Someone else, Storch thought he recognized the voice of Medina, added, "Like they ever killed anybody themselves."
Storch made himself walk into the new room, felt the door close behind him. Neither of the soldiers followed him in. The air continued to blast over him, Storch recognizing the breath of machines, but no oil, no tang of metallic friction. Computers. They wouldn't be able to just vent the heat from a big computer set-up without drawing the state police or the DEA, at least not at night. Against the hushed roar of the air, Storch could make out subtle clattering noises that hinted at people typing at keyboards, but he couldn't guess how many. He knew it was the ions, but he felt testy, felt the Headache coming back hard, and he barely kept in check the urge to just yell until somebody did something. But more pressing business kept him waiting in silence for long minutes that stretched into an hour before he felt he'd earned the right to make a sound.
He opened his mouth to speak, when a nimble hand undid his blindfold and snatched it away. He blinked a few times, but he was struck speechless by what he saw.
The room was not much larger than a bank vault. The thick concrete walls were reinforced with steel I-beams and draped with foam insulation, forming niches in which stood stacked computer towers. Six workstations—four against the walls, and two in the center of the vault. Four people of indeterminate sex and race sat at the outer workstations, swaddled from head to foot in white cleansuits and particle masks.
The floor was carpeted in plastic tarps, but under it Storch could feel a dense weave of cables crisscrossing the room. This system was easily the rival of the unorthodox mainframe he'd seen at the School Of Night. He suspected the same people might've had a hand in the design of this system, as well. The generators for it must be enormous, and there must be a satellite uplink around here, as well, because tapping into the local power grid would cause brownouts, and a telephonic connection would be easily traceable to its source.
"How are you feeling, Sergeant Storch?" a reedy voice demanded from behind him. Storch stepped forward, pivoted and brought his head down, but the man was no immediate threat, at least not physically. He was old, but Storch couldn't guess how old, because he had no wrinkles, and unnaturally black hair. His face looked aged, but somehow unused. His hand lay upon a small plastic gun that looked like it shot darts or pepper spray, but he looked completely unfazed by Storch's potential for violence. He was a civilian, and a scientist on top of it. This was the one they'd warned him about—Wittrock.
"I'm as comfortable as can be expected. I was led to believe somebody here was going to tell me what the hell is going on."
"How many people have you killed, Sergeant?"
"What? That's—I have four confirmed kills on my Army record, but the truth is probably closer to twenty-five. Men."
Well, and one woman, but she had it coming, even in cold blood. Yep. I don't want to think about her.
"What has that got to do with anything?"
"How do you sleep at night?"
"Fu—What is this?"
"Answer the question."
"They don't keep me awake at night,
Doctor
. I know what people say about me, and I say fuck 'em. There's—something…"
something, oh yeah
"…something wrong with my immune system, but it doesn't get in my way, if anybody fucks with me."
"That's why you're here, is it? To get even? Sergeant, in the course of my career with the Department of Defense, I have been directly responsible for nearly twenty-five thousand deaths, nearly all of them civilians. I see every one of them every time I close my eyes. We came to be here because we share a common disgust with killing, but still, we have need of killers. Major Bangs seems to think he needs you, and Bangs must be indulged, to a point. We are not mercenaries, nor are we terrorists. But we have committed acts of high treason and acts of war against the government of the United States. We are feared and hated in Washington, as much for what we did for them as for our current task. We'd like to use you, but not simply to get even. It is imperative that you understand. Are you capable of understanding?"
Finally.
"Jesus, God, yes. Try me."
Wittrock made a still sourer face, as if he'd been hoping for another answer. "You'll be an enemy of the state. Even if you survive the Mission, you'll be forced to flee the country. No retiring to the vegetative existence you lived before. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that anyone who comprehends the situation would cast his lot in with us. You could still leave."
Sure.
Major Bangs had made it abundantly clear that there was no going home, as if there were a home to go back to. "Doctor, I have nowhere else to go."
"Is that the new recruit? Send him in, Witt." The voice was too faint, too feeble, to have a bodily source. Storch looked around for a speaker, but Wittrock turned and went to a niche and reached for one of the computer panels, took hold of it just so, and the wall opened and a low, short corridor lit by dim red bulbs yawned in the opening.
"He's not stable, Darwin. I—have misgivings." Wittrock stood before it with one hand still fluttering over his gun, studying Storch with a dubious expression.
Even cuffed, Storch could easily have bulled past him and broken his nose in the bargain, but he balked as the voice inside the tunnel crumbled into deathbed laughter. "I'm sure there's nothing he could do to me that I wouldn't welcome, Witt. Let him come. If he's so intent on dying with us, he should at least have the benefit of knowing just what sort of lunatic asylum he's signed up with."
Wittrock bit back a further protest, then stepped aside. "In there…he'll tell you what you need to know. Don't talk. Listen."
Storch watched Wittrock as he walked into the tunnel. He had to duck his head—this was never meant for human traffic, was probably some sort of conduit for pipes when it was supposed to be a toxic waste dump. As it was, the tunnel provided marvelous defense. He stumbled twice, both times rearing up and bashing his head against the ceiling. The second time, he struck the steel lintel of a doorway, and ducked through it, cursing. He stopped short in a small cell lit only by a computer screen spewing waterfalls of digits. The walls were draped in huge sheets of drafting paper, stained with umber streaks by leakage through the concrete walls— schematics of circuitry boards, or maybe blueprints of a housing development.
A man sat in a chair beside the computer, his face etched rather than illuminated by the glow of the screen. No, not a chair, a wheelchair. And no, not quite a man. Not anymore.
He was completely hairless, and wore a loose robe that looked distressingly like a funeral shroud. He looked to be about four sizes too small for his skin. It shifted and slipped around him, masking tremors that bespoke grievous neural damage. His face, neck and hands were mottled with splashes of dead white, the colorless color of moonstone. He coughed chronically, an explosive sound like bags of wet sand bursting on concrete from a very great height. In a voice like callused, flaking hands rubbing together, he spoke.
"My name is Armitage, and all of this is as much my fault as anyone's. We—Calvin and I, some others here—used to design weapon systems for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Never heard of it?"
"No, sir. I was in Fifth Special Forces, Rangers before that."
"I'm well aware of your service record, Sergeant, and I'm not surprised you never heard of us. We worked out of bases with no names, on projects the public wouldn't know about for decades. We were the heirs of the Manhattan Project, but we were insulated from the ethical pitfalls of our work by the lessons of Los Alamos. We were not after cumbersome doomsday weapons, but precise solutions to the problem of force. Besides, most of what we thought up, we knew they'd never build. Too expensive, too risky, too frivolous, too awful. Anything we drew up that looked feasible was peddled to a private contractor. So we played with toys, and never thought we'd have to turn them on a living being. That's how you make doomsday weapons, Sergeant. You let scientists play with toys.
"In 1983, when Reagan introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative, he got together over fifteen billion dollars for research to build a utopian system that would render nuclear weapons obsolete. Within a year, it was a big joke; they weren't even hoping to have the technology until the mid1990s, and the President's own science advisor admitted to the press that the whole SDI package was a hypothetical bargaining chip, that just the threat of the U.S. someday developing such a system might deter the Soviets from building more missiles. The truth was, they didn't blow fifteen billion on pipe-dream missile defense projects, any more than they spent seven grand on a coffee maker. There were countless smaller projects in the offing that were very real possibilities, weapons that would bring the Russians to the bargaining table in a cold sweat.
"The worst of them was dropped in our laps in the summer of '83, right after Reagan broke open the piggy bank. The most conservative cost estimates for building a space-based laser even today, run over two billion.
He
brought us plans for an affordable orbital weapon platform, but not for missile defense, oh no, not for defense at all. All the preliminary research was already done, all the R&D was neatly wrapped up. All we had to do was build the thing, and the weapon itself was cheaper than a single M1A1 Abrams tank. He called it RADIANT."
"Who?" Storch didn't want to interrupt the old man, but he was straying into territory he must assume Storch understood.
With a start, he realized Wittrock had slipped up behind him. "He doesn't need to know all of it," he said, but Armitage dismissed him with a wave of one palsied claw.
"It was Keogh," he went on. "He called himself Keitel, then, and he wore a different face, but it was the same…man, for want of a better word. We didn't know who he was, and the government told us not to ask. He handed us all his research from the seventies. At first, we thought he'd only tested it on animals. By the time he'd wormed his way in and we knew the truth, nobody in charge cared. They did a background check, but there was nothing, at least nothing they cared about. If he would have gone to the Pentagon, or the Department of Defense, or Lockheed, or even the CIA, he would've been arrested, discredited, all his research buried deeper than Tesla's. Keitel walked into the right office at the exact right time—it was a meeting of DARPA, a very goal-oriented division that cut across all of those groups. He showed us plans for something that, if all it did was what he promised, it still would've been damned unthinkable, and the DoD was flush with cash and power and paranoia, so they told us to build it. I'd heard that our government took in Japanese and German concentration camp doctors in return for their research on human subjects, but I never believed it. Keitel changed all that for me."
"What the fuck was it?"
"The absolute apex of anti-personnel weapons technology, and so elegantly simple it could've been built in the Renaissance. Basically, it was nothing more than an array of lenses in a satellite. It collected the sun's energy and fed it through the lenses, so it could pour it with pinpoint accuracy on any spot on the globe."
"It was a laser?"
"A laser is just an ultra-high frequency wave of light, generated with solid fuel and a large mirror. Lasers are to the emission from this thing what the sound of white noise is to Stravinsky's Firebird. It didn't just intensify the light. It perverted it, mutated it. The waves did some damnably odd things—Keitel said he was tuning the harmonics, called it a scalar wave. It didn't burn, it didn't even get hot, but it scrambled animal cells, disrupted DNA at a molecular level. The waves were embedded with packets of information, he said. It sounded like New Age, cold-fusionstyle rhetoric, but Keitel's results showed subjects dying of multisystemic cancer within one week of exposure. He'd tuned it up a lot since his first field tests. His working model turned chimps inside out, but he kept insisting it'd have to be fired from outside the atmosphere to achieve the full effect.
"It wasn't hard to convince the brass; they were excited about the very idea of a magic wand that could give the Politburo cancer in their beds. We built the whole thing in less than two months, the lens array was the hardest part, and Keitel kept that whole part to himself. They sent it up on the Enterprise shuttle launch in February of '84; one of the many secret military payloads that nobody ever wonders about. They brought it online without a hitch. The first test from orbit was also the first government-sanctioned test on human subjects.
"Not that they were undeserving, we were told. Along with the cows and the pigs and the chickens and the chimps, they staked out twelve military prisoners, including some men from Vietnam who'd been caged up in the States. Men who defected, and radioed our boys into ambushes in the jungle. They were still listed as MIA, and the Pentagon just never had the stones to execute them. They were Special Forces boys like yourself. They managed never to find their way back from Vietnam, and were only picked up in 1978. The things they supposedly did over there made the Khmer Rouge look like the Salvation Army. They actually told us that we were to look at it as a military execution, nothing more."
Storch's teeth clicked together on the end of his tongue. Spike Team Texas. What was wrong with him, he'd gotten from them. And what they were, they'd become because of RADIANT.
"In March of 1984, they set up the prisoners and the barnyard exhibit on one of the few atolls in the South Pacific that the Army didn't nuke in the forties, and they fired it up. Even in broad daylight, it was some show.
White light poured down from the sky like the hand of God, but I never saw anything look so wrong as it did. And it worked. All twelve subjects bloomed into glorious terminal cancer inside of a day. They congratulated us, that day. Told us we would go down in history as the men who stuffed the nuclear genie back in the bottle.