"Not that we've had access to any of the data from repeated exposures," Barrow injected, "but I expect we'd see a marked decrease in dissolution rates over time. The only thing we positively know about the RADIANT offspring is that they adapt. The lysing agent was used to make the bullet that hit Sergeant Storch, but he survived. He escaped. I don't see any strategic allowance for that in Dr. Wittrock's plan, do you?"
Aranda realized the scientist was addressing him directly, though his eyes remained nailed to Wittrock.
The bomb-maker's face was an unpainted latex mask. "Storch is a chimera, produced by anomalous circumstances. His unintended survival was because of his previous inoculation, and the lysing agent still altered him at a molecular level. The tri-helical structure of his DNA was broken. His brainwaves no longer displayed the spike signature of entrainment—"
"But he walked out of here! You order us to believe that the weapon will prove effective on those imprinted by Keogh. But it's already failed. Despite your best efforts, Doctor, we've secured a few specimens of our own. We've learned things, rather extraordinary things, but I doubt we've learned anything you don't already know."
Wittrock turned the projector on Barrow. Electron microscope shots of dying Keogh cells, like a maze of walled cities consuming themselves in divine fire, writhed on the Green's contorted face. "What do I know, Barrow? Enlighten me, if you can keep your spurious religious beliefs out of it."
"They communicate," Barrow said. "They don't just exchange proteins, anymore. Individual cells isolated yet in close proximity to each other are beginning to radiate scalar wave energy, and I think they're trying to communicate. He's in them, down to their every flake of skin, in every protein string, every nucleotide, and he's reaching out. We observed the same sort of energy from the test subject who was destroyed in the cell adjacent to Storch. It was trying to communicate with him telepathically. But none of this is new to either of you, is it? I'm sure you're familiar with Armitage's neural network theory."
Aranda blinked. That name had not been spoken aloud in meetings for quite a while. "I've never heard of it," he said lamely, "but I sure wish somebody would talk straight and tell me."
Wittrock wrung his hands and spoke up over Barrow's shrill attempt to retake the floor. "He was preoccupied with the subtle energy emanations of the brain. The brain as a transceiver, but because each brain is wired uniquely, each sends and receives on a unique subtle energy frequency. It was the basis of all his research on soft-kill technology, but that wasn't his final goal. He believed—towards the end, when he was up against his own mortality, and not really all that lucid—that the energies are our souls, and potentially indestructible. He speculated further that RADIANT could be used to project consciousness along with the genetic data required to remake malignant tissue into a new body."
"What?" Aranda stepped out from his staff and approached Wittrock. "Are you saying he told you that RADIANT-infected people would
become
Keogh? You
knew
? Bangs didn't know, did he?"
"It was only a theory," Wittrock retorted, "not even comprehensible to those who didn't work directly on RADIANT."
"But there's more," Barrow cut in. "Armitage wrote us that he thought Keogh was building a neural network out of his clones. Each one is a scalar-wave copy of the original consciousness, so it doesn't matter how many you kill, if there's one left, you lose. But when there are enough of them—"
"Which is precisely why we've got to strike now, with what we've got!" Wittrock barked.
Aranda stood between them. "When there are enough of them, what?"
"They'll become one," Barrow replied. He took over the projector and typed in a file access command on its keyboard. A three-dimensional model of a constellation of dots appeared. As more dots winked into life and the constellation became a galaxy, they began to glow fitfully, like fireflies.
"This is a model we extrapolated from Dr. Armitage's formulae. Notice how, as more and more identically charged individuals are introduced into the system, the resonant energy output of each is magnified."
He tweaked something on the keyboard. The dots winked in unison, a neon jellyfish. "They synchronize, and unify. The sheer mass of the system reaches critical when upwards of a few thousand individuals come into close proximity to each other. That seems to be the threshold for the effect, given what we know about their brain activity."
He stabbed another button. The flashing dots coalesced into a glowing sphere, a tentacled sun that swelled and brightened until everyone was blinded and looked away.
"Your special effects," Wittrock sneered, "prove nothing, except the urgency of acting now. If Darwin's neural net theory is even remotely possible, which I'm far from granting, we must still strike at every center of biomass with the lysing agent before they can adapt to its effects. However, I submit that adaptation would be impossible, given that the agent is impregnated with unstable lysosomes of his own genetic signature."
Aranda wheeled on Wittrock and shut down the projector. "When did you even begin to suspect this? When were you going to tell us? After, if anyone survived?"
"Major, it has no bearing on this operation. Even Barrow's projection shows that they're far from achieving a viable network."
Barrow lunged between them. His white dreadlocks lashed Aranda's face. "There are quite possibly more than five thousand of them in the world, Doctor. We're far from understanding how whole organisms interact, because we've only had single cell cultures to work with. If they didn't reproduce so readily—"
"You idiots have been cloning them?" Aranda turned on Barrow and seized his elbows, lifted him clean off the ground. "That's exactly why I didn't want to give any of them to
him
!" He dropped the terrorized Green leader, fighting for breath.
All eyes fixed on him. He heard the air recirculators breathing through the pine needles. "And what have you learned from it? Do
you
have a cure for walking cancers?"
Barrow shrank from him and sucked at an unlabeled inhaler. When he recovered, his voice was three octaves lower, but mellowed with an unsettling calm. "It doesn't matter, Major. This isn't a new development. He was here first. He's only using our technology against us to speed up the process. But very soon, all the bodies are going to become cells in a single body, and all the minds are going to become one mind. His. There'll be nothing to do, then, though Wittrock and his can-do blackboard mass-murderers will happily provide you with solutions, right up to and including nuking everything and hiding down here for the next ten thousand years. This lysing agent might work in this operation, but I doubt you'll hurt a hair on their heads the second time, even if you don't leave a single survivor. They'll broadcast their death-energy in scalar waves, or viruses—"
"Death energy?" Wittrock scoffed. "Christ, Barrow, you used to be a scientist!"
"Then I saw it. You saw it, too. You've studied the Pnakotic Manuscripts. You read the account of the Dyer Antarctic expedition. You know about the School Of Night's research, their attempts to directly contact the Unbegotten Source. You've seen the Burgess Shale Anomaly in the Smithsonian with your own eyes, and you know as well as I do what it really is! You know what He is!" Barrow stalked Wittrock. Aranda reached out to catch him, but Barrow coiled, ducked under his arms and launched himself at the senior scientist. "You know who he was!"
Wittrock stood fast, glaring wooden defiance at his rival. Barrow stopped just short of knocking heads with Wittrock. His long, bony hands went out and clawed the air around Wittrock's impassive face. "You saw it all, but you can't face it. If you did, you'd lose your mind, and become me."
Enough of this bullshit.
Aranda cued Dr. Blount, one of Wittrock's underlings, and a former black ops planner for the National Reconnaissance Office, who took over the projector. "I think, gentlemen," Blount bellowed, modulating his voice once the others died away, "that all of these metaphysical questions may be rendered moot, concurrently with the present operation. At the time of the raid, we will notify the Russians of the orbit path and projected location of RADIANT. As many of you already know, our Russian counterparts have assembled a force package capable of neutralizing the delivery vehicle of the infection, and stand ready to deliver it. The Radiant Dawn squatter community in the shadow of Chernobyl in the Ukraine has been the site of riots, as word has spread among the malignant millions there that Radiant Dawn can cure them. The Ukrainian government and the Russians are eager to be rid of it, and a crackdown will be coordinated to coincide with the destruction of RADIANT. Similar counter-proliferative actions can be expected in Africa and South America, when the various governments involved come into line. So wherever the center of mass might lie, we will drastically reduce its size and remove its means of reproduction in one blow."
Aranda looked to Barrow, whom he'd expected to shut up once and for all. But the Green zealot recoiled as if a tiger had leapt out of Blount's mouth and savaged his face. Pumping his inhaler, he rasped, "Just as likely, you'll only provoke him into turning RADIANT on a major city. Maybe he'll kill millions, but a few thousand or so with cancer will still rise up. Even if your technology works, for a change, you'll only trigger a more violent reaction." He turned and braced Aranda. His pupils were so dilated that Aranda could see his whole face reflected in them. "You can't lead us into this, Major, not now, not like this. You still don't know enough. Even
he
doesn't know enough," pointing at Wittrock, "and what he does know, he hides until it suits him."
Aranda shook the scientist's hands off him and turned away. "We're committed. White Bird is the largest concentration of infected mass, and it's growing. We've collected samples of soil and water from the valley, and the pine trees are producing lethal carcinogens in their pollen, in the dead of winter. The Heilige Berg separatists abandoned the place, and split up. We're almost certain that most are infected, and probably irradiated. We can't wait to see what spring'll be like."
Barrow leaned into him again. He whispered, "Why are they leaving now, Major? Who tipped them off? If you take RADIANT away, you better get every last one of them around the world before they come together. Because you're only going to force Him to adapt, find a new way to reproduce—"
"Get away from me," Aranda said, then turned on Wittrock. "If I learn that you've been holding anything that could help back, I'll feed you to the fucking Greens, do you understand?"
The glade boiled over with competing shouting matches as Aranda stormed out, shouldering past Dr. Hanley to enter airlock. "We wouldn't eat him," she said, "but you say the word, and we'll gladly compost him for you." She showed him a tranquilizer gun.
He raced to his room and collapsed on his bunk. His head felt like an egg in a bear trap. When he closed his eyes, he could almost visualize his pain, like a glowing steel (
tumor
) ball bearing rolling around on the floor of his brain. He went for his pills and ate today's and tomorrow's without looking at the mix of colors, then lay down. He had briefings in an hour, then they would go downrange to a mountain valley in Idaho to incinerate three hundred and fifty innocent people who happened to be infected with a sentient disease. Until the meds began to kick in and his headache went away, he prayed that he would forget this day as soon as it was over.
~19~
We are Spike Team Texas. Our war is forever.
He pledged the oath to the sun as its first rays struck his face, as he had every day of his life since the Change. It was what got them through it, and the words made him strong.
Before and below him, the battlefield unfolded like a table-top model, the camouflaged cogs of a machine awaiting a critical infusion of heat and invading elements to set it into motion.
The mercenaries had built the trailer-park around the tower into a fortress, with walls of razor-wire, twelve troop trucks, two Bradley fighting vehicles, a half-track and a swarm of snowmobiles jammed into the field between the tower and the foot of the peaks. A reflecting radar station on a trailer swept the eastern skies from just in front of the main entrance. Another just like it was parked on the other side of the Snake River, in a little forward ops base where the helicopters roosted. APC's patrolled the perimeter, which was marked out with barbed wire, claymores and infra-red sensors. The field where children had played only yesterday was pregnant with mines so densely packed that a stone dropped on one would bounce from one explosion to the next in a chain-reaction. In the midst of it all, groups of Radiant Dawn guests watched from the front steps, like prisoners in a concentration camp. Like bait.
Helicopters, a Bell Model 406 and, he observed with a warm tug of nostalgia, a Huey Cobra, patrolled the valley down to the foot of the mountain, Gatling guns swiveling like eager mandibles. On the jagged peak above and behind the tower, they had three antiaircraft batteries: two Bofors systems on the summit, each running a quartet of 40mm cannons, and a Helicon system about fifty yards above the roof, with three 20mm Vulcan autocannons. Loaders and sighters watched FLIR and radar displays on their computers that cut through the fog and showed them circling hawks and a flock of Canadian snow geese. They were well-sheltered with gray canopies covered in snow and gravel, and might escape the notice of a casual flying observer, but for the jungle-spaghetti of arm-thick power and comm cables spilling down the cliffs to the trailer park.
He saw, too, what they, with all their fancy toys, could not. The Missionary observation post set on the next ridge, two klicks to the north, had been vacated in a hell of a hurry just before dawn, with the all-seeing mercs none the wiser. He sensed the people in the woods, who were invisible to the chopper pilots with their FLIR goggles, because they were buried in snow and radiated no heat, just yet. He saw the road winding down the broken back of Heilige Berg, past the abandoned Nazi compound, and, through the ever-present mountain mist, he saw the fields and ranches of the valley below.