The Peace War (36 page)

Maitland pointed to the status board, which his men were painfully updating with the
field reports that were coming in. "See? The people on the ground have missed almost all
the concentrations we identified from orbit. The enemy is

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well camouflaged. Without good sensors, we're just not going to see him."

"They have spotted several small teams, though."

Maitland shrugged. "Yes, sir. I take it we have permission to bobble them?"

There was a glint in Avery's eyes as he responded to the question. However Lu's
theories turned out, Maitland's days with this job were numbered. "Immediately"

A small voice sounded from the general's terminal. "Sir, I'm-having some trouble with
the update of the Mission Pass area. Uh, two A51 is have overflown the Pass... They both
say the bobble there is gone."

Their eyes snapped up to the situation board. The map was constructed with
photographic precision. The Mission Pass bobble, the Tinker bobble that had nearly
killed her the night before, glinted silver and serene on that board. The satellite system
still saw it-or reported seeing it.

Gone.
Avery went even paler. Maitland sucked his breath back between his teeth. Here
was direct, incontrovertible evidence. They had been taken, fooled. And now they had
only the vaguest idea where the enemy might really be and what he might do. "My God.
She was right! She was right all along."

Della was not listening. There was no triumph in her. She had been fooled, too. She
had believed the techs' smug assurance that ten years was the theoretical minimum for
the duration of a bobble. How could she have missed this?
Last night I had them, I'll bet.
l had Hoehler and Wili and Mike and everyone who counts
...
And I let them escape
through time to today.
Her mind racing frantically through the implications. If twenty-four-hour bobbles could be cast, then what about sixty-second bobbles — or one-second
ones? What advantage could the other side gain from such?
Why, they could-

"Ma'am?" Someone touched her elbow. Her attention returned to the brightly lit
command room. It was Maitland's aide. The general had spoken to her. Della's eyes
focused on the two old men.

"I'm sorry. What did you say?"

The general's voice was flat but not hostile. Even surprise was leached from him now.
Everything he depended on had failed him. "We just got a call on the satellite network.
Max priority and max encryption." That could only be a Director — and the only other
surviving director was K.T. in China. "Caller demands to talk to you. Says his name is
Miguel Rosas."

Mike drove. Fifty meters ahead, almost swallowed up in the fog, he could see the other
crawler. Inside it were Paul and Wili and Allison, with Allison driving. It was easy to
keep up until Allison trucked off the broad roadway into the hills. He came down a
hillside a little fast, and nearly lost control.

"You okay?" Paul's voice sounded anxiously in his ear. He'd established the laser link
just seconds before.

Mike twitched the controls tentatively. "Yeah. But why come straight down that hill?"

"Sorry, Mike." It was Jill — no, Allison. "Sideways would have been worse; might have
slipped treads."

Then they were moving through open country. The ring of periscopes was not as good
as a wraparound holo, but it did give the sensation that his head was in the open. The
keening of the engine covered any natural morning sounds. Except for their crawlers, and
a crow flickering past in the mist, nothing moved. The grass was sere and golden, the dirt
beneath white and gravelly. An occasional dwarf oak loomed out of the fog and forced
Allison and then Mike to detour. He should be able to smell morning dew on the grass,
but the only smells were of diesel fuel and paint.

And now the morning fog began to part. Blue filtered through from above. Then the
blue became sky. Mike felt like a swimmer come to the surface of a misty sea, looking
across the waters at far hills.

There was the war, and it was more fantastic than any oldtime movie:

Silver balls floated by the dozens through the sky. Far away, Peacer jets were dark bugs
trailing grimy vapor. They swooped and climbed. Their dives ended in flares of color as
they strafed Tinker infiltrators on the far side of the valley. Bombs and napalm burned
orange and black through the sea of fog. He saw one diving aircraft replaced by a silvery
sphere — which continued the plane's trajectory into the earth. The pilot might wake
decades from now — as Allison Parker had done — and wonder what had become of his
world. That was a lucky shot. Mike knew the Tinker bobblers were small, not even as
powerful as the one Wili brought to L.A.. Their range with accuracy was only a hundred
meters, and the largest bobble they could cast was five or ten meters across. On the other
hand, they could be used defensively. The last Mike had heard, the Bay Area Tinkers had
got the minimum duration down to fifteen seconds; just a little better and "flicker" tactics
would be possible.

Here and there, peeping out of the mist, were bobbles set in the ground: Peacer armor
bobbled during the night fighting or Tinkers caught by the monster in the valley. The
only difference was size.

The nose of the crawler dipped steeply, and Mike grunted in surprise, his attention
back on his driving. He took the little valley much more slowly than the last one. The
forward crawler was almost up the other side when he reached the bottom. His carrier
moved quickly through a small stream, and then he was almost laid on his back as it
climbed the far side. He pushed the throttle far forward. Power screamed through the
treads. The crawler came over the lip of the embankment fast, nose high and fell with a
crash.

"The trees ahead. We'll stop there for a couple of minutes." It was Wili's voice. Mike
followed the other crawler into an open stand of twisted oaks. Far across the Livermore
Valley, two dark gnats peeled off from the general swarm that hovered above the Tinker
insurgents and flew toward them. That must be the reason Wili wanted to get under
cover. Mike looked up through the scrawny branches and wondered what sort of
protection the trees really gave. Even the most primitive thermal sensor should be able to
see them sitting here with hot engines.

The jets roared by a couple thousand meters to the west. Their thunder dwindled to
nothing. Mike looked again across Livermore Valley.

Where the fighting was heaviest, new bobbles shone almost once a second. With the
engines idling, Mike thought he could hear the thunder and thump of more conventional
weapons. Two jets dived upon a hidden target and the mists were crisscrossed with their
laser fire. The target tried something new: A haze of bobbles — too small to distinguish at
this distance — appeared between aircraft and ground. There was a flash of sudden red
stars within that haze as the energy beams reflected again and again from the multiple
mirrors. It was hard to tell if it made an effective shield. Then he noticed the jets
staggering out of their dive. One exploded. The other trailed smoke and flame in a long
arc toward the ground. Mike suddenly wondered what would happen to a jet engine if it
sucked in a dozen two-centimeter bobbles.

Wili's voice came again, "Mike. The Peacers are going to discover that we have been
faking their satellite reception."

"When?" asked Wili.

"Any second. They are changing to aircraft reconnaissance."

Mike looked around him, wishing suddenly that he were on foot. It would be so much
easier to hide a human-sized target than a crawler. "So we can't depend on being
`invisible' anymore."

"No. We can. I am also speaking with Peacer control on the direct line-of-sight." These
last words were spoken by a deep, male voice. Mike started, then realized he was not
talking directly to Wili. The fake had a perfect Oregon accent, though the syntax was still
Wili's; hopefully that would go unnoticed in the rush of battle. He tried to imagine the
manifold images Wili must be projecting to allies and enemies. "They think we're Peacer
recon. They have fourteen other crawlers moving around their inner area. As long as we
follow their directions, we won't be attacked... And they want us to move closer in."

Closer in.
If Wili could get just another five thousand meters closer, he could bobble
the Peacer generator.

"Okay. Just tell us which way to go."

"I will, Mike. But there's something else I want you to do first."

"Sure."

"I'm going to give you a satellite connection to Authority High Command. Call them.
Insist to speak with Della Lu. Tell her everything you know about our tricks —"

Mike's hands tightened on the drive sticks. "No!"

" — except that we control these two crawlers."

"But why?"

"Do it, Mike. If you call now, you'll be able to give away our satellite trick before they
have proof. Maybe they will think you're still loyal. It will distract them, anyway. Give
away anything you want. I'll listen, too. I'll learn more what's passing at their center.
Please, Mike."

Mike gritted his teeth. "Okay, Wili. Put 'em on."

Allison Parker grinned savagely to herself. She hadn't driven a crawler in almost three
years — fifty-three if you counted years like the rest of the universe. At the time, she'd
thought it a silly waste of taxpayer's money to have recon specialists take a tour with a
base security outfit. The idea had been that anyone who collected intelligence should be
familiar with the groundside problems of security and deception. Becoming a tank driver
had been fun, but she never expected to see the inside of one of these things again.

Yet here she was. Allison gunned the engines, and the little armored carrier almost
flew out of the thicket of scrub oak where they'd been hiding. She recognized these hills,
even with the hovering spheres and napalm bursting in the distance. Time didn't change
some things. Their path ran parallel to a series of cairn-like concrete structures, the ruins
of the power lines that had stretched across the Valley. Why, she and... Paul... had hiked
along precisely this way... so long ago.

She tried to shake free of the painful double images. The sun was fast burning off the
morning fog. Soon the concealment the Tinkers were using to such advantage would be
gone. If they couldn't win by then, they never would.

In her earphone, she heard a strange voice reporting their position to the Peacer
command center. It was eerie: She knew the message came ultimately from Wili. But he
was sitting right behind her and had not spoken a word. The last time she looked, he
seemed asleep.

The deception was working. They were doing what Peacer control said, but they were
also coming closer and closer to the edge of the inner security area.

"Paul. What I saw from orbit is only about six thousand meters north of here. We'll be
closest in another couple of minutes. Is that close enough?"

Paul touched his scalp connector, seemed to think. "No. We'd have to be motionless for
almost an hour to bobble from that range. The best trade-off is still four thousand meters.
I — Wili — has a spot in mind; he and Jill are doing prelim computations on the assumption
we can reach it. Even so, he'll need about thirty seconds once we get there."

After a moment Paul added, "In a couple minutes, we'll break our cover. Wili will stop
transmitting and you'll drive like hell straight for their bobbler."

Allison looked through the periscoped hull. The crawler was so close to the security
perimeter, the towers and domes of the Enclave blocked her view to the north. The
Enclave was a city, and their final dash would take them well inside its boundaries.
"We'll be sitting ducks." Her sentence was punctuated by the swelling roar of a stub-winged jet that swept almost directly over them. She hadn't seen or heard it till that
instant. But the aircraft wasn't strafing. It was loafing along at less than one hundred
meters per second, a lowlevel recon.

"We have a good chance," Wili's voice came suddenly in her earphone. "We won't
make our run until the patrol planes are in good position. We should be in their blind spot
for almost five minutes."

"And they'll have other things to worry about," said Paul. "I've been talking to the
Tinkers coming in on foot. They all know the site of the Peacer generator now. Some of
them have gotten pretty close, closer than we. They don't have our equipment — but the
Authority can't know that for sure. When Wili gives the signal, they'll come out of hiding
and make their own dash inwards."

The war went far beyond their crawlers, beyond even the Livermore Valley. Paul said a
similar battle was being played out in China.

Even so, victory or defeat seemed to depend on what happened to this one crawler in
the next few minutes.

Della slipped on the earpiece and adjusted the microphone to her throat. She had the
undivided attention of Avery, Maitland, and everyone else in earshot. None of them
except Hamilton Avery had heard of one Miguel Rosas, but they all knew he had no
business on a maximum security channel. "Mike?"

A familiar voice came from the earpiece and the speaker on the terminal. "Hello, Della.
I've got some news for you."

"Just calling on this line is news enough. So your people have cracked our comm and
recon system."

"Right the first time."

"Where are you calling from?"

"The ridgeline southwest of you. I don't want to say more — I still don't trust your
friends... It's just that I trust mine even less." This last was spoken low, almost muttered.
"Look. There are other things you don't know. The Tinkers know exactly where your
bobbler is hidden."

"What?" Avery turned abruptly to the situation board and motioned for Maitland to
check it out.