"All the forfeitures imposed on us as so-called Manna Project support payments have already siphoned off a king's ransom in technology and scientific expertise. The truth is we've been nothing but a cash cow and sorry stepchild to that global clique since the beginning. And it's damn well time we stood up for ourselves!"
Corealis looked Warrington hard in the eye.
"Has it ever occurred to you why they've been so continually tough on us, Eugene?"
Somewhat cowed, the president stammered indignantly. "B-because we were the most affluent of the pre-crash nations and should rightfully bear the heaviest taxing!"
Corealis shook his head woefully. "Open your eyes, Mister President. They're jealous of us. And have always been. Their only real hold was through our own volunteer subscription to the almighty Manna Project. If we broke that, what would they have?
"We enlisted in what was to be a noble campaign. Instead, we made ourselves prisoners to our own oath for a cause that was soured by petty greed and outright hatreds from the start. But if we cancel our membership and don't yield to their pressure for self-prosecution, we can stay solvent and in control of our own existence when Skylock relaxes."
Corealis drew a resolute breath. "Our SHAPP reports continue to indicate a steady decrease in the rate and intensity of the solar storm. Skylock is showing the first real signs of weakening. They're staying mum on the fact. But the U.N. Disaster Relief board knows it too. That's what has them keeping the screws so tight on the old USA, because they want us under their thumb completely before things clear up. And asking their financial help now would only make it that much easier for them."
Warrington fell quiet, drawing Corealis closer with a softer, conspirator's tone.
"Eugene, I've studied this thing from every angle. With a population staying regulated by this new discovery, we could live indefinitely within existing, domestic resources. Think of it. Enough food and jobs to go around. Comfortable living, adequate petroleum, and technology for everyone to share in.
"No one is asking for an indiscriminate, mass sterilization of any one group, just a tactical application when and where future projections dictate the need.
"For a time, no action at all would even be necessary. Heaven knows, as ghastly as it was, the N.A. Flu itself was a good enough interim thinning mechanism. We suffered our own losses here, but populations recover from mass diseases. Then they crowd and cramp themselves until terrible wars of expansion break out and thin things back. This is a fact, just like history has proven time and again.
"An ongoing reliable and workable population ratio is the only practical way to regulate fair shares for each citizen. And if we can't force legislation on them, then we need to take bloodless action on their own behalf—and that of this country's posterity."
The president blinked free of his trance. His eyes widened in somber disbelief. His words came slow and barely above a whisper.
"Just like that. You can reduce a horrific plan of conquest to a few simple mechanics?" President Warrington straightened with fresh resolve. "I am still going to petition that World Finance Council. I am going to ask their forgiveness and help, like I said. And I am going to surrender this illegal, secret project to their authority and bear personal consequences if that's what it takes to absolve my country of any involvement.
"In the meantime, I want a rescue party mounted and sent out to wherever that radio call came from, as soon as possible. I also want full particulars on this 'project' compiled and in my possession by tomorrow night."
Warrington turned from the now silent project director. Reaching for the door he paused, adding a last mandate over his shoulder.
"I want something else, too, Royce. The names of everyone involved with you in this—and your immediate resignation from your post."
Leaving the tape player behind, the president opened the door and was gone.
Corealis stood grim in the aftermath. He raked muscular fingers through his coarse graying hair, thoughts colliding at light speed deep inside his head.
Was the call real—or just some bizarre illusion? Had damage been done to the refining work? The plans? The product? Had any foreign legion posts heard the call and homed in on it? A serious push with ground-effect vehicles could put adversaries in range of the station within days.
Corealis did realize he had one single, large advantage. No matter how close anyone might get through sheer luck, only his people knew exactly where and what was going on. He also had the EM storm coming and a "react" team on standby.
An overdue switch closed in the director's mind. He grabbed at the phone.
"John, trouble. Wake up the agents and pilot. Doc Ashton, too. I hope Clausen's plane lives up to its billing, because I want it flying within the hour. But first, hook me up with Dick Welton."
The sedan quietly took up station outside Trennt's bungalow. Idling patiently at the foggy curb, its sullen geometry was staked out in the cheerless red and amber smudges of its running lights.
Crushing out a smoke, Trennt took a final look at the place. Brief stays and unplanned, odd-hour departures were part of the job. Yet a strange facet about good lodging was always in the pang of hominess he felt on leaving—a peculiar wish that something could be taken along as a memento to sustain him later.
But again, this place as all others before it, offered no suggestions. So like the weary traveling salesman he'd become, Trennt dutifully flipped off the lights and set the door lock. Gear in hand, he stepped quickly into the stale night air, toward his ride.
The sedan deposited Trennt at the compound airfield, beside a medium-sized VTOL jet. Its dim cabin lights glowed a cozy saffron in the growing, bitter mist as Trennt stopped by its pilot and a ground crewman in the midst of exchanging signed receipts.
"I'm Trennt," he announced, surrendering his pocket badge to the pair.
"Okay," answered the young pilot. "About ten minutes more and we should be in the air."
The flier swung his pencil between a couple of technicians seen moving about the cockpit and a distant pocket of heat lightning.
"Apparently we need some last minute computer module adjustments before wading into that."
Trennt glanced beyond. The first blue and pink streamers of an EM storm were corkscrewing in, graceful and silent, from the predawn northeastern sky.
"Don't planes usually avoid magnetic storms?"
The flier grinned privately.
"This one is different, trust me. Go ahead and get settled in. Vittles in the galley, if you want."
Trennt looked about the drizzly taxiways. He sniffed the familiar, though much diluted, bite of ozone.
"Big inversion on the way."
"Already here," replied the groundsman folding his papers.
"Chicago took another big hit right after midnight. Level eight. Socked them in good. Sanitation boys'll have a busy time trucking stiffs to the burners after this one."
"Yeah."
Trennt gazed pitingly toward the invisible, suffering city, then back toward the parked plane.
"Seen anything of my partner?"
"Short guy? Already aboard."
Trennt stepped through the small hatchway and into the twenty-passenger jet. Ahead, the technicians glanced up from their control panel work. Midway back, Baker snuggled under a blanket. Business goods set in a pair of canvas satchels beside him, his peaceable grin was that of the world's best little boy on Christmas Eve.
In the rear sat a passenger Trennt didn't expect or recognize: an uncomfortable looking middle-aged man, clutching a bulky carry-on bag of his own. Trennt nodded hello, but the man only returned a bovine stare, preoccupied and unresponsive.
Baker, though, did mumble a closed-eyed, dozy greeting.
"Like going to work in a chauffeured Caddy, huh, Jimbo?"
"Yeah," Trennt answered, glimpsing about. "Pretty big plane for just a couple of us."
"First class, Pard. An' just a taste o' what's up the road, if'n we handle this job right."
The shooter's face lit to a broad, savoring smile.
"Say, you take up their offer of evenin' companionship?"
Trennt settled in across the aisle. "No."
"I sure did. Dialed me up that number and they sent over a couple tender young honeys eager to take me places I ain't been in quite some time." Baker's grin withered as he spared a critical eye for his associate. "See there, Pard. That's your trouble. Keepin' to yoursef' all the time just ain't natural. A man needs the right kind of relaxation now and again to keep things in balance."
Trennt ignored the advice and cocked his head rearward.
"Who's the stiff?"
"Doctor somebody," chuckled Baker. "Kinda peak-ed lookin' hisself though, ain't he?"
"You hear any reason for the sudden call-up?"
"Trouble in the hen house—paper cut, stubbed toe. Who knows? Figger it all out when we get there."
The shooter yawned, found that satisfied grin again, and drifted off, fast asleep.
Trennt marveled at the man's untroubled cherublike glow. No lost winks over the horrors he'd survived. Or devised. Not a care of what gruesome end might lay hours ahead. Just turn it on, turn it off, like always.
Finally the technicians departed and the pilot arrived. As if making up lost time, he initiated a smart, two-handed drill in the cockpit. A brisk sequence of sharp clicking switches and toggles filled the air. Outside, one, then the other, aft-placed turbines awakened and stirred to life. Within seconds, their mounting eagerness synchronized into a quivering rhythm.
Waved clear by the ground crew, VTOL ducts and tilt wing mechanisms hummed confidently to their takeoff attitude. Amid a rising howl, the craft gathered its strength and pulled from the ground. Seconds more and it was above the hangars, slowly rotating about a rising axis toward the west, on a merging path with the growing flux of skybound magnetics.
From his lofty perch, Trennt imagined he could discern the vague outline of distant Chicago. Drooped beneath her sooty crown of thorns, the grand old lady of the prairie hovered as a dim collage of askew roof lines. Only the twin 3000-foot Nippon Towers stood out. Then they too fell away. Supplicating arms drowned in the newest quagmire of brown photochemical soup, soup that ruined lungs and birthed killer pleurisies among its citizens—like that which had claimed his own family.
Chicago. Trennt knew her all too well. Twenty-first-century life wrapped in the tattered discards of the Dark Ages. Its once magnificent boulevards now just cluttered valleys to the fire-blackened stonework jutting skyward like desolate mountain peaks. Deep in its bowels, the old landmarks lived on as razed abstracts: museums, planetarium, aquarium; the scorched and chipped crematoriums that were once Soldier Field and Comiskey Park.
Smothered in a roiling caustic fog tonight again, the city stubbornly clung to life. With sunup the poison would once more evaporate. Somewhere a church bell would shudder to life and draw others to a throbbing chorus of "all clear." Families would pull off their urine-soaked rag respirators, parcel off their dead, and get on with the business of survival.
Trennt had braved the routine many times and earned his stripes as a survivor of the big city riots, outliving the absolute madness, which drove off the town's very soul one unforgettable scalding July night.
Dumped there by the millennium census, the Cee-Dee population had lived jammed in each other's faces for three years. Heated by lax supplies and inadequate public care, their frustration finally exploded like a huge boil, emptying its corruption far into the streets.
Wholesale slaughter flushed out, anxious to punish the system which had abandoned its people. But what remained of true authority was locked safely out of reach. So the rage fell back on itself, setting neighbor on neighbor and square miles to the torch. When the insanity finally died, so did the spirit of the people. Ever since, their only noise was the clamor of defeat.
The whole time he'd lived as her adopted son, Trennt had hated the town. But now, cut free and outside, he felt a weird rush of something like regret, pity toward an abusive mother who simply couldn't help herself.
Trennt dwelled on the horizon a long time after the town was gone, awash in other memories: long ago troop movements, drives against sworn enemies of his country—supposed threats to his way of life. It had mattered once. Or so they'd said. And he'd believed them. America, right or wrong; the simple-minded declaration of an old-fashioned bumper sticker validating it all.
Now, they were telling him again. Different words, but the same old tune. Them and us. Conditional logic that made even the bleak reality of total extinction seem less a threat than the loss of national sovereignty. Not that any of it mattered in the real world. Those living in Chi-town would probably agree that the dead were better off anyway. And to him it was all just part of another job.
Trennt looked again at Baker. Beside the dozing shooter sat two canvas duty bags. Trennt slid one over and peeked in. As the old saying went, the tradesman certainly was known by his tools. A pair of holsters and well-oiled 10 mm automatics rested inside. Beneath were two disassembled S-12 shotguns, ready for a deadly mix of explosive and flechette ammunition. A cased sniper rifle and enough other ordnance to arm a determined infantry squad filled the other bag.
Trennt shucked one of the clip-fed weapons free of its chamois wrap. He clicked the barrel in place and pondered the evil-looking result. Rubber grips, forged aluminum receiver, extruded high tensile barrel. Lightweight, well-balanced. Coated in black oxide, it shined dully in the cabin lights as both a familiar lover and menacing servant.
Just holding the weapon awakened old and primitive feelings deep inside the handler. Power. And shame. That grating mix cultured in the insanity of war, where one sustained and the other tormented.
On a small, insulated tackle-type box, was a yellow label printed over in a red ink. A tiny ball surrounded by three wedge-shaped blades warned of its contents—the A-bomb detonator Corealis had mentioned.