Monster Nation(85)

Mellowman put his finger through the trigger guard of the shot gun. He started to squeeze.

Then he stopped.

Muffled, deepened as it came wending its way through the fabric of his jeans jacket, music floated up out of Mellowman's chest. Skynyrd. Freebird.

'Aw, f*ck no, aw, not now,' he whined. 'Nah, not that ring''

He lowered the shotgun and took a red-white-and-blue cell phone out of his inner jacket pocket. He stared at it as if he were holding a coprolite in his hand. Something exotic and bizarre and loathsome all at the same time.

He flipped it open and started to talk.





Monster Nation





Chapter Three


Bad result from the nephrectomy but codeine was made for nights like these and the swish of the dialysis machine is perfect white noise. She's sleeping peacefully, now. Wish I could say the same. [Lab Notes, 11/1/02]

Vikram tapped in a password on his keyboard and a window opened up on the main monitor. Satellite imagery of the Rockies, received in real time from the OSR's newest and most sophisticated birds. The current view showed a composite image with the false color data from an infra-red Landsat run through a codec that matched it up with the standard footprint imaging of a Keyhole-class spybird.

'Amazing'you're telling me these pictures are how old?'

'Only a second or two, and that delay comes from the time it takes the computers to process and render the images. We have a Lacrosse-class satellite coming over the horizon in a few minutes and then we'll be able to start constructing stereoscopic images, they promise to me. Three dimensional views.'

Bannerman Clark shook his head. He could hardly believe this. The last time he'd relied on satellite data to plan an offensive had been in Desert Storm. Back then images from the birds had to be developed'they came on actual photographic film. Sometimes it took hours to get an image, or even days if the footprints weren't right. 'How did we come so far so fast?' he asked.

'Advances in computer technology,' Vikram suggested, with a shrug. 'For the most part. Also there are very many more satellites now that before. They say five of them are passing over your head on any given day.'

Clark shook his head. 'We're still looking for a needle in a haystack, though.' A map of Colorado had been tacked to one wall near the monitors. Desiree Sanchez's epidemiology data had been plotted on the map as a series of vectors pointing back towards the epicenter. Theoretically it should have been all they needed to triangulate the position'to find the locus where the Epidemic had truly begun. Unfortunately Sanchez's data were thin on the ground and some of them contradicted others. They had narrowed their search parameters to a narrow corridor high up in the mountains, a zone varying between three and seventeen miles across and about a hundred miles long, from Steamboat Springs down to Florence. That left them with fifteen hundred square miles of rugged terrain to look at. An area, then, a little larger than Rhode Island.

Clark had to keep in mind as well the fact that they had no idea what they were looking for.

'Alright, let's start at the bottom of this map and work our way north. We'll take shifts manning the controls'Vikram, you'll need to give me a quick rundown on how they work. The next time your shift finishes go talk to the Chief and find out if any of the soldiers have training in signal intelligence. Let's start panning across this ridge here, alright? I hope you've had your coffee.' Clark sat down next to Vikram and the master processor box. The ruggedized computer had so many cables and patch cords emerging from its back end that it looked like the head of a squid. The monitors, the keyboard and the mouse were all wireless, which still looked wrong to Clark, as if they were missing vital components, as if someone had installed them incorrectly. 'How do you aim the camera?'

Vikram smiled cheerfully and launched another program from his start menu. 'Bannerman, we can do this that you ask. We can study every square inch of the display. Or we can run this algorithm that looks for salient features. It ignores the hundreds of square miles of tree cover, you see, and looks for things that are out of place.' Vikram keyed in a search request for point-sources of heat above one fifty degrees Celsius. The laptop chunked and grumbled for a moment and then windows started popping up all over the monitor. Vikram maximized one and together they looked at a rendered view of a car fire, the chassis blazing away in super-high-contrast black and white. The camera wheezed in and out of focus as it tried to stay locked on to the wavering flames.