Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (21 page)

1. Bump in the Road

Pamela Sheldon was driving her boss, the Patriarch of the Praxis Family Association, John Praxis, back to the compound on Coyote Creek, which lay along the East Bay shoreline in what used to be the cluster city of Fremont. They were traveling south on the battered strip of asphalt and concrete that in years past had been designated Interstate 880, or the Nimitz Freeway. Neither name meant much of anything anymore. The highway now connected nothing except one burned out crater in Oakland with another in San Jose, and the states that had once been so interconnected, as well as the national government that had built the highway system in the first place, no longer existed. Even Pamela, who was old enough to remember the name “Nimitz,” couldn’t say exactly who or what that had been. And the “way” was nothing like “free.”

Taking the highway was just barely better than going cross-country. Almost every overpass they came to had fallen into the roadway. Then they had to divert to the off-ramp, drive across the intersecting street—without breaking an axle in the potholes or grounding the car’s blast-resistant V-frame on chunks of concrete—and come back down the on-ramp. It made for a twisting, corkscrew sort of travel.

Not that Pamela herself was doing the driving. The HUMV-IX’s intelligence did all the work, using video imaging in the infrared frequencies and obstacle ranging in the ultrasonic. That way they could ghost along at night, lights off, and attract the least attention from the road companies and other scavengers. No, she was just along as excess baggage. Praxis had needed her to watch his back as he left the building in San Francisco where his meeting had just ended, and he would expect her to check him in through security at the family compound. Praxis was her responsibility until he was standing safely inside his own front hallway and had removed his shoes.

Since she was officially his bodyguard, Pamela tried to amuse herself by monitoring the vehicle’s automated defenses. Redundant scopes and screens in the dashboard facing the front seats offered a human’s-eye view of the electronic sweeps and countermeasures the armored car was currently projecting and reflecting. The circling green radii and wavering red loop patterns stretched out across a shadowy, faded-back landscape of pavement, trees, dry brush, and arroyo which was pocked and gridded with the solid imagery—built up from various databases—of pillboxes, scattered warning beacons, informally claimed territorial zones, and formally filed if antiquated property lines.

Nothing was moving in the night. And that was just as well.

Pamela was about to switch off the screens, fold her arms across her chest, and drop her head for a two-minute nap when she heard a faint
click!
from the undercarriage. She came instantly alert.
What could that—?

The seat bottom kicked her hard in the butt.

A yellow glare rose outside the darkened windows.

The dashboard exploded outward to enfold her in a Kevlar balloon.

The armored body did a somersault that left her weightless and disoriented.

And then the car came down on its side.

* * *

The last time John Praxis had sat in a dentist’s chair to have his teeth budded was twenty-five, no, twenty-six … well, a quarter century ago, anyway. With moderate care and sonic cleaning, a new set of teeth was supposed to last an old-style lifetime—seven or eight decades, at least. Now Praxis had to sit still for the surgeon to implant new buds and install a hard-plastic bridge across them that would serve the triple purpose of protecting the soft tissues while they grew, giving him something to chew with, and back-stopping the gums when he started teething again, just like a newborn baby.

This time he was only replacing six molars, three uppers and three lowers, on his right side. Those teeth had smashed together when his ground car struck a land mine, a Chinese relic left over from the Time of Troubles. No one had been badly hurt in the blast, because the car was armored on top, sides, and bottom. But Praxis’s jaw had clicked shut when the airbags went off, and the force of the impact broke his teeth. He was ready to opt for crowns and cement, the old-fashioned way, because the roots and his gums were still strong. But Dr. Hockley had overruled him. “We don’t repair in this shop, John. We replace. I won’t let you pay for anything less.”

At least the experience was better than twenty-five years ago, when his first set of replacement molars, both sides, practically all his teeth, had worn down through the enamel and then into the dentine and the pulp cavity. Hockley and his colleagues attributed the unnatural wear to his diet at the time: minute quantities of volcanic ash and obsidian spherules consumed with every mouthful of grain over half a dozen years, until the atmosphere finally cleared from the Yellowstone Eruption. That abrasive action had destroyed the chewing surfaces. Everybody’s back teeth wore down, bled, and then rotted in their mouths. The dentists made out like bandits that year.

But what could anyone do about the grit back then? A body had to survive. They had called it the Hunger Winter.

And how had the Praxis family survived? By trading capital for food. Once again, John Praxis had reason to thank Jeffrey’s daughter Susannah—now their head of Planning and Procurement—for suggesting the family association model in the first place, which gave them an advantage in preparedness, and then for recognizing and acting on the implications of the Hunger Winter. Susannah had convinced Praxis—and all the cousins, aunts, and uncles who held shares in the Association—that money-wealth would be less important over the long haul than food-wealth. She had stood firm in her conviction that the Hunger Winter would not be an inconvenience for just a season or two but might hang on for several years, possibly as long as a decade, and herald a major change in the biosphere.

Armed with that information, Praxis had approved the immediate acquisition of Garden Resources, Inc., a Sacramento-based food processing company. It had a full-scale biotech research laboratory and bioreactor plant attached to its major business of buying, cleaning, processing, and packaging fresh foodstuffs. He ordered the lab scientists to stop designing genetic improvements to carrots and radishes, and instead set to work modifying algae, yeasts, and microbes so that they could convert waste products from local crops—the nutrients still to be found in nut husks and fruit pits, plant biomass, animal byproducts, and dung—into food supplements. The bioreactors turned this raw material into filling for the cartridges which printed sustainable family meals that might even be attractive and appetizing.

At the same time, Praxis had sent agents up and down the Central Valley before the full impact of the Yellowstone Eruption could be felt. They bought up every piece of property that was available: rice farms and row crops in the Sacramento Valley, fruit and nut orchards in the San Joaquin, ranches in the extreme south, sand lots and scrubland on the desert edges that had long since been abandoned to the weeds—which were still biomass. He paid exorbitant sums for marginal properties, then paid even more to drill wells and buy water rights, so they would not be dependent on rainfall or government allotments from river runs and the annual snowpack.

He had Jacquie Wildmon in Houston design small, nimble intelligences that could go out into the worldwide markets with independent authority to buy up broken and damaged lots of grain and other food commodities. They bought rice from the Philippines, wheat from Russia, dates and figs from Iran, olive oil from Spain, and then routed them all back to Sacramento.

He had Paul Praxis and a team of in-house intelligences design food transports that looked like ordinary hopper trucks, tankers, and trailers but were actually armor-plated and armed with high-energy weaponry and automatic thermal-sighting modules from the Rover series. He had the team design static and dynamic defenses for all of their properties—with special attention to the Garden Resources plant—and work out delivery schedules from there to various the family enclaves.

Within three months of the eruption, the Praxis Family Association had an assured food supply. Within six months, they were eating gourmet-quality dinners derived from almond hulls, rancid rice, and cow dung. The Association treasury was almost depleted, and family members might have had to plan carefully and tighten their belts at times. But none of them starved.

* * *

Callie Praxis called her nephew Paul and the bodyguard Pamela into her office in the Fremont compound, which they had long ago nicknamed “Fort Apache.” Both wore the blue-and-gray, urban-camo battle dress uniform of the PFA Defense Force. Praxis family members, who had shares, privileges, and stipends, and their paid retainers, who had only contracts and monthly wages, alike wore the family military insignia—a stylized view of the Parthenon in red with a closed fist superimposed on it in black—as well as their own unit markings and badges of rank. In Paul’s case, he bore the headquarters staff patch on his sleeve and a single general’s star on his collar tabs. As a detached retainer on special assignment, Pamela wore the uniform but without any sign of rank, just the tape on her right pocket with the name “Sheldon.”

“How did my father get injured?” Callie demanded of the young woman. Well, young in face and body, perhaps, but almost as old as Callie herself, who was 102 and feeling her age that morning. “How did you
let
him get injured?”

“No excuses, ma’am.” Pamela just stared at the wall beyond Callie’s head. She was probably screaming worse things inside her own skull than Callie could ever say aloud to her. Still, this was a necessary exercise, a form of catharsis for both of them.

“The accident really was unforeseeable, Aunt Callie,” Paul explained.

“Were you there?” she asked drily. And when he hesitated, “So shut up.”

“It must have been a land mine,” Pamela grated. “I should have checked—”

“They’d been down that road a hundred times,” Paul put in.

“Didn’t you have your magnetic sweeps out?” Callie asked.

“It might have been buried deep,” Pamela said. “Or plastic cased.”

“So? How many more lie under our roads—buried deep or plastic cased?”

Paul shrugged at the question. Pamela was lost again in her own thoughts.

During the second year of the Hunger Winter, an expeditionary force from Greater China had landed on the beaches of the Pacific Northwest. With the Federated Republic in a shambles and most of the remaining state authorities overcome by the scope of the disaster, the world rushed in. The Chinese used the excuse of a mercy mission, bearing foodstuffs, medical supplies, and portable housing shelters, but the contingent was armed and traveled in military transports with offshore naval and air support. By the time various Chinese units had fought their way over the Coast Range to Olympia, Washington; Salem, Oregon; and Redding, California, everyone on the ground generally understood the full military nature of the expedition.

John and Callie had organized the PFA Defense Force out of the security guards they were already using to protect their food shipments. Local people with military backgrounds, and anyone prepared to take training, signed up with the family because it meant a job with access to food, security, and stability. Paul Praxis and his youngest son John Junior—the boy had been named in honor of his great-grandfather—were put in charge. To supplement the human forces, they placed the robot factories on overtime churning out Rovers, Wardogs, and Aerobats, with Big and Little Brothers programmed to coordinate and guide them. At first, John had made light of the matter: “I never expected to become a warlord,” he once quipped. To which Callie had replied: “Only if you live long enough.”

When the Chinese Expeditionary Force reached the family holdings north of Sacramento, they never knew what hit them. The Chinese still relied on people, lots of people, holding rapid-fire assault weapons aimed with iron sights and launching grenades from underslung tubes or hurling them with bare hands. They had never encountered a mechanical wave of stealth-wraiths with visual deflectors, radar shielding, and ceramic armor, which moved three times faster than any human being and fired with deadly accuracy. The machines didn’t spray the landscape with bullets but picked off their targets with laser precision: one image, one shot, one kill, all to the head.

Order among the Chinese forces broke down, but the soldiers refused surrender and an orderly withdrawal. Why go home to the life of a peasant under state control? Instead, they broke up into war bands that roamed the countryside, guerilla fashion, supported with occasional air drops of weapons, ammunition, and supplies. The Chinese Incursion lasted ten years, almost as long as the Hunger Winter itself, and to the present day people still heard rumors of isolated outposts in the forests of the Redwood Empire and behind the ridges of the High Sierra. And of course the Chinese government continued to maintain a treaty port at Seattle and a protectorate with cantonments around Puget Sound.

Why had the PFA Defense Force not followed up on its advantage? With their technically superior arms and easy recruitment of willing fighters, the Praxis family might have invaded the Pacific Northwest, driven the Chinese back into the ocean, and reclaimed their half of the country. Callie had certainly been in favor of such direct action. But John had resisted. His goal had always been to protect and preserve his family and their holdings, not to create a nation state, not to acquire land, power, and supremacy—and certainly not to engage in Armageddon around Seattle.

A similar incursion had been launched on the East Coast: across from Cuba, up through Florida, and into the Deep South. Who was ultimately behind it, whether the Russians and Venezuelans who bore the brunt of the fighting, or the coalition of French and Germans bankers who financed the venture, was never entirely clear to those fighting the Chinese out on the West Coast. What they did know was that the conflict finally ended when what passed for an American government on that side of the country cauterized the entry point at Miami with a nuclear bomb and established a cordon—in effect, an open-season killing field—in southern Georgia and Alabama. But parts of the Old South now spoke a kind of creole English mixed with Russian and Spanish.