The Peace War (38 page)

Through the narrow gap between the sides of the alley a Peacer satellite floated beyond
the blue sky. One reason he had chosen this parking spot was to have that line of sight. In
ninety seconds, the radio star would slide behind carven wooden eaves. He would lose it,
and thus its relay to synchronous altitude, and thus his control of things worldwide. He
would be deaf, dumb, and blind. But ninety seconds from now, it wouldn't matter; he and
all the other Tinkers would win or lose in sixty.

The whole system had spasmed when Paul was knocked out. Jill had stopped
responding. For several minutes, Wili had struggled with all the high-level computations.
Now Jill was coming back on line; she was almost finished with the local state
computations. The capacitors would be fully charged seconds after that. Wili surveyed
the world one last time:

From orbit he saw golden morning spread across Northern California. Livermore
Valley sparkled with a false dew that was really dozens — hundreds — of bobbles. Unaided
humans would need many versions of this picture to understand what Wili saw at once.

There were ground troops a couple of thousand meters east of him. They had fanned
out, obviously didn't know where he was. The tricky course he had given Allison would
keep him safe from them for at least five minutes.

Jets had been diverted from the north side of the Valley. He watched them crawl across
the landscape at nearly four hundred meters per second. They were the real threat. They
could see him before the capacitors were charged. There was no way to divert them or to
trick them. The pilots had been instructed to use their own eyes, to find the crawler, and
to destroy it. Even if they failed in the last, they would report an accurate position — and
the Livermore bobbler would get him.

240

He burst-transmitted a last message to the Tinker teams in the Valley: Paul's voice
announced the imminent bobbling and assigned new missions. Because of Wili's
deceptions, their casualties had been light; that might change now. He told them what he
had learned about Renaissance and redirected them against the missile sites he had
detected. He wondered fleetingly how many would feel betrayed to learn of Renaissance,
would wish that he — Paul — would stop the assault. But if Paul were really here, if Paul
could think as fast as Wili, he'd've done the same.

He must end the Peace so quickly that Renaissance died, too.

Wili passed from one satellite to another, till he was looking down on Beijing at
midnight. Without Wili's close supervision, the fighting had been bloodier: There were
bobbles scattered through the ruins of the old city, but there were bodies, too, bodies that
would not live again. The Chinese Tinkers had to get in very close; they did not have a
powerful bobbler or the Wili/Jill processor. Even so, they might win. Wili had guided
three teams to less than one thousand meters of the Beijing bobbler. He sent his last
advice, showing them a transient gap in the defense.

Messages sent or automatically sending. Now there was only his own mission. The
mission all else depended on.

From high above, Wili saw an aircraft sweep south over the alley. (Its boom crashed
around the carrier, but Wili's own senses were locked out and he barely felt it.) The pilot
must have seen him. How long till the follow-up bomb run?

The Authority's great bobbler was four thousand meters north of him. He and Jill had
made a deadly minimax decision in deciding on that range. He "looked at" the capacitors.
They were still ten seconds from the overcharge he needed. Ten seconds? The charge rate
was declining as charge approached the necessary level. Their haywired interface to the
crawler's electrical generator was failing. Extrapolation along the failure curve: thirty
seconds to charge.

The other aircraft had been alerted. Wili saw courses change. More extrapolation: It
would be very, very close. He could save himself by self-bobbling, the simplest of all
generations. He could save himself and lose the war.

Wili watched in an omniscient daze, watched from above as death crept down on the
tiny crawler.

Something itched. Something demanded attention. He relaxed his hold, let resources be
diverted... and fill's image floated up.

Wili! Go! You can still go! Jill flooded him with a last burst of data, showing that all
processes would proceed automatically to completion. Then she cut him off.

And Wili was alone in the crawler. He looked around, vision blurred, suddenly aware
of sweat and diesel fuel and turbine noise. He groped for his harness release, then rolled
off onto the floor. He barely felt the scalp connector tear free. He came to his feet and
blundered out the rear doors into the sunlight.

He didn't hear the jets' approach.

Paul moaned. Allison couldn't tell if he was trying to say something or was simply
responding to the rough handling. She got under his weight and stagger-ran across the
alley toward a stone-walled patio. The gate was open; there was no lock. Allison kicked
aside a child's tricycle and laid Paul down behind the waist-high wall. Should be safe
from shrapnel here, except-she glanced over her shoulder at the glass wall that stretched
across the interior side of the patio. Beyond was carpeting, elegant furniture. That glass
could come showering down if the building got hit. She started to pull Paul behind the
marble table that dominated the patio.

"No! Wili. Did he make it?" He struggled weakly against her hands.

The sky to the north showed patches of smoke, smudged exhaust trails, a vagrant
floating bobble where someone had missed a target-but that was all. Wili had not acted;
the crawler sat motionless, its engines screaming. Somewhere else she heard treads.

The boom was like a wall of sound smashing over them. Windows on both sides of the
street flew inward. Allison had a flickering impression of the aircraft as it swept over the
street. Her attention jerked back to the sky, scanned. A dark gnat hung there, surrounded
by the dirty aureole of its exhaust. There was no sound from this follow-up craft; it was
coming straight in. The length of the street — and the crawler — would be visible to it. She
watched it a moment, then dived to the tiled patio deck next to Paul.

Scarcely time to swear, and the ground smashed up into them.

Allison didn't lose consciousness, but for a long moment she didn't really know where
she was. A girl in a gingham dress leaned over an old man, seeing red spread across a
beautiful tile floor.

A million garbage cans dropped and rattled around her.

Allison touched her face, felt dust and untorn skin. The blood wasn't hers.

How bad was he hurt?

The old man looked up at her. He brushed her hands away with some last manic
strength. "Allison. Did we win... please? After all these years, to get that bastard Avery."
His speech slurred into mumbling.

Allison came to her knees and looked over the wall. The street was in ruins, riddled
with flying debris. The crawler had been hit, its front end destroyed. Fire spread
crackling from what was left of its fuel. Under the treads something else burned green
and violent. And the sky to the north...

...was as empty as before. No bobble stood where she knew the Peace generator was
hidden. The battle might yet go on for hours, but Allison knew that they had lost. She
looked down at the old man and tried to smile. "It's there, Paul. You won."

"We got one of them, sir. Ground troops have brought in three survivors. They're-"

"From the nearer one? Where is that second crawler?" Hamilton Avery leaned over the
console, his hands pale against the base of the keyboard.

"We don't know, sir. We have three thousand men on foot in that area. We'll have it in
a matter of minutes, even if tac air doesn't get it first. About the three we picked

Avery angrily cut the connection. He sat down abruptly, chewed at his lip. "He's getting
closer, I know it. Everything we do seems a victory, but is really a defeat." He clenched
his fists, and Della could imagine him screaming to himself
What can we do?
She had
seen administrators go over the edge in Mongolia, frozen into inaction or suicidal
overreaction. The difference was that
she
had been the boss in Mongolia. Here...

Avery opened his fists with visible effort. "Very well. What is the status of Beijing? Is
the enemy any closer than before?"

General Maitland spoke to his terminal. He looked at the response in silence. Then,
"Director, we have lost comm with them. The recon birds show the Beijing generator has
been bobbled..." He paused as though waiting for some explosion from his boss. But
Avery was composed again. Only the faint glassiness of his stare admitted his terror.

" — and of course that could be faked, too," Avery said quietly. "Try for direct radio
confirmation... from someone known to us." Maitland nodded, started to turn away.
"And, General. Begin the computations to bobble us up." He absentedly caressed the
Renaissance trigger that sat on the table before him. "I can tell you the coordinates."

Maitland relayed the order to try for shortwave communication with Beijing. But he
personally entered the coordinates as Avery spoke them. As Maitland set up the rest of
the program, Della eased into a chair behind the Director. "Sir, there is no need for this."

Hamilton Avery smiled his old, genteel smile, but he wasn't listening to her. "Perhaps
not, my dear. That is why we are checking for confirmation from Beijing." He flipped
open the Renaissance box, revealing a key pad. A red light began blinking on the top.
Avery fiddled with a second cover, which protected some kind of button. "Strange. When
I was a child, people talked about 'pushing the button' as though there was a magic red
button that could bring nuclear war. I doubt if ever power was just so concentrated... But
here I have almost exactly that, Della. One big red button. We've worked hard these last
few months to make it effective. You know, we really didn't have that many nukes
before. We never saw how they might be necessary to preserve the Peace. But if Beijing
is really gone, this will be the only way"

He looked into Della's eyes. "It won't be so bad, my dear. We've been very selective. We
know the areas where our enemy is concentrated; making them uninhabitable won't have
any lasting effect on the race."

To her left, Maitland had completed his preparations. The display showed the standard
menu she had seen in his earlier operations. Even by Authority standards, it looked old-fashioned. Quite likely the control software was unchanged from the first years of the
Authority.

Maitland had overridden all the fail-safes. At the bottom of-the display, outsized
capitals blinked:

WARNING!

THE ABOVE TARGETS ARE FRIENDLY

CONTINUE?

A simple "yes" would bobble the industrial core of the Authority into the next century.

"We have shortwave communication with Peace forces at Beijing, Director," the voice
came unseen, but it was recognizably Maitland's chief aide. "These are troops originally
from the Vancouver franchise. Several of them are known to people here. At least we can
verify these are really our men."

"And?" Avery asked quietly.

"The center of the Beijing Enclave is bobbled, sir. They can see it from where their
positions. The fighting has pretty much ended. Apparently the enemy is lying low,
waiting for our reaction. Your instructions are requested."

"In a minute," Avery smiled. "General, you may proceed as planned." That minute
would be more than fifty years in the future.

"yes," the general typed. The familiar buzzing hum sounded irregularly, and one after
another the locations on the list were marked as bobbled: Los Angeles Enclave, Brasilia
Enclave, Redoubt 001... It was quickly done, what no enemy could ever do. All other
activity in the room ceased; they all knew. The Authority was now committed. In fact,
most of the Authority was gone from the world by that act. All that remained was this
one generator, this one command center — and the hundreds of nuclear bombs that Avery's
little red button would rain upon the Earth.

Maitland set up the last target, and the console showed:

FINAL WARNING! PROJECTION WILL SELF-ENCLOSE. CONTINUE?

Now Hamilton Avery was punching an elaborate passcode into his red trigger box. In
seconds, he would issue the command that would poison sections of continents. Then

Maitland could bobble them into a future made safe for the "Peace."

The shock in Delia's face must finally have registered on him. "I am not a monster,
Miss Lu. I have never used more than the absolute minimum force necessary to preserve
the Peace. After I launch Renaissance, we will bobble up, and then we will be in a future
where the Peace can be reestablished. And though it will be an instant to us, I assure you
I will always feel the guilt for the price that had to paid." He gestured at his trigger box.
"It is a responsibility I take solely upon myself."

That's damned magnanimous of you
. She wondered fleetingly if hard-boiled types like
Della Lu and Hamilton Avery always ended up like this — rationalizing the destruction of
all they claimed to protect.

Maybe not. Her decision had been building for weeks, ever since she had learned of
Renaissance. It had dominated everything after her talk with Mike. Della glanced around
the room, wished she had her side-arm: She would need it during the next few minutes.
She touched her throat and said clearly, "See you later, Mike."

There was quick understanding on Avery's face, but he didn't have a chance. With her
right hand she flicked the red box down the table, out of Avery's reach. Almost
simultaneously, she smashed Maitland's throat with the edge of her left. Turning, she
leaned over the general's collapsing form-and typed: