Resistance

2028 March 4 17:03
Test Year 1, Day 280, 19:30 MST
Tau, White Towers

The choppers maintained radio silence, except for local communications with the White Towers and when they flew over campus to bring the program Marriner had decided to attempt to broadcast to the population. They had very little information on what was happening below and stayed at high altitude to avoid provocation and any surface-to-air weapons. A few other Techers had escaped and were found by the Revere Company before the Failures’ hunters, and there was a covert light message pulsed from a window towards a chopper as it flew overhead, but the only information that they had obtained from these was that Lesikk was dead. The prisoner had not been at all helpful: all he knew was that Maness ordered him to attack pika. Even the full extent of the assault had been hidden from him. Kathryn had long ago hidden a buried connection, low bandwidth, from campus to an outlying farm site, so that by a complex series of relays the White Towers were able to have limited access to Athena and the other computers on campus.

That did not help them at first. Chao’s code monkeys might not have found the access drop, but they were closely monitoring all activity on the computers. It was possible to disguise file scans as housekeeping tasks, but any attempts to change things or disrupt data transfer would be noticed and probably reacted to with a wipe of the system. And reading the information on Athena did not say much: the Failures kept their own separate network (an encrypted local mesh wireless) for critical data, like who was in the hospital and who was imprisoned, and who had been killed.

But amongst the refugees from Laura’s Screamer Lab were the Course 6ers who had helped her to rewire the phone system. One of them remembered a work-around she’d installed in one of the cell phone nodes to connect it to the voice-over Internet. The data packets were encrypted, but they could identify which phone was calling and which one was receiving, and the encryption was not too thick to be broken. Thirty-one days after the Failure strike, the White Towers began to listen to Chao’s phone and those of several of his lieutenants, finally confirming that Chao was indeed alive.

Chao’s supporters, the Failures, had increased only slightly in number, but considerably in fervor. Some parts of the eavesdropped conversations were disturbingly reminiscent of the Stanford Prison Experiment and other suddenly produced atrocities where the aggressors had not fully appreciated their new position. They had seized all weapons, down to kitchen knives, from their five thousand prisoners, and forced them to a rigid curfew and sequence of work shifts that always kept at least half of them in dormitories close to the bomb. The outlying frats had been raided and those of their population that had not escaped had been either killed or captured.

Work parties in the fields were guarded, and attempts at escape punished without mercy. Crop production was down to a point that would eventually reduce the population through starvation and all of the precious cows had been slaughtered so that favored Failures could eat steak after the battle. Maness had separated married couples from each other, the remaining infants from their parents, and was starting to gender segregate the population. Lessik and a few dozen others had been asked to work with the new regime, and had refused, despite some misuse of drugs. They had been publicly brutalized and killed. MIT was under the rule of the gun, by students who had created and caught up in their own strange ideology in which they could do no wrong as long as the Test was failed in accordance with the will of Andy Chao.

After more time spent listening to such news than any of them would have wanted, the forces of the White Towers learned why the Failures were doing this, rather than simply nuking themselves. They learned about Chao’s three other nukes, and his plans for Caltech. Now that he had all of campus at his mercy, if not entirely willingly, he had started a large construction project to the west. Long-range reconnaissance by ground patrols, dodging lookouts, confirmed the bugs. The Failures – no prisoner labor here – had dug three pits in the ground and were lining them with most of the supply of concrete. A laser sound sensor against the outside of Chao’s bunker, built around the hostage nuke on the top of the building, provided the details. The pits were to be missile silos. Chao was not content with holding MIT hostage. He wanted there to be no possibility of transmission.

There was no telling how long it would take them to build functioning liquid fuel motors or construct the missiles themselves, but a hundred kilotons of nuke was bound for Caltech, unless it could be stopped.

Will got this news at midnight. By the next morning, Mina was leading the first group of a hundred to build a shelter in Iron Hills and Will had promised help to the White Towers by every means possible.

More information came in. Chao was layering more methods of destruction over campus: the two bombs he intended for the missiles were stored, under guard, inside large dormitories. If they detonated, they wouldn’t take out all of campus, but the people in the dorms would die, the buildings would be ruined, and the fallout would poison the entire area. They would not be moved until the missiles were ready. The fourth bomb was shielded and inside the hospital and interrogation center, underneath the sidewalk in the courtyard. It would not be easy to get to, and wasn’t going to be moved. Cyanide was being stockpiled and placed in canisters in the New Charles reservoir, to poison the water supply. The chemical engineers who followed the Failures had started manufacturing nerve agents, but sarin and novichok were more difficult to synthesize than they had initially thought. They might have about ten grams worth in several months, enough to gas a few buildings.

With all this information coming in, Delbert and Kathryn both had not slept much in the past week. Now they sat facing each other over laptop screens and two piles of scratch paper, at the rough table that had been cut out of the debris that had been cleared to make this room. They had been running tactical simulations. They had constructed a best fit to their knowledge of Chao’s behavior patterns and those of his allies, adding in the probability of a revolt, the nukes and the other relevant weapons, the possibility of changes that might happen, and the best current maps of campus. Kathryn would simulate an attack, Delbert would run defense. Then they’d swap. But all their work had told them only what they had known from the beginning:

“We can disable the gas canisters with sodium hydroxide mixed with quick-set foam – if some of us can get close enough without triggering a release.”

“That’s not enough. We’ve got to take out the hostage bomb, and the backup. If we don’t, we might be able to take out the missiles by a coordinated strike, but the fallout … and then campus goes … and if we miss one missile …” Delbert slouched back against the rough wood of the wall, wearing what had been his training fatigues and had become his field uniform.

“There’s a way to take out the missiles without giving notice.” Gera and Zijun came into the room. The former mafioso tossed a sketch onto the table. It was hand-drawn, but the angles were perfect and the lines straight. “What do you think of this? I think we can make them with three months of work.”

The design was a distant relative of the nuclear pulse units that had once been proposed for the Orion Project. Take two pieces of uranium, smash them together inside a mass of absorbent plastic in a case layered with many layers of different types of metal. The layers transferred the energy back, and the plastic took out the particle radiation. The end result was a one-direction beam of gamma radiation that would fry any electric circuit. They only had enough uranium for four large pulsers. But Gera and Zijun’s aim was good enough that they would not miss.

“These pulses will really fry the missiles from ten klicks away?”

“That’s right, unless he loads them with so much shielding that they will never make California.”

“And I think we can seed the reservoir with one of the cyanide-metabolizing algae from the swamp. It isn’t responsive to most pesticides, and won’t be too noticeable anyway.” Xin had been thorough in his survey of the local biology. “They’ll eat up any leak. If the canisters aren’t perfectly tight, they may even start growing inside.”

“But that still leaves the nukes.” Kathryn suddenly pointed back to the design of the pulser. “Can you make a small one as well?”

“What for? You’re not going to get close to one of the bombs … Oh.”

“Yes.”