THE GROWING
Written by: Susanne Beck and Okasha
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
With Asi happily ensconced at her feet, Kirsten taps at her keyboard, entering the last of the partial serial number into her specialized search engine. Another quick tap sets the wheels in motion, and she slumps back against the couch, watching the numbers crunch. Asi takes this as a sign that some attention-getting is in order, and he sits up, weaseling his massive head between the laptop and Kirsten's belly. Big brown eyes roll up at her as his tail beats a comforting tattoo against the chest cum table.
“Slut,” she chuckles as she reaches out to scratch his ears. “Nothing but a slut-puppy you are.”
Asi groans in agreement before weaseling further onto what little there is of her lap.
“Oh no. If you think you're gonna climb up here, you're got another thing coming. Mommy's work—aha! Speak of the devil. Okay darlin. Show me what you got.” Pushing her glasses higher on her nose with an absent finger, she studies the results of her search. She frowns. “Great. Sixty thousand possibles. How peachy.” She sighs, white teeth worrying pensively against her full lower lip. “Let's see…how to narrow this down.” Her eyes brighten, and she taps in several commands, followed by the ‘enter' key. “There. Chew on that for a bit.”
Satisfied, she turns back to her whining canine companion, and bending forward slightly, touches noses with him. “Now, where were we?”
“Just wait till I tell Dakota how you spend your free time when she's not around.”
The dry, melodious voice, completely unexpected, causes Kirsten to jump, almost dumping the precious computer from her lap. Heart beating a mile a minute, she looks up to see the shadowy figure cross easily into the light. “Jesus, Maggie! You almost gave me a heart attack, here!”
“Sorry,” Maggie replies, though her tone doesn't exactly convey apology.
“I didn't even hear you come in!”
“You told me not to knock.”
“I know, I know.” Settling the laptop, she looks over at her friend as the Colonel settles her long frame into the armchair. “Long day?”
“You don't know the half of it.” Maggie drags a weary hand through her close cropped hair. “Just got out of a debriefing with Manny.”
“And?”
“Droids,” she responds, mouth cutting off her words with the precision of a Ginsu. “Lots of ‘em. Armed with surface to air missiles. Heading this way.”
“Shit. How long?”
Maggie shrugs. “Dunno. Depends on how fast they're moving. About a week, on the outside, I'd guess.”
The twinge in Kirsten's gut multiplies tenfold, but her eyes meet Maggie's steadily. “How are we going to stop them?” she asks softly.
“I don't know that either.” Silence falls between them, but is broken a moment later. “So, what are you doing this fine day?”
“Hold that thought,” Kirsten replies as her computer chimes softly at her. A smile creases her face as she looks down at the latest results. Sixty thousand possibilities has suddenly become forty, thirty of which she can rule out without a second glance. One name stands out from the rest, and her grin broadens. “Ha! Gotcha, you bastard!”
“Care to share?” Maggie asks after a moment of watching Kirsten gloat.
“Wha-?” Kirsten blinks. “Oh. Yeah, sure.” She turns the computer so that the screen faces Maggie. “See?”
Maggie takes a quick look, then lifts her eyes to her companion's. “In a famous physician's immortal words, I'm a pilot, not a bionicist, Jim.”
Righting her machine, Kirsten laughs at the fairly accurate imitation. “Well, I am, so I'll try to explain it to you.”
“Do tell,” is the dry response.
“Ok. Remember our suicide bomber friend of a week or so past?”
“I do.”
“Well, as you know, I've been spending my time trying to discover what I can from its remaining parts.”
“And you discovered something?”
“In a manner of speaking. Actually, your man Jimenez discovered it for me. I promoted him, by the way.”
“Oh you did, did you? What rank?”
“I'm…not sure.” She waves a hand. “Anyway, what he found for me was a circuit board that just happened to contain the serial number for this particular model. It was pretty badly burned, but I was able to extract enough of the code to plug it into my database, and viola!”
“And what does that tell you, exactly?”
Kirsten ponders the question for a moment. “Have you ever heard of Richardson's Avionics?”
Maggie tilts her head, thinking. “No, I don't believe I have. Should I?”
“Probably not. To the world, they were pretty much a two-bit operation, manufacturing parts for single engine aircraft and the like.”
“But to those in the know…?”
“Let's just say they were the recipient of quite a few juicy government defense contracts over the past twenty years or so. The story was that they were developing top secret radar evading and jamming equipment for warplanes.”
“Interesting.”
“Quite.” A pause. “But I see now that that's not all they were developing.”
Maggie sits forward, intrigued. “No?”
“No. The serial number on that droid leads right to Richardson's doorstep. None of us knew that these type of droids even existed. And we weren't meant to.”
“Which is why their manufacture was kept off of the military bases.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay. What does this knowledge do for us?”
“Possibly plenty.” Kirsten adjusts her glasses again. “For one thing, we have proof of another species of androids whose only purpose is to kill. Something all non military androids were supposedly guaranteed against doing. Secondly, and this is only a guess, since these androids were already programmed to kill humans, it's likely that whatever code that was used to ‘turn' the others wasn't implanted into this model. It would have been a needless waste of resources and energy, something that Westerhaus would never have stood for, and his stench is all over this project.”
“I'm afraid I'm still not seeing how this benefits us,” Maggie admits.
“I'm getting to that part.” Kirsten looks at her and grins. “If I'm right, and if these droids aren't programmed with the same unbreakable code, that means that someone who knows a thing or two about android coding can turn these people killers into android killers.”
Comprehension dawns, and Maggie breaks out in a beaming smile. “Kirsten King, I could kiss you!”
“What, and give you another thing to tattle to Koda about?” she teases, feeling inwardly very pleased.
“I won't tell if you won't.”
Kirsten laughs. “I'll settle for a nice handshake. And maybe another shot of your Southern Comfort a little later on.”
“You're on!” She settles back in the chair. “Ok, logistics time. How do we go about getting a hold of these droids and reprogramming them, assuming that can be done?”
“Well, as I see it, there are three possibilities here.” Lifting her right hand, Kirsten begins ticking the points off on her fingers. “As far as I can tell, these droids were manufactured with only one purpose, and that was to explode. Which means that it's very likely that they can't work the machinery replicate themselves. So, either manufacturing was shut down when the ‘uprising' happened, and all the droids simply left the factory to go on their killing missions, or some of the androids programmed to do manufacturing came down from Minot, or there are some humans still left alive who are cranking those babies out as fast as they can.”
“If you had to choose, which one would you go with.”
“If I had to choose, I would go with number two, I think. Call me a sop, but I have a hard time believing an entire manufacturing plant full of humans would willingly continue building the things that likely murdered their families and friends. And I think that that plant is much too valuable to Westerhaus and his stoolies to let lie fallow, so that leaves androids from Minot as our only viable option.”
“Hmm.” Maggie rubs her chin absently as she thinks. “My gut tells me you're right about this. Unfortunately, that scenario is the worst one for us, for obvious reasons. How big is the plant?”
“Actually, not that big at all,” Kirsten replies, pulling up the blueprint from her database. “If I plot out part of the code here, I can probably be in and out in less than a few hours.”
“You?!?” Maggie asks, wide-eyed. “Oh no, no, no, no, no. Sorry, Ms. President, but if I let you within a thousand miles of a droid manufacturing plant, Dakota would kill me. Then she'd probably find a way to bring me back to life, just so she could kill me again. No thank you. I'll figure out a way--.”
“Maggie.” Kirsten's soft voice interrupts her ramblings. “I have to be the one to go. You can't just go down there, spray the place with bullets, and kidnap a couple dozen androids to bring back here to me. It doesn't work that way. The coding has do be done at the plant. My little laptop won't cut it, I'm afraid. I'm going down there.”
“Kirsten,” Maggie replies, voice deadly serious, “you know I can't allow that.”
Pulling off her glasses, Kirsten fixes the Colonel with a stare that is pure ice. “You don't have a choice in the matter, Maggie. I'll make it a direct order if I need to, but I don't want to have to do that. You know I'm right. You know this is right.”
“I know that letting you go down there, to a plant full of androids, is the most wrong thing there is, Kirsten. You're so much more than a scientist to us.”
“Right now, the scientist is all that matters. If I can reprogram enough of these androids to infiltrate their fellows' ranks and destroy them, it could give us the only break we have. I can't not do it, Maggie.”
“But Kirsten—.”
“Maggie, look me in the eye and tell me that we will win this war without those androids. Tell me that you've got some secret superweapon stashed away that will take care of the problem once and for all. Tell me that Dakota's vision is nothing but a bad dream after too much pepperoni pizza. Do that and I'll forget the whole thing.”
The two stare eye to eye for long moments.
Finally, Maggie blinks, and looks down at her hands. “You know I can't tell you any of that.”
“Then it's settled. I'll leave first thing tomorrow morning. The plant is less than a hundred miles away. I should be back before midnight.”
“Kirsten--.”
“The matter is settled, Maggie. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some coding to do.”
And, just like that, Kirsten slips her glasses back on, and is lost to her, once again immersed in the world of android codes. Resisting the urge to grab the woman by the shoulders and shake some sense into her, Maggie rises to her feet and, after a moment, turns on her heel and leaves, closing the door quietly behind her.
Kirsten looks up once the house is empty. “Goodnight, Maggie,” she murmurs. “Thank you for caring.”
******
“Holy mother,” Tacoma breathes as he shines his light down the narrow stairway and into the cluttered cellar. “It looks like a National Guard armory down there!”
“Yeah. Just keep alert. We don't know if he left any little surprises for us to trip on our way down.”
“Roger that.” Tacoma makes deliberate sweeps with his flashlight, keen eyes examining every square inch illuminated. “Looks clean from here.”
“Alrighty then.” Koda starts cautiously down the stairs, eyes open and alert. She reaches the third step from the bottom when her brother's voice sounds over her shoulder.
“Hold up a second.”
Koda freezes where she is. “Something?”
“A twinge in my gut. Something's not right. Here, let me through.”
“Um, I hate to break it to you, big brother, but there's barely room for me on this step. And you're blocking me from behind. Do you propose levitation or should I just try my invisibility trick?”
“Very funny. Here, let me try—this.” Grunting, he puts his hand carefully in front of her face, feeling blindly for what he senses is there. “Just…a little…furth—.”
The sound of a gun going off is deafening in the small confines of the stairwell.
The men above hear it easily and, as one, race for the door to the cellar. Poteet reaches it first. “Doc! Cap! Are you guys alright?”
Dakota's voice drifts up from the darkness below. “Just fine.” She stares at the charred, ragged hole in her brother's shirt cuff. “Nice reflexes there, Tex.”
“Jesus. That was almost your head, chunkshi !”
“But it wasn't, thanks to you.” She peers down the rest of the stairs. “How's the gut now?”
“As soon as it stops digesting my heart, I'll let you know.”
Reaching up, she gives his large, warm hand a squeeze. “Thanks, thiblo . I owe you one.”
“Nah,” he shrugs, trying to sound offhand and not exactly succeeding, “that's what big brothers are for, right?”
“Riiight,” she drawls before beginning her descent once again. She reaches the floor when her brother's voice halts her steps. “Another twinge?”
“Just making sure,” as he steps off the last stair and moves around her, his light sweeping in arcs across the floor and reflecting off of the dozens of wooden packing crates stacked along the length and breadth of the mid-sized cellar. He whistles soft and low. “How in the hell did he get a hold of all this?”
“Probably the same way he was able to openly sell illegal weapons in his storefront,” Koda replies, looking past the muscled bulk of her brother's body. Spotting something out of the corner of her eye, she freezes. “Tacoma, shine your like back this way.”
“What way?”
“Toward that packing crate with the crowbar on it. Yeah that one.” Her eyes narrow, trying to recapture what she's sure she's seen. “Anything look fishy to you?”
“I'm not the one with the eagle eyes here, sis.” Still, he does his best. “No, don't see anything but a few dust motes. What do you see?”
“Not sure. Move the light to your right, slowly. There. What does that look like to you?”
Concentrating on holding the light steady, he squints and spies a thin, translucent thread from the crowbar's forked end to the ceiling rafter above it. “Well, it's either a tripwire, or a cobweb. It's sagging in the middle, so I'd go for old cobweb, but I wouldn't bet your life on it, chunkshi .”
Taking the flashlight from his hands, she shines it along the walls and ceiling, eyes straining for any glimpse of weaponry or other lethal surprises. There is nothing that she can see, but her instincts, once alerted, refuse to be quieted.
“Squat down.” As her brother follows her instructions, Dakota hands him back the flashlight, digs into the pocket of her jeans and pulls out the keys to the APC. “Get ready to duck….”
“Dakota--.”
With an easy underhand motion, she tosses the keys so that they break through the thin thread above the crowbar. In the same motion, the covers her brother's body with her own, pushing him to the floor. A split second later, four miniature crossbows let loose their bolts, one from each side of the room, all set to intersect through the plane of space that anyone who had hefted the crowbar would be occupying—a space that is, thankfully, empty.
“Can you let me up now, Koda?” Tacoma's muffled voice filters up from beneath her. “This moldy cement is giving me hives.”
Carefully, Dakota leans back, eyes alert for any further danger. Thankfully, all remains quiet, and she helps her brother sit up.
Tacoma looks over his shoulder at the crossbow bolt driven halfway through the cheap plywood wall at the level of where his head would have been had his sister not pushed him down. He lets out a slow breath, then gifts Koda with a small grin. “Guess we're even now, huh?”
Laughing, she slaps his meaty shoulder. “You are such a goober.”
“Yeah, yeah, you say that now .” Rising easily to his feet, he reaches down a hand and helps her up. “Shall we see what Santa Skin-Head left us for Christmas?”
******
Koda eases Redtail One out of the small shopping center's parking lot, followed by the other trucks in the convoy. The back wheels answer sluggishly to the steering wheel; the lead vehicle, like the others, is packed from bed to canopy with crates of small arms and the ammunition to go with them. Old Boney had been a desultory desultory sort of right-winger, not much into doctrinaire survivalism himself but willing to capitalize on the kind of paranoia that drove self-styled “militiamen” to indulge in black helicopter fantasies and stock up on illegal weapons, all against the day that the commies came swarming over the Pole. Or the federal government, whichever arrived first.
Terrence, on the other hand, had been a nutjob's nutjob. When Sister Rosalie had assigned a book report on a “classic” in seventh grade— and by “classic” she had meant something like David Copperfield or The Last of the Mohicans —Terrence had turned in a glowing review of The Turner Diaries . Some of the literature they had found along with the guns had been considerably more radical. If Terrence had lived through the uprising, she had no doubt he would be yelling “I told you so!” to anyone who would listen.
But Terrence had been into droids, especially the military models. He'd even bought a surplus metalhead or two and had been trying to modify them for what he'd termed “commando operations.”
Live by the droid, die by the droid.
Beside her, Poteet turns his handsome new Bowie knife over in his hands. Once they had cracked the store, they had had to empty it down to the slingshots and Swiss Army can openers or risk the weapons' getting loose in the population. Which would not have been a problem in nine cases out of ten. But the variety and extent of Terrence's stock indicated a considerable customer base. And there was bound to be more than one surviving wingnut out there, more than one surviving Dietrich. Not the kind of folk one would want to trust with mortars and grenades and LAAW rockets.
“Eyes on the street, Joe,” she says quietly. “There's more weapons like these out there, and not all are upstanding citizens like us.”
“Ma'am,” he says with a guilty glance up at her. Then he sets his prize aside and takes up his M-16 again, laying it lightly across his knees.
Koda flashes him a smile to let him know he's not in trouble and glances into the rearview mirror. The other three trucks follow closely behind, all of them as heavily laden as Redtail One. Casually Dakota waves at the line of kids and teenagers standing across the street, watching as she and her party relieve Boney's establishment of his inventory. She says, “They're gonna be real disappointed we didn't leave them anything.”
“Looks like folks have liberated just about everything that's not nailed down.”
“And a few things that were.” Navigating around the hulks of cars left standing in the street, Koda gestures toward and abandoned house. The windows gape black, the glass lifted out, not broken; the wall studs stand bare like ribs where clapboard siding has been pried away, possibly for building, more likely for fuel. A couple blocks down, a six-foot-high plank fence with an iron gate surrounds another house.
“You know, ma'am, it could all still go to hell,” Poteet observes.
Koda shoots him a brief glance, noting the solemnity on his rawboned face. “In a heartbeat, Joe.”
Further along, the houses give way to a strip of used car lots and other businesses, all of them broken open with splinters of glass still scattered on the sidewalks, glittering now in the afternoon sun, their doors hanging loose on twisted hinges. A church still stands mostly intact; outside a branch bank a handful of twenty-dollar bills, bleached grey by the weather, skid along the gutter as a breeze gusts by.
Koda turns left to regain the Interstate, taking a different route than the one they had followed coming in. Maybe the wingnut paranoia is beginning to rub off, she reflects; given their firepower, there is no real possibility of ambush. Still, best not to advertise where they have been or become predictable.
At the next turn, the wind brings the sound of shouting, a man's deep voice and, incongruously, the squeals and laughter of small children. A block down the street stands the venerable brick façade of St. Boniface's church and school, and the voices grow louder as Koda pulls level with it. On the playground two small children ride the seesaws up and down, while another pumps his legs to carry the swing higher and higher. A veiled woman watches over them from a flight of steps leading up into the building, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed on the knot of adults gathered at the picnic tables under a small grove of pine trees.
More veiled women, and for a moment time slips and it comes to Koda that the nuns have somehow returned. But most of the women wear jeans and sweaters; the few men, denim and Stetsons. All but one.
Standing on one of the concrete picnic tables, he leans on a tall cross made of two branches roughly lashed together. His beard, liberally sprinkled with grey, cascades past his collar, and his long hair stirs in the breeze. Before his ears dangle long, corkscrew curls, though Koda would bet her ranch and all the stock on it that he is no Hassid. He wears a cassock buttoned almost to the throat; on his chest lies a large cross, also crudely made from twigs. She slows the convoy, rolling down her window to hear more clearly.
“. . .only a righteous remnant left here on earth to endure the Tribulation. In those days, says the Prophet Isaiah, seven women will lay hold of one man, saying ‘be our husband.' The time was when women could refuse their duty to the Lord and to their husbands, but no more. The man-faced scorpions of the Tribulation, sent by God to cleanse his earth of the unrighteous, have killed not a tenth part of mankind but nine out of ten. We let a woman rule over us, and this is God's just punishment for our disobedience. Now we must restore the order God meant for us to live in. Let no woman have authority, but be in all submission, and if she would learn anything, let her ask her husband. But let her remember her real purpose, and that is the bearing of children.”
Frowning, Koda counts up the veiled women. Seven. The preacher's “wives?” Two, at least, look under age, fifteen or so. “We're gonna need to get some civilian law enforcement in here,” Joe mutters. “Next thing you know ol' Judah there's gonna start serving Kool-Aid.”
Koda gives him a sharp look. “You know this guy?”
“Know him? Nah.” Poteet shakes his head. “But I've seen him preaching on the streets or in parks a few times I was in town on weekends. Calls himself Judah ben Israel now, but I think it was Brother Sam Something before. Cops hauled him off once when he was baptizing folks in the Civic Center fountain during a concert.”
She has head enough. Judah ben Israel, is something they should have known was coming. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the framework of the law to deal with him, unless they can find a way to enforce the age of consent laws. Koda presses the gas pedal, speeding up the truck, and heads back to the relative sanity of the Base.
*******
To those readers in the US, Happy Thanksgiving! To everyone else, Happy Thursday! Hope you enjoyed this latest update! Drop us a line at swordnquil@aol.com if you're so moved. Till next week, hasta!
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