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CHAPTER TEN

NORTH CAROLINA STATE TROOPERS had set up a checkpoint on the road out of Greenville, a mile before the junction where Kestrel and Len in the battered farm pickup, and Olsen driving the truck laden with fifty-gallon drums of timber preservative, would go separate ways. Kestrel and Len would trace a route through the minor roads crossing the Great Smoky range; Olsen would keep to the interstates, following I-85 south to skirt Atlanta, then taking I-75 to meet up with them again in Chattanooga that night.

The Scorpion cell in Charlotte had been disbanded suddenly on terse instructions from above. Other members were dispersing to destinations known only to themselves and whoever gave the orders; the names Kestrel had known them by had been retired. On joining the Chattanooga cell, she would no doubt cease being "Kestrel" anymore, too. At first, CounterAction had given her the pseudonym Kay, but she rejected it. Care was needed in making sure that code words bore no accidental similarities or connections to the things they were supposed to disguise. Lives had been lost through such coincidences. "Kay" would have been too suggestive of her real name: Cade. Marie Cade.

A couple of jeeps manned by armed National Guard and mounting machine guns were positioned at the sides of the roadblock, ready to go. A sergeant came up to the driver's window, while two troopers went back to probe among the bales of roofing shingles that the pickup was carrying. Len presented a wallet containing the vehicle documentation and his ID, then followed with Marie's, made out in the name of Jenny Lawson, as she passed it across. The sergeant perused them casually, recited the names aloud into a compad and waited a moment for the screen's response.

"Where are you heading?" he inquired, running an eye over the interior of the cab.

"Up to Hiawasee. Stuff for a cabin being remodeled along by the lake there," Len replied. He looked the part: unshaven for two days, with a crumpled tweed hat, plaid shirt and padded work vest, a carpenter's tool belt over blue jeans. His voice was gruff and neutral.

"That wouldn't seem to me too much like a lady's kind of work," the sergeant commented, looking at Marie.

"What century are you from? I'll hammer `em as good as anyone," she answered defiantly.

"Would you have such a thing as a bill of sale for this material?" the sergeant asked. Len produced one from Lowes in Spartanburg, where they had loaded the prom guns. The sergeant glanced back toward the rear of the pickup, where the troopers had been scanning the load with a hand-held spectral analyzer, explosives sniffer, and a metal sensor. "On your way," he told them, waving. Len eased the pickup away amid rattles and grinding of gears, taking care not to seem too hasty. Marie kept her eyes ahead until they were a good hundred yards clear, then exhaled shakily. In the side mirror, she could see Olsen's truck standing in line behind a couple of cars.

It had been intended that the load would attract attention. The prom guns were inside the double-walled back of the cab and the hidden compartment beneath the bed at the rear, between the chassis girders—both metal-enclosed, opaque to the regular search instruments. The guns Olsen was carrying were inside the false-bottom drums—although a spot check and sampling would have drawn the wood preservative they were supposed to be filled with from an internal chamber.

Interesting weapons, prom guns. They had disappeared from Hyadean stocks in South America, and the only details Marie knew were that they had come into the U.S. via Morocco and the Caribbean. "Prom" was a contraction of "programmable munitions." The gun was the size of an assault rifle and launched a stream of self-propelled projectiles containing lateral-thrusting charges carried in a counter-spinning ring, which could be fired to alter the trajectory in flight. Quite complex control patterns could be programmed into the launcher, enabling targets dug in under cover, hidden around corners, or concealed by obstacles to be hit. A skilled user could seek out a target blocked by combinations of them. Marie had tested and practiced with them in remote parts of the mountains east of Charlotte.

"I don't believe what this country has turned into," Len growled as the pickup ground and shuddered to gain speed. "Roadblocks; people being pulled out of bed in the middle of the night. Things never used to be that way. Yet the media talk about it as if it's normal. People forget. It's alien ways. They're turning us into a colony in our own country."

"That's what we're fighting," Marie reminded him unnecessarily. The hills back from the highway looked green and peaceful. Water behind the trees reflected patches of sky. Marie felt weary of it all: combat training and sabotage; constantly having to be ready to move; always being haunted by the specter of capture, interrogation, and everything that went with it. Why couldn't she couldn't just live a safe and familiar day-to-day life somewhere, enjoying little things like friends stopping by to visit, or being alone with her thoughts on a hill after a walk up through a forest?

All that the people needed to take their country back was solidarity and awareness. Even with all their technology and alien backing, the powers that were robbing them of their livelihoods and turning them into property like some modern version of a feudal order could never prevail against a determined majority. But the majority were uninformed and unorganized. What did it take to wake them up to what was going on? Why did Marie care? She could go back to China, find a niche there, and probably never have to worry about being directly affected to any serious degree again. So why had she come back?

For the same reason she had left the comforts and security of her former life in California, she supposed. The restlessness that compelled her to contribute even a token to putting something right with the world. How anyone could remain complacent when there was so much going wrong with it, she was unable to comprehend. How could she once have dreamed of making a life with Roland? Because he was Roland. She still thought of him, even though all that had been a different universe, a million years ago. That was the stupid thing.

"Do you know there was a time when you could drive from anyplace to anyplace anytime you felt like it?" Len said. "Didn't have sensors under the road reading who was leaving the state. Didn't need no ID with a tax compliance sticker to get gas."

"Anywhere? Like New York to California?"

"Yep, if the fancy took you. Just get up and go."

"It sounds unreal." Marie was distant, still partly lost in her own musings.

"People don't remember," Len said again. "Everything's rules and restrictions. We're being turned into an alien military base, that's what it is."

Marie used to wonder why, if their world was so disciplined and orderly, governed under a single ruling system, the Hyadeans possessed a military establishment at all. Their answer was that they needed to protect themselves against a rival power known as the Querl, who inhabited a group of worlds loosely strung across the same star systems. The Querl were of the same race as the Hyadeans, having split off as a rebellious faction and left to found a culture based on their own political and economic principles. According to the Chryseans—which was the correct name for the Hyadeans of the home planet and its subject worlds—these principles were unsound and illogical, resulting in chaotic rule by ill-defined authorities, with consequent depletion and degradation of the Querl planets. The Chryseans would educate Earth and provide guidance to prevent similar things from happening here. And the institutions that were ultimately in control of things—in the West, anyway—were lending themselves readily to bringing their own houses into line. A compliant media establishment spread the word and the imagery, and for years the people, by and large, had been buying the line and not seeing the regimentation, exploitation, and the slow erosion of what had once been their rights. But now they were feeling the effects, and that was changing. Recruitment for Sovereignty was on the increase, and support was quietly spreading across a wide but largely invisible infrastructure of American life that didn't have access to the interplanetary financial markets and saw little prospect of benefiting significantly from the proceeds. As resistance grew, the classical escalating pattern would develop of what one side saw as protest and suppression being viewed by the powers in control as provocation and response. The times would get ugly before they could improve. CounterAction was preparing.

Marie didn't see herself as a subversive fighting against America. By all the principles she had been told about and grown up believing in, she was fighting for what America was once supposed to have stood for.

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Framed