Kingdom of Monsters by John Schneider (microsoft ebook reader .TXT) 📗

dragons to play with, and had taken advantage of it.

One of the young ones, a wide-eyed Lolita named Lily, had made past-tense reference to their 'men-folk', and was promptly shushed by Ginger.

Sally had not pressed for details.

She had, however, mentioned it to Rhodes, who nodded thoughtfully.

“Witches,” he muttered.  “Satanists converted to dragons.”

“Witches aren't synonymous with Satanists,” Sally said, as she herself had been corrected by both Lily and Ginger.

“But they are, right?”

Sally nodded.  “Right.”

Rhodes had leaned back in his chair with a sigh.

“Well,” he said rubbing his eyes, “I'm afraid you're going to have to tell your friends there will be some emergency war-time restrictions on their right to practice religion.”

But Sally already knew the rest.  By Rhodes' logic, they were still women.

He had leaned forward.

“They are assets,” he emphasized.  “And they will be tolerated.  But not enabled.  Please relay that, so I don't have to.”

That was another thing – Rhodes seemed to think Sally had some special pull with the civilian population at the Mount – puzzling, because Nurse Rose had been her only friend.  Sally was quartered separate from the residential barracks, so her interaction was minimal – both the civilians and the rank-and-file servicemen most often saw her in the company of Rhodes.  That was her identity.

It was remarkable the roles you fell into.

In her younger days, she was the quintessential sorority girl – they used to call her Delta Dawn.

Now nuclear options were at her fingertips – just a maximum-security door away.

Of course, every door was like that on the Mount.  There were locks and codes and procedures – similar to how inmates operated and worked within a prison – only in this prison, the inmates slept a hundred yards away from the warden.

“What's on the docket today?” Sally asked, as she followed Rhodes into the claustrophobic mine-shaft of an elevator, that gave her the horrors every time she stepped into it.

“Going down to see the Doc,” Rhodes said, closing the door quickly before she could object.

Doctor Victor Shriver dwelled down within the very bowels of this not-quite bottomless pit, down past the barracks, past multiple equipment and maintenance levels.

At the very bottom of it all, was Shriver's lab.  The mad lab as it had come to be known, populated by a single individual, who was without a doubt, the creepiest person in the entire complex.

There was an unsettling drop in Sally's stomach as the elevator seemed to fall forever.  The tiny electric light was military basic – if it went out, they would be in utter darkness.

Sally could feel the oppressive weight of the mountain around them, only waiting for the slightest shift to crush their tiny lifeline shut forever.

Chapter 9

Dr. Shrinker, as he was known among the troops, WAS the science these days.

His comments regarding the Arc-Project were succinct.  As he put it, “We aren't forcing anyone to get pregnant, but if you put men and women together, it's going to happen.  And yes, I'm all for encouraging just that.”

Sally, safely knocked-up, standing at the General's shoulder, had another question.

“What if a member of the community doesn't want to reproduce?”

Shrinker – Shriver – had shrugged.

“Then that member will have to perform some other function.”

His voice was always very neutral as he spoke, as if any inflection at all might corrupt the pure factual logic.  Nor did he invite dissent.

“A worker or a breeder,” he said.  “I think it's fair to call them both work.  But you need to provide some function, or we can't afford you.”  He dismissed the point as settled.  “It's a tough world,” he said.

Shriver's criteria determined who got onto the Mount – total numbers allowed versus gender-breakdown and necessary genetic diversity.

So while Rhodes asked Sally her opinion on most things, here was one of the other people he asked.  And Sally would daresay, the one he probably listened to the most.

It certainly seemed that his was the weighted voice when it came to dealing with outbreaks – nuke a bloom, burn a bud – that was his.

The thought of nuclear weapons being set off, literally beyond the end of the world, was nearly as depressing as the end itself.

Nukes remained a threat simply because of their existence.  During the weeks of battles that followed KT-day, missiles had fired that shouldn't have – that couldn't have – somehow overriding fail-safes that by simple numeric probability couldn't be overridden.  Worse, missiles with targeting systems that had no hackable interactive technology were redirected.

Three things needed to happen for a successful nuclear strike – the warhead needed to be activated, the missile needed to be targeted, and then it had to be launched.  Each of these levels was guarded by multiple levels of security.

A sub-launch, for example, would require the participation of nearly every member of the crew – everything from achieving launch depth to the turning of keys – and a rogue launch would require PhD-level understanding to rework the targeting system, even after coding had released the keys.  And once a missile was chambered and the sub was at sea, that should have been impossible.

But somehow it happened.

Errant nuclear strikes had been worldwide.  The EMP had been as well – and not just a bad one, but designer-bad.

The digital-age was gone.  All that rot about what might survive?  Exaggerated – all of it.  Individual pieces of tech survived – items surrounded by any sort of makeshift Faraday cage – a tin waste-basket was often enough – but the networks were gone.  And of course, the widespread EMP had been combined with a physical demolition.

At this point, military communication was down to radio-relays and walkie-talkies, dotted with little bits of post-millennium tech.

The surviving nukes, depending on where you found them, should still work, but required targeting commands from tech that didn't exist anymore – or barely existed.  So each of these surviving missiles would require refitting.  And then, whatever came online, by whatever method, also needed to be coordinated through the chain of command.

All this demanded a bit of know-how, and