"Give him half a chance and an audience, he'll push the button," she said faintly.
"I'm sorry?"
She looked out of the window at the steady stream of poor evacuees being shepherded away from the site. They were clearly poor; most of them had lopsided or misshapen or otherwise ugly, natural faces—one or two actually looked aged. "He's an artist," she said calmly. "I've dealt with the type before, and recently. Like the bad guy said, never give an artist a Browning; they're some of the most dangerous folks you can meet. The Festival fringe—shit! Artists almost always want an audience, the spectacle of destruction. That name—Dadaist. It's a dead giveaway. Expect a senseless act of mass violence, the theater of cruelty. About all I can do is try and keep him talking while you get in position to kill him. And don't give him anything he might mistake for an audience. What kind of profile match do you have?"
"He's a good old-fashioned radge. That is to say, a dangerous fuckwit,"
said MacDougal, frowning. She blinked for a moment as if she had something in her eye, then flicked another glyph at Rachel. "Here. Read it fast, then start talking. I don't think we've got much time for sitting around."
"Okay." Rachel's nostrils flared, taking in a malodorous mixture of stale coffee, nervous sweat, the odor of a police mobile incident room sitting on the edge of ground zero. She focused on the notes—not that there was much to read, beyond the usual tired litany of red-lined credit ratings, public trust derivatives, broken promises, exhibitions of petrified feco-stalagmites, and an advanced career as an art-school dropout. Idi had tried to get into the army, any army—but not even a second-rate private mercenary garrison force from Wichita would take him. Nutty as a squirrel cage, said a telling wikinote from the recruiting sergeant's personal assist. MacDougal's diagnosis was already looking worryingly plausible when Rachel stumbled into the docs covering his lifelong obsession and saw the ancient photographs, and the bills from the cheapjack body shop Idi—his real name of record, now he'd put his dismal family history behind him—spent all his meager insurance handouts on. "Treponema pallidum injections—holy shit, he paid to be infected with syphilis?"
"Yeah, and not just any kind—he wanted the fun tertiary version where your bones begin to melt, your face falls off, and you suffer from dementia and wild rages. None of the intervening decades of oozing pus from the genitals for our man Idi."
"He's mad." Rachel shook her head.
"I've been telling you that, yes. What I want to know is, can you take him?"
"Hmm." She took stock. "He's big. Is he as hard as he looks?"
"No." This from Schwartz. "I could myself have easily taken him, without armor. Only he had a gun. He is ill, an autosickie."
"Well then." Rachel reached a decision. "We've got, what? Forty-four minutes? When you've got everybody out, I think I'm going to have to go in and talk to him face-to-face. Keep the guns out of sight but if you can get a shot straight down through the ceiling that—"
"No bullets," said MacDougal. "We don't know how he's wired the dead man's handle, and we can't afford to take chances. We've got these, though." She held up a small case: "Robowasps loaded with sleepy-juice, remotely guided. One sting, and he'll be turned off in ten seconds. The hairy time is between him realizing he's going down and the lights going out.
Someone's got to stop him yelling a detonation command, tripping the dead man's handle, or otherwise making the weasel go pop."
"Okay." Rachel nodded thoughtfully, trying to ignore the churning in her gut and the instinctive urge to jump up and run—anywhere, as long as it was away from the diseased loony with the Osama complex and the atom bomb upstairs. "So you hook into me for a full sensory feed, I go in, I talk, I play it by ear. We'll need two code words. 'I'm going to sneeze' means I'm going to try to punch him out myself. And, uh, 'That's a funny smell' means I want you to come in with everything you've got. If you can plant a lobotomy shot on him, do it, even if you have to shoot through me. Just try to miss my brain stem if it comes down to it. That's how we play this game. Wasps would be better, though. I'll try not to call you unless I'm sure I can immobilize him, or I'm sure he's about to push the button." She shivered, feeling a familiar rush of nervous energy.
"Are you about that certain?" Schwartz asked, sounding dubious.
Rachel stared at him. "This fuckwit is going to maybe kill dozens, maybe hundreds of people if we don't nail him right now," she said. "What do you think?"
Schwartz swallowed. MacDougal shook her head. "What is it you do for a living, again?" she asked.
"I reach the parts ordinary disarmament inspectors don't touch." Rachel grinned, baring her teeth at her own fear. She stood up. "Let's go sort him out."
HARMLESS
Earth, seen from orbit in the twenty-fourth century, was a planet harrowed by technological civilization, bearing the scars left by a hatchling transcendence. Nearly 10 percent of its surface had been concreted over at one time or another. Whole swaths of it bore the suture marks of incomplete reterraforming operations. From the jungles of the Sahara to the fragile grassland of the Amazon basin it was hard to find any part of the planetary surface that hadn't been touched by the hand of technology.
Earth's human civilization, originally restricted to a single planet, had spread throughout the solar system. Gas giants in the outer reaches grew strange new industrial rings, while the heights of Kilimanjaro and central Panama sweated threads of diamond wire into geosynchronous orbit. Earth, they had called it once; now it was Old Earth, birth-world of humanity and cradle of civilization. But there was a curious dynamic to this old home world, an uncharacteristically youthful outlook. Old Earth in the twenty-fourth century wasn't home to the oldest human civilizations. Not even close.
For this paradoxical fact, most people blamed the Eschaton. The Eschaton—the strongly superhuman AI product of a technological singularity that rippled through the quantum computing networks of the late twenty-first century—didn't like sharing a planet with ten billion future-shocked primates. When it bootstrapped itself to weakly godlike intelligence it deported most of them to other planets, through wormholes generated by means human scientists still could not fathom even centuries later. Not that they'd had much time to analyze its methods in the immediate aftermath—most people had been too busy trying to survive the rigors of the depopulation-induced economic crash. It wasn't until well over a hundred years later, when the first FTL starships from Earth reached the nearer stars, that they discovered the weirdest aspect of the process. The holes the Eschaton had opened up in space led back in time as well, leading a year into the past for every light year out. And some of the worm-hole tunnels went a very great distance indeed. From the moment of the singularity onward, SETI receivers began picking up strong signals; hitherto silent reaches of space echoed with the chatter and hum of human voices.
By the third century after the immense event, the polities of Earth had largely recovered. The fragmented coalitions and defensive microeconomies left behind by the collapsing wake of the twenty-first century's global free-trade empire re-formed as a decentralized network able to support an advanced economy. They even managed to sustain the massive burden of the reterraforming projects. Some industries were booming; Earth was rapidly gaining a reputation as the biggest, most open trading hub within a hundred light years. The UN—even more of a deafening echo chamber talking shop than the first organization to bear that name—also included nontribal entities. Restructured to run on profit-making lines, it was amassing a formidable reputation for mercantile diplomacy. Even the most pressing problem of the twenty-second century, the population crash that followed in the wake of the singularity, had been largely averted. Cheap anti-aging hacks and an enlightened emigration policy had stabilized the population at mid-twentieth-century levels, well within the carrying capacity of the planet and in the numbers required to support advanced scientific research again. It was, in short, a time of optimism and expansion: a young, energetic, pluralistic planetary patchwork civilization exploding out into the stellar neighborhood and rediscovering its long-lost children.
None of which made for a bed of roses, as Rachel Mansour—who had been born on this same planet more than a hundred years previously—probably appreciated more than most.
"I'm ready to go in," she said quietly, leaning against the wall next to the cheap gray aerogel doorslab. She glanced up and down the empty corridor.
It smelled damp. The thin carpet was grimy, burdened by more dirt than its self-cleaning system could cope with, and many of the lighting panels were cracked. "Is everyone in position?"
"We've got some heavy items still assembling. Try not to call a strike for at least the first ten seconds. After that, we'll be ready when you need us."
"Okay. Here goes." For some reason she found herself wishing she'd brought Madam Chairman along to see the sort of jobs her diplomatic entertainment account got spent on. Rachel shook herself, took a deep breath, and knocked on the door. Madam Chairman could read all about it in the comfort of her committee room when the freelance media caught on.
At the moment, it was Rachel's job, and she needed to keep her attention 101 percent locked on to it.
"Who is that?" boomed a voice from the other side of the partition.
"Police negotiator. You wanted to talk to someone?"
"Why are you waiting then? You better not be armed! Come in and listen to me. Did you bring cameras?"
Uh-oh. "Schwartz is right," Rachel muttered to her audio monitor. "You going to take off now?"
"Yes. We're with you." MacDougal's voice was tinny and hoarse with tension in her left ear.
Rachel took hold of the doorknob and pushed, slowly. The rentacops had applied for the emergency override, and the management had switched off all the locks. The door opened easily. Rachel stood in the doorway in full view of the living room.
"Can I come in?" she asked, betraying no sign of having noticed the whine of insect wings departing her shoulders as the door swung wide.
The apartment was a one-room dwelling: bed, shower tray, and kitchen fab were built to fold down out of opposite walls of the entertainment room. A picture window facing the front door showed a perpetual view of Jupiter as seen from the crust of smoking, yellow Io. It had once been a cheap refugee housing module (single, adult, for the use of), but subsequent occupants had nested in it, allowing the basic utility structures to wear out and trashing the furnishings. The folding furniture was over-extended, support struts bent and dysfunctional. The wreckage of a hundred ready-meals spilled across the worn-out carpet. The sickly sweet smell of decaying food was almost masked by the stench of cheap tobacco. The room reeked of cigarette smoke—a foul, contaminated blend, if Rachel was any judge, although she'd given up the habit along with her third pair of lungs, many years ago.
The man sprawled in the recliner in the middle of the room made even the mess around him look like an example of good repair. He was nearly two meters tall and built like a tank, but he was also clearly ill. His hair was streaked with white, his naked belly bulged over the stained waistband of his sweats, and his face was lined. He swiveled his chair toward her and beamed widely. "Enter my royal palace!" he declared, gesturing with both hands. Rachel saw the dirty bandage wrapped around his left wrist, trailing a shielded cable in the direction of a large crate behind the chair.
"Okay, I'm coming in," she said as calmly as she could, and stepped inside the room.
A hoarse robot voice burbled from the crate: "T minus thirty-five minutes and counting. Warning: proximity alert. Unidentified human at three meters.
Request permission to accelerate detonation sequence?"
Rachel swallowed. The man in the chair didn't seem to notice. "Welcome to the presidential palace of the Once and Future Kingdom of Uganda! What's your name, sweetie? Are you a famous journalist? Did you come here to interview me?"
"Um, yes." Rachel stopped just inside the doorway, two meters away from the sick man and his pet talking nuke. "I'm Rachel. That's a very nice bomb you've got," she said carefully.
"Warning: proximity alert. Unidentified human at—"
"Shut the fuck up," the man said casually, and the bomb stopped in midsentence. "It is a lovely bomb, isn't it?"
"Yes. Did you make it yourself?" Rachel's pulse raced. She blipped her endocrine overrides, forcing the sweat ducts on the palms of her hands to stop pumping and her stomach to cease trying to flip out through the nearest window.
"Moi? Do I resemble a weapons scientist? I bought it off the shelf." He smiled, revealing the glint of a gold tooth—Rachel managed to keep a straight face, but her nostrils flared at the unmistakable odor of dental decay. "Is it not great?" He held up his wrist. "If I die, poof! All funeral expenses included!"
"How big is it?" she ventured.
"Oh, it's very big!" He grinned wider and spread his legs suggestively, rubbing his crotch with one hand. "The third stage dials all the way to three hundred kilotons."
Rachel's stomach turned to ice. This isn't your run-of-the-mill black-market bomb, she subvocalized, hoping MacDougal would be listening carefully.
"That must have cost you a lot of money," she said slowly.
"Oh yes." The grin faded. "I had to sell everything. I even gave up the treatments."
"Which treatments?"
Suddenly he was on his feet and ranting. "The ones that make me Idi Amin!
King of Scotland, Victoria Cross, KBE, MBE, Governor of Kiboga and Mayor of Bukake! I am the President! Respect me and fear me! You chickenshit white Europeans have oppressed the people of Africa long enough—it's time for a new world of freedom! I stand for Islamic values, African triumph, and freedom from the oppressors. But you don't give me no respect! Nobody listens when I tell them what to do. It's time for punishment!" Spittle filled the air in front of her. Rachel tried to take a step forward without attracting his attention, but the bomb noticed.