Alfred stepped out of the room, and proceeded down the hallway. There was lots of area lighting, the sort of thing you'd expect in a major system failure. Ah ! The marines had finally detected his network. They had killed his stealthed aerobot. He still had contact with half a dozen mobiles scattered in the brush to the north. They were hunkered low, mainly trying to be very quiet and still maintain a net. The American assault grid was sweeping the area, destroying them one by one. The USMC mechs drifted down like a kind of black snow, unnoticed by the crowds, and visible to his robots only in the last instant before their destruction.
He came out of the stairway, onto the first floor. Ahead was the main entrance.
Five seconds till UP/Ex launch! He could imagine the chaos on the American side, losing their top analyst right at the crisis point. This was sniper warfare, brought into modern times, and three more seconds' delay would
His milspec contacts lost transparency and he felt a flash of heat on his face. Alfred dived for the floor. When the shock hit, the building swayed, barely stable in its uncommunicating configuration. He lay still for a moment, watching.
That had been a High Energy Infra-Red laser, punching straight through the roof of the GenGen lab some two thousand meters away. He had a single direct view, a glimpse of trees silhouetted against a pearly glow, a rising cloud of steam and fog. Part of the haze was zapped vegetation. Most was damage-suppression mist, designed to soak up the knife edges of reflected death. The Americans had fired thirty times in less than a second. Glints from those blasts would have splattered kilometers in all directions, invisible to the naked eye, but potentially blinding and blistering those same eyes.
A second viewpoint came online. The target hillside looked like a miniature Mauna Loa, a river of flowing rock that slumped down into the hillside. Flashes of light marked the ongoing work of thermal flechettes. Thunder pounded.
So the American response had been prompt and decisive, cauterizing and sealing the launcher area, with minimum collateral damage. And all my dreams are ashes .
His contacts had transparency again. Alfred came to his feet and ran out of Pilchner Hall.
Ahead of him people swirled in panic, first stunned by network failure, now dazzled by HEIR laser glints. Get into the crowd . Even though he was shoulder-to-shoulder with humanity, for the first time this evening Alfred felt really alone. Some people around him stared upward; some were temporarily blinded. People were crying. Others were counseling the sensible thing: Get under cover, keep your gaze down and away from reflectors. In the midst of network failure, these people were reduced to literal word of mouth. But that word was spreading. More and more people realized that for only the third or fourth time in recent history, their own country was under a military assault. So far none of them had guessed that it was their own military's doing.
Alfred kept his head down, his face covered. It wasn't a suspicious posture; hundreds of others were cowering similarly. He shrank his communications down to a fuzzy static that conveyed only a few bits per second and that routed chaotically through his mechs. His ops gear was heavily shielded; to the USMC probes it would seem like just another Epiphany unit struggling to cope with the sudden failure of the public nets.
All that might buy him ten more minutes. Long before then, the DHS analyst pool should recover from Alice's collapse and run a retrospective surveillance of the local video streams. Analysts obsessing on a dataset that small were deadly effective. He could imagine their gleeful pursuit: See how the enemy mechs are clumped across from Pilchner Hall? Scan back to early in the evening; who-all has been near that building? Why, there's Gu's daughter going in, and a few minutes earlier, an Indian-looking fellow doing the same. Scan forward; no action till a minute ago, when that same Indian-looking fellow comes running out. Track him forward to the present and my, my, there he is, trying his damnedest to seem an innocent bystander.
In any case, tonight's Indo-European operation was beyond all deniability. And that was the minor disaster. For a few seconds, Alfred Vaz drifted in uncharacteristic despair. What about all my years of planning? What about saving the world ? He had heard enough to know that Rabbit's accusations were in the pdf sent to Parker's laptop. Alfred would never complete his research program. Indeed, Rabbit had been the Next Very Bad Thing. The carrot greens in Mumbai had made the point, but I willfully ignored the evidence, so hoping I was to win with my plan .
And yet what of Rabbit now? Quite possibly its substantive evidence was indecipherable garbage. Conceivably the minds behind Rabbit were reduced to ignorance. Then maybe, maybe, with all my leverage at External Intelligence, I can survive to try again .
Alfred moved back to the edge of the crowd and cautiously reached out to his network. He'd lost his link into the labs. For half a minute there was nothing except a deadly snick and snack that sounded privately in his ears, marking the steady extermination of his little army.
There . A route through his surviving devices, back into Pilchner Hall. Tiny windows popped up and he found a viewpoint, a single lab camera that had survived the HEIR attack and looked down upon the Mus array cabinet. The camera had suffered glitter damage, swaths of stuck pixels, but he could see enough.
Collateral damage could be your friend; there might be nothing here to prove Rabbit's accusations! The blast from the Americans' attack on the launcher had knocked over his very special cabinet. The last group of mice had fallen along with it. Best of all, the Yanks' thermal bombs had flooded the area around the launcher with molten overburden. The lava had closed off the hole created by the attack, just as intended, but it had not stopped there. The glowing, tarry tide had pushed out along the aisles and piled almost two meters deep in places. Its farthest extent lapped the fallen cabinet and covered all but a corner of that final batch of mouse boxes.
There was no sign of the Gus. Before the laser attack, they had been standing just beyond the current destruction. If he'd had more viewpoints, he might have tracked them down but would that matter? Their jumbled memories were a still a threat, but that was now beyond his control. Suddenly, Alfred realized he was smiling. Strange how in the midst of disaster, he could be pleased that his two most persistent antagonists not counting Rabbit, may he burn in hell had probably survived.
He was closer to the library now. Civilian rescue workers were in evidence, though the network support was probably provided by the marines.
Interrogation teams were not yet in action. And he'd found a backup aero-bot to relay through! He got one fresh message before it was lost:
Mitsuri > Vaz: <sm>Gnberk's analysis is almost complete. Please give us a few more minutes' cover, Alfred. USMC is still focused on the labs. You have a clear run to your Bollywood team.</sm> She marked a map with the cinema team's current location, on the north edge of the crowds, in the eucalyptus. The Bollywood crew and its automation were well prepared for tonight's operation, though the on-site people were not knowing participants.
Alfred took a final check all around himself. He walked a few paces through the trees and he was in midst of his Bollywood crew.
"Mr. Ramachandran! We have lost all connectivity." The video tech's eyes were wide. "Everything was fine, but now it is so very terrible!" The crew were experts on the spectacular, but not the real.