Child of Grass: Sea of Grass, Book Two Read online

  Smiller shook her head. Her face showed little emotion. “And the consensus of the pilots?”

  “If they don’t have to, they’d rather not. They don’t like the risks. Tech crew concurs. The crowd will most certainly panic—and when they panic, people will die. We just can’t predict how the Linneans will react. And once we move in, we know that the crossbow cowboys will start shooting. If one of them gets a hit, we risk losing a machine. If not over the city, then maybe over the prairie because it might not have the range to make it home. Either way, we don’t need that kind of disaster. And if we leave wreckage anywhere, then sooner or later somewhere a Linnean tinkerer will look at it and get the idea of a heavier-than-air machine. We definitely do not need that kind of trouble down the line.” He looked unhappy. “We’ve also considered spraying the town with tear gas or sleepy-time or sheer-happiness.”

  Smiller raised an eyebrow. “Tell me more.”

  “Well, again we have no way of knowing what effect we’ll have on the crowds. We have to assume the worst—” Alex shook his head. “We did a revised estimate of what it would take to sweep the whole town. We could do it. But dangers remain high. Tear gas creates confusion, panic, and a risk of fire. And sleepy-time or sheer-happiness really don’t reduce the risks any. If even one person knocks over a lantern, you still get a fire that wipes out the city—and you can count on a lot of people dying in a drug-induced narcolepsy. Hell to pay on both sides of the Gate. Gas only complicates the problem.”

  “All right, you’ve convinced me, Alex. We can’t pull them out of the town. The Hale-Stones win this round. So let’s talk about Plan B—?”

  “Break up the train.”

  Smiller raised an eyebrow. “Y’know, they’ve got an army ready to travel with those rail-wagons. . . .”

  “We’ve thought about that too,” said Alex. “We want to keep the wagons from getting to Mordren Enclave. So we find a way to stop them on the open prairie and work from there.”

  “You have a moving target and a very small window of opportunity.”

  “Yes, we thought about that. Suppose we take out the rail line.”

  “How?”

  “We go north of Callo into the sea of grass. We drop phosphorous sparklers and start a range fire—a big fire, a wall of fire. We have strong southerly winds and by tonight they could be hitting thirty or forty knots. And if the storms keep pushing in across the north, we could have gale-force winds across the northern plains by tomorrow. So we have the conditions for it; we could start a firestorm. We’ve run projections; we could burn out everything for days. Including Callo City. A fire like this—” Alex shrugged. “It would probably burn until first snowfall.”

  “Four months away. And in the meantime, a lot of innocent people and livestock would get hurt,” Smiller said.

  “It would also shut down our biggest trouble spot once and for all.”

  “We’ll just end up with a new trouble spot somewhere else.” Smiller shook her head.

  “Range fires serve the ecology,” Alex noted. “When the clouds of ash get carried out to sea, the iron in the soot particles feeds the phylo-plankton. That generates oxygen, it feeds the fish, and it all comes back—”

  Smiller raised her hand to cut him off. “But it doesn’t serve our purpose to burn down half the world. The fire won’t destroy the rails. The Linneans build them rugged enough to withstand a range fire. And a fire still doesn’t get our people out of the cages. It just does a lot of damage. And you have the unacceptable risk that our own people might get burned to death in the rail-wagons if the Linneans abandon them and run. No. I don’t like it. I don’t like the idea of that much destruction.”

  “Didn’t think you would,” said Alex, “but we had to give you the option. Maybe we want Mother Linnea to demonstrate her anger. . . ?”

  “No, I don’t think so. If Mom is going to demonstrate her anger, let her focus it a lot better than this. What else have you got?”

  Alex didn’t look disappointed. He said, “All right. What do you think of a boffili stampede?”

  Breakfast

  Smiller didn’t react immediately. She put her face in her hands, then after a moment, wiped her hair back off her forehead. Still thinking, she looked up at the ceiling. Abruptly, she looked back to Jake. “This smells like one of your ideas.”

  He grinned immodestly. “I made a suggestion.”

  “Have you got a boffili herd?” Smiller asked.

  “It just so happens, we do. The northern herd, the one we call The Great Herd—we’ve tracked them for a week. They cover three hundred square klicks, they move anywhere from five to thirty klicks a day, depending on the grass and the water. Their migration leads them directly north of Callo. If we strafe them with the choppers, we can probably steer a stampede in any direction we choose.”

  “Probably?” Smiller met his enthusiastic expression with a more jaundiced one of her own. “Have you tested this theory?”

  “Um,” Jake looked embarrassed. After a moment, he admitted. “Well, yes. Twice. Sort of. Once by accident. Once on purpose.” He took a sip of his coffee and then explained. “Last summer. Val flew too close to the western edge of the little big herd. She triggered a small stampede. You remember that. You gave us orders not to fly below five thousand anywhere near a herd. But three days ago, when we got this idea, we knew we’d have to test it. So Beau and I rigged some noisemakers on the transport and went for a ride. We headed south to where the satellites showed a herd too small to have a name. We strafed them from west to east and sent them charging off toward the horizon. They ran for an hour before the stampede finally petered out. We think a bigger herd might go a lot farther. The panic effect.”

  “And what damage did the herd itself suffer?”

  “According to our reconnaissance photos. . . .” Jake paused, then delivered the bad news. “Out of five thousand animals, nearly four hundred injured or killed.” Jake said it without emotion. “But they flattened everything in their path. You should have seen it, Smil—a swath of destruction from here to forever. If we could move the northern herd within thirty or forty klicks of the rail-line and then stampede them, they’d churn it up so bad, they’d have to rebuild the entire line before they could send another wagon to Mordren.”

  Smiller looked skeptical. “Only one question. How do you steer a boffili herd?”

  “We tested that too. After the stampede, we landed the transport smack in the path of the herd. About a kilometer ahead of them, just a little to the north; we played sounds of kacks howling, and boffili distress calls, and we released a cloud of carrion smells. It worked like a right turn only sign. The herd turned on a corner, they went south to avoid us. We could do that with The Great Herd. We could put three or four choppers orbiting ahead of them, all broadcasting—especially the low frequency distress calls, maybe drop some carrion smells—and we could steer the herd right to Callo. And we don’t need the choppers to start a stampede, so we don’t have to risk someone seeing us that close to the city. We can do it with small explosives dropped at the rear. . . ?”

  I could see that Smiller was considering the idea. But I hoped she wouldn’t. I didn’t want to see the great animals used this way. Especially not if it meant hurting them. I hoped she felt the same way.

  “Y’know,” Smiller mused, running her fingertips around the rim of her mug. “We don’t need a stampede, do we? The Great Herd takes a week to pass a single point. Callo sits on a hill, the boffili won’t climb it, and if they passed around it, they’d pretty well immobilize the town. And you know the city folk wouldn’t dare risk triggering their own stampede.”

  “But that still doesn’t get our people out,” said Jake.

  “No. But it would pretty well tear up the rail-line. Half a million boffili crossing those tracks, each one massing how much. . . ?”

  “The average animal weighs in at ten thousand kilos, Smil. Some of them come in at two or three times that.”

  “My point exa
ctly. They’d smash the rail lines.” She rubbed her chin thoughtfully, turning the idea over in her mind. Abruptly, she rejected the idea. “No, we don’t dare. What if one of those damn fools in the city decides he wants a boffili steak for dinner? If he triggers a stampede, he could take out the whole town. And our people with it. No, we can’t send the herd anywhere near the city. Innocent people would get hurt. Let’s try something else.”

  She toyed with her eggs, while she thought out loud. “I wonder . . . if we could put the herd right smack between Callo and Mordren, what do you think would happen. . . ? Do you think that would stop the rail-wagons from getting through? I do. The Linneans won’t dare risk getting surrounded by boffili, and the soldiers will retreat as the herd advances. . . . But if they have time, they’ll unhitch the horses from the front, move them around and hitch them to the back, and they’ll just take the wagons back to Callo. And that puts us back right back where we started. . . .

  “So how do we get them to leave the wagons behind. . . ? No. How do we get them to leave the prisoners behind? We need to look at that—this has possibilities.” She fell silent for a moment, while she continued to ponder. “The Magistrates will probably seal the wagons. . . . If they do, they won’t unseal them before they reach Mordren. They can’t. They might even send the keys on ahead with a different rider, to prevent anyone from opening the wagons at all. So we need to make them abandon the wagons.” Another long pause. “Of course . . . if they do, that still leaves them surrounded by the herd, and we inherit the problem.” She looked to Jake. “Can you drop a grapple from a thousand meters, snag a rail wagon and fly it off?”

  Jake shrugged. “No problem. We have the smart-grapples. If you can isolate the wagons, I can lift them out.” He added, “I like the idea of having a whole train of rail-wagons disappear mysteriously. They’ll never know and we get more artifacts to play with. Hell, I’ve got boys who’ll ride the grapples down themselves to secure them, if you need it.” He rubbed his chin. “But we still run the same risk the Linneans do—the boffili spook too easily. The noise, the lights, the team—we could stampede the meat. Just moving them into place we take that risk; but having choppers hovering overhead, lifting boffili-sized objects into the air . . .” He shrugged again. “The odds look real good for a disaster.”

  “Any way to shave those odds?”

  “Dunno. Maybe we could lay down some sleepy-time. Make the whole herd drowsy. . . ?”

  Smiller shook her head. “I don’t think we have enough to anesthetize that much meat. And besides, if we lay down a cloud of sleepy-time, we don’t need the herd. Let’s just anesthetize the train.”

  “Yeah, we could do that.” Jake looked at his watch. “We need to make a decision soon, Smil.”

  Smiller opened her mouth to reply, but she was interrupted by a noise from the door. A steward we hadn’t seen before pushed aside the chair in front of the swinging doors and came bustling over to the table with a coffee pot in each hand. He was alone—

  “Just leave them,” Jake said, indicating the coffee pots.

  “No, no. I insist,” he said, circling the table, busily refilling each person’s coffee cup. Very casually, I pulled my hood up over my head and hunched down over my mug. I didn’t think he’d seen me. I was mostly hidden from his view by da-Lorrin.

  Smiller and Jake exchanged a glance. And then, as if she were continuing a whole other discussion, Smiller turned directly to him and said briskly, “So, Jake, that leaves us only the nuclear option, doesn’t it?”

  It was as if we’d sat down in the middle of someone else’s movie. Jake said calmly, “We have both the warheads loaded, Smil. And we have the authorization. We can take out Callo whenever you say. The weather looks good for today, tonight, tomorrow. No fallout risk to us, but the Mother Land will get a heavy dose. After that, it looks to spread out over mostly uninhabited areas.”

  Byrne spoke up then. “The science team would prefer a daytime detonation, they’ll get better pictures. And of course, Propaganda Division says it works in our favor to have surviving witnesses able to describe a holy light brighter than day and a towering cloud of godly rage.”

  I was watching the steward. He was pretending not to hear, but it was pretty hard not to hear. He worked his way slowly around the table.

  “Any problems with EMP?” Smiller asked someone I didn’t know.

  “We’ll lose most of our local monitors out to a radius of a hundred klicks at least,” he said. “We never thought we’d need to EMP-harden them. We’ll send a shut-down signal fifteen minutes before detonation, but we can’t guarantee they’ll wake up afterward. Remember, part of the device has to stay awake for timekeeping and listening, and if the Electro-Magnetic Pulse from the blast takes that out, we lose the device. But we’ve got replacements ready to drop in the field as soon as the dust clears. We can start getting signals out of the affected areas within the hour.”

  The steward got to me then. “Coffee?” he whispered. I shoved my mug brusquely in his direction, without looking up. He filled it with hot coffee and never saw my face. But when he got to da’s mug, he accidentally slopped some coffee on the table and made a great show of wiping it up. I buried my chin in my hands and kept my face low, so he couldn’t see me. Meanwhile Smiller and Jake kept talking as if he weren’t there.

  “What about firestorm effects?” Smiller asked, glancing idly at the steward.

  “I’ll answer that one,” said Alex. “We’ve run some simulations and it doesn’t look good. The firestorm will burn itself out quickly because of lack of fuel, but we had a very wet winter and a very dry summer. We’re likely to have range fires spreading across the whole continent. Definitely as far east as Mordren. Certainly as far west as the Mother Land. And of course that’ll trigger stampedes in all directions. Either way, we’ll lose a lot of little towns and farms. As soon as you authorize the drop, we’ll start warning our families to get to high ground. We’ll have to extract some of them, but I’ve got the planes to do it. I’ll give you the list to review as soon as we finish here. Oh, and they’ll need cover stories for their survival, if we reinsert them, so we’ll allow for that too.”

  Smiller waited while the steward refilled her cup as if he weren’t there. As soon as he finished, she reached for the cream and poured a lot of it into her coffee. Then she took her time adding six or seven spoonfuls of sugar. “Well, that leaves only the question of our Scouts,” she said slowly, looking around the table. I noticed that nobody else was drinking their coffee either. “If we can’t get them out, we can’t. They’ve always known that we have to consider them expendable. And if we have to sacrifice four of them now to make a point to the Linneans, well—” She shrugged. “Sooner or later, we knew someone would have to pay full price for this ticket. Jaxin, Corda, Sykes, Val—they all knew the risks when they signed up. We have their signed authorizations on file.” She sighed loudly. “I’ll have to write letters to their families. But if we have no other way. . . . Does everybody agree?”

  Everybody made a great show of nodding.

  “You too, Dr. Keller?” Smiller was speaking to me.

  I nodded and grunted in a deeper voice than usual.

  “Tough decision,” Smiller agreed. “I hope your stomach feels better soon. The long trip always does that to me too. Ask Mike for something to settle it. He usually has some magic potion or other.” She went on blithely. “I’ve ordered your instruments installed on the God-chopper for the drop. I hope you don’t mind. I’d hate to have you miss it after coming all this way.”

  I managed a feeble wave and then I had to put my hand to my mouth to stop myself from giggling. I choked it into a cough, which became a very real choke. Da patted me on the back, very seriously.

  Smiller turned back to the rest. The steward was still wiping and pouring. “Oops, I’ve emptied this one. I’ll go get the other pot and hurry right back—”

  “No need,” said Smiller. “We’ve just finished.” She smiled around the
table. “I’ll need signatures from all of you. As agreed, we’ll share the responsibility for this decision—”

  She made a show of rising from her chair, as did everyone else. I pushed my chair slowly back, suddenly wondering if she’d been serious about the use of a nuclear device on Callo. I risked a glance up. The steward, looking a little pale, was just pushing his way out through the swinging door. The same pilot who had checked the doors before started to go after him.

  “No, let him go,” said Smiller. “Find out his name—and his buddy’s name. But don’t do anything else. Let’s see how fast the Hale-Stones leave Callo. Oh, and let’s have this coffee tested. Find out if he put anything in it. If he did, I’ll make him drink six pots of it himself.” She motioned everyone back to their seats then. She glanced around the table, grinning broadly for the first time today. “Good job, everybody. Nice catch, Kaer. You can play on my team any time.”

  Plan B

  After everybody had settled themselves at the table again, Smiller said, “I almost wish we did have a device. I’d use it on the Hale-Stones.”

  Jake said, “We can rig you an FAE device. It’ll work just as well. We have the parts. We can even use it to simulate the EMP effects of a nuke by shutting down all the radio traffic in the area. We can jam everything in the target zone.”

  Smiller glanced at him. “An FAE, hm? It surprises me only that you haven’t already assembled it.”

  “Um, well . . . we have.”

  “Thank you, Jake. Don’t ever play coy with me again.”

  “If I’d have asked you last week, you’d have said no. And I didn’t want to waste time waiting for you to get your head around the idea. Now you have it if you need it.”

  “Y’know, I really don’t like that kind of thinking, but—” She waved a hand quickly to dismiss the rest of the argument. “Never mind. Not a problem. At least we have the option. But I want to find a more elegant way out of this mess. Brute force has its uses, but I prefer cleverness. Remember, whatever mess we make, we’ll have to deal with the consequences for a long, long time to come.”