The Future War

'Officially I want to blow your head off on sight,' the man said. 'If you hadn't saved my life that time in Albania, I would want to blow your head off.' He shook his head. 'I never figured you'd end up on the other side.'

Dieter shrugged his massive shoulders. 'It's a different war now, Tom,' he said. 'Different sides. You don't even know what side you're on.'

'I never figured you for a Luddite, either.'

'I'm not. They're idiots,' Dieter said patiently. 'In fact, a lot of them are on the other side themselves.'

Tom ran a hand through his short brown hair. 'Wait a minute. What, precisely, are we talking about?'

'Skynet,' Dieter said.

Tom blinked at him. 'The computer the Pentagon's got the hots for?' he said. 'What's that got to do with the way you started blowing things up with those Connor maniacs?'

Dieter looked him in the eye, his expression earnest: it was a very effective way to lie. Particularly as the lie was merely technical—the other man wouldn't believe the truth, but he might believe a modified version that came to the same thing in practice.

'They're going to make Skynet a point failure source,' he said.

He raised a hand. 'Yes, yes, all sorts of firewalls and precautions.

But they're still putting the weapons under the control of a machine—the Connors think, and they've convinced me, that there are back doors into the system. Hell, man, if we could get into secret research facilities, couldn't someone else? And that someone would have their finger on the button.'

He wiped his mouth and threw down the napkin; he'd missed pastries, too. Backwoods Alaska wasn't the place to stroll down to a cafe.

'I don't expect you to agree with me,' he said. 'Just think about it. If I believe it, shouldn't you think about it? Especially if I believe it enough to piss off Section and risk my life.'

He nodded, rose, and walked out. Another trick of the trade was simply to keep moving, and avoid choke points like the airports whenever you could. He'd flown in; he'd drive out.

Despite the spread of surveillance cameras, they still couldn't keep track of every car.

* * *

'I'm not interested,' John said flatly.

Dieter controlled his temper, watching the young man as he stood against the railing of the cabin's veranda, staring northward at the line of the snow-clad mountains. Usually he stood with an easy, catlike readiness, a grace implicit even in his stillness. Now the flat line of his shoulders looked slightly hunched, stiff with tension.

'You should be,' the Austrian said mildly. He held a hand out to stop Sarah's interruption. 'As a backup, at least. Yah, maybe it's all unnecessary. Better to take unnecessary precautions than not to take precautions and then they turn out to be necessary, eh?'

John turned; the new scars stood out on the tan of the weathered outdoorsman's face. It was starting to lose some of its adolescent smoothness, too. Dieter realized suddenly that he was facing a man, and a dangerous one, not just a grieving boy.

'You don't think Wendy did it,' John said, unconsciously touching the marks the Terminator-controlled leopard seals had left on his face.

'No. I do think she did it,' Dieter said. The younger man looked blank for an instant, and the Austrian went on. 'I just think that it's not absolutely certain. And when the downside risk is this big, I don't take chances.'

For an instant Dieter thought he'd gotten through; then John turned away.

'I'll be out late,' he said. 'Don't wait up.'

* * *

John drove along not thinking and trying not to feel. Because if he allowed himself to feel for one minute, then the bitterness of betrayal might just keep him driving, never to return. Wendy had found a way to stop Skynet from becoming sentient while still allowing it to look as though the project had succeeded. He'd pressed the enter button himself while behind her… He tightened his lips and forced himself to stop thinking again.

Pool and beer, he told himself, just think about pool and beer.

And bad jokes with good company. He could almost smell the barroom. John took a deep breath and exhaled some of the tension out of his body.

They were right, he just didn't want to hear it. No, he thought. Think of the Klondike. The moose antlers over the coatrack, the dim mirror behind the long wooden bar, the beer signs and the smart-ass waitresses.

Think about how you're going to beat Dash Altmann out of another twenty bucks. Think about anything but the possibility that they'd failed.

* * *

Ninel Petrikoff shut off her computer and leaned back in her chair, hands clasped over her lean stomach. It was becoming an open secret in Luddite chat rooms that Ron Labane hadn't been murdered by a rabid fan at all. He'd been kidnapped by government agents and rescued by a Luddite commando cell.

She'd been astonished and thrilled that the man would personally answer her e-mail; suspicious, too, of course. In the long run, though, Ninel had decided that it didn't matter if it was Labane or one of his secretaries doing the writing. If she said anything worth his hearing, she was sure the word would be passed along.

But the tenor of these latest messages was getting ominous.

She wasn't sure if she was able to take it seriously. Labane had said that once this Skynet project was up and running, the Luddites would have no choice but to rise up and strike out at the military-industrial complex.

We've tried reason, we've tried legislation [he'd written].

We've tried every peaceful means imaginable, and all it's gotten us is shut out, shut down, and condescended to. But this thing is the last straw. It has no conscience, yet it will be put in charge of the most deadly weapons on the planet. It must be stopped by any means necessary.

How? We will have to eliminate every power source and reduce the enemy and their god machine to the level of ordinary human beings. Yes, initially it will cause suffering. But if we don't act in time they could blindly cause the end of the world.

In Alaska, we need to destroy the pipeline they've shafted through pristine wilderness. If you are willing to help, Ninel, I can put you in touch with a team. Don't answer now; think about it for the next forty-eight hours. I hope that we can count on you, my friend. Our cause is just and our actions necessary. If you can't bring yourself to actively aid us, then I hope we can count on you to at least not interfere.

My thoughts are with you,

Ron.

She brushed back her thick bangs and blew out a frustrated breath. She was a trapper, not an activist, and a loner, not a joiner. It had long ago occurred to her that this web site could be some sort of government antiterrorist ruse designed to suck in the rabid and the unwary.

Yeah, she hated the pipeline. But she liked having a snowmobile and the generator that let her have her contact with the Internet. Shut that down and she was shutting herself down, too.

Or not. She shook her head in frustration. Maybe she wasn't as much of a loner as she thought she was. Right now, for example, what she wanted was to head out to the Klondike for a beer, at the least a beer. Maybe some normal company would tell her which way to jump. Although 'normal' by Alaskan standards would probably be a stretch in the lower forty-eight.

* * *

The thickly wrapped figure by the side of the road stuck out a thumb without either stopping or looking back. John pulled up to offer a lift. A girl got in and pulled off her fur hat; she turned to look at him with ice-pale eyes.

'Thanks,' she said.

'No problem,' John said.

He'd seen her before at the Klondike, noticing her thick, white-blond hair and classic Eskimo features. She was a quiet type who preferred to play a game of chess to a game of pool or cards. He'd never seen her come or go