The Peace War (29 page)

Throughout the discussion, Wili sat quietly at the edge of the veranda, where the
sunlight came through the camouflage mesh most strongly. In the back of his mind, Jill
was providing constant updates on the Authority broadcasts she monitored. From the
recon satellites, he knew the location of all aircraft within a thousand kilometers. They
might be captured, but they could never be surprised.

This omniscience was little use in the present debate. At one extreme, he "knew"
millions of little facts that together formed their situation; at the other, he knew
mathematical theories that governed those facts. In between, in matters of judgment, he
sensed his incompetence. He looked at Allison. "What do you think? Who is right?"

She hesitated just a moment. "It's the reconnaissance angle I really know." It was eerie
watching Allison. She was Jill granted real-world existence. "If the Peacers are
competent, then I don't see how Mike could be wrong." She looked at Naismith. "Paul,
you say the Tinkers' revolt will be completely suppressed if we take time out to move. I
don't know; that seems a much iffier contention. Of course, if you're
both
right, then
we've had the course..." She gazed up at the dappled sunlight coming through the green-brown mesh. "You know, Paul, I almost wish you and Wili hadn't trashed the Authority's
satellite system."

"What?" Wili said abruptly. That sabotage was his big contribution. Besides, he hadn't
"trashed" the system, only made it inaccessible to the Authority. "They would find us
long ago with their satellites, if I had not done that."

Allison held up her hand. "I believe it. From what I've seen, they don't have the resources
or the admin structure for wide air recon. I just meant that given time we could have
sabotaged their old comm and recon system — in such a way that the Peacers would think
it was still working." She smiled at the astonishment on their faces. "These last weeks,
I've been studying what you know about their old system. It's really the automated USAF
comm and recon scheme. We had it fully in place right before... everything blew up. In
theory it could handle all our command and control functions. All you needed was the
satellite system, the ground receivers and computers, and maybe a hundred specialists. In
theory, it meant we didn't need air recon or land lines. In theory. OMBP was always
twisting our arm to junk our other systems and rely on the automated one instead. They
could cut our budget in half that way."

She grinned. "Of course we never went along. We needed the other systems. Besides,
we knew how fragile the automated system was. It was slick, it was thorough, but one or
two rotten apples on the maintenance staff could pervert it, generate false interpretations,
fake communications. We demanded the budget for the other systems that would keep it
honest.

"Now it's obvious that the Peacers just took it over. They either didn't know or didn't
care about the dangers; in any case, I bet they didn't have the resources to run the other
systems the Air Force could. If we could have infiltrated a couple people into their
technical staff, we could be making them see whatever we wanted. They'd never find us
out here." She shrugged. "But you're right; at this point it's just wishful thinking. It might
have taken months or years to do something like that. You had to get results right away."

"Damn," said Paul. "All those years of clever planning, and I never..."

"Oh, Paul," she said softly. "You are a genius. But you couldn't know everything about
everything. You couldn't be a one-man revolution."

"Yeah," said Mike. "And he couldn't convince the rest of us that there was anything
worth revolting against."

Wili just stared, his eyes wide, his jaw slack. It would be harder than anything he had
done before but, "Maybe you do not need spies, Allison. Maybe we can... I've got to
think about this. We've still got days. True, Mike?"

"Unless we have real bad luck. With good luck we might have weeks."

"Good. Let me think. I must think..." He stood up and walked slowly indoors. Already
the veranda, the sunlight, the others were forgotten.

It was not easy. In the months before he learned to use the mind connect, it would have
been impossible; even a lifetime of effort would not have brought the necessary insights.
Now creativity was in harness with his processors. He knew what he wanted to do. In a
matter of hours he could test his ideas, separate false starts from true.

The recon problem was the most important-and probably the easiest. Now he didn't
want to block Peacer reception. He wanted them to receive... lies. A lot of preprocessing
was done aboard the satellites; just a few bytes altered here and there might be enough to
create false perceptions on the ground. Somehow he had to break into those programs,
but not in the heavy-handed way he had before. Afterward, the truth would be received
by them alone. The enemy would see what Paul wanted them to see. Why, they could
protect not just themselves, but many of the tinkers as well!

Days passed. The answers came miraculously fast, and perilously slow. At the edge of
his consciousness, Wili knew Paul was helping with the physics, and Allison was
entering what she knew about the old USAF comm/recon system. It all helped, but the
hard inner problem — how to subvert a system without seeming to and without any
physical contact remained his alone.

They finally tested it. Wili took his normal video off a satellite over Middle California,
analyzed it quickly, and sent back subtle sabotage. On the next orbit, he simulated Peacer
reception: A small puff of synthetic cloud appeared in the picture, just where he had
asked. The satellite processors could keep up the illusion until they received coded
instructions to do otherwise. It was a simple change. Once operational, they could make
more complicated alterations: Certain vehicles might not be reported on the roads, certain
houses might become invisible.

But the hard part had been done.

"Now all we have to do is let the Peacers know their recon birds are `working' again,"
said Allison when he showed them his tests. She was grinning from ear to ear. At first
Wili had wondered why she was so committed to the Tinker cause; everything she was
loyal to had been dead fifty years.

The Tinkers didn't even exist when her orbiter was bobbled. But it hadn't taken him long
to understand: She was like Paul. She blamed the Peacers for taking away the old world.
And in her case, that was a world fresh in memory. She might not know anything about
the Tinkers, but her hate for the Authority was as deep as Paul's.

"Yeah," said Paul. "Wili could just return the comm protocols to their original state.
All of a sudden the Peacers would have a live system again. But even as stupid as they
are, they'd suspect something. We have to do this so they think that somehow
they
have
solved the problem. Hmm. I'll bet Avery still has people working on this even now."

"Okay," said Wili. "I fix things so the satellites will not start sending to them until they
do a complete recompile of their ground programs."

Paul nodded. "That sounds perfect. We might have to wait a few more days, but-"

Allison laughed. " — but I know programmers. They'll be happy to believe their latest
changes have fixed the problem."

Wili smiled back. He was already imagining how similar things could be done to the
Peacer communication system.

War had returned to the planet. Hamilton Avery read the Peace Authority News
Service article and nodded to himself. The headline and the following story hit just the
right note: For decades, the world had been at peace, thanks to the Authority and the
cooperation of peace-loving individuals around the world. But now — as in the early days,
when the bioscience clique had attempted its takeover — the power lust of an evil minority
had thrown the lives of humankind into jeopardy. One could only pray that the ultimate
losses would not be as great as those of the War and the plagues.

The news service story didn't say all this explicitly. It was targeted for high tech regions
in the Americas and China and concentrated on "objective" reporting of Tinker atrocities
and the evidence that the Tinkers were building energy weapons-and bobble generators.
The Peace hadn't tried to cover up that last development: A four-hundred-meter bobble
floating through the skies of L.A. is a bit difficult to explain, much less cover up.

Of course, these stories wouldn't convince the Tinkers themselves, but they were a
minority in the population. The important thing was to keep other citizens — and the
national militias — from joining the enemy.

The comm chimed softly. "Yes?"

"Sir, Director Gerrault is on the line again. He sounds very... upset."

Avery stifled a smile. The comm was voice-only, but even when alone, Avery tried to
disguise his true feelings. "Director" Gerrault indeed! There might still be a place for that
pupal Bonaparte in the organization, but hardly as a Director. Best to let him hang a few
hours more. "Please report to Monsieur Gerrault — again — that the emergency situation
here prevents my immediate response. I'll get to him as soon as humanly possible."

"Uh, yes, sir... Agent Lu is down here. She also wishes to see you."

"That's different. Send her right up."

Avery leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. Beyond the clear glass of the
window wall, the lands around Livermore spread away in peace and silence. In the near
distance — yet a hundred meters beneath his tower — were the black-and-ivory buildings of
the modern centrum, each one separated from the others by green parkland. Farther away,
near the horizon, the golden grasses of summer were broken here and there by clusters of
oaks. It was hard to imagine such peace disrupted by the pitiful guerrilla efforts of the
world's Tinkers.

Poor Gerrault. Avery remembered his boast of being the industrious ant who built armies
and secret police while the American and Chinese Directors depended on the people's
good will and trust. Gerrault had spread garrisons from Oslo to Capetown, from Dublin
to Szczecin. He had enough troopers to convince the common folk that he was just
another tyrant. When the Tinkers finally got Paul Hoehler's toy working, the people and
the governments had not hesitated to throw in with them. And then... and then Gerrault
had discovered that his garrisons were not nearly enough. Most were now overrun, not so
much by the enemy's puny bobble generators, as by all the ordinary people who no longer
believed in the Authority. At the same time, the Tinkers had moved against the heart of
Gerrault's operation in Paris. Where the European Director's headquarters once stood,
there was now a simple monument: a three-hundred-meter silver sphere. Gerrault had
gotten out just before the debacle, and was now skulking about in the East European
deserts, trying to avoid the Teuton militia, trying to arrange transportation to California
or China. It was a fitting end to his tyranny, but it was going to be one hell of a problem
retaking Europe after the rest of the Tinkers were put down.

There was a muted knock at the door, and Avery pressed "open," then stood with
studied courtesy as Della Lu stepped into the room. He gestured to a comfortable chair
near the end of his desk, and they both sat.

Week by week his show of courtesy toward this woman was less an act. He had come
to realize that there was no one he trusted more than her. She was as competent as any
man in his top departments, and there was a loyalty about her-not a loyalty to Avery
personally, he realized, but to the whole concept of the Peace. Outside of the old-time
Directors, he had never seen this sort of dedication. Nowadays, Authority middle-management was cynical, seemed to think that idealism was the affliction of fools and
low-level flunkies. And if Della Lu was faking her dedication, even in that she was a
world champion; Avery had forty years of demonstrated success in estimating others'
characters.

"How is your arm?"

Lu clicked the light plastic cast with a fingernail. "Getting well slowly. But I can't
complain. It was a compound fracture. I was lucky I didn't bleed to death... You wanted
my estimate of enemy potential in the Americas?"

Always business. "Yes. What can we expect?"

"I don't know this area the way I did Mongolia, but I've talked with your section chiefs
and the franchise owners."

Avery grinned to himself. Between staff optimism and franchise-owner gloom she
thought to find the truth. Clever.

"The Authority has plenty of good will in Old Mexico and Americacentral. Those people
never had it so good, they don't trust what's left of their governments, and they have no
large Tinker communities. Chile and Argentina we are probably going to lose: They have
plenty of people capable of building generators from the plans that Hoehler broadcast.
Without our satellite net we can't give our people down there the comm and recon
support they need to win. If the locals want to kick us out badly enough, they'll be able —"

Avery held up a hand. "Our satellite problems have been

cleared up."

"What? Since when?"

"Three days. I've kept it a secret within our technical branch, until we were sure it was
not just a temporary fix."

"Hmm. I don't trust machines that choose their own time and place to work."

"Yes. We know now the Tinkers must have infiltrated some of our software
departments and slipped tailor-made bugs into our controller codes. Over the last few
weeks, the techs ran a bunch of tests, and they've finally spotted the changes. We've also
increased physical security in the programming areas; it was criminally lax before. I don't
think we'll lose satellite communications again."

She nodded. "This should make our counter-work a lot easier. I don't know whether it
will be enough to prevent the temporary loss of the Far South, but it should be a big help
in North America."