Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

"We be goin' to Fedon's Camp," Sticky said loudly, liltingly. "You listenin', Atlanta? Julian Fedon, he was a

Free Coloured. His time was the French Revolution and he preach the Rights of Man. The French smuggle him guns, and he take over plantations, free the slaves, and arm them. He burned out the baccra slaveocrats with righteous fire. And he fight with a gun in his hand when the Redcoats invade... it took an army months to break his fort."

They had come into a broken bowl of hills-ragged, vol- canic wilderness. A tropical paradise, dotted with tall watch- towers. At first sight they looked blankly harmless, like water towers. But the rounded storage tanks were armored pillboxes, ridged with slotted gun slits. Their gleaming sides were pocked with searchlights and radar blisters, and their tops were flat- tened for helicopter pads. Thick elevator taproots plunged deep into the earth-no doors were visible anywhere.

They drove uphill on a tall stone roadway of hard, black blasted rock. Excavation rubble. There were mounds of it everywhere, leg-breaking dykes of sharp-edged boulders, half hidden under bird-twittery flowering vines and scrub... .

Fedon's Camp was a new kind of fortress. There were no sandbags, no barbed wire, no gates or guards. Just the ranked towers rising mutely from the quiet green earth like deadly mushrooms of ceramic and steel. Towers watching each other, watching the hills, watching the sky.

Tunnels, Laura thought. There must be underground tun- nels linking those death towers together-and storage rooms full of ammunition. Everything underground, the towers mush- rooming from under the surface in a geometry of strategic fire zones.

What would it be like to attack this place? Laura could imagine angry, hungry rioters with their pathetic torches and

Molotov cocktails-wandering under those towers like mice under furniture. Unable to find anything their own size- anything they could touch or hurt. Growing frightened as their yells were answered by silence-beginning to creep, in muttering groups, into the false protection of the rocks and trees. While every footstep sounded loud as drumbeats on buried microphones, while their bodies glowed like human candles on some gunner's infrared screens... .

The road simply ended, in a half-acre expanse of weedy tarmac. Sticky killed the engine and found his polarized glasses. He peered through the windshield. "Over there,

Laura. See?" He pointed into the sky. "By that gray cloud, shaped like a wolf s head... "

She couldn't see anything. Not even a speck. "A spy plane?"

"Yeah. From here, they can count your teeth on telephoto.

Just the right size, too.... Too small for a stupid missile to find, and the smart ones cost more than it does." A rhythmic thudding above them. Laura winced. A skeletal shadow crossed the tarmac. A cargo helicopter was hovering overhead.

Sticky left the jeep. She saw the shadow drop a line, heard it clunk as it hit the hard top of the jeep. Latches clacked shut and Sticky climbed back in. In a moment they were soaring upward. Jeep and all.

The ground fell dizzily. "Hold tight," Sticky said. He sounded bored. The chopper lowered them atop the nearest tower, into a broad yellow net. The net's arms creaked on heavy springs, the whole jeep listing drunkenly; then the arms lowered and they settled to the deck.

Laura climbed out, shaking. The air smelled like dawn in

Eden. All around them mountainsides too steep for farming: green-choked hills wreathed with ink-gray mist like a Chinese landscape. The other towers were like this one: their tops ringed by low ceramic parapets. On the nearest tower, fifty yards away, half-naked soldiers were playing volleyball.

The chopper landed, stuttering, on the black trefoil of its pad nearby. Rotor wind whipped Laura's hair. "What do you do during hurricanes?" she shouted.

Sticky took her elbow and led her toward a hatchway.

"There are ways in, besides choppers," he said. "But none you need to know about." He yanked the twin hatch covers open, revealing a short flight of stairs to an elevator.

["Hold it,"] came an unfamiliar voice in her ear. ["I can't handle both of you at once, and I'm not a military architect.

This seaside stuff is weird enough... . David, do you know of anyone in Rizome who can handle military? I didn't think so..Laura, could you kill about twenty minutes?")

Laura stopped short. Sticky looked impatient. "You won't be seeing much, if that's what's stopping you. We goin'

down fast."

"Another elevator," Laura told Atlanta. "I'll be going offline."

"It's wired," Sticky assured her. "They knew you were coming."

They dropped six stories, fast. They emerged into a striated stone tunnel the size of a two-lane highway. She saw military storage boxes stenciled in old Warsaw Pact Cyrillic. Sagging tarps over vast knobby heaps of God-knew-what. Sticky am- bled forward, his hands in his pockets. "You know the

Channel Tunnel? From Britain to France?"

It was cold. She hugged her arms through the chador's baggy sleeves. "Yeah?"

"They learned a lot about tunnel making. All on open databases, too. Handy." His words echoed eerily. Ceiling lights flickered on overhead as they walked and died as they moved on. They were walking the length of the tunnel in a moving pool of light. "You ever see the Maginot Line?"

"What's that?" Laura asked.

"Big line of forts the French dug ninety years ago. Against the Germans. I saw it once. Winston took me." He adjusted his beret. "Big old steel domes still rusting in the middle of pastures. There are railroad tunnels underneath. Sometimes tourists ride 'em." He shrugged. "That's all they're good for. This place, too, someday."

"What do you mean?"

"The tankers are better. They move."

Laura matched his stride. She felt spooked. "It reeks down here, Sticky. Like the tankers... "

"That's tangle-gun, plastic," Sticky told her. "From war- game drills. You get hit by a tangle-gun, there's a funny stink while the plastic sets. Then it's like you're wrapped in barbed wire... .

He was lying. There were labs down here somewhere.

Somewhere off in the fungal darkness. She could feel it. That faint acid reek .. .

"These are the killing grounds," he said. "Where the invaders will pay. Not that we can stop them, any more than

Fedon did. But they'll pay blood. These tunnels, they're full of things to jump you out of darkness...." He sniffed.

"Don't worry, not your Yankees. Yankees nah have much nerve these days. But whoever. Babylon."

" `The Man,' " Laura said.

Sticky grinned.

The Bank's Directors were waiting for her. They were simply there, in the tunnel, under a pool of light. They had a long, rectangular meeting table and some comfortable leather chairs. Coffee thermoses, ashtrays, some keypads and pen- cils. They were chatting with each other. Smiling. Little curls of cigarette smoke rising under the light.

They rose when they saw her. Five black men. Four in well-tailored suits; one was wearing a uniform with starred shoulder boards. Three sat on the table's left, two on the right.

The chair at the head of the table was empty. So was the chair at its right-hand side. Sticky escorted her to the seat at the table's foot.

The general spoke. "That will be all, Captain." Sticky saluted sharply and turned on his heel. She heard his boots ring as he-marched off into darkness.

"Welcome to Grenada, Mrs. Webster. Please be seated."

Everyone sat, with . squeaks of leather. They all had brass nameplates, thoughtfully turned her way. DR. CASTLEMAN. MR.RAINEY.

MR. GOULD. GEN. CREFT. MR. GELLI. Mr. Gelli was the youngest man, among them. He looked about forty; he was

Italian, and his skin was black. The empty seats had name- plates, too. MR. STUBBS. And P.M. ERIC LOUISON ...