Rainbows End

Dr. Xiang Takes Charge

Günberk and Keiko and Alfred each had their own analyst pools. Ten seconds ago those analysts had agreed: As an active threat, Rabbit was gone, both topside and in the operation's milnet. Dissent clusters hung around the opinion, but they were related to collateral-damage prediction.

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: God willing, we've stopped the monster.

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: And we have the inspection data we came for. Now it's time to get the hell out! She brought up a zoomed picture of the contingency tree. They were way out on a limb that led to full loss of deniability. And yet, until they knew for sure the results of their investigation, they needed the Americans kept ignorant.

Alfred presented his latest extraction schedule, the times padded just enough to cover his outshipment activities.

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: Eight minutes! That much? Keiko still had things covered on the north side of the labs. And the views of the riot showed the Bollywood team still in place by the library… but that affair was descending into civil disorder, the sort of thing that brings a direct police response. Meshing Alfred back into the Bollywood people should be easy now; very soon it would be impossible.

Vaz — > Braun, Mitsuri: I'll trim every second I can, Keiko.

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: You'd better! Five minutes is the most I can guarantee.

Alfred smiled at Keiko's impolitely constrained panic. She and Günberk would do their best. And in some ways, this chaos was helpful. Fooling Günberk and Keiko had always been Alfred's biggest problem. His outshipment would've been impossible if they weren't so distracted.

Two minutes passed. Three. His secret team had completed most of the fakery. They had updated the logs to satisfy both Alliance and future U.S. investigators. Now they were working with one small section of the Mus musculus arrays, his true animal model. Alfred hopped from viewpoint to viewpoint, swooping over cabinets that looked like office blocks in some bland, utilitarian city. He couldn't take more than a few of the mice, just a few of those conceived since the last update. His team had already shut down the in-progress experiments and started destruct operations. Now they detached the chosen arrays and began prepping them for launch. Other members of the team were already sending shipping cartridges to the pneumo port atop the cabinet. He could fit one twenty-by-thirty array… six hundred mice — into each cartridge.

Mitsuri –> Braun, Vaz: Alfred! The public net is failing.

Vaz swore and glanced at the topside analysis. This wasn't even close to Keiko's deadline.

Braun –> Mitsuri, Vaz: It's a full system failure. Mr. Rabbit has screwed us.

The analysts were boiling with contrary opinions. Failures like this happened a couple of times a year somewhere in the world, the price that civilization paid for complexity. But here there was a more sinister suspicion, that this failure was collateral damage from the revocation. Maybe Rabbit's riot magic depended on his commandeering the embedded computer systems of the public environment. Now that his certificates were revoked, there was a cascade of failures working through almost everything, just as fast as the certificates failed.

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: Alfred! Clean up and get out!

The second and third cartridges would be ready in a moment. Alfred glanced at the UP/Ex status. The launcher was close to the MCog area. Most important, it was locally managed, unaffected by the crash outside. He entered a destination in Guatemala — and selected a launch vehicle that he'd emplaced some weeks before. It ought to be stealthy enough to get out of U.S. airspace.

Vaz — > Braun, Mitsuri: One minute. Can you give me that?

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: I will try.

The topside analysts were hard into contingency planning and probability estimates. A thousand little changes were being made across the UCSD landscape, wherever the Indo-European operation had influence. The Bollywood presence would survive as long as any up there.

Alfred forced his attention back into the labs. The second cartridge was loading. The first cartridge was shooting down the pneumo, taking its little passengers to the launcher.

Alfred froze. The Gus were gone from the fruit-fly area. There was movement in another window, at the edge of the mice arrays. A girl and a man running toward the camera. They hadn't been fooled by the fruit flies.

Alfred leaned forward. Okay. One minute. What could his people cook up in that time?

Lena's wheelchair was no hiking machine. It did well enough on the asphalt, even going uphill; Xiu had to trot to keep up. But where the asphalt was carved by gullies, the chair had to walk. The going got very slow.

"Can you even see the road, Lena?" Her view-page was as dark as the natural view.

"No. I think someone has turned off the hillside. Side effect of the riot, maybe." She moved to the middle of the road. "Sst! They're still coming." She waved at Xiu to come forward. "How can we stop them? One way or another, we have to find out what's happening."

"Robert will see you."

"Damnation!" Lena dithered, caught in a dilemma.

"Go back to the side of the road. I can stop them more safely, anyway."

"Hmph," said Lena. But she retreated.

Xiu stood still for a moment. There were the distant sounds of the freeway. From over the hilltop there were noises that might have been chanting. But nearby was just insect sounds, the feel of air cooling in the night, the narrow roadway jumbled and rocky under her feet. She saw light sweep across the outcroppings above her.

"I can hear them, Xiu."

Xiu could, too, the crunch of tires and now the faint whine of electric motors. The mystery car came around a last, unseen bend in the road, and she tensed to dive out of the way.

But on this road, cars could not speed. Its headlights slowly bore down on her. "Make way, make way." The words were loud, and the view-page in her hand came alight with flashing warnings about the penalties for interfering with the California Highway Patrol.

Xiu started to give way, and then she thought, But it's the CHPI want to talk to .

She waved for the car to stop. The vehicle slowed still more, then turned and tried to edge past her on the left. "Make way, make way."

"No!" she shouted and hopped back in front of it. "You stop!"

The car moved even more slowly. "Make way, make way." And it tried to pass her on the other side. Xiu jumped in the way again, this time flailing her backpack as though it could do some damage.

The auto backed up a yard or two, and turned slyly as if preparing an end run. Xiu wondered if she really wanted to jump in front of what happened next.

With every heartbeat, pain spiked through Tommie. After a moment he realized that was good news. He raised his head, saw that he was stretched out on the backseat of a passenger car. That was Winston and Carlos in the facing seats.

"Where's Robert and his little girl?"

Winston Blount shook his head. "They stayed behind."

"We split up, Professor Parker."

Scary memories were coming back. "Oh… yeah. Where's my laptop? We gotta call 911."

"We called, Tommie. Everything's okay now, this is a CHP vehicle."

Despite his haziness, that didn't make sense. "It sure doesn't look like one.

"It's got all the insignia, Tommie," but there was dawning uncertainty in Winston's voice.

Tommie slid his legs from the seat and pushed himself into a half-sitting position. The pain squeezed tight on his chest, clawed out along his arms. He almost blacked out again, and would have fallen forward if not for Carlos.

"Hold… hold me up!" Tommie looked forward. The car's headlights were on. The road was steep and narrow, with scattered remnants of asphalt surfacing, the sort of thing you might see in the East County, or in short stretches along the coast, a disconnected remnant of lost roadway. They slowed, negotiating deeply shadowed gullies. Bushes swept close around them. And now ahead he saw someone standing in the middle of the road. The car slowed to a crawl just five yards short of — it was a young woman.

"Make way, make way." Their car said over and over, trying to get by on one side and then the other.

The woman hopped from side to side, blocking them. She was shouting, and swinging a good-sized backpack at them.

Their car backed up a few feet, and Tommie heard the faint squeal of a capacitor preparing for something drastic. The wheels turned a few degrees — and the woman jumped in front of them again. Her face was bright in the headlights. It was a pretty Asian face… if you added thirty years to it, you got the face from some very distasteful turn-of-the-century papers in Secure Computing . She was the last person he'd ever expect to play "block the tanks at Tiananmen Square."

The headlights went out. The car jolted forward. Then the brakes engaged and they slid halfway into the ditch. There was a muffled explosion that might have been that capacitor slagging itself. The doors on both sides of the vehicle popped open and Tommie slid partway into the cool night air.

"You okay, Professor Parker?" That was Carlos's voice, coming from close behind his head.

"Not dead yet." He heard footsteps on the roadway. A light flared in a small hand, and the woman said loudly, "It's Winston Blount and Carlos Rivera — " and then more conversationally, " — and Thomas Parker. Y-You probably don't know me, Dr. Parker, but I have admired your work."

Tommie didn't know what to say to that.

"Let us pass," said Winston. "This is an emergency."

He was interrupted by the sound of wheels — but not from another car. A voice spoke from the darkness: "Where's Miri? Where's Robert?"

Carlos said, "They're still inside. They're trying to stop the — We're afraid that someone is taking over the labs."

Motors whined. It was a wheelchair, carrying someone all hunched over. But the voice was strong and irritated. "Damn it. Lab security would prevent that."

"Maybe not." Winnie sounded like he was chewing on broken glass. "We think that someone has… subverted security. We called 911. That's what you're interfering with." He waved at their car. It was halfway into the ditch, unmoving.

Tommie looked at the darkened passenger car. "No," he said. "That's a fake. Please. You call 911."

The wheelchair rolled nearer. "I'm trying to! But we're in some kind of a deadzone. We should go down the hill, find something we can latch on to."

"Dull" said Carlos. He was staring all around, the way kids do when their contacts fail.

The redoubtable Dr. Xiang waved her little handlight, light and shade sweeping up around her. Strange. There was a kind of hesitancy about her. X. Xiang was one of the true Bad Guys of the present era, at least one of the people who had made the Bad Guy regimes possible. You could never tell it by looking at her. She doused the light, and stood silently for a moment. "I-I don't think we're in a local deadzone."

"Sure it is!" said Winnie. "I'm wearing, and I can't see a thing except the real view. We have to get to the freeway, or at least get a line of sight on it."

And now Tommie remembered what Gu's granddaughter had said. Maybe the local nodes were being spoofed. Xiang had another theory:

"I mean the deadzone is not just here. Listen."

"I don't hear a thing — oh."

There were little sounds, insects maybe. There was faint shouting from over the hills. Okay, that must be the belief-circle diversion. What else? The freeway sounded… strange, not the constant, throbbing surf of wheels on road. Now there was only the faintest sound, a dying sigh. Tommie had never heard such a thing, but he knew how stuff worked. "Failure shutdown," he said.

"Everything? Stopped ?" said Carlos, horror climbing up into his voice.

"Yup!" Tommie's chest pain beat toward a crescendo. But hey, let me live long enough to learn what's going on !

The voice from the wheelchair said, "Even if we can't get word out, someone will notice."

"Maybe not," Tommie gasped out. If the blackout was large and spotty, with the appearance of natural disaster — why, it might cover something really big going on underground.

"And there's nothing we can do to help," said Winston.

"Maybe not." Xiang's words echoed Tommie's, but her voice was thoughtful, distant. She flicked her light at the backpack. "I've had a lot of fun in shop class. You can make so many interesting things now."

Tommie managed, "Yeah. And they all obey the law."

X. Xiang's laugh was soft. "That fact can be used against itself, especially if the parts don't know the big picture."

A lot of Tommie's old friends talked that way; it was mostly idle talk. But this was X. Xiang.

She pulled out a clunky-looking gadget. It looked like an old-time coffee can, open at one end. She held the coffee can where it could see her view-page. "Lots of gadgets are still working, they just can't find enough nodes to get a route out. But there's a big military base just north of here."

From the wheelchair: "Camp Pendleton is about thirty miles thataway." Maybe the speaker gestured, but Tommie couldn't see.

Xiang scanned her coffee can across the starless sky.

"This is crazy," said Winston. "How can you know there are nodes in your line of sight?"

"I don't. I'm going to shine signals off the sky haze. I'm calling in the marines." And then she was talking to her view-page.

Bob Gu and his marines logged more time in training systems than they ever did in combat or on watch. Training managers were legendary for creating impossible emergencies — and then topping them with something even more unbelievable.

Tonight the real world was outdoing the craziest of the trainers.

Alice had been moved to Intensive Care. Bob would have gone with her — except that whatever had taken her down was enemy action, and not the end of it.

The analyst display had sprouted new nodes and a dozen long-shot associations: Credit Suisse CA had just collapsed, a major disaster for Europe. The certificate revocations would have effects even in California. Bob took a closer look. The Credit Suisse collapse was so abrupt that it had to be a sophisticated attack. So what was a distraction from what ?

The DoD/DHS combined Earth Watch was involved now. Tonight's action could be something new, a Grand Terror that ran simultaneously through the U.S.A. and the Indo-European Alliance, profiting from the gaps created by national sovereignties. Looking at the analysis above him, Bob could see only the broadest outlines, but it was evident that the intelligence agencies of the U.S.A., the Alliance, and China were collaborating to hunt down the source of the threat.

In CONUS Southwest, his new top analyst was doing her best. His analyst pool was still crippled, but folks were talking productively. Their structures of conjecture and conclusion were growing. The new top analyst took voice: "Colonel, the revocation storm is very intense at UCSD."

The traffic display showed that the demonstration around the library had ground to a halt. The new failures were not due to backbone router saturation. Participants were being decertified by the thousands. Millions of support programs were balked. If nothing else, this showed that massive foreign involvement in tonight's festivities had not been some analyst pipe dream. Whatever had hit Europe was intimately involved here.

But the bio labs still showed green. Even the participation of the night crews in the library demonstrations had worked out for the best. Maybe productivity and performance would be down for this shift, but that was a commercial issue. In fact, the departure of the human crews had simplified the lab situation. There was nothing there but automation — and it showed all was well.

"FBI again requests clearance to take over."

Bob shook his head irritably. "Denied. As before."

Hmm . More than riot participants were being decertified. Three analysts from the Southern California utilities reported infrastructure failures in the campus area. Why would local infrastructure depend on certs from Credit Suisse?

"Correlation of systems failures with the revocation storm is ninety-five percent, Colonel."

No kidding . Even if the labs were clean, there was some kind of deadly interference here. Bob tapped the command he had been contemplating these last few minutes:

LAUNCH ALERT

"Analysts update contingency nine and give me a launch mark," he said.

There was a pause as the request was reviewed by the DoD/DHS combined Earth Watch. His CONUS Southwest watch was on a very short leash since Alice's breakdown:

But clearance came back in just five seconds.

Bob scarcely noticed his gee pod inflate. He would be the last out of the barn, so there was a lot to watch.

LAUNCH LAUNCH LAUNCH

"Uncrewed vehicles launched."

His displays showed thirty canisters of combat network-munitions shot high into the Southern California night. The uncrews were from the north side of the base, twenty kilometers away. Farther north, from MCAS Edwards, more primitive weapons rose into the heavens. Their manifest was a catalog of extreme possibilities: rescue lances (500), damage-suppression fogs (100), HEIR lasers (10), thermal flechettes/isolation variant (100)… and then the last three, the nightmares — sterilization-fog dispensers (10 by 10), HERF area munitions (20 by 20 by 4), strategic nuclear munitions (10 by 10 by 2). Analysts are paid to think worst-case … but Lord . The bio labs were the only excuse for these items.

But in truth — if you discounted the absence of follow-up equipment — this was a fairly conventional load for a modern expeditionary force. Three times in Bob's career, such launches had ended in real combat. But those had been half a world away, in Almaty, in Ciudad General Ortiz, and in Asuncion. The most terrible weapons had never been used, though Asuncion had been a very near thing.

Tonight he was aiming all this hardware at his own neighbors, just thirty miles south of Camp Pendleton. Full force in an urban area was like going after rats in your kitchen with a machine gun. Keep your head down, Miri .

"FBI again requests clearance to take over."

"Denied. The situation has escalated." For the moment, hopefully just for the moment. If police and rescue could bring the system back up, then all the hardware that Bob had just boosted over Southern California would simply be an expensive exercise. But one good thing about being locked and loaded was that he had lots more call on resources: Gu grabbed analyst teams from all across the national workshift and pushed the intel and sensor backlog at them. Priority questions: Are the San Diego labs secure? What is the prognosis for the current system failures?

Meantime, Bob's launches had soared to the top of their trajectories. He tweaked the Edwards munitions still higher, delaying them behind the gear from Pendleton. If nothing was resolved soon, he would have to light the uncrews' jets. I need answers, guys !

But the analyst mob was still busy connecting a billion dots, looking for patterns and conspiracies. Then a single observation changed everything. A weather-service geek doing her monthly reserve duty grabbed a very high priority: "Twenty seconds ago. I see ad hoc signaling in the backscatter above here" — and she drew an ellipse over San Diego North

County, covering much of Camp Pendleton. Somebody was making their own communications, simply blinking a light into the sky haze! The long axis of the scatter ellipse pointed right back toward UCSD. The words of the intercepted message streamed across Bob's vision:

Xiu Xiang — > anyone clever enough to notice me in the backscatter: GenGen laboratory automation has been corrupted. The system is attacking anyone opposing it. This is not a game. This is not a joke. What? Yes, I'll tell them. There are two people still in the labs. They are good guys! They are trying to help.

The NOAA analyst spoke over the script display: "The message is a one-second burst, retransmitted twelve times. What you're seeing is the summed cleanup."

It was clear enough. Bob Gu's fingers tapped in their gloves, launching his marines.

Then his own gee pod came tight and — — for a moment Bob Gu was not paying attention. For a moment he could not pay attention. Battle commit put the combat CO himself into the fray. In this case, launch took his landing dart almost horizontally out of Pendleton. Maybe this is not a good idea , he thought muzzily. But he always thought that coming out of a twenty-gee railgun launch.

Now he had to recollect his wits and context. His team and equipment were on schedule. The unthinkable Last Resorts were still high overhead, flexible to the last. The network munitions were already at UCSD. And the bio labs still showed green, all secure and peaceful.

His own landing dart was seconds away from the UCSD.

There was something else that was important, something in the last few seconds. Xiu Xiang? Bob's recollection came unsquished just as a DHS analyst team presented its own form of the insight: Xiu Xiang. A not uncommon name. But in all of Southern California there probably weren't more than three or four who owned that name. And one lived at Rainbows End with Lena Gu.

Suddenly he had a good idea just who was in the crosshairs of all that he commanded.

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