange drove up, her eyes darting from one to the other. "What's happened? Is Doctor Palma here?"

"No'm," Quantrill said sheepishly, and indicated the tea set. "I promised Sandy I'd pay her a visit. Thought she might like this."

Louise Grange placed her hand over her shallow breast, sighed, found a smile for him.' "That's—awful nice of you."

"I 'm gonna show him where I play, mom," Sandy began.

"Not in the hole, child! You didn't go inside, boy?"

Quantrill saw the almost infinitesimal headshake from Sandy. "Uh—well, we were going to."

"Not today, I 'm afraid," said the woman. “It ain't fit for company. It pains me not to be a good neighbor, but—" She wrung thin hands together, beseeching him to understand without words.

"Time I was going anyhow," he said, and smiled. He waved to the girl as he put the van in motion. As long as she was visible in the rearview, he could see Sandy waving. He saw that his hands were clenched on the steering wheel, and cursed sickness. And friendship.

Sandys jurnal Sep 9 Man.

Ted came again today, brout me a real tea set for my hope chest. Ive hid it here with my kemlamp in church. Well 1 call it church. The rocks in my cave are like carvd trees, they make it look like the bigest church in the world. You can get here from the hole by swimming. My dady would have a hissyflt if he knew how I found out but he coudnt spank me I wish he coud. Mom and my dady talk a lot. She takes notes and he has to wisper things over sinse her crying drouns him out. Im sorry Im getting this page wet. Im waiting for my dady to get better like he says he will. Mom says you have to beleive God will make my dady well. There must be a airshaftfrom the hole to my church sinse I just heard somthing like like moms voise but it sounded more like a booger. I will stop for now and go see.

Sandys jurnal Sep. 10 Tus.

god is a dam lie.

The Libyan burrow-bombs may have played hell with the ELF grid, thought Boren Mills, but the concussion had blown him off the Baffin Island listings. Mills and others recovered in a spacious modern hospital in Thunder Bay, just across Lake Superior from the US, and Mills was secretly amused to learn that he now qualified for a foreign service medal. He complained of blurred vision for a week after his eyesight returned to normal, certain that the longer his recuperation, the more likely he would be posted to a reasonable duty station. In his own mind Mills was not malingering. He was studying the war's progress, the better to discover how he might get himself posted to some spot where he would be most effective. Boren Mills had been victimized by an explosion, and knew that he would never be effective in battle.

Thanks to attrition in the Navy, Mills became a full lieutenant upon his return to active duty. His foreign service and purple heart ribbons lent dash to his uniform. A new sparkle invaded his eyes the day they spied a classified bulletin on Israel's new gift to the US.

The Ghost Armada, as it was dubbed, had brought Israelis safely to Cyprus by fooling every extant electronic device. Though chafing at the delay, America was glad to have the new system which could throw false blips on enemy acquisition radar while it kept genuine bogies off the scopes. Mills indulged in a brief brainstorm, concluding that Israel's weapon was nothing like the old Stealth program which had been leaked by the US for political purposes a generation before. The Ghost Armada would have to focus on the sensors, not on the target to be sensed. Its application for US purposes would require the best possible protection. Anybody remotely connected with the program would be nonexpendable, pampered, defended.

Lieutenant Boren Mills spent two days on his letter, updating and modifying his own assessment of his special talents. The self-assessment always formed part of the core of a computer's file on anyone. If he was not identified by a records search as a man ideally suited to help develop a remote-coding microwave system, Boren Mills would be sadly mistaken.

Boren Mills made fewer mistakes than most.

SPL order 251, 23 SEP 96 EXTRACT

PARA 16. FOL NAM NAV OFCR is REL from ASG W/PREV duty STN EFF this date and W/REP for PPTY ASG to Kikepa STN, Nühau NAV FAC ASAP by MIL TRANS Priority A RPT A to ARR NLT 1 OCT 96 Kikepa STN, Nühau…

Permanent party posting to Kikepa Point was not quite what Mills had in mind. He considered a relapse, researched the island of Nühau, then concluded that he would be as secure there as anywhere. Certainly a posting to a naval research facility on a privately-owned island in the Hawaiian chain was better than Baffin Island. If you were going to live one step from the end of the world, it might as well be the warm tropical end.

Mills could have been on a military transport the next day, but wisely spent his next four days in a transient BOQ cramming his head and his personal floppy cassettes with everything he could learn on remote electronic query and input modules. He was a very quick study; by the time he landed on Oahu for the Nühau hovercraft, Lieutenant Boren Mills would bear some surface similarity to the experience profile he had claimed to the Navy's central computer.

His only worry was the seclusion of Nühau. There would be no large population there, no finishing schools or sophisticated high schools with their breathtaking arrays of pre-collegiate beauties. Mills's sexual preferences were kinky only in the narrowness of the age group he preferred, i.e., early post-Lolita. Physical ripening, that first delectable flowering of maturity, fascinated Mills; captured his lusts. He did not maltreat or embitter the girls he knew; preferred, in fact, a sixteen-year-old who already knew her way around. There had been plenty of those in the cities, Mills reflected; but it might be different at Kikepa Point.

He would cope somehow. As he packed, Mills was smiling on the inside. His posting to the Naval R & D facility suggested that he was already on the way to success. In a trivial way, he had already proven that he could remotely stuff an electronic system with balderdash.

Just when the optimists were clearing their throats to gloat over the 'modest' levels of global fallout, the second paroxysm of nukes came in October. The first group emerged from the sand seas of eastern Libya to take out Schwyz (an error; it was meant for Zurich), Lucerne, Berne, Lausanne, Zurich (if at first you don't succeed…), and in a shocker, Rome. It amounted to a simple refusal by Libya to take any more guff from the UN, from which she had withdrawn. Libya did not know whether she was united with Syria at the moment, or not. Syria said not. Libya's ruling junta, more willing than their venerated Khaddafi to follow bombast with bombs, unilaterally chose to break through the stalemate with Israel. Other countries of the AIR might permit the UN to mediate the newly vexed Jewish Question, but not Libya. To her junta it seemed clear that Christians and Jews had turned the UN into one enormous Swiss-based conspiracy.
Ergo
, Switzerland
delenda est
.

Libya did not target Cyprus or Israel itself, convinced that the Jewish Ghost Armada would somehow deflect her medium-range missiles harmlessly. Libya did not have enough Indian nukes to waste a single one.

Within a day, Libya's Mediterranean coast was a beach of radioactive glass, her junta atomized, her southern borders invaded by neighboring Chad, her existence as a political entity erased by a rain of missiles from a still-functioning Europe.

Strategists on all sides blanched, then, when missiles streaked up from a site near Ras Lanuf on the Libyan coast two days later. No one had suspected that Libya had a nuclear second-strike capability, let alone a delivery system that could reach the port cities of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba.

It seemed to Latin-American Marxists almost as if a maddened Libya, in her death throes, had responded on behalf of the US in retaliation for the Florida invasion. But the US submarine-based Trident missiles threw many smaller warheads, and did not throw them so far. SinoInd leaders insisted that the Libyan second-strike had really been a Yanqui stroke, but no one could prove it. No one except the crew of the USS
Kamehameha
, whose Mediterranean armament included eight Tridents of extended range with warheads that did not fit the known Trident signatures. The Tridents had emerged from very near Libyan soil. Flummoxed by American use of Israel's new weapon, every electronic watcher pinpointed the launch site fifteen klicks inland. Latin American governments took the body blows as a probable hint by an injured colossus that no further unfriendly acts would be tolerated. If any fresh SinoInd troops entered Florida, they'd better not speak Spanish.

As if to prove they were as capable as anyone of further contaminating the globe, Chinese subs launched waves of nukes against RUS industrial centers in Western Siberia, and US centers in Colorado and Wyoming. In both cases, fossil fuels were the targets. The RUS machine still depended on petroleum, though America had made headway in converting western shale and coal into fuel. Too many of the warheads got through, and some were ground-pounders.

The immediate US/RUS answer was nuclear, chiefly from subs that pounded SinoInd oil reserves in Rajasthan and Sinkiang. As if in afterthought, a flurry of RUS warheads detonated underwater in Japan's inland sea north of Kyushu, where shoreline debris eventually proved that Chinese submersibles had been hiding there. Japan's leaders could hardly have been ignorant of the Chinese presence, as Japanese media were quick to allege. The Japanese dead numbered only in thousands, chiefly from inundations by great waves. But the inland sea was squarely between Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and Japan was virtually one great urban clot. Thereafter, Japan took her neutrality seriously.

The delayed US/RUS response began quietly in places like Vorkuta, San Marcos, Izhevsk, Klamath Falls: basic training sites. Green US troops began their passage through Ontario to Hudson Bay. Canada had developed her submersible cargo fleet to carry ore and petroleum under pack ice through a wintry Northwest Passage, but with round-the-clock refitting the sluggish vessels soon carried troops past Peary Land and Spitzbergen to Archangelsk. It was hoped that lurking SinoInd attack vessels could be decoyed by surface applications of the Ghost Armada. Meanwhile, so many US/RUS all-weather stealth aircraft were spanning the Bering Strait that visual-contact air engagements with SinoInd swing-wings were becoming the rule there.

It had been over a month since Cathy Palma had ridden with Quantrill to the Grange cave. They'd found the entrance dynamited, the survivors gone without trace. The single wooden cross that stood in the rubble had been carefully carved:

Wayland F. Grange 1955-

For a time, Quantrill hoped Louise and Sandy Grange would turn up in Sonora, or among the thousands in the relocation center. Then in early October, Grange's Blazer was found abandoned and stripped, evidently by one of the religious zealot groups that seemed to be flowering as suddenly as desert plants. Quantrill accepted the news without comment.

Soon afterward came the flurry of second strikes that sent survivors back underground for weeks. Quantrill read more and watched the holo. And avoided emotional ties more than ever, though Palma had urged him to enroll in the relocation center school, hoping that he would respond to others his own age.

"Look," he said once to the exasperated Palma; "my strategy is to learn from the library terminal. Geometry, inorganic chem, military history. It's all I have time for, and you said yourself I shouldn't go outside again for another week."

"You think we can't run an immunology program without you, Ted? Don't flatter yourself." She saw the dull anger in his face. "You've done a lot; nobody denies that. But just between us, they're already in Phase Three in the labs. We're licking the bug! Believe me, Aggie Station can spare one cargo handler. And I can spare you if it means finishing your education." She did not add,
and rejoining your peers
.

"Between you and the holo, I'm getting what I want," he said stonily, and changed the subject. "For one thing, I'd like you to help me cut through all the crap I'm getting on the news about local guerrilla gangs. They sound like crazies to me, but you don't see anybody on the news really saying that. I need somebody to brief me, not bullshit me."

Palma did not like his increasing use of military terms:
strategy, briefing, guerrilla
came easily to him these days. "Now's as good a time as any," she sighed.

He took his time phrasing the question, a legacy from taking courses via library holo terminals. "Are they Mormons?"