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>Günberk'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.
Alfred shifted into the persona of harried cinema exec. "You have your cached videos, do you not? You forwarded the earlier contexts back home, did you not?"
"Yes, but — " They wanted to rush out from the trees, to help the injured down by the library. That was for the best; in moments, Vaz would be one of the group again. Perhaps the DHS analysts were still in chaos. It would be amusing (and amazing, too) if this cover got him past the USMC cordon and out of California. As he followed his cinema crew out into the open space around the library, he had only one remaining link to his mil-net. It was past time to drop that bit of incrimination.
But there was still intelligence streaming in. Terrible, chilling words that Alfred would never have been burdened with if he hadn't still been linked.
"Please. Please don't do this to her. She's just a little girl."
Gu . Alfred searched wildly in his only remaining view. Back in his physical person, he stumbled.
The video tech grabbed his elbow, steadying him. "Mr. Ramachandran! Are you quite well? Were you blinded in the attack?"
Alfred had the presence of mind not to shake her off. "I'm sorry, it's just all this destruction. We must help these poor people."
"Yes! But you must stay safe yourself." The tech guided him down to where the rest of the Bollywood crew was already helping the emergency workers. Her aid gave him cover to look carefully out from his underground viewpoint. The damage to the camera had partially healed; some of the stuck pixels were flickering, and now he could see a little beyond the left of the fallen cabinet… The elder Gu was pinned beneath. Lord, where was the other one?
I didn't mean for this . He should say nothing, but his body betrayed him:
Anonymous — > Robert Gu: <sm>Where is your little girl?</sm>
"Who is this?" the voice screamed in his ear, then continued more quietly, more desperately. "She's right here. Unconscious. And I can't move her out of the way"
Anonymous — > Robert Gu: <sm>I'm sorry.</sm> Alfred couldn't think of anything more to say. Dead, these two might marginally improve his own prospects. He looked angrily away from the viewpoint. Damn me . He had accomplished nothing this night except destroy good people. But how could he safely save them?
"Please. Just tell the police. Don't let her burn."
More spikes of overpressure, the sound of a thousand fragile things breaking, of heavy plastic tearing, bones being crushed. Robert didn't really hear it all. The bones getting crushed, that was distracting. Even the follow-up explosions and the heat went more or less unnoticed.
Robert surfaced from introspection that might as well have been unconsciousness, except that it hurt a lot more. Miri was on her hands and knees. She was wailing. "Grandpa! Grandpa! Say something, please . Grandpa!"
He twitched a hand, and she grabbed it. "I'm so sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to knock things over. Are you hurt?"
It was one of those questions that had an easy answer. Agony the size of an elephant was sitting on his right leg. "Yes," but the rest of a clever answer was lost in the pain.
Miri was crying, choking, very un-Miri-like. She turned and pushed at the cabinet that had him pinned.
Robert took a deep breath, but that mainly made him dizzy. "The cabinet's too heavy, Miri. Stay back from it." Why was the air so hot? The steady light was gone. Something like an open furnace glowed beyond the fallen equipment, where the sounds were all of popping and hissing.