David's Sling (31 page)

"At least we fixed that Hunter before any Russians saw it. I wonder how their air defense guys missed it?

Ronnie bent over, clearly unwell. He looked quizzically at Nathan, then winced. "Are you kidding? It's midnight over there. How can they see anything at all?"

Nathan was moving to Ronnie's side even as he thought about the time zone difference. Of course! The image from the SkyHunter was an enhanced night view. It probably would have crashed before the Russians saw it.

"We need to get you to bed," Nathan said, taking Ronnie by the arm. By now, Ronnie was shivering.

Florence appeared out of nowhere. "Take this, she ordered him, a pill in one hand and a cup of water in the other. Ronnie obeyed, wobbling over to his chair. "You'll keep on getting worse until you start taking care of yourself. You know that, don't you?"

Ronnie chuckled. "Right, ma. Whatever you say."

Florence shook her head at Nathan. "I've got him," she said.

"Apparently," Nathan agreed as they headed out the door.

Infrared patterns of human beings in frenzied action, concealed from optical vision by camouflage, meant division headquarters. Division headquarters meant float over target. Float over target meant select aimpoint. Aimpoint selected meant bomb release. Bomb rack empty meant fly home.

The SkyHunter did not notice that the frenzied human activity below became even more frenzied after the bombing—even hysterical. The SkyHunter did not realize that the pre-bombing activity had been organized and purposeful, nor did it realize that the new hysterical activity had lost both organization and purpose. Kurt, however, would have understood it completely.

Soon, the regiment headquarters below the division would understand the difference also. Those regiments would understand when they stopped to await futher orders, and none issued forth.

Frozen in place, they would realize how vulnerable they were without the authority to move. Their understanding would fade as the fearful hysteria swept their own headquarters. The hysteria would freeze ever more units across an ever wider front. They would remain frozen for a long time.

The Third Shock Army mil be the heroes of the next war
.

Captain Townsend heard the words clearly, spoken in a low, confident, sad voice. For a moment, the voice seemed so clear it might have been real. He was back in tactical nuke school: he craned his neck up to see Colonel Schneider, the tall American instructor, as he spoke the words.

The British Army of the Rhine has the toughest sons of bitches in NATO. But there aren't enough of them. And they have the worst equipment. And the North German Plain is completely indefensible. And the Soviet Third Shock Army has the toughest sons of bitches in the Soviet Union.

Captain Townsend nodded imperceptibly to the tall American so far away in space and time. Colonel Schneider had known what would happen.

The Third Shock Army will have a road race amongst themselves to see who gets to the Rhine first.

Captain Townsend stared impassively toward the dawn. He could not yet hear the vehicles in the road race. His nostrils flared. But he could
feel
them, there on the horizon, shrouded in fog and smoke.

A bird chirped from somewhere in the camouflage netting. The lively sound seemed unnatural in this land of the dead. The silence that followed also seemed unnatural. Hell should not be quiet.

The clanking of treads and the roar of diesels murmured from far away. The members of the road race were gearing up for full daylight speed. In an hour or so, they would circumvent the minefields and the barricades thrown up by British engineers in the wee hours. Then the Soviet racers would charge across Townsend's position.
Over my dead body
, Townsend swore to himself. He smiled for the first time that morning, recognizing the truth in his thoughts. His army was running out of ammunition and out of territory to fight across. They might retreat from here, but they would not find another place to make a stand.

He wondered if it was proper to thank God for Chobham armor. Too many people he had known—people he dared not think of as friends, not now—had died in their foxholes and their simple metal boxes when the Soviets launched their assault with a gray whistling rain of artillery shells. The theoreticians had counted on the foot soldiers, hidden in the brick buildings of the little towns of Germany. With shoulder-held missile launchers, they were to have countered the thousands of tons of Russian steel.

But the Russians had developed bad habits early in the game. They tended to go around the little towns when possible. They tended to pound the little towns into parking lots when necessary. The soldiers on foot disappeared. Only those clothed in Chobham armor, like Townsend, remained.

Townsend looked in all directions from his perch on the top of his tank on the top of a low rise. He saw virtually no defenders anywhere. This caused him to smile again. The defenders were few, true enough, but not so few as it appeared. The Third Shock Army would spend several unpleasant hours here before the road race resumed.

The clanking grew louder. A gray carpet separated itself from the gray dawn. The carpet crawled across the plain, spilling around the villages in fluid swirls.

German towns are separated by a distance of approximately two kilotons
, Townsend heard nuclear weapons expert Colonel Schneider say.
You can't kill any tanks without killing lots and lots of people.

The desire to live welled up in Townsend's mind, and for a moment, he yearned to throw nukes across that gray metal carpet. A sob grew and faded in his throat. With nukes, he could stop this assault, but he knew that such a defense would mean Soviet retaliation. He, Captain Townsend, would still die in the end, after condemning untold thousands of civilians to burning deaths.

A flicker in the corner of his eye made him look up and beyond his invisible army. A spattering of fireworks smeared across the sky, falling. As he watched, the sparks flickered and died. The projectiles that now advanced along the fireworks' course could not be seen, but the captain could intuit their presence, as earlier he could sense the presence of the Soviet tanks. He had never heard of an artillery or aerial bombardment quite like this before, but he understood its purpose. He visualized the graceful arc of the bombs' flight paths. They would fall on him and his troops. Even with small warheads they would do great damage.

Captain Townsend looked back wistfully at the approaching Third Shock Army. With chilling certainty he knew that the road race would cross his position unimpeded.

Blood pumped through Nathan's head in dizzying circles. He wanted to stop the rush.

He wanted to stop the world. He wanted to do anything, be anyone, go anywhere, as long as he did not have to
be here now
. He glanced across the room's occupants with wild eyes; Leslie, Florence, and Juan looked back with the same wild desire to
escape
.

The first ten HighHunters had dispensed their Crowbars over the North German Plain to break the galloping Soviet Third Shock Army. With engineering precision, the Crowbars selected and targeted themselves upon their chosen victims. But the targets were not elements of the Soviet Army. Every Crowbar hurtled now toward a vehicle that belonged to the British Army of the Rhine. The Crowbars were quite indifferent to the agony of the observers in Yakima.

"Anyone have an idea of where the problem lies?" Nathan asked with surprising calm.

Leslie displayed no more panic than did Nathan. "I'm sure it's in Lilas stuff." He turned from the work station. "I'll go get her. I hope she's recovered enough to take care of this. " As he crossed the room his pace picked up, until he bore through the doorway at a dead run. Nathan looked back at the imagery from one of the Crowbars. A stolid British captain rested his arms on the turret of the tank that this Crowbar had selected for destruction. Nathan sat down at the work station, brought up the Crowbar software, and stared at the code he had no hope of fixing.

"I wish I were there," he muttered.

Juan stood at his shoulder. "Where?"

Nathan pointed at the British captain. "I wish I were there, and that they were here." He clenched his fist. "At least that would be just. This fiasco is mine."

A smile flickered across Juan's mouth. "I heard a Zetetic lecturer once. He said that 'Justice exists only to the extent that Men have the power to create it.' " Juan's eyes darkened. "Would you really trade places with those men?"

"Of course." Nathan looked away. "But I don't have the power." He looked back to see Juan staring at the screen, eyes glistening.

"Damn you," he whispered. "I hate altruists." A moment later he commented, "Lila can't fix the problem. "

Nathan looked at him.

"She'll get rattled by the pressure." He reached past Nathan to pound out a terse request for the computer. When it responded, he continued, "We have not quite six minutes left to fix it."

"Can we just clear the Crowbar memories, make them miss everything and dig up the ground a bit?" Nathan asked.

Juan shrugged. "Then the Brits will die anyway, won't they? They're hopelessly outnumbered." His eyes defocussed. "I know this stuff as well as Lila does."

Nathan sat very still. "I know."

Juan's voice grew airier, more distant. "I know its response to every kind of touch." He caressed the monitor. His eyes closed, and his voice filled with authority. "Please give me the chair. "

Nathan stood aside; Juan sank into the chair. He rolled close to the screen. His hands moved across the keyboard; the display changed, and kept on changing as Juan burrowed into the heart of the Hunter. The display changed faster—so fast that Nathan could not even scan the contents before they disappeared. Yet when he looked back at Juan, he had the eerie sensation that Juan had read every flashing symbol with full understanding. Nathan knew that he himself was not quite so brilliant a programmer as Juan, but nevertheless, he knew what was happening in Juan's mind as he read the sheets of computer displays.

Even at the incomprehensible speed with which Juan now soared—through the Modulog meanings, and the relation diagrams, and the truth tables, and the switches in the Crowbar's programming—his speed fell far short of the speed of the computers themselves. But Juan brought something into the heart of the Crowbar that no computer had—an understanding of the
purpose
of the Crowbar and its software. At each step, on each decision, Juan now asked of himself, "Yes, this works. But does it achieve the purpose?"

Thousands of such decisions rolled across the screen; thousands of times Juan asked himself that question and produced a reluctant answer of "Yes." But sometimes the decision, having assured Juan that the program worked correctly on some larger scale, allowed him to skip across the thousands of decisions that went into that larger decision. And so he jumped and cut across the landscape of the Hunter's soul, pouncing at each stop with the same furious question: "Do you achieve your purpose?" Soon it became difficult to tell who answered the question—whether it was the soul of the Hunter, or the soul of Juan Dante-Cortez.

Nathan shook himself to break the thread of his trance. He realized that Juan would not break his connection to the computer so easily. Juan sat immobile, his breathing so shallow as to be unnoticeable, his eyes unblinking. Only his fingers moved, in tiny jerks that clicked on the keyboard.

Footsteps sounded. Nathan whirled and waved Leslie and Lila to silence. He tiptoed up to them. "Juan's trying to fix it. I think our best bet is to leave him alone." He saw Lila looking past him and taking in Juan's autistic appearance. Juan's mouth hung open now, and saliva drooled from his chin. Still the screens of the work station flickered, perhaps even faster than before.

Nathan turned to Lila. "The only thing we can do for Juan is call the hospital. He'll need the same treatment now," his voice broke, "as he did five years ago."

A burst of clicking made Nathan turn back to Juan. He saw the image from the HighHunter blur as it shifted across the German landscape. It wobbled for a moment, then locked on a new shape: the shape of a Soviet tank.

Nathan started to smile, until he heard Juan gurgling. The sound was not quite human.

Captain Townsend could not relax his back muscles as he watched the Soviet army approach. He sensed as a steady pressure the unseen bombs approaching him from the rear. That sneak attack would deprive him of this last chance to remind the enemy that Brits were not easily defeated. If only the bombs had been launched a few minutes later. . . . The Soviet tanks were close enough now that he could make out their individual features. In just a few minutes, Captain Townsend's last battle would begin.

Suddenly, he felt the release of pressure. Had his instincts failed him? He looked to the sky, expecting to be struck at any moment by the descending killers.

Instead, the sky filled with noise: not explosions, just noise. It was the sound of a thousand tiny sonic booms.

Now explosions bellowed, unmistakably the sound of tank ammunition erupting in flame. The explosions came from the
Soviet
battle line. Little sparks fell en masse and sent huge gouts of flame shooting back into the sky. Captain Townsend's eyes widened with a feeling he had not known for days: the feeling of hope.

The gray metal carpet stopped moving. Columns of vehicles blocked up behind the burning remains of the victims. The captain smiled in a way that was happy yet unpleasant. The scattered lead tanks of the Third Shock Army, the ones who sped forward ahead of the broken and dying, would be easy pickings. And the followers, now threading their way painfully through the field of wreckage, would be easier still.

Nathan stood at the doorway to the Tieton Room. It felt different; for the first time in two weeks, it was empty. He realized the extent of the ravages his small team had made on the order and neatness of the room. The red and gold chairs faced in all directions, a random scattering thrown about as by a tornado. Paper, cables, and used ribbons remained as the waste products from the computers; cups, napkins, and junk food wrappers remained as testament to the absent human beings. It looked like a war zone.