A pulse appeared in his throat. His soldiers seemed frozen, staring into her face as their captain did. Then one broke free, the youngest of the group. He shook himself, as though awakening suddenly in an unfamiliar place. His eyes glittered with hard cold fear. But he advanced nonetheless, forcing himself forward, and stood with his captain.
The others, perhaps released by his movement, began to back away. Weapons sagged.
The officer’s breath was coming in short hard gasps.
He struggled with his gun, trying (I thought) to pull the trigger. But it was no longer aimed at me.
He took a step back. And one by one, they retreated into the stairway until only the young soldier was left. He held tight to his AK-47, and stared at her with stricken eyes. She spoke to him in Vietnamese, gently, and then he too was gone.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Do you really not know?” Her face had taken on the tint of the smoldering sky. “After all this time, after all the killing, do you really not know?” Her gaze swept the rooftop, and locked on the city. Savagery flickered in her eyes. “Your fathers knew me. At Troy, at Port Arthur, at the Coral Sea, they knew me. Pray that your sons do not.”
I don’t know how to describe that moment. I was terrified, as I had not been at any other time during that fearful evening. She stood full in the moonlight, breast heaving, voice thick with emotion. “You’ve come for me,” I said in a hoarse whisper.
Her expression softened. “No. Not for you.”
“Then why are you here?” I was drenched with sweat.
“I was careless.”
And I thought: the pilot. The Cobra pilot. I must have said it aloud.
Something swirled within that dark shape. “No. Rather, the soldier who tried to challenge me a few moments ago. The young one. Within the hour, he will sacrifice his life for a comrade.”
“My God,” I said. “One of those bastards? You came for one of those bastards?”
“Yes,” she said. “One of those bastards.” The words were brittle. Flat. They hung on the night air, dull with impotent rage. “I am concerned only with courage, Anderson. Not with politics.”
“What about the pilot? And his gunnei?” I demanded.
“I am not alone.” Her eyes slid shut. “Tonight we fill the skies of this wretched peninsula!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, not sure exactly what I meant.
“We all are.” She inhaled, deeply, sadly. “It is not permitted that the valiant should perish. But who comes for the ordinary man? Who stands with him when the shells rain down? Who speaks to him in the moment of terror? We are too few.
“You are children, Anderson. Have you any idea how many will die tonight?” Her eyes raked the stars, and she raised a fist at the moon. “How many more battlefields can this pitiful world support?”
I can close my eyes now and see that rooftop and smell burning tar. And hear her final words. Her voice was warm and rich, lovely and terrible. “Anderson, we do not come for all who die in combat. But we will come for you. You will have your hour, and I will be with you.”
You will have your hour,
Hell, I’m over 40 years old. I do actuarial tabulations for Northwestern Insurance. A desk job. I don’t walk very well. I’m thirty pounds overweight. And I have three kids. The Army will never have any use for me.
I think sometimes about her, and I wonder if she was wrong. And I think about the kind of war that would need my services.
It’s why I don’t like to hear Brad Conner joke about him and me holding off invaders at Virginia Beach.
SEAQ and Destroy
Charles Stross
Day 1
NewsBurst: 11:43 G.M.T.
The Third World War began this morning with a Russian dawn raid on the City of London. Bombs exploded all over the Docklands Enterprise Zone, disrupting the white-hot core of European industrial asset-stripping; the follow-up raids involved extensive use of lethal virus weapons and tactical assault units. Casualties included Larry Steinberg, a systems analyst for BSF:
Video intercut:
Steinberg: “It was terrible. They must have infiltrated those time bombs weeks ago, but there was no sign of them. They began going off at nine-thirteen this morning, bringing down whole systems. One entire block just crumbled ... it was terrible, I tell you. We lost SEAQ for starters and then it all went to hell. There were casualties everywhere ... I saw this young dealer, she was crying and pulling her hair out over her colleague, he’d copped it but bad, flat on the floor ...”
Voice-over:
“Barclays de Stoat Fader is just one of the large financial houses to suffer at the hands of the spetznaz assault this morning. Other large institutions affected include Country NatWest and the European desks of Drexel Burnham. “Casualty figures are high, possibly running into tens of thousands of city workers and billions of ECU’s of damage. Further video updates will follow.”
Viral attack was largely confined to peripheral dealer desks where data throughput was limited to those personnel who had time to play a pirated game of Strip Poker which was being passed around. The virus was triggered by a date check, which suggests that the assault has been prepared far in advance. The main network through which it was disseminated appears to have been via SEAQ, the Stock Exchange Automated Quotations system.
BSF have refused to comment on a rumour to the effect that the attack was planned with the assistance of disgruntled employees sacked last year after a securities scandal which led to the company being investigated by the MMC.
The Soviet Embassy in London was unavailable for comment. The US Treasury Department is expected to make a statement later in the day.
NewsBurst: 12:51 G.M.T.
Initial damage caused by the Soviet attack appears to have been limited, and the main clearing banks are switching in their reserve and back-up capacity. About 30% of the damaged dealer desks are up and running from back-ups, but the virus-infected optical discs are still in quarantine with DTI investigators and S&Q Enterprises called in. The attack failed to induce a massive slide, but Snake currencies are shaky and an unscheduled internal adjustment has been announced for this afternoon. Interest rates have not yet been affected, but announcements are expected hourly.
At 12:49 the European Currency Unit stood at 0.92 Roubles, down 23 Kopeks in just three and a half hours. The U.S. Dollar remained stable at 0.89 ECUs, three cents up on yesterday.
A press conference has been scheduled by the Soviet Embassy in nine minutes’ time and will be covered by this service. Just in:
At the press conference in Washington that has just ended, the U.S. Treasury Department spokesman, Mr. John Flatbush, read the following statement but left the platform before he could be asked any questions:
“At nine hundred hours today the Treasury Department’s monitoring service became aware of the serious nature of the current Russian attack on London. We are of course monitoring the present scenario in real-time, but we do not believe that there are any grounds for alarm in this country. The days of the great corporate raiders—Icahn and Boesky and the like—are over, thanks to the decisive lead provided by the Jackson administration in restructuring the U.S. economy. There are no grounds to fear a joint Japanese-Soviet attack on our corporate heartland, but in order to prevent any localized slides we are taking action to freeze European assets held in U.S. stocks and bonds. These shares will be underwritten by the Federal Reserve Bank for the duration of the—er, instability.