Rainbows End (32 page)

Miri’s face snapped around, “I will not help you cheat, Robert!”

They both stopped and stared at each other. “That’s not what I meant, Miri!” Then he thought about what he had actually said.
Christ. In the old days I insulted people all the time, but I knew when I was doing it
. “Honest. I just meant that finals are a problem, okay?”

Lena — > Miri, Xiu: Be cool, kiddo. Even
I
don’t think Robert’s messing with you. Xiu — > Lena, Miri: This is a first for you then.

Miri glared at him for a second more. Then she made a strange sound that might have been a giggle. “Okay. I should have known a Gu would not cheat. It’s just that I get so
mad
at some of the kids in my study group. I tell them what to do. I tell them not to cheat. And yet they are always chiseling at the collab protocols.”

She started walking again, and Robert followed along. “Actually,” she said, “I was just making conversation. I have a mission, something I should tell you.”

 

“Oh?” “Yes. Bob wants to send you out-of-state. He figures you tried to beat up Alice.” She paused, as if waiting for some defense.

 

But Robert only nodded, remembering the look in Bob’s eyes. So Rainbows End was too close by. “How long do I have?”

“That’s what I want to tell you, not to worry. You see — ” It turned out that his rescue came from an unlikely source, namely Colonel Alice herself. Apparently, she hadn’t felt the least bit threatened by him. “Alice knew you were just desperate, I mean — ” Miri made a verbal dance of avoiding insult and gross language: Basically, Alice already thought he was a crazy old man. Crazy old men have to go to the bathroom all the time; they get overly focused on that problem. Furthermore, Alice didn’t regard his manhandling of her as assault. Robert remembered how sore his head was after he tripped over her feet and slammed into the doorjamb. Black-belt whatever must be one of Alice’s myriad JITTs. Alice was the dangerous one. Poor Alice, poor Bob. Poor Miri.

“Anyway, she told Bob that he was overreacting, and you really need your schooling here. She says you can stay as long as your behavior is…” Her voice dwindled into silence, and she looked up at him. She couldn’t figure how to pass on the rest diplomatically:
as long as you don’t blast my daughter again
.

“… I understand, Miri. I’ll be good.” “Well. Okay.” Miri looked around. “I, um, I guess that’s all I had to say. I’ll let you get on with… whatever you’re doing. Good luck with finals.”

 

She swung back on her bike and pedaled industriously away. That old bike had only three speeds. Robert shook his head, but he couldn’t help smiling.
The Officer of the Watch

Robert’s finals were over. He had earned a 2.6 average, and a B in Search and Analysis. He had worked harder than he ever had in his life. If it weren’t for the imminent irrelevance of it all, he would have been proud of himself.

Now it was Monday afternoon and Robert was counting the hours, almost down to counting the minutes. The Mysterious Stranger had been very scarce lately. The cabal had met a couple of times, with Tommie doling out information on a need-to-know basis. Tommie had read too many spy novels. For now, all Robert knew was that they were meeting at the library at 5:30 tonight.

Meantime, somewhere under Camp Pendleton…

In theory, being officer of the watch for Continental U.S. Southwest was no different than running a snoop-and-swoop operation anywhere in the world. In theory, there could be world-wrecking conspirators at work here. In fact, this was home, in some of the best-connected real estate in the world. The chances they’d have to swoop were near zero. Nevertheless, for the next four hours Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gu, Jr., would be responsible for protecting about one hundred million of his neighbors from mass destruction.

Gu arrived twenty minutes early, checked in with the current officer of the watch, and then looked for DHS screwups. Those were usually the worst thing about CONUS watches. Through the miracle of virtual bureaucracy, Gu’s Marine Expeditionary Group was tonight a part of the Department of Homeland Security. This was how DHS kept its budget so, ahem, small. “Like a modern corporation, DHS seamlessly meshes with whatever organizations are needed at the moment.” That was the hype. And tonight — well glory be — there was not a single authorization glitch in sight.

Bob walked around the bunker, transformed the green plastic walls into windows on the Southern California night. The air filled with abstractions, the status of his people and his equipment, the reorganization of his share of the analyst pool. He grabbed some coffee from the machine by the door and settled down at a very ordinary desk just a few feet from the launch area.
“Patrick?”

His second-in-command appeared across the table. “Sir?”

“Who-all have we got tonight?” An unnecessary question, but Patrick Westin produced the official list. The Marine Expeditionary Group consisted of four twelve-marine maneuver teams. Call them squads; everyone else did. Back in the twentieth century, Bob’s “command” would have rated a second lieutenant. On the other hand, the MEG controlled thousands of vehicles (though most were the size of model airplanes) and enough firepower to finish almost any war in history. Most important to Bob Gu: Everyone in his group had been through combat training as tough as any in the past. They were marines. Patrick called them all in for a short meeting. The room stretched back from around Bob’s desk and for a few moments pretended to be an auditorium. Everyone looked cool; it had been a long time since anything had gone Really Wrong within CONUS.
And were a big part of the reason why
.

“We’ll be here four hours,” said Bob. “Hopefully, the time will be a very boring snoop. As long as that’s the case, you’re free to stay in staff areas adjacent to your vehicles. But most of you have been on my watch before. You know I want you to keep your eyes open. Keep up with the analysts.” He waved at the analyst pool. For a CONUS Southwest watch, this amounted to about fifteen hundred dedicated specialists, but with connections leading down to hundreds of thousands of services and millions of embedded processors. Tonight, Alice was in charge of the pool, and already the changes were evident, the three-dimensional rat’s nest transformed with a clarity rarely seen outside of managers’ dreams. Aside from her marvelous reorganization, the display was completely conventional. Between the humans who had clearance and could communicate directly there were hundreds of color-coded associational threads. The mass of the lower levels was constantly aflicker, weights and assessments and connections shifting from second to second.

Bob pointed at the reddish threat wackos that were always part of the mix. “What have we got to worry about for the next four hours?” The analysts behind the red nodes spewed out their consensus list and supporting pointers.

But even the paranoids didn’t have much to say tonight:

Action issues
Possible Anti-Librareome protest at UCSD Belief circle riot a near certainty
Possible organized participants
Jerzy Hacek belief circle
CIA assessment of Indo-European connection Scooch-a-mout belief circle
CIA assessment of Central African connection CIA assessment of Sub-Saharan connection CIA assessment of Paraguay connection RIAA report to Congress
Commercial entities
Possible threats to infrastructure
Proximity to Critical National Security Sites General Genomics
Huertas International
Increased illegal computation imports Orange County
Los Angeles County
Off-scale low probability estimate linking preceding items Law enforcement issues
FBI vice raid at Las Vegas Splendor Farm, a near certain event Possible request for intelligence support
DEA enhancement-drug raids in Kern County
Possible request for intelligence support
Possible out-of-area activity
Pacific Islander settlements in Alberta
Persons of Interest
Arizona
California
San Diego County
Increased short-term South Asian visitors
Others
Nevada
Recusal advisements

Bob let the list hang for a moment. “Ha,” said one of the gunnies. “At least the policias won’t be a problem.” Denying the law-enforcement requests should be easy tonight, not like for kidnapping or murder prevention.

A tech sergeant flickered highlights across the UCSD event cluster. “This is what will keep us busy.” Her light paused, expanding on definitions. “What? This is a fight
between
belief circles? I never heard of such a thing.”

One of the youngest marines laughed. “You’re just getting old, Nancy. Cross-belief strife is tragic new.”

Bob didn’t try to parse the slang, but he’d heard enough from Dad and Miri to get the point. He expanded the description of the expected riot. “It looks like a combination of twentieth-century protest and modern gaming. It should be as safe as most public events. The problem is the location.” There was so much bio-lab work near UCSD that any instability was a concern. “This is worth a lot of your attention. Note the stats on foreign interest.” He moved on to the links in Persons of Interest. As usual, those expanded into the tens of thousands. At one point or another almost everyone — unless they were dead, in which case they might still count for bioterror paranoia — came under scrutiny. “I’m not going to ask you to dredge through the Pol or this watch will last all year. But follow what the spooks throw up at you — and watch for real-time changes.” That last was classic wisdom, proven in dozens of disasters and disasters-avoided so far this century. The analysts always had a million suspicions, but when they hit the hard cold world of real time, success depended on whether the operational folks had been paying attention.

And then there was the item that stood a little down from all the others: Recusal Advisements, that is, team members who might somehow compromise this watch. Normally, that was the most paranoid list of all — but his crew would see no cloud of detail here, not even links. Such advice was Eyes Only for himself and his backups. In practice, if there had been any serious problems there, they would have been taken care of well before this briefing.

“Questions?”

He looked around. There was a moment of silence, marines drinking in the details of the moment, answering a lot of questions for themselves. Then the young slang-slinger spoke up. “Sir, the equipment, is it the same as for a technical-threat overseas mission?”

Bob looked back into the young eyes. “The boost gear is lighter than usual… That’s the only difference, Corporal. We’re here to protect, but ultimately that means to protect the whole country.”
The whole world, some would say
. “So, yes, we’re carrying a full strategic load.” He leaned back and gave a look that included all his marines. “I don’t expect any problems. If we pay attention and do our jobs, this will be just another peaceful evening for the people of California.”

He dismissed the crew, and the room shrank to its true dimensions. Patrick Westin had a few follow-up questions about squad deployment, and then his image departed, too. Bob Gu turned down his augmentation and for a brief moment there was just his table and chair, sitting by the coffee machine. On his right was the doorway that led to real hardware. With luck, he wouldn’t see any of that tonight.

Bob — > Alice: Are you cool?

Alice — > Bob: Cool and clear. The UCSD thing will be good practice for my lab audit. Talk to you after. That is, after the watch was complete. Tonight Alice was top analyst; if she weren’t currently Trained for the audit, she might have been the operational commander. She was one of only a handful of people qualified for both jobs. In either role, she was a joy to work with — as long as he didn’t have to think about the sacrifices that made her performance possible.

He finished his coffee and brought back his visuals, now fully customized. He checked again with Cheryl Grant. She was ready to go. Okay, for the record:

Gu — > Grant: I take the watch, ma’am. He and Grant exchanged salutes. The clock was started. His squads settled into total alertness. They would have to stay that way for four hours — not a long time, but about the longest you could remain watch-alert without drugs.

Bob’s job was different. He was like a sheepdog running around the outside of the flock, skittering from topic to topic. He watched where marines and analysts were spending their time. This was partly to stay ahead of hot spots, partly to detect attentional holes. For a moment, he looked down from a popular-press viewpoint over UCSD. This… event… was going to involve a lot of demonstrators, many of them physically present. And network stats showed that a flash crowd situation was possible on top of that. He wondered if Miri was surfing this.

The thought brought him back to the moment. He looked again at the Recusal Advisements. Half of his marines had relatives enrolled at UCSD. That was the big problem with a local snoop. Three of his people were actually part-time students at UCSD. The slang-slinger had a hobby of Scoochi decoration that involved a number of Bangalore fans. If this hadn’t been the kid’s duty night, he’d be down there on campus right now. But the analysts had done a minute-by-minute on the young fellow, going back fourteen months. There were some illegalities, some enhancement drug abuse, but nothing that would affect the mission.

Bob had searched the entire recusal tree. Now he ran off its pointers, boring deep. Dad didn’t show up.
And I was sure he’d be mixed up in the Librareome thing
. Not that that would be serious grounds for recusal. He was skittering too far afield, a common problem for commanders with latitude —

Xiu Xiang
? The name was vaguely familiar, but it wouldn’t have popped out at him if his own name hadn’t been in the item. Xiang was one of about three hundred thousand people in CONUS Southwest who were currently of interest for tinkering with hardware. Much of that was illegal, of course; such people could be thrown to the FBI. But it was more productive simply to track them. Most of these people were benign hobbyists or intellectual-property cheats. Some were the hands for terrorist cults. And some were the analyst smarts
behind
those cults. Xiang had the intelligence and training to be in this last category, but so far the most interesting thing about her was the range of toys she had built, a regular museum of oddball electronics. And she was in one of Dad’s classes. That connection was marked “tenuous.”