Aces High Page 12

  Another aide bustled up and passed Carter a note. “Okay,” the general said. “The governor of New York has asked all aces in the New York area to meet at city hall. There’s talk of using you people as shock troops.” He peered at the android through his glasses. “You are an ace, right?”

  “I’m a sixth-generation machine intelligence programmed to defend society.”

  “You’re a machine, then?” Carter looked as if he hadn’t quite understood this till now. “Someone built you?”

  “That’s correct.” His contractions were getting better and better, his speech more concise. He was pleased with himself.

  Carter’s reaction was quick. “Are there any more of you? Can we build more of you? We’ve got a situation, here.”

  “I can transmit your request to my creator. But I don’t think it’s likely to be of immediate help.”

  “Do that. And before you take off, I want you to talk to one of my staff. Tell him about yourself, your capabilities. We can make better use of you that way.”

  “Yes, sir.” The android was trying to sound military, and thought he was succeeding.

  “No,” Tachyon said. “It’s not wild card.” Further facts had come in, including pictures. No wild card plague—not even an advanced version—could have produced results like this. At least I won’t get blamed for this one, he thought.

  “I think,” Tach said, “that what just struck Jersey is a menace my race has itself encountered on several occasions—these creatures attacked two colonies; destroyed one, and came close to destroying the other. Our expeditions destroyed them later, but we know there are many others. The T’zand’ran…” He paused at the blank looks. “That would translate as Swarm, I think.”

  Senator Hartmann seemed skeptical. “Not wild card? You’re telling me that New Jersey has been attacked by killer bees from space?”

  “They are not insects. They are in the way of being—how to say this?…” He shrugged. “They are yeasts. Giant, carnivorous, telepathic yeast buds, controlled by a giant mother-yeast in space. Very hungry. I would mobilize if I were you.”

  The mayor looked pained. “Okay. We’ve got a half-dozen aces assembled down below. I want you to go down and brief them.”

  The sounds of panic filtered through the skylight. It was four in the morning, but half Manhattan seemed to be trying to bolt the city. It was the worst traffic jam since the Wild Card Day.

  Travnicek grinned as he paged through the scientific notes that he’d scrawled on butcher paper and used cigarette packets during his months-long spell of creativity.

  “So the army wants more of you, hey? Heh. How much are they offering?”

  “General Carter just expressed an interest. He isn’t in charge of purchasing, I’m sure.”

  Travnicek’s grin turned to a frown as he held his notes closer to his eyes. His writing was awful, and the note was completely illegible. What the hell had he meant?

  He looked around the loft, at the appalling scatter of litter. There were thousands of the notes. A lot of them were on the floor, where they’d been ground into the particleboard.

  His breath steamed in the cold loft. “Ask for a firm offer. Tell him I want ten million per unit. Make that twenty. Royalties on the programming. And I want the first ten units for myself, as my bodyguard.”

  “Yes, sir. How soon can I tell him we might expect the plans to be delivered?”

  Travnicek looked at the litter again. “It might be awhile.” He’d have to reconstruct everything from scratch. “First thing, get a firm commitment on the money.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Before you go, clean this mess up. Put my notes in piles over there.” He pointed at a reasonably clean part of one of his tables.

  “Sir. The aliens.”

  “They’ll keep.” Travnicek chuckled. “You’ll be that much more valuable to the military after these critters eat half New Jersey.”

  The android’s face was expressionless. “Yes, sir.” And then he began tidying the lab.

  “Good gosh,” said Carter. For once the chaos that surrounded him ceased to exist. The silence in the improvised command post in a departure lounge of Newark International Airport was broken only by the whine of military jets disgorging troops and equipment. Paratroops in their bloused pants and new-model Kevlar helmets stood next to potbellied National Guard officers and aces in jumpsuits. They all waited for what Carter would say next. Carter held a series of infrared photographs to the faint light that was beginning to trickle in through the windows.

  “They’re moving south. Toward Philadelphia. Advance guard, flank guards, main body, rear guard. Carter looked at his staff. “It looks like they’ve been reading our tactical manuals, gentlemen.” He dropped the photographs to his table.

  “I want you to get your boys mounted and headed south. Move straight down the Jersey Turnpike. Requisition civilian vehicles if you have to. We want to outflank them and go in from the east toward Trenton. If we drive in their flank maybe we can pin their rear guard before they clear Princeton.” He turned to an aide. “Get the Pennsylvania Guard on the horn. We want the bridges over the Delaware blown. If they don’t have the engineers to blow them, have them blocked. Jackknife semitrucks across them if they have to.”

  Carter turned to the aces who stood in a corner, near a pile of hastily moved plastic chairs. Modular Man, Howler, Mistral, Pulse. A pterodactyl that was actually a little kid who had the ability to transform himself into reptiles, and whose mother was coming to get him for the second time in a few hours. Peregrine, with a camera crew. The Turtle orbited over the terminal in his massive armored shell. Tachyon wasn’t here: he’d been called to Washington as a science advisor.

  “The Marines from Lejeune are moving into Philadelphia,” Carter said. His voice was soft. “Somebody saw sense and put them under my command. But only one regiment is going to get to the Delaware in time to meet the alien advance guard, and they won’t have armor, they won’t have heavy weapons, and they’ll have to get to the bridges in school buses and Lord-knows-what. That means they’re going to get crushed. I can’t give you orders, but I’d like you to go to Philadelphia and help them out. We need time to get the rest of the Marines into position. You might save one heck of a lot of lives.”

  Coleman Hubbard stood in the hawk mask of Re before the assembled group of men and women. He was bare-chested, wearing his Masonic apron, and he felt a bit self-conscious—too much of his scar tissue was exposed, the burns that covered his torso after the fire at the old temple downtown. He shuddered at the memory of the flame, then looked up to draw his mind from the recollection.…

  Above him blazed the figure of an astral being, a giant man with the head of a ram and a colossal erect phallus, holding in his hands the ankh and the crooked rod, symbols of life and power—the god Amun, creator of the universe, blazing amid a multicolored aura of light.

  Lord Amun, Hubbard thought. The Master of the Egyptian Masons, and actually a half-crippled old man in a room miles away. His astral form could take whatever shape it wished, but in his body he was known as the Astronomer.

  Amun’s radiance shone in the eyes of the assembled worshippers. The god’s voice spoke in Hubbard’s head, and Hubbard raised his arms and related the god’s words to the congregation.

  “TIAMAT has come. Our moment is nearly here. We must concentrate all our efforts at the new temple. The Shakti device must be assembled and calibrated.”

  Above the god’s ram-head another form appeared, an ever-changing mass of protoplasm, tentacles and eyes and cold, cold flesh.

  “Behold TIAMAT,” Amun said. The worshippers murmured. The creature grew, dimming the radiance of the god.

  “My Dark Sister is here,” said Amun, and his voice echoed in Hubbard’s head. “We must prepare her welcome.”

  A Marine Harrier sucked a flapper into an intake and screamed as it spewed molten alloy and slid sideways into doomed Trenton. The sound of flappers drowned the wail of jets an
d the throb of helicopters. Burning napalm glowed as it drifted on the choked water. Colored signal smoke twisted into the air.

  The Swarm main body was bulldozing its way through Trenton, and the advance guard was already across the river. Blocking and blowing the bridges hadn’t stopped them: they’d just plunged into the frigid river and come across like a vast, dark wave. A hundred flappers had surrounded the Marine commander’s chopper and brought it down, and after that there was no one in charge: just parties of desperate men holding where they could, trying to form a breakwater against the Swarm tide.

  The aces had become separated, coping with the emergencies. Modular Man was burning enemy, trying to help the scattered pockets of resistance as, one after the other, they came under assault. It was a hopeless task.

  From somewhere on the left he could hear the Howler’s shrieks, curdling Swarm bone and nerve. His was a more useful talent than the android’s; the microwave laser was too precise a weapon for dealing with a wave assault, but the Howler’s ultrasonic screams could destroy whole platoons of the enemy in the space of a second.

  A National Guard tank turned a corner behind where Modular Man floated in the middle of the conflict, then drove into a building, jamming itself in rubble. Flappers had coated the tank’s armor, obscuring its view slits. The android dived onto the tank, picked up flappers, tore them like paper. Acid juices spattered his clothing. Artificial flesh smoked. The tank ground bricks under its treads, backing out of the building.

  As the android rose, the Great and Powerful Turtle formed a vast blip on his radar. He was picking up Swarm buds bodily, flinging them into the air, then letting them fall. It was like a cascade fountain. Flappers beat hopelessly at the armored shell. Their acids weren’t enough to get through battleship armor.

  The air crackled as it was torn apart by energized photons: Pulse, his body become light. The human laser ricocheted off enemy, brought a dozen down, then disappeared. When Pulse finally ran out of energy he would revert to human form, and then he would be vulnerable. The android hoped the flappers wouldn’t find him.

  Mistral rose overhead, colored like a battleflag. She was seventeen, a student at Columbia, and she dressed in bright patriot colors like her father, Cyclone. She was held aloft by the cloak she filled with the winds she generated, and she battered at the flappers with typhoons, flinging them, tearing them apart. Nothing came close to her.

  Peregrine flew in circles around her, uselessly. She was too weak to go against the Swarm in any of its incarnations.

  None of this was enough. The Swarm kept moving through the gaps between the aces.

  Wailing filled the air as jagged black shadows, Air Guard A-10s, fell through the sky, their guns hammering, turning the Delaware white. Bombs tumbled from beneath their wings, becoming bright blossoms of napalm.

  The android fired until his generators were drained, and then he fought flappers with his bare hands. Despair filled him, then anger. Nothing seemed to help.

  The enemy main body hit the river and began its swim. Few soldiers were alive to fight them. Most of the survivors were trying to hide or run away.

  The Sixth Marine Regiment was dead on arrival, and nothing could alter the fact.

  Between Trenton and Levittown, bombs and fire had turned the brown December landscape black. Swarm buds moved across the devastated landscape like a nightmare tide. Two more Marine regiments were entrenched in the Philadelphia suburbs, this time with artillery in support and a little group of light Marine armor.

  The aces were waiting in a Howard Johnson’s off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The plan was for them to be thrown into any counterattack.

  A battery of 155s was set up in the parking lot, and fired steadily. The crescendo of sound had already blown out most of the restaurant’s windows. The sound of jets was constant overhead.

  Pulse was lying down in a hospital tent somewhere; he’d overstrained his energies and was on the brink of collapse. Mistral was curled up sideways in a cheerful orange plastic booth. Her shoulders shook with every crash of the guns outside. Tears poured in rivers down her face. The Swarm hadn’t come near her but she’d seen a lot of people die, and she had held together through the fight and the long nightmare of the retreat, but now the reaction had set in. Peregrine sat with her, talking to her in gentle tones the android couldn’t hear. Modular Man followed Howler as the ex-sandhog searched the restaurant for something to eat. The man’s chest was massive, the mutated voicebox widening the neck so that the android couldn’t put his two hands around it. Howler wore a borrowed set of Marine battle dress: flapper acid had eaten his civvies. The android had had to fly him out at the end, holding the ace in hands that had been eaten down to the alloy bones.

  “Canned turkey,” Howler said. “Great. Let’s have Thanksgiving.” He looked at Modular Man. “You’re a machine, right? Do you eat?”

  The android jammed two alloy fingers into a light socket. There was a flash of light, the smell of ozone: “This works better,” he said.

  “They gonna put you into production soon? I can see the Pentagon taking an interest.”

  “I’ve given my creator’s terms to General Carter. There’s been no reply yet. I think the command structure is in disarray.”

  “Yeah. Tell me about it.”

  “Wait,” said the android. Behind the crashing of the guns, the roar of jets, he began to hear another sound. The crackle of small-arms fire.

  A Marine officer raced into the restaurant, his hand holding his helmet. “It’s started,” he said. The android began running through systems checks.

  Mistral looked up at the officer with streaming eyes. She looked a lot younger than seventeen.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  The Swarm was stopped on the outskirts of Philadelphia. The two Marine regiments held, their strongpoints surrounded by walls of Swarm dead. The victory was made possible thanks to support from Air Force and Navy planes and from the battleship New Jersey, which flung 18-inch shells all the way from the Atlantic Ocean; thanks also to Carter’s National Guard and paratroops driving into the Swarm from their rear flank.

  Thanks to the aces, who fought long into the night, fought on even after the Swarm hesitated in its onslaught, then began moving west, toward the distant Blue Mountains.

  All night the Philadelphia airport was busy with transport bringing in another Marine division all the way from California.

  The next morning the counterattack began.

  After nightfall, the next day. A color television babbled earnestly from a corner of the departure lounge. Carter was getting ready to move his command post west to Allentown, and Modular Man had flown in with news of the latest Swarm movements. But Carter was busy right now, talking over the radio with his commanders in Kentucky, and so the android listened to news from the rest of the world.

  Violence from Kentucky splashed across the screen. Images, taken from a safe distance through long lenses, jerked and snapped. In the midst of it was a tall man in fatigues without insignia, his body blazing like a golden star as he used a twenty-foot tree trunk to smash Swarm buds. There was an interview with him afterward: he looked no older than twenty, but his eyes had thousand-year ghosts in them. He didn’t say much, made excuses, left to return to the war. Jack Braun, the Golden Boy of the forties and the Judas Ace of the fifties, back in action for the duration of the emergency.

  More aces: Cyclone, Mistral’s father, fighting the Swarm in Texas with the aid of his own personal camera crew, all armed with automatic weapons. The Swarm was in full retreat across the Mexican border, driven, by armor from Forts Bliss and Hood, and by infantry from Fort Polk, the fliers decimated by widespread use of Vietnam-era defoliants. The Mexicans, slower to mobilize and with an army unprepared for modern large-scale warfare, weren’t happy about the Swarm being pushed into Chihuahua and protested in vain.

  More images, more locales, more bodies scattered across a torn landscape. Scenes from the autumn plains of northern Germany, wher
e the Swarm had dropped right into the middle of a large-scale maneuver by the British Army of the Rhine, and where they had never even succeeded in concentrating. More troubled images from Thrace, where a Swarm onslaught was straddling the Greco-Turkish-Bulgarian border. The human governments weren’t cooperating, and their people suffered.

  Pictures of hope and prayer: scenes of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, already packed with Christmas pilgrims, now filling the churches in long, endless rounds of murmured prayer.

  Stark black-and-white images from China, refugees and long columns of PLA troops marching. Fifty million dead were estimated. Africa, the Near East, South America—pictures of the Swarm advance across the third world, images of an endless wave of death. No continent was untouched save Australia. Help was promised as soon as the superpowers cleaned up their own backyards.

  There were speculations about what was going on in the Eastern bloc: though no one was talking, it seemed as if the Swarm had landed in southern Poland, in the Ukraine, and in at least two places in Siberia. Pact forces had mobilized and were moving into battle. Commentators were predicting widespread starvation in Russia: the full-scale mobilization had taken the trucks and railways the civilian population used for the transportation of food.

  Old pictures came on the screen: Mistral flying immune in the sky; Carter giving a subdued, reluctant press conference; the mayor of Philadelphia on the verge of hysteria … the android turned away. He’d seen too many of these images.

  And then he felt something move through him, some ghost wind that touched his cybernetic heart. He felt suddenly weaker. The television set hissed, its images gone. A rising babble came from the communications techs: some of their equipment had gone down. Modular Man was alarmed. Something was going on.

  The ghost wind came again, touching his core. Time seemed to skip a beat. More communications down. The android moved toward Carter.