Nancy Kress - Crossfire 02 (13 page)

“That’s what the reports say. Major Helf?”

“The ship is three hundred million clicks out,” said the voice of Julian’s physicist, Lucia Helf. Alex, staring at the back of Natalie’s black curls, thought for a moment that Lucia Helf meant “ship” literally. But of course that was part of the drill. They were tracking a hypothetical Fur vessel bent on attack.

A Fur ship equipped with their version of a McAndrew Drive could come in decelerating at a hundred gees. It then needed time to cruise into orbit, perhaps reconnoiter, perhaps send down a shuttle… or perhaps not. No one knew exactiy what the Furs would do. Whatever it was, however much time it took would equal the time available to evacuate Mira City. Maybe six hours from the time the orbital probes picked up the ship. Maybe six days. Maybe sixty days. The drill used the least possible time.

Paul Ramdi, an energy engineer, said over the open link, “All class red facilities shielded.”

“Good,” Julian said. “Mr. Ching?”

“I just heard from the mayor—bunker number two is sealed. Captain Quiles reports that Mira City is about half-empty.”

Alex said, “Have the mines reported yet? And the water-treatment plant?”

“Not yet,” Andy Ching said. She heard the excitement in his voice, so like the young girl in her nightgown. Andy, too, was very young. Julian had quietly insisted that the youthful generation of Chinese be represented in each command bunker.

Alex watched over Natalie’s shoulder and her face darkened. “Julian—Lau-Wah isn’t in his bunker.”

Julian’s voice said sharply, “Where is he?”

“They don’t know. He didn’t take a rover—well, they weren’t there, you know that—Natalie says he’s not answering his comlink.”

“Two hundred fifty million clicks out,” Lucia Helf said.

“Mines shielded now,” Andy said.

Alex said to Natalie, “Tell them not to seal the bunker yet. Lau-Wah must have stopped to deal with some problem.”

“Then why hasn’t he reported in?” Julian said.

“I don’t know.”

They waited. The water-treatment plant reported in: shielding complete. Lau-Wah did not join his bunker.

When the hypothetical ship had reached orbit, Ashraf ordered Lau-Wah’s bunker sealed. Alex heard his voice quaver and she thought of Jake. By now Jake should have reached his end point, a small hospital cave beside the tram track’s termination, not very hard for the old and sick to get to. Not very safe, either. Duncan Martin had been assigned there by lottery as an able-bodied orderly, a military attack not having much need for the usual skills of actors. Alex wondered if, during an actual attack, Duncan would stay at the cave or would try to join a group running farther away.

“Shuttle descending,” Lucia Helf said.

Julian had worked out strategies for attacking a Fur ship in orbit, using the
Beta Vine
or his own ship, the
Crucible.
Those strategies could not be tested. Nor could the plans for attacking a Fur shuttle. Depending on where a shuttle descended from orbit, Mira would deploy the solar array, lasers, mining explosives, all the meager resources (Julian said they were meager) of destruction that Greentrees would offer. If the shuttle headed directly for Mira City, Julian would execute the maneuver he was about to test now.

“The biggest problem is these ’force walls’ you describe,” Julian had said, and Alex had noted his phrasing. No one on Greentrees could produce an example of the force fields that could be created and dismantled with the flick of a curved stick, walling captives in and danger out as the Furs chose. So Julian believed in them only provisionally. That didn’t stop him from defending against the fields, in the only way he could think of.

“Shuttle one hundred fifty meters above Mira,” said Lucia Helf, with as much tension in her voice as if the thing had actually existed.

“Deploy EMP!” Julian said. “Now!”

Everything on Alex’s display went dark.

The electro-magnetic pulse knocked out electricity, radio waves, microwaves, X-rays—everything from io-
⁴
nanometers to nearly a kilometer. It wiped computers clean. That was why days had been spent moving as much equipment as possible out of Mira City, beyond range, for this drill. Personal equipment, at least small items, was supposed to move out with the populace. The big equipment—mining, water treatment, all the infrastructure of civilization—had been

shielded with lead and foamcast and stone and dirt. “We don’t know what they have,” Julian had said, “so we’re going to remove as much as we can from Mira.”

Gazing at the bunker displays, Alex saw that he had.

The command bunkers, now like most of the inhabitants, were beyond the EMP range. Immediately reports began flooding in from Ashraf and the others. “It worked, I think!”

“Nothing coming from Mira.”

“Those bastards are now unarmed and vulnerable.”

“Wait—here comes the comlink from the water-treatment plant, Suval Tremaine just walked outside to link… no problems! The shield held, all equipment functioning!”

“Mira Corp Mining Consortium report… all functioning fine.”

Alex listened intently to the comlink chatter while watching Natalie’s displays. She could hear Julian’s half smile in his voice. “Security Chief Davenport reports the city down. We’ll have to replace a lot of lighting and pumping chips, I’m afraid.”

Alex, Natalie, and Ben grinned at one another. The chips had been removed, building by building, leaving only enough to indicate the range of the EMP. Also sacrificed had been some old, nearly obsolete but sophisticated machinery. The sacrifice was worth it.

And yet a shiver ran over Alex. Grins, congratulations, a fine celebratory glow… because they had succeeded, hypothetically at least, in rendering other beings helpless. Was that what war did?

She realized, dimly, that she didn’t know anything about what war did. Not real, visceral knowledge. Well, how should she? How should any of them except Julian and his Terrans?

By now Guy Davenport’s security force was moving back toward Mira City, carrying comlinks and reporting as they went. A skeleton force had been left in the city to prevent looting, if any Greentrees inhabitants had decided to risk remaining behind. Security’s weapons wouldn’t work, of course, but then neither would the looters’. Nobody had anticipated any real trouble.

Natalie gasped. Alex’s attention snapped back to the audio comlink report.

“—shooting fire out of the nozzle! I’ve never seen anything—”

“Where the hell did they get flamethrowers?” Julian’s voice demanded.

“Who?” Alex cried.

“—fire at the hospital! It’s caught fire …”

The hospital was one of the third-generation buildings that Alex had been so proud to show Julian: graceful soaring wood, beauty to comfort the ill and dying.

It had been built last year, to replace the utilitarian foamcast hospital. It stood at the very edge of Mira City, at the very edge of the EMP range.

“Who?”
Alex demanded again.

“Hope of Heaven,” Natalie said.

Abruptly a visual display came to life. Alex watched, frozen, as masked figures ran away from the hospital. Behind them, red and yellow flames danced gaily over the purplish wood of the graceful building. The airy rooms, Alex thought, where the sick could gaze out on the bright genemod flower beds. The meditation chapel, the operating rooms, the children’s wing…

A blackened beam crashed to the ground, dragging with it part of a wall.

“—This is Jenson Cutler just arrived back in Mira City for MiraNet,” said a shaky voice, “sending from the roof of a building to… to all of you. Masked people are burning the hospital… no, now they’re shooting flames at another building down the street, I don’t know what it is…” The robocam swiveled and Alex saw flames—so gorgeous, so cheerful looking!—hit another curved, soaring structure.

“SecSun Mining,” she said aloud, to no one.

The building burned as joyously as the hospital.

“I’m going in,” said another voice on another channel. “They can’t just—”

“Do not advance!” came Guy Davenport’s voice, more decisive than Alex had ever heard it. “You have no weapons. Stay where you are; that’s an order.”

“But they’re… oh my God!”

“Sweet gravy Allah,” came Jenson Cutler’s voice, and Alex barely had time to note with some numb, inane part of her mind that her young third cousin had used a bastardized Arab oath before the robocam turned for yet another view.

Furs were running down the street.

When did the enemy land?

But of course they weren’t space Furs. A moment later, the longest moment of her life, Alex realized her mistake. The Furs running toward the flamethrowers were Nan Frayne’s wild Furs, inexplicably invading a temporarily prechip Mira City. The Hope of Heaven rebels—as the robocam zoomed in, Alex could see the Chinese character on their masks—turned the flamethrowers toward the Furs. The young humans weren’t fast enough. The Furs darted behind foamcast buildings. They moved with incredible speed.

A spear arced through the air and caught a rebel in the chest.

Alex was back in the genetics lab, watching another spear fly into a midair lion, Nan Frayne’s voice in her ear:
“There’s a ship approaching Greentrees… you better go find out. I’ve got better things to do.”

Spears and lances were not affected by an EMP.

Another rebel went down, impaled through the chest, still screaming. The robocam swiveled wildly. Incoherent shouting, and then two more rebels dropped their flamethrowers and clapped their hands on top of their heads in surrender.

Then two more.

Alex stumbled toward the display for a closer look. Later, it seemed to her that it had all happened during that one clumsy step forward, although of course it couldn’t have been that compressed. But that’s the way she remembered it. Guy Davenport’s security force rushing forward, taking the rebels prisoner. People spraying water on the fires; the pumping stations were not, thank heavens, computer controlled. And Nan Frayne’s Furs melting away, disappearing as completely as if they had never been there at all, had been as hypothetical as the space Furs’ ship, their shuttle, the nonexistent attack on a city not quite empty enough.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Ashraf demanded of Julian. The small man in his rumpled Threadmores looked surprisingly dignified. He neither fidgeted nor glanced around distractedly. His dark eyes stayed fixed on Julian’s, and in them Alex saw less personal offense at being deposed than impersonal concern for the truth.

“Julian, If you brought in Nan Frayne and her Furs to protect Mira City, we should have known. Alex, Lau-Wah, and Guy, at a minimum.”

At the mention of Lau-Wah, Alex bit her lip. Lau-Wah had never reported in to his bunker. He was still missing.

Julian said, “Ms. Frayne made it a condition of her cooperation that I tell no one. She said that was nonnegotiable. I believed her.”

Alex believed it, too.

Julian continued, “I didn’t know, of course, that Hope of Heaven would choose the Mira City drill to attack. I was protecting us against as many contingencies as I could. That’s a strategy we had discussed and agreed on.”

“Us.”
Julian counted himself as one of them.

They were meeting in the Mausoleum, whose chips had been the first to be replaced. Ashraf’s office, unlike Alex’s, was painfully neat, and unexpectedly cheerful for the stark foamcast building. Bright woven rugs and hammered copper plates from Terra, precious antiques, hung on the white foamcast walls. Another rug, green with a geometric design, covered the floor. The basic foamcast furniture had been softened with cushions. Holo cubes of Ashraf’s children played on his desk. The room had the warmth that Siddalee was always complaining Alex’s office lacked, although Siddalee was no better at creating it than Alex herself.

She said to Julian, “How did you get Nan Frayne to post her Furs as guards? Those creatures have always resisted having anything to do with any human except her. They’re as xenophobic as the space Furs.”

Julian said, “They haven’t ever understood before that the space Furs who destroyed their villages and much of their populace fifty years ago might return and finish the job.”

Ashraf said, “And how did you make them understand that?”