Troy Rising 1 - Live Free or Die (37 page)

“This is... evil,” Yanes said, putting on his earphones and glasses. He took a deep breath
and started the saw. “Just... wrong.”

He winced at the scream as he applied the saw to the frame.

“Sorry. Sorry....”

***

“How's the gluing going?” Tyler asked.

“You just
glue
these together?” the tech asked, shaking his head. He was used to working on circuitry in
a clean room and using high-powered microscopes and waldoes. Not sitting at a table
applying what looked for all the world like hot glue to them. And even though atacirc had
reduced in price, he was still gluing together a fortune in circuitry.

“According to Athelkau the glue creates molecular level connectivity between the chips,”
Tyler said, shrugging. “We're going to have to use a lot of brute processor power since
our plates are basically crap. I had a shipment of atacirc coming in. With enough
processors and the right software you can overcome anything.”

“Even integration?” the techn asked. “I mean, there are about a billion control runs for
this thing, right?”

“Two hundred and eighty-seven thousand control runs or sensors,” Tyler said. “Which we're
going to attach the same way and more or less at random. One hypernode connection for each
pilot, one hell of a lot of processor and some hacked software. I didn't say it would be
pretty, just that it might work.”

***

“Rivets?”
Gnad said, looking at the ship. “You
riveted
the cockpit on?”

Since the
Star Fury
had a passing resemblance to the SR-71, if you backed
way
up it just looked
more
like an SR-71. If you backed up enough, for example, to miss the patched on carbon fiber
where Tyler had cut a little too wide and the rivets holding on the cockpit.

“The frame's carbon fiber,” Tyler said, shrugging. “The cockpit's titanium. There's no
good, fast, way to connect the two. We couldn't wait for the special epoxy to set. Three
layers of extra carbon fiber and... rivets. It's sort of like doing the edge of a sail.”

“The body was part of the frame-matrix,” Gnad pointed out.

“Yeah, well, we glued in some supports,” Tyler said, shrugging again. “Athelkau said it
wouldn't fly in it, but it should fly. Sort of. If we can get the integration of the
pilots together.”

“Steve's arriving tomorrow,” Gnad said. “On one of the Glatun medical support ships.”

“Yep,” Tyler said.

“Is it just me, or is most of the world crazy?” Gnad asked.

While Tyler had been up to his neck in red tape and carbon fiber, which he was starting to
quietly loathe, the world had been dealing with a plague.

The odd part about it was the... attitude. The progress of the diseases was throwing off
people's response. The initial presentation of the Brunette Killer portions of the
bio-attack package were minor. Cold-like. You got the sniffles and that was about it. Made
sure it spread but the hosts weren't, in general, harmed. People with reduced immune
systems might get worse, but they were already being wiped out in droves by the
'pre-existing conditions' bugs. Africa, with all its AIDS problems, was being hit
particularly hard. So hard it was difficult for the news to even keep up. Most of it was
coming from South Africa and you could only see piles of bodies being burned so many times
before you just got inured.

But most people who had a decent immune system, no major pre-existing conditions and who
had treated the Johannsen Worm, felt fine. They had the sniffles. Big deal?

That condition, based on the analysis of the Brunette Killer, would continue for
thirty-two days after initial presentation. And then, if you didn't get the vaccine, you
died. In about three hours. Three
very unpleasant
hours.

But that meant that you had to
trust
the people giving you that information to accept the nannites. You had to
trust
the Glatun and the people they were interacting with. You had to trust, in other words,
people who many governments and the press, especially the international press, had said
for years shouldn't be trusted if they said that that the sun came up in the east.
Because, clearly, the sun coming up in the east was just a plot to oppress the poor people
of...

Many people weren't accepting it. Whole
governments
were dragging their feet. Officially. Unofficially, every governmental official on earth
had screamed for the nannites. They weren't stupid about personal survival. But in many
cases their
official
line was that 'the validity of the claims by the WHO, the Glatun and especially the
American CDC needed further study by their own experts.'

The President of South Africa had officially stated that the plagues were a plot by the
West to reinstate apartheidÑwhich between the Blond component and fact that AIDs was
mostly found in the non-Caucasian portion of the population had a certain amount of
tractionÑand that the Glatun medicines were actually mind-control devices. He and all his
family had been treated but he was telling his
people
not to take the medicine. Similar statements had been made by officials from throughout
Sub-Saharan Africa. The only leaders in the region who had embraced the treatments were
the Presidents of Burundi and Kenya. And they had not only inoculated their military, they
were performing forced inoculations as fast as they could get the nannites distributed.
And running into armed opposition.

The Grand Mullah of Mecca had given a speech denouncing the nano-vaccines and stating that
they were made from the entrails of pigs. He had, at least, been consistent and not gotten
the shot himself. The King of Saudi Arabia had, however, while officially backing the
statements of the Grand Mullah. The Gulf, in general, was pretty mixed in distribution.
The more 'Western', and therefore decadent, portions were distributing aggressively. The
more 'pure' areas were resisting or had rejected it.

The Iranians were denouncing it while doing distribution which was just confusing as hell.
The Sudanese had officially rejected it, inoculated their military and government
officials and their allies and denied it to any resident of Darfur. The rebels in Darfur
had gotten cases of it from non-governmental organizations and were distributing it as
fast as they could.

Some groups in Iraq were resisting the distribution, mostly Sunni tribes. The Kurds had
distribution
finished
before the US. Turkey was backing the distribution one hundred percent while trying to
deny it to the Kurdish regions. Which had finished distribution, smuggled in from the
Kurdish regions of Iraq, before the Iraqi Kurds.

The leadership of every major Islamic terrorist group had stated that any Muslim who took
the vaccine was damned in the eyes of Allah. Intel suggested that they had obtained
inoculations through black market sources. Cases of it had been stolen from NGOs in
Afghanistan and the Tribal Areas of Pakistan. They were turning up, mostly still full, in
the markets. Nobody wanted to
use
them, they were just another form of loot. The most advanced medicine in the world, a shot
that would keep a belly-wound from becoming septic and increase healing rates four-fold,
was going for ten dollars a case. And mostly they were being bought for the really
excellent, vacuum-resistant, water-resistant, plasma-resistant, drop-resistant, cases. The
nano-vaccines were being
dumped
.

Most of the governments of Asia were solidly behind the distribution. Groups within
countries, however, were resisting. Especially areas that were hard-core Islamic. Even
then, individuals were getting access. But the local leadership was trying like hell to
stop it. 'Unclean! Unclean!'

In Burma, the government officially restricted it from being distributed to 'rebel'
elements which meant virtually every one of the hundred ethnic groups that were scattered
through Burma that weren't 'Burmese'. Tyler had taken just enough time out from his work
to get one of the
Paws
to drop bundles of nano-packs to every little village in the back side of beyond in Burma.
The
Paw
had actually taken fire. It turned out that pressor beams and shields were virtually
identical. On its way out, it had dropped more in the Ghorkali regions of Nepal which were
just on the end of a very long supply line.

All of the governments of Latin America were behind the distribution, even those that
called the US and the West evil incarnate. But in many cases they were 'rationing' the
distribution. In Colombia's case, they were mostly trying to keep it out of the hands of
the drug lords. And generally failing.

The Horvath had planned on separating the sheep, as they saw it, from the goats. The
international reaction to the Glatun medical support was doing the same thing. If you
rejected technology or had a difficult time with reality...

“The death toll is going to be staggering,” Gnad said, shaking his head.

“I've got this thing about death,” Tyler said, examining the results of one of Athelkau's
models. Using the AI was costing like crazy but it seemed to have worked. “If a person
wants to survive and tries to survive and is smart about it, I'm all good. I hope like
hell they survive. I feel terrible about all the kids who are about to die. Kids can't
make their own choices. I really don't give a damn one way or the other about the idiots.”

“That's very... Sartran,” Gnad said. “Existentialist even.”

“Say that with a smile, brother,” Tyler said. “Heinlein once said that ignorance is its
own death penalty. Truth is, the way the world has worked for a long time that's not true.
Now... it's literally true. Don't know about the plagues or reject the information and
it's an automatic and irrevocable death penalty. Besides, one death is a tragedy, a
billion is a statistic.”

“Think it will go that high?” Gnad said, his eyes wide.

“No,” Tyler said. “But hundreds of millions? Yes. You want to know the worst part?”

“What could be worse than hundreds of millions of deaths?” Gnad said.

“Billions, technically,” Tyler said. "But the worst part is I don't think it's going to
matter. Except, and this is the really ugly part, in the net positive. Currently, the
statistics are that it's mostly taking out people who have reduced capacity for, well,
anything. Functional labor if you will. The elderly, people with long-term problems. There
were a bunch of pre-disposed to cancer and other factors that weren't caught in time that
were... gainfully employed and productive members of society? Can I be that unPC? But most
in most of the Western countries got the vaccines in time. The rest? South Africa has
already had six
million
deaths.
Fifteen percent
of its population. It's suffering economically but mostly because of the process of
clean-up. And the only reason that we know their death rate is that they're fairly
functional. We have no clue about most of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.

“The plagues, so far, have killed a
reported
one hundred ninety-six
million
people world-wide. That's just an
enormous
number. Thirty
million
in the US alone and we think that's going to go to about
fifty
million.
Twelve percent
of our population. And the full weight hasn't hit, yet. The Brunette Killer package hasn't
activated. The pre-disposed package hasn't even run its course. And you know what? There's
a lot of grieving and the stock market is down and the financials are a bit of a mess and
every projection
shows that in six months we're going to be better off. And
that
is the worst part.”

“How can we be
better
off?” Gnad asked. “That's... insane.”

“That's the bad part,” Tyler said, looking at him with a grimace. "That's the really,
really
horrible
part. This is cleaning up some long-term problems related to modern society. The transfer
of wealth that's about to take place with virtually
everyone
over the age of seventy dying is enormous. And the government's going to tax the hell out
of it. Social Security just got solvent overnight. People with pre-disposed genetic
conditions absorbed ten percent of Medicaid. Old people absorbed over
eighty percent
and climbing. Medicaid and Medicare and all the other creeping socialized medicine
programs were absorbing more and more of our Federal and State budgets. The combination
has essentially
cleared up
the deficit.

“China and India were in the position of getting old before they got wealthy. Fixed that.
If the terrorists keep with their determination to reject the vaccines? Fixed that, too.
Hell, the way things are going there's not going to
be
a Pashtun tribe in another two weeks. Or any of the hard core militants in the
world
. Or most of the groups which contributed the majority of members of the international
jihad like the Algerian Rif tribes. Britain reports that some thirty percent of their
'ethnic minorities' are rejecting vaccines. Guess
which
ethnic group? Pakistan is only getting twelve percent
takers
. There's not going to
be
a Pakistan when this is done. India might as well absorb it.”

“You're making this sound like a good thing,” Gnad said.

“Congratulations,” Tyler said. “Being as coldly rational as a human calculator... it is.
That's the really, really horrible part. And I don't know if the worst part is the reality
or that I'm cold enough to calculate it without flinching.”

“I think... that you can calculate it without flinching,” Gnad said.

“It's like the rivets, really,” Tyler said, sadly. “Sometimes, you gotta ignore how ugly
it is and do the job in front of you. My mom died yesterday. The nannites didn't have
enough of an immune system to work with.”

“I'm sorry,” the Vice President said. “Both of mine got the vaccine. And it apparently
took.”

“Yeah, well,” Tyler said, shrugging. “The girls and their mother are in an 'undisclosed
location'. Not my fairly well known Lair but... similar. And the Horvath are about to get
some payback.”

***