Hidden Empire Read online

  "I figured those were the projectors," said Cole, "but what are they projecting onto?"

  "Your corneas," said Mingo. "It even adjusts for contact lenses, if you wear them. For a while they tried to project directly onto the retina, but then the projectors really did interfere with your normal range of vision. Plus they were worried about side effects from projecting directly into the eye. So they project from the sides onto the cornea directly over the lens of each eye. It does both eyes at once so you'll have depth perception. But also if one of them is damaged, the other can do it alone. It only projects onto the one eye, so it's not as clear, but it'll do."

  Down left and down right didn't do anything at all. Mingo explained. "The down-left command puts you in contact with home base. Whatever they want to make available to you, it comes in on that display command. And the down-right command puts you in sync with your DCGS, so they can feed you information from any UASs you have, up to four drones—Pred or Reaper, view of ground or air, live camera or a data display. Only we aren't synced with any DCGS right now, and besides, it takes about a week of wearing the helmet before the drone display stops making you throw up."

  Not being connected to any station of the DCGS—the distributed common ground system that relayed data from Unmanned Aerial Systems, or drones—meant that what they were doing here was definitely off the books. But that was par for the course with Rube's jeesh.

  Cole took the helmet off. "This is a field commander's best dream. To know all the time what your guys are doing. How they're doing. But it scares me."

  "Come on," said Mingo. "Afraid it'll fry your brains?"

  "I'm afraid I'll get too dependent on it, and then it'll cut out on me in combat."

  "It could happen," said Mingo, "but the only things that could do it would probably also blow up your head."

  "What if there's a heavy concrete wall between us?"

  "That's the beautiful thing," said Mingo. "It has two redundant transmission systems for you and your team. There's radio, but there's also an ultra-low-frequency digital sound system. If you get far enough apart and you're using the sound transmission system, the display gets a little blocky."

  "Pixelated," said Arty helpfully.

  "Twitterpated," said Load.

  "Pixelated," insisted Arty.

  "I do believe in pixies, I do, I do," said Load.

  "This helmet is smarter than I am," said Cole.

  "And the exoskeleton is stronger," said Mingo. "But you're the one telling them both what to do."

  "So what's the mission?" asked Cole.

  The men glanced at each other. "No mission," said Mingo. "I mean, you're the guy who has the President's ear. What if he had something special for you to do? You could say, 'I've been practicing with the boys and we've got some good tricks.'"

  "So you can take these prototypes out of the country?" asked Cole.

  "If we need to," said Mingo. "The helmets aren't a prototype, they're in production. And within two weeks, we'll have enough exos for the whole jeesh."

  "I'm going to need to take the time to learn how to use all this. Get fluent with it."

  "Well," said Mingo, "this is my day job."

  "And one thing I'm not clear on," said Cole. "You want me to learn how to do this with you guys? With me as commander? Those days are over, guys."

  "Not for us," said Cat. "Look, man, we followed Rube, and all of us got used to our own niche. You came in, you learned our niches fast, you used us right. None of us were trained to do Rube's job—and so you did it. That's your niche. You don't choose the target, you just lead us in acquiring it. Like point guard on a basketball team."

  "Meaning I'm not as tall and can't shoot as well, but I see the big picture and can tell you where to pass."

  "No, that's basketball," said Cat.

  "But you compared this to basketball. Point guard, right?"

  "It was an analogy, Cole," said Cat. "We're not in the army anymore. We're all free agents. But when we play together, the team needs a leader just the same, and you're it."

  "And you bring me in last."

  Cat grinned. "Need to know, man."

  "And you're not last," said Mingo. "These are all we've got in the loop right now. Babe, Drew, Benny, they've been out of town a lot, no time to learn it. We haven't even told Babe about it—he's all over India, trying to learn how to improve their advertising methods."

  Cat imitated Babe's voice. "Just put a naked woman in the ad. Not your mother! A young woman. A beautiful woman."

  "It's worth working on, don't you think?"

  "Just one problem," said Cole. "What does an EMP do to this stuff?"

  "What?" asked Mingo.

  "An electromagnetic pulse," said Cole. "Like the thing Aldo Verus used to bring down two planes when his people took over New York City."

  "I know what an EMP is," said Mingo. "But it took a howitzer-size piece of equipment. You think you're going to face an enemy that has one of those tucked under his arm?"

  "I don't know what we're going to face. I'm just saying."

  "EMP devices are like poison gas," said Mingo. "Anybody who uses it has to figure it'll get used against him."

  "But what if we face an enemy that doesn't have any high-tech stuff for an EMP to affect?" asked Cole.

  "Well, the EMP device would be a high-tech device, right?" asked Load. "If they've got no electronics, the EMP would be one of the electronics they ain't got none of."

  Cole grinned. "Worst-case scenario?"

  Cat gave an Elvis sneer. "Worst case, man, is me putting this foot deep inside your proctological zone."

  "Do these exos come off so easy if their electronics are fried? Or do you have to fight your way out of them while somebody's shooting at you?"

  Load gave a command to shut down the exo he was wearing. Then he flipped the shoulder bar forward and gave it a sharp twist one way, then the other. His exoskeleton collapsed like a rag doll. "It's got a mechanical solution, too," said Mingo.

  "By the way," said Cat, "we been calling them 'Bones' and 'Noodles,' on account of it taking longer to say 'exoskeleton' and 'electronically enhanced command helmet.'"

  "I'm sold," said Cole. "I'll order a hundred thousand of them."

  "Fully operational by 2015, at that number," said Mingo.

  "But eight, for now," said Cole. "Unless you're adding somebody else to the team."

  "Eight was good enough for Rube," said Cat. "And it was good enough for you, too, during the civil war. Don't see any reason to change."

  "If Jesus could have trained his apostles better," said Mingo, "he wouldn't have needed twelve."

  "Eight is enough," said Arty. "Who knew?"

  "Unlike you lazy retired guys," said Cole, "I have to go to work in the morning. I also have to arrange the time off to train with you. Can I get back to you about all that?"

  "Of course," said Mingo. "You'd better start biking home about now. I suggest cutting over to Highway 28 and taking that north to Dulles. Unless your buddy Little Potus is willing to send you air transport. Or, I guess, your own special train."

  "Hey, I grew up with electric trains," said Cole. "Mine were just smaller. And Mingo, you promised to give me a ride back."

  Mingo grinned. "I could give you your own set of Bones. It's way faster than the bike."

  "But it attracts more attention. And I'd be likely to trip crossing the Potomac."

  "Naw," said Cat, "you can leap the Potomac. At the falls, anyway."

  "Now wouldn't that have been useful a few years ago."

  Of course they all knew he was referring to the day Rube got murdered—they had to rescue Cole from the middle of the river, where Aldo Verus's walking tanks had him pinned down after a crazy chase through D.C.

  "Just remember," said Arty. "This isn't an Iron Man comic. There's no shielding. Unless you wear Kevlar."

  "So I'm not bulletproof."

  "But you can leap short buildings in a—"

  "In a single bound," said Col
e. "I'm getting it."

  "And … don't tell the President yet, okay?" asked Load.

  "Tell him what?" asked Cole. "You mean he doesn't know about it?"

  "He doesn't know that this technology is in our hands," said Mingo. "And he probably doesn't know how effective it is. But hey, we could jump the White House gates in front of the Secret Service and be inside before they started shooting at us."

  "Let's not put that to a test just yet," said Cole.

  The others laughed. A little nervously, or so it seemed to Cole.

  After Mingo dropped him off in front of his rooming house, as he carried his bike upstairs Cole thought back on the conversation and wondered why they had used breaking into the White House as their example. Just because it was so well defended that it symbolized a tough target? Or was there something else on their minds?

  We keep gathering together in ever-larger communities. Towns. City-states. Kingdoms. Empires. The art of living together in large numbers is called "civilization," and people who can get along well in such an intense social setting are called "civilized."

  But we must never forget that the only reason humans keep banding together in ever-larger numbers is because it enhances our ability to survive as a species. If it did not do so, those human traits we call "civilized" would have been extinguished generations ago, and the traits we call "barbaric" would have predominated.

  The job of families is to create children and rear them to carry out all the behaviors that promote the survival of the civilization. Families use the civilization to enhance their children's ability to reproduce successfully by expanding the gene pool and ensuring the general prosperity; a civilization uses families to perpetuate the successful values and behaviors of that civilization so it can persist across time and continue giving its members superior ability to reproduce.

  The laws of evolution apply to civilizations as surely as to species and individuals: Only the fittest survive.

  So it is a foolish civilization that ever acts in such a way as to interfere with the successful reproduction of its own citizens. Whether consciously or not, the citizens of such a civilization will abandon it, either by moving away or by reducing their allegiance to it until they are willing to see it be conquered, overthrown, or culturally transformed back into a reproduction-enhancing entity.

  Civilizations fall either when they stop working, or when they are confronted by a civilization that is better at its job.

  Chinma was up a tree, checking on his money, when the thugs arrived. Chinma knew it was wrong to care about his stash when the family was in such desperate straits. But Father had refused to take his money when Chinma offered it. And now Father was dead and the family was poorer than ever. Nor was there any help to be had from the rest of the tribe. Half of them were dead, the survivors struggling just to keep their poor farms productive.

  Chinma knew he should offer the money to his mother. But he didn't trust her to use the money wisely. This was a terrible thing to think about his own mother, he knew. But she was too smart for her own good sometimes. And too good at other times to be very smart. She might turn the money over to the new chief—whoever that would be, now that Father was dead, and all of his most promising sons. Or she might take the money and flee alone back to Yoruba lands, where she had been born and raised; and whether she would take Chinma or not, he could not be sure.

  But what could he, a twelve-year-old boy still emaciated from the ravages of the monkey sickness, do with this much money? There was nothing to buy in the village, and no way to get from the village to Ilorin, and there was no city closer. Besides, they had heard that everyone in Ilorin was sick or dying or dead now.

  Chinma was not stupid. He knew that it was his illness, which he caught from the monkey sneeze, that was spreading now, not Ire's sickness, for the people got sick the way Chinma had, very slowly, with sneezing first and then headache and mucus in the lungs and then coughing so violent that you could tear muscles or break ribs, and then the constipation and the diarrhea and the unbearable thirst. And, if you were going to die, bleeding from the eyes and nose and ears, which spurted a little with every sneeze or cough.

  But Chinma had not bled, nor had his mother, nor his brother Ade.

  Could he ask Ade what to do? No. Once Ade would have been wise, but now he stayed always near to Mother, doing only what she asked. It made a kind of sense—Mother had nursed Ade carefully through his long illness, and then he had nursed her in turn when he was better and Mother had caught the disease from him. Ade now belonged to Mother, body and soul.

  Chinma felt no such loyalty. Mother had not tended him. Only her eldest son was worth the risk. When the illness was at its worst, Chinma had had to crawl to the river and drink. They wouldn't even share the filtered water that they drank in the house. And then when they were so sick they couldn't get up to fill their cups from the filtered water, and the filter jug was empty anyway, he brought them water from the river, a little at a time because he was so weak he couldn't carry a full pail. He tried his best to help them, but he gave up when Mother screamed at him because his baby sister died and said it was because he brought dirty river water to them.

  Chinma had lived without anybody's help. What did he owe to any of them now? He had earned this monkey money. He wasn't the one who made the monkeys sick. And what if he had come down the tree and said to Ire, "I don't think we should take these monkeys, they sneeze and bite"? Ire would have laughed at him and called him a baby, and then if he still wouldn't bring them down, Ire would have beaten him until he did go up and get them. Chinma had not been given any choices, except one—to be careful not to let the papa monkey bite him. He would be dead now like Ire if he had. So all that was in Chinma's power, all that had ever been in his power, was to save his own life as best he could.

  He was about to come down from the tree when three trucks came roaring into the village. This never happened—who did they know who was rich enough to own three trucks? Men leaped out of the trucks with automatic weapons and started firing. These were not warnings—they aimed at people and shot them down. They fired into the houses and huts at hip level.

  Chinma's family and fellow villagers ran screaming toward the forest, but the bullets followed them. They spared no one—not the babies, and not the women, not even to rape them as Chinma had heard such raiders always did.

  There was nothing Chinma could do to help. He could only cling to his branch and hope that they didn't look up. A glance would not reveal him if he held very still, but there were not so many leaves between Chinma and the ground that if they actually searched the treetops they would fail to see him.

  But they did not look up. Why would they? There were only birds and monkeys in the trees, not boys—why would there be a boy in the trees?

  Only when the shooting stopped did Chinma remember the little camera in his pocket, the one the scientist had given him. When he was sick no one had found it because no one took care of him or even came near him.

  Chinma knew that the camera ran on batteries.That's why he had never taken a picture with it—for fear that the batteries would run down before he could get to a computer. But now he would take pictures so people could see what these robbers had done to his village.

  So from the tree he took three pictures, of three bodies he could see lying on the ground. Two of the pictures also had robbers in them. And then one of them came to the others dangling one of Chinma's baby nephews by the ankles. Chinma couldn't see which one it was, but it had to either be Ire's youngest or little Iko, Ire's sister's son, because they were the only babies that had lived through the plague. The baby was crying.

  The ruffians laughed, except for one who seemed to be in charge, because he started yelling at them in Hausa. Chinma only knew a little Hausa, and only because it was the language of the northern Muslims who ruled Nigeria. But he understood enough to know that some of what he said was: "Do you want to get sick? Do you want to die? I told you not to touch anybody! This
is the place where the sneezing sickness started!"

  So all of this death had come to the village because of Chinma, after all. Everything began with his catching those sick monkeys. But he hadn't chosen them, had he? He couldn't help that he got sneezed on—how could he know the monkey would do that? He didn't make it happen, he was the second victim, after Ire.

  And why would these men come here to kill everybody when the disease had already swept through the whole tribe? Everyone knew that once you caught a sickness from another person, if you lived through it you couldn't catch it again. This was the one place in all of Nigeria where it was certain you could not catch the monkey sickness. Yet they had come here and killed them all. Ignorant, stupid robbers. Why was it their business anyway?

  The man in charge was still yelling, and the other men were still gathered around the baby, when more trucks arrived. Only this time it wasn't robbers. This time it was the army.

  For a moment Chinma expected the soldiers to start shooting, to kill these robbers and punish them for having wiped out the village. But instead, the soldiers walked through the village checking to make sure everyone was dead. Now and then there was a gunshot.

  The boss of the soldiers walked to about ten paces away from the boss of the robbers and demanded, "Did any get away?"

  The thieves all shook their heads vehemently.

  The soldier boss pointed with his weapon at the baby, which was now lying on the ground, still crying softly. "Why is that alive? Who touched it?"

  The robber who had carried the baby tentatively raised his hand.

  "Pick it up!" shouted the soldier boss.

  The robber picked up the baby. Nobody was laughing now.

  "Toss it up, high in the air!" shouted the soldier boss.

  It was as if the robber was trying to toss the baby to Chinma, it came straight toward him.

  The soldier boss raised his weapon and fired a long burst. Because of the angle from where the soldier boss was, the bullets cut through the leaves about twenty feet from Chinma, but still he flinched. He didn't know if he got a picture or not, but he had pushed the button as soon as the firing started, and maybe he pushed it more than once. He was so scared his hands trembled, and because of that he almost lost his hold on the branch, and then he almost dropped the camera, and then he made a noise, a loud gasp.