But, as ever, he remained on the edge of wakefulness even while asleep, the ancient inescapable discipline of his profession. The soft bleebling of the telephone by the bedside sounded, the private line, and by the second ring Irene and her negligee were gone and the phone was in his hand.
“Carmichael.”
“General Carmichael, it’s Sam Bacon.” The former Senate Majority Leader, with the fine tennis-player legs. Now one of the ranking civilian officials of the California Army of Liberation. “I’m sorry to be awakening you so early on Christmas day, but—”
“There’s probably a good reason, Senator.”
“I’m afraid there is. Word has just come through from Denver. They’re going to do the laser thing after all.”
“The stupid fucking sons of bitches,” said the Colonel.
“Ah—yes. Yes, definitely,” said Bacon. He seemed a little taken aback at the sound of such colorful language, coming from the Colonel. That was not the Colonel’s custom. “They’ve seen Joshua Leonards’s report, and Peter’s comments too, and the response is that they’re going to go ahead with it anyway. They’ve got an anthropologist of their own—no, a sociologist—who says that if only for symbolic reasons we need to begin some sort of counter-offensive against the Entities, in fact it’s long overdue, and now that we have the actual capacity to do so—”
“Symbolic lunacy,” the Colonel said.
“We all second that, sir.”
“When will it happen?”
“They’re being very cagey. But we’ve also intercepted and decoded a Net message from the Colorado center to their adjuncts in Montana that seems pretty clearly to indicate that the strike will occur on January 1 or 2. That is, approximately seven days from now.”
“Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“We’ve already notified the President, and he’s sending a countermanding order through to Denver.”
“The President,” said the Colonel, making that sound like an obscenity also. “Why don’t they notify God, too? And the Pope. And Professor Einstein. Denver isn’t going to pay any attention to countermanding orders that come out of Washington. Washington’s ancient history. It shouldn’t be necessary for me to say that to you, Senator. What we need to do is get somebody into Denver ourselves and disable that damned laser trigger ourselves before they can use it.”
“I concur. And so do Joshua and Peter. But we have some serious opposition right within our own group.”
“On the grounds that an act of sabotage aimed against our beloved liberation-front comrades in Denver is treason against humanity in general, is that it?”
“Not exactly, General Carmichael. The opposition comes on straight military grounds, I’m afraid. General Brackenridge. General Comstock. They believe that the Denver laser strike is a good and proper thing to attempt at this present time.”
“Jesus Christ Almighty,” the Colonel said. “So I’m outvoted, Sam?”
“I’m sorry to say that you are, sir.”
The Colonel’s heart sank. He had been afraid of this.
Brackenridge had been something fairly high up in the Marines before the Conquest. Comstock was a Navy man. Even a Navy man could be a general in the California Army of Liberation. They were both much younger than the Colonel; they had never had any combat experience whatsoever, not even a minor police action in some third-world boondock. Desk men, both of them. But they had two votes to his one in the military arm of the executive committee.
The Colonel had suspected they would take the position that they now had taken. And had fought with them about it.
Let me remind you, he had said, of a remarkably ugly bit of military history. The Second World War, Czechoslovakia: the Czech underground managed to murder the local Nazi commander, a particularly monstrous character named Reinhard Heydrich. Whereupon the Nazis rounded up every single inhabitant of the village -where it had happened, a place called Lidice, executed all the men, sent the women and children to concentration camps, where they died too. Don’t you think the same thing is likely to happen, only at least twenty thousand times worse, if we lay a finger on one of these precious E-Ts?
They had heard him out; he had given it whatever eloquence he could muster; it had not mattered.
“When was this vote held?” he asked.
“Twenty minutes ago. I thought it was best to let you know right away.”
The Colonel yearned to slide back into his dream. Once more, 17 Brewster Drive; the young Irene in her amethyst-colored negligee; the hard pink tips of the beautiful breasts that ultimately would kill her showing distinctly against the filmy fabric of the garment. But none of that was available just now.
What was available, sitting up there high above the Earth in geosynchronous orbit, was a three-year-old laser-armed military satellite that the Entities had curiously failed to notice when they had neutralized the other human orbital weapons, or had not understood, or simply were not afraid of. It had the capacity to shoot a beam of very potent energy indeed at any point on Earth that happened to pass beneath it. It had been intended, in those long-ago idyllic pre-Entity days of three years ago, as the United States’ all-purpose global policeman, equipped with the high-tech equivalent of a very long billy-club: the ability to cut a nifty scorch-line warning across the territory of any petty country whose tinhorn despot of a ruler might suffer from a sudden attack of delusions of grandeur.
The problem was that the software that activated the satellite’s deadly laser beam had been lost during the Troubles, and so the thing was simply sitting up there, idle, useless, pointlessly going around and around and around.
There was a new and even bigger problem now, which was that the Colorado counterpart of the California Army of Liberation had discovered a backup copy of the activator program and was proudly planning to launch a laser strike against the Denver headquarters of the Entities.
The Colonel knew what the consequences of that were going to be. And dreaded them.
To Former Senate Majority Leader Sam Bacon he said simply, “So there’s no way, diplomatic or otherwise, of preventing them from launching the strike?”
“It doesn’t seem so, General.”
Lidice, he thought. Lidice all over again.
“Oh, the damned fools,” said the Colonel quietly. “The hotheaded suicidal idiots!”
Across the world in England, Christmas Day had long since arrived.
A child had been born at Bethlehem on this day some two thousand years before, and two thousand years later children continued to be born at Christmastime all around the world, though the coincidence could be an awkward one for mother and child, who must contend with the risks inherent in the general overcrowding and understaffing of hospitals at that time of year. But prevailing hospital conditions were not an issue for the mother of the child of uncertain parentage and dim prospects who was about to come into the world in unhappy and disagreeable circumstances in an unheated upstairs storeroom of a modest Pakistani restaurant grandly named Khan’s Mogul Palace in Salisbury, England, very early in the morning of this third Christmas since the advent of the Entities.
Salisbury is a pleasant little city that lies to the south and west of London and is the principal town of the county of Wiltshire. It is noted particularly for its relatively unspoiled medieval charm, for its graceful and imposing thirteenth-century cathedral, and for the presence, eight miles away, of the celebrated prehistoric megalithic monument known as Stonehenge. Stonehenge, in the darkness before the dawn of that Christmas Day, was undergoing one of the most remarkable events in its long history, and, despite the earliness (or lateness) of the hour, a goodly number of Salisbury’s inhabitants had turned out to witness the spectacular goings-on.