Tommie slid his legs from the seat and pushed himself into a half-sitting position. The pain squeezed tight on his chest, clawed out along his arms. He almost blacked out again, and would have fallen forward if not for Carlos.
"Hold hold me up!" Tommie looked forward. The car's headlights were on. The road was steep and narrow, with scattered remnants of asphalt surfacing, the sort of thing you might see in the East County, or in short stretches along the coast, a disconnected remnant of lost roadway. They slowed, negotiating deeply shadowed gullies. Bushes swept close around them. And now ahead he saw someone standing in the middle of the road. The car slowed to a crawl just five yards short of it was a young woman.
"Make way, make way." Their car said over and over, trying to get by on one side and then the other.
The woman hopped from side to side, blocking them. She was shouting, and swinging a good-sized backpack at them.
Their car backed up a few feet, and Tommie heard the faint squeal of a capacitor preparing for something drastic. The wheels turned a few degrees and the woman jumped in front of them again. Her face was bright in the headlights. It was a pretty Asian face if you added thirty years to it, you got the face from some very distasteful turn-of-the-century papers in Secure Computing . She was the last person he'd ever expect to play "block the tanks at Tiananmen Square."
The headlights went out. The car jolted forward. Then the brakes engaged and they slid halfway into the ditch. There was a muffled explosion that might have been that capacitor slagging itself. The doors on both sides of the vehicle popped open and Tommie slid partway into the cool night air.
"You okay, Professor Parker?" That was Carlos's voice, coming from close behind his head.
"Not dead yet." He heard footsteps on the roadway. A light flared in a small hand, and the woman said loudly, "It's Winston Blount and Carlos Rivera " and then more conversationally, " and Thomas Parker. Y-You probably don't know me, Dr. Parker, but I have admired your work."
Tommie didn't know what to say to that.
"Let us pass," said Winston. "This is an emergency."
He was interrupted by the sound of wheels but not from another car. A voice spoke from the darkness: "Where's Miri? Where's Robert?"
Carlos said, "They're still inside. They're trying to stop the We're afraid that someone is taking over the labs."
Motors whined. It was a wheelchair, carrying someone all hunched over. But the voice was strong and irritated. "Damn it. Lab security would prevent that."
"Maybe not." Winnie sounded like he was chewing on broken glass. "We think that someone has subverted security. We called 911. That's what you're interfering with." He waved at their car. It was halfway into the ditch, unmoving.
Tommie looked at the darkened passenger car. "No," he said. "That's a fake. Please. You call 911."
The wheelchair rolled nearer. "I'm trying to! But we're in some kind of a deadzone. We should go down the hill, find something we can latch on to."
"Dull" said Carlos. He was staring all around, the way kids do when their contacts fail.
The redoubtable Dr. Xiang waved her little handlight, light and shade sweeping up around her. Strange. There was a kind of hesitancy about her. X. Xiang was one of the true Bad Guys of the present era, at least one of the people who had made the Bad Guy regimes possible. You could never tell it by looking at her. She doused the light, and stood silently for a moment. "I-I don't think we're in a local deadzone."
"Sure it is!" said Winnie. "I'm wearing, and I can't see a thing except the real view. We have to get to the freeway, or at least get a line of sight on it."
And now Tommie remembered what Gu's granddaughter had said. Maybe the local nodes were being spoofed. Xiang had another theory:
"I mean the deadzone is not just here. Listen."
"I don't hear a thing oh."
There were little sounds, insects maybe. There was faint shouting from over the hills. Okay, that must be the belief-circle diversion. What else? The freeway sounded strange, not the constant, throbbing surf of wheels on road. Now there was only the faintest sound, a dying sigh. Tommie had never heard such a thing, but he knew how stuff worked. "Failure shutdown," he said.
"Everything? Stopped ?" said Carlos, horror climbing up into his voice.
"Yup!" Tommie's chest pain beat toward a crescendo. But hey, let me live long enough to learn what's going on !
The voice from the wheelchair said, "Even if we can't get word out, someone will notice."
"Maybe not," Tommie gasped out. If the blackout was large and spotty, with the appearance of natural disaster why, it might cover something really big going on underground.
"And there's nothing we can do to help," said Winston.
"Maybe not." Xiang's words echoed Tommie's, but her voice was thoughtful, distant. She flicked her light at the backpack. "I've had a lot of fun in shop class. You can make so many interesting things now."
Tommie managed, "Yeah. And they all obey the law."
X. Xiang's laugh was soft. "That fact can be used against itself, especially if the parts don't know the big picture."
A lot of Tommie's old friends talked that way; it was mostly idle talk. But this was X. Xiang.
She pulled out a clunky-looking gadget. It looked like an old-time coffee can, open at one end. She held the coffee can where it could see her view-page. "Lots of gadgets are still working, they just can't find enough nodes to get a route out. But there's a big military base just north of here."
From the wheelchair: "Camp Pendleton is about thirty miles thataway." Maybe the speaker gestured, but Tommie couldn't see.
Xiang scanned her coffee can across the starless sky.
"This is crazy," said Winston. "How can you know there are nodes in your line of sight?"
"I don't. I'm going to shine signals off the sky haze. I'm calling in the marines." And then she was talking to her view-page.
Bob Gu and his marines logged more time in training systems than they ever did in combat or on watch. Training managers were legendary for creating impossible emergencies and then topping them with something even more unbelievable.
Tonight the real world was outdoing the craziest of the trainers.
Alice had been moved to Intensive Care. Bob would have gone with her except that whatever had taken her down was enemy action, and not the end of it.
The analyst display had sprouted new nodes and a dozen long-shot associations: Credit Suisse CA had just collapsed, a major disaster for Europe. The certificate revocations would have effects even in California. Bob took a closer look. The Credit Suisse collapse was so abrupt that it had to be a sophisticated attack. So what was a distraction from what ?
The DoD/DHS combined Earth Watch was involved now. Tonight's action could be something new, a Grand Terror that ran simultaneously through the U.S.A. and the Indo-European Alliance, profiting from the gaps created by national sovereignties. Looking at the analysis above him, Bob could see only the broadest outlines, but it was evident that the intelligence agencies of the U.S.A., the Alliance, and China were collaborating to hunt down the source of the threat.
In CONUS Southwest, his new top analyst was doing her best. His analyst pool was still crippled, but folks were talking productively. Their structures of conjecture and conclusion were growing. The new top analyst took voice: "Colonel, the revocation storm is very intense at UCSD."
The traffic display showed that the demonstration around the library had ground to a halt. The new failures were not due to backbone router saturation. Participants were being decertified by the thousands. Millions of support programs were balked. If nothing else, this showed that massive foreign involvement in tonight's festivities had not been some analyst pipe dream. Whatever had hit Europe was intimately involved here.