Chapter 7: Wrapping Up the Loose End

The injured children were quickly restored to perfect physical health. Their mental health was another thing entirely. Most had been too close to nuclear explosions. For an instant I wondered if Confederacy medicine would be adequate. Thermal injuries. Impact injuries. Foreign object penetrations. Radiation poisoning. Chemical poisoning. The physical would have been terminal—but medtubes rebuilt them.

Worse was the devastation of losing their entire world. No family—except for me. Their homes were now smoking ruins. Here with me they were going to have a different life.

"What is that?" the girl had a face again—a cute face. She pointed with fingers that had been burned off by nuclear fire. She was pointing at a baboon named Fannie Mae.

"She's a medical assistant," I explained. "She is a baboon. Fannie Mae likes to help."

"Mother is dead, isn't she?" the girl asked.

"Yes," I said. "My parents are dead, too."

"That's bad," the girl sighed. "My name is Halima. May I call you Father?"

"Yes," We were conversing in Arabic—I think. The dialect wasn't from Cairo, like my professor's. "How do you feel?"

"I haven't decided." Halima described the typical near death experience. Detachment. Moving through a tunnel towards a light. Serenity. The presence of loved ones. "Mother said that I was going to live with you now. She said everything was all right."

Fannie Mae hugged Halima and dragged the cart with a light lunch. Green gelatin. What's it with hospitals and odd-colored gelatin, anyway? What have hospitals got against real food?

A week had passed since General Mubarak had presented 80 dying orphans to me as a parting gift. As stated, they were all physically healthy—now it was time to heal their psyches. Fortunately I had help—a menagerie. Big Mama was a motherly grizzly bear. There were cheetahs, a lion, a tiger, a jaguar—but except for the cheetahs, big cats were not really people-friendly. Dogs—Arabs regard dogs as unclean creatures. It was something to overcome. Horses—the new orphans LOVED the herd. And there were smaller animals, too. Though prickly, the hedgehogs were cute and friendly.

Most of all, there were hundreds of other orphans. We humans are social animals and we seek to dominate other humans. Fortunately this competitiveness was channeled into less destructive activities. The new children were hit with several handicaps including language: English was common language spoken. The 80 new orphans had been given English language instruction in their medtubes and later in their sleep learners. Some of the old orphans did speak Arabic—and the other languages—and some were given language training so that they could play with the new orphans.

After Halima ate, I picked her up and carried her to the stables.

"This is Blitzkrieg," I introduced Halima to the big gray war horse. "He's my friend."

"He is big!" Halima exclaimed.

"Blitzkrieg, will you allow Halima to sit on your back?" I asked the horse.

"You talk to the horse?" the girl asked.

"Yes," I said. "Horses talk, too—but they do horse talk. Blitzkrieg has been very patient with me. He says it's okay if you sit on his back for a while. I'll be right here."

Halima perched on the big horse's back and I pulled a taffy apple from a stasis box. Blitzkrieg didn't need to beg. I don't like teasing animals. He munched the treat contentedly and Halima asked questions.

"Lieutenant Lawrence," Georgia's voice came over the public address system, "report to Briefing Room Four."

"Duty calls," I reached for Halima. "I'll take you down."

A few minutes later I entered Briefing Room Four. Colonel Dorman was there with Georgia and Mary Popov.

"Somebody stamped my meal card 'no coffee' and I don't like it," Dorman huffed. "I can't get a cup of coffee out of the replicators. Any replicators! I know you had something to do with it."

"How about I get you a cup of coffee, sir?" I offered. "What do you like?"

Black. No sugar. Dark roast. Strong. Colonel Dorman trembled as I handed the steaming 24 ounce paper cup to him and he swallowed nearly half in one long gulp. I felt guilty even though I had only THOUGHT about restricting Colonel Dorman's access to coffee.

"Ricardo is your personal AI now," Georgia said. "Arab Dagger is over except for one additional mission. You are going to plan the operation to arrest the persons behind that nuclear attack on Islam's most holy sites. You will train the team performing the capture. You are granted full access to any information you require."

"One thing, Lawrence," Dorman growled, "you are to remain restricted to this station for the entire operation. You will not lead the raid yourself. You won't even be on the assault shuttles. You may run the operation from your CIC but you are to keep your hairy butt here!"

For the record I have no body hair. Lilith doesn't like body hair.

Ricardo took over the briefing. Conversing with AI is much easier for me than talking to my fellow humans—for one thing, I can do data dumps and downloads. I really didn't need to be in my personal Combat Information Center to plan and prepare the operation, but I'd be left alone there—except for people who were committed to helping me. "People" included four-footed critters such as Nana, a German Shepard dog. I admit it—being confronted with badly-injured orphans was disturbing. War is Hell—don't make any mistake about it. And I was going to have to wage war on persons unknown. I had a start—Baruna Maru, Golden Olympia Maritime Research. Corporation games include obscuring ownership—obviously a successful ruse that prevents criminal charges against "real" people and dodges taxation. There are reasons successful corporations play those games—if they don't the corporations get eaten up by governments and by other corporations.

The Confederacy AI network tracked the Baruna Maru to Calcutta and to a closed dock from which the submarine sailed. It had been part of the Soviet Navy, then given to the Chinese. Sold to India for scrap, the Baruna Maru officially wasn't transferred with its compliment of R-13 missiles.

At the other end of the journey the Baruna Maru was scuttled. Its missiles were launched to home in on beacons planted where the conspirators wanted the detonations to occur—and the detonation height was 1000 meters above the target so that the fireball would touch the Earth and vaporize the targets—Islam's holy sites. The blasts were nominally 1.2 megatons. Imagery prior to the detonations showed at least two of the sites had someone holding a cell phone or beacon that the missile may have been homing in on. Back at the launch site, a Confederacy drone confirmed that the skeleton crew of 30 were still there. The Golf-class submarine had a full-up crew of 98 men, but could be run with far less—especially when modern automation was installed. Anybody who has toured a submarine will realize that the crew had to share everything—even take turns breathing.

I took some time figuring out what happened to the anti-ballistic missile defenses. For one thing, there may have been GPS jammers, a device that prevented GPS-guided missiles from hitting their intended target. The possible hand-held homing devices would have fixed that—or perhaps someone was simply taking photos with cell phones in a "no photography" area. No cell phones either—Islam protected the sanctity of their holy sites. Investigating what happened to the anti-missile missiles would lead me to who paid for the sabotage.

The spiderweb of fingerprints led me to a company in Indonesia that specialized in internet security. Somehow this company managed to hack into the command and control database and cause the air defense networks involved to ignore the R-13 missiles entirely. That's it—the air defense network didn't "see" the missiles. I made a note to get a patch on the intended anti-Sa'arm air defense network so that wouldn't happen. There were some people on Planet Earth who welcomed human extinction.

Hold that thought: human extinction. I had read a book by Saul Golden on the desirability of eradicating the human race. A quick check told me that the book was published by the Golden Olympia company—and sold a little less than 250,000 copies. The company was based in Washington state. It couldn't be that simple!

I was conducting a criminal investigation and I wanted to prove my case to a panel of Confederacy AI. If I didn't meet their rigorous standard of proof, I didn't have the right suspects. It was a criminal investigation, but unlike a cop or prosecutor in the USA I wasn't restricted to what I could find through search warrants. I could even force suspects to tell me their truths—what they believed and perceived. It wasn't torture—it was immersion in a sleep learner and lowering inhibitions. Care had to be taken because sleep learners could be misused—the sleep learning process can make a person remember things that never happened. It never occurred to the AI to do such a thing—but we humans are nastier than baboons.