The Stone Dogs (61 page)

"Kay," Yolande muttered. She turned on her side and threw an arm and leg across Marya's body. "Sleep now." Her eyelids fluttered closed.

Marya's right arm was free; she raised it in the dim light of the reflected earth, letting it shine on the imperishable metal of the controller. Then she brought it to her lips, opening them to the cool neutral taste, slightly bitter. She lay so, motionless except for an occasional slow blink, as the hours crept by and the sweat cooled on her skin.

The opening of space was a military measure, but its only
military
effect to date has been to maintain the stalemate at a higher level. The truly revolutionary impact has been, as so often, the
unintended
and
unforeseen
consequences. The most obvious has been the flow of new materials, products which could not be produced at all on Earth or only at prohibitive cost. Monocrystal materials, ultra-pure silica wafers and optical fibers, bearings and alloys close to the theoretical maxima, room-temperature superconductors, all are flowing in abundance from the plants built to sustain the orbital defenses. More surprising than this has been the sheer scale of developments. In space, our industrial machine is suddenly relieved of crippling, blinding burdens, burdens of which we had never before been aware. We have only recently learned to control nuclear fusion on a planetary surface, but in space fusion power— the Sun—is freely available on an unlimited scale. With unlimited power, vacuum, zero gravity, and no environmental problems, manipulation of materials becomes vastly simpler. Solar sails and plasma drives make space transport cheap, while pulsedrive with its constant high acceleration takes rapid interplanetary travel possible. The flow of fissionables from the asteroids in turn reduces the cost of transport- much cruder methods. Involving fusion warhead-type bombs, can't be used to move massive objects such as comets and asteroids of moderate size. Scramjets were the first step; Earth-to-orbit launch with ground-based power sources such as lasers and magnetic catapults came next. Once significant manufacturing and mining capacity had been established in space, growth became exponential. The use of space-generated power beamed to the surface for launch energy closed the circuit and cybernetic mass production of solar cells is reducing energy costs to the point where only the very cheapest hydroelectric power can compete. From a few hundred in the early 1960s, the number of humans resident in space grew to perhaps ten thousand In 1970; hundreds of thousands a decade later; by the beginning of the 1990s, probably nearly a million. This is the most significant development in human history since the American Revolution and its counter-creation of the Domination. It has altered the terms of the Protracted Struggle; the two-tiered economy of the Domination has had to contort itself into knots to adapt to space; and while illiterate slaves on the Moon tend hydroponic crops in the tunnel-colonies, there are limits to the process. It has or will soon free humankind from the threat of complete annihilation which haunted the generation after the discovery of atomic energy.

Perhaps most important in the long run, it has freed industrial civilization from the constraints of the terrestrial environment. Metals and fossil fuels are nonrenewable, and the ability of Earth to absorb contaminants and by-products was already being strained by our present stable global population of 2,800,000,000. The problem of raising the serf population of the Domination to Alliance standards hardly bears thinking about—if the terms of reference are limited to Earth. They no longer are, and there is no longer an argument from necessity for poverty.

History In a Technological Age

by Andrew Elliot Armstrang, Ph.D.

Department of History

San Diego University

Press, 1995

NEW YORK CITY

HOSPITAL OF THE SACRED HEART

FEDERAL CAPITAL

DISTRICT UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

APRIL, 1998

Nathaniel Stoddard grinned like a death's-head at the shock in Lefarge's eyes.

"Happens to us all, boy," he said slowly. "Ayuh. And never at a convenient time."

Lefarge swallowed and looked away from the wasted figure, the liver-spotted hands that never stopped trembling on the coverlet.
I've always hated the way hospitals smelled,
he thought. Medicinal, antiseptic, with an underlying tang of misery. The private room was crowded with the medical-monitoring machines, smooth cabinets hooked to the ancient figure on the bed through a dozen tubes and wires; their screens blinked, and he knew that they were pumping data to the central intensive-care computer. Doling out microdoses of chemicals, hormones, enzymes…

"I'd have told them to stop trying two years ago, if I hadn't been needed," Stoddard said. The faded blue eyes looked at him with an infinite weariness, pouched in their loose folds of skin.

"But if I'm indispensable, the nation's doomed anyway, son."

Lefarge looked up sharply; that was the first time the old man had ever used the word to him. He reached out and clasped the brittle-boned hand with careful gentleness.

"My only regret is that you couldn't take over my post,"

Stoddard said. "But what you're doing is more important. Janice and the boy all right?"

Lefarge smiled, an expression that felt as if it would crack his cheeks. "Janice is fine. Nate Junior is a strapping rockjack of thirty now, Uncle Nate. Courting, too, and this time it looks serious. We'll have the Belt full of Stoddards yet.".

The general sighed, and closed his eyes for a moment. "The Project? What do your tame scientists say about the trans-Luna incident?"

Well, at least the information's still getting through
, Lefarge thought.
I might have known Uncle Nate
would arrange to keep
a tap into channels.

"They…" He ran a hand through his hair, and caught a glimpse of himself in the polished surface of a cabinet.
Goddam.

I show more of Maman every year.
His cropped hair was as much gray as black, now; no receding hairline, though. "Well, the consensus is that it… mutated. They had to make it so that it could modify itself, anyway. The trigger is multiply redundant, but it's just data, and if something knocks out a crucial piece…"he shrugged and raised his hands. "No estimate on spread, either. Slow. Maybe ten percent penetration by now, if we're lucky. Two years to critical mass. Absolutely no way of telling if there'll be more, ah, mutations. Or if they'll figure it out." He shrugged again. "The Team says de Ribeiro was right; we took a… less than optimum path in computer development, way back when. Too much crash research, too much security.

Though they practically end up beating each other over the head about what we
should
have done! Anyway, even the Project can't redevelop an entire technology. They've pushed the present pretty well to its limits, and what we're using is the product."

Stoddard's eyes opened again. "Fred…" He fought for breath, forced calm on himself and began again. "Fred, don't let them throw it away. We can't… The Militants will win the next Archonal election in the Domination. Coalition… we're pretty sure. War… soon after. Inevitable… fanatics. Think of the damage if they attack… first. Remember…
Nelson's eyepatch."

Fred felt the hair crawl on the back of his neck. Admiral Nelson had been signaled to halt an attack; he put the telescope to his blind eye, announced that he had seen no signal, and continued.

A red light began to beep on one of the monitors. Seconds later a nurse burst into the room.

"Brigadier Lefarge!" she said severely, moving quickly to the bedside. "You were allowed to see the patient on condition he not be stressed in any way!"

He leaned over Stoddard, caught the faded blue eyes, nodded.

"Don't worry, Uncle Nate," he said softly. "I'll take care of it."

"Brigadier—" the nurse began. Then her tone changed to one he recognized immediately: a good professional faced with an emergency. "Dr. Suharto to room A17! Dr. Suharto to room A17!"

Her hands were flying over the controls, and the old man's body jerked. More green-and white-coated figures were rushing into the room; Lefarge stepped back to the angle of the door, saluted quietly, wheeled out.

* * *

Anton Donatei was holding down Stoddard's desk now.

Lefarge had worked with him often over the years; less so since the New America project got well underway and he was seldom on Earth. About his own age, thin and dark and precise, with a mustache that looked as if it had been drawn on. Competent record in the field, even better once he was back at headquarters.

But a by-the-book man, a through-channels operator. The other man in the room was a stranger, a civilian in a blue-trimmed gray suit and nattey silver-buckled shoes; the curl-brimmed hat on the stand by the door had a snakeskin band and one peacock feather. A whiff of expensive cologne; just the overall ensemble that a moderately prosperous man-about-town was wearing this season.

"Anton," Lefarge nodded. He continued the gesture to the civilian, raised an eyebrow. His superior caught the unspoken question:
Who's the suit?

"Brigadier, this is Operative Edward Forsymmes, Alliance Central Intelligence."

Fucking joy. He is a suit.
Still, this was no time to let the rivalry with the newer central-government agency interfere with business. San Francisco was capital of the Alliance, and the Alliance was sovereign. The OSS had been founded as an agency of the old American government; it was only natural that the Grand Senate wanted an intelligence source of its own.
And the
suits still couldn't find their own arses with both hands on a
dark night.

Lefarge extended his; the ACI agent rose and shook with a polished smile. There was strength in the grip; the man had a smooth, even tan, and no spare weight that the American could see; thinning blond hair combed over the bald spot, gray eyes.

"Jolly good to meet you," he said pleasantly.
British?
Lefarge asked himself.
No. Australasian; South
Island, at a guess.

Possibly Tasmanian
. A quarter of the British Isles had moved to the Australasian Federation over the past century, and the accents had not diverged all that much, especially in the Outer Islands. "Shall we proceed?"

The ACI man sat and clicked open his attach case, pulling out a folder. It had an indigo border, Most Secret. An OSS

code-group for title; the New America designation. Lefarge shot an unbelieving glance at his commanding officer.

Donatei shrugged, with a very Italian gesture. "The Chairman's Office thought the Agency should be involved," he said in a neutral tone.

Christ
, Lefarge thought with well-hidden disgust. Not enough that San Francisco was getting involved, but the Agency and the Chairman's office. The Chairman was an armchair bomb-them-all , and the Agency were a band of would-be Machiavellis, and the two never agreed on anything— except to distrust the OSS.

"Well," he said. "What's the latest on the hijacking incident?"

Donatei waved a hand to the civilian.

"Really, quite unfortunate," the ACI man said. "Your boffins did say that this would be a controllable weapon, did they not?"

Lefarge flicked a cigarette out of his uniform jacket and glanced a question at Donatei. "Sir?"

"Go ahead, Brigadier."

"It's
largely
controllable," Lefarge explained patiently, thumbing his lighter. "Christ, though, look at what it has to penetrate! We're trying to paralyze the whole Snake defensive
system
, not just one installation, you know. That means we have to get into the compinstruction sets when they're embedded in the cores of central-brain units; then it has to jump the binary-analogue barrier repeatedly to spread to the other manufacturing centers where they burn-in cores. Talking sets here, not just data.
Plus
the continual checks they run against just this sort of thing; they're not stupid." He drew on the tobacco, snorted smoke from his nostrils. "One replication went a little off, and responded to a specific-applications attack command instead of the general-emergency one. If we could get more
original
copies into fabrication plants… What've we got on reaction?"

The Australasian tapped his finger on the file. "The SD are running around chopping off heads," he said thoughtfully. "But rather less than we expected. It seems they had the beginnings of a tussle over those prisoners of ours they took in the hijacking, the usual War-Security thing they amuse themselves with… and then their top politicals stepped in. Closed everything down; shut off all investigation; had the core from the stingfighter they lost,
and
the prisoners, and the bodies, all shipped to Virunga Biocontrol. We did catch an unfamiliar codegroup; all we could crack was the outer title.
Stone Dogs,
whatever that means." He smiled at the two OSS officers. "You chappies wouldn't be holding out on us, would you?"

Lefarge and Donatei exchanged a glance.

"We've never gotten a handle on it," Donatei admitted. "The name's cropped up,"—he paused to consult the terminal in the desk—"five times, first time in 1973. Again in '75, '78, '82. Then you, which is the first time in nearly a decade. It's about the most closely-held thing they've got, and all we can say firmly is that it's tied to Virunga… which
might
mean something biological. Or might not."

"Those damned Luddites!" the ACI man exclaimed. Donatei and Lefarge nodded in a moment of perfect agreement; the anti-biotech movement had crippled Alliance research for a generation. It was understandable, considering the uses to which the Draka had put the capabilities, but a weakness nonetheless.