Whistling Past the Graveyard (10 page)

“So it seems.”

Flint shrugged. “Runaway ego is also pretty common with guys in his class. I’m not really worried about whether he rules his staff with an iron fist. It’s an extension of the university model, so he probably picked that up at MIT. He was top dog there, too.” He glanced at the closed door. “No, what concerns me is how possessive he is about this.”

“Surely that’s pretty common too among top researchers,” said Doc. “Especially guys pioneering their own fields.”

“Maybe,” Flint said dubiously, “but it comes off more as arrogant and secretive. I could accept that a bit easier with an egghead running a software lab―you know, fear that someone else will copy the idea and rush another version to market. Happens all the time in the gaming industry. Can’t say I’m fond of seeing it in a weapons designer working for us.”

Scarlett stood up. “I know what you’re saying, Flint. Prospero’s attitude has been
noticed
. Duke said as much during our briefing. It’s not just the viability of the program that’s under the microscope.”

“No joke,” nodded Doc. “Last thing we need is an
actual
mad scientist going off the rails with forty billion dollars’ worth of automated killing machines that only he knows how to control.”

It wasn’t meant as a joke, and no one laughed.

Flint got to his feet. “Okay…we asked for a demonstration. Let’s go see what he has.”

-4-

“The Island”―Dead Lake Testing Area

Dr. Prospero stood in the middle of the empty desert, surrounded by red flares that burst above him like fireworks and drifted down to encircle him like one of the rings of hell. As each new flare burst the scientist could see the clouds of white phosphorous smoke hanging in the sky, and then as the flares drifted down on their tiny chutes the sky above him faded again to utter blackness.

The desert at night was usually so quiet. He loved coming out here to think, to work things through. To consider the past and plan for the future. The emptiness and vastness of the Nevada desert was his sanctum, his cloister for years.

Now it burned with red fire and the silence was torn by the hollow, steady crack of automatic gunfire and the occasional deep-throated boom of missiles. Hellfire missiles, which Prospero thought was a fine irony.

He waited. Dragonflies flitted around him. They always made him smile. They swirled around him, buzzing on green wings that gave off a faint electric hum. Anyone unfamiliar with the tiny biomimetic  machines would think they were really insects. Prospero extended a hand and one of them landed on it, antennae twitching, miniature legs bending and walking in an almost perfect imitation of life.

“Go play,” he said and shook it off. The words sounded playful, but they keyed the search and observe protocols in their microchips. The dragonflies turned and flew into the darkness, hunting the monsters that hunted him, their beating wings recharging their batteries as they flew. Not quite a perpetual motion machine, but as close as he had been able to manage so far.

Prospero had also launched a half dozen of the larger but still man-portable SkyLite observation drones. The lithium-polymer batteries on the stealth drones only held a four-hour charge, but it took only a few minutes for them to reach thirty-six thousand feet. The Joes had satellites which could be targeted and destroyed by any number of air-to-space or space-to-space weapons; but Prospero had swarms of tiny machines that were harder to see, harder to catch, disposal and replaceable.

“Fly, fly, fly,” he said in an almost dreamy voice.

There were gunships in the blackness above him, running silent and dark; and even though he could not see the wicked mouths of the miniguns pointing at him, he could
feel
them. At least a dozen of them, each capable of firing six thousand rounds per minute through their rotating six-inch barrels. Enough firepower to wipe out a company.

Because there was no possibility of escape, Prospero did not care about them.

There were other monsters in the dark, and he turned his head slowly from side to side, trying to decide the approach vector for the drones. He knew that at least two of the unarmed combat air vehicles would be zeroing him. There was a Phantom Ray II up there, the newest of Boeing’s Phantom Works craft. Armed with the Hellfires and other goodies, some as experimental as the drone that carried them.

And if that psychopath Hawk had anything to do with planning this attack, then there would be a General Atomics Avenger up there, too, laboring under the weight of Paveway bombs. Hawk’s personal favorite.

Prospero could try to run, but where could he go? They were drawing a circle around him, closing it tight like the neck of a drawstring bag. With him inside.

He smiled.

On his way out here he had carried two large metal cases that looked like dog carriers. Each case had a spring flap keyed to a pedometer built into his exosuit. Every fifty yards the flaps opened and dropped half a dozen Sprawlers. These small hexapedal devices dropped like spiders onto the sand, immediately activated ground sensors, and scuttled off into the dark. They were unarmed, but they were fast and long before the Joes found
him
he would know where
they
were.

Professor Miranda’s soft voice whispered in his ear.

“They’re coming.”

“And about time, too,” he replied.

“Are you ready?”

He hit a keypad and a hologram of a topographical map appeared in his visor. The map sparkled with blue dots that identified his Sprawlers and Dragonflies and SkyLites, and glowed with larger yellow dots that showed what his mechanical friends had found. “Completely.”

“Be careful,” she cautioned. “I don’t trust them. I think they’re determined to take you down.”

Prospero laughed. “They’re welcome to try.”

“Then watch your back, because they’re going to try right
now!
”

The world of darkness turned to blinding noonday brightness as missiles punched into the desert floor and burst. Twin fireballs curled upward and the concussive crossways blast of the shockwave hit the man with bone-crushing force, lifting him, throwing him like a doll into a sandstone wall sixty yards behind him. The force of the impact was enough to splinter bone and rupture muscle tissue, bend steels and shatter hardened polymers.

Except that none of this happened to the scientist.

He slammed into the wall and slid down, but only into a crouch. Fire and hot dust swirled around him, but he was safe and whole. And smiling.

He pushed off the wall and stood, turning left and right to watch for the next attack.

“Gunships!” cautioned Miranda’s voice, but Prospero did not need the warning as fifty-caliber rounds pounded into his chest, driving him backward against the wall. Hundreds of hits. Thousands.

Then another salvo of rockets turned the sandstone wall into a rain of jagged debris, knocking him over, burying him to the waist. In the nearly constant muzzle-flash he saw the Blackhawks hovering ten feet above the desert floor, side doors open, miniguns swung out on electric turrets and opened up, their roar louder than thunder.

The guns hammered him until they fired themselves dry, then they rose slowly, moving upward and sideways, turning to bring their rocket pods to bear.

Prospero fought his way out of the waist-deep rubble. He grabbed a rock the size of a mailbox, lifted it with a grunt, and threw it to one side. Then he straightened, rising to his full height of nine feet.

“Night vision,” he said and instantly the world transformed from black and red to green and black and white.

“SkyLites,” he said, “talk to me.”

One side of his vision was suddenly filled with images taken from the drones that circled like buzzards over the desert.

“Thermal overlay.” Dots appeared on the image. He counted four Blackhawks and three fixed-wing drones. Hawk had sent
two
Avengers to back-up the Phantom Ray. All of the military drones were circling back toward him, their systems apparently ignoring the smaller UAC’s that Prospero had launched. Other signatures showed a phalanx of fast-moving desert patrol vehicles converging.

It was anyone’s definition of a worst-case scenario. A pair of Abrams tanks couldn’t fight their way out of this. Which is why he’d sold his General Dynamics stock last month. The Caliban exosuit he wore was about to put the tank manufacturer in the antiques business.

“Are you all right?” asked Professor Miranda, her voice twitchy with stress.

“I’m perfect,” he said and then laughed. “They’ve shown us what they can do. Now let’s show them what
we
can do.”

“Prospero…Allyn…please,” she said urgently, “don’t take any unnecessary risks. You—”

“Hush, darling. Hush. This is what we wanted. This is what we
needed.
We’ve been wracking our brains trying to figure a way to give a practical demonstration to our overseas friends. This was
handed
to us on a silver platter. A full system demonstration, and the government is not only paying for it, but mandating it. What could be more perfect?”

“I know, but these people, these Joes…just because they’re military don’t fool yourself into thinking their collar size is bigger than their I.Q.”

He laughed again, and there was a wild quality to it. He even heard it, and didn’t care. It was a time to be wild, to be fully alive!

“They’re dinosaurs, my dear; they just don’t yet know that they’re extinct. Besides, the Joes will see only what we want them to see.”

“Don’t underestimate them—”

“Miranda, hush. Just make sure everything is fed to the secure uplink. I want our
friends
to see the Joes throw everything they have against us.”

“Be careful, my love. The Joes are coming in for another run.”

“Let them come,” said Prospero. Then he switched from external to internal voice mode. “Caliban
combat systems to voice control.”

“System on.”
Caliban’s computer voice was the only part of this he didn’t like. It was an older computer voice system that manufactured words instead of compiling them from a programmed library. The new voice software package had not been installed yet. He was sorry about that. The voice choices included Morgan Freeman, Mark Hamill, or Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Hamill would have been fun. Luke Skywalker guiding him through this would be fitting. It all seemed like science fiction anyway. Even to him.

“Laser targeting.”

“On line.”

“Uplink to enemy tactical satellite.”

“Uplink established.”

He stepped forward. The servos attached to his boot straps lifted the forty-pound foot as easily as if he wore a pair of flip-flops.

“Skyjack on line,” he said.

“Booting,”
said the computer voice.
“Skyjack system on line.”

The whine of the chopper rotors increased as the Blackhawks tilted for a strafing run. They’d hammer him again, allowing the laser-sighting system of the drones to acquire him for another rocket attack.

“Initiate Skyjack protocol Prospero One-nineteen.”

“Initiating.”

The satellite display board flashed and cleared, removing all of the identified combat craft. Then one by one they popped back on, but this time each dot was surrounded by a white circle. Before they had all re-appeared the circles were overlaid by white crosses.

Caliban’s
dispassionate computer voice began counting it off.

“Blackhawk one acquired.”

“Blackhawk two acquired.”

“Blackhawk three acquired.”

“Blackhawk four acquired.”

“General Atomics Avenger one acquired.”

And on and on until all of the vehicles and aircraft surrounding him were logged.

Prospero smiled. “Prepare to accept command code.”

“Ready.”

“‘
Tempest
,’” he said. Instantly the computer voice rattled off a stream of command codes.

“Destroy all enemy warcraft,” said Prospero. He did not need to give that command, and in truth it did nothing to increase the lethality of the Skyjack program. The virus software would now be rerouting the systems of every automated vehicle, on land or in the air. In seconds the machines sent to
test
him would obliterate each other. All of that was written into the code…but it felt good to speak the order; when the destruction began it would be at his command.

Pleased, the old scientist sat down on the rock he had thrown and waited.

There were three seconds of silent darkness.

All around him the skies blossomed with white light. Gunfire roared. Rockets fired one after the other. Bombs fell.

The whole desert seemed to explode.

None of the bullets struck him. None of the missiles flew in his direction.

He smiled.

“Destroy them all,” he murmured. “Burn them out of my sky.”

On his helmet’s monitor the blips indicating the Blackhawks and the drones and the fast attack vehicles flickered and vanished until only one craft was left. Then, it too burst into flame and fell like a meteor through the night. It struck the sandstone eighty feet from where he sat. Prospero didn’t even bother to raise an arm to protect himself from the flaming debris.

-5-

The Ice House

Kaffeklubben Island, 440 miles from the North Pole

The man sat alone, draped in soft shadows, his shoulder and face etched by yellow firelight. Pine logs hissed and popped in the stone hearth. The air around him was troubled by the almost maniacal complexity of Rachmaninoff’s
Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30
, and yet the man in the chair found the music deeply soothing. It was like sailing through the eye of a hurricane—chaos all around and yet deep inside there was perfect stillness. And with stillness came clarity.

A glass of wine sat forgotten on the table beside his chair.