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 .