Bruce Sterling - Distraction

And yet they could do no such thing. They could only wait. The situation was out of their hands. They were no longer masters of their own destiny, they no longer held the initiative. The real struggle was taking place in Washington, in The Hague, in a flotilla of Navy ships somberly crossing the storm-tossed Atlantic, about as slowly as was physically possible. The nation was at War.

No sooner had they resigned themselves to their own irrelevance than the situation took a lethal head spin. The leader of the CDIA arrived in Buna. He was a Moderator from Colorado named Field Marshal Munchy Menlo. Munchy Menlo’s original name was Gutier-rez; in his distant youth, he had been involved in some nasty anti-insurgency shoot-’em-ups in Colombia and Peru. Munchy Menlo had become something of a lost soul in civilian life; he’d had drinking problems, he had failed at running a grocery. Eventually he’d drifted off the edge of the earth into Moderator life, where he had done very well for himself.

Field Marshal Menlo — he boldly insisted on retaining his “road name” — was a creature of a different military order than any Oscar had met before. He was plainspoken, bearded, and reticent, modest in his manner. He radiated a certain magnetism peculiar to men who had personally killed a lot of people.

With the outbreak of War, Oscar himself had had a promotion; he was now an actual, official member of the National Security Council. He had his own hologram ID card, and his own NSC letter-head proclaiming him to be a “Deputy Adviser, Sci-Tech Issues.” Oscar was naturally the local liaison for Field Marshal Menlo. When the man arrived from Washington — on a lone motorcycle, and with-out any escort — Oscar introduced him to the War Committee.

Menlo explained that he had come on a quiet, personal recon-naissance. The new CDIA was considering a military attack across the Louisiana border.

The Collaboratory’s War Committee met in full to hear Menlo out. Thre were fifteen people listening, including Greta, Oscar, Kevin, Albert Gazzaniga, all the Collaboratory’s various department heads, along with six Moderator sachems. The Moderators were de-lighted at this news. At last, and with federal government backing, they were going to give the Regulators the sound, bloody stomping they deserved! Everyone else, of course, was appalled.

Oscar spoke up. “Field Marshal while I can appreciate the mer-its of a raid on Louisiana — a lightning raid… a limited, surgical raid — I really can’t see that a military attack on our fellow Americans gains us anything. Huey still has a grip on the levers of power in his state, but he’s weakening. His credibility is in tatters. It’s just a matter of time before internal dissent drives him out.”

“Mmm-hmmm,” said the Field Marshal.

Gazzaniga winced. “I hate to think what the global media would make of American soldiers shedding American blood. That’s ghastly. Why, it’s civil war, basically.”

“It would make us look like barbarians,” Greta said. “Economic embargo. Moral pressure. Net subversion, informa-tion warfare. That’s how you handle a problem like this,” Gazzaniga said with finality.

“I see,” said the Field Marshal. “Well, let me bring up one small, additional matter. The President is very concerned about the missing armaments from that Air Force base.”

They nodded. “They’ve been missing quite a while,” Oscar said. “That scarcely seems like an urgent issue.”

“It’s not widely known — and of course, this news isn’t to leave this room — but there was a battery of specialized, short-range, sur-face-to-surface missiles in that Air Force base.”

“Missiles,” Greta repeated thoughtfully.

“Aerial reconnaissance indicates that the missile battery is hidden in the Sabine River valley. We have some very good human intelli-gence that suggests that those missiles have been loaded with aerosol warheads. ”

“Gas warheads?” Gazzaniga said.

“They were designed for deploying gas,” Menlo said. “Non-lethal, crowd-control aerosols. Luckily, their range is quite short. Only fifty miles.”

“I see,” said Oscar.

“Well,” said Gazzaniga, “they’re nonlethal missiles and they have a short range, right? So what’s the big deal?”

“You people here in Buna are the only federal facility within fifty miles of those missiles.”

No one said anything.

“Tell me how those missiles work,” Greta said at last.

“Well, it’s a nice design,” Menlo offered. “They’re stealth mis-siles, mostly plastic, and they vaporize in midair in a silent burst dis-persion. Their payload is a fog: gelatin-coated microspheres. The psychotropic agent is inside the spheres, and the spheres will only melt in the environment of human lungs. After a few hours in the open air, all the microdust cooks down, and the payload becomes inert. But any human being who’s been breathing in that area will absorb the payload.”

“So they’re like a short-term, airborne vaccination,” Oscar said.

“Yes. Pretty much. That’s well put. I think you’ve got the picture there. ”

“What kind of insane person builds things like that?” Greta said in annoyance.

“Well, U.S. military biowar engineers. Quite a few of them used to work at this facility, before we lost the economic war.” Field Mar-shal Menlo sighed. “As far as I know, that technology has never been used.”

“He’s going to bomb us with those things,” Oscar announced. “How do you know that?”

“Because he’s hired those biowar technicians. He must have picked ’em all up for a song, years ago. He’s stuffed ’em down a salt mine somewhere. Psychotropic gas — that’s just what he used against the Air Force base. And airborne vaccinations, he used that to kill mosquitoes. It all fits in. It’s his modus operandi.”

“We agree with that assessment,” Menlo said. “The President asked him to give those gas weapons back. No go. So, he must mean to use them.”

“What’s the nature of this substance in the micro spheres?” Greta said.

“Well, psycho tropics seem likeliest. If they hit a place the size of Buna, you could have the whole town basically insane for forty-eight hours. But those microbeads could hold a lot of different airborne agents. Pretty much anything, really.”

“And there’s a battery of these missiles pointed at us, right now?”

Menlo nodded. “Just one battery. Twenty warheads.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Gazzaniga announced, “if there was a lim-itd, surgical raid… not by U.S. troops officially, but let’s say, by some competent combat veterans disguised as irregular Modera-tors…”

“Completely different matter,” said a department head.

“Exactly.”

“Actually defuses the crisis. Increases the general security.”

“Just what I was thinking.”

“How long before you can attack, Marshal Menlo?”

“Seventy-two hours,” the Field Marshal said.

But Huey had bombed them within forty-eight.

The first missile overshot the Collaboratory dome and landed in the western edge of Buna. A section of the city the size of four football fields was soaked with caustic black goo. The arrival of the bio-missile and its explosion were completely silent. It took until three in the morning for a partying German film crew in a local bed-and-breakfast to notice that the town’s streets, roofs, and windows were covered with a finely powdered black tar.

The reaction was mass hysteria. The captive Haitians in Washing-ton, DC, had been getting a lot of press lately. The attack of gas psychosis in the Air Force base had not been forgotten, either. The news from the Collaboratory’s War Committee had, of course, imme-diately leaked to the public — not officially, but as rumor. Confronted with this black manifestation of their darkest fears, the people of Buna lost their minds. Fits of itching, burning, fainting, and convulsions were reported. Many of the afflicted claimed to have bicameral con-sciousness, or second sight, or even telepathy.