Ghost of the Gods - 02 (52 page)

“Do you see the pattern?” asked Sarah.

“You mean every fifteen minutes?” said Mark.

“No, there’s something odd… Why those cities and not Los Angeles or New York?” asked Sarah. “Why Fort Worth when Dallas is thirty miles away and has a much higher population? Why not New York? It’s the perfect target. There are more people packed tightly together in the Manhattan Protectorate than all those other cities combined. The Manhattan Protectorate is fish in a barrel for those bastards.”

“I see what you mean,” said Mark. “Not one protectorate has been attacked, and they should all be at the top of the list now that the hives can trigger huge attacks.”

“They’re herding people into protectorates,” said Sarah. “The breeding ranches of the future. Want to live? Squeeze into a protectorate.”

“Quiet!” said Kathy. “Listen to what they’re saying.”

The Air Truth reporter’s speech was halting. There was some kind of commotion in the background.

Yes…. all right… I’m going to report that too... Okay, everyone, I’m told it’s now been over thirty minutes since the last kill-zone hit Fort Worth and no new kill-zones have been reported. Either the pattern has changed or this nightmare has ended for now. Let me switch to one of our analysts… Mary Hamilton…. Mary, are you there?

Yes… yes, I’m here… I just wanted to explain how different this outbreak is compared to what happened two years ago when kill-zones where striking all over the world and all at the same time. The obvious difference is that every creature with a central nervous system is now at risk—people, our pets, even insects. The less obvious difference in this series of attacks, one every fifteen minutes, is that it’s more like a gruesome warning of some kind than an all-out attack.

A warning?

Yes… It’s almost like a countdown and they stopped at ten. Each city in the sequence had a smaller population than the immediately prior city. It was as if they had an almanac and went through the list of cities by population in reverse order.

Mark plugged in the Droid he had taken off the dead bodyguard. While a thread of his attention was fully engaged in what was occurring inside the Land Cruiser, another part of his awareness was about to compose an e-mail. From within the privacy of a hidden vault of awareness inside his mind, dangerous ideas had crystalized. He was trying very hard to keep his surface thoughts from veering off to the hidden message within the message he was about to write. He had to keep the god-machine in the dark. Openly thinking only about literal interpretations of what he was writing was critical. This e-mail was nothing short of a stealth weapon he would launch at Prometheus using the dead bodyguard’s phone.

With anything less than nuclear weapons, simultaneous destruction of the huge number of existing hives was impossible without months of prepositioning and planning. That kind of nuclear assault would leave a pockmarked, ravaged earth behind. Mark was betting that McKafferty would see things the same way and opt to attack Prometheus instead of the hives. As Mark completed his e-mail, the part of his awareness inside his private vault hoped McKafferty would understand and accurately read between the lines and the intentional lies. Mark had no way to encrypt the e-mail with any assurance the god-machine could not decrypt it, and what was the point, anyway? The god-machine could have already read the e-mail a word at a time as he composed it.

He also might be fooling himself that his private vault was so private. He was only going by what Noah had taught them about mental self-control and concealing thoughts. How was there any way to know if the vault worked other than send the message and find out? There was also a significant benefit in allowing the god-machine to read both the e-mail and his surface thoughts literally while missing the concealed, all too human message it also contained. He nervously pressed the
send
button. A delivery confirmation came back within seconds. Mark had won this small battle. It was now out of his hands. The god-machine had taken no action to stop what had just been done—then he suddenly had doubts. What if the god-machine had been watching everything and this was exactly what it wanted? What did that mean?

“We have to do something,” said Kathy. “Someone has to stop this. What about Zuris? He has zone-jammer suits, weapons, and soldiers. They can track down and destroy each hive. You said the god-machine won’t care. It may even help us get rid of those monsters.”

“Maybe Zuris is working with the hives,” said Noah. “Has anyone wondered how he was able to develop such advanced machines? He is building devices that might as well be alien technology as far as modern science is concerned.”

“How do you know Zuris won’t help unless we ask?” complained Kathy.

“The hives have a loaded gun to the head of every organic in the world,” said Noah. “How do you destroy the hives one at time without the hives taking you with them once they realize what you are doing?”

“You told me they can’t attack worldwide without the god-machine stomping on them because of the damage they’d do to Mother Nature,” said Kathy. “They can’t get us before we get all of them. There are a lot more humans than hives. We could outnumber them a million to one.”

“In the end the hives will win,” said Noah. “The guides are sentient machines. They have done the math and would not have launched their attack if the math did not assure victory. They are improving their weapon every day. There is less collateral damage today than when they started. With every day the ratio of collateral damage tips more into their favor. The guides were very cunning using zero-G to build their kill-zone weapon and the goddess to protect it. Events have already spiraled beyond control. There are too many nests and they have the ultimate weapon. The smart thing to do is wait until we have an effective, realistic plan. Until then, what hives do to the organics is far less costly in blood than what the goddess would do if the organics became desperate and unleashed nuclear weapons. The organics are better off under temporary rule of the hives until we can devise a way to eradicate the vermin without triggering Armageddon.”

“I am one of those organics!” shouted Kathy. “Why don’t you just drop me off at a nearby city where a kill-zone will murder me?”

“Right now Prometheus is not the ultimate weapon,” interrupted Mark. He’d had enough. “We all know a critical flaw still exists. We all agree on that. Their kill-zones are still not working right. They’re destroying a huge amount of biosphere with every attack. Right now they’re using their weapon sparingly because they have no other choice. They know and we know the goddess can’t remain neutral if they launch a global bloodbath, which includes eighty to ninety percent of the environment within each kill-zone. You think the calculations favor their victory. You’re wrong. They can only win once their kill-zones are perfected and the collateral damage stops occurring. I think your terrorist attacks on their hives goaded them into aggression sooner than was wise. We need to take advantage of that mistake. We need to obliterate them now before their weapon is perfected and they truly become unstoppable.”

“Are you really ready to take that gamble?” asked Noah. “Are you ready to gamble with the lives of all the organics? I say we go to my Arizona safe house and come up with a winning chessboard. The hives don’t want to kill all the organics, they want to control and breed the organics.”

“Remember Stalin, Hitler, Mao
Zedong
!” said Mark. “
Never again
is what we said after the Holocaust, and yet we stood back and watched it happen again and again.
Never again
is what I say right now. We don’t have the luxury of waiting to develop grand strategies while the hives commit larger and larger atrocities to bring the population down to a size they can control or imprison.”

“Thank you!” said Kathy.

“There’s nothing we can do that isn’t suicidal,” said Noah. “I am heading to Arizona.”

“You’re wrong. There’s something we can do and I just did it,” said Mark.

He released a memory capsule to Noah and Sarah containing the carefully couched mixture of lies and truths he’d e-mailed moments ago, then handed the Droid to Kathy to read.

“What have you done!” yelled Noah.

He slammed on the brakes, sending the Land Cruiser skidding onto the shoulder of the road. With stunning speed Noah jumped out of the Land Cruiser, yanked open Mark’s door, and hauled him from his seat. Mark grabbed Noah’s arms to break his grip. It was like trying to bend small tree trunks. Noah was far stronger than he could have imagined. The hybrid was a good eight inches taller and probably a hundred pounds heavier, but that did not account for this strength. One hand at a time, Noah tried to move his grip to Mark’s throat. Mark fought against every inch of progress, but failed. Noah started to squeeze. Mark instantly lost the ability to breathe and knew this could be life or death. It was like a hydraulically powered claw had him by the throat. He kicked Noah repeatedly. The grip around his neck grew tighter instead of faltering with each blow.

“Moron!” bellowed Noah. “The goddess knows you sent that e-mail. You have killed us all.”

Mark tried to jam his thumbs into Noah’s eyes, but Noah was far quicker and extended his arms, which took his face out of reach. Mark was seeing blobs of color in his vision. His strength was waning. An assist was warning him that the blood supply to his brain had nearly stopped. The entire encounter had lasted no more than ten seconds. The explosion of a handgun fired right next to him froze Noah’s grip.

“Let him go,” shouted Sarah. “That was a warning. The rest are going into your fucked-up brain.”

Mark toppled to the ground. He had not realized until Noah dropped him that his feet had been lifted into the air. Free-swimming COBIC were already hard at work inside him repairing the damage. Mark was regaining strength and got to his feet. He stared at Noah. The huge hybrid was simmering with rage. Noah had failed to recognize the concealed, all too human messages in that e-mail. Much of what Mark wrote was a fabricated story about what had occurred between him and McKafferty while he was being flown to Dallas. The god-machine had no way of knowing what occurred at 30,000 feet, so the obvious lies were a perfect covert message between him and McKafferty. The intended message to McKafferty was: Destroy Prometheus now and the god-machine would not seek revenge. Delay and the hives would just become stronger. The question was whether McKafferty would understand and act. The general might do nothing. If this ploy failed, Mark would have to try a more obvious and dangerous approach.

“You cannot imagine what you have done by sending that list of hive locations to the USAG,” said Noah with disgust. “I am not sorry for what I just did to you, but I was not trying to kill. Our bodies are very resilient.”

“I hope you enjoy walking,” said Sarah.

“You need me,” said Noah. “Because of that fool’s e-mail, nuclear weapons may start falling at any moment on hives. We need to get to my safe house before the end of the world begins. You know you can’t break into my safe house. You need the access code, which I changed before coming after you.”

“McKafferty doesn’t have to use nuclear weapons on the hives
,”
said Mark. “And it’s too late to go after Prometheus.”

He was lying. His voice had a croaking sound to it. Every word was calculated. Just as with his e-mail, he was mixing his cocktail of lies and truths. All these thoughts and words would reach the god-machine’s ears. He had no idea what to think about Noah’s insanely violent reaction. Was it an act to support Mark’s lies?

“You do not know this,” said Noah. “But the organics have an intelligence organization named CIT that has identified the locations of many of the hives. Your list will serve as much desired confirmation and give them all they need to act against the hives. They may take out Prometheus, then go right after the hives or the reverse. They may decide a game of mutually assured destruction with the hives or the god-machine is a safe bet. The people at the top have zone-jammers and are at no risk from hive or goddess retaliation, especially after Prometheus is gone and the goddess no longer controls many of the organics’ weapons.”

“How do you know all this?” asked Sarah, echoing what Mark was thinking.

“I have sources,” said Noah. “Your e-mail may have tipped a careful balance of power. You have no idea what you have done.”

“The goddess did not stop me from writing and sending that e-mail,” said Mark. “Why is that? Fallibility? Plans within plans? What?”

Noah stared with an odd, screwed-up expression on his face and said nothing….

The Goddess

General McKafferty – North Atlantic Ocean – March 20, 0002 A.P.

McKafferty was staring out a window in his small cabin on the airborne command post. All computers used for C3 functions had been either disabled or restricted onboard the jet, which meant outside communication was limited: no phone, e-mail, or text. The giant Boeing E-4B was in a slow, circular holding pattern off the Atlantic coast. The airframe was the same as a Boeing 747. They had refueled an hour ago and had no plans of landing until the immediate crisis was over.

All top decision makers in the government were ensconced inside similar flying fortresses, safe from the god-machine for now. McKafferty shook his head, thinking about how poorly this strategy had worked the last time. Two years ago much of the airborne government had run out of fuel because no one alive on the ground was capable of organizing the needed refueling. It took two airborne tankers to refuel an E-4. Smaller airframes working this mission only required a single tanker’s worth of fuel. All the jets in the fleet needed to refuel about twice a day. It was madness. The executive branch thought they had a better strategy this time. McKafferty thought they were fooling themselves. If forced to land, the people at the very top of the pyramid had zone-jammer suits made by Zero-G. McKafferty had one tucked away under his berth. The existence of the suits was a highly classified secret. There were not enough to go around. Once the top of the pyramid had been allocated the five hundred suits the government had been sold, infighting among the VIPs began. They all had a suit while their family members did not. Zuris then began doling out additional suits almost as trophies. He seemed altruistic because he would only give them away and not sell them, but it was raw power politics at its finest. Who was that prick to decide who would live or die? McKafferty was disgusted by the secrecy and the entire charade of it being a privilege to have received zone-jammer suits. He rubbed his temples to ease the pain. He knew if there was no other choice than die, he still might not put on his suit. What was left of his family was unprotected.

Zuris had resurfaced and was holding up at a secret facility, location unknown. The man had amazingly not lost any of his political power and in fact was now even more in control. He was now running much of the country and the military fully in the open. From video conferences it became obvious Zuris had held back some of his zone-jammer technology, but no one dared called him on it. The bastard was apparently able to shield small buildings and had never shared that little piece of news. McKafferty suspected the people running what was left of the shattered government would gladly crown Zuris king in exchange for shielding a bunker or two or three.

McKafferty was reviewing plans for obliterating the Zero-G facility. All the plans gave him a sense of justice. Not only would this be a decisive blow against the god-machine, it would also hurt Zuris to see one of his prizes turned into rubble. Once the god-machine began attacking cities all across America, the decision to hit Zero-G was out of McKafferty’s hands. The politicos had been forced into drastic action, and taking out Zero-G was at the top of the short, drastic list they had been given by the Pentagon. The politicos, the Pentagon, and now even Zuris wanted it hit soon and hit hard.
They would not negotiate with terrorists, be they human or machine. McKafferty also caught a whiff of what smelled like revenge coming from Zuris, or maybe the man just wanted his mistakes buried quickly and deeply. Wrenching back command and control of their military network and drones was assured by this strike. Even if that was all they accomplished, it was worth it. No one was sure this strike alone would stop the kill-zones. The goal was to draw blood and show the machine there was a price to be paid. In the seconds between when the bombs were released and obliteration, an ultimatum would be sent through Prometheus to the god-machine. Part of that ultimatum was that we humans had more targets of opportunity after this one, including two supercolonies and many of the communes. It was all about the gritty politics of war, which had a language all its own.

The only question that remained was how to flatten Zero-G.
The attack plan McKafferty was currently reviewing was called Long Bow and specified a strike package using one megaton nuclear EPWs. The assessment was that one nuclear earth-penetrating weapon could do the job with a recommendation of three to guarantee complete destruction. For more times than he wanted to recall in the past twenty-four hours, he was looking at the very real option of nuclear weapons on American soil.

McKafferty heard a commotion toward the rear in the command post. The phone mounted on his bulkhead buzzed. He went aft instead of answering. He walked into a situation room that had taken up sides and was at war with itself. Someone had figured out that the citywide kill-zones were decreasing in size and thought this was terrific news. Others aggressively disagreed. McKafferty was confident it was nothing but spotting meaningless patterns in the fog of war. This entire outbreak had been so different from what had happened two years ago. The initial kill-zones around Zero-G and the Los Angeles coms bunker had fit the original pattern. In fact, they had shown unsuspected surgical accuracy by killing only combatants and not civilians. By comparison, the follow-up attacks on large cities were sloppy. The newer attacks carried different data signatures, which had forced the NSA to tweak their advance warning software. There was also heavy collateral damage in animals and the targeting was very poor. As a result, none of the military’s predictions were matching reality. There was also the question of why had some of the largest cities been spared so far. McKafferty refused to draw any conclusions. He remembered how foolish he’d been the other day, thinking they were in a standoff with the god-machine that would last for some time. The music had stopped only a few hours after that moment of hubris with confirmation of kill-zones smashing into large cities around the country.

One of the general’s aides walked up and motioned him to step outside the situation room. He handed McKafferty one of the covered clipboards they were now using instead of tablets for top-secret information.

“Sir, this e-mail took a while to get through the human filters. It was addressed to you personally, but not sent to your Pentagon e-mail address. We have confirmed the identity of the sender as much as possible. We believe the message is authentic. It’s from Dr. Mark Freedman. He is using a phone registered to Zero-G.”

McKafferty scrutinized the e-mail. What did this mean? Though there had always been the hope Freedman had been killed at Zero-G, he was not surprised the bastard had escaped again. He walked back to his cabin to compare Freedman’s list of communes to the top-secret list CIT had compiled.

McKafferty soon confirmed that location after location matched, along with a very large bonus round of communes they had no idea existed until now. McKafferty stared out the window, trying to think this through. The e-mail was definitely from Freedman. He’d used the passphrase he’d been issued two years ago at the BVMC lab when he was still human and still on the right side. Freedman was stubbornly pushing his theory that communes were the aggressor with the added complication that they were using Prometheus as a kill-zone weapon. His fabrications about what they had discussed on the way to Dallas contained a coded message to hit Prometheus and any other sister sites that might exist. McKafferty had to grudgingly admit Freedman’s theory did fit the facts almost as well as anything the NSA or CIA had cooked up. The fight would certainly be easier if communes were behind all this killing and not the god-machine. Ending this conflict by destroying a single target called Prometheus would be a stunning victory. McKafferty wished it were so but could not swallow that kind of thinking. Regardless, both the god-machine and communes were enemies of the state. This was war and Freedman had just given him some actionable intelligence on communes. If Freedman was right about everything, then flattening Zero-G made even more strategic sense. Maybe Freedman was trying to make amends?

McKafferty picked up the phone and had orders transmitted to NSA to see if they’d captured any signal intelligence that showed kill-zone commands could be originating from Zero-G. As he hung up the phone, he wondered if the god-machine had been listening in. He’d been assured with the C3 onboard computers turned off, the command post was secure. The only computers they were using were off the grid.

Soon after the cyber-attack, they’d been operating under the assumption that every digital communications system was compromised. For top-secret material they were using backup systems that relied on secure USB thumb drives or printed messages, both delivered by courier. They had supersonic jets running delivery loops from airborne command posts to ground stations. For intra-jet coms they used unbreakable, one-time cipher pad encryption and handheld line-of-sight laser communications gear, which was never hooked into a network and so off the grid and unreachable by the god-machine.

The military had planned for warfare under nuclear EMP attack and cyber-attack. The American military was not impotent. They had hardened and isolated much of their defensive and retaliatory systems. While naval and ground forces were vulnerable, the Air Force was not. Their air power was still just as accurate in delivering devastating strike packages, just not as coordinated. They owned the high ground.

McKafferty awoke to the buzzing of his phone. He could not remember falling asleep. He was suffering from total exhaustion. He was too worn out to go aft and instead grabbed the receiver. What he heard woke him right up. The god-machine had sent by secure e-mail a warning to the executive branch. The use of the government’s own encrypted secure e-mail system helped to confirm the source as the god-machine. The warning was that the god-machine did not care what we did to each other as long as it did not include the use of weapons of mass destruction. The use of NBC weapons on any target would result in
terrible consequences
. McKafferty wondered if this was just a coincidence or if the god-machine was anticipating their actions based on the e-mail Freedman had sent in the open without any encryption. Maybe Freedman was even smarter than he thought. By sending his message in the open, he was inviting this kind of confirmation of his claims by the god-machine. If this was a reaction by the god-machine to his message, then it went a long way in validating Freedman’s theories. It also was a second vote in favor of Freedman being on the right side of this fight.

What if Freedman was also right about the communes? McKafferty could not totally dismiss the possibility that the soulless buggers were using Prometheus to trigger the city destroying kill-zones. In a fair and just universe destroying Prometheus would end the kill-zones, though McKafferty was still convinced the sole aggressor was the god-machine and the attacks would continue. No matter what action the military took, heavy civilian casualties were a possible outcome. It was long overdue to get seriously bloody on that fucked-up machine.

General McKafferty – North Atlantic Ocean – March 20, 0002 A.P.

The coffee from his shattered mug was running down the bulkhead. McKafferty felt a little better after having thrown it. He reread the latest e-mailed list of demands from the god-machine one more time. If they gave in and implemented this list, they would be putting a yoke around their neck that could never be broken. The machine even wanted full video surveillance inside the entire federal government, including the DOD. The exclamation point on the sentence was the god-machine’s missile attack on
Air Force One
. Automated countermeasures had averted disaster by a hair and given an F-22 Raptor the kill-shot that took out the source, a stealth drone. Yet the god-machine had made its point.
Terrible consequences
for using nuclear weapons might mean decapitation of the government and not kill-zone attacks on the population. So much for feeling safe on the high ground. The president sounded ready to comply with the list of demands. McKafferty found himself in the unexpected position of being grateful that Zuris was now in the role of dictator at large. The man must have had steel surgically implanted in his spine. He was not giving an inch and was pounding his fist, demanding immediate destruction of Zero-G if for no other reason than to show the goddamn god-machine that we humans were willing to play tit for tat with all the chips on the table.

The final consensus was to go with McKafferty’s recommendation of using a night strike package of conventional EPWs called Big Blues. The weapons would be loaded onto every mission-ready B2 Spirit they had Stateside. This gave them fifteen batwing stealth bombers, each with a max payload of two Big Blues. Each bomb tipped the scale at 30,000 pounds. It was an awesome amount of non-glow in the dark shock and awe. The speed and precision of the B2s would deliver a hailstorm of EPWs, timed fractions of a second apart on impact. The entire bombing run would be over and the Prometheus bunker would be rubble, four seconds after the first bomb detonated.

The more McKafferty thought about it, Freedman was probably right about retaliation. There was no upside for the god-machine to retaliate once Prometheus was gone, but self-defense had to be a completely different calculation for that godless chunk of silicon. The attack had to be quick enough and unstoppable after the first bomb was released and the ultimatum delivered. Was four seconds giving the machine too much extra time to think and react? Long Bow could reduce the retaliation risk with split-second timed instant nuclear destruction. It would be like a smoldering period at the end of their ultimatum. McKafferty was relieved Long Bow was off the table. He kept thinking about all the innocent citizens in the Dallas area who would die from blast and radiation if they’d decided on Long Bow.

Mark Freedman – Arizona safe house – March 20, 0002 A.P.

Mark thought of Noah’s safe house as an enigma. It was a high-technology island in an ocean of primordial shifting sands. The artwork that covered the walls and filled the open spaces looked like it belonged in a museum. Curious etchings, done on gold leaf, depicted scenes that just did not look quite like they fit into known history. The gold could have been a hundred years old or a hundred thousand years old. There was no way to scientifically date it. An assist had provided cryptic and incomplete information about the etchings. Mark began to wonder if those pieces of art were far older than a sane person would imagine, and what did that say about Noah? How long could a hybrid really live? Sarah had given Mark one of her Berettas, which he kept holstered on his side at all times in case Noah decided to try to jettison one or more of his house guests.

Mark was seated in the living room looking out through the wall of glass. Every few minutes he found himself secretly willing McKafferty to follow his advice of attacking Prometheus and leaving the hives alone. Don’t stir up those hornet’s nests. Mark thought about the beekeeper suits sitting in the duffel bag in his room. If Zero-G had mass produced those suits, none of this would be happening. If Zero-G had developed a portable large-area zone-jammer system, they would have had a weapon that could cleanly destroy hives by cutting them off from the n-web. Defying all the odds, Zero-G under Zuris’s leadership had made every possible wrong decision when it came to winning this war.