Rainbows End

Bob Contemplates Nuclear Carpet-Bombing

Bob coasted across the UCSD campus, his landing dart now as slow and quiet as the network munitions that were raining out of the sky. This was a classic network-superiority assault, absent significant defenses. There were many many things to do and only seconds to do them, but for these few moments he had a paradoxical sense of security. There weren't many places in the modern world where a human could be as self-sufficient — if only temporarily — as when in command of such an assault. Bob Gu's expeditionary group had its own network, its own power supplies, its own sensors. Even if all his remote analysts were to disappear, his marines would still be in business.

At the moment, thousands of assault nodes were nestling into trees and bushes, fastening themselves to vehicles and ledges and the sides of buildings. Even before they touched down, they asserted primacy over what civilian network hardware still functioned. That takeover was almost complete. He already had access to almost all the embedded controllers in the area. In combat, those local systems were often unsalvageable. Here, there were a few seconds of intense interrogation, DHS authority was asserted, and he had control. The cars and wearables, the medicals, the viewpoints and financials and police systems, they were all responding. Police and rescue workers were reconnecting via the combat net. Already he could hear their voices picking up the operation. With just a little luck, there would be no loss of life, just a very bad and strange network outage. He would leave the combat net in place, just as in a foreign operation. Over the coming days it would be replaced — not by administrative forces but by the gradual reassertion of the civil system. None of that was really important. "The labs. Have they responded?"

"Yes, sir," came Patrick Westin's reply. He was on the ground with the first squad, near the GenGen main entrance. "We have access to the labs' backup security. It's agreeing with the primary, claims the underground is secure, no sign of perver — "

Civilian status alarm: Building Failure . The letters streamed across a corner of Bob's view. The university library was going down. In combat bad things happen, but tonight the cause looked like stupidity plus bad luck — first the rioters making their library "dance," then network outage destroying its smarts. Whatever the reason, people would end up just as dead.

Bob threw the problem to his reserve squad, which just now was four hundred meters up, coming down with assorted hardware… including the rescue lances. He was vaguely aware of the lance canisters popping their fins, turning to point down into the library. There was the flash of a hundred tiny rockets, and as many hardened nodes were rammed downward through the concrete and steel of the elderly building. Inside, action would be faster than any human attention, the composite flechettes guiding themselves between walls, doing their best to minimize damage to old-style wired utilities. Once in place, they would displace the control codes of the dead building system, and attempt to contact the stability servos. Waves of compute and recompute flickered from the squad's status board. Success depended on just what had survived and how fast it could engage the marines' localizer mesh.

But rescue was not the mission. His attention was on Patrick Westin —

"Understood," Gu said. "Make it clear to biotech management and automation: They are to stand down and seal off the labs. Nothing goes in or out."

"Warn and embargo. Yes, sir."

Maybe the Xiang message was some bizarre fraud. Maybe, yeah. He gave Westin another squad and engaged police backup. GDC inspectors would be here from Denver in about thirty minutes and then they could contemplate making a safe entrance into the labs.

Bob glided in a silent arc around the south side of the campus. It was time to land himself and his third squad. Where?

If this was enemy action, there should be Local Honchos on the enemy side. He popped up the suspect lists. There was the usual population of foreign students. The interesting ones would be interviewed by the end of the evening. The library festivities had been almost a total surprise to the press — so why had that Bollywood contingent just happened to be in town and on-site? Surely the Indo-European Alliance wouldn't try anything really destructive. But the European cert collapse seemed at the heart of the destruction here in San Diego. The analysts and Bob's own intuition put the Bollywood crew at the top of his interest list.

He stalled his dart in a clearing among the eucs, and crunched down on a litter of branches and dead leaves. The third squad dropped at twenty-meter intervals east and west from his position. There were shouts and lights from up the hill toward the library. The building was still out of plumb, but stability servos were engaged and — if nothing else failed — it should maintain a standing state. Police vehicles had come alive; direct loudspeakers were making calming announcements. If things worked out, they might even be able to disguise the fact that there had been a military response. Local public safety could pat itself on the back for heading off one of those rare but inevitable system glitches… Just ahead was the cluster of game and film people from Bollywood. They had already received a hold notice. None of them were attempting to leave. Just a few words with you, ladies and gentlemen, that's all we want .

GenGen said the labs were sealed tight, ready for the proper authorities — when? Ha! The CDC inspectors were ahead of schedule; somehow they had gotten superballistic transport. They'd be on the ground in ten minutes. He had support extending up the chain of command. And downward, too. Some very large, very competent groups were reworking the odds that the labs had been converted to factory-of-death mode. They agreed that the probability was less than one percent — that is, science fiction.

Now his analyst pool was larger than Bob Gu had ever seen, perhaps fifteen percent of the analytical power of the entire U.S. intelligence community. All that support should have been comforting, yet there were places where the connectivity looked thin. Maybe that was just the way the associations flowed when a crisis was totally bizarre.

Others thought it strange, too. He saw lots of paranoid colors. Finally someone got desperate:

I have a sanity check. We've lost communication with five percent of our original threat analysts since the revocation attack began. This should be impossible. All analysts were internal to the U.S. intelligence community. If Credit Suisse certificates were necessary for any of those participants to maintain connectivity, then there was at least a design failure… and maybe the enemy had been part of Bob's own support staff.

There was an immediate counterargument:

You're mistaking loss of connectivity for loss of trustability.

Then parts of the analyst pool got jammed in the controversy. It was the kind of deadlock that only a miracle-worker could quickly untangle… and Alice is off in some hospital ward.

Another alarm flashed across the lower part of his vision. His combat network lay all across campus now, and it did more than manage communication. Altogether, it was a two-thousand-meter-wide snooper-scope, and its report: GenGens private UP/Ex launcher has just gone hot. A counter showed sixty seconds till cargo boosted out of the labs.

Even as USMC sensed the launch capacitor charging up, GenGen's own network continued to assure the world that all was safely sealed.

Something was trying to break out of GenGen.

This is way too much like Asuncion.

Bob glanced at the nukes and death-fog dispensers and HERFs and HEIRs floating down through 10,000 meters. To the journalists, those weapons should look like random aerobots — but they gave Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gu, Jr., the physical power to annihilate any threat in this corner of the U.S.A.

So what was the Minimum Sufficient Response?

Thirty seconds till UP/Ex launch. Chaos still reigned in the land of the analysts.

Verified contact with DoD/DHS had been lost.

Sometimes decisions come down to one poor slob on the ground.

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