SALTAROS: Shadows and Light
Nov. 20th, 2016 06:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zzambrosius_02CHAPTER FOUR: Missions and Permissions; Strategy and Security.
It was quite a large and lively group of them who descended on Café Xenosenos later that day: Danilos and Ambros had initiated the gathering, to discuss their various educational and propaganda activities, in the Lines where they were or had been resident. Skavo arrived shortly after they did; Arrenji and Voukli appeared soon. Two other BWG reps had come along with Danilos. They stayed silent for most of the meeting, but they recorded everything, using laptops and flying cameras. The Postal Guild rep from the previous day’s meeting was there: Voukli introduced her as Magistri Prazini.
Ambros reflected on her name: ‘Prasina is the word ‘green’ as an adjective. I’m guessing Prazini is a nickname, from her eyes and hair.’ Prazini from
Postal had very bright green eyes and iridescent green hair.
“I’m not sure we have any dye in my Line that would create such an amazing hair color,” he said, smiling at her.
“We don’t have any dye that would do this, either. Nothing that would leave the hair unburned. I had a genetic modification.”
“Oh,” he said, taken aback.
“Yes,” she added: “as soon as I had the Status and could find a tech that would do the job. I just always wanted my hair to match my eyes...” She shrugged, smiling back at him.
“It’s quite striking.”
“Thank you. Your partners are not here today...”
He made rueful face: “All busy, in Line Seventeen. Gotta keep up our ‘business’ affairs there. I’ll fill them in when I get a chance.”
Danilos said: “I really hope we can work out some way to speed the education and propaganda process in our Lines. In my Line, and the other ‘Bushite’ Lines especially. When I fled Line Eight, the whole planet was on the verge of fascism. It hasn’t gotten any better since I left. I mean, sure, I can re-publish your e-mag in my Line, that’ll be a start. I can do it from the Library here, I won’t even have to risk a trip ‘home’. But how can we move faster? We really need accelerated change, if we’re gonna save the USITs.“
Ambros got serious: “I’m open to suggestions. It’s a damn complex problem, though.”
Prazini said: “I don’t see why. In Commonwealth Lines, and in our Allied Syndicalist Lines, it wouldn’t be that hard. Just...” she frowned, shaking her head: “Get the facts out, tell the truth, right? That’s what Information and Data Guild does. Can’t people work things out for themselves?”
“Well,” said Ambros, pausing. “I’ll only speak for my own Line, of course. It’s not that simple. The media that inform the common people are so corrupted by the elites who ‘own’ them that it’s about impossible to get uncorrupted facts out into people’s hands. The various factions of the ruling class control the several ‘networks’, and own the magazines and newspapers. The existence of the Webz, and the chat rooms used by rebels of various types, that makes it possible to co-ordinate responses and pass along a little of the truth. But anyone who disagrees with the dominant paradigm is pretty much drowned out.”
“Yup,” said Danilos: “In my Line as well. And then, there’s also the whole ‘divide and rule’ strategy.”
Arrenji nodded: “As in race, gender, and age differences, exploited to prevent any movement from forming.”
“Ethnicities, too.” Ambros smiled ruefully: “Try banging your head against that one someday.”
“I know,” said Danilos. “I know exactly what you mean.”
Voukli was a little frustrated: “How can people be so foolish? Can you be more specific?”
Ambros and Danilos glanced at one another: “You go,” said Ambros.
Danilos nodded: “Ambros and I had a little talk about this, last night on the War Guilds’ ‘barbarian chatter’ site. It’s like this...”
“Let’s use the Iranian example,” Ambros suggested.
“Okay, cool. So one of the nation-states in all of the US Imperial Lines is called Iran. It is a distant successor state to the Persian Empire, which is far enough back that pretty much all Lines, Commonwealth included, have a version of it.
“So, in USITs that country is overwhelmingly Islamic.”
“A religion. That would complicate things.” Voukli was nodding.
Ambros said: “The vast majority of people in USITs have one religion or another. The Iranians are mostly Shia Muslims.”
The ’wealthers all frowned or grumbled at this. Arrenji just grinned: “Gotta start where we are, folks.”
Danilos said: “So, the USITs are called that because that nation, the United States, is the dominant Imperial power in those Timelines.”
“To one degree or another,” Ambros interjected.
“As a result,” Danilos continued: “people from all over the planet tend to migrate to the continental US, whenever they can. Most people see the US as the best place to live, among a lot of worse choices.
“There is a community of Iranian immigrants in the US, in all USIT Lines.”
“We should probably clarify,” said Ambros: “A group of communities.”
“You mean factions within the community?” Prazini asked.
“Yes, many.” Danilos shrugged, hands at shoulder level: “I’m only going on about this as an example, but it’s a rather good one.”
“Okay, continue, please,” said Voukli.
“Right,” said Ambros: “Danilos’ Line and mine share this part of our History. In the fifties of the twentieth century, in our Lines’ calendar, the people of Iran elected a government which began doing things that the US government disapproved of.”
“The short version of ensuing events looks like this,” said Danilos: “The US and British espionage departments staged a coup, and put the previous government back in power.
“The previous ruler was a Monarch, called Shah Reza Pahlavi. So in addition to a trickle of economic refugees, who had been reaching the US for decades before, there was a wave of political refugees, opponents of the Shah, who arrived in a bunch about then.” Danilos looked at Ambros.
Ambros said: “Twenty years later, more or less, a revolution occurred in Iran, and the rebels drove out the Shah. So...” Ambros waited.
“A new wave of immigrants to the US, supporters of the Shah,” said Voukli, not disappointing him.
“Yes,” he said, a little bitterly: “Also, opponents of the Shah who also opposed the new government, which was—is—called an ‘Islamic Republic’.”
“Ugh.” Voukli snarled.
“I agree,” said Ambros. “Anyway, with all of the above in mind, imagine trying to talk to that ‘community’. Royalists, socialists who were supporters of the elected government, supporters of the current government, dissenters to all three groups, and three generations of Iranian-Americans...”
“Some of whom agree with their parents and grandparents...” Danilos grinned wickedly.
“And some of whom don’t, taking opposing sides to their families, or no side at all...” Ambros said. “Also, kids who have adopted some or all of the hedonism that dominates American society...”
“And some reformist Socialists, or Communists, or Anarchists, and so on: all the factions of the Left in America. Even a few Objectivists.” Danilos began shaking his head: “Nearly all of whom think that what is happening in Iran is far more important than any global crisis that may be building, right beneath their noses.”
“We could,” Ambros said, “infiltrate that community. BWG or Postal Guild could find someone who could learn Farsi under RNA, and speak American with the correct accent, and appear to be an Iranian immigrant.”
“But such a person could only speak to one of those factions at a time...” Voukli was getting it.
Danilos continued: “Right. Now here’s the real rub: Nearly every country on Earth is similarly represented in America, with similar disagreements among the populations. Other advanced capitalist countries, like Canada or the European hegemony, have the same problems, at a lower level. The State Capitalist economies, like China and Cuba and Vietnam, they control people with similar divide and rule strategies, but they are less hesitant to simply jail or kill dissenters. The same with the outright fascists, like the Latin American dictatorships.”
“And of course,” said Ambros: “the same extreme polarizations exist in American society, as a whole. Danilos and I have been talking to my Affinity group, my family, and we think it is completely impractical to try to speak specifically to any one faction. We need to find a way to communicate with a lot of people, and say things such that many of those people come to agree with us, at a very basic level.”
“As bad as it is, in our Lines, we can’t rush this: the basic educational effort has to do its job before we can go forward,” Danilos said this with some reluctance.
“But you also dare not delay,” said Skavo: “Save where delay cannot be helped.”
“Exactly,” said Danilos.
“So anyway,” said Ambros: “Keep this all in mind. Whatever we are doing in US Imperial Lines, it has to start as ‘generally relevant’; we need very basic home truths, which apply to people’s everyday lives. And people’s jobs are, generally speaking, the source of a lot of the stress and nastiness in their lives. So...I will be contacting the Eugene branch of the IWW. The most sophisticated Syndicalist thinkers in Seventeen are members of that group, as I once was, and I hear that they have begun organizing workplaces again.”
Danilos nodded slowly: “I think that’s also true in my Line. I never thought of reaching out to them.” He shook his head, then: “Wobblies,” he said, grinning in faux alarm: “’One Big Union For All the Working Class...’ What the hell next?”
“Whoever and whatever can actually help you,” said Skavo.
“A different kind of coalition,” said Ambros, grinning: “Pragmatic idealists.”
A long silence followed: drinks got sipped, snacks got eaten.
Arrenji cleared her throat: “I have something to say here.”
Everyone stayed silent and looked at her. Ambros glanced around: respect, awe, interest, and fear showed in every face but his, in different proportions.
She said: “Sacred Band has scientists looking into all aspects of the Multiverse, as we know it. There are levels of reality that you and I and all of our allies and enemies do not—cannot—really understand.
“One thing to keep in mind, though: a...’principle’ or ‘law’ or ‘theory’...those aren’t the right words, or even the right concepts...but there is an apparent phenomenon that SB researchers call ‘sardonic synchronicity’. The short form of it is, what happens in one Line will have an effect on all similar Lines, lessening as the Timelines diverge. Not always the effect you’d expect...that’s why we call it Sardonic.”
Voukli continued the thought: “So every little bit you do, in USIT Eight, or in Seventeen, will affect the other USIT Lines. The more good you do, the more your efforts will be amplified.”
Arrenji added: “The disaster in USIT Six will affect other US Imperial Lines, as well: and probably badly, from our point of view.” She shrugged at Danilos:
“Eight is in for a tough time; Line Seventeen may barely notice.”
Danilos nodded: “Gotcha.” He raised his chin, pursed his lips, and frowned: “Sardonic synchronicity...I wonder how that could be. Perhaps...” He trailed off into computer jargon and mathematics. The other two Black Warrior Guild reps began to speak to him in the same ‘language’.
As the rest of the party broke up, Ambros looked back. He saw the three of them deep in conversation, scribbling on scraps of paper, handsigning, and sending electronic messages back and forth among themselves. He grinned: ‘Happy is the rebellion that has such techs on its side!’
Ambros dropped in to his usual landing spot near his Salon. He strolled quickly along, smiling at passers-by. He cut diagonally across his parking lot, and approached the door on the west side of the building.
He keyed the door open and said: “Office lights on.” He made a beeline for the light.
He called up the desktop computer: “On,” he said: “Phone mode.” It buzzed a couple times, then gave him his cue.
“Peter Morley, Dan Samuelson,” he said.
“Together?” The machine had a distinctly artificial voice; that had become his preference after a couple of incidents of AI activity by his technology.
He said: “If you can.”
“Dhulyéna.”
‘”Working,”’ he thought.
He stripped off his cloak and hat and loosened the laces on his black Free Walker boots. These were knee-high and made of extremely heavy elk hide. Each boot had a hidden sheath, with a haftless knife concealed therein. He touched each one in turn. He sighed.
Deputy Dan’s voice came over the speakers: “What’s up?”
“Hold a moment...”
Former Eugene Police Sergeant Peter Morley came on the line: “Ambros?”
“Okay, listen up you two: somebody tried to run me off the road this morning. I want...”
Dan interrupted: “You making an official report, to me?”
Ambros hesitated: “Yes,” he said, at length: “Yes, I believe I am.”
“Okay, are you at home?”
“No, I’m at the Salon. See ya?”
“On my way...”
“I’ll just nip over there, too.” Ambros could hear Morley shuffling papers; since Pete had quit the police department—gotten fired, really—he’d been working for Jerry Mallory at St. Valentine’s, a Catholic Charities division that ran thrift stores and recycling pseudo-businesses, as well as homeless outreach and a dozen other do-good enterprises.
He sat quietly, pondering. He began to meditate: “Calm,” he said aloud on each inward breath, and “Relax,” on each exhale. After a few minutes he rose and put the kettle on. Then he went to the front door, where he keyed the place open and allowed Dan to enter. Morley drove up in a beat-up 1970s Dodge with St. Val’s stickers on the windows.
When they were seated and had mugs of tea in hand, Ambros said: “Just a minute...” and made a series of handsigns and keystrokes to the desktop; in a moment, the voice of Detective Sergeant Barkley came over the speakers:
“Mr. Rothakis. What can I do for you?”
“For now, just listen.” He described that morning’s encounter, including the size and color of Big Green. “I found this stuck inside the wheel well under the front fender of Luisa’s truck,” he finished, dropping the GPS and its battery on the table.
Dan had been taking notes on a legal pad; he looked at those items and cursed mildly.
Morley shook his head: “That’s property of the EPD,” he said sadly. He spoke to the air: “Marta, we’re looking at a Eugene Police Department GPS tracker, pulled from Mr. Rothakis’ truck.”
“Oh, Hell,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Dan: “And that green two-ton truck sounds like Brad Dillon’s. I don’t like that combination at all.”
Peter and Barkley made noises of agreement.
After a pause, Ambros said: “Okay. Let’s assume you are correct. Who is Brad Dillon, and why did he and two other men try to kill me?”
“Bradley J. Dillon is—or I should say, is believed to be—head of the local branch of Posse Comitatus. Ever hear of them?” Dan looked grim.
“I have,” said Ambros. “Their branch in Cleveland killed a couple of my friends. That was in ’74, before anybody even knew they existed. Anyone in law enforcement, I mean.”
“Huh.” Dan looked quizzical.
Ambros shrugged: “We knew they existed. We were anarchists. Who would we have reported their activities to? Who would believe us?”
“Good point,” said Morley.
“Okay,” said Ambros, after a few moments: “I know what I’m up against, now.”
Morley said: “Barbaric neo-nazi extremists, who have a passion for secrecy. What will you do about them?”
Ambros grinned: “You don’t wanna know, Pete. But...” he rolled his chair over to the desktop and began a search: “Now that I know who they are, I can probably get you some info that you can use.” He typed, activating Shifter and laptop; he waited, then typed again. With the weight of that much Commonwealth tech leaning on the Webz, he soon had what he wanted. He scrolled rapidly through the file; then he highlighted a page and hit the print button.
The printer under the tea shelf hummed and clattered; Ambros pulled four sheets out. “One for each of us,” he said. “I’ll get this to Barkley before too long.”
“Jesus, Ambros, this is a membership list!” Dan was amazed.
“Yeah. I have really good information tech at my fingertips, nowadays. If they’d stayed offline and not given in to the temptations of modern social media, I couldn’t have found that. But that guy Dillon has an encrypted MyFace page, and my machine used that to find his computers and link to them. He has a bunch of data in a ‘secret file’ on his home desktop. I copied the whole file, if you want it.”
“I do want it,” said Barkley: “I want...”
“Sergeant...” said Morley.
“What?”
“Hannah d’Angelo is on this list.” Morley spoke to Ambros: “Miss d’Angelo is Chief Black’s executive secretary.”
“Oh.” Ambros pondered: “Do you suppose that the Chief of Police...knows that she’s in this group?”
“I don’t think so,” said Morley, uncertainly. He perused the paper in his hands: “Fourteen men on this list, and eight women: all wives or girlfriends of the men. Including Miss Hannah.”
“Miller and Thompson are both on this list,” said Dan.
Morley said: “That kinda figures. Those two are so bent...” He laughed, and said to Ambros: “Miss d’Angelo is Miller’s wife, and Dillon’s girlfriend. Miller does not know that his wife is also banging Dillon.”
Ambros’ eyes narrowed: “We could maybe use that to sow dissension in the group.”
“Ya think? I’ll push the rumor harder if you want...” Dan seemed amused.
Ambros nodded: “Fire away. I’ll get you video evidence, you let me know when to release it.” He rose and stretched: “I, however, have some preparations to make.”
“What are you up to?” Barkley asked.
“Well, nothing you’d want to know too much about, frankly. I will report on this...situation...” he waved the membership list: “...to my invisible support group, and then...” He laughed, then said: “Then I need to locate a couple of pickup trucks.”
He shut down the line to Barkley; then he escorted the two men out. After that, he sat a while making plans. He tapped the MPS and called home to Rose House: “Hey there, sweethearts. I got bad news and good news...”
The next morning, Ambros dropped in to the Country Fair site. As soon as he was there, he Saltated sideways to the Alcatraz Quiet Timeline. Rain beat down on his hat and cloak.
The Alcatraz Quiet Line had that appellation because the Hellenic Commonwealth had a base at the old prison on Alcatraz Island in that Line. It was Quiet because...”Because there was no more life native to this Line,” Ambros said out loud.
He walked slowly over to a booth, or the remains of one. He opened an extra large umbrella and sheltered under it, waiting. It was raining too hard for him to clearly see the area, but he knew what it was like: all the plants dead, the animals mummified, silent except for the sound of wind and water.
“Nothing rots, even in the damp, when there are no bacteria, no fungi. But...”
He realized that, despite the briefness of their visits, the many different ’Wealthers who’d passed through the place must have shed bits of bacteria over the years.
“That would all build up, after a while,” he said quietly, contemplating. He took a breath, nostrils flared and mouth open; he smelled and tasted just the faintest hint of rot, as though the dead world were waking to a hint of biological activity. “Hmmm. Wow.”
‘I knew this could happen,’ he mused: ‘It already started in San Francisco. I guess...I guess there must be seeds, a few of them...yeah, remember how verdant the Ohio River Valley is, must have been a whole plant biome there, waiting for the moment when we showed up and killed the Phage. But this? This means the whole planet is waking up, bit by bit.’
Voukli dropped in, wearing a raincoat and rubber boots. She strode over and huddled under the umbrella with him. Arrenji appeared, similarly garbed, and did likewise.
They faced inward, their heads sheltered, rain pounding off of their backs.
The Magistriae gazed at him blankly, showing no emotion. He spoke:
“I asked you here so I could tell you about a nightmare scenario that I dreamed up. I don’t think it wise to broadcast this idea on the War Guild sites, and I don’t quite trust the Sacred Band computer system to hold this close enough. I’m kinda regretting mentioning anything about my fears, the other day at the meeting. I hope folks will just let it pass, if we don’t bring the thing to their attention again.”
The women glanced at each other. Arrenji said: “It must be pretty scary to shake you up like this. Spill it. I’ll hold it as confidential, and I’ll let you know if I feel it must become public.”
Voukli said: “Same here.”
“Right. I’ve done a little digging. I have found a small—a very small—amount of evidence to suggest that I’m right. I’ll send you links through the SB Kyklo, so you can check those out. I feel safe in doing that, as long as I don’t explain why I sent them. After I tell you this, you’ll know what to look for.
“I’ve become mortally scared that the Emperor Jean is hatching a really big attack. Bigger than we’ve ever seen, bigger than anyone has ever planned for.”
“The breeding camps suggest that very plan,” Voukli pointed out: “but we’ve been disrupting them significantly, and it’d be at least fifteen years before the slave army would be ready.”
He shook his head: “I’m thinking something sooner, and wider. Not as many troops, but aimed across a lot of Lines.”
He started to explain his fears. As he proceeded through the outline, Voukli
and Arrenji got progressively grimmer. When he finished, they both shook their heads, dismayed.
“Wow.” Arrenji looked down, brow furrowed.
“I agree,” said Voukli: “Wow.”
He shrugged: “Take a look at the documents I’ll send you. Postal has not yet seen the pattern, or else they are keeping quiet, too.”
“Uh-huh.” Arrenji looked up again: “You got any ideas about counter-measures?”
“Yes. I think we can use Vree and Clotarde and their groups to slow the process down, without tipping anything to them. They are gung-ho for sabotage and assassination for their own reasons. They don’t need to know our reasons for the targets we aim them at.”
“Okay, that makes sense,” Arrenji said. “But even if we slow them down, the attack is still coming. If you’re right about this. What do we do then?”
Voukli spoke: “There are not enough troops in any of our Allied Lines to effectively combat this...” She grimaced.
“Nightmare,” Arrenji said. “Don’t take this wrong, Spathos. But I really hope you are wrong this time.”
“Yeah, me too. Hope isn’t enough, though. I want us to prepare.”
“But how?”
“Sun tzu. Sun Pin. Sherman, Patton, Epamanondas. And Lee, for a bad example. I put it all in a paper document.”
He handed them each a copy: “This is just an outline. The concepts, especially Deep Flanking, need to be translated into ‘Multiversal’ terms. I’m working on that. The closer we get to l’Iriquois’ D-day, the more people will have to know about this. But for right now, I think it should be just us.”
Voukli shuddered: “I agree.”
Arrenji handsigned her concurrence: “When the nightmare leaves this circle, it should go first to Skavo, and then to your Affinity group.”
Voukli and Ambros handsigned agreement. Arrenji nodded, then turned into the rain and walked away. The usual pop of air as she vanished sounded muffled and indistinct.
Voukli stared at him, Comanche inscrutability in evidence. “Have you talked to your strimeniae recently? In private, I mean?”
“Not since...four days. Going home tonight.”
She nodded: “Okay. See you at Alcatraz, Fourthday.”
“I’ll be there.”
She strolled over to the drop-in point and vanished. He smiled, a little weakly: “That was strange, even by Voukli standards,” he muttered: “I wonder what news is waiting for me at home?”
That afternoon, a sweaty dirty Ambros sat in a big comfy Morris chair in the living room at Rose House. The chair had been a spare, kept in the corner of the office that Marie ran her various businesses from. Now it was, apparently, his.
Kim came in and stopped: “You’re bleeding!” She walked over to him: “What have you been doing?”
“Oh, I was tending the barberry in the back yard...”
“I didn’t know we had any barberry back there.”
“Neither did I, until I cleared the brambles and bindweed off it. There’s a gate in the fence back there, too. I got the thorny stuff out of the gateway, and then wove a bunch of the barberry suckers back into the main plants. Makes a good barrier hedge, for anyone who might try to climb over the fence.”
“Good,” she said: “Not all of our neighbors are civilized, you know.”
“No shit. I have to get a lock for that gate, and some lumber to reinforce it.”
“Don’t you think you should get cleaned up? Some of those scratches look bad...”
“It’s all surface damage. I figured to let it all clot, then shower. Of course, it scabbed over half an hour ago and I’ve been sitting here ever since, thinking about the rest of my day.”
Marie and Luisa came in then, and expressed concern about his wounds.
“Don’t worry, I can’t get a bacterial infection. The Meds in the Commonwealth have been working overtime on my immune system and clotting factors and all that. Standard for Commonwealth citizens, you know. And as Sacred Band, I get extra stuff, like really fast healing of wounds and such. These scratches won’t even be visible tomorrow.”
“Oh,” said Luisa.
“What are you doing this afternoon?” asked Marie.
“Scheduled for a mission to USIT Six,” he replied.
“That’s what you are all worried about?” Kim poked him, smiling.
“Yeah. Supposed to be a humanitarian mission to get food and medicine to those soldiers that ATL Prime abandoned in Six.”
“You think there will be a fight?”
“That’s kinda up to them, but they are sick with radiation and under a lot of stress. We are going in armed and armored, but...”
After a pause, Luisa said: “...but anything can happen, even really bad stuff.”
He nodded: “At any time. So...I fret a little, and I work out contingencies, and I know there will be a bunch of back-up, and then, eventually, I go do the job.” He glanced at the clock: “I have ten more minutes, our time. I guess I’ll shower at the Command Complex before I armor up.”
Luisa said: “Um. When you, when we Jump to the Commonwealth Line, it’s almost the same time of day, and time moves at the same speed in the two Lines, right?”
“Correct.”
“But...we’re Jumping to Athens. In Greece. Shouldn’t it be a different time of day there? Like...”
Ambros grinned: “Exactly ten USIT hours later. Right. And it would be, except for something that Averos calls ‘Timeline Precession’.”
“Pre...cession.” Kim had the distracted look of a person hearing voices; in her case, knowledge imparted by RNA induction. “Right. I see that. It’s like a twist in the continuum...at the nine-dimensional level...and it happens to be ten of our hours exactly.”
“A coincidence?” asked Marie.
“A very convenient one,” said Ambros. “Some Lines are as much as twenty or as little as five hours off Commonwealth Standard. Those numbers are a pain in the ass to deal with.”
“Uh-huh,” said Luisa.
He stood up and began to stretch and twist, limbering his body for action: “I saw Voukli this morning. She mentioned the three of you.”
“Ah,” said Kim. “Did she make a pass?”
Ambros boggled: “Why do you think she would?”
Marie snickered: “Because she asked us for permission to.”
Luisa said: “And we granted that permission.”
“Oh.” He shook his head, hard: “The circumstances were not conducive to foreplay. Or flirtation. I expect she decided to wait for a less rainy and depressing environment.”
“Well,” said Luisa: “What will your answer be, when she asks?”
The three of them sat, each in her favorite chair, gazing at him. He looked across the room, over their heads, distracted. After a bit, he said: “I’ll have to think about that. I expect that she’d be...different. As a partner, I mean. She’s pretty badass, you know.”
“She is,” said Kim.
Marie smiled wickedly: “Does she intimidate you?”
“You bet she does.” He frowned, thoughtful: “I guess I’d better start carrying some condoms around with me.”
Kim raised an eyebrow: “Whatever for?”
The women all laughed at him. After a few seconds, he laughed, too: “Of course. How could anyone in the Commonwealth have or pass on an STD?”
“It’s better than that...” Marie trailed off.
Ambros raised his chin: “Oh.” Triggered by the conversation, RNA knowledge filled his mind: “They have a contagious anti-viral, anti-bacterial...and anti-prion medical treatment that kills about thirty known STDs...Most of them I never even heard of!” The implications of that sank in on him.
Luisa got it, then: “Have sex with Voukli, and you’ll never get an STD, ever?”
“And as soon as we sleep with him, the same will be true for us...” Kim smiled slyly: “With just a little—effort—we can spread that immunity through this Line, as well.”
Ambros sat there, boggled. The women laughed at him, again.
Then he riposted: “Will she be asking me about you soon, Kim?”
She blushed: “Maybe. What will you say?”
"If the desire is requited, then follow your bliss.”
She grew even pinker, then laughed: “I will. I do believe I will.”
Ambros shrugged his armor into place, hopping up and down a bit to settle the pieces.
He wore his Sacred Band Commando armor, and carried a ‘rifle’ as well as his usual handgun and APS. The long gun worked on the same principle as the pistol.
Averos had explained the mechanism to him, with a firearm that was partly disassembled: “This generator is powered directly by the power module, or ‘battery’.” Averos pointed at various bits as he spoke: “It concentrates a rather large amount of energy into a small space, thus creating a large but short-term particle. Then this very small magnetic cannon fires the pellet at the target. The pellet is not stable, so it breaks down within a couple minutes at the longest. But in the time it exists, it does a lot of damage to anything it hits or passes through. And Commonwealth firearms are nearly silent, by nature, since there is no explosive involved. There is sometimes a sonic boom, with arms that are set to impart maximum speed to the pellet. But even that is not very loud, because the pellet is so small.”
Ambros exited the locker room, carrying his helmet. That was made of high-tech ceramic-plastic-metallic alloys, as were all of the plates and scales of the armor.
Ambros found an elevator: “Aníchte,” he said, and the door slid open. He entered.
He handsigned at the control panel, and the car began to drop. It carried him much deeper than he usually went, heading for the sixth floor below ground.
The elevator car stopped, then moved sideways at high speed, pressing him against one wall. The car slowed at last, and stopped; the door opened.
He disembarked into a huge room, the size of a 747 hangar: three stories tall, with workstations all around the walls and an enormous launch/landing pad in the center of the room. Women and men in tan tunics and trousers maneuvered a crate into place on the pad, then cleared the area. A bell rang, seven times; the crate disappeared with a very loud bang, as air collapsed into the space where it once stood.
Ambros looked around: he saw Voukli, armored but unhelmed. He steered in her direction.
“All right soldiers,” said a harsh voice, slightly amplified by the ‘radios’ in their helms: “We got a mixed bunch today, so everybody pay close attention here.”
They sat in a half-circle of very comfy chairs surrounding a podium, where the speaker stood.
‘Black Warrior Guild Magistri,’ he thought: ‘That’s impressive.’ He put his helm on, for a moment: The tag above her head said: “Magistri Ellisi’. He doffed the helm again and listened.
She continued as soon as everyone was seated: “This will be a Black Warrior Guild operation, so listen closely: SB and non-combatants, the sign for
trouble is seven beeps, close together.” She demonstrated with a handsign. “Boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop,” went the speakers in their helms.
“Non-combatants, if you hear that, take cover or hit the ground. Once you are down, head for the crates: they are proof against ATL slug-throwers, and we can Saltate them out of harm’s way in a flash. SB, if there’s a situation bad enough to trigger that alarm, do as you see fit. BWG has SOP in place, so you can follow their lead, or act alone. Your call.
“Now, Black Warrior Guild has separated the warring sides by force and trickery, so we may hope not to wind up in any crossfire. But there’s no telling how the ATL troops will react to our presence, when we appear in their sights and on their flanks. We’ve leafleted their HQ and front lines, and told them that we’re bringing supplies for them, but the front line soldiers don’t necessarily believe it. Keep your eyes and ears open, girls and boys.” She grinned: “Blacks and SB will drop in first, non-combatants will follow with the freight. Helms on! Let’s do this!”
“ARCHÍZENUME!” the Blacks all hollered. Ambros donned his helmet and strode off toward the troop transport pad.
He and Voukli joined a dozen BWG soldiers on the pad: “First group” came the announcement, which echoed around the room: “Prepare!”
They all unshipped their rifles and checked the safeties: ‘Ready to fire,’ he thought, as he looked at his. They formed up in a circle, weapons pointed upwards.
The bell rang. He heard six strokes before the Controller Saltated them.
They dropped in to a devastated landscape. He barely noticed the usual dizziness. “This is British Columbia?” he asked, appalled. Where an old growth forest had stood, not a tree was upright.
“Yeah,” said Voukli. “We’re six leagues from the Gate. Where the Gate was, I mean.” She and Ambros both moved as quickly as possible for the nearest available cover, a pile of gigantic pine and fir trees fallen in a heap. The Black Warrior Guild contingent moved into position at one end of the pile. Ambros peered through the interlaced branches of the trees, noting that they were entirely stripped of needles. He could see some rough fortifications of logs and mud stretching away from him, with flags of the French-Iriquois Confederacy flying at intervals along them.
“So,” he said, sliding down onto his knees, as Voukli did the same: “In my Line’s measures, we are twelve miles east of Ground Zero, the Gate near Vancouver.”
“Right,” she said. “All those soldier-boys over there,” she waved at the line, “are surely suffering from radiation sickness.”
“And they’d be in worse shape if the wind wasn’t out of the south,” said Ambros. Voukli indicated agreement.
Ambros breathed deeply, and made a face. All around them lay bodies of men and animals, some showing signs of gunshot or shrapnel wounds. He gagged a little:
“That stinks.”
“Dead people do,” said Voukli: “At least it’s a chilly day.”
Ambros nodded, grimacing.
The first crate dropped in on the other side of their cover, causing the soldiers in the ATL trenches to loose a volley of fire at it. Ambros and Voukli joined the BWG contingent as they scrambled over and around the pile. One man carried a white flag, and waved it vigorously as they all advanced on the crate.
The gunfire fell to sporadic bangs, and then stopped. Ambros could hear shouted commands from the trenches, and then he saw an answering white flag waving above the log barricade nearest them.
Snow covered the ground. Clouds in the distance advanced from the west, promising more snow and freezing rain. The sun was not visible; fog around them and low clouds above hid all but a wan and feeble light. The ground trembled a little, as in an earthquake.
An embassy climbed over the barricade and began picking its way across the ground between. Ambros watched them, curious. “This’ll be the first time I’ve had a chance to speak with an ATL military man,” he said, suppressing his radio link and speaking directly to Voukli.
“Yeah. Be alert. The guy in front is a Legion Colonel. Dangerous and treacherous. No Ethics that you would recognize.”
“Got it,” he said.
The embassy approached. Everyone on both sides very cautiously raised their face shields. The truce held, and a conversation began.
The Colonel spoke to the Commander of the Blacks, and she replied, with vigorous gestures at the crate behind her.
“C’mon,” said Voukli, “let’s get a listen.”
“...bollocks,” said the Colonel: “Why would I accept such aid? Surely it is poisoned, or otherwise booby-trapped. I reject your overtures. Leave us to our deaths, Commonwealth scum.”
The Black Commander spoke softly: “You are misjudging us. We are not as you are. We mean to see to it that your men receive the food and clothing and medicines in that crate, and in the others that will soon arrive. Is it not enough that we have drawn and driven your enemies away? You would surely have been overwhelmed by now if we had not.”
They were both speaking Rational French. Ambros had supplemented his meager knowledge of his Line’s version of French with an RNA course on the slightly rationalized variety used in the ATL military.
The Colonel’s ID patch named him ‘Renault, C.’ He wore no helmet.
“Nonsense. Leave us, I say. We desire none of your help.” Colonel Renault then pulled a grenade from his belt, yanked the pin out and tossed it at Voukli. He turned and ran ten paces, then hit the ground, covering his head.
Ambros stepped in front of Voukli, caught the grenade, and threw it as hard as he could to the west, where nothing but downed trees and the corpses of men and animals could be seen. He turned his back and shielded his face with his arms. The rest of the Commonwealth group did the same.
The bomb exploded with force that they could feel, even a hundred fifty ells away. A few bits of shrapnel zipped through the parley: one ATL soldier fell, wounded.
He saw from the corner of his eye the Black Warrior Commander draw her pistol and fire. At that range the projectile disintegrated Col. Renault’s head, and his body flopped and twisted on the ground.
Voukli laughed.
Ambros looked at her askance. He was shaking, only then processing what he had done. “Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever thrown anything that hard, or that far, in my life!”
Voukli slapped his shoulder, the scales on her gauntlet clacked against his pauldron: “Good job,” she said, laughing again. “Thanks!”
The Commander waved her pistol around: “Which of you idiots is second in command here?”
A man stepped forward, reluctantly: “I am. Major Durant.”
That fellow wore the uniform of the ATL Regular Army. He showed clear signs of exposure to ionizing radiation: lesions and raw wounds on his bare hands, and a bruised saggy look to all the flesh around his eyes and mouth. His beard, a few days old, appeared thin and patchy.
“Well?” said the Commander: “Are you going to be more reasonable? Or should I shoot you and talk to the next bozo?”
“You have food for us...?”
“And medicine, including drugs that will reverse your radiation sickness. We’ve packaged the drugs as slap-patches, such as your medics use for morphine. Shall we start unloading?”
Ambros and Voukli sat by the side of the crate, their helms on but faceplates up. Laborers carried supplies and equipment out of the gigantic box and stacked them on the ground. Major Durant listened carefully to what the Tech Guild liason said: “The equipment in the green boxes is mostly agricultural in nature. Seeds, plows, harnesses. The harness can be adapted to men or horses or whatever animal or tractor provides the motive power for your work.”
Durant seemed confused: “Why do we need this, this...”
Commander Ellisi said: “You need this equipment because you will otherwise starve. Your masters have abandoned you here. You must grow and process food, and defend yourselves until your enemies have given up on their project.”
Liaison began again: “We are leaving enough food to last you until you have a harvest. There are also materials for constructing greenhouses, the instructions are in illustrated form. There are wagons and barrows, some motorized, so that you can move south and east out of range of your enemies...”
“We need ammunition! “
“No,” said Ellisi: “No chance. We will not arm you against your foemen. You, or your commanders, made this situation, now deal with it.
“But...”
“Silence!”
“What?”
“Listen to the tech, here. Technical Guild Apprentice Valsisi: complete your assigned briefing. Major Durant: be silent and attend.”
Valsisi began to speak again: “The entire system of petroleum extraction is in a state of collapse, so your foes will soon be in the same fix you are. That is: on foot, in the winter, running out of fuel and ammunition. If you begin to retreat from them immediately, they may well lose interest...”
Ambros’ attention wandered. He rose and turned slowly in place, examining the landscape, searching for threats.
He thought about the response to his most recent post on the War Guild’s Kyklo: his essay on ‘tactical security in SB operations’. Or: ‘Don’t stand around and get shot, dummy!’.
‘Anybody with a modicum of common sense read that as it was intended,’ he thought. Predictably, Spathos Regulos had slagged the entire essay, posting a point-by-point ‘refutation’ that combined incorrect readings of his points, ad hominem arguments, straw men and false dichotomies into a hash of utter nonsense. ‘I laid out a fairly simple proposition, really: regard every slug strike on your armor as a “fail” and do what it takes to minimize those hits. Reg fundamentally didn’t get it, did he?’
He hadn’t troubled himself to reply to Reg; luckily, others had, including several people whom he had never met. Regulos continued to argue with them, even after they had pointed out the untruths and logical flaws in his posts. ‘How does the Commonwealth education system produce such overall good results, but somehow leaves a guy like that behind? Oh, well, not for me to deal with...at least not in the foreseeable future.’
The idea that his participation in the Commonwealth would one day be about much more than just Sacred Band and War Guild operations crossed his mind:
‘How much can one man or one person do, though?’
Voukli’s voice spoke in his ear: “Spathos, there is a disturbance about a league away, down the line of trenches.”
Ambros stood up and said: “Non-combatants: expedited evac.”
The Laborers moved fast, removing the final contents of the crate; then they all crowded inside. Ambros gave a sign to Ellisi, who signaled him to move away from the crate. It vanished with a bang.
Ambros pulled his faceplate down, settled his gauntlets, and checked the safety on his rifle. “Ready,” he said, quietly.
They Saltated again, this time into a crossfire. He dropped to the ground and brought his rifle to bear. Thirty others did the same, Black Warriors mostly, with a couple SB commandos he didn’t recognize.
“Who the hell should we shoot?” he muttered.
Voukli’s voice came over his radio: “Nobody, yet. Hold fire! HOLD!”
He could see rifle barrels of roughly WWII style poking out of the ATL barricades, and occasional muzzle flashes. Most of the shooting was evidently happening inside the trenches, though. ‘Fighting among themselves?’ he wondered.
Voukli began ordering the situation: “All Blacks, hear this: get the non-combatants inside the crate. Fire only as necessary to accomplish that. Get me numbers on wounded or injured, ASAP! Get a white flag up in front of the crate...well, put it back up!”
One by one the rifles visible across the way vanished. The firing petered out, and an answering white flag appeared on the battlements.
The man who crawled over the barricade was an older fellow, wearing the insignia of a high-ranking non-com. He obviously had a lot of Native American ancestry.
He came alone, carrying his truce flag in his right hand and a pistol by two fingers in his left hand.
Voukli went to meet him; Ambros scrambled up and followed her, warily.
‘Sergeant-major Indigo Valois,” he said as he came in range: “I apologize for the stupidity of my superior officers. I will be pleased to take possession of the xxxxxxxx gifts you have offered.” He spoke in a degraded version of Rational French, with Iriquois words mixed in: “We are suffering *************** bravely. We (unpronounceable) gladly.” He turned the handle of his pistol to Voukli.
She turned it around, barrel down, and handed it back: “I don’t want your surrender. Take what we are offering, and begin your retreat south and east...”
Ambros sighed. He did not, however, activate the safety on his rifle. He placed his back to Voukli’s and watched the horizon.
The next day was as full as any other day in his life. Nevertheless Ambros tore himself away from mundane details and pleasurable pastimes and headed out to Veneta to deal with a task too long delayed. He entered the café in Veneta with a specific mission in mind; he must have seemed more grim than usual.
"You okay, Mr. Rothakis?" Megan set down his chai, looking worried.
He smiled, schooling himself to a gentler aspect: "Yeah, it's just online trolls. I need to put a couple people in their places."
Her face turned doubtful: "That never works for me," she said, ruefully.
"Yeah, me neither, ordinarily. This time I know some passwords..." He left her to contemplate that as she went back to the counter.
He opened the New Pismo, activated a search program, and began to surf: 'Here's Chief Black's password file...that's a connection to his personal machine...shit...'
He sat back, looking at the three-D display with a chagrined expression.
"How in Hades did he find those photos?" he muttered. "He must have had a clue to my former name..." He stopped muttering, suddenly cold: 'First thing is to get rid of the evidence...'
He began tracing each photo back to its online source and deleting it.
He used the New Pismo's (very sophisticated) facial recognition programs, and slowly but surely deleted Carlo Scharffen from the Webz.
"Fortunately,' he thought, 'I was not an early adopter of the tech devices available in the Nineties. The few photos of me as Carlo in those days are all old tech, and had to be scanned in by my friends. Mostly SCA persona, and labeled as such. Those can stay up, for now.'
He paged back to Chief Black's accounts: 'Chief,' he pondered: 'if you'd minded your own affairs and left me be, this wouldn't have happened to you. Oh, well.' He picked out the files that concerned him, traced each one to its backups and linked them.
One by one he hit "select all" and then "delete/overwrite". One by one Black's files that concerned Ambros/Carlo vanished into a haze of ones and zeroes.
'That oughta do it.' He contemplated the advantages of Commonwealth technology: "I could never have done that, back in the day. My friend Hacker Girl might have been able to, but she'd have charged me at least fifty grand for the job.' He patted the top of the New Pismo's screen, saying: "Good machine."
It beeped at him, and he stared at it suspiciously.
He contemplated further action: ‘I think an insurance policy is in order.’ He used the Chief’s passwords to hack into the department’s central memory. Rather than talk to the machine, he set it to receive commands from the keyboard. He typed: ‘Give me access to the whole set of personnel files...separate out any file with three or more citizen complaints listed, whether there was disciplinary action taken or not...load those files into an overfile...download that overfile to my desktop...set up a dead man switch, publish the overfile on any Monday if I don’t use the password to stop it...make that password: ‘blackmail’.’ He checked the spelling: ‘Good enough,’ he thought.
He copied the overfile again, and sent it to his memory cache at the Library in Athino. He shut that link back down as soon as the Library’s machine acknowledged receipt: ‘I don’t like to connect to the Commonwealth from here,’ he pondered. ‘It looks like a secure communication, but it makes me nervous...trust your gut, old man...’
He used Commonwealth tech in Line Seventeen, though. ‘There are huge advantages. There’s almost no chance that anyone can hack back to me with this machine as my entry point. They can’t hack what they can’t see.’ He spoke quietly, so as not to draw the attention of the crowd: “Search all Line Seventeen news sources for the usual suspects...”
For once, something popped up: “Oh, shit,” he said, frowning; he tapped keys and sent mental commands, and got a translation from Spanish to American:
“The infamous terrorist Jaime de Cordova, once thought dead, has been seen in Guatemala City, sources in the Policia Ciudades tell us. The Federales are thought to be closing in on his hideout, which is rumored to be on the south side of the Ciudad del Sol. Residents of that part of the city are cautioned to watch out for him, and report his presence to the authorities...here are numbers to call, and a web address for the Federales...armed and extremely dangerous... ”
‘All rumors, so far,’ he thought. “Let’s hope it’s a false alarm; Jaime ought to be a continent away from G-City, long ago.’ He reminded himself to get an RNA course under his belt, soon, to supplement his hard-won but woefully inadequate Spanish language skills. ‘No, moron...put that on the to-do list. You’ve forgotten it twice already...’ He typed it in, cursing his lack of time.
He checked in on the cop who had shot at him during the Mainstage operation. His eyes narrowed, and he frowned: ‘Someone’s been messing with old Lt. Roger.’ He pondered a moment, then very gently poked at the records: “Untraceable from this Line,” said the mechanical voice, vibrating in his ear. He poked some more, and saw that Grandson’s bank accounts had suffered a continuous stream of hacks, always with the same object: ‘Somebody, and I bet I know who, has been seeing to it that Roger Grandson’s checking account is constantly just short enough to get his debit card rejected. She’s not stealing any money, just moving it to his savings and retirement accounts, then back again. Very clever, Magistri.’ He reflected upon this, and was glad she was on his side. He also decided that he could leave Lt. Grandson to her: ‘Voukli is a lot more expert in online revenge tactics than I am...’
Later that same day, Ambros dropped in to USIT Six and looked around at the devastated landscape. He stood about halfway up a medium-high ridge, which undulated along, echoing the turns and bends of the river in the valley below. In the far distance, just visible on the horizon, he saw the remains of New York City. The Big Apple still smoked, in spite of the snowy cold of nuclear winter. Nearby, the blackened remains of smaller towns stuck up out of deep snow, burned by raiders and reavers and other arsonists.
He grunted in disgust. He grabbed the handle of the two-wheeled garden cart that he’d brought that morning, and began to drag it along, pacing slowly up the gentle slope towards a walled compound on the nearest hilltop.
He turned the last curve and came in sight of the front gate. The place was sturdily fortified: the walls were an amalgam of heavy timbers, junk cars, several kinds of fencing, and some garage doors set in poured concrete. He slowed even more: after a moment, an arrow struck the ground very close to his feet. It quivered there, threateningly.
He turned the wheels crosswise to the slope and took another step forward. More arrows flew, some hitting the cart.
He opened his hands and called out: “C’mon, folks, this outfit is bullet and blade proof. Your little crossbows are not gonna hurt me. I got some relief supplies for you here, but if you insist on being assholes, I can find some other deserving group...Eh?” He kept his voice cheerful, anyway, though the Commonwealth Commando armor made him look exceedingly threatening.
After a long delay, a voice came from the gate: “Okay, sorry. We’ve had a bad time of it.”
“I expect you have. And I do look scary, I guess.”
“Yah. How you want to do this?”
He gave an exaggerated shrug, visible to the survivors even through the armor:
“Up to you, I guess. You can open the gate and I’ll haul it in. You can send someone out. Or I can leave the wagon here and disappear.”
There followed another long pause; Ambros waited patiently, meditating: “Calm; relax; breathe.”
At length a woman’s face appeared over the wall: “No offense, but we’d rather you just left the wagon.”
“I understand. I got you some food, seeds, tools, and some medicine. There are military-style slap patches with drugs that can reverse radiation sickness...”
“We got a ex-Navy Seal in here, and a couple other vets. They’ll know how to use those.”
He nodded: “Okay. I’ll just meander off, now.”
“Will you be back?” The woman seemed distressed: “We could use any help you can give us. And I’m really sorry that Ed and all shot at you, I mean that.”
“It’s all right, really,” he said, slapping the breastplate of his armor: “I came prepared. And yes, I’ll be back: I do have others I want to help, though, so it will be a while. Okay?”
“Beggars and Choosers,” she said, resignedly. She vanished behind the wall.
He saluted Warrior-style, then turned and strode away.
He spent the rest of that day repeating the process in several parts of the US in Line Six. Some of the compounds he approached shot directly at him, thinking him a raider of some sort; others welcomed the supplies he brought without any violence. By the end of the day he’d seen the distant remains of a dozen erstwhile American cities in Line Six: Cleveland, DC, Seattle, and others. ‘Miami,’ he thought: ‘That was a weird one. Foot-deep snow and downed palm trees, the Everglades frozen solid, people who didn’t even have coats, or blankets...’ He resolved to take such things to his chosen refuges in the South. ‘Next trip,’ he promised himself.
He sat at the desktop computer in his office at the Salon, making arrangements: Every week, a dozen carts to be delivered to his nursery by a local farm supply store, food and seeds from various vendors delivered to the Salon. “Every Wednesday morning my calendar pings me, I pick up medicines from the Commonwealth Line, load up the latest batch of carts, check on the survivors via MPS-Shifter, and deliver the goods. I should be able to get that down to two hours work, eventually.” He thought about it for a minute, then resolved to deliver the same load, minus radiation meds, to each of the several homeless camps he had contacted in the swamps west of Eugene. “Three hours work, then. I’ll make it fit in, somehow.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World
It was quite a large and lively group of them who descended on Café Xenosenos later that day: Danilos and Ambros had initiated the gathering, to discuss their various educational and propaganda activities, in the Lines where they were or had been resident. Skavo arrived shortly after they did; Arrenji and Voukli appeared soon. Two other BWG reps had come along with Danilos. They stayed silent for most of the meeting, but they recorded everything, using laptops and flying cameras. The Postal Guild rep from the previous day’s meeting was there: Voukli introduced her as Magistri Prazini.
Ambros reflected on her name: ‘Prasina is the word ‘green’ as an adjective. I’m guessing Prazini is a nickname, from her eyes and hair.’ Prazini from
Postal had very bright green eyes and iridescent green hair.
“I’m not sure we have any dye in my Line that would create such an amazing hair color,” he said, smiling at her.
“We don’t have any dye that would do this, either. Nothing that would leave the hair unburned. I had a genetic modification.”
“Oh,” he said, taken aback.
“Yes,” she added: “as soon as I had the Status and could find a tech that would do the job. I just always wanted my hair to match my eyes...” She shrugged, smiling back at him.
“It’s quite striking.”
“Thank you. Your partners are not here today...”
He made rueful face: “All busy, in Line Seventeen. Gotta keep up our ‘business’ affairs there. I’ll fill them in when I get a chance.”
Danilos said: “I really hope we can work out some way to speed the education and propaganda process in our Lines. In my Line, and the other ‘Bushite’ Lines especially. When I fled Line Eight, the whole planet was on the verge of fascism. It hasn’t gotten any better since I left. I mean, sure, I can re-publish your e-mag in my Line, that’ll be a start. I can do it from the Library here, I won’t even have to risk a trip ‘home’. But how can we move faster? We really need accelerated change, if we’re gonna save the USITs.“
Ambros got serious: “I’m open to suggestions. It’s a damn complex problem, though.”
Prazini said: “I don’t see why. In Commonwealth Lines, and in our Allied Syndicalist Lines, it wouldn’t be that hard. Just...” she frowned, shaking her head: “Get the facts out, tell the truth, right? That’s what Information and Data Guild does. Can’t people work things out for themselves?”
“Well,” said Ambros, pausing. “I’ll only speak for my own Line, of course. It’s not that simple. The media that inform the common people are so corrupted by the elites who ‘own’ them that it’s about impossible to get uncorrupted facts out into people’s hands. The various factions of the ruling class control the several ‘networks’, and own the magazines and newspapers. The existence of the Webz, and the chat rooms used by rebels of various types, that makes it possible to co-ordinate responses and pass along a little of the truth. But anyone who disagrees with the dominant paradigm is pretty much drowned out.”
“Yup,” said Danilos: “In my Line as well. And then, there’s also the whole ‘divide and rule’ strategy.”
Arrenji nodded: “As in race, gender, and age differences, exploited to prevent any movement from forming.”
“Ethnicities, too.” Ambros smiled ruefully: “Try banging your head against that one someday.”
“I know,” said Danilos. “I know exactly what you mean.”
Voukli was a little frustrated: “How can people be so foolish? Can you be more specific?”
Ambros and Danilos glanced at one another: “You go,” said Ambros.
Danilos nodded: “Ambros and I had a little talk about this, last night on the War Guilds’ ‘barbarian chatter’ site. It’s like this...”
“Let’s use the Iranian example,” Ambros suggested.
“Okay, cool. So one of the nation-states in all of the US Imperial Lines is called Iran. It is a distant successor state to the Persian Empire, which is far enough back that pretty much all Lines, Commonwealth included, have a version of it.
“So, in USITs that country is overwhelmingly Islamic.”
“A religion. That would complicate things.” Voukli was nodding.
Ambros said: “The vast majority of people in USITs have one religion or another. The Iranians are mostly Shia Muslims.”
The ’wealthers all frowned or grumbled at this. Arrenji just grinned: “Gotta start where we are, folks.”
Danilos said: “So, the USITs are called that because that nation, the United States, is the dominant Imperial power in those Timelines.”
“To one degree or another,” Ambros interjected.
“As a result,” Danilos continued: “people from all over the planet tend to migrate to the continental US, whenever they can. Most people see the US as the best place to live, among a lot of worse choices.
“There is a community of Iranian immigrants in the US, in all USIT Lines.”
“We should probably clarify,” said Ambros: “A group of communities.”
“You mean factions within the community?” Prazini asked.
“Yes, many.” Danilos shrugged, hands at shoulder level: “I’m only going on about this as an example, but it’s a rather good one.”
“Okay, continue, please,” said Voukli.
“Right,” said Ambros: “Danilos’ Line and mine share this part of our History. In the fifties of the twentieth century, in our Lines’ calendar, the people of Iran elected a government which began doing things that the US government disapproved of.”
“The short version of ensuing events looks like this,” said Danilos: “The US and British espionage departments staged a coup, and put the previous government back in power.
“The previous ruler was a Monarch, called Shah Reza Pahlavi. So in addition to a trickle of economic refugees, who had been reaching the US for decades before, there was a wave of political refugees, opponents of the Shah, who arrived in a bunch about then.” Danilos looked at Ambros.
Ambros said: “Twenty years later, more or less, a revolution occurred in Iran, and the rebels drove out the Shah. So...” Ambros waited.
“A new wave of immigrants to the US, supporters of the Shah,” said Voukli, not disappointing him.
“Yes,” he said, a little bitterly: “Also, opponents of the Shah who also opposed the new government, which was—is—called an ‘Islamic Republic’.”
“Ugh.” Voukli snarled.
“I agree,” said Ambros. “Anyway, with all of the above in mind, imagine trying to talk to that ‘community’. Royalists, socialists who were supporters of the elected government, supporters of the current government, dissenters to all three groups, and three generations of Iranian-Americans...”
“Some of whom agree with their parents and grandparents...” Danilos grinned wickedly.
“And some of whom don’t, taking opposing sides to their families, or no side at all...” Ambros said. “Also, kids who have adopted some or all of the hedonism that dominates American society...”
“And some reformist Socialists, or Communists, or Anarchists, and so on: all the factions of the Left in America. Even a few Objectivists.” Danilos began shaking his head: “Nearly all of whom think that what is happening in Iran is far more important than any global crisis that may be building, right beneath their noses.”
“We could,” Ambros said, “infiltrate that community. BWG or Postal Guild could find someone who could learn Farsi under RNA, and speak American with the correct accent, and appear to be an Iranian immigrant.”
“But such a person could only speak to one of those factions at a time...” Voukli was getting it.
Danilos continued: “Right. Now here’s the real rub: Nearly every country on Earth is similarly represented in America, with similar disagreements among the populations. Other advanced capitalist countries, like Canada or the European hegemony, have the same problems, at a lower level. The State Capitalist economies, like China and Cuba and Vietnam, they control people with similar divide and rule strategies, but they are less hesitant to simply jail or kill dissenters. The same with the outright fascists, like the Latin American dictatorships.”
“And of course,” said Ambros: “the same extreme polarizations exist in American society, as a whole. Danilos and I have been talking to my Affinity group, my family, and we think it is completely impractical to try to speak specifically to any one faction. We need to find a way to communicate with a lot of people, and say things such that many of those people come to agree with us, at a very basic level.”
“As bad as it is, in our Lines, we can’t rush this: the basic educational effort has to do its job before we can go forward,” Danilos said this with some reluctance.
“But you also dare not delay,” said Skavo: “Save where delay cannot be helped.”
“Exactly,” said Danilos.
“So anyway,” said Ambros: “Keep this all in mind. Whatever we are doing in US Imperial Lines, it has to start as ‘generally relevant’; we need very basic home truths, which apply to people’s everyday lives. And people’s jobs are, generally speaking, the source of a lot of the stress and nastiness in their lives. So...I will be contacting the Eugene branch of the IWW. The most sophisticated Syndicalist thinkers in Seventeen are members of that group, as I once was, and I hear that they have begun organizing workplaces again.”
Danilos nodded slowly: “I think that’s also true in my Line. I never thought of reaching out to them.” He shook his head, then: “Wobblies,” he said, grinning in faux alarm: “’One Big Union For All the Working Class...’ What the hell next?”
“Whoever and whatever can actually help you,” said Skavo.
“A different kind of coalition,” said Ambros, grinning: “Pragmatic idealists.”
A long silence followed: drinks got sipped, snacks got eaten.
Arrenji cleared her throat: “I have something to say here.”
Everyone stayed silent and looked at her. Ambros glanced around: respect, awe, interest, and fear showed in every face but his, in different proportions.
She said: “Sacred Band has scientists looking into all aspects of the Multiverse, as we know it. There are levels of reality that you and I and all of our allies and enemies do not—cannot—really understand.
“One thing to keep in mind, though: a...’principle’ or ‘law’ or ‘theory’...those aren’t the right words, or even the right concepts...but there is an apparent phenomenon that SB researchers call ‘sardonic synchronicity’. The short form of it is, what happens in one Line will have an effect on all similar Lines, lessening as the Timelines diverge. Not always the effect you’d expect...that’s why we call it Sardonic.”
Voukli continued the thought: “So every little bit you do, in USIT Eight, or in Seventeen, will affect the other USIT Lines. The more good you do, the more your efforts will be amplified.”
Arrenji added: “The disaster in USIT Six will affect other US Imperial Lines, as well: and probably badly, from our point of view.” She shrugged at Danilos:
“Eight is in for a tough time; Line Seventeen may barely notice.”
Danilos nodded: “Gotcha.” He raised his chin, pursed his lips, and frowned: “Sardonic synchronicity...I wonder how that could be. Perhaps...” He trailed off into computer jargon and mathematics. The other two Black Warrior Guild reps began to speak to him in the same ‘language’.
As the rest of the party broke up, Ambros looked back. He saw the three of them deep in conversation, scribbling on scraps of paper, handsigning, and sending electronic messages back and forth among themselves. He grinned: ‘Happy is the rebellion that has such techs on its side!’
Ambros dropped in to his usual landing spot near his Salon. He strolled quickly along, smiling at passers-by. He cut diagonally across his parking lot, and approached the door on the west side of the building.
He keyed the door open and said: “Office lights on.” He made a beeline for the light.
He called up the desktop computer: “On,” he said: “Phone mode.” It buzzed a couple times, then gave him his cue.
“Peter Morley, Dan Samuelson,” he said.
“Together?” The machine had a distinctly artificial voice; that had become his preference after a couple of incidents of AI activity by his technology.
He said: “If you can.”
“Dhulyéna.”
‘”Working,”’ he thought.
He stripped off his cloak and hat and loosened the laces on his black Free Walker boots. These were knee-high and made of extremely heavy elk hide. Each boot had a hidden sheath, with a haftless knife concealed therein. He touched each one in turn. He sighed.
Deputy Dan’s voice came over the speakers: “What’s up?”
“Hold a moment...”
Former Eugene Police Sergeant Peter Morley came on the line: “Ambros?”
“Okay, listen up you two: somebody tried to run me off the road this morning. I want...”
Dan interrupted: “You making an official report, to me?”
Ambros hesitated: “Yes,” he said, at length: “Yes, I believe I am.”
“Okay, are you at home?”
“No, I’m at the Salon. See ya?”
“On my way...”
“I’ll just nip over there, too.” Ambros could hear Morley shuffling papers; since Pete had quit the police department—gotten fired, really—he’d been working for Jerry Mallory at St. Valentine’s, a Catholic Charities division that ran thrift stores and recycling pseudo-businesses, as well as homeless outreach and a dozen other do-good enterprises.
He sat quietly, pondering. He began to meditate: “Calm,” he said aloud on each inward breath, and “Relax,” on each exhale. After a few minutes he rose and put the kettle on. Then he went to the front door, where he keyed the place open and allowed Dan to enter. Morley drove up in a beat-up 1970s Dodge with St. Val’s stickers on the windows.
When they were seated and had mugs of tea in hand, Ambros said: “Just a minute...” and made a series of handsigns and keystrokes to the desktop; in a moment, the voice of Detective Sergeant Barkley came over the speakers:
“Mr. Rothakis. What can I do for you?”
“For now, just listen.” He described that morning’s encounter, including the size and color of Big Green. “I found this stuck inside the wheel well under the front fender of Luisa’s truck,” he finished, dropping the GPS and its battery on the table.
Dan had been taking notes on a legal pad; he looked at those items and cursed mildly.
Morley shook his head: “That’s property of the EPD,” he said sadly. He spoke to the air: “Marta, we’re looking at a Eugene Police Department GPS tracker, pulled from Mr. Rothakis’ truck.”
“Oh, Hell,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Dan: “And that green two-ton truck sounds like Brad Dillon’s. I don’t like that combination at all.”
Peter and Barkley made noises of agreement.
After a pause, Ambros said: “Okay. Let’s assume you are correct. Who is Brad Dillon, and why did he and two other men try to kill me?”
“Bradley J. Dillon is—or I should say, is believed to be—head of the local branch of Posse Comitatus. Ever hear of them?” Dan looked grim.
“I have,” said Ambros. “Their branch in Cleveland killed a couple of my friends. That was in ’74, before anybody even knew they existed. Anyone in law enforcement, I mean.”
“Huh.” Dan looked quizzical.
Ambros shrugged: “We knew they existed. We were anarchists. Who would we have reported their activities to? Who would believe us?”
“Good point,” said Morley.
“Okay,” said Ambros, after a few moments: “I know what I’m up against, now.”
Morley said: “Barbaric neo-nazi extremists, who have a passion for secrecy. What will you do about them?”
Ambros grinned: “You don’t wanna know, Pete. But...” he rolled his chair over to the desktop and began a search: “Now that I know who they are, I can probably get you some info that you can use.” He typed, activating Shifter and laptop; he waited, then typed again. With the weight of that much Commonwealth tech leaning on the Webz, he soon had what he wanted. He scrolled rapidly through the file; then he highlighted a page and hit the print button.
The printer under the tea shelf hummed and clattered; Ambros pulled four sheets out. “One for each of us,” he said. “I’ll get this to Barkley before too long.”
“Jesus, Ambros, this is a membership list!” Dan was amazed.
“Yeah. I have really good information tech at my fingertips, nowadays. If they’d stayed offline and not given in to the temptations of modern social media, I couldn’t have found that. But that guy Dillon has an encrypted MyFace page, and my machine used that to find his computers and link to them. He has a bunch of data in a ‘secret file’ on his home desktop. I copied the whole file, if you want it.”
“I do want it,” said Barkley: “I want...”
“Sergeant...” said Morley.
“What?”
“Hannah d’Angelo is on this list.” Morley spoke to Ambros: “Miss d’Angelo is Chief Black’s executive secretary.”
“Oh.” Ambros pondered: “Do you suppose that the Chief of Police...knows that she’s in this group?”
“I don’t think so,” said Morley, uncertainly. He perused the paper in his hands: “Fourteen men on this list, and eight women: all wives or girlfriends of the men. Including Miss Hannah.”
“Miller and Thompson are both on this list,” said Dan.
Morley said: “That kinda figures. Those two are so bent...” He laughed, and said to Ambros: “Miss d’Angelo is Miller’s wife, and Dillon’s girlfriend. Miller does not know that his wife is also banging Dillon.”
Ambros’ eyes narrowed: “We could maybe use that to sow dissension in the group.”
“Ya think? I’ll push the rumor harder if you want...” Dan seemed amused.
Ambros nodded: “Fire away. I’ll get you video evidence, you let me know when to release it.” He rose and stretched: “I, however, have some preparations to make.”
“What are you up to?” Barkley asked.
“Well, nothing you’d want to know too much about, frankly. I will report on this...situation...” he waved the membership list: “...to my invisible support group, and then...” He laughed, then said: “Then I need to locate a couple of pickup trucks.”
He shut down the line to Barkley; then he escorted the two men out. After that, he sat a while making plans. He tapped the MPS and called home to Rose House: “Hey there, sweethearts. I got bad news and good news...”
The next morning, Ambros dropped in to the Country Fair site. As soon as he was there, he Saltated sideways to the Alcatraz Quiet Timeline. Rain beat down on his hat and cloak.
The Alcatraz Quiet Line had that appellation because the Hellenic Commonwealth had a base at the old prison on Alcatraz Island in that Line. It was Quiet because...”Because there was no more life native to this Line,” Ambros said out loud.
He walked slowly over to a booth, or the remains of one. He opened an extra large umbrella and sheltered under it, waiting. It was raining too hard for him to clearly see the area, but he knew what it was like: all the plants dead, the animals mummified, silent except for the sound of wind and water.
“Nothing rots, even in the damp, when there are no bacteria, no fungi. But...”
He realized that, despite the briefness of their visits, the many different ’Wealthers who’d passed through the place must have shed bits of bacteria over the years.
“That would all build up, after a while,” he said quietly, contemplating. He took a breath, nostrils flared and mouth open; he smelled and tasted just the faintest hint of rot, as though the dead world were waking to a hint of biological activity. “Hmmm. Wow.”
‘I knew this could happen,’ he mused: ‘It already started in San Francisco. I guess...I guess there must be seeds, a few of them...yeah, remember how verdant the Ohio River Valley is, must have been a whole plant biome there, waiting for the moment when we showed up and killed the Phage. But this? This means the whole planet is waking up, bit by bit.’
Voukli dropped in, wearing a raincoat and rubber boots. She strode over and huddled under the umbrella with him. Arrenji appeared, similarly garbed, and did likewise.
They faced inward, their heads sheltered, rain pounding off of their backs.
The Magistriae gazed at him blankly, showing no emotion. He spoke:
“I asked you here so I could tell you about a nightmare scenario that I dreamed up. I don’t think it wise to broadcast this idea on the War Guild sites, and I don’t quite trust the Sacred Band computer system to hold this close enough. I’m kinda regretting mentioning anything about my fears, the other day at the meeting. I hope folks will just let it pass, if we don’t bring the thing to their attention again.”
The women glanced at each other. Arrenji said: “It must be pretty scary to shake you up like this. Spill it. I’ll hold it as confidential, and I’ll let you know if I feel it must become public.”
Voukli said: “Same here.”
“Right. I’ve done a little digging. I have found a small—a very small—amount of evidence to suggest that I’m right. I’ll send you links through the SB Kyklo, so you can check those out. I feel safe in doing that, as long as I don’t explain why I sent them. After I tell you this, you’ll know what to look for.
“I’ve become mortally scared that the Emperor Jean is hatching a really big attack. Bigger than we’ve ever seen, bigger than anyone has ever planned for.”
“The breeding camps suggest that very plan,” Voukli pointed out: “but we’ve been disrupting them significantly, and it’d be at least fifteen years before the slave army would be ready.”
He shook his head: “I’m thinking something sooner, and wider. Not as many troops, but aimed across a lot of Lines.”
He started to explain his fears. As he proceeded through the outline, Voukli
and Arrenji got progressively grimmer. When he finished, they both shook their heads, dismayed.
“Wow.” Arrenji looked down, brow furrowed.
“I agree,” said Voukli: “Wow.”
He shrugged: “Take a look at the documents I’ll send you. Postal has not yet seen the pattern, or else they are keeping quiet, too.”
“Uh-huh.” Arrenji looked up again: “You got any ideas about counter-measures?”
“Yes. I think we can use Vree and Clotarde and their groups to slow the process down, without tipping anything to them. They are gung-ho for sabotage and assassination for their own reasons. They don’t need to know our reasons for the targets we aim them at.”
“Okay, that makes sense,” Arrenji said. “But even if we slow them down, the attack is still coming. If you’re right about this. What do we do then?”
Voukli spoke: “There are not enough troops in any of our Allied Lines to effectively combat this...” She grimaced.
“Nightmare,” Arrenji said. “Don’t take this wrong, Spathos. But I really hope you are wrong this time.”
“Yeah, me too. Hope isn’t enough, though. I want us to prepare.”
“But how?”
“Sun tzu. Sun Pin. Sherman, Patton, Epamanondas. And Lee, for a bad example. I put it all in a paper document.”
He handed them each a copy: “This is just an outline. The concepts, especially Deep Flanking, need to be translated into ‘Multiversal’ terms. I’m working on that. The closer we get to l’Iriquois’ D-day, the more people will have to know about this. But for right now, I think it should be just us.”
Voukli shuddered: “I agree.”
Arrenji handsigned her concurrence: “When the nightmare leaves this circle, it should go first to Skavo, and then to your Affinity group.”
Voukli and Ambros handsigned agreement. Arrenji nodded, then turned into the rain and walked away. The usual pop of air as she vanished sounded muffled and indistinct.
Voukli stared at him, Comanche inscrutability in evidence. “Have you talked to your strimeniae recently? In private, I mean?”
“Not since...four days. Going home tonight.”
She nodded: “Okay. See you at Alcatraz, Fourthday.”
“I’ll be there.”
She strolled over to the drop-in point and vanished. He smiled, a little weakly: “That was strange, even by Voukli standards,” he muttered: “I wonder what news is waiting for me at home?”
That afternoon, a sweaty dirty Ambros sat in a big comfy Morris chair in the living room at Rose House. The chair had been a spare, kept in the corner of the office that Marie ran her various businesses from. Now it was, apparently, his.
Kim came in and stopped: “You’re bleeding!” She walked over to him: “What have you been doing?”
“Oh, I was tending the barberry in the back yard...”
“I didn’t know we had any barberry back there.”
“Neither did I, until I cleared the brambles and bindweed off it. There’s a gate in the fence back there, too. I got the thorny stuff out of the gateway, and then wove a bunch of the barberry suckers back into the main plants. Makes a good barrier hedge, for anyone who might try to climb over the fence.”
“Good,” she said: “Not all of our neighbors are civilized, you know.”
“No shit. I have to get a lock for that gate, and some lumber to reinforce it.”
“Don’t you think you should get cleaned up? Some of those scratches look bad...”
“It’s all surface damage. I figured to let it all clot, then shower. Of course, it scabbed over half an hour ago and I’ve been sitting here ever since, thinking about the rest of my day.”
Marie and Luisa came in then, and expressed concern about his wounds.
“Don’t worry, I can’t get a bacterial infection. The Meds in the Commonwealth have been working overtime on my immune system and clotting factors and all that. Standard for Commonwealth citizens, you know. And as Sacred Band, I get extra stuff, like really fast healing of wounds and such. These scratches won’t even be visible tomorrow.”
“Oh,” said Luisa.
“What are you doing this afternoon?” asked Marie.
“Scheduled for a mission to USIT Six,” he replied.
“That’s what you are all worried about?” Kim poked him, smiling.
“Yeah. Supposed to be a humanitarian mission to get food and medicine to those soldiers that ATL Prime abandoned in Six.”
“You think there will be a fight?”
“That’s kinda up to them, but they are sick with radiation and under a lot of stress. We are going in armed and armored, but...”
After a pause, Luisa said: “...but anything can happen, even really bad stuff.”
He nodded: “At any time. So...I fret a little, and I work out contingencies, and I know there will be a bunch of back-up, and then, eventually, I go do the job.” He glanced at the clock: “I have ten more minutes, our time. I guess I’ll shower at the Command Complex before I armor up.”
Luisa said: “Um. When you, when we Jump to the Commonwealth Line, it’s almost the same time of day, and time moves at the same speed in the two Lines, right?”
“Correct.”
“But...we’re Jumping to Athens. In Greece. Shouldn’t it be a different time of day there? Like...”
Ambros grinned: “Exactly ten USIT hours later. Right. And it would be, except for something that Averos calls ‘Timeline Precession’.”
“Pre...cession.” Kim had the distracted look of a person hearing voices; in her case, knowledge imparted by RNA induction. “Right. I see that. It’s like a twist in the continuum...at the nine-dimensional level...and it happens to be ten of our hours exactly.”
“A coincidence?” asked Marie.
“A very convenient one,” said Ambros. “Some Lines are as much as twenty or as little as five hours off Commonwealth Standard. Those numbers are a pain in the ass to deal with.”
“Uh-huh,” said Luisa.
He stood up and began to stretch and twist, limbering his body for action: “I saw Voukli this morning. She mentioned the three of you.”
“Ah,” said Kim. “Did she make a pass?”
Ambros boggled: “Why do you think she would?”
Marie snickered: “Because she asked us for permission to.”
Luisa said: “And we granted that permission.”
“Oh.” He shook his head, hard: “The circumstances were not conducive to foreplay. Or flirtation. I expect she decided to wait for a less rainy and depressing environment.”
“Well,” said Luisa: “What will your answer be, when she asks?”
The three of them sat, each in her favorite chair, gazing at him. He looked across the room, over their heads, distracted. After a bit, he said: “I’ll have to think about that. I expect that she’d be...different. As a partner, I mean. She’s pretty badass, you know.”
“She is,” said Kim.
Marie smiled wickedly: “Does she intimidate you?”
“You bet she does.” He frowned, thoughtful: “I guess I’d better start carrying some condoms around with me.”
Kim raised an eyebrow: “Whatever for?”
The women all laughed at him. After a few seconds, he laughed, too: “Of course. How could anyone in the Commonwealth have or pass on an STD?”
“It’s better than that...” Marie trailed off.
Ambros raised his chin: “Oh.” Triggered by the conversation, RNA knowledge filled his mind: “They have a contagious anti-viral, anti-bacterial...and anti-prion medical treatment that kills about thirty known STDs...Most of them I never even heard of!” The implications of that sank in on him.
Luisa got it, then: “Have sex with Voukli, and you’ll never get an STD, ever?”
“And as soon as we sleep with him, the same will be true for us...” Kim smiled slyly: “With just a little—effort—we can spread that immunity through this Line, as well.”
Ambros sat there, boggled. The women laughed at him, again.
Then he riposted: “Will she be asking me about you soon, Kim?”
She blushed: “Maybe. What will you say?”
"If the desire is requited, then follow your bliss.”
She grew even pinker, then laughed: “I will. I do believe I will.”
Ambros shrugged his armor into place, hopping up and down a bit to settle the pieces.
He wore his Sacred Band Commando armor, and carried a ‘rifle’ as well as his usual handgun and APS. The long gun worked on the same principle as the pistol.
Averos had explained the mechanism to him, with a firearm that was partly disassembled: “This generator is powered directly by the power module, or ‘battery’.” Averos pointed at various bits as he spoke: “It concentrates a rather large amount of energy into a small space, thus creating a large but short-term particle. Then this very small magnetic cannon fires the pellet at the target. The pellet is not stable, so it breaks down within a couple minutes at the longest. But in the time it exists, it does a lot of damage to anything it hits or passes through. And Commonwealth firearms are nearly silent, by nature, since there is no explosive involved. There is sometimes a sonic boom, with arms that are set to impart maximum speed to the pellet. But even that is not very loud, because the pellet is so small.”
Ambros exited the locker room, carrying his helmet. That was made of high-tech ceramic-plastic-metallic alloys, as were all of the plates and scales of the armor.
Ambros found an elevator: “Aníchte,” he said, and the door slid open. He entered.
He handsigned at the control panel, and the car began to drop. It carried him much deeper than he usually went, heading for the sixth floor below ground.
The elevator car stopped, then moved sideways at high speed, pressing him against one wall. The car slowed at last, and stopped; the door opened.
He disembarked into a huge room, the size of a 747 hangar: three stories tall, with workstations all around the walls and an enormous launch/landing pad in the center of the room. Women and men in tan tunics and trousers maneuvered a crate into place on the pad, then cleared the area. A bell rang, seven times; the crate disappeared with a very loud bang, as air collapsed into the space where it once stood.
Ambros looked around: he saw Voukli, armored but unhelmed. He steered in her direction.
“All right soldiers,” said a harsh voice, slightly amplified by the ‘radios’ in their helms: “We got a mixed bunch today, so everybody pay close attention here.”
They sat in a half-circle of very comfy chairs surrounding a podium, where the speaker stood.
‘Black Warrior Guild Magistri,’ he thought: ‘That’s impressive.’ He put his helm on, for a moment: The tag above her head said: “Magistri Ellisi’. He doffed the helm again and listened.
She continued as soon as everyone was seated: “This will be a Black Warrior Guild operation, so listen closely: SB and non-combatants, the sign for
trouble is seven beeps, close together.” She demonstrated with a handsign. “Boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop,” went the speakers in their helms.
“Non-combatants, if you hear that, take cover or hit the ground. Once you are down, head for the crates: they are proof against ATL slug-throwers, and we can Saltate them out of harm’s way in a flash. SB, if there’s a situation bad enough to trigger that alarm, do as you see fit. BWG has SOP in place, so you can follow their lead, or act alone. Your call.
“Now, Black Warrior Guild has separated the warring sides by force and trickery, so we may hope not to wind up in any crossfire. But there’s no telling how the ATL troops will react to our presence, when we appear in their sights and on their flanks. We’ve leafleted their HQ and front lines, and told them that we’re bringing supplies for them, but the front line soldiers don’t necessarily believe it. Keep your eyes and ears open, girls and boys.” She grinned: “Blacks and SB will drop in first, non-combatants will follow with the freight. Helms on! Let’s do this!”
“ARCHÍZENUME!” the Blacks all hollered. Ambros donned his helmet and strode off toward the troop transport pad.
He and Voukli joined a dozen BWG soldiers on the pad: “First group” came the announcement, which echoed around the room: “Prepare!”
They all unshipped their rifles and checked the safeties: ‘Ready to fire,’ he thought, as he looked at his. They formed up in a circle, weapons pointed upwards.
The bell rang. He heard six strokes before the Controller Saltated them.
They dropped in to a devastated landscape. He barely noticed the usual dizziness. “This is British Columbia?” he asked, appalled. Where an old growth forest had stood, not a tree was upright.
“Yeah,” said Voukli. “We’re six leagues from the Gate. Where the Gate was, I mean.” She and Ambros both moved as quickly as possible for the nearest available cover, a pile of gigantic pine and fir trees fallen in a heap. The Black Warrior Guild contingent moved into position at one end of the pile. Ambros peered through the interlaced branches of the trees, noting that they were entirely stripped of needles. He could see some rough fortifications of logs and mud stretching away from him, with flags of the French-Iriquois Confederacy flying at intervals along them.
“So,” he said, sliding down onto his knees, as Voukli did the same: “In my Line’s measures, we are twelve miles east of Ground Zero, the Gate near Vancouver.”
“Right,” she said. “All those soldier-boys over there,” she waved at the line, “are surely suffering from radiation sickness.”
“And they’d be in worse shape if the wind wasn’t out of the south,” said Ambros. Voukli indicated agreement.
Ambros breathed deeply, and made a face. All around them lay bodies of men and animals, some showing signs of gunshot or shrapnel wounds. He gagged a little:
“That stinks.”
“Dead people do,” said Voukli: “At least it’s a chilly day.”
Ambros nodded, grimacing.
The first crate dropped in on the other side of their cover, causing the soldiers in the ATL trenches to loose a volley of fire at it. Ambros and Voukli joined the BWG contingent as they scrambled over and around the pile. One man carried a white flag, and waved it vigorously as they all advanced on the crate.
The gunfire fell to sporadic bangs, and then stopped. Ambros could hear shouted commands from the trenches, and then he saw an answering white flag waving above the log barricade nearest them.
Snow covered the ground. Clouds in the distance advanced from the west, promising more snow and freezing rain. The sun was not visible; fog around them and low clouds above hid all but a wan and feeble light. The ground trembled a little, as in an earthquake.
An embassy climbed over the barricade and began picking its way across the ground between. Ambros watched them, curious. “This’ll be the first time I’ve had a chance to speak with an ATL military man,” he said, suppressing his radio link and speaking directly to Voukli.
“Yeah. Be alert. The guy in front is a Legion Colonel. Dangerous and treacherous. No Ethics that you would recognize.”
“Got it,” he said.
The embassy approached. Everyone on both sides very cautiously raised their face shields. The truce held, and a conversation began.
The Colonel spoke to the Commander of the Blacks, and she replied, with vigorous gestures at the crate behind her.
“C’mon,” said Voukli, “let’s get a listen.”
“...bollocks,” said the Colonel: “Why would I accept such aid? Surely it is poisoned, or otherwise booby-trapped. I reject your overtures. Leave us to our deaths, Commonwealth scum.”
The Black Commander spoke softly: “You are misjudging us. We are not as you are. We mean to see to it that your men receive the food and clothing and medicines in that crate, and in the others that will soon arrive. Is it not enough that we have drawn and driven your enemies away? You would surely have been overwhelmed by now if we had not.”
They were both speaking Rational French. Ambros had supplemented his meager knowledge of his Line’s version of French with an RNA course on the slightly rationalized variety used in the ATL military.
The Colonel’s ID patch named him ‘Renault, C.’ He wore no helmet.
“Nonsense. Leave us, I say. We desire none of your help.” Colonel Renault then pulled a grenade from his belt, yanked the pin out and tossed it at Voukli. He turned and ran ten paces, then hit the ground, covering his head.
Ambros stepped in front of Voukli, caught the grenade, and threw it as hard as he could to the west, where nothing but downed trees and the corpses of men and animals could be seen. He turned his back and shielded his face with his arms. The rest of the Commonwealth group did the same.
The bomb exploded with force that they could feel, even a hundred fifty ells away. A few bits of shrapnel zipped through the parley: one ATL soldier fell, wounded.
He saw from the corner of his eye the Black Warrior Commander draw her pistol and fire. At that range the projectile disintegrated Col. Renault’s head, and his body flopped and twisted on the ground.
Voukli laughed.
Ambros looked at her askance. He was shaking, only then processing what he had done. “Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever thrown anything that hard, or that far, in my life!”
Voukli slapped his shoulder, the scales on her gauntlet clacked against his pauldron: “Good job,” she said, laughing again. “Thanks!”
The Commander waved her pistol around: “Which of you idiots is second in command here?”
A man stepped forward, reluctantly: “I am. Major Durant.”
That fellow wore the uniform of the ATL Regular Army. He showed clear signs of exposure to ionizing radiation: lesions and raw wounds on his bare hands, and a bruised saggy look to all the flesh around his eyes and mouth. His beard, a few days old, appeared thin and patchy.
“Well?” said the Commander: “Are you going to be more reasonable? Or should I shoot you and talk to the next bozo?”
“You have food for us...?”
“And medicine, including drugs that will reverse your radiation sickness. We’ve packaged the drugs as slap-patches, such as your medics use for morphine. Shall we start unloading?”
Ambros and Voukli sat by the side of the crate, their helms on but faceplates up. Laborers carried supplies and equipment out of the gigantic box and stacked them on the ground. Major Durant listened carefully to what the Tech Guild liason said: “The equipment in the green boxes is mostly agricultural in nature. Seeds, plows, harnesses. The harness can be adapted to men or horses or whatever animal or tractor provides the motive power for your work.”
Durant seemed confused: “Why do we need this, this...”
Commander Ellisi said: “You need this equipment because you will otherwise starve. Your masters have abandoned you here. You must grow and process food, and defend yourselves until your enemies have given up on their project.”
Liaison began again: “We are leaving enough food to last you until you have a harvest. There are also materials for constructing greenhouses, the instructions are in illustrated form. There are wagons and barrows, some motorized, so that you can move south and east out of range of your enemies...”
“We need ammunition! “
“No,” said Ellisi: “No chance. We will not arm you against your foemen. You, or your commanders, made this situation, now deal with it.
“But...”
“Silence!”
“What?”
“Listen to the tech, here. Technical Guild Apprentice Valsisi: complete your assigned briefing. Major Durant: be silent and attend.”
Valsisi began to speak again: “The entire system of petroleum extraction is in a state of collapse, so your foes will soon be in the same fix you are. That is: on foot, in the winter, running out of fuel and ammunition. If you begin to retreat from them immediately, they may well lose interest...”
Ambros’ attention wandered. He rose and turned slowly in place, examining the landscape, searching for threats.
He thought about the response to his most recent post on the War Guild’s Kyklo: his essay on ‘tactical security in SB operations’. Or: ‘Don’t stand around and get shot, dummy!’.
‘Anybody with a modicum of common sense read that as it was intended,’ he thought. Predictably, Spathos Regulos had slagged the entire essay, posting a point-by-point ‘refutation’ that combined incorrect readings of his points, ad hominem arguments, straw men and false dichotomies into a hash of utter nonsense. ‘I laid out a fairly simple proposition, really: regard every slug strike on your armor as a “fail” and do what it takes to minimize those hits. Reg fundamentally didn’t get it, did he?’
He hadn’t troubled himself to reply to Reg; luckily, others had, including several people whom he had never met. Regulos continued to argue with them, even after they had pointed out the untruths and logical flaws in his posts. ‘How does the Commonwealth education system produce such overall good results, but somehow leaves a guy like that behind? Oh, well, not for me to deal with...at least not in the foreseeable future.’
The idea that his participation in the Commonwealth would one day be about much more than just Sacred Band and War Guild operations crossed his mind:
‘How much can one man or one person do, though?’
Voukli’s voice spoke in his ear: “Spathos, there is a disturbance about a league away, down the line of trenches.”
Ambros stood up and said: “Non-combatants: expedited evac.”
The Laborers moved fast, removing the final contents of the crate; then they all crowded inside. Ambros gave a sign to Ellisi, who signaled him to move away from the crate. It vanished with a bang.
Ambros pulled his faceplate down, settled his gauntlets, and checked the safety on his rifle. “Ready,” he said, quietly.
They Saltated again, this time into a crossfire. He dropped to the ground and brought his rifle to bear. Thirty others did the same, Black Warriors mostly, with a couple SB commandos he didn’t recognize.
“Who the hell should we shoot?” he muttered.
Voukli’s voice came over his radio: “Nobody, yet. Hold fire! HOLD!”
He could see rifle barrels of roughly WWII style poking out of the ATL barricades, and occasional muzzle flashes. Most of the shooting was evidently happening inside the trenches, though. ‘Fighting among themselves?’ he wondered.
Voukli began ordering the situation: “All Blacks, hear this: get the non-combatants inside the crate. Fire only as necessary to accomplish that. Get me numbers on wounded or injured, ASAP! Get a white flag up in front of the crate...well, put it back up!”
One by one the rifles visible across the way vanished. The firing petered out, and an answering white flag appeared on the battlements.
The man who crawled over the barricade was an older fellow, wearing the insignia of a high-ranking non-com. He obviously had a lot of Native American ancestry.
He came alone, carrying his truce flag in his right hand and a pistol by two fingers in his left hand.
Voukli went to meet him; Ambros scrambled up and followed her, warily.
‘Sergeant-major Indigo Valois,” he said as he came in range: “I apologize for the stupidity of my superior officers. I will be pleased to take possession of the xxxxxxxx gifts you have offered.” He spoke in a degraded version of Rational French, with Iriquois words mixed in: “We are suffering *************** bravely. We (unpronounceable) gladly.” He turned the handle of his pistol to Voukli.
She turned it around, barrel down, and handed it back: “I don’t want your surrender. Take what we are offering, and begin your retreat south and east...”
Ambros sighed. He did not, however, activate the safety on his rifle. He placed his back to Voukli’s and watched the horizon.
The next day was as full as any other day in his life. Nevertheless Ambros tore himself away from mundane details and pleasurable pastimes and headed out to Veneta to deal with a task too long delayed. He entered the café in Veneta with a specific mission in mind; he must have seemed more grim than usual.
"You okay, Mr. Rothakis?" Megan set down his chai, looking worried.
He smiled, schooling himself to a gentler aspect: "Yeah, it's just online trolls. I need to put a couple people in their places."
Her face turned doubtful: "That never works for me," she said, ruefully.
"Yeah, me neither, ordinarily. This time I know some passwords..." He left her to contemplate that as she went back to the counter.
He opened the New Pismo, activated a search program, and began to surf: 'Here's Chief Black's password file...that's a connection to his personal machine...shit...'
He sat back, looking at the three-D display with a chagrined expression.
"How in Hades did he find those photos?" he muttered. "He must have had a clue to my former name..." He stopped muttering, suddenly cold: 'First thing is to get rid of the evidence...'
He began tracing each photo back to its online source and deleting it.
He used the New Pismo's (very sophisticated) facial recognition programs, and slowly but surely deleted Carlo Scharffen from the Webz.
"Fortunately,' he thought, 'I was not an early adopter of the tech devices available in the Nineties. The few photos of me as Carlo in those days are all old tech, and had to be scanned in by my friends. Mostly SCA persona, and labeled as such. Those can stay up, for now.'
He paged back to Chief Black's accounts: 'Chief,' he pondered: 'if you'd minded your own affairs and left me be, this wouldn't have happened to you. Oh, well.' He picked out the files that concerned him, traced each one to its backups and linked them.
One by one he hit "select all" and then "delete/overwrite". One by one Black's files that concerned Ambros/Carlo vanished into a haze of ones and zeroes.
'That oughta do it.' He contemplated the advantages of Commonwealth technology: "I could never have done that, back in the day. My friend Hacker Girl might have been able to, but she'd have charged me at least fifty grand for the job.' He patted the top of the New Pismo's screen, saying: "Good machine."
It beeped at him, and he stared at it suspiciously.
He contemplated further action: ‘I think an insurance policy is in order.’ He used the Chief’s passwords to hack into the department’s central memory. Rather than talk to the machine, he set it to receive commands from the keyboard. He typed: ‘Give me access to the whole set of personnel files...separate out any file with three or more citizen complaints listed, whether there was disciplinary action taken or not...load those files into an overfile...download that overfile to my desktop...set up a dead man switch, publish the overfile on any Monday if I don’t use the password to stop it...make that password: ‘blackmail’.’ He checked the spelling: ‘Good enough,’ he thought.
He copied the overfile again, and sent it to his memory cache at the Library in Athino. He shut that link back down as soon as the Library’s machine acknowledged receipt: ‘I don’t like to connect to the Commonwealth from here,’ he pondered. ‘It looks like a secure communication, but it makes me nervous...trust your gut, old man...’
He used Commonwealth tech in Line Seventeen, though. ‘There are huge advantages. There’s almost no chance that anyone can hack back to me with this machine as my entry point. They can’t hack what they can’t see.’ He spoke quietly, so as not to draw the attention of the crowd: “Search all Line Seventeen news sources for the usual suspects...”
For once, something popped up: “Oh, shit,” he said, frowning; he tapped keys and sent mental commands, and got a translation from Spanish to American:
“The infamous terrorist Jaime de Cordova, once thought dead, has been seen in Guatemala City, sources in the Policia Ciudades tell us. The Federales are thought to be closing in on his hideout, which is rumored to be on the south side of the Ciudad del Sol. Residents of that part of the city are cautioned to watch out for him, and report his presence to the authorities...here are numbers to call, and a web address for the Federales...armed and extremely dangerous... ”
‘All rumors, so far,’ he thought. “Let’s hope it’s a false alarm; Jaime ought to be a continent away from G-City, long ago.’ He reminded himself to get an RNA course under his belt, soon, to supplement his hard-won but woefully inadequate Spanish language skills. ‘No, moron...put that on the to-do list. You’ve forgotten it twice already...’ He typed it in, cursing his lack of time.
He checked in on the cop who had shot at him during the Mainstage operation. His eyes narrowed, and he frowned: ‘Someone’s been messing with old Lt. Roger.’ He pondered a moment, then very gently poked at the records: “Untraceable from this Line,” said the mechanical voice, vibrating in his ear. He poked some more, and saw that Grandson’s bank accounts had suffered a continuous stream of hacks, always with the same object: ‘Somebody, and I bet I know who, has been seeing to it that Roger Grandson’s checking account is constantly just short enough to get his debit card rejected. She’s not stealing any money, just moving it to his savings and retirement accounts, then back again. Very clever, Magistri.’ He reflected upon this, and was glad she was on his side. He also decided that he could leave Lt. Grandson to her: ‘Voukli is a lot more expert in online revenge tactics than I am...’
Later that same day, Ambros dropped in to USIT Six and looked around at the devastated landscape. He stood about halfway up a medium-high ridge, which undulated along, echoing the turns and bends of the river in the valley below. In the far distance, just visible on the horizon, he saw the remains of New York City. The Big Apple still smoked, in spite of the snowy cold of nuclear winter. Nearby, the blackened remains of smaller towns stuck up out of deep snow, burned by raiders and reavers and other arsonists.
He grunted in disgust. He grabbed the handle of the two-wheeled garden cart that he’d brought that morning, and began to drag it along, pacing slowly up the gentle slope towards a walled compound on the nearest hilltop.
He turned the last curve and came in sight of the front gate. The place was sturdily fortified: the walls were an amalgam of heavy timbers, junk cars, several kinds of fencing, and some garage doors set in poured concrete. He slowed even more: after a moment, an arrow struck the ground very close to his feet. It quivered there, threateningly.
He turned the wheels crosswise to the slope and took another step forward. More arrows flew, some hitting the cart.
He opened his hands and called out: “C’mon, folks, this outfit is bullet and blade proof. Your little crossbows are not gonna hurt me. I got some relief supplies for you here, but if you insist on being assholes, I can find some other deserving group...Eh?” He kept his voice cheerful, anyway, though the Commonwealth Commando armor made him look exceedingly threatening.
After a long delay, a voice came from the gate: “Okay, sorry. We’ve had a bad time of it.”
“I expect you have. And I do look scary, I guess.”
“Yah. How you want to do this?”
He gave an exaggerated shrug, visible to the survivors even through the armor:
“Up to you, I guess. You can open the gate and I’ll haul it in. You can send someone out. Or I can leave the wagon here and disappear.”
There followed another long pause; Ambros waited patiently, meditating: “Calm; relax; breathe.”
At length a woman’s face appeared over the wall: “No offense, but we’d rather you just left the wagon.”
“I understand. I got you some food, seeds, tools, and some medicine. There are military-style slap patches with drugs that can reverse radiation sickness...”
“We got a ex-Navy Seal in here, and a couple other vets. They’ll know how to use those.”
He nodded: “Okay. I’ll just meander off, now.”
“Will you be back?” The woman seemed distressed: “We could use any help you can give us. And I’m really sorry that Ed and all shot at you, I mean that.”
“It’s all right, really,” he said, slapping the breastplate of his armor: “I came prepared. And yes, I’ll be back: I do have others I want to help, though, so it will be a while. Okay?”
“Beggars and Choosers,” she said, resignedly. She vanished behind the wall.
He saluted Warrior-style, then turned and strode away.
He spent the rest of that day repeating the process in several parts of the US in Line Six. Some of the compounds he approached shot directly at him, thinking him a raider of some sort; others welcomed the supplies he brought without any violence. By the end of the day he’d seen the distant remains of a dozen erstwhile American cities in Line Six: Cleveland, DC, Seattle, and others. ‘Miami,’ he thought: ‘That was a weird one. Foot-deep snow and downed palm trees, the Everglades frozen solid, people who didn’t even have coats, or blankets...’ He resolved to take such things to his chosen refuges in the South. ‘Next trip,’ he promised himself.
He sat at the desktop computer in his office at the Salon, making arrangements: Every week, a dozen carts to be delivered to his nursery by a local farm supply store, food and seeds from various vendors delivered to the Salon. “Every Wednesday morning my calendar pings me, I pick up medicines from the Commonwealth Line, load up the latest batch of carts, check on the survivors via MPS-Shifter, and deliver the goods. I should be able to get that down to two hours work, eventually.” He thought about it for a minute, then resolved to deliver the same load, minus radiation meds, to each of the several homeless camps he had contacted in the swamps west of Eugene. “Three hours work, then. I’ll make it fit in, somehow.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World
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Date: 2016-12-13 04:36 am (UTC)