David's Sling (18 page)
The satellite images did not just show Lila the colors of the rainbow; they showed the whole spectrum from low HF radio to high UV. She could not run full spectroscopic analyses—the atmosphere blocked too much energy for that—but she could run approximations. First she identified fluorine in the atmosphere—fluorine bundled in compounds with carbon. With oxygen. With hydrogen. With growing horror, she matched the spectrum against known molecules until, late at night, she hit the tag.
The match had not been perfect, but it had been too close for coincidence. The villages had been sprayed with some derivative of Soman, a persistent nerve gas.
Why hadn't anybody reported this in the newspapers? With more cold analysis, she understood that silence, too. The murderers had been thorough in destroying those isolated villages where rebels might breed, far from the brutal controls imposed on the cities. The Soviets had carefully left no witnesses.
And Kurt McKenna had thrust this atrocity into her face. Hating even the touch of the photos, she had scooped them back into the envelope. And now she drove with them to the Hyatt, to throw them back in his face as he had thrown them at her.
Standing outside his hotel room, she realized she had never felt true anger before. Nothing compared with this feeling of anger, the surge of fury's power as she pounded on his door. Her arm seemed a mere tool of force, to be used to break anything that blocked her way.
The door opened slowly. She pushed on it with the seemingly irresistible force of her anger, but the slow motion of the door seemed barely perturbed. A balancing force controlled its motion, mocking her: Kurt McKenna.
She stepped across the threshold, invading his private space, closing on him so she could feel his breath as she screamed, "You bastard! You don't care about those people! You knew what I'd find!"
A slight motion of his jawline suggested the control he exercised over his own feelings. "Three points, only one correct. Yes, I am a bastard. But I do care about those people—perhaps more than you do. And no, I didn't know with certainty what you'd find. But you've told me, just by being here. You found something even more terrible and evil than me."
She stood with her fists clenched, not quite able to pound on him as she had pounded on the door.
He glanced down, saw her stance, and smiled viciously. "Violence? You wouldn't want to reduce yourself to my level, would you? Or are you afraid that I would hit back? You'd be right. I use violence against anyone who uses it against me. Wouldn't you?"
"You bastard! You're as bad as they are!"
Now, in a flickering movement of his eyes, she saw an anger even greater than hers, though not so hot: a cold, killing anger. His anger consumed hers, sucking the fury from her arms, turning it back with the slow pressure of his breath on her face. Involuntarily, she stepped back.
His mouth worked a moment before he spoke, but his voice remained steady. "You know better. I don't kill civilians. I kill people who kill civilians." He paused, a pause that shouted with anger. "You are the one who's as bad as the people you hate. You don't really hate them. You don't even hate what they do. What you hate, Ms. Lottspeich, is knowing about what they do. If they would just leave you out of it, so you didn't have to know, you wouldn't hate anyone or anything."
She held her breath. That was ridiculous. And yet—she felt her hands clenching and unclenching—was it true?
"And most of the people like you in America can get away with it. After all, those soldiers can only touch you
over my dead body
, and the dead bodies of all the other fools like me who volunteer for the job. But you won't lift a finger to help us. You're too good for us, aren't you?" She wondered what he was referring to, in his peculiar accusation. Then she realized: "Did Nathan Pilstrom send you?"
McKenna snorted. "Not on your life. Nathan never forces people to listen him, the way I forced you to listen to me. He has a vision that he offers to everybody, but you have to choose it of your own free will." His voice softened for a moment. "Perhaps he's right. Perhaps you shouldn't force ideas down other people's throats." Then the anger returned. "Or perhaps I'm right, instead."
"Why didn't you take this thing—what was it, the Sling Project—to one of your normal military contractors?"
Again Lila saw his jaws tighten. "They aren't my contractors.
"My father told me stories about Vietnam. The way the guns we were using—the M16s—would jam in the middle of a fight and leave our troops unarmed. Do you know why the M16s jammed in Vietnam? Do you know why people like me died because they couldn't shoot back? The original, commercial gun they modified into the M16 didn't jam. But the Army's ordnance bureaucracy wouldn't allow a simple gun developed by someone else to become the standard. Oh, no. They had to improve it. They improved it enough so that it didn't work anymore." His nostrils flared. "To prove the goodness of their goddam bureaucracy, they crippled the men who had to fight—the men who had enough people trying to kill them.
"Those people in that bureaucracy had forgotten as thoroughly as you have. For too many of them, their contracts are more important than any results they might produce." He stopped speaking.
After a silence, Lila asked, "Why did you do this to me?"
"Because you're the best. And right now, right here on the Sling Project, we need the best." He pointed to the packet of photos, the packet filled with atrocities. "We need you, we need the best, because as ruthless as I am, I am not as ruthless as they are."
She shuddered, threw the packet aside. And as it thudded against the carpet, she saw how right he was. She feared the knowledge of evil, not the evil itself.
A fear of knowledge did not mesh with her self-image. Reluctantly, she reclaimed the packet from the floor.
Kurt continued. "Without your help, I'll have to kill civilians, too. Maybe I won't kill civilians as efficiently as they do, but I'll still kill them. When I shoot at soldiers like the ones in Iran, I'll have to use such massive weapons that the innocent bystanders won't have a chance."
"You said you don't kill civilians," she jeered.
"I lied," he said. "But you can change me into a person who's telling the truth."
They stood in rigid intensity, staring at one another, as McKenna explained how to stop wholesale murder—not by committing wholesale murder in return, but by committing selective murder of the men who gave the orders to commit wholesale murder. It was still murder, of course. But did it not count for something, that the number of casualties might decrease a hundredfold?
As McKenna spoke, Lila felt her anger shift, ever so slightly. Her anger no longer vented against McKenna's harsh personality. Somehow, in his own distorted way, he cared about people. Her anger now focused beyond him, at those even worse than McKenna. Her anger struck at the faceless creatures, certainly not men, who called down the rain of death upon the helpless villagers in the photos.
"Will you help me?" McKenna asked at last.
Her focus returned to McKenna, her immediate enemy. "Certainly not," she spat. With that she left. She ran through the rain to her car, realizing as she struggled with her keys that she still had McKenna's packet. With a grunt, she flung it into the car.
She drove almost blindly, trapped between the pitch-black night and her own black thoughts. The road vanished, except within the narrow, gleaming spots of her own headlights. Only occasionally could she glimpse the white road markers that inscribed a safe path.
She would not, could not help McKenna. He stood for everything she hated. No, not quite, she remembered. There was something even more hateful beyond him.
She remembered Nathan sitting next to her a month ago. He had been so open, his intentions naked to her, as he tried to explain his purpose. She had cut him off too abruptly. She had known that she was being unfair even at the time; now she thought she understood why. She had been afraid to listen, for fear that she might agree. She had slapped him verbally and conceptually, but unlike McKenna, he had not struck back. Yet she felt sure that his conviction ran as deep as McKenna's.
She would not, could not help McKenna. But she could certainly help Nathan.
She arrived home shaking from the fatigue of the stressful drive and from the anger that still had no physical outlet. She glanced at her watch; it was almost midnight. She felt feverishly awake.
She dialed the phone. A voice gasped blearily, "Pilstrom speaking," which reminded her that in D.C. it was close to 3 a m. She felt a perverse pleasure in waking him.
"Nathan, this is Lila Lottspeich. Do you still need an image analyst on the Sling Project? Well, the next time you're awake, mail me a contract." She heard him muttering from the other end of the continent. She said loudly, "What? Yeah, I'm on the team. Goodnight." She smiled as she hung up, though she now regretted zapping Nathan in the middle of the night.
She smiled, thinking of the power she had to strike back against the creatures who killed indiscriminately.
Revenge
. The feeling repelled her even as she reveled in it. Was she now as bad as they were? Her friends would certainly think so. They hated the military as much as she did.
Were those creatures as bad as she now thought? Doubt flickered in her mind, but it could not stand against her new conviction. She had uncovered their cruelty with her own mind; she saw the blood staining their hands.
Another new sensation scared her even more deeply. In all her years of passive objection to the military and all its works, she had never felt so thrust into the center of a conflict, so able to make a difference, so isolated in her strength, yet so willing to fight with all that strength. She had never felt so valiant.
As Lila lay down, to sleep with the secure joy of that valor, she wondered how long the feeling would last. She knew that if it wore off, this would be her last peaceful sleep for a long time.
THE RULE-MAKERS
September 14
Filter third for reliability. This filter protects against politicians.
—Zetetic Commentaries
Nathan stewed quietly in the waiting room outside Charles Somerset's office. The clatter of obsolete typewriters echoed down the cold, plastercast hallways of the Pentagon. Nathan wondered how people could work here, and how they could think clearly in such a hostile environment. One answer chilled him: perhaps they
couldn't
think clearly here. Perhaps they couldn't think here at all.
He closed his eyes, washing out the sounds and the distractions, trying to wash the irritation from his mind as well. He knew he would need his greatest powers of perception for this meeting. Each of his few other attempts to talk with FIREFORS people had met with either curt civility or expansive emptiness, both well-designed to prevent outsiders like Nathan from acquiring useful information. Yet now the program manager of FIREFORS had asked to see him. That could only mean an ambush. What was the PM of FIREFORS planning?
He heard a door squeak on its hinges and opened his eyes.
At first Nathan thought he was looking at a successful, cultured street beggar. Charles wore a brown suit that might have been slept in; clearly, it had been cut to hang limply on its owner. His striped red tie sagged in a sloppy knot near the collar. His eyeglasses had slid far down his nose, and his hairline had receded far up his forehead.
Charles continued to open the door. His lethargic care with the task kept pace with the slow slide of his eyeglasses; his smile of greeting brightened in harmonic time with both.
His every movement seemed soggy except that of his eyes. Beneath heavy lids, they darted across Nathan's face and posture. "Welcome," Charles said with a voice of dispassionate amusement. With a moment's energetic effort, he raised his eyebrows. "Welcome to the team."
"Welcome to what team?" Nathan asked as he followed the program manager through the door.
"Why, the FIREFORS team, of course."
Nathan studied the schizophrenic arrangement of books and papers in the office while Charles's words sank in. "What do you mean by that?"
"You're a member of the team now.
My
team." After showing Nathan a chair next to the conference table, Charles retrieved a single sheet of paper from his desk. "This is a letter from General Hicks to General Curtis, authorizing transfer of Sling Project oversight to FIREFORS. It was mailed yesterday."
Charles Somerset had gained the power to destroy the Sling
. Nathan sensed Charles's condescending gaze upon him. He realized that in some drab yet hideous fashion, this moment qualified as a great victory for Charles.
"Of course, the letter probably won't penetrate the bureaucracy to your contracting officer until tomorrow. But I thought you should know about it as soon as possible. We need to get a jump on the changes we'll have to make in the Sling. We need to get it into line with the rest of our projects."
Nathan looked up at him for a painful moment, then accepted a copy of the letter—both to read it and to take a moment to collect his thoughts.
There has been too much national coverage
—the words jumped at Nathan from a middle paragraph—
of supposed FIREFORS competition with the Sling Project. I agree with you: it makes no difference whether the competition is real or not. We must consolidate.
Nathan stared at the letter for a long time, to recover for continuing the psychological game now underway. He knew who he needed here: he needed Leslie. Leslie, with his years of maneuvering through military politics, would have known how to respond. But he would be out of town all week.
It probably didn't make any difference. The letter, the change in organization, each was now a
fait accompli
. Had it been possible for the Institute to do anything about it, Somerset surely would not have offered the information.
What Nathan really wanted to do was cut and run—just leave the room and the Pentagon and Charles's smiling face behind. But Charles was now in some sense both his boss and his customer; however dangerous that might be, he would only aggravate the danger by being nasty.
Charles scraped a chair across the floor to join him. "You all right?" he asked with too much pleasure and too little concern.
"Of course," Nathan said, straightening to look Charles in the eye. "You realize that just because this letter has been mailed, this isn't official yet. Since I share your concerns about following proper procedures, I can't make any commitments without authorization from my contracting officer."
Charles seemed taken aback by the astuteness of this response, but he recovered quickly. "No problem, it will be official soon enough. I was just planning to give you some general guidance now, anyway. We'll have a more detailed discussion of the new directions after you talk with DNA. And we'll get really explicit, down to the nitty gritty, after a complete project review." Charles looked wistful for a moment. "If we had our way, we would put a stop work on the project temporarily, until our re-evaluation is complete." He paused, a look of distaste crossing his face. "But we haven't been authorized to do that."
Nathan suppressed a smile; Charles's victory had not been unconditional, anyway.
Charles waited for Nathan to respond. When no words came forth, he continued on his own, more than willing to handle the discussion solo. "As for our new general guidance, I'd like to start with a little thing. We've read the reports on the Sling. It looks like a fine piece of work, although a little primitive, compared to what we've been doing. One of the things we haven't seen anywhere is a discussion of how the warheads in the HighHunter—you call them Crowbars, I think—pick their targets."
Nathan frowned. "We're still working on the algorithm for selecting important objects, such as commanders' tanks. Is that what you mean?"
Charles mumbled something. From the uncertain sound in his voice, Nathan suspected that Charles might not know what he meant himself. "What I'm driving at is, do your Crowbars talk to each other, so they can guarantee that they fell on different tanks? How do they know they won't all hit the same one?"
"Ah, I see." Nathan nodded; Kurt had worried at that question for a long time. "We thought about it, but we decided we couldn't do that. There's not enough space in the Crowbar for the comm and not enough time to figure it out anyway. Each Crowbar will have a slightly different set of parameters, so they are likely to pick different targets.'
Charles shook his head, a slow pendulum with a catch in it. "That isn't acceptable. The warheads must communicate and guarantee that they don't conflict."
Nathan just stared for a moment. "But that would be silly." He explained with a tone that softened the bluntness of the words, "It's not only expensive, it's unnecessary as well. The idea is to put a lot of Crowbars up there, and have a pile of them come down together, like hailstones. If we get ten percent of them hitting the same thing, all we have to do is launch ten percent more to start with."
The pendulum swung again. A grave look touched Somerset's darting eyes. "Listen. I know you're new to this contracting business, but there're some serious things you need to learn. First of all, we've got to deal with the Bill Hardies of the world. Think what it would sound like if
he
reported on this: The Army is building a weapon that hits itself almost as often as it hits the enemy.' " Charles looked concerned, like a teacher speaking privately to a slow student. "We aren't talking here about technical necessity, or economic sanity—we're talking about political survival in case the news media get excited about us. Do you understand?"
Nathan considered that the last news campaign had resulted in the letter he had just read, and he felt a surge of understanding for Somerset's game. "Yes, I see your point," he conceded. "You want to create a more workable political design. But I still disagree with your conclusion— because your political design is completely unworkable as an engineering design. The problem you're addressing is not a valid one upon which to make a political decision, because as engineers, we know a right answer."
Charles grunted. "Maybe so, but I want to keep the FIREFORS team funded." Getting no answer again, he pointed out the corollary. "I want to keep you funded."
Nathan sighed. "What is your next point of general guidance?"
"Since you're going to need a comm processor for the new Crowbar-to-Crowbar communication, I'd like to recommend—and frankly, we'll probably demand when the time comes—that you use the AN/UYK 93 computer for the job."
Nathan looked at him with puzzlement. "Isn't that computer still under development?"
Charles smiled. "I'm glad you've heard of it. We've been trying to get word around about it for some time. This is my first indication that we've succeeded. Yes, it's almost ready."
Disbelieving horror dried Nathan's throat. "How can you expect us to use something that doesn't exist yet?"
Charles waved a hand, dismissing Nathan's concern. "The spec's available."
"What if it doesn't meet our needs?"
The hand waved again. "No problem. We'll just change the spec."
Nathan could think of no retorts that were sufficiently irrational.
"And I hope that, for all your communication systems in all these different Hunter platforms, you're using our JANEP protocol family."
Nathan shook his head violently. "That would be crazy. No one uses those protocols anymore. They're obsolete."
A stern expression molded Somerset's pliant features. Nathan would not have guessed it would look so natural there. "We use those protocols in all our products. You must use them to stay compatible."
A stillness settled across the room—the stillness of a battlefield after the carnage. "How can you expect to succeed when half your system is 15 years obsolete, and the other half is five years short of being born?" With a stab of insight—the stab of a nail—Nathan remembered Leslie's story of the Maneuver Control System.
MCS, as it was known to friends and enemies, was a computer system built for the Army back in the '70s and '80s. The contractor had been required to use a computer that was over ten years old, and a software toolkit that was still under development—and wouldn't be ready for years. The contract had been a great success: millions of dollars had been spent on old hardware and futuristic software. Only the less important third priority—the job of building a Maneuver Control System—had failed, slipping its schedule year after year.
Somehow, the Defense Department always had deep passions for the technologies of yesterday and the technologies of tomorrow. But they never tolerated the technologies of
today
. And tragically, the technologies of today were the only technologies worth using—the only ones a sane person would use to protect his society.
Charles removed his glasses. While he wiped them, he delivered the final guideline. "One last thing. This business of using commercial equipment has got to stop. Military equipment has to be survivable. So every component of the Sling Hunters has to be militarized."
Only the slightest move forward betrayed Nathan's desire to leap across the conference table and strangle the murderer of his child. "We can't do that! We haven't anywhere near the resources for that kind of undertaking, even if it made sense. The whole idea of the Sling is to build a family of disposable systems, like Dixie cups or TOW missiles."
Charles nodded. "I think I see your confusion. Of course you've never been able to think of militarizing your Hunters, because you didn't have the resources. That's where FIREFORS can help you, even as you are helping us. If the Sling Project is sufficiently important, we can get you the money."
"But the Project would be doomed from the start! It would be far too expensive to build in large quantities."
"That's for someone else to decide. We're only responsible for designing products to meet the military requirement. The financial problems with deployment are handled elsewhere. Mr. Pilstrom, even if we
wanted
to worry about the production cost,
we arent allowed to.
"
Nathan heard a hint of exhaustion in Somerset's voice—the exhaustion of a man who had once in his life worried about problems beyond his current battle. He saw in Charles the end product of bureaucracy: a basically good man with one terrible fault. He had learned how to succeed in the distorted reality that bureaucracies create.
Charles continued, again willing to carry the conversation alone. "There's a second alternative. We do have permission to use commercial components for subsystems that aren't mission-critical."
Nathan listened with suspicion. "What does that mean, not mission-critical?"
"A subsystem is mission-critical if the troops would be unable to continue fighting without that subsystem. If the subsystem is that critical, it must meet mil spec. Doesn't that make sense? Something that critical must work correctly."
Something didn't seem to fit quite right in that analysis, but Nathan couldn't see the flaw at the moment. "I guess it makes sense."
"But if the troops can continue to fight effectively without it, then it's not mission-critical. Then you can make it less rugged. You still have to make it more rugged than average commercial stuff, of course, but you can bend the spec." Charles looked eager—almost too eager—to help solve this problem. "We could just declare the entire Sling Project to be non-mission-critical, thus allowing us to make it commercial. Considering your hostility to militarizing the Hunters, that's probably our best bet."
How sincere Charles sounded when he used the term "we"! Did Charles actually believe his statements about "our" team? He might. Nathan shrugged. "That sounds like an interesting alternative. But as I said earlier, I won't make any commitments until this transfer of control is official."
"Of course." Charles sighed, not angry, but perhaps saddened by the vision of a lengthy educational process. "No commitments," he agreed.
Kira's knuckles whitened on the steering wheel of her car as she cursed the traffic jammed up before her. To her left, through the blazing colors of the autumn leaves, she could see the Potomac: a muddy soup with puddles of rock jutting randomly into the gray air. To her right, above the line of the trees, she could see a skyscraper jutting into the equally gray skies. Even in the dull shadow of this autumn twilight, the Wilcox-Morris Building had not lost its silvery sheen. She could see Daniel's office perched like an aerie at the pinnacle. She remembered looking down from that office onto the Parkway, and feeling a mixed sense of sympathy and superiority toward the men and women trapped there.