Directive 51 (68 page)

He flipped the letter to the back of the stack and looked at the title page. OVERALL PLAN FOR SPRING OFFENSIVE.

He froze. On the next page was a map of the Dakotas, with arrows running along rail lines and roads, and junctions marked with D+2, D+9, and so forth, all the way to Minnesota. The next page was a table of West Coast and Rocky Mountain Castles that had declared for Nguyen-Peters, with columns for “troop strength,” “probable arms,” “allies,” “estimated food stocks”—

“Mr. Manckiewicz?”

“Yes, I can’t accept this, it’s—”

It wasn’t the same man; it was four of the President’s Own Rangers. “Sir, we have to ask you to come with us, and we were told to secure all documents in your possession.”

“Yes,” Chris said, “you definitely need to secure this. The man who gave it to me—”

“You can explain that later, sir.”

It wasn’t until they cuffed him that he realized what was happening.
Wonder if they’re registering trademarks anywhere yet? Maybe I’ll start a whole
chain
of papers called
Free Trip to the Pen.

At first Captain Wallace, Army Counterintelligence, seemed pretty nice; he explained that he had once been a Seattle police detective, working fraud, ID theft, and cash-hacks, and he was still more used to civilian investigations. He hoped Chris would cooperate.

Chris told him exactly what had happened and described the man as well as he could remember; Wallace was oddly uninterested, as if he already knew who had done it (
Perhaps the spy was already busted?
Chris thought). He established that Chris had looked at the documents but had no intention of disclosing their contents.

“I hate the idea of a civil war,” Chris explained, “but if there is one, I’m on the side of this government, and I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize victory.”

“Is that a matter of revenge? You were jailed by the Athens government before being sent here—”

“Well, it didn’t make me especially like them, of course, but my real problem is that the Southeast is turning into one big Army base, gearing up to attack some squatty little patch of dirt that had nothing to do with Daybreak. And while they’re getting ready, they’re wiping out most of the traditional liberties.”

“Such as freedom of the press?”

“Well, I’m pretty attached to that one. Look, I had just realized what I’d been given when the Rangers came and busted me. I hadn’t had time or opportunity to turn it in—jeez, I guess your office would have been the right place, I didn’t even know
that
.”

“Yes, actually, my office would have been the right place.”

“Off the record, did you catch the guy?”

“You might say that. Off the record entirely, though.” Wallace sat down, so close to Chris that their knees almost touched. “So let me make sure of a few things. No one else saw the documents but yourself. How would you describe what you saw?”

“It looked like the first stages of a military offensive against the Athens government—securing our communications through Montana and the Dakotas to the New State of Superior, and cleaning out Castles that might act as enemy bases in our rear.”

“I can see you’ve done some military reporting before.”

“Second Iranian War; I was embedded with Tenth Mountain for three months, and almost all that was at headquarters.”

“Ah. And your record there?”

“Flawless on security issues, Captain Wallace. Not that anyone can prove anything with all the computers down.”

“True, but good to know.” The captain sat down and gazed straight into his eyes. “And you would not have divulged or published because—?”

“Because I’m a loyal citizen of this government. I’d be interested as all hell of course and I might have written a book
after
the war—probably would have—but I wasn’t going to let anything I publish harm us in the struggle, if it comes down to a war between a military-intel-administrative dictatorship and the actual Constitutional government.”

“You wouldn’t let anything you publish harm our side?”

“No, I would not. No matter what they show in the movies, not every reporter—”

The captain grabbed Chris by the lapels and shouted into his face, a long wailing scream, hot breath pouring in through Chris’s gaping mouth and flooding his throat, spittle spraying into his staring eyes. With his nose almost on Chris’s, he bellowed, “And yet you go and publish, and sell it in the marketplace, a book jammed full of
lies
, that slanders our president and our entire leadership, explains in detail the illegal position of the junta in Athens, directly says the Constitution is at fault, and cannot be called anything but treasonous slander! You run that ridiculous speech that you invented for the president to have given in Pale Bluff, promising to hand over power to the junta!
In your own words
, this book is exactly intended to harm us in this struggle! What do you have to say for yourself, you lying sack of shit?
How much did they pay you to do this, in Athens?
”

Captain Wallace shook Chris, yanking him back and forth, and repeated the accusations, over and over, screaming and scattering spit over Chris’s face. When he ran out of air he threw Chris back in the chair. “Now, if you
really
meant that about supporting the legitimate government, you’ll sign these documents!”

“What if I don’t sign?”

“What if you don’t sign?” The captain grabbed him by the hair, tilted his face back, and slapped him. “Didn’t you say you were
supporting
our side? Didn’t you
say
that?”

Chris knew he was going to be here for a long time.

“So,” Arnie said, turning the page over on the old flip chart, “big windmill with generator here, supplies power to this rotary-quenched spark gap, the high tech of 1915 here today. It’s a big piece of equipment, with a huge capacitance and at high voltage, so we’ll want to keep people far from it. Then we hook it to this oval of old high-tension lines, which will be our antenna. And the result is that we’ve got the biggest, loudest radio transmitter on Earth, by far.

“Now, in a warehouse, we found four hundred toy telescopes, all metal and glass, which we set up in arrays of fifty, spaced and angled to be looking at space above the antenna. Dark construction paper over the eyepieces like so. We use old surveying transits, sextants, and the almanac to get them aimed perfectly—”

“Let me guess. It’s a religious ritual,” Graham Weisbrod said. Several Cabinet members chuckled, which made Heather add a few points to their Sycophancy Index, a statistic she’d been making up for some time; Allie, sitting at his elbow, laughed and rubbed Graham’s arm.

Arnie flushed, and Heather beamed a thought at him:
Come on, don’t let the bitch fluster you, she’s trying to fluster you. You’ll have a bucket of beer, and the kid and I will have some milk, and we will joke around about the Sycophancy Index over dinner, and it won’t matter
. Arnie seemed to gather himself as if he could hear her. “So this will attract one of the EMP gadgets—whatever they are. From a robot’s-ear view, it’ll be the biggest and most obvious target this side of Jupiter. The toy telescopes that happen to catch the flash will burn holes in their construction paper, so the array will tell us about where the bomb went off, and the recording windup clock here can be coordinated with it.”

“If you have the telescopes, why do you need the clock?” McIntyre asked.

“We coordinate them. The EMP will be a huge, unmistakable mark on the disk, but in the few seconds before it, we’ll also be recording the echoes of the radio waves off the object, and with ten accurate chronometers scattered over a few thousand miles, we’ll be able—using graph paper and a lot of hand calculations—to put together what amounts to one good radar image. We’ll have its trajectory, and we’ll be able to solve that trajectory backward and know where it came from.

“And here’s the kicker. The AM modulator will work off a mechanical-disk recording device—”

“A record player, Arnie,” Heather said. Even she couldn’t help grinning at that one.

“Well, yes, it works just like an old-fashioned phonograph, and we’ll be broadcasting that we are using this gadget to identify the source of the EMPs, over and over, and nothing else.”

McIntyre nodded. “So if it’s a real thinking enemy, or even a medium-good artificial intelligence, it won’t target our big transmitter—it’ll hit something with more value, or hold its fire.”

“Exactly,” Arnie said. “But if it’s just a machine, no smarter than a bug, as we think it is—well, then it’ll go for the brightest light on the porch. And if it’s just a machine, with no enemy in control of it anymore, then basically there’s no war and we’re just dealing with a leftover mine. No war.”

Graham nodded. “Thankyou for yourclarity. So if yourexperiment works, we’re facing a system artifact, not an enemy nation or organization—”

“Well, the experiment works either way. The result will either be consistent with a system artifact
or
with enemy action—”

Allie said, “We already
know
it’s a system artifact, Arnie, your research on that was
brilliant
and you did it back when you had real computers to work with. What we need is an experiment that
proves
it.”

“Proving it is impossible,” Arnie said. “All we can do is marshall more and better evidence. Even if results are completely consistent with a system artifact, it could be an enemy laying low by pretending to be a system artifact. And for that matter something that looks like conscious enemy action might be a system artifact getting lucky. So—”

“And you want to launch a project this big, and involve the illegal junta in it, when it doesn’t prove anything?” Allie asked. She was sitting very close to Graham, who was looking down at the table. Heather thought,
I hope that means he’s at least a little ashamed.

Heather had tried to steer Graham into approving it without seeing the politics behind it, but that wasn’t going to happen, so she waded in. “What Arnie is proposing is that we try an experiment, predict the results, and see what happens—and because the EMP will happen where we’ll be watching, we’ll see more. It’s not expensive, it mostly uses resources that were just going to crumble in the next few years anyway, and besides if the government in Athens goes in on it with us, and sends observers and scientists, then whether or not we get anything scientifically out of it, it ought to kind of get the ball rolling toward reconciliation.”

“There’s already been too many gestures of reconciliation,” Allie put in. “If you ask me. Especially with Manckiewicz publishing that so-called Pale Bluff Address that—”

“That you and I both heard Graham actually say,” Heather said. “Don’t forget that detail. Are you going to put
me
in jail for remembering it? Whether you approve of it or not, he said it, and it was a door to reconciliation, which—”

“Door to
surrender
,” Allie said, looking at McIntyre.

Weisbrod made a tent with his hands and stared into space.
God, I hope that means you’re actually thinking and not trying to impress your aggressive little minion with what a thinker you are,
Heather thought,
and I wish I didn’t have to worry about that. It just seems so
unfair.
I never had to worry about that before.

“Well,” he said, “if you could float the idea past Cameron Nguyen-Peters, through a back channel, then I’d say we wouldn’t want to be the side that said no.”

“But we’re not quite saying we’re going to do it, for sure.”

“No, I guess we’re not.”

“Then what if they say the same thing?”

Weisbrod shrugged. “We’ll consider that situation if it comes up. Right now we can just probe each other about it. My guess is that they won’t want to run the risk of an experiment that is apt to bolster the system-artifact hypothesis.” He smiled at her, and it was a moment where she saw the old Graham. “So I’m saying go ahead because I think we’ll get some cheap propaganda points, and if they agree, we’ll get some slightly more expensive propaganda points. Either way, we come out ahead, and I don’t really think there’s any risk of our being embarrassed.” He glanced around the room and said, “Any dissent?”

He’s not including Allie’s pouting expression as dissent,
Heather thought,
that’s something.

Because they did not dare use radio anymore, the fastest secure communication these days was via the Bubble Drop: letters written in pencil and wetted with disinfectant were sealed in a glass jar with a nail tied to a piece of copper wire. The jar was degaussed in the Big Ripper, as the Evergreen State physicist who had devised it had dubbed it—a generator-magnet-coil system, driven by a weight descending on a line from a six-story building. Whatever was inside the coil received enough strong, shifting electric and magnetic fields to kill most nanoswarm, and if any of them survived, the field and current surges were enough to cause them to start breeding at the junction of copper and iron. So if an hour after degaussing, no white fuzz was growing where the nail joined the wire, the bottle was pronounced sterile.

Then Bambi Castro, taking the Stearman on the down-coast mail run to the nine Castles that were aligned with Olympia, would fly the jar a hundred miles or so out into the Pacific, loft a brightly colored paper kite on a five-hundred-foot cotton kite string, and work downward until the plane was just skimming the waves. At that point, she’d toss the jar, tied to the kite string, over the side, where it would drop into the water and act as a sea-anchor to the kite.