"It's still two more rows, then five cabinets down."
"But I thought you said — never mind." Miri walked past two more rows. Robert followed.
She looked up at him.
"I… I'm not sure." He glared over the tops of the cabinets, trying to orient on the launcher, trying to force memory.
She hesitated and then touched his arm. "It's okay, Robert. Sometimes, you can't remember. But things will get better for you."
"Wait," he said. "I'm sure this is right." The pneumo tube behind the nearest had just received a shipping cartridge. Mouse boxes were rolling on board.
"So that means, um" — and Miri's hand slipped from his arm. She looked around and then up at him: "Where are we?"
Maybe it hadn't been nerve gas. Maybe it was something worse. And Miri got the bigger dose . Above the cabinet the pneumo hatch had closed. There was a pillowed thud and the cartridge sped away.
Another cartridge pulled into the siding above the cabinet. Another batch of mice rolled to meet it. It was out of reach, But I still understand what has to be done . Robert looked down at Miri and did his best to smile and lie. "Oh, we're just on a tour, Miri. How about it, would you like to climb on top of that cabinet?"
She looked up past him. "I'm not a little girl, Robert. I don't climb on other people's property."
Robert nodded, and tried to hold his smile. "But Miri, this… this is just a game. And… if we can stop the white thing with your, your game gun, then we win. You want to win, right?"
Now that brought a smile, full of pert intelligence. "Of course. Why didn't you say it was a game. Huh. This looks like some kind of bioscience lab. Nice!" She looked at where the transport was sliding the mouse boxes along. "So what do you want me to do?"
Once she's up there she'll forget all over again . "I'll tell you when you get up there." He lifted from beneath her arms. "Reach up! Grab the edge and I'll push."
Miri giggled, but she did reach up, and Robert did push. She slid through the gap beneath the siding. Her spray can was just inches from the transport tray.
"Now what?" her voice came down to him.
Yes, now what? You go to all the trouble to do something, and then you forget the point. Only this time, he knew the point was something very important. Robert flailed, beginning to panic. "Cara, I don't know — "
"Hey, I'm not Cara. My name is Miri!"
Not my sister, my granddaughter . Robert stepped back from the cabinet and tried to make sense: "Just shoot the spray can at the moving things, Miri."
"Okay! No problem."
A sound that was pain spiked into his head. Over the cabinet, he had a glimpse of a strange hole that split the side of the UP/Ex launcher. Nothing to do with Miri ! The thought had barely registered when he was slammed backwards.
Array One was in the GenGen launcher! The stealthed launch vehicle had a good chance of making it out of the the U.S. cordon. Array Two? Alfred's cameras showed that his strategy with the Gus was working. Somehow they had found the one Mus cabinet that really mattered, but his improvised gas attack was taking effect. The two were moving with a kind of aimless uncertainty.
He had time to prep the second load; he could get both out!
Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: <sm>USMC elint has detected ballistic launcher power-up in the labs! What can that be, Alfred?</sm>
Damn USMC. Alfred's analysts hadn't thought American electronic intelligence would be so sensitive.
Vaz — > Braun, Mitsuri: <sm>It's just bad luck. The GenGen launcher is cycling through its nightly calibration. </sm> That was a lie, but Alfred had his story ready. He launched a flurry of faked analysis, showering conclusions across Keiko and Günberk's teams. After the fact, he'd blame the launch on a resurrected Rabbit.
Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: <sm>But will the Americans believe that?</sm> She popped up some windows, her best estimate of just when and how the USMC might respond to the launch prep.
No time for the third cartridge. The GenGen launcher was loaded, the capacitor within forty-five seconds of launch. If only the Americans would just dither a bit.
Vaz — > Braun, Mitsuri: <sm>I'm finished with cleanup. Heading for rendezvous.</sm> Alfred took a last glance around. In fact, all his checklists were finally green. Across the room, the Orozco boy was sleeping peacefully. He would remember nothing of tonight, and his personal log had been artfully corrupted.
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.