Rock Killer (17 page)

She closed the door and locked it. Then she flowed, like mercury, into his arms.

A few minutes later Thorne asked, breathlessly, “What about my roommate?”

“Don’t worry,” she breathed, and kissed him again.

In the
Kyushu
’s saloon, Alex looked at Dr. Jubair. “Ibrahhim, what would you like to drink?”

“Nothing, thank you,” the doctor replied in his soft voice.

Alex looked at Diane. She shrugged. Diana had asked them to keep Jubair busy for at least an hour. But the reticent physician was a challenge to keep entertained.

“Your records show,” Alex said, “that you’re from the Trucial Coast, Ibrahhim.”

“Yes,” he replied. “But we don’t recognize that name. The Baathist changed it when they conquered the United Arab Emirates.”

“How did you get out?” Diane asked. “I thought the Baathists didn’t allow educated people to leave.”

“My father anticipated the attack and we all left for Europe just weeks before the tanks of the Baathist army rolled across the border.”

The doctor spent the next hour describing the rape of his homeland by the Baathists. He stopped the stories of horror only after a very happy looking Thorne and Diana joined the group.

***

Charlie spent the next few days at the house doing menial tasks. The interior of the house was old but clean. The walls needed painting and the posters that had been tacked up weren’t sufficient to hide the problem. The old carpet, though, seemed to be half dirt and half fiber. The furniture was sparse and old. One corner of the small living room was piled high with books and magazines. The dates on the magazines were all from early in the century, before most everything went electronic online. Charlie counted 15 permanent residents in the house including herself and Beatty. Six were women. There was always cleaning up after the crowd packed into the small domicile, and a garden that needed manual weeding. Charlie didn’t wonder why they didn’t use genetically engineered bacteria and viruses that attacked only weeds. She found these people had an antipathy for technology. The house, like Trent’s, didn’t even have a computer. She wondered why they used electricity.

Charlie helped clean the house using vinegar and baking soda and lemon juice. Her grandmother did the same thing years ago because it was cheaper.

The communal meals of organically grown vegetables were spent in indoctrination. Charlie was learning that organically grown meant pest-infested. There were round table discussions that Beatty or someone else would lead. Charlie wanted to counter their arguments with a few of her own but her “Shari” persona agreed with these nuts. They lectured her on the dangers of industrialism, capitalism, and individualism. It was assumed that totalitarian government was the only solution. She heard about the problems of overpopulation and why drastic measures had to be taken to control the production of babies. The Chinese model was often praised. Charlie had heard about that, and the mandatory sterilization and the post-natal abortions of second children.

When Beatty said there’d have to be a large reduction in human population, she noted all present seemed to assume they weren’t the ones that would be sacrificed on the altar of radical environmentalism. Charlie wasn’t old enough to know the arguments hadn’t changed in almost 100 years.

She was told the joy of living in unity with Gaia. It was almost a religion with these people, she noted. The Earth was almost always anthropomorphically referred to as “Mother” or “Gaia.” In fact, almost everything but humans were humanized, so killing off large amounts of people as necessary to save Mother Earth was somehow acceptable, but chopping down a tree became murder. They talked of an invisible spirit world, of magic and special powers of everything from Native American symbols to chunks of quartz. Many in the house wore jewelry with crystals of quartz, hematite, even obsidian. Charlie wondered, since every non-organic solid is a crystal, why doesn’t a tin can have the kind of special properties they ascribe to the pretty crystals?

In the Gaia Alliance value system, the superstitions of ancient peoples were preferred to the knowledge of modern science, which was dismissed as non-holistic empiricism, cold and unfriendly, and the creation of dead, European, heterosexual men. This “materialistic science”, it was argued, was developed by these men solely to suppress competing world-views that would erode their power over non-Europeans, women, and deviants; that is, unless it backed up their positions on the dangers of global cooling and what SRI was supposedly doing to the asteroid belt.

According to what Charlie was being told, the scientific method of requiring reproducible evidence was a conspiracy to derogate metaphysics and was sexist, racist, and homophobic. To Charlie’s thinking, the GA’s platform consisted of the wholesale destruction of thousands of years of human struggle to improve life. She continued to look for clues that could lead her to the evidence she sought. But the communal lifestyle—she shared a tiny room with six others—made it almost impossible.

A week after she arrived, Beatty, Charlie, and three others piled into the electric car and drove out of Los Angeles heading east. They stopped in Barstow to buy some electricity. Hours later they continued into the Mojave Desert. They left the interstate and traveled a series of worsening roads. Finally they came to a dusty stop and stiffly got out.

There was a corrugated metal shack, standing forlornly in the desolate landscape covered with low brush and an occasional lava outcropping. Charlie wondered how far they were from the SRI antenna field that fed Los Angeles electricity from one of SRI’s solar power satellites—the field the GA had planted a bomb in. Beatty had related with zeal the circumstances during the drive from Barstow.

The Greens in the California State Assembly were trying to make receiving microwave energy from space illegal. Beatty hinted that it wasn’t coincidence that just as their bill died, the sabotage happened. Los Angeles needed state money to repair the field and Sacramento didn’t provide it. What they couldn’t obtain legally, the radical environmentalists obtained through violence. The Greens, of course, claimed always that they didn’t have any connection with the GA, didn’t condone their actions, and were shocked–
shocked
–that the GA resorted to violence.

Beatty’s face grew red as he explained that SRI loaned the funds needed to the city and let them pay it back through slightly higher cost of the energy. He didn’t mention if the GA had further designs against the antenna field. Apparently they’d moved on to bigger and more violent things.

Beatty unlocked a large padlock on the shack’s door and went in. Charlie was glad it was winter, since it was only about 25 degrees out. Beatty came out of the shack with an honest-to-god M16; it had to be 70 years old but was in good shape, although the plastic parts looked a bit ragged.

Beatty lectured for interminable minutes on the use of the weapon. He showed them how to load and charge it. Then he talked about how to fire it effectively. Charlie tried to look attentive and didn’t correct his mistakes.

Then, in turn, each of them fired the weapon. One, a young girl Charlie guessed was barely 18, was so frightened she could barely stand the touch of the plastic hand guards. Charlie went last. She aimed the weapon at the paper target and jerked the trigger back, missing high and to the right. She didn’t want to hit it the first time, after all.

Beatty lectured her on trigger squeeze. She tried it again and did better but still missed. Finally, she hit the target dead on. She repeated the feat.

“Have you fired a gun before?” Beatty asked.

“Of course not,” Charlie said. Guns were completely banned in the U.S. and only criminals and governments used them.

“Beginner’s luck, I guess,” Beatty said.

They broke for dinner using the hood of the car as a table to eat a packed meal. As it grew dark, Beatty again lectured them. “The problem with democracy,” he said, “is compromise. There will always be those that oppose what is correct. In a democracy you have to compromise with those fools. And there can be no compromise in the protection of the Earth. We’re talking about mankind’s survival. Only in revolution there is no compromise and only in violence there is revolution. That is why we must learn to use weapons.”

Charlie walked away from the group.

“Where are you going?” Beatty demanded.

“To piss,” Charlie snapped back.

“Okay,” Beatty said, and turned back to continue his monologue.

Charlie went behind the shack for privacy. When finished she walked the long way around the building. Looking around the far corner of the structure, everyone had their back to her, still listening to Beatty. She slipped into the hut.

It was very dark inside and it took Charlie’s eyes a long time to adjust. The first shape she saw was a wooden crate, square on the end and about a meter and a half long. The lid was loose and she pulled it up.

There were three weapons, of a type Charlie didn’t recognize, under the lid. Charlie guessed there were three layers of three weapons for a total of nine. She looked around more and found some cases of ammunition both 7.62 millimeter for the strange weapons and a case of 5.56mm for the M16. There was nothing indicating the presence of the South African made KS-900 used in the attack on the Moon.

“What are you doing in here?” Beatty yelled from the door.

He reached in and grabbed her arm, roughly pulling her out of the shack.

“I was looking for some toilet paper,” Charlie explained.

“There’s none in there,” Beatty growled loudly.

“Okay,” Charlie said. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t go anywhere until I say so, okay?”

“Okay,” Charlie repeated softly.

“Don’t let it happen again.”

“I won’t.”

Beatty walked away and only then did Charlie let out the breath she’d been holding even while speaking.

***

The border between Syria and Israel had seen an unsteady peace for almost half a century. There were incidents, of course, but most of these were covered up. Deaths were explained as training accidents, destruction as wear and tear.

The border resembled the demarcation lines that had been synonymous with the cold war of the last century. There was a kilometer of “no man’s land” mined and covered by robotic weapons. On each side there were both silicon and human eyes searching out for intruders from the enemy’s side. Tall fences bordered the tortured strip of land. There were breaks in the fences on the Syrian side known to their border guards.

Through such a break, four men moved silently in the black of a moonless night. They had a map of the mines and robot weapons’ killing fields on both sides. Traversing the one kilometer to the Zionist state was the most dangerous part of the mission–it took hours. The sky was lightening behind them as they cut through the barbed wire. They knew that would set off alarms. They were counting on it.

The Israeli border guards drove to the break in their Korean-made four-wheel-drive vehicles. The invaders used Chinese-made rocket launchers to destroy the little trucks. The orange balls of flame boiled against the purple sky. The invaders moved inward. Israel is a small, crowded nation. It didn’t take long for them to find innocents.

A day later the Israelis responded. Their American-made jets bombed Syrian army positions in the rugged southern end of the Al-Biqa’ Valley.

There were protests in the U.N. and tape on CNN of dead civilians on both sides. Then the rest of the world forgot perhaps out of a callousness that comes of seeing violence used too much for political gain.

But General Zuabi remembered, and Faruq knew he would expect to be rewarded for arranging the incident. The command of the United Baath Revolutionary Army would be open as soon as Faruq became president and eliminated its leader, who was loyal to the current president.

Chapter Nine

“...we’ll decide whether to blow you out of space.”

The rear Masuka drive had failed and the drive techs didn’t know when it’d be up again. Bente ordered the mass driver to full power, which wasn’t much more than it normally gave.

The rock was going to miss Earth orbit if she didn’t act quickly and correctly.

She yawed the rock, which moved too slowly, and accelerated toward the Earth. This gave her some breathing space. She used the computer to project a braking maneuver using the Earth’s gravity. She’d have to avoid too low of an orbit as the odds she’d plow the asteroid into a satellite or a shuttle grew the closer to Earth her path went. And she had to avoid geosynchronous orbit where satellites were orbited in a crowded swarm. She hoped there was nothing else in her new, unplanned course.

The computer showed the velocity she needed. They were going much too fast. She yawed the asteroid more to put the mass driver in front. The numbers were changing too slowly. It was only a matter of time and the asteroid would fly by the Earth to probably orbit the sun. She could calculate whether it had enough velocity to escape the solar system, but why bother?

“Damn,” Bente said. But the simulation had been the hardest she could think up. The Masuka drive failure just as she was inserting the asteroid into Earth orbit was very improbable.

She took a deep breath and wiped the sweat from her forehead.

She’d try it again after a break. The computer beeped and Bente hit the answer button.

“Navigator Bente Naguchi?” a voice asked.

“Yes.”

“This is the communications room. You have an emergency visual message from Akio Naguchi on the Moon. We can send it to your computer.”