Free The Demon Plagues by David VanDyke Page A

“Bringing me here is bad
tradecraft, DJ.”
    “I know, but I wanted to talk to all three of
you personally before I went ahead with the proposal.”
    “You already know what I think.”
    “You think I shouldn’t risk it; but there has
to be some attempt to re-open normal relations with the Big Three,
especially with the North Americans. The EP started in North
America in the popular mind, even if it was a Soviet creation. The
United Governments of North America is still the largest
superpower.”
    “These dinosaurs will eventually collapse
under their own weight, just like the first Soviets.”
    “Even if I was certain of that – hell, look
how long North Korea’s lasted – I’m not willing to wait. We have to
make some kind of peace.”
    “Once the nuclear threshold was breached,
they got to use the big stick on whoever didn’t have one. How are
you going to get them to give that up for good?”
    “The Nuclear Concord has held. They haven’t
risked an atomic strike in over a year. Even their own people were
getting tired of the images of horror we broadcast past their
censorship. Their consciences might not be EP-enhanced, but the
common people have them, and they are getting sick of the
oppression and brutality of their own government. Americans
especially are not the type to accept this kind of tyranny for
long.”
    There came a knock at the door.
    “Come in Rick, Millie, sit down. How is the
cyber attack going?”
    Rick smiled and took a seat, his sister next
to him. “Quite well, I think. We’ve managed to crash a number of
their servers, and we shut down some sites. They will think they
headed off a tremendous threat to their arsenal.”
    “Did we pinpoint the leak, Cassie?”
    “Yes we did. It was in Farnsworth’s office,
as we suspected. A Psycho, well-trained. We’ll have to update and
refine the psych tests and polygraphs; this one counterfeited the
ones we gave.”
    “Is he alive?”
    “Yes. Funny thing about narcissists – they
won’t usually kill themselves to protect their masters. So the
Aussies get another one.” Her tone was disapproving.
    “They can have them for all I care.”
    Cassandra frowned. She considered this one of
Markis’ blind spots; he had blossomed as a leader and politician,
but he still tended to stick his head in the sand when it came to
certain problems, or at least to grasp at simplistic solutions. So
when the Australians had volunteered to take all the Psychos in
Free Communities off their hands, to be held in special prisons
far, far into the Outback, he had agreed immediately.
    Over her objections.
    Something about the arrangement made her
profoundly uneasy. She told herself that Australia was a Free
Community with Edens in charge, and that they were fundamentally
incapable of perpetrating atrocities. But she also knew that human
beings had an amazing ability to fool themselves, lying to
themselves, convincing themselves of the most outlandish things,
and truly believing them. And true belief could always threaten a
conscience, no matter how robust. If you truly believed infidels
were condemned by your god, or your enemies were subhuman, then
killing them wasn’t very hard, especially if you didn’t have to do
it personally.
    She reminded herself that she had to get with
Shawna Nightingale and discuss the widely dispersed, almost
unsupervised research programs.
    Some were relatively innocuous, such as the
many nonlethal weapons they had come up with. Some were deeply
disturbing to Edens, and had been suspended or closely scrutinized;
most of these had come from the fertile and immature minds of
children and teenagers, for whom death and immorality were often
just abstract concepts. Things like artificial intelligences to
control robot weapons, to do the killing that Edens couldn’t; use
of artillery-sown mines, pushing the killing into merely ‘possible’
and ‘potential’; chips in Eden soldiers’ brains that would override
their consciences;