The Future War

ALASKA

John hugged his mother, feeling the hard muscle over the delicate bones. She was heading to South America to organize shipments of food and supplies. Their contacts there had confirmed that most countries below the equator had survived very well by comparison with the United States. That didn't mean there wouldn't be plenty of danger for his mother to deal with.

He put his hands on her shoulders and looked down into her face for a long time. The gray light of morning made her look older than she was…

But we're not getting any younger, any of us, he thought.

And if we're being completely truthful in here, I'm a little scared. She's been my tower of strength all my life— even when I thought she was completely crazy. Even when she was crazy and I had to call her on the let's-kill-everything stuff…

"You be careful," he said sternly.

"Spoilsport," she said with a grin, thumping his chest lightly.

"I was planning to party my way down the Pan-American Highway."

He laughed. "I'm gonna miss you, Mom."

" 'Course you are," Sarah agreed. "I'll miss you, too. But you don't need me." She looked up at him, pride shining in her eyes.

"I'll always need you, Mom." He put his arm around her shoulders and walked her toward her motorcycle. "A guy needs his mom." He gave her another quick hug. "Don't get killed," he warned.

"Back atcha," she said.

Then she turned to Dieter. They'd said good-bye last night with an almost desperate passion. It might be years before they saw each other again. He gave her a sad smile and opened his arms. She walked into them and hugged him around his trim waist, leaning her head against his chest, listening to the firm rhythm of his heart.

"I love you," she whispered.

He cupped her head with one big hand. "I love you, too."

She reached up and brought his head down for a kiss. When it was over they gazed into each other's eyes like young lovers. She smiled.

"It's not forever," he said.

"No," she agreed briskly. She picked up her helmet. "Just longer than I'd like. Take care of yourself."

"What was it you said? Back atcha."

Sarah grinned and mounted the Harley, an older model they'd fixed to run on alcohol. They'd figured that would be more available than gasoline. And when worse came to worst they could manufacture the stuff. She kicked-started the big machine and with a wave started off. Sarah didn't even try to look behind; the helmet would hinder her visibility and she didn't feel like spoiling her exit by falling off the damn bike.

Maybe with me gone, John will find himself a nice girl, she thought. Or a bad one. She understood his grief and guilt at losing Wendy, she really did. But it wasn't right for a healthy young man like John to show no interest in the opposite sex.

Maybe a bad girl would be better, then; there'd be less resistance to slipping between the sheets.

John's so honorable, that could stop the whole program. I raised me a good man there.

Though Sarah feared it was some subliminal fear that his mother would put the evil eye on his sweetie. Which might be because she was feeling some residual guilt over her treatment of Wendy. Given the way things turned out. So, maybe with her out of the way, the emotional logjam would break and the next time she saw him he'd have a girl beside him with a baby in her arms.

Sarah examined the mental image, not sure how she felt about it. I don't think I'm ready to be a grandmother, she thought. Then an image of Dieter laughing uproariously at these absurd musings popped into her head.

God! But she was going to miss those two.

MISSOURI

Captain Yanik pulled the paper from the machine and read the dispatch. His eyebrows went up; good news for a change.

From: CONUS CentCom

To: Captain Charles Yanik, Black River Relocation Camp Subject: Rogue Trucks

Faults in rogue vehicles due to "noise" overriding computer's internal command structure causing vehicles to engage in random, but lethal manner.

While correcting problem technicians have devised method of making self-driving trucks function w/o drivers. Currently reduced traffic makes S/DTs more efficient than human drivers.

Once route is programmed into computer truck will safely deliver any cargo in least time over best possible route.

Complement of fifteen trucks en route to Black River Relocation Camp. Freeing troopers for other duties. END

MESSAGE

Such as what? Yanik wondered, looking around at the raw pine boards of the command shack.

Though he suspected that they'd be put to police work.

Regular police forces were overwhelmed. Now that the cooperative citizens were in the camps, the criminal element was having a field day breaking and entering, burgling, and committing arson.

Who the damn fools think they're gonna fence a TV to is beyond me. If there were any fences still operating out there, they were probably more interested in full gas cans or cases of soup. Bet you can keep your diamonds, though, Yanik thought, smiling.

He glanced through the open door and almost ran for his office when he saw Lieutenant Reese coming. He forced himself to stand and wait. The man was only coming to see if there were any orders waiting for him. Which there never were.

"Sir," Reese said smartly, giving a crisp salute.

Yanik returned it, less crisply. "There's been no change, Lieutenant. And the no-personal-messages-allowed orders still stand."

Reese looked taken aback. "I'm not trying to send a personal message, sir. I'm just trying to get assigned to where I'll do the most good. I'm wasted here."

"I disagree," the captain told him. Reese might have talents that could be used elsewhere, but he was a very good officer and he most certainly wasn't wasting his time. "You've been an asset here, Lieutenant. And I've sent your query up the line. They know where you are and what you can do, and when they want you they'll tell you. In the meantime, I'm in need of competent officers."

Reese lowered his eyes. "Yes, sir."

Yanik studied him from under lowered eyebrows. "Probably they've hardly even begun the assessment phase of things, Reese.

It may be months before they'll need your training." He dropped the message in his hand onto a pile to be filed. "Don't worry, you'll have your weeks without sleep. In the meantime, I'm told that some of the inmates have set up a still somewhere. In the interest of keeping the peace and keeping them from poisoning themselves and others, I'd like you to find it and get rid of it."

"Yes, sir." Reese paused. "They'll only set up another one, sir."

Yanik was studying another message. "Think I don't know that, Lieutenant?" He looked up. "We have to keep the civilians entertained somehow."

BLACK RIVER RELOCATION CAMP CLINIC

Mary Shea made a notation on a patient's chart and moved to the next bed; they were using a series of double-wides, together with sheds and tents and—she suspected—parts from prefabricated chicken coups, but at least they kept off the rain and had floors. Everything else in camp was gluey mud; the air in the clinic smelled better, of course. They were using bulk bleach salvaged from a cleaners as a make-do disinfectant.

She inserted an old-fashioned mercury thermometer under the patient's tongue and took his pulse; the skin was a little clammy and moistly warm. It was a bit fast. His temperature was a hundred and one, down a bit. Unfortunately she thought it would go up again come sundown.

The sanitation in this hastily flung together camp worried her—a lot. It was grossly inadequate for the number of people here, and for all they were supposed to be a supply center, the clinic was constantly running out of the most basic supplies. She suspected that this patient's illness was a water-related one, possibly cholera; the diarrhea indicated that—strongly—but they wouldn't know for sure until they got the results back from the lab. And the lab was in worse shape than the clinic.

The nutrition wasn't very good either. Beans and rice, mostly.

Sometimes she absolutely craved meat; it was like her teeth were begging her to let them chew animal protein.

When the camp did get meat, the doctors and nurses insisted that a large portion of it be given to the hospital, before the rest was made available to the camp at large. The broths they made were a great help to the patients and they made sure that any pregnant or nursing mothers got a share of the meat.

The smell of cooking soup or roasting meat actually made her drool. And coffee, God, if she could only have a cup of coffee!

The next patient was an elderly woman with a very high fever, nausea, and very bad diarrhea. She complained of pains in her joints and headache as well. Dr. Ramsingh had gone to the HQ to talk to the captain about this. Two patients was hardly an epidemic, but these suggestive symptoms couldn't be ignored.

The old lady looked up at her with fever-bright eyes when Mary put the thermometer under her tongue.

"Don' wann be a burthen," she said.

"You're not," Mary assured her. "You'll be fine soon."

She certainly hoped so. That there might be cholera in this camp was inexcusable. These people would be better off in their own homes rather than here, risking the spread of a deadly disease.

Many people, she knew, had argued against these—no other word for it—concentration camps. She'd heard the army's argument that it was more efficient, but any place so badly constructed that a cholera epidemic threatened the population in less than a month was hardly a model of organization.

Though to be fair—she patted the old woman's hand and moved on—if the pathetic trickle of supplies coming into the camp represented the best the government could do, then civilians on their own would quickly starve.

The problem was there was no news available to them except what they got from the army. Mary couldn't help but feel uneasy at being reduced to one source of news; there was no way of crosschecking anything. Not that the government was giving them a very sunshiny outlook. To hear the army tell it, the world beyond the borders of the camp was a radioactive cinder. Which we can see with our own eyes isn't true. So why was the army telling them that?

There was a commotion at the head of the ward and Mary looked up.

"This is the hospital ward," the matron was explaining. "You have to take them to the clinic."

"Don't tell us to take them somewhere else," a man was saying, shouting, actually. "Can't you see they're sick?"

"Help us!" the woman beside him said desperately.

Mary headed toward them. Oh God, she thought, it's children.

One of them a babe in arms, the other about the size of a four-year-old. Her gut went cold. Cholera was very hard on the very young and the very old. Her eyes met the matron's and they made a mutual executive decision.

"If one of you will stay with Matron and help her fill out a chart, I'll help the other put these children to bed." Mary put the tray on the desk and held out her arms.

The man and woman glanced at each other, then the man held out the child he was carrying; a boy, Mary saw. She took him and led the woman down the ward toward a pair of cribs that Mary now thought insanely optimistic of whoever had put this place together. Just two, she thought sadly.

"What are their symptoms?" she asked the mother. She didn't need to be told "fever"; she could feel it burning through the blanket. Ice, she thought, where are we going to get ice?

"Diarrhea," the mother said, her voice shaking. "It just won't stop."

It was the symptom Mary had most dreaded hearing. She efficiently stripped and cleaned the little boy and put a Pampers on him. Those aren't going to last long, she thought bitterly.

She'd have to organize some of the civilians to help out with the laundry. Things were about to get high maintenance around here.

The thing was, where was the fuel to boil all this water going to come from? They'd have to send men out to cut down trees, then chop the wood, then make the fires and tend them. At least it would keep people busy. Those who stayed healthy. The question was how many of them had the disease already working its way into their systems.

She listened to the near-panicked mother as she started listing the symptoms all over again. Mary gave the woman a second look, noted the hectic flush, the too-bright eyes. Help! she thought, as short and desperate a prayer as she'd ever prayed.

Mary brought a chair over and sat the mother down.

"Conserve your strength," she cautioned. "You're going to need it." Then she went to the supply cabinet and came back with some bottles of water boosted with vitamins and electrolytes.

"Get them to drink as much of these as possible," she instructed.

"I know they're sick to their stomachs and won't want it, but they need it, so get it down them." She put a couple of facecloths and a bottle of alcohol down on a bedside table. "When they get too hot, wipe them down with this. I'll be back shortly."

As she headed down the aisle, the father was coming toward her, all his anxious attention on his wife and children. She and the matron stared at each other for a moment.

"Go tell Doctor," Matron ordered. "I'll look after things here."

ALASKA

Once again Ninel rode her bike up the overgrown driveway to Bale-witch's pleasant cottage. She'd been off-line, except to check her own site, for the last three weeks. There'd been her traps to mend and oil and put away until next winter, skins to see to, and the garden plot to clear of winter debris in preparation for planting. Ninel thought it would be a while before she'd trust the weather enough to put in seeds, though. She had some seedlings started in the cold frame she'd built, but it had been so cold lately that Ninel was sure she'd put them in too soon.

It was surprising that no one had sent her any e-mail in such a long time. But a brief check had shown that there wasn't much activity anywhere. Still, that happened sometimes, the occasional dry spell that occurred for no known reason. What worried her was that she had expected to hear from Balewitch, or someone she had delegated.

This was the second time she'd paid an unscheduled visit; Ninel hoped someone would be home. She turned into the curve of the driveway, and through the trees she could see the older woman standing on her steps, clearly waiting for her.

She doesn't look any too pleased to see me, Ninel thought.

Maybe she should have tried again to contact Balewitch before coming. But several messages had gone unacknowledged, so there hadn't seemed to be any point to trying again.

"Do you have any idea what's going on in the world?"

Bale-witch said by way of greeting.

"Excuse me?"

"You don't, do you?" Balewitch descended the steps, then sat down on them. "What have you been doing?"

Ninel looked at her, trying to figure out what this was about.

She'd tried to contact the woman. It wasn't like she'd left home with no forwarding address. "I've been busy," she said at last.

Balewitch looked at her in disbelief, then laughed, long and heartily. "I guess you have been," she said at last.

Ninel was not even slightly amused by this sort of behavior.

She wondered if the woman had been laughing at Ninel's expense all along. "I think maybe I've made a mistake." She turned the bike around.

"Don't get on your high horse, honey," Balewitch said.

The woman's voice was so unlike the voice she usually used that Ninel whipped round suddenly, almost tripping over her bike. She stared at Balewitch wide-eyed.

"Thing is, I know you're connected to the Internet, so I'm wondering how you could possibly have missed the event of the millennium," Balewitch said, eying her suspiciously.

"I only got on to check for e-mail," Ninel said. "I did check a few other places, but there was no activity and nobody answered my queries." She shrugged. "I had work to do."

Balewitch shook her head. "Sheesh. While you were doing your chores World War Three was going on."

Ninel gave her a worried frown. "Excuse me?" she said.

"Armageddon, the Apocalypse, global thermonuclear war?

You've heard these terms before, yes?" The girl's expression was priceless, her pale eyes were like saucers, it was all Balewitch could do not to laugh at her.

Ninel stared, then stretched her neck out in an unmistakably questioning manner.

"No, sleeping beauty, I'm not kidding and I'm not crazy, either." Balewitch shook her head. "Your lack of curiosity astounds me."

"But… ?" Ninel looked up at the sky. Suddenly its overcast look and the colder weather made an awful sort of sense.

"How could you not know?" Balewitch raised an eyebrow.

"Like I said, lack of curiosity." A very useful attribute under certain circumstances. This little girl was looking more useful by the minute. "Can you handle a gun?"

"Yes."

"Good, because you shouldn't be without one from this point forward. When people think the cops aren't coming, they tend to do things they ordinarily wouldn't." The poor kid looked stricken.

"What's going to happen now?" Ninel asked.

Balewitch considered her. "An associate of mine and I have been doing outreach work with the army," she began. The girl gave her that same, bug-eyed questioning look. "Yeah, ironic, isn't it? When I was your age I was so antimilitary I could hardly sleep for hating them. But we actually need them now." She chuckled. "I guess disaster makes strange bedfellows."

"But they did this," Ninel said.

"Nope. Turns out Ron Labane was right. That super-computer of theirs malfunctioned. As soon as they turned everything over to it, it blew up everything in the arsenal. Damn fools!"

Oh, she was enjoying this, the kid was eating it up.

Ninel frowned. "Is there anything I can do to help?" she asked.

Balewitch was nodding. "I don't see why not. I'm getting tired, and so's my friend. We can use some help. If you could be this out of touch even though you're regularly on the computer, then there must be tons of people in the back of beyond who need to be told. Not only told, but escorted to the relocation camps."

"What?" Ninel actually reared back at that. "Relocation camps? I don't like the sound of that."

"Neither did I," Balewitch agreed. "But we may not actually get a summer up here this year and winter is gonna be a stone bitch. Essential supplies are already growing scarce; who knows what it will be like by winter. Even the Eskimos will freeze from what they're telling me, and Ron agrees with them." She shook her head. "Like I said, ironic."

It made sense, sort of. Ninel had heard of the nuclear winter theory. According to what she'd read, the dust and smoke created by the nuclear blasts might render this latitude uninhabitable for as long as three years. She supposed it wasn't something that should be chanced, at least not the first year.

"What can I do to help?" she asked.

Balewitch smiled and rose from the step. "Come inside and I'll tell you all about it."

* * *

John drove up on his dirt bike to find their recruits packing up. "What's going on?" he asked.

Paul the vegan came over and handed him a sheet of paper.

Citizens of Alaska, due to ongoing emergency conditions, the U.S. government is asking for your cooperation.

Experts have predicted that Alaska will experience an unparalleled winter this year and possibly for several years to come.

In order to protect yourselves and your families from these unusually harsh conditions, the U.S. Army has constructed temporary shelter for you in the warmer states below the forty-ninth parallel. This is to allow a more evenhanded and efficient distribution of already scarce supplies.

Citizens in your area are requested to gather in Delta Junction or Tanacross, where transportation will be provided to take you to a temporary shelter in Canada, run in cooperation with the Canadian government, prior to removing you to the southern states of the U.S.

Temporary shelters have been erected in these towns in the event that you arrive after a convoy has left. Rest assured that your wait will be short and though the facilities may be rough, they will be better in the U.S. and Canada.

It was signed by some general. John's muscles tightened in fight-or-flight reflex and he could feel adrenaline coursing into his bloodstream. Calm, he told himself. Be calm or they won't listen to you at all.

John couldn't believe how fast Skynet had swung into action.

How many people has it already managed to exterminate? he wondered.

Of course everything in the broadsheet was so plausible; the suggestion of nuclear winter might even be true. No doubt that was why the army was cooperating. Individual soldiers and isolated commanders had no way of checking this out. They were getting their orders in the usual way, with the usual codes—hell, maybe they were even hearing the right voices. He sensed that a lot of people were going to die before they discovered their mistake.

"Where did this come from?" John asked.

"A young woman brought it," Paul told him. "Said she was part of an outreach program working in conjunction with the army. They're looking for survivors in the outback. People like us who are out of communication." He gave John a long, hard look.

"A young woman," John said slowly.

"An exotic-looking creature," Paul's wife said. "She looked Eskimo, except she had white-blond hair and pale blue eyes. I've never seen that combination before."

John looked up from the broadsheet. "I think I might know her," he said. "Name's Ninel."

"That's her," one of the other men said.

John chewed on his lip. How to put this? "There have been reports of people being lured into trucks and then taken into the woods and shot," he said. "This Ninel is reported to being one of those involved."

He suspected that if this was his Ninel, she was being duped into helping with this. But what he had to do now was stop this mass emigration.

"Well, if we get to the Junction and things don't look right, we'll just come back here," a man said. The others nodded agreement.

"If you go there, they may force you to go with them," John warned.

Paul put his hand on John's shoulder. "Look," he said, "we can't tell you how grateful we are to you and your mother and your big friend Dieter for all that you've done for us. But you can't protect us from a winter that never ends."

"Yeah, this ain't Narnia," one of the women said. "If we can't grow food and those trucks are gone for good, then we'll starve here."

"That's right," her husband put in. "This program makes sense." He shook his head. "We've got kids, John. We can't afford to take chances."

But you'll take a chance on this, John thought. "Look," he said, "I'm just saying be careful. Maybe it would be better if you sent a couple of the guys to check it out. You know, stand at a distance and watch what happens, see how people are treated, that kind of thing. Even follow them for a ways, just to be sure."

The couples looked at one another. "We'll be careful," Paul said. He held out his hand.

John took it. How could they know? he thought in regret.

Nothing in their lives could have prepared them for what's going to happen. And there wasn't a thing he could do to stop them. Oh, he could try telling them the truth, but then they'd run, not walk, to Delta Junction and whatever hell Skynet had planned for them.

"Good luck," he said, and got back on his bike. "Can I keep this?" he asked. Smiling, they nodded and waved happily as he rode away. He could almost weep for the children; in fact, he thought he would, later. But for now, he and Dieter would have to come up with some sort of plan.

* * *

"You think you know this girl?" Dieter said.

"Slightly," John said. "I've played chess with her."

"So she could be a dupe or she could be one of them."

"She could be both," John said. "But I didn't get a sense of the kind of fevered lunacy that makes an ecoterrorist from her the one time we interacted. She seemed like an interesting, normal girl."

Dieter suppressed a smile, thinking, But, John, most of the world thinks that you're an ecoterrorist.

Aloud he said, "Psychiatrists say that most terrorists aren't insane. In fact, most groups go to some lengths to rid themselves of any psychotic elements. And, of course, they are taught to seem normal, even when they're about to blast themselves and the people around them to kingdom come."

"Yeah, I know, I've read the literature. But I've also met some of them, Dieter. There's something about them. You know what I mean."

The Austrian sighed. "The thing is, my friend, when you met them you knew they were terrorists, and they knew that you knew. That gave them permission to let their guard down, to perhaps strut for your benefit. I know they wouldn't be so free in a public place."

John stared into the distance. "When you're right, you're right," he finally said. "Maybe I'm not as quick on the uptake as I like to think I am."

"You're a lot quicker than I was at your age. And I was never slow. Your upbringing will be a huge advantage to you in the coming years."

The younger man's mouth twisted sardonically.

"Meanwhile…" John said.

"Meanwhile it's time to do some triage, so to speak. We need to consolidate our allies, to get them in a place where we can do the most good. Because the fact is we're going to have to watch Skynet kill a lot of people before anyone even suspects anything.

If we told them what was going on, they might actually be more resistant to the truth. I'm afraid that no one will believe this until they see those HKs and Terminators coming for them. Even then a lot of people will just stand there and let themselves be killed rather than believe it's really happening."

John looked away, frowning. "I hate to just give up on these people. Especially the kids."

Dieter understood that kind of stubbornness. No doubt John felt that he was losing his first real battle in the war with the machines and it galled him to see innocents suffer. "Try to remember, John, that Alaska is very big and that you're just one man. We need allies to accomplish anything. It's not just the machines against you and your mother now, it's the machines against the human race. You need to adjust your way of thinking, to scale things up enormously. Yes, we may lose a lot of people to the machines. It is tragic, but not your fault, and not your failing.

"You have to go south. Make contact with those survivalists you and your mother have been cultivating. And there are Sector agents down there who can be of help to you."

"Assuming they aren't unwittingly helping Skynet," John reminded him.

Dieter threw up his hands. "Well, you knew the job was hard when you took it."

"Except I didn't take it; it was shoved down my throat!" John glared at nothing. "Sorry," he said a moment later.

"I need to get to the coast," Dieter said. "Our old friends Vera and Tricker will have Love's Thrust waiting for me at Dilek in ten days." He watched the younger man, waiting for a reaction.

"Why did we bother to set up supply dumps here if we were just going to abandon them?" John demanded.

"To keep in practice and because one day we might need them." He waited, but John seemed disinclined to say more. "It is a hard fact that sometimes you have to retreat to have a chance at winning."

"I know."

"And sometimes a commander must sacrifice a lot of lives in order to achieve victory."

"Yeah," John said. "Can I hitch a ride down the coast with you guys?'

Surprised, Dieter nodded.

"See," John said. "I can be ruthlessly practical."