The Stone Dogs (71 page)

A warning sent through Security crept into the Chiliarch's mind. "Dump the core, over to dispersed operation." A sound of protest from the Infosystems Officer; that would reduce their combat capacity by nine-tenths. "Do it, do it
now.
"

"Initiatin'… suh, it won't respond. Null board."

"Get in there and slag the core, physically, now."

[Seven seconds]

Fingers were prying at access panels. Hands tore bunches of wire free, and sparks flickered blue.

[Five seconds]

Sections of screen were going dark. He could see globes of fire rising and flattening against the upper atmosphere, down below on Earth. Vortexes of black cloud were gathering.

[ Three seconds]

Even now there was no panic. Desperate effort…
Impossible,
he decided. The Chiliarch closed his eyes, called up a certain day.

He was small again, and his father was
lifting
him…

[Two seconds]… up so high toward the tree…

[One second]… with Mother smiling, and…

[ Detonation]

WASHINGTON HOUSE DEEP SHELTER

FEDERAL CAPITAL DISTRICT

NEW YORK CITY

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

NOVEMBER 4, 1998

"This had better be worth it,
compadre,
" Carmen Hiero said, fastening her robe. It was the early hours of the morning, and she reached grumpily for the coffee. Then she saw her aide's face, and gulped without tasting. "Something more about those broadcasts?"

"No, still just harmless modulated signals," the aide said. "But there's something else… Madam President, the chairman's gone to the Denver War Room." Thousands of feet under a mountain; she felt something clutch at her windpipe. That was where the real decisions would be made, as was right and proper; the Alliance was sovereign, not the member states. "Please, the briefing's being prepared." It was a short walk to the War Room; even after all these years, she still found the salutes a little incongruous for an elderly Sonoran lady in a housecoat.

"What's the status?" she asked, sinking into the command chair. There was a tired smell of cigarettes and stale coffee, under the artificial freshness.

"They've gone to Force Condition Eight," the general said.

"Full mobilization. Evacuations in progress; nearly complete, in fact. Nothing overt, not yet; we're matching, of course. No panic…" Unspoken, the knowledge that the civil defense measures were inadequate passed between them.
Yes, yes,
general. I did my best. Pray that we will not see how far short
of enough that is.

"And they're continuing that crazy broadcasting. The experts say the only thing it's going to affect is the homing sense of pigeons. Evidently that's in the same range, planetary magnetism or some such. And… yes, Denver says the Project people in the
Sacajawea
did match velocities with the
Mamba."

Hiero nodded. She had always felt that name was a little ill-omened;
Sacajawea
had led Lewis and Clark on their expedition to the northwest. Heroic, if you looked at it from a Euro-American perspective, but even if the family did not talk about it, there were indios in the Hiero background. And from their point of view, of course— She forced her mind back to the present. Best not to think too much of the past, here and now.

That way lay thinking that somehow she could have prevented this.

"They're—" He frowned. "That's odd, they're making a Priority A broadcast,
from the shuttle."

She snorted. "Get me Orbital Three. Split screen, and call up the
Sacajawea
broadcast."

Reason fought with sick dread. It made no sense-, the balance had not changed. Von Shrakenberg was still in power over there, and still a rational man, for a Draka. They had been counting on that, on him keeping the Militants out until the Alliance was ready…

How could they have found out about the Project?
she thought; that was enough to send a stab of pain from the incipient ulcer through her stomach. "Milk," she said.
No. It
must be more. They would know we are not ready.

"Madam President, we're having a little trouble with the link to Orbital One," the comtech said, puzzled. "The signal's odd.

Here's the Project broadcast."

It was Brigadier Lefarge. She sat bolt-upright at the sight of his expression. "To all Alliance bases and personnel. To all Alliance bases and personnel. The Domination has engaged in a,"—his voice paused, as if searching for words—"an act of bio-psychological—"

She felt a sudden quietness spread from the tech's desk, rippling out. "Put them on central screen, and
get Orbital One,
"

she said.
Oh, my children
. "Now.
Vamos."

The communications desk of the orbital battlestation came on, but there was no one behind it. Silence, then a flicker. Then the image on the screen jumped, to the command deck. A man turned to look at them, and Carmen Hiero crossed herself reflexively. There were screams, and one of the techs started vomiting on her console. The man on the screen wore the uniform of an Alliance general; there were deep nail-gouges down the side of his face, and an eye hung loose on a stalk along his cheek.

"Urrrrrrr
," he said, advancing on the screen pickup. They could see the body behind him, broken and floating in the zero-G

chamber. Little else; too much blood was coming from the throat. More floated around the general's mouth.
"Aaaaaaaaaa.

" The mouth swelled enormous, and a slick grating sound came through the speakers; the sound of teeth on crystal sandwich.

The general was trying to gnaw his way to the command room on Earth. Wet mouth on the screen, and the teeth were splintering now. Chewing, with shreds of tongue hanging between the jagged ends. "Ah. ah.
gggggg."

Below her in the War Room the tech was screaming again, but now he was standing, tearing out handfuls of his hair. The president lifted her hands against the sight, and the fingers turned on her. They smiled, showing their fangs. Burrowed toward her face and began to feed, smiling.

Pain
. That was the first thought. Then, absurdly:
So this is
what madness is.

She stood, floated upward, landed on feet that rooted themselves deeper than the world. That was terrible, because she must run, she must hide, the
Anglo
girls at Mt. Holyoke had sprinkled brown sugar over her sheets again and—

—She was walking down the corridor towards the elevators, and the wall kissed her shoulder wetly. A tech was kneeling in a corner, hands locked around her feet, shivering with a tremor that sent waves of blue into the air in time with her whimper.

Hiero pulled her own hands away from her face, feeling the tendrils stretch and pulse. A man stumbled toward the tech and squatted before her. He had a fire-ax in one hand, and mass of bloody tissue in the other; the spurting wound between his legs showed what it was. He held it out to her, and Hiero wanted to weep with the numinous beauty of the motion that smelled of pomegranates.

Instead she walked into the elevator and keyed for the surface.

It shot upward and inward, compressing her into a fetal curl.

Bones snapped and flesh tore as it masticated her, rolling her into a ball that it spat out into the corridor. Tissue and fragments flowed together and she crawled along a carpet that moaned in pain and writhed away from her. Something grabbed her and jerked her upright. Insect-stick limbs, oval body, buzzing wings, centered in a face she knew.
What is this monster doing
with
Roderigo's face?
she thought, and felt rage seep wetly out her stomach. Words spattered around her, heavy with evil oils.

She lunged forward and it ran, ran before her out onto a balcony beneath a sky that shivered and thundered.

Light blossomed, and there was a moment of total clarity as her melted eyeballs ran down her cheeks. Then—

SEABED, ANGOLAN ABYSSAL PLAIN

MALVANIS
SSN-44

NOVEMBER 4, 1998

1005 HOURS

"Damned fragmentary, Captain," the Exec said. The lines scrolling up the screen were the long-wave relay from Hawaii.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"The first part's an all-points from some Space Force johnny,"

Jackson replied, rubbing one hand across the other. She felt a little off, as if things were blurring at the edges.
Christ, I can't be
coming down
with the flu now of all times.
"The stuff after that is completely garbled. Rerun the first, the comp ought to have decoded it by now." That was Nav Command for you, nothing better to do than cryptography.

Wanda Jackson read the report over, once and then again, then turned her head to look at the Exec. Her hand reached for the controls, and she keyed the general circuit.

"Now hear this,
" she said. "All hands. This is the captain speaking. All hands will proceed to the nearest medicomp and take the maximum waking trank dose,
immediately
. Remain calm. Once you have taken the medication, report to sickbay by watches."

The Exec handed her an injector; she pressed it against her neck and felt a cool bite. A wall of glass came down between her and the world, imposing an absolute calm. That was close. The sick feeling at the edge of her vision was still there, but now she could feel it as something apart from her. The captain touched another control, this time to sickbay.

"Dr. Fuentes?" she asked.

"
Si
, Capitan," he answered. Dull, heavy tone. Good.

"
Have your psychotropic basket of tricks ready. You
understand?"

"Si."

Still with the flat lack of caring; trained reflex would take over, when motivation was gone. That would be enough, until they took the counteractants. Paranoia and schizophrenia were reasonably well understood, and you could suppress the symptoms quite readily, for a while.

It would reduce their efficiency, of course. But they could do the job.
Good thing I don't care much
what must be happening
, she thought idly, and rose to head down the corridor.

OFF THE COAST OF NORTH ANGOLA

2,500 METERS ALTITUDE

NOVEMBER 4, 1998

1035 HOURS

"Oh, shit, oh, shit," the pilot of Louise Gayner's aircar was saying as he fought the controls.

"Pull yourself together, man," she snapped, and looked down at her wrist. 1035, November 3rd; not a day she was going to forget very soon.

Perhaps that was a little unfair,
she thought, as he quieted.

The aircraft was down low, no more than two thousand meters, and doing better than Mach 2; not bad, considering the turbulence since the blast front hit. That had probably been Lobito, considering their position on the coast; a medium-sized port city.
Pity. Thought they'd stick to counterforce.
The weather outside was turning strange, with cloud patterns she had never seen before. Nothing on the standard channels, nothing but the roaring static bred by the monstrous electromagnetic pulses that were rolling around the earth.

High-altitude detonations. Her aircar was EMP hardened, of course…

Nothing but cloud above, choppy blue-gray ocean below, visually. The radar was crawling with images, higher up: hypersonic craft, decoys, suborb missiles, bits and pieces of this and that. She swallowed, and realized with a start that her throat was dry; her flask was steady as she raised it to her lips. Wine and orange juice; to hell with the doctors. Two more traces, lower down,
fast
. From off to the west, only a few kilometers ahead of them. Something lanced down out of the sky, a pale finger that touched one of the traces. The explosion was a bright
blink
against the sea; the other trace was gone away, over the horizon.

"I don't think…" Gayner began. Another dagger from the sky, this time brighter and more ragged.
Ablation track,
she thought, and sipped at the flask again.
Missile, trying for the submarine
.

As if to punctuate the identification, the sea erupted in a dome of shocked white, kilometers across. A low-yield fission weapon, tactical type. "I don't think there's much point in continuing on to Luanda," she continued.

The canopy went dark, and showed only the blossoming sunrise in the east. For a moment there were two suns; Gayner braced herself, and felt the automatic shockbars clamp down around her body. "Not much point in trying to reach home," she whispered. "Well divert east and land in the Kasai."
If we make
it.

A fist struck.

DRAKA FORCES BASE ARESOPOLIS

MARE SERENITATIS, LUNA

NOVEMBER 4, 1998

1200 HOURS

Yolande Ingolfsson felt the rock tremor beneath her. "What was that?" she asked sharply. For an instant she felt bitter envy of the operators crouched over their screens. They had no time to think.

"Sector Ten," one replied. "Levels one through eight not reportin'. Penetrator." That was serf housing, she remembered.

The breakthroughs seemed almost random; the last hit had been a fabrication plant. This would mean heavy casualties, ten thousand or better. Crushed, burned, explosive decompression.

Probably fairly quick, at least.
It was a good thing that grief was not cumulative; impossible to really feel more than you did for an individual. If you could pile one up on top of another, human existence would be impossible.

"Incoming." Yolande looked up from her warship-style crashcouch to the main screen. Another spray was coming into sight over the mountains, fanning out in blinking tracks. Some vanished even as she watched, but that quadrant's main battlecomps were down, the weapons reaching for the warheads were under individual control.

"Those three are going to—" The faint vibration again, then a louder, duller sound. "That's the dome gone."

A hand closed on her throat.
Don't be ridiculous, it's only an
artifact
, she told herself.

"Outside comm?" she asked.

"Very irregular, from Earth," the officer replied. Yolande looked over to the main view of the mother planet, routed in from a pickup well out. Cloud reached unbroken around the northern hemisphere, and large patches of the south. Even as she watched a light blinked blue-white against the night quadrant.