Wireless (15 page)

Finally, the tank was full. So Joe girded his loins, donned his armor, picked up his weapons, and went to do battle with the dragon by the pond.

The woods around the pond had once been enclosed by a wooden fence, a charming copse of old-growth deciduous trees, elm and oak and beech growing uphill, smaller shrubs nestling at their ankles in a green skirt that reached all the way to the almost-stagnant waters. A little stream fed into it during rainy months, under the feet of a weeping willow; children had once played here, pretending to explore the wilderness beneath the benevolent gaze of their parental-control cameras.

That had been long ago. Today the woods really
were
wild. No kids, no picnicking city folks, no cars. Badgers and wild coypu and small, frightened wallabies roamed the parching English countryside during the summer dry season. The water drew back to expose an apron of cracked mud, planted with abandoned tin cans and a supermarket trolley of Precambrian vintage, its GPS tracker long since shorted out. The bones of the technological epoch, poked from the treacherous surface of the fossil mud bath. And around the edge of the mimsy puddle, the stage trees grew.

Joe switched on his jammer and walked in among the spear-shaped conifers. Their needles were matte black and fuzzy at the edges, fractally divided, the better to soak up all the available light: a network of taproots and lacy black grasslike stuff covered the ground around them. Joe’s breath wheezed noisily in his ears, and he sweated into the airtight suit as he worked, pumping a stream of colorless, smoking liquid at the roots of each ballistic trunk. The liquid fizzed and evaporated on contact: it seemed to bleach the wood where it touched. Joe carefully avoided the stream: this stuff made him uneasy. (As did the trees, but liquid nitrogen was about the one thing he’d been able to think of that was guaranteed to kill them stone dead without igniting them. After all, they had cores that were made of gun cotton—highly explosive, liable to go off if you subjected them to a sudden sharp impact or the friction of a chain saw.) The tree he’d hit on creaked ominously, threatening to fall sideways, and Joe stepped round it, efficiently squirting at the remaining roots. Right into the path of the distraught farm.

“My holy garden of earthly delights! My forest of the imaginative future! My delight, my trees, my trees!
My trees!
” Eyestalks shot out and over, blinking down at him in horror as the farm reared up on six or seven legs and pawed the air in front of him. “Destroyer of saplings! Earth mother rapist! Bunny-strangling vivisectionist!”

“Back off,” said Joe, dropping his cryogenic squirter as he reached for his air gun.

The farm came down with a ground-shaking thump in front of him and stretched eyes out to glare at him from both sides. They blinked, long black eyelashes fluttering across angry blue irises. “How
dare
you?” demanded the farm. “My treasured treelings!”

“Shut the fuck up,” Joe grunted, shouldering his gun. “Think I’d let you burn my holding when tha’ rocket launched? Stay the
fuck
away,” he added as a tentacle began to extend from the farm’s back.

“My crop,” it moaned quietly: “My exile! Six more years around the sun chained to this well of sorrowful gravity before next the window opens! No brains for baby Jesus! Defenestrator! We could have been so happy together if you hadn’t fucked up! Who set you up to this, Rat Lady?” It began to gather itself, muscles rippling under the leathery mantle atop its leg cluster.

Joe shot it.

Tubocurarine is a muscle relaxant: it paralyzes skeletal muscles, those that connect bones, move limbs, and sustain breathing. Etorphine is a ridiculously strong opiate—twelve hundred times as potent as heroin. Given time, a farm, with its alien adaptive metabolism and consciously controlled proteome might engineer a defense against the etorphine—but Joe dosed his dart with enough to stun a sperm whale, and he had no intention of giving the farm enough time. It shuddered and went down on one knee as he closed in on it, a syrette raised. “Why?” it asked plaintively in a voice that almost made him wish he hadn’t pulled the trigger. “We could have gone together!”

“Together?” he asked. Already the eyestalks were drooping; the great lungs wheezed effortfully as it struggled to frame a reply.

“I was going to ask you,” said the farm, and half its legs collapsed under it, with a thud like a baby earthquake. “Oh, Joe, if only . . .”

“Maddie?”
he demanded, nerveless fingers dropping the tranquil izer gun.

A mouth appeared in the farm’s front, slurred words at him from familiar-seeming lips, words about Jupiter and promises. Appalled, Joe backed away from the farm. Passing the first dead tree, he dropped the nitrogen tank: then an impulse he couldn’t articulate made him turn and run, back to the house, eyes almost blinded by sweat or tears. But he was too slow, and when he dropped to his knees next to the farm, the emergency pharmacopoeia clicking and whirring to itself in his arms, he found it was already dead.

“Bugger,” said Joe, and he stood up, shaking his head.
“Bugger.”
He keyed his walkie-talkie. “Bob, come in, Bob!”

“Rrrrowl?”

“Momma’s had another breakdown. Is the tank clean, like I asked?”

“Yap!”

“Okay. I got ’er backup tapes in t’office safe. Let’s get’t’ank warmed up for ’er an’ then shift t’tractor down ’ere to muck out this mess.”

That autumn, the weeds grew unnaturally rich and green down in the north paddock of Armitage End.

A Colder War

Roger Jourgensen tilts back in his chair, reading.

He’s a fair-haired man, in his mid-thirties: hair razor-cropped, skin pallid from too much time spent under artificial lights. Spectacles, short-sleeved white shirt and tie, photographic ID badge on a chain round his neck. He works in an air-conditioned office with no windows.

The file he is reading frightens him.

Once, when Roger was a young boy, his father took him to an open day at Nellis AFB, out in the California desert. Sunlight glared brilliantly from the polished silverplate flanks of the big bombers, sitting in their concrete-lined dispersal bays behind barriers and blinking radiation monitors. The brightly colored streamers flying from their pitot tubes lent them a strange, almost festive appearance. But they were sleeping nightmares: once awakened, nobody—except the flight crew—could come within a mile of the nuclear-powered bombers and live.

Looking at the gleaming, bulging pods slung under their wingtip pylons, Roger had a premature inkling of the fires that waited within, a frigid terror that echoed the siren wail of the air-raid warnings. He’d sucked nervously on his ice cream and gripped his father’s hand tightly while the band ripped through a cheerful Sousa march, and only forgot his fear when a flock of Thunderchiefs sliced by overhead and rattled the car windows for miles around.

He has the same feeling now, as an adult reading this intelligence assessment, that he had as a child, watching the nuclear-powered bombers sleeping in their concrete beds.

There’s a blurry photograph of a concrete box inside the file, snapped from above by a high-flying U-2 during the autumn of ’61. Three coffin-shaped lakes, bulking dark and gloomy beneath the arctic sun; a canal heading west, deep in the Soviet heartland, surrounded by warning trefoils and armed guards. Deep waters saturated with calcium salts, concrete cofferdams lined with gold and lead. A sleeping giant pointed at NATO, more terrifying than any nuclear weapon.

Project Koschei.

The following briefing film is classified SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM. If you do not have SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM clearance, leave the auditorium
now
and report to your unit security officer for debriefing. Failing to observe this notice is an imprisonable offense.

You have sixty seconds to comply.

Red Square in springtime. The sky overhead is clear and blue; there’s a little wispy cirrus at high altitude. It forms a brilliant backdrop for flight after flight of four-engined bombers that thunder across the horizon and drop behind the Kremlin’s high walls.

Red Square, the May Day parade, 1962. This is the first time that the Soviet Union has publicly displayed weapons classified GOLD JULY BOOJUM. Here they are:

Later in the same day. A seemingly endless stream of armor and soldiers marches across the square, turning the air grey with diesel fumes. The trucks roll in line eight abreast, with soldiers sitting erect in the back. Behind them rumble a battalion of T-56s, their commanders standing at attention in their cupolas, saluting the stand. Jets race low and loud overhead, squadrons of MiG-17 fighters.

Behind the tanks sprawl a formation of four low-loaders: huge tractors towing low-slung trailers, their load beds strapped down under olive drab tarpaulins. Whatever is under them is uneven, a bit like a loaf of bread the size of a small house. The trucks have an escort of jeeplike vehicles on each side, armed soldiers sitting at attention in their backs.

There are big five-pointed symbols painted in silver on each tarpaulin, like pentacles. Each star is surrounded by a stylized silver circle; a unit insignia, perhaps, but not in the standard format for Red Army units. There’s lettering around the circles, in a strangely stylized script.

These are live servitors under transient control. The vehicles towing them bear the insignia of the second Guards Engineering Brigade, a penal construction unit based in Bokhara and used for structural-engineering assignments relating to nuclear installations in the Ukraine and Azerbaijan. This is the first time that any Dresden Agreement party openly demonstrated ownership of this technology: in this instance, the conclusion we are intended to draw is that the sixty-seventh Guard Engineering Brigade operates four units. Given existing figures for the Soviet ORBAT, we can then extrapolate a total task strength of 288 servitors, if this unit is representative.

Five huge Tu-95 Bear bombers thunder across the Moscow skies.

This conclusion is questionable. For example, in 1964 a total of 240 Bear bomber passes were made over the reviewing stand in front of the Lenin mausoleum. However, at that time technical reconnaissance assets verified that the Soviet air force has hard-stand parking for only 160 of these aircraft, and estimates of airframe production based on photographs of the extent of the Tupolev Design Bureau’s works indicate that total production to that date was between 60 and 180 bombers.

Further analysis of photographic evidence from the 1964 parade suggests that a single group of twenty aircraft in four formations of five made repeated passes through the same airspace, the main arc of their circuit lying outside visual observation range of Moscow. This gave rise to the erroneous capacity report of 1964 in which the first-strike delivery capability of the Soviet Union was overestimated by as much as 300 percent.