A Rage for Revenge

59 Colonel Tirelli

I watched the ground slide past beneath us. The countryside grew ever more rugged. The rolling hills turned into rocky crests and Lizard kept pulling the chopper higher and higher above each advancing ridge. Soon, we were swooping and swerving through steep canyons of brush and pine. The slopes were dry and brown, and close enough to touch.

"Why are you staying so low?" I asked.

"I don't like being tracked."

"Tracked? Worms don't have the technology-"

"Hmph." She just grunted.

I didn't pursue the subject. After a moment, I said, "I suppose you want me to thank you."

"You suppose wrong. I don't care what you do."

"Well, you came after me."

"No, I didn't. You were just a stopover." We lifted up to the crest of a ridge, then dropped down the opposite side. It was like riding a roller coaster. My stomach was about two loops behind. "This is what I came to do. I do this as many times a week as I can get fuel and armament."

She said, "You still have an inflated idea of your own importance, Jim. You think we care about you. Truth is, you're not worth the fuel to make a special trip." She looked at me. "Really."

"Then why did you bother?"

"You had one of our vans. I was curious. Who were you? How did you get it? Where were you going with it? According to our satellite tracking, you were headed straight into the thickest worm infestation on the North American continent. We had you figured for a renegade. We almost pushed the button on you a week ago."

"Huh? How?"

"You have to ask?" she said. "Those vans have satellite phone links, right? Your computer was always in constant communication with the network. The network always knew where you were."

"I thought I disconnected the links."

"You did. But that's a military van. It just switched over to one of its backups."

"That's not possible! I disconnected every link on the schematics."

"That's right, you did. You got every transceiver that shows on the schematics. That's one of the reasons we thought you were a renegade, delivering arms to worms."

I didn't notice the second part of that statement, I was still realizing the implications of the first. "Those vans have secret channels?"

Lizard grinned at me. "Do you like secrets?"

I shrugged. "Not particularly. All my experience with secrets is that they're a damn nuisance."

She said, "You're right. They are." Then she asked, "Do you want to know the greatest American military secret of the past twenty years?"

My impulse was to answer yes, then I thought about it. That took about ten seconds. I said, "I don't think so."

"Actually, it doesn't matter," Lizard said. "Because it's not a secret any more."

"All right, I'll bite. What isn't?"

"This: every piece of military equipment manufactured in this country in the past twenty years has been a Trojan horse."

"Huh?"

"It's in the microchips. There are certain extra circuits-a piece in this chip, a piece in that chip-they look like they're supposed to do something else. Most of the time they do. Except every so often, they emit a random piece of low-level electronic noise. It's a spurious thing, nearly impossible to trace."

"I remember reading about that. The Israelis noticed it. They said the electronics were flawed. And we acknowledged that there was a problem with spurious signals."

"Right-except the problem wasn't the signals. It was the fact that they weren't supposed to be detectable. Those signals were coded responses to high-level electronic queries from stationary satellites. For twenty years, we've had the ability to scan the entire planet, querying the weapons we've built to let us know where they are. Not only weapons we've built, but weapons other people have built that we've supplied parts for. We've been doing it almost since the very first serial number was coded into a chip. The day that it became possible for chips to identify themselves, the technology became practical. The weapon listens for its own serial number or its category code. When it hears it, it responds within twenty-four minutes. It gives a distinct electronic beep or buzz, on one of several hundred randomly chosen microwave channels. Most receivers tune out those signals automatically. Most technicians have never even heard our noises except as static. "

"But-why? I mean, I can see that there is some value in tracking our own equipment, but it seems such a cumbersome way."

"Actually, it's all automatic. And you're looking at it from the wrong angle. It wasn't to track our own weaponry as much as it was to track weaponry we'd manufactured or supplied parts for. Do you know that the United States was the number one supplier of military hardware for over sixty years? It's an incredible intelligence advantage to know where all your weapons are."

"That's unbelievable!"

She grinned. She looked absolutely delighted. "That's its virtue. The whole idea is too outrageous to believe. The one time we had a security leak, the other side's intelligence refused to accept the validity of the information. They thought it was some kind of ploy, because there was no confirming evidence at all."

I was a little confused. "But if we had that kind of power, that kind of advantage, why did we still lose the war in Pakistan? The other side was using captured weapons, as well as equipment they'd purchased third- and fourth-party. Didn't the system work?"

"The system worked perfectly," Lizard said. "We were able to track whole divisions of the enemy by nothing more than routine queries of the field weapons in the hands of the infantry. It was a flawless demonstration." She looked positively cheerful as she recounted. "The problem was, we couldn't use the intelligence without the risk of exposing the whole game. So we never released any of that intelligence except when we had confirmation from an additional source, say a satellite photo. And most of our spy satellites were being knocked down as fast as we were putting them up. So we couldn't use that intelligence. It was too big a secret," Lizard said. "We had to save it for a war that directly endangered the existence of the United States. It was that powerful a strategic advantage."

"Um," I said. Then, "You said it isn't a secret any more. What happened?"

"Oh, about three months ago, some of our Fourth World allies tried to land some divisions in the Gulf of Mexico. Near Houston. They called it an army of Economic Liberation."

"Huh? I never heard about it."

"Not too many people did. A very funny thing happened. Their rifles blew up. Their boats sank. Their planes came apart in the air. Their missiles exploded. Their tanks melted. Their communications failed. There weren't too many survivors."

"Huh?"

"That was the rest of the secret. If you can program a chip to identify itself when it receives a specific signal, you can also program it to destroy itself when it receives another specific signal. We've had the ability for twenty years to disarm or disable at least a third of-the world's military equipment-any individual weapon or any category of weapon, worldwide or limited to a specific area.

"We didn't dare use the system offensively before, because we couldn't risk damaging our national reputation for zero-defect weaponry. We didn't dare risk our intelligence advantage either. But this was the first time that foreign troops were landing on our shores, and that was what the system had been designed for. It worked perfectly." She looked as proud as if she'd designed it herself. I wondered just how important she really was. Was her rank of colonel just another cover? I didn't know what to believe about the United States government any more. Nothing in it was ever really what it was supposed to be.

"So my van . . . ?"

"Right. I had your code all along. We could have blown you up any time."

I said, "Oh, shit."

She said, "Uh-huh."

I said suddenly, "Why didn't you?"

"We were giving you a chance to surrender peacefully."

"You knew it was me?"

"Oh, no; you could have been any jackass. I was going to pick you up for questioning and find out why human beings were delivering weapons to the worms. When I saw it was you, I hit you with the wake-up hypo instead of the sleepytime one."

"I could have blown you up! I had my finger on the button! I had antiaircraft missiles!"

"But you didn't fire, did you?"

"No. I didn't know who you were, but I knew you didn't miss by accident. You could have hit me if you'd wanted to. So I knew those had to be warning shots. You wanted me to stop. My daddy used to say, never argue with a loaded gun. Of course, he was talking about the realities he used to write-there's always a better solution-but the same principle applies in the real world. At least, I hope it does."

"It does. Your daddy was real smart. It's a good thing you listened to him. If you had returned fire, using any weapon system in that van, you'd have blown yourself up. I'd already sent a coded signal from a hundred kilometers away. You were the trigger. The self-destruct was armed and waiting. Whether you returned fire or not determined if it went off. I've seen three vans blow up that way. I have to admit, I expected to see yours go off too."

I remembered just how close I'd come to pushing that button. I'd been terrified of that chopper when it buzzed me. For half a second, I'd considered hitting the button and sending a Sidewinder-6 up her tail.

What I'd told Lizard hadn't been entirely accurate. I hadn't held my fire because of any rational assessment of the situation. There hadn't been time to stop and realize that she'd missed deliberately. I'd held my fire because . . . I'd held my fire. I looked at the memory and all I could see was myself holding back and saying, "No!" I didn't know why I'd held back at all.

I wondered for a moment if it was that I just didn't have the nerve. Had I been that rattled? Or that scared?

No, that wasn't it either.

I could still see the van exploding in a ball of flame, the frame instantly buckling, breaking in half, walls blowing outward, pieces of metal tumbling upward and skittering sideways, hurled by the force of the blast. Then the blossom of flames exploded again as the armaments went off, and the pieces disappeared inside a larger, still-growing fireball-that could have been me!

I went back to the beginning of the memory: the chopper coming out of the sky behind us, strafing low over the van-me pulling myself into the turret, doing something with the controls, automatically, almost like a machine myself-my finger poised over the fire control-the explosion behind me!-the computer asking, "Shall I return fire?"-"No!". . . .

I held onto that moment and looked at that "No!" as hard as I could. That was it, there! Why had I shouted no?

I kept on looking at the moment, recreating it, replaying it over and over in my head, obsessively examining it. This was the answer that I needed, right here-inside this memory.

And suddenly it popped into focus. I knew why I hadn't fired. I grinned with the surprise of it.

"What's so funny?" Lizard asked.

"I am," I said. "Do you know what a jerk I am?"

"Yes," she said. "But you can tell me anyway."

"I've been running because I'd thought I'd fallen off the deep end. I'd thought I'd lost all perspective on human life."

"If you mean that little incident at Family," she said quietly, "I know all about it. No court in the country would convict you. You were very careful. Everything you did was legal." She glanced over at me. "Are you all right?"

"No," I said. There was a terrible buzzing in the space between my ears. "I don't want to talk about Family. It makes my head hurt. It makes my stomach hurt." The wall between me and my memories was starting to crumble. I was starting to feel the pain again. I ground the heels of my palms into my eyes, trying to rub the visions away.

She looked at me, curiously.

"I have this noise going on inside my head." I tried to explain. "It's all mixed up again. As long as I don't think about what happened at . . . as long as I talk about other things, I'm okay."

"You were telling me why you didn't pull the trigger on the chopper," she prompted.

"It's all part of the same thing." It was hard to say, and it was easy too. Once I got started, the words babbled out of me as if of their own volition. "I don't know who I am, Lizard. And I'm so afraid that I'm starting to turn into . . . something like somebody I used to know. That's why the incident at . . . That's why I-I drove out here to die, but I didn't want to die; but at the same time I couldn't think of anything else to do. I was so sure that I'd become someone who's lost all sense of the-the what?-the sacredness of human life.

"But-this is the good part. What I've just realized is that I didn't fire at the chopper because I couldn't. I mean, I wouldn't. I almost did. For a moment there, all I saw was the chopper, and I almost pressed the button-but I didn't. Somehow, I knew that you really didn't want a firefight. I just knew it. You didn't want to kill me. So you weren't my enemy. That's why I didn't fire. I didn't have to. That's what's so wonderful. If I had really turned into some kind of monster, I'd be dead now. I mean . ." I started giggling. "This is terrific! I feel a thousand years younger! Because I've found out that I'm not quite as bad as I was afraid I was. That's very important for me to know. Really!"

Lizard was smiling gently. She reached over and patted my knee. It seemed almost an affectionate gesture. "That's quite a thing to learn," she said. "For some of us- " She stopped herself in mid-sentence.

"No, go on!" I said.

She shook her head. "It's not important." Then she looked at me. "Just know this, Jim. You're not the only one who has to carry these questions around with him."

I thought about it. "No, I guess not. I guess I've been kind of stupid, haven't I? I thought it was just me."

Lizard sighed. For a moment, she sounded tired. "There's a whole operation at Denver aimed at keeping us sane. You can't make the decisions we have to make day after day after day and remain human. But somehow we have to-or we'll lose what we're fighting for. We're just beginning to get a sense of the size of that problem now, Jim. It's the biggest problem we've got. If anything's going to defeat us, it'll be our own failure to take responsibility for what's going on inside our heads."

"Um," I said.

"What's that about?" she asked.

"It's nothing."

"That was a very loud nothing."

"It's just that . . . taking responsibility for what's going on inside my head is how I got into this mess."

Lizard was studying her controls. I thought she hadn't heard me, but abruptly she said, "Well, think about this. How big a mess would it be if you hadn't taken responsibility?"

Yes. There was that.

We flew in silence for a while. There was something else, she'd said

In fact, she'd said it twice! "Wait a minute! You said, 'weapons to the worms.' "

"Uh-huh." She indicated the map on the screen, tapped one of the color squares on the bottom. "See those blue spots? Those are the locations of United States military equipment-inside known worm infestations."

"How long has this been going on?"

"Oh, we've had some scattered cases for over a year, but suddenly in the past two, three months, it's been exploding all over the map. As near as we can tell; there are renegade humans cooperating with the worms. It's as if somebody somehow made a treaty. We want to know how-and why. That's why we want to capture a renegade alive." She frowned. "Maybe next time."

I studied the map. There were too many blue spots speckling the red swatches. "Why don't you just blow up the weapons?" I asked.

"Oh, we will," she said. "You'll see in a few minutes." She pointed to the spot of light that indicated the chopper. It was very close to the target. "We're almost there."