Barnes, John - Mother of Storms

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MOTH ER 0 IF
STORMS
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Other Tor books by John Barnes
Orbital Resonance
A Million Open Doors
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MOTH E R 0 IF
STORMS
JOHN BARNES
A TORN DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this
book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely
coincidental.
MOTHER OF STORMS
Copyright © I994 by John Barnes
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions
thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
A Tot Book
Published by Torn Doherty Associates, Inc.
I75 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. I0010
Tot®is a registered trademark of Torn Doherty Associates, Inc.
Design by Lynn Newmark
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnes, John.
Mother of storms / John Barnes.
p. cm.
"A Torn Doherty Associates book."
ISBN 0312855605
I. Hurricanes--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.A677M67 1994
813.54--dc20
94-607
CIP
First Edition: July 1994
Printed in the United States of America
0987654321
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For Kara Dalkey
--who else7
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Every book accumulates some debts, but this one accumulated some special
and important ones:
Dr. Stephen Gillett, who taught me what a clathrate was and kept me
poking at the science until he said, "Good enough to fool me, anyway."
Daniel D. Worley and David Pan, for information about the Pacific and
a window into an all-but-forgotten corner of the world.
Ashley Grayson, my agent, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, my editor, for
frequently telling me I really was going to finish. And then for making me
go through it all one more time so that I was really finished.
Melissa Gibson, who not only typed, but read, and not only read, but
occasionally pointed out places where it was turning into nonsense.
And, during the very last week of getting the book done, two people
who restored my ability to concentrate. I expect to see them at the top of
the do-it-yourself field someday soon--Anna Rosenstein, author of How to
Bob for Cats Through Your Kitchen Floor, and David Wintersteen, author of Special Weapons and
Tactics in Covert Home Repair.
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ONE
ATTRACTOR
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MARCH--JUNE
T
HIS IS THE good part. Hassan Sulari loves this one. When the magnetic
catapult on the mothership throws his little spaceplane forward and he
kicks in his scramjets, somewhere over Afghanistan, he'll sail up and away
into a high suborbital trajectory over the pole. Hassan has never gotten
authorized for orbit, but this is pretty close.
It's his first real mission. He's carrying four cram bombs--"Compressing
Radiation Antimatter" is what it stands for, and when they talk to the media
they are supposed to stress that they are "mass-to-energy, not really nuclear''
weapons, because for all practical purposes they are baby nukes and
that's bad PR.
The catch is that damned jack in the back of his head. He accepted a lot
of extra money from Passionet to have it installed and to fly with it, it's
going to make him rich--and in UNSOO that's not common--but there is
still the nagging feeling of showing off. After all, he's a pilot, not an actor.
"We're getting ready to go plugged with you," the voice from Passionet
says. "If you've got any embarrassing thoughts to get out of the way, think
them now."
"None I know of. I'm at orbital injection minus four minutes." Hassan
does his best to sound bored.
"We know--timing's perfect. Give our folks a ride."
Just as they click off and it goes live, he does have the strange thought
that there really don't have to be human crews for UN Space Ops like
this--a machine could do a prohibited-weapons interdict just as well. He
finds himself wondering why he does this--no, to his shame, why he is
fearing doing it.
That makes his stomach knot hard during the last instants of countdown.
Then he hears the word "inject" and the mothership catapult flings him
forward over the nose of the big airplane; watching his stability gauge, he
sees it's all go, waits a few more seconds till the navigation computer has
a fix, and then flips the scramjet lever.
He is slammed into his seat again, and the brown-and-white mountains
of early spring morning fall away below him. The vibration is heavy, and
the pressure is intense; he sees the West Siberian plain open out beneath
him, wrapped in its canopy of blue air. He is as high up as weather satellites
go. His heart is pounding and despite the military reason for the mission he
is mentally lost in the scenery.
By the time the scramjets cut out, there is polar ice on the horizon, and
his hands automatically begin their ritual of arming and readying the shots.
He arcs higher still, coasting upward on inertia, and now the Earth
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12 JOHN BARNES
begins to return toward him. He is weightless--not because there is no
gravity but because he is moving with it--and he has an intense recollection
of his childhood fantasies about space travel. He hopes they won't mind
having that in the wedge they are recording--
Over the pole now, falling nose-down across the ice cap ninety miles
below, and the countdown begins; his weapons lock on target and he need
only pull the trigger on cue to turn over control to the missiles themselves.
He receives the go-ahead and initiates.
There are four hard shoves on the little spaceplane, and he sees his
missiles falling away like sparklers thrown down a dark canyon. He will miss
their impact off the North Slope, but the pleasure of launching them was
exquisite.
And from the jack in his head, he is informed that 750 million people
shared the experience.
There's a cherry-red glow around the bottom of the spaceplane, and
weight begins to return as the plane once again resists gravity rather than
fides with it. It was more like a training flight than he expected. He's never
seen Pacificanada, but he's told the new, struggling nation loves UN Peacekeeping
Forces credits, and he will have plenty.
As he falls back toward home, life seems pretty sweet when it can
include things like this.
Randy Householder is cruising 1-80 out of Sacramento in a car so old it had
to be retrofitted to drive itself. It runs and it's what he can afford, and he
doesn't worry about it.
But he's trying to get onto the net, and that is unbelievably slow and
frustrating tonight. After fourteen years he's learned that this always means
the same thing--some damn crisis tying things up. Back in '16 when the
Flash happened, it was six days before he could get on and get his messages.
At least this time he can get them, but they're slow.
It's been a long time since he's been impressed by getting a hundred
messages. That's normal traffic. About half of it will be some small-town
police chiefs, sheriffs, magistrates, proconsuls, ombudsmen, whatever they
cai1 them around the world, mostly letting him know they're still looking
for evidence and that nothing has come in. A few will be new ones taking
over, some will be old ones leaving and letting him know their successors
may not be helpful.
The other half will be people like Randy, mostly just passing along
support notes. There are seven others Randy hears from most nights--all
the ones who had children killed in a way similar to what happened to
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MOTHER OF STORMS 1,3
Kimble Dee. They're always there. Sometimes he talks with them live;
they've traded pictures and such over the years.
There will almost always be at least one reporter. Randy does not talk
to reporters anymore. The damn media take up too much of the bandwidth
on the net--like they're doing tonight. And they're no help.
Last time he talked to one, she kept wanting to know about how he lives
his life. Shit, Randy told her, he didn't have a life. He stopped having a life
fourteen years ago when the cops came to the door of his mobile home, and
made him and his then-wife Terry sit down, and told them that Kimble Dee
had been murdered, and it looked like a sex murder. Life stopped when they
told him they had the man who did it and no clues about motive, but they
knew damned well from the iack driven into her skull why she'd been
murdered and raped--Christ, Christ, the coroner had said she'd been
jammed with a mop handle hard enough to rupture her intestines, and then
raped while she hemorrhaged, but she'd still been conscious when the man
hanged her.
Randy's clutching at his keyboard with his fists and that does no good.
Say relaxed, stay calm, keep hunting. IFs going to be a long one, you've always
known that. '
Kimble Dee was killed to make an XV wedge. There's a big underground
market in those things. Once or twice a year, someone is arrested for selling
the one that features her death. Sometimes they arrest the guy he bought
it from; sometimes Randy is able to hack the files about one of the suspects,
and find more people who might be involved. Now and then--the last time
was three years ago--something cross-correlates, and Randy's datarodents
bring him back one more piece of information, move him another step up
one of the distribution chains.
When that happens, there's an arrest. Randy gets reward money. Like
he cares crap about that. But Randy and the world's cops get one step closer
to the guy who paid for it; somewhere out there, some big shot, someone
with more income to spend on his "fun" than Randy ever made in any year
of his life, is still at large and unsuspected. He's the man who handed all that
money to a man and said, "Here's what I want you to do to a pert little
blonde girl."
The man who killed and raped Kimble Dee Householder has been in his
grave for eleven years. Randy was there to see him strapped into the chair.
The man who hired it done is still out there.
Randy's going to see him dead, too.
Just as soon as all this damned noise gets off the net. He checks the text
news channels and finds it's some stupid thing about Alaska, Siberia, the UN,
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