GWOT VII - Anger

[drewkitty]

GWOT VII - Anger


I'll be honest. After a week of blowing up cities - and watching California get blown up in parallel - I was done.

Just done. Sure, the deaths were virtual, but soon enough, they'd be quite real. And I wasn't the bombardier or the pilot ... they could plead orders. Or any of the hundreds of specialists in between peaceful uranium ore lying in the dirt for many centuries, and sudden sunshine on a cloudy day. They also could plead that they were just doing their jobs.

I was going to be the one giving the orders. That's a different level entirely.

I hardly knew how to drink, and after the one effort to get me blasted, no one wanted to teach me more. Maybe afterwards, if there was an afterwards.

The range had lost its joy for me. During the desperate rush to get Site up and running, I had to bring my own pistol skills from average-mediocre to excellent in a tearing hurry. (The alternative was to get killed and let everyone else I was protecting get killed. I was ... motivated.)

Then after my vacation at Homeland Rest Spa, the range was part of rebuilding my identity. Adapting to my ruined left hand, recovering my center and balance. At Alviso, I discovered the joys of unlimited ammunition. (Not really: I had to be reasonable. But I could occasionally let rip with a full mag from California's now ubiquitious machine pistol, and no one would reproach me but me.)

It was on the Border that gunfire started to lose its attraction for me. Hearing loss. And the realization that many problems can't be solved by guns. Also, the increasing need for me to _direct_ others in using their crew-served weapons. A commander is just too busy to personally pull trigger.

Until Iowa.

There are certain things you do not ask your troops to do. Therefore, if they are truly necessary, you must do them yourself.

Interrogation by gunfire is perhaps the least unpleasant example. Every person I'd done that to was already condemned to death by our rules of engagement and the rudiments of international military law. The least they'd done was mass murder of noncombatants, and it went from there to nightmare fuel.

It was still a straight-up IHL - international humanitarian law - violation. I knew it. My troops knew it. The Governor knew it. And yet I was covered in medals. For shooting someone until they gave me an answer I could hang them for, and then saying to a crowd of people, "Next!"

The only time in California service I'd been reproached for it was during a five minute interview with the Captain of the Fleet in Monterey, shortly before going to the Border. He desperately needed naval officers; I had leadership skills, and the ruthlessness to for example not at random, drop torpedoes into water full of California sailors to kill the American sub that had put them in the water. And the sailors themselves.

He'd told me. "Killing is an addiction. If you have this addiction, overcome it at once. That is an order."

I'd tried. If there was an omniscient witness to our actions in this fallen world, that being would know I'd tried. And if I could figure out how, I'd kill them first. On a priority. I hated God with a passion that allowed me to understand the Christian fundamentalists who sought to make Iowa into a abattoir. And ultimately, frustrate them.

There was no joy in pixels. But having an imagination, I could see in my mind's eye what we were going to unleash on cities full of innocent people.

A brilliant flash, a thermal pulse that would set fires for miles all around, a killing wind. In the center, crater glass. On the inner edges, a rubble field with mostly dead and a few unlucky dying trapped within. In the 'suburbs,' if one had struck a city, only 'moderate' damage consisting of hundreds of fires, thousands of collapsed structures, tens of thousands of dead, and many more wounded all of whom needed immediate advanced medical care. And would not get it. We'd proven that to anyone's satisfaction in our desperate attempts to help the victims of the San Francisco attacks. In literal wartime ... nothing, but what you had in your hands.

We had distributed already hundreds of thousands of Thanatos kits. They would not save a single life. They would keep a injured person more functional, or ease the passing of a dying person. Injector meds for pain control, pills for final comfort. And our medics carried syringes of a unique design, rainbow colors and prominent death's heads, labeled "Blissful Death."

There was nothing attractive about death on the industrial scale.

Also, the world did not deserve it. We knew far too much about radioactive crops, radioactive forests, scorched biomes, the accumulation of radiation and toxic materials in food chains.

With enough detonations, we could throw off the albedo of the upper atmosphere. Nuclear winter. Not an antidote for global warming - the two effects do not counter each other, but heterodyne. Think of the weather as a very complicated truck. Now wrench the wheel hard to the left, then to the right. It does _not_ even out.

There was literally only one justification that could be applied to the enormity of what I was being trained to do.

We must prevent it. Before America does it.

There was no doubt that America would do it. She had already done it once.

There was some doubt as to whether we could kneecap her before she blew the world's brains out. But to fail to try was to assure failure. The stakes were for the world.

"We will not go gently into that good night," the Governor had decided. And quietly let me know, that she would ride out the war in Sacramento. The absolutely highest priority target for American retaliation.

I'd had a word with the lead of the Governor's bodyguard. Just a word. We'd agreed. There was one subject on which the Governor's orders would be disregarded.

I had not exactly been asked if I was willing.

I'd been told.

But my heart had leapt at the chance.

I still didn't understand why.

It wasn't about power. It wasn't about revenge for what had been done to me. It wasn't about building a brighter tomorrow I could not imagine myself being a part of.

So today, I had no long walk through secret corridors to very secret rooms.

I had a walk through the park. Still on base, and even there with a discreet tail following. And another discreet tail following them. How many layers deep, I had no idea.

I sat on a bench. Looked at the sky. I had no idea, perhaps an American deep recon satellite was looking back at me, recording my face, and some analyst was noting the datum that I was being trained in the California Naval Militia's most secret base.

Someone came up to me on a bicycle, handed me a note, and rode away.

It was an engraved card, inviting me to lunch with ... I suppose I should call him my supervisor. The man who had brought me here.

And handed me codes and keys and ordere me to train me in the mechanics of world death.

###

We didn't eat in his office. Lunch was served in a private dining room. We faced each other across a table, laden with about three times as much food as we could eat. The servants locked the doors from the outside.

He caught my glance at the food.

"The servants get the leftovers. Nothing goes to waste. This may be luxury, but 'California is poor.'"

Indeed we were. That was the mantra. We were poor because we chose to care about all our people, and that was expensive. We also had to match the American war machine with a tenth of the GNP and only double their percentage budget.

I nibbled. He started to draw me out, chatting of inconsequential things. The weather (I saw the blue Iowa sky), what I hoped to do after the war (sleep, but he didn't settle for that answer).

There weren't the cues in this room, that there were in his office. That he was a triple doctorate, not only a Collections Agent but one of the people who ran the Collections _programs_, that he had been in special warfare twenty years before I was born.

"How is the training going?"

"I'll be ready to kill us all, any time," I murmured as I took a bite.

He paused and looked ... thoughtful.

"That bad?"

"As you know, the philosophy behind decap is that the enemy never sees it coming. Never has a chance to up alert levels. Assassination."

He nodded.

"Yet the plan is that we are going to present an _ultimatum_ to the Americans. I've been told we have perfect knowledge of their programs. Not just a count of every item, but the exact locations. No surprises, air or space or naval or ground."

He nodded again.

"If we missed just one thing, we are dead."

"That worries you."

"I've thought of six things that the Americans could have, that we couldn't counter. Would you like the list?"

"Yes, please."

The fact that he did not take notes alerted me that we were under surveillance.

"First, the Australia and Israeli options. Second, secret polar bases - arctic, antarctic, places like Alaska and Thule. Third, Trident launchers in a non-trad hull, like what China pulled off in the Great Lakes. Fourth, a doomsday device - like the Russian Strangelove, but bigger because, well, Texas."

I paused.

"Pantax," and the word was a dissertation in itself. "As dual use," I added. And he flinched.

"Fifth, underwater bases. We don't know for sure what the Glomar Explorer was actually doing, fifty years ago. Last but not least. The whole enchilada of space based weapons systems. EMP. Kinetics. Fractional orbital bombardment."

He nodded.

"Let me take these in reverse order. America has and does nothing in space that we do not know about."

His lips moved briefly, and control.

My eyebrow went up a little before I dragged it back down.

"We own the subsurface. We know about the special design at Pantax and we have arranged with the Texas government to counter it."

That was interesting. Part of America allowing Texas to secede, instead of pattern-nuking it, was that America retained control of the Pantax complex. I wasn't aware that California and Texas had that level of alliance, either.

But there's a lot I don't know. By design.

"We know exactly where every single Trident missile rolled off the lines went. We have good mapping of the entire planet, there are no secret underground bases, only ones they think are secret. And both Australia and Israel are sick of America's thermonuclear shit."

Interesting mix of the threads on that. But it implied something amazing in California control, that I had never been briefed on. A mapping radar that could map thousands of feet deep over the entire planet? Possibly a way of detecting fissiles from great distances? Or that often-sought but never found cyberweapon that made an enemy's information infrastructure work better for you than it ever had for him?

"I'll add one more that we know about. The slingshot."

Huh.

"A rocket, based on that Atlas stage they publicly say they lost, with a fission-fusion-fission device and a cobalt lining intended to detonate in the upper atmosphere on re-entry. A doomsday device on a long elliptical orbit. Only America with the codes to disarm it, and doom arrives in two years unless America chooses to turn it off."

"It cannot launch. You don't need the details."

I nodded. What I don't know can't be tortured out of me.

"Those were all excuses, although I'm glad we discussed them. What's the real issue? That you believe we are doomed to fail no matter how hard we try?"

I remained mulish.

"You are not the only candidate in training. I can down-check you. I know you'll try your utmost, that's never been the question. What's distracting you?"

I tensed my bad hand. Started to ball it into a fist. Took the resulting club and knocked it into the table. Self inflicted pain to help control an emotional response.

He of course recognized this.

"If it's any comfort to you, we know that you are one of the angriest human beings in this state. Possibly the world."

There it was, in the open. Like a steaming plate of shit among the sushi and barbeque.

"You've had the basic psych. You know you were dealt a bad hand, you know you have a right to be angry. You are fair with your subordinates. You are even fair with the enemy. Your anger is not rooted in fear. If anything the opposite."

I spent what little bit of self control I had left on maintaining a poker face, which he read right through.

"Let me tell you something else. It's OK to long for it to be over."

"Not. If. I. Take twenty. Million. Californians. With me," I grated out.

"That's the risk. I know how little you like psychology. I'm going to tell you something in confidence, that is probably going to piss the Governor off. Every few days, the Governor and I have a video chat. Everyone in California has access to a Psych, by law. I'm the Governor's."

Now that was a truly huge piece of intel. Not to mention that the Americans probably knew about the link, if they weren't actually listening to it.

"The Governor and I have discussed this extensively. You accept that the Governor is the executive for the state, that the twenty million people we are sworn to protect are chips in the Governor's hands?"

I nodded.

"Iowa. Your orders."

"Succeed or die in the attempt."

Then I flinched. It was too horrific to contemplate.

He nodded.

"America cannot be allowed to destroy humanity, to destroy the world. It cannot happen. We must stop it. And the Governor has decided, with my concurrence and that of a majority of the select intelligence committees, that in the face of that fire, California herself is expendable. Her twenty million people. You, me. San Diego to Yreka.

"Worse yet. I won't survive it." He gestured to the base around us. If it wasn't the highest priority American target, it was definitely in the top five.

"You probably will survive it."

"Wish we could trade."

"Well, we can't. I am too well known, and frankly, I don't have the ability you do. The skill you learned for California in Iowa. The ability to feel nothing but recoil, when you murder."

He'd called it out. I wasn't angry when I killed. I was angry when I didn't get killed. So I was angry all the time, and was cursed to be angry until the day I died.

"I wish I could call you my friend. We'll probably never know each other well enough for that. So I'm going to pretend you are my friend, of life long standing, because you love what I love and you believe what I believe. I need you to make one final sacrifice for the Golden State."

I shrugged.

"My life, my fortune, my sacred honor. All on the pyre already."

"No. I need you to give up the thing you are most attached to. The thing that allowed you to stubbornly endure. Your atrocious childhood, your menial duties, the call to be a hero, to save lives by the scores and then by the thousands.

"I need you - California needs you - to resign your anger. To throw the rage itself on the pyre."

I couldn't help it.

"NO!" I roared. "NO! NO, I WON'T."

The door started to open a little, and he pressed a call button and spoke quietly.

"The next person to touch that door, except me, will be shot," he said.

The door closed.

"Anger is your power source. But you won't need power for this. You won't need more courage than you have. You will need to show the real you to the world. Not just me, not just the Embassy. The Chinese and the Americans.

"If they can't see the real you, because you wield the mace and spiked shield of anger, we are all truly lost."

I made the mental leap to try to imagine myself ... not angry.

And found a new fear.

That without my anger, I would be nothing.

I said as much.

"You are very, very far from nothing. Even bear foot, even naked ..."

"... you are deadly to California's foes," we said together. The scout-soldier's oath.

Did I have the courage to resign my anger? To face the world naked? Not in body, but in soul?

"I'm going to need some help," I said simply.

Although he covered it well, the slight relaxation in his manner told me all I needed to know.

That was the crisis moment and I had passed it.

Then I realized he had let me see that, and that I was in far deeper waters that I knew.

But before me was a man who could give swimming lessons. To sharks.

"Where do I begin?"