Ali Harahap nodded. “Indeed so,” he said in his singsong Sumatran accent, lighting a cigarette that smelled sharply of cloves. “But what is not said, cannot be betrayed.” There were more nods around the table.
“Good man.” Fred nodded, satisfied. “That was the right attitude. It isn’t anymore. Before I go on, I want to make clear that what I’m about to say is unauthorized. If this ever gets out, I could be shot.” A slight intake of breath among the others. “And all of you could be ruined, your careers ended. Does anyone want to leave?”
Colin McKenzie laughed shakily and wiped at the sweat on his high forehead; he was Quebec-Scots, a heavy-construction man. “Wouldn’t do any good, would it, unless we finked? And you’re the OSS rep here, Fred.”
The security chief waited. When a minute had gone by, he turned to de Ribeiro. “Fill them in, Professor.”
“We all know we have been building a starship,” he began stroking his goatee, “with surprising success—although the only way to test it is to undertake the voyage. Scarcely a low-risk method! Many of you have suspected that the reason for this is as a last-ditch guarantee against defeat, to preserve something if the Alliance falls.”
Patricia Hayato nodded. “We’ve all gotten used to secret projects,” she said. “Since the war, every five years another group of scientists drops out of sight. The Los Alamos Project pattern. Mistaken, in my opinion. It sacrifices long-term to short-term; more suitable for wartime than the Protracted Struggle.”
De Ribeiro inclined his head graciously. “What is the best disguise? A disguise that is no disguise at all. Here we hid the New America within a series of concentric shells of secret projects, each one genuine. Within the New America, the ultimate secret. A weapon.”
Hayato threw up her hands. “Oh, no, not some superbomb!” Everyone else winced slightly; the rain of fission weapons that had brought down the Japanese Empire toward the end of the Eurasian War was still a sensitive subject. “Just what we need, more firepower. What have you discovered, a way to make the sun go nova?”
Lefarge rapped sharply on the table. “Ladies, gentlemen, we’ve all been cooped up with each other so long our arguments have gotten repetitive. Let the professor speak, please.”
The Brazilian examined his fingertips. “We’ve developed a weapon that is no weapon—which should appeal to you, my dear colleague.” Hayato flushed, she took neo-Zen more seriously than the founders of that remarkably playful philosophy might have wished. “You were quite right; bigger and better means of destruction have reached a point of self-defeating futility. But consider what controls those weapons.”
“Data plague,” Henry Wasser said. He was head of the antimatter drive systems, and worked most closely with the Infosystems Division de Ribeiro directed. “I always did think you had too much facility for what we needed.”
De Ribeiro beamed; he had always had something of the teacher about him, and enjoyed a sharp student. “Exactly.” A sip of coffee. “To be more precise, contamination of the embedded compinstruction sets of mainbrain computers, the cores.” The white-haired Brazilian sighed. “Their complexity has reached a point barely comprehensible even to us, and the Domination’s people are somewhat behind.” He brooded for a moment. “The paranoia both sides labor under has been a terrible handicap. Both in designing our little infovirus, and in spreading it. The absolute barrier between data storage and compinstruction . . . ” Another silence. “Still, perhaps our errors in design have spared us certain temptations, certain risks. Often I feel that computers might have been as much a snare, a means of subverting our basic humanity, as the Draka biocontrol. As it is, we have reached a limit and will probably go no further—” Lefarge rapped on the table again, and he started.
“Sí. In any case, it was unleashed perhaps a year ago. It spreads slowly, from one manufacturing center to another, as improved instruction-sets are handed out. In the event of war”—he grinned—“the Draka will find their machines . . . rebellious.”
“And when enough are infected, the Alliance would move. That was the original plan.” Lefarge looked around the table. “We’re cut off here. Not from the latest fashions or slang; we get those coming in. But from the movement of thought, opinion, the climate of feeling. They’ve relaxed, down there, this past decade. They’ve started to think there might be some alternative to kill-or-be-killed. Fewer and fewer clashes, no big incidents. The Draka have been cutting back on their ground forces; these so-called ‘reforms’ . . . ”
His fist thumped the boards. “They know enough to see that tanks aren’t going to win them any more wars. And a better-treated slave is still a slave . . . Hell, I don’t have to tell you all this. The crux of it is, they’ve changed the plans, there in San Fran. They’re thinking in terms of an ultimatum; demonstrating our capacity, then demanding that the Draka back down, accept disarmament as a prelude to”—his mouth twisted—“gradual reform.”
Their eyes turned to Hayato. The lifesystems specialist fiddled with her cup. “No,” she said. “It wouldn’t work.” Meeting their regard: “Yes, I know I’ve made myself unpopular by saying Japan would have surrendered without cities being destroyed by nuclear weapons. I still think so. The Domination is a different case entirely. The old militarist caste in Japan, they could surrender, sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the nation. The Draka, the Citizens, their caste is their nation. If that’s destroyed, everything worthwhile in the universe is gone, and they’d bring the world down with them out of sheer spite.”
Lefarge turned his hands palm-up. “Anyone think different?”
McKenzie hesitated, then spoke. “Fred . . . look, I’m just a glorified high-iron man. What the hell do I know? That’s what we’ve got spooks like you for, and a government we elected, come to that. Policy’s their department.”
Lefarge opened his mouth to speak. Hayato cut in: “That’s bullshit, Colin, and you know it. We’ve got the power; that means we have the responsibility to make a decision, one way or another. And it is a decision, either way.”
He slumped. “I’ve got kin back on Earth,” he said.
“We all do,” Lefarge said. “Every indication of the way they’ve configured their off-Earth forces, every intuition I’ve built up about Draka behavior, tells me that the Snakes have some sort of ace in the hole comparable to us. It’s a race, and we know for a fact that they won’t hesitate a moment once they’re ready; they aren’t going to suffer from divided counsels. That’s why we’ve got to act. Right, let’s have a show of hands.”
One by one, they went up. McKenzie’s last of all, but definitely.
“I hope everybody realizes we’re committed? Good, here’s what we do. First, we make multiple insertions of the infovirus; we’re set up for it. Next—”
Cindy Lefarge held her husband’s hand. The grip was strong enough to be painful, but she squeezed back patiently, waiting in the silence of the emptied room.
“Am I doing the right thing?” he asked at last, in a haunted voice.
“It’s what Uncle Nate wanted, honey,” she whispered back.
“Yes, but . . . he was an old, old man by that time.”