The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma (25 page)

“Not known yet, sir; we do have some small cave-ins that can be cleared. Most serious seems to be the problem of fleet electronics. Hopefully the techs can solve it quickly.”

“Well, I'm not waiting!” Bane exclaimed. He tapped the sequence of three buttons to launch his remaining attack squadron of five ships, led by his own vessel. Their destination: San Diego. It was one of the most powerful GSA bases, with nuclear submarines, stealth bombers, mechanized land units, and a host of other military equipment.…

*   *   *

MINUTES LATER, THE
self-proclaimed General stood on the command bridge of Voleer One as the armored transport craft burrowed its way through the crust of the planet with four other voleers behind it, all carrying his specially designed weapons of mass destruction and six thousand soldiers. This would be the opening salvo, and as soon as the problems were solved with the other squadrons there would be more afterward, coming out of nowhere. He planned to play a violent game of hit-and-run, until the enemy threat was ended.

Bane intended to put his enemy completely out of business.

Now his fleet of voleers was crossing beneath the deserts of northern Mexico, heading in a northwesterly direction, tunneling through the earth hundreds of meters underground. On a wall screen he saw that the navigators had recommended final course adjustments, and the pilots were setting the proper coordinates.

His voleers carried military vehicles and attack aircraft, brimming with Splitter technology to inflict the maximum possible non-nuclear damage on the target. Bane had old-style nuclear weapons back in his Michoacán arsenal (and still accessible), but he had not brought them with him, seeing no need for them at this time. There was more downside than upside potential if nukes were used and triggered the destruction of the entire planet. An atomic war was madness, and he would take measures to avoid using such weapons at all.

He glanced at the master control panel, but knew he was out of range of any underground signals from the other eight squadrons in his fleet. He hoped they had all launched, and were speeding toward their various targets. For the moment, he focused on San Diego.

In annihilating that military base he could not avoid destroying much of the adjacent reservation for humans, undoubtedly killing hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. It was unavoidable. The same held true for every other target, as soon as they were hit.

The GSA had to fall, and the nine attacks should make them capitulate. If not, he would call for additional strikes against hundreds of additional targets.

He thought about the hotheaded Red Major—Reed Zachary—who had stolen three aircraft and made his own ill-fated attack. It was too bad the young officer had not waited. He'd been impatient to hit the enemy, had refused to wait and had paid the price for it with his life, along with the lives of the crews and soldiers who had accompanied him. It had all been a waste, a loss of talent and equipment. Bane hated to lose good, highly trained people, and he particularly missed Zachary, whose argumentative personality had been stimulating, and had caused Bane to think about a number of things he might not have otherwise considered.

Looking around the command bridge, Bane saw Marissa Chase, the pretty young officer with whom he'd been sleeping. Arguments with her were often stimulating, when they had arousing sexual overtones.

It occurred to him now that in his zeal he was acting precipitously, just as Zachary had done before him, going off with an inadequate force, overeager to do battle. Maybe this was a mistake, if the techs couldn't launch the other voleers. He shouldn't attack only one base, if the other strikes were not also being made. An attack on San Diego by one squadron, even with a series of attacks on other bases by the same squadron afterward, would alert the enemy and cause him to stiffen his defenses. The SciOs would be called into action with exotic weapons, and the GSA already had many Janus Machines that could be used as powerful cannons.

Simultaneous surprise attacks would be much better.

Abruptly, General Bane altered the command coordinates, and a short while later his five voleers surfaced in the darkness, but with nothing to attack. They were in the arid Painted Desert of the Arizona Territory. The ships had electronic veiling so that they could not be detected by satellites or other surveillance technology, but now he could communicate with the rest of his fleet and his base back at Michoacán. He sent a coded transmission across his encrypted, clandestine system, to the voleers and the base.

The message was not received there, but went instead to an unmanned outpost he maintained on the Pacific coast of the Mexican territory, west of the Michoacán base. This concerned him a great deal.

An AI response came back to him, reporting the bare facts in a smooth, asexual machine voice: “A second temblor hit Michoacán after you left, caving in the base on forty voleers. Suggest you call off your mission and return to aid in rescue and salvage operations.”

Bane cursed into the chill of the desert night. He didn't see how this could have happened! Taking into account the history of quakes in the region, his engineers had designed seismic reinforcements into the construction of the base. Central Mexico had the advantage of location from a military standpoint, enabling him to attack both continents, north and south. He was likely to lose that advantage now, and perhaps a great deal more.

Burrowing underground again, leading his single squadron back to the disaster site, he worried about the logistical and technological problems of getting the other vessels out of the cave-in (if they were even salvageable) and how to avoid detection by the enemy.

After so much preparation in recent months, he had been eager to make the opening salvos of a powerful guerrilla war. Instead, he had suffered a huge reversal before firing even a single shot, a setback that would require him to go back and rework his entire plan. If he could save more of the high-tech voleers (and that was a big “if”), he would set up a new subterranean base in a more stable area from a seismic standpoint. In any event, he would need more money from his allies, and they would not be pleased about that.

He ordered the squadron to top subsurface speed.

 

26

Does the end ever justify the means employed to achieve it? When considering the welfare of the Earth and its inhabitants, is it even a question of morality, or is it more about the survival of the planet, about setting priorities that boil down to this: Which species deserve to survive and which do not?

—one of Artie's encrypted data files

WEARING HIS GREEN
cop uniform and shiny helmet, Andruw Twitty stood at the barricaded main entrance of the Montana Valley Game Reserve. It was early morning on a crisp, overcast day. Leaving a Greenpol squad car nearby, he had just announced his presence to one of the guards, a petite woman whose uniform seemed too large for her. She was a hubot, he determined from her machine-design armband and the slight translucence of her skin, so she had some human biological component in her body. The Chairman was known to keep hundreds of the humanoids around here.

Twitty couldn't tell what this one might have in her body to qualify her as one of the hybrids. Perhaps she had a human internal organ—a heart, a lung, or a kidney; there were often interesting stories about where the body parts came from. Some had been salvaged from the bodies of Corporate War heroes, people that Chairman Rahma wanted to glorify for his own propaganda purposes, always enhancing the mythology of the revolution. There was even a rumor that a hubot had run amok in one of the relocation camps, murdering people because it had received a demented brain, like a robotic version of Frankenstein's monster. Twitty had always doubted that story; it sounded apocryphal to him.

To get to the Rocky Mountain Territory by maglev train, Twitty had used his police credentials, which not only enabled him to leave the Seattle Reservation but to travel a good distance from it. Then, around a hundred and fifty kilometers from the game reserve, he'd obtained the use of the Greenpol car.

In the past, he had reported to the Chairman by EVR transmission, but his attempts to get through in that manner this time had been thwarted, with stiff responses that the GSA leader was “unavailable.” The responses sounded canned to Twitty, and he was convinced that Rahma did not even know he was trying to get through to him.

Perhaps he would have more luck by showing up in person and asking for an audience. Confidential Greenpol reports indicated that the Chairman was in fact at home. Twitty was convinced that what he had to say merited a personal audience with the great man, and that he would be grateful once he heard the additional information about Joss Stuart and Kupi Landau. Damaging information.

Momentarily, the guard returned and shook her head. “The Chairman is unavailable,” she said. It was the same irritating message that had been transmitted to him at the Seattle Reservation, after he returned home and submitted his report to Greenpol authorities there.

Annoyed, Twitty said, “You know I am a police officer who has previously reported directly to Chairman Rahma, and I assure you that what I have to say is of the utmost importance.”

The guard shook her head adamantly.

A shadow crossed the ground, and Twitty noticed a large creature in flight overhead, with immense, batlike wings that extended outward from a doglike—no,
wolflike
—body. He shuddered as the animal flew closer, and seemed to be looking directly at him with eerie, pale yellow eyes. It was much, much bigger than a wolf.

“What the hell is
that
?” Twitty asked.

The guard looked up, but seemed unconcerned and just shrugged.

With a scowl, Twitty wondered what manner of creature this was. Some endangered species, no doubt, that Rahma had rescued from overseas. Odd, though. He had not heard any publicity about this one. He wished he had brought along his sidearm.

“Hear me out for a minute,” Twitty said, keeping a wary eye upward. “This morning, a government broadcast said there is no evidence to blame Joss Stuart for the destruction of the ReFac building in Berkeley. They're saying that all indications point to the explosion being an accident—one that has given Stuart ‘cute little talents' that he can use at party games to impress women. Listen, the son of a bitch is my roommate, so I know him personally, and I assure you he has more than ‘cute little talents.' Stuart is quite dangerous, and has threatened to harm me if I…”

Again she shook her head, and interrupted to say, “Send your report through normal channels. The Chairman doesn't have time to listen to everyone who wants to break into his busy schedule.” The guard smiled. “Please understand, I hear some
very
creative stories here.” She waved a hand dismissively. “Now go, or I'll have to put you on report.”

Twitty reddened, but he turned and left. As he drove toward the nearest maglev terminal, he saw the airborne wolf tracking him, flying low, swooping this way and that across his path, making sure he saw it. The thing gave him the creeps.

Finally, the creature turned and flew back toward the game reserve.

*   *   *

IN HIS OFFICE,
the Chairman had refused to even speak with the guard over the security system, which had the effect of sending the pesky eco-cop on his way. Rahma had been following the ongoing reports on Joss Stuart and his strange powers, and under other circumstances he might have allowed Twitty a few minutes of his time. But nothing involving Joss Stuart came close to another matter that had come up.

A much more important matter.

Just before Twitty's arrival, the Chairman and Jade Ridell had been making love on the couch in his office, but had been interrupted by a high-priority holo-net transmission that beeped and appeared in the air by them.

Now Chairman Rahma sat naked on the edge of the couch, staring at the confidential holo-report that floated in front of him, an update from the Army of the Environment on the troubling attack that occurred near the Bostoner Reservation. His old girlfriend Kupi Landau had destroyed one of the aircraft, saving her Janus Machine and its crew. He had already lauded her heroic actions when she was in Quebec afterward, and he'd arranged for her to receive a medal. But he had something else in mind for whoever organized that attack, if they were still alive. Public executions to show he would not tolerate opposition.

He scanned the report quickly. To his dismay, it didn't have any additional information on the attackers, and especially not on how they might have used that tube-shaped transporter to get to the site. The large machine had emerged from underground just before the attack, that much was certain, but how had it gotten there? He scowled, recalling that the vessel had been detonated by a self-destruct mechanism, and not by weapons fire from his defenders.

The report went into some conjecture about who might have been responsible for the attack, from the Panasians to the Eurikans to renegade Corporate elements, without drawing any definitive conclusions. Essentially, the communication was a waste of time to even read.

Jade slipped back into her clothes. “Try to think of the good side of this,” she said, having seen part of the electronic document over his shoulder. “At least the attackers didn't damage much. I mean, it was a small-scale operation, and it failed.”

He glared at her, and shouted, “You naïve girl, don't you understand that I need to know who was behind this?” Rising to his feet, he considered striking her but resisted, because he abhorred violence and used it only when necessary to maintain the order of the state. “There is nothing good about this situation, no matter how you try to spin it. Now get out!”

Jade had quickly become one of his favorite female companions, having advanced past everyone except Dori Longet and Valerie Tatanka. He might even be having sex with Jade more now than the other two, but he didn't enjoy conversations with her as much. Despite her intelligence, Jade's inexperience and outspokenness got on his nerves at times, irritating him to the core. This was one of those times.