The Peace War (31 page)

It was a strange feeling to have been present at the founding of the present order, and to
be alive now, fifty years later. This great Authority, ruling the entire world — except now
Europe and Africa — had grown from nothing more than that third-rate company Paul
worked for in Livermore. What would have happened if she and Angus and Fred had
made their flight a couple of days earlier, in time to return safely with the evidence?

Allison looked out the mansion's wide windows, into the twilight. Tears didn't come to
her eyes anymore when she thought about it, but the pain was still there. If they had
gotten back in time, her CO might have listened to Hoehler. They just might have been
able to raid the Livermore labs before the brazen takeover that was called the "War"
nowadays. And apparently the "War" had been just the beginning of decades of war and
plague, now blamed on the losers. Just a couple of days' difference, and the world would
not be a near-lifeless tomb, the United States a fading memory. To think that some lousy
contractors could have brought down the greatest nation in history!

She turned back into the room, trying to see the three other conspirators in the dimness.
An old man, a skinny kid, and Miguel Rosas. This was the heart of the conspiracy?
Tonight, at least, Rosas sounded as pessimistic as she felt.

"Sure, Paul, your invention will bring them down eventually, but I'm telling you the
Tinkers are all going to be dead or bobbled before that happens. The Peacers are moving
fast
."

The old man shrugged. "Mike, I think you just need something to panic over. A few
weeks back it was the Peacers' recon operation. Wili fixed that — more than fixed it — so
now you have to worry about something else." Allison agreed with Mike, but there was
truth in Paul's complaint. Mike seemed both haunted and trapped: haunted by what he
had done in the past, trapped by his inability to do something to make up for that past.
"The Tinkers have simply got to hide out long enough to make more bobblers and
improve on 'em. Then we can fight back." Paul voice was almost petulant, as though he
thought that he had done all the hard work and now the Tinkers were incompetent to
carry through with what remained. Sometimes Paul seemed exactly as she remembered
him. But other times — like tonight he just seemed old, and faintly befuddled.

"I'm sorry, Paul, but I think that Mike he is right." The black kid spoke up, his Spanish
accent incongruous yet pleasant. The boy had a sharp tongue and a temper to go with it,
but when he spoke to Paul-even in contradiction he sounded respectful and diffident.
"The Authority will not give us the time to succeed. They have bobbled the Alcalde del
Norte himself. Red Arrow Farm is gone; if Colonel Kaladze was hiding there, then he is
gone, too." On a clear day, dozens of tiny bobbles could be seen about the skirts of the
Vandenberg Dome.

"But our control of Peacer recon. We should be able to protect large numbers of-" he
noticed Wili shaking his head. "What? You don't have the processing power? I thought
you —"

"That's not the big problem, Paul. Jill and I have tried to cover for many of the Tinkers
that survived the first bobblings. But see: The first time the Peacers fall on to one of these
groups, they will have a contradiction. They will see the satellites telling them something
different than what is on the ground. Then our trick is worthless. Already we must
remove protection from a couple of the groups we agreed on — they were going to be
captured very soon no matter what, Paul," he spoke the last words quickly as he saw the
old man straighten in his chair.

Allison put in, "I agree with Wili. We three may be able to hold out forever, but the
Tinkers in California will be all gone in another couple of weeks. Controlling the enemy's
comm and recon is an enormous advantage, but it's something they will learn about
sooner or later. It's worthless except for short-term goals."

Paul was silent for along moment. When he spoke again, it sounded like the Paul she
had known so long ago, the fellow who never let a problem defeat him. "Okay. Then
victory must be our
short-term
goal... We'll attack Livermore, and bobble
their
generator."

"Paul, you can do that? You can cast a bobble hundreds of kilometers away, just like
the Peacers?" From the corner of her eye, Allison saw Wili shake his head.

"No, but I can do better than in L.A. If we could get Wili and enough equipment to
within four thousand meters of the target, he could bobble it."

"Four thousand meters?" Rosas walked to the open windows. He looked out over the
forest, seeming to enjoy the cool air that was beginning to sweep into the room. "Paul,
Paul. I know you specialize in the impossible, but... In Los Angeles we needed a gang of
porters just to carry the storage cells. A few weeks ago you wouldn't hear of taking a
wagon off into the eastern wilderness. Now you want to haul a wagonful of equipment
through some of the most open and well-populated country on Earth.

"And then, if you do get there, all you have to do is get those several tons of equipment
within four thousand meters of the Peacer generator. Paul, I've been up to the Livermore
Enclave. Three years ago. It was police service liaison with the Peacers. They've got
enough firepower there to defeat an old-time army, enough aircraft that they don't need
satellite pickups. You couldn't get within forty kilometers without an engraved invitation.
Four thousand meters range is probably right inside their central compound."

"There is another problem, Paul," Wili spoke shyly. "I had thought about their
generator, too. Someday, I know we must destroy it — and the one in Beijing. But Paul, I
can't find it. I mean, the Authority publicity, it gives nice pictures of the generator
building at Livermore, but they are fake. I know. Since I took over their communication
system, I know everything they say to each other over the satellites. The generator in
Beijing is very close to its official place, but the Livermore one is hidden. They never say
its place, even in the most secret transmissions."

Paul slumped in his chair, defeat very obvious. "You're right, of course. The bastards
built it in secret. They certainly kept the location secret while the governments were still
powerful."

Allison stared from one to the other and felt crazy laughter creeping up her throat.
They really didn't know. After all these years they didn't know. And just minutes before,
she had been hurting herself with might-have-beens. The laughter burbled out, and she
didn't try to stop it. The others looked at her with growing surprise. Her last mission,
perhaps the last recon sortie the USAF ever flew, might yet serve its purpose.

Finally, she choked down the laughter and told them the cause for joy. "...so if you
have a reader, I think we can find it."

There followed frantic calls for Irma, then even more frantic searches through attic
storage for the old disk reader. An hour later, the reader sat on the living room table. It
was bulky, gray, the Motorola insignia almost scratched away. Irma plugged it in and
coaxed it to life. "It worked fine years ago. We used it to copy all our old disks onto solid
storage. It uses a lot of power though; that's one reason we gave it up."

The reader's screen came to life, a brilliant glow that lit the whole room. This was the
honest light Allison remembered. She had brought her disk pack down, and undone the
combination lock. The disk was milspec, but it was commercial format; it should run on
the Motorola. She slipped it into the reader. Her fingers danced across the keyboard,
customizing off routines on the disk. Everything was so familiar; it was like suddenly
being transported back to the before.

The screen turned white. Three mottled gray disks sat near the middle of the field. She
pressed a key and the picture was overlaid with grids and legends.

Allison looked at the picture and almost started laughing again. She was about to
reveal what was probably the most highly classified surveillance technique in the
American arsenal. Twelve weeks "before," such an act would have been unthinkable.
Now, it was a wonderful opportunity, an opportunity for the murdered past to win some
small revenge. "Doesn't look like much, does it?" she said into the silence. "We're
looking down at — I should say 'through' — Livermore." The date on the legend was
01JUL97.

She looked at Paul. "This is what you asked me to look for, Paul. Remember? I don't
think you ever guessed just how good our gear really was."

"You mean, those gray things are old Avery's test projections?"

She nodded. "Of course, I didn't know what to make of them at the time. They're about
five hundred meters down. Your employers were very cautious."

Wili looked from Allison to Paul and back, bewilderment growing. "But what is it that
we are seeing?"

"We are seeing straight through the Earth. There's a type of light that shines from some
parts of the sky. It can pass through almost anything."

"Like x-rays?" Mike said doubtfully.

"Something like x-rays." There was no point in talking about massy neutrinos and
sticky detectors. They were just words to her, anyway. She could use the gear, and she
understood the front-end engineering, but that was all. "The white background is a
'bright' region of the sky — seen straight through the Earth. Those three gray things are the
silhouettes
of bobbles far underground."

"So they're the only things that are opaque to this magic light," Mike said. "It looks like
a good bobble hunter, Allison, but what good was it for anything else?" If you could see
through literally everything, then you could see nothing.

"Oh, there is a very small amount of attenuation. This picture is from a single
`exposure,' without any preprocessing. I was astounded to see anything on it. Normally,
we'd take a continuous stream of exposures, through varying chords of the Earth's crust,
then compute a picture of the target area. The math is pretty much like medical
tomography." She keyed another command string. "Here's a sixty meter map I built from
all our observations."

Now the display showed intricate detail: A pink surface map of 1997 Livermore lay
over the green, blue, and red representation of subsurface densities. Tunnels and other
underground installations were obvious lines and rectangles in the picture.

Wili made an involuntary aping sound.

"So if we can figure out which of those things is the secret generator... " said Mike.

"I think I can narrow it down quite a bit." Paul stared intently at the display, already
trying to identify function in the shapes.

"No need," said Allison. "We did a lot of analysis right on the sortie craft. I've got a
database on the disk; I can subtract out everything the Air Force knew about." She typed
the commands.

And now the moment we've all been waiting for." There was an edge of triumph in the
flippancy. The rectangles dimmed all but one on the southwest side of the Livermore
Valley.

"You did it, Allison!" Paul stood back from the display and grabbed her hands. For an
instant she thought he would dance her around the room. But after an awkward moment,
he just squeezed her hands.

As he turned back to the display, she asked, "But can we be sure it's still there? If the
Peacers know about this scanning technique-"

"They don't. I'm sure of it," said Wili.

Paul laughed. "We can do it, Mike! We can do it. Lord, I'm glad you all had the sense
to push. I'd have sat here and let the whole thing die."

Suddenly the other three were all talking at once.

"Look. I see answers to your objections, and I have a feeling that once we start to take
it seriously we can find even better answers. First off, it's not impossible to get ourselves
and some equipment up there. One horse-drawn wagon is probably enough. Using back
roads, and our `invisibility,' we should be able to get at least to Fremont."

"And then?" said Allison.

"There are surviving Tinkers in the Bay Area. We all attack, throw in everything we
have. If we do it right, they won't guess we control their comm and recon until we have
our bobbler right on top of them."

Mike was grinning now, talking across the conversation at Wili. Allison raised her
voice over the others'. "Paul, this has more holes than-"

"Sure, sure. But it's a start." The old man waved his hand airily, as if only trivial details
remained. It was a typical Paulish gesture, something she remembered from the first day
she met him. The "details" were usually nontrivial, but it was surprising how often his
harebrained schemes worked anyway.

"Eat Vandenberg Bananas. They Can't Be Beat." The banner was painted in yellow on a
purple background. The letters were shaped as though built out of little bananas. Allison
said it was the most asinine thing she had ever seen. Below the slogan, smaller letters
spelled, "Andrews Farms, Santa Maria."

The signs were draped along the sides of their wagons. A light plastic shell was
mounted above the green cargo. At every stop Allison and Paul carefully refilled the evap
coolers that hung between the shell and the bananas. The two banana wagons were
among the largest horse-drawn vehicles on the highway.

Mike and the Santa Maria Tinkers had rigged a hidden chamber in the middle of each
wagon. The front wagon carried the bobbler and the storage cells; the other contained
Wili, Mike, and most of the electronics.

Wili sat at the front of the cramped chamber and tried to see through the gap in the
false cargo. No air was ducted from the coolers while they were stopped. Without it, the
heat of the ripening bananas and the summer days could be a killer. Behind him, he felt
Mike stir restlessly. They both spent the hottest part of the afternoons trying to nap. They
weren't very successful; it was just too hot. Wili suspected they must stink so bad by now
that the Peacers would smell them inside.