Drakon Read online

  He swallowed the sour throat-scraping taste of failure. Ebola, he thought. The Ebola virus had nearly gotten out of Africa twice; it was contagious as hell, and had a fatality rate of better than 90 percent. Someone with this group's skills could engineer something like that as they pleased. Give it a year-long incubation period with the victim contagious all the time. Ebola turned your connective tissue into mush . . . .

  He ejected the magazine of his Glock, snapped in a fresh one and bolstered it, all automatic reflex before he got a cupful of water and went over to kneel by George. The heavy-set man was holding a wad of tissues to his nose and dripping red down a sodden shirt.

  "Dink we'll be hearing de randsub deband zoon?"

  "Time will tell. At least we've got a clear make on one of them."

  And when the ransom demand came, they might have to pay up.

  ***

  "These are very fine diamonds, Mr. Smith," the dealer said, laying aside his loupe.

  Kenneth Lafarge sat back in the rickety office chair and nodded. The little room was cramped and musty, piled with papers and ledgers; the desk held what this world considered a very up-to-date computer system, and a square of heavy paper with a spill of jewels across it.

  "Gem quality, and not listed on the system as prohibited merchandise."

  The dealer had a thick accent and wore a skullcap. That seemed to be usual on 47th Street, in this weird analog of New York. The skin between his shoulder blades crawled slightly as he smiled. This wasn't the city that had died in thermonuclear fire in 1999, but his mind's eye still saw those images. Samothrace had passed them down from generation to generation after the Exodus, a heritage of loss and revenge.

  "Of course, you understand, without documentation, the price . . ." A delicate shrug from the diamond dealer.

  He nodded. Plenty more where those came from. In fact, as long as he had carbon for raw material, any number of them. The suitcase contained a very compact little molecular assembler, well up to such simple tasks.

  "Why don't you tell me what you think is reasonable, Mr. Feldman?" he said. It wouldn't do to arouse suspicion by not bargaining.

  ***

  Ken replaced the phone with a sigh. No luck with anyone at the investment bankers.

  Granted, he couldn't give them enough details to show that he was anything but a crank. Yet . . . these people didn't seem to have any healthy paranoia at all!

  Futile, he thought. Still, one had to make the effort. These businessmen didn't know what they were getting into.

  The sign outside the building read Smith Computer Services; the cover was convenient, and it was pathetically easy to fox the IRS machines. Most of the big rooms were full of improvised rigs, cobbled together from local components. The rear of the building held a single spartan bedroom, and a gallery big enough for him to exercise and practice in. The main problem was people trying to buy computer services from him.

  He sighed again and turned to a terminal. Progress? he asked.

  The voice—melded from his implant and the much more capable machine in the suitcase—replied:

  Very little, the enemy's transducer includes all standard domination counter-infiltration infosets and is being used to protect the local machinery, I will need a direct landlink to penetrate.

  Hmmm. The police?

  As directed, the FBI have received the communication routed from the Canadian authorities, the dispassionate voice in his brain continued. An agent in receipt of the information has travelled to New York. The other intelligence agencies will be denied access. Data relating to your encounter with the two agents will be protected.

  Ken ground his teeth at the memory of the fiasco in Washington. The local police and government were worse than useless. I have to assume the snake is watching. It wouldn't be any great problem to put flagging markers in the local infosystems; and there was no way he could keep the natives from using them if he revealed himself. If it found out he was here, things could get very bad.

  I could put together a laser-triggered fusion weapon, he thought.

  Contraindicated. Probability of earth/1 detection increases asymptotically in that scenario.

  Moodily, he took up a sheaf of printout. More research on the divergence point between this line and Earth/1. Even the primitive, rudimentary infoweb of this 1998 had substantial research potential. The AI logged on to the . . . net, they called it . . . and asked questions under a dozen different user IDs.

  Definitely the 1770s, he thought. There was a two-year difference in the date the Netherlands entered the War of the Revolution. Some more subtle changes as well; the British seemed to have done slightly better throughout the Revolution here than they had in the history he learned. Wait a minute. Ferguson.

  Major Patrick Ferguson, according to the printout, had been killed in the British defeat at the battle of King's Mountain in 1779. He called up memory: a Major—later General—Patrick Ferguson had won the battle of King's Mountain in 1779. He'd also invented the first workable breech-loading rifle; the Loyalist exiles who founded the Domination-to-Be in southern Africa had used it on the natives there, immortalized it as the Gun That Broke the Tribes. Here, breechloaders hadn't come into common use for seventy years after that.

  "Ahh," he said, leafing through the sheaves of printout again.

  Here on Earth/2, Ferguson had been badly wounded during the American retreat from Long Island, in 1776; the unit equipped with his new rifle had been broken up. In Earth/1's history, he'd been slightly wounded and his riflemen had continued to be a thorn in the American side. In Ken's history, France and the Dutch had entered the war against the British in 1779. Here, the Dutch had stayed neutral until 1781. In Earth/1's history, the British had seized the Cape Colony, and used it to resettle the Loyalists and Hessians after the surrender at Yorktown in 1781. Over a hundred thousand of them, joined a little later by the French refugees from the Negro uprising in Santo Domingo.

  That had been the seedbed of the Domination—a slave-based caste society of ferocious aggressiveness spreading out over southern Africa in the next generation.

  On Earth/2, the Cape remained Dutch for another two generations, and never received the mass migration that started it on the road to world power. Eventually the natives took it over again. The great gold and diamond mines stayed undiscovered for a full century, until the 1880s; in his world they'd been exploited from the 1790s, and financed the industrialization of Africa.

  Fascinating. The changes broadened out from there.

  It was a more innocent world than his; poorer, more troubled in some respects, backward technologically, but without the monstrous weight of victorious totalitarianism that had crushed his ancestors at the end of the twentieth century.

  "And it's up to me to preserve it," he said softly.

  The working desk held a printout—flat, in 2-D—of his family back on Samothrace, standing in front of the ranchhouse. Mother, Dad, his sisters, the low sprawling stabilized-adobe structure his ancestor had built when men first came to the Alpha Centauri system, bringing the inheritance of humanity and liberty. He would never see them again; that was something you had to get used to, in the interstellar service—it might change with the molehole technology, but he'd been raised to think in sublight terms. He'd left them to protect them, a parting as final as death.

  There was a world of people like them here, though.

  Direct attack on the drakensis in its nesting site, he asked.

  Probability of detection from earth/1 negligible, the machine said, probability of mission success imponderable due to random factors.

  He leaned back in the swivel chair. Yes, he decided. The snake would be getting stronger all the time. It was designed to dominate, to rule, to work through others. The longer he waited, the more layers of innocent—or at least unknowing—true-humans he'd have to wade through to get to it.

  It was probably monitoring air traffic. An ocean approach, though . . .

  And he'd keep trying th
e financial people. Maybe one of them would listen to him, in the end.

  Chapter Seven

  Florence was a shock, Gwen decided. Mainly because so much was the same. The Eurasian War of her 1940s had killed a tenth of humankind and left most of northern Europe beaten flat, to be rebuilt in the conqueror's fashion. Italy had been overrun swiftly and with minimal combat, though. Her grandparents had settled in the country near here in 1946; her human mother was bom there in 1954. Gwen had been cloned and implanted in a clinic in Florence, in the 1970s.

  "Not far from right . . . here," she mused, shouldering through the crowds.

  Still the same low sienna-colored skyline of tile roofs. The white-ribbed red dome of the Cathedral, with Giotto's bell tower; still a church, here. The Palazzo Vecchio, not a Security Directorate regional headquarters, here. The same narrow streets. And yet everything so different from the city of her youth. Hotter, crowded. Far too many of the absurd stinking ground vehicles; they were monstrosities even in the Americas, insane in this medieval street pattern. Noisy, gabbling, stinking feral humans everywhere, invading her sphere of social space, refusing to give way, some of them even daring to touch her. At first it was all she could to not to lash out, forcing her mind to clamp down on her glands. The air was better than New York's, but that was all you could say for it.

  "I don't like what they've done with my home," she whispered subvocally.

  That was illogical; the Domination's District of Tuscany had never existed here. The Ingolfsson plantation was a village called Radda, and had never known her family's footsteps. In fact, the Ingolfsson who'd founded the line had probably died in Iceland in 1784, rather than arriving in the proto-Domination as a refugee settler.

  This mockery of her birthplace still put a subliminal growl in her throat. It might have been better to meet the scientist in Berlin.

  No point in delaying. The Locanda Scoti was a moderately good pensioni not far from the Duomo, marked only by a plaque marked P. Scoti, right across from the Strozzi Palace. Inside was dark and quiet, the furnishings mostly eighteenth century. The staff looked at her with suspicion—she was in hiker's gear, and holding a knapsack—but she ignored them and took the stairs with a quick springy stride.

  "Herr Doktor Mueller?" she said, knocking at the door.

  There was a single human male inside: middle-aged and not too healthy, she could tell that from the scent and the sounds of breathing and heartbeat. Also the smell of alcohol, some potato distillate.

  "Frau Ingolfsson?"

  "Ja."

  She'd picked up modern German in preparation. It was easier than adjusting to this history's version of Italian, fewer childhood memories to overwrite.

  The door opened a crack She pushed it wider, gently but irresistibly, and walked in. The man closed it hastily; within was dark, far too dark to be comfortable for human-norm vision. Papers were scattered over a table, and the bottle of . . . schnapps, the label said. She picked it up and drank down six or seven solid swallows. Not bad, if you wanted colorless, tasteless alcohol distilled from root vegetables. Gwen twitched the curtains open. Friedrich Mueller threw a hand up. She waited until the human had stopped blinking and squinting, then squeezed her hand. The thick glass broke with a spatter of liquid and fragments. Then she held the hand before his face.

  The German watched silently, blinking, as the cuts closed and blood clotted with inhuman speed. Then she gripped his wrist, put her other hand on his shoulder and lifted, lifted until he was clear of the floor, waited for an instant and then set him down again. After a moment he slumped into a chair and stared at her, cleaning his glasses on his tie and staring at her. She could hear his heart leap, then steady a little erratically.

  "I hope you're satisfied," she said. "I could tie that poker in knots, if you wish."

  "No," he said slowly. His hand reached for the spot the bottle had occupied, then sank down. "I . . . I was fully convinced by the, the documents and so forth. Impossible to doubt such sums of money as well, and the papers were convincing . . . but this, this is a bit of a shock to me still, you will understand."

  Odd creatures, humans, she thought once again. To believe, and yet not believe.

  "I understand completely," she said soothingly, sitting down across the table from him.

  "Another world," he whispered, taking up some of the papers. Among them was X-ray film.

  Dr. Friedrich Mueller looked at the transparency. His hands shook and his face shone with lust; not for the woman across the table from him, but for what the film represented.

  "These bones . . . they look as if they have flanges on them," he said.

  "That's effectively what they are," Gwen said.

  "Muscle attachments, I suppose," Mueller mumbled to himself. "Very broad area of attachment . . . but wouldn't the leverage be too much structurally?"

  "The bone density is higher, as well as being stronger per unit of weight," Gwen said. "That's one reason I'm heavier. Also the muscle tissue itself is different, more fibers; the hemoglobin has a higher oxygen-transport capacity."

  "It would have to, even with the added capacity from the larger heart and lungs." tie nodded, and shuffled through the stack. "This organ, below the lungs, what is it?"

  "Auxiliary heart, on standby unless the main is damaged. It keeps the circulation going on a minimal level until the primary organ regenerates."

  "Full regeneration?" The German scientist's eyebrows rose. "Of an entire organ?"

  "Limbs, organs, nerve and bone," Gwen said cheerfully. "Let's get something better than that swill you were drinking."

  She picked up the phone. "A bottle of white and a selection of antipasti, please. That'll be cash." They fell silent until the maid had brought it.

  "Regenerate unless I'm killed instantly," Gwen went on. "Blowing off enough of my body-mass would do that, or destroying enough of the brain, or cutting my throat back to the neckbone, something of that order." He nodded again, reverently, and returned to his study of the transparencies. "Some of this hardly looks like biological systems at all," he said. "This webbing under the subcutaneous layer . . ."

  "That's armor," Gwen said. "It's grown there as single-molecule chains of organo-metallic compounds by a . . . call it a synthetic virus. Damned uncomfortable, while it's being done. There are a number of, hmmm, we call them biomods, done that way."

  The German looked up. "Logical," he said. "I should think a good deal of your technology works so, at a molecular-mechanical level."

  "Or atomic. Down there, there isn't all that much distinction between a machine and an organism," she said. "It's all chemistry if you get small enough. Or even physics."

  He laid his hands on the table and looked at them. "I have spent my entire life in futility, it would seem," he sighed.

  "Scarcely," Gwen said with a chuckle, picking an olive out of a bowl. She savored the rich salt-oil taste, crunching the pit for the extra trace of bitterness. Then she went on:

  "You could scarcely know someone with my database was going to show up. For that matter, your species is more scientifically creative than mine."

  Mueller looked up sharply. "How so?"

  "We modified ourselves neurologically before we fully understood the brain-mind interface," she said. "For that matter, we don't fully understand it yet. Drakensis seem to have less capacity for . . . intuitive leaps than you do, although we've got more g-factor intelligence. Perhaps we oversimplified while trying to eliminate some redundancies."

  Mueller frowned. "I am surprised. I would have expected the neural functions to be a thoroughly solved problem—have you not true artificial intelligences?"

  "Only by virtually copying brains; and then what you get is a brain in a box, and it's easier to breed them—we can use direct data-transfer with our own minds anyway if we need to link to machinery. In any case, it turns out to be impossible to be significantly more intelligent than the upper curve of the human range."

  Mueller rubbed his fingers together. "
You cannot increase the computational functions?"

  "Yes, but that's irrelevant. You people here are still thinking of brains as organic computers made of neurons, and that's far too coarse a level of metaphor. For one thing, neurons turn out to be only signalling devices. The real information processing in the brain takes place in smaller structures you're just beginning to discover, and at a quantum level. It's non-algorithmic as well. In your terms, the brain isn't a Turing machine."

  She extended a hand. "Do we have an agreement, then, Doctor Mueller?"

  He took it in his. He was an ugly specimen, flabby and pale and sour-smelling, but the look of worship on his face made it almost agreeable.

  "How could I not, and pass up a chance at such information?" he said. "The only thing which puzzles me is why you need the services of . . . of a witchdoctor like me."

  "What you know isn't wrong, just incomplete," Gwen explained. She crunched a few more olives. "And you will be invaluable integrating my knowledge inconspicuously with the current technostructure here."

  "For a while," the German said, his lips tightening.

  "The current order hasn't, ah, fully utilized your talents, I know," Gwen said.

  Red spots appeared on Mueller's cheeks. "I have been hounded—persecuted—myself and my family . . ." He controlled his breathing.

  He'd also been quite important in the scientific bureaucracy before the fall of the East German state. Afterward, trial and unemployment, and an abrupt drop in status and income.

  "You'll have nothing to complain of in my service," Gwen said.

  "Yes, I would not expect the vulgarity, the penny-pinching of capitalists from a world so advanced."

  "Well, we're certainly not capitalistic," Gwen said with a slight smile. "We're not exactly true communism either, you understand."

  Mueller shrugged and cleaned his glasses again. "That particular faith I have lost some years ago," he said. "A stable order that appreciates my capacities and rewards me fairly, that is all I ask."