Decon

From CleanPosts

DECON

On August 31, 1947, the United Nations proposed the creation of two independent states in Palestine, one Arab and one Jewish, with the city of Jerusalem under separate international control to administer the holy places of the world's three major monotheistic religions.

The Jewish side of the partition was to have 500,000 Jews and 400,000 Arabs. The Arab side was to have 700,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews, and Jerusalem was to have about 100,000 of each ethnicity. The Jews would get the blasted wasteland of the Negev desert, and the Arabs would get the fertile upper Galilee region.

(The UN thought all these arrangements were fair. So fair, in fact, that after Israel declared Statehood and the UN realized the Displaced Persons were being handed rifles as soon as they got off the boat at Haifa, another SC resolution was passed to prevent immigration of males from age 17 to 45.)

David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency whose authority had been established by the League of Nations, knew the Jews would have to fight even for the lousy territory they had been assigned. He ordered every Jew in Palestine mobilized for war, men and women alike.

On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly accepted the partition proposals, by a vote of thirty-three votes to thirteen, with ten abstentions. The Jewish people, homeless since the days of the Roman Empire, were to have their own state again. There was rejoicing in the streets, but they danced while knowing war lay just ahead.

On the day after Partition, a bus carrying Jewish civilians to Jerusalem was attacked by Arabs with rifles and grenades, killing five people, including a young bride named Shoshona Mizrachi Farhi on the way to her wedding The bus attack came to symbolize the beginning of the war for independence, which would claim the lives of 6,000 Jews, or one percent of the total population.

In this period, after Partition but before the official declaration of the state of Israel, the armed forces were called the Haganah (Defense). Great Britain still occupied Palestine, and considered the Haganah an illegal organization. By the fall of 1947 it had two thousand regulars and a thou-sand reserves, including Lilith Gervasi of Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, who served as a signaler, but she also carried her rifle.

The next month, armed Bedoin nomads surrounded a number of isolated settlements in the south, including Yad Mordechai. The Jewish leader David Ben-Gurion swore that not one single settlement would be evacuated. Armored cars produced in Tel Aviv were used to secure the water pipelines that these settlements depended on, and to send weapons and reinforcements through the Bedoin lines.

Some communities, however, were beyond reach and had to fight alone and unaided, and by the end of the month, the Haganah decided that it was too difficult to support them, Ben-Gurion's oath notwithstanding. They ordered the settlers to evacuate, but this order was ignored.

In January 1948, the first state-sponsored forces from Syria began to make raids, and in this instance, the Jews were aided by counter-attacks from the Royal Air Force, for the British remained the rulers of Palestine, at least on paper.

In February, the remote settlements under siege began to be visited by private pilots flying Piper Cub aircraft, who would make daring landings where there were no runways, bringing arms and ammunition, and evacuating the wounded to Tel Aviv. At this time, the conflict transitioned from a series of periodic violent incidents into a genuine war.

By March 26th, the Haganah completely abandoned the coastal highway running south from Tel Aviv and Lilith's kibbutz at Yad Mordechai was completely cut off. Only four private aircraft maintained contact between north and south, carrying basic supplies and newspapers.

Two of these aircraft were flying saucers, one flown by Jill, and another one flown by Dory, carrying Hunky as well. They made their first appearance at Yad Mordechai when the settlers were pinned down under Arab fire. Just the appearance of the two silvery disks hovering over the kibbutz was sufficient to drive the attackers off.

Lilith had flown in one of the disks before, so she was not afraid. When Jill, Hunky and Dory emerged carrying boxes of medical supplies, Lilith was in the front of the crowd of settlers to greet them.

"Where's Robyn?" she asked, and Jill knew she had found the woman she was looking for.

"Robyn is in the captivity of the United States government," Jill said. "We've come to ask your help in getting her free."

"Is she in mortal danger?"

"We don't think she is in immediate danger, no," Jill admitted. "But if Robyn is your friend..."

"Yes, Robyn is my friend, but the Yishuv, the People, come first. When the country wins through to independence, then I will win freedom for my friend."

"Then we will help you, as we can," Hunky said.

• * * * *

Deep in the bowels of the Domestic Enemies Classification, Observation, and Neutralization headquarters, Ed Conley tortured Robyn with electric shock to make her reveal how the saucers flew.

The actual session didn't hurt (except for the very first jolt) because she used the same trick she learned at the Olowade clinic and put herself in a dead coma for three hours.

Conley was frustrated. Despite all his experience and boasts to the contrary, there was nothing he could do, no matter how ingenious, to make Robyn show the slightest sign of fear or suffering. And when he despaired of persuading her to speak, even the immediate threat of a bullet in her head only seemed to amuse her further.

But this time when she woke up alone in a cell her muscles were very sore, hours after a bout of torture that had quickly been cut short when Conley realized she was unconscious. The electric shocks had forced muscles throughout her body to contract violently. She felt as though she had beat herself up.

Robyn knew her tormentor was a quick study, and he was probably watching her rubbing her muscles to try to relieve the pain. She decided she needed to do something about that Conley person once and for all.

Robyn's dress was of Gorpai make, satiny and white, but with a hint of metallic reds and greens shifting on its surface, like the colors of an oil stain floating on a puddle. She took off her dress and began ripping out the hem to obtain objects she had hidden there, small tools made of a polymer whose structure would not be synthesized on earth for another fifty years.

There was a plastic jeweler's screwdriver almost as hard as steel, but perfectly invisible to the metal detector that had been waved over her body. Also there was a dental pick and a very thin scalpel. She didn't get very far with these, because the guards busted in and took them from her, along with her dress. Confirmation that she was being watched.

"It's cold."

"We will provide you with clothes," they said, "without the little surprises sewn into it."

"In that case get me a clean pair of panties."

They denied Robyn this request on account she wanted it, therefore it was a trick. Or they were simply being mean. They locked her up again wearing nothing but her bright yellow undies and matching bra.

She sat down and looked bored for a few minutes. Then she took off her panties and began picking at the thread stitching of the decorative pattern embroidered on them. Her guards watched this on their screen, but assumed she was just idly trying to fill in time with something to do. Robyn accumulated the thread from her panties into a big tangled pile of stuff resembling spider's silk.

The stitching Robyn had dug out from the fabric of her panties was a polymer chain finer than a newborn's hair, yet stronger than steel wire. Robyn called the stuff Polywire.

Her undies were shredded and Robyn's fingers grew bloody from lacing the stuff through little vent holes around the cell door. A small piece of one thumb, in fact, had been sliced clean off and the floor was slippery with her blood. It hurt like hell, but she had to work fast.

Her watchers grew alarmed at the blood, and guessed she had found a way to commit suicide. Ed Conley saw the scene on closed-circuit television and ran down to her cell.

The door opened and Conley walked halfway through. He stopped and stood there in total disbelief.

"The Boda gets a point on the board!" Robyn burst triumphantly.

Conley's legs buckled. He jerked and bounced down on Robyn's deadly web, letting gravity finish the grisly job. After his spinal cord was severed many slices of Conley meat plopped down in a wet pile at the door.

The guards were furious. They tried to cut the web down but only succeeded in slicing their own knives into little razor blades. Robyn began to laugh hysterically. Finally they used their hand guns to blow chunks out of the door frame where the wire was slung. The web drifted down to the floor and the guards stepped through aiming directly at Robyn.

"Gun mentality," she sneered, standing there nude except for her bra, but unashamed.

• * * * *

Hunky and Dory and Jill were called Mahal, or foreign volunteers, and they were held in awe by the settlers of Yad Mordechai, because their saucers could hover with no fuel except water and air, and they could whisk themselves back to America in less than an hour, which they often did to obtain supplies from a seemingly inexhaustible source.

Lilith herself was part of the Gahal, or immigrant soldiers. Most of the children in the kibbutz were Sabra. That is, they had been born in Palestine and knew no other home. Lilith was their guardian when their parents worked the fields, both before and during the war.

After a Jewish convoy was attacked en route to reinforcing Yad Mordechai, and all forty-six soldiers killed, the Haganah developed a plan to occupy those Arab communities that lay close to or directly between Jewish cities and the far-flung settlements.

In most cases, the Arabs fled their communities when they were besieged and occupied. In the case of the town of Dair Yassin where they did not, the Jewish terrorist groups Irgun and the Stern Gang massacred all the Arabs, men, women, and children, to the shock and horror of most Jews, including Lilith, as well as the leadership of the Haganah.

But the Haganah was not yet willing to cut off all ties to Irgun, because they had needed manpower and rifles, and the same enemies. In April they even conducted joint operations along the coast while the British accelerated their complete withdrawal from Palestine.

In reprisal for the Deir Yassin massacre in March, a convoy of armored buses was attacked on April 15, and seventy-seven Jewish doctors, nurses, and patients were killed. Only twenty-eight survived, and only eight of these were not wounded.

King Abdullah of Transjordan, who was the only ally of the Jews in the region, offered Jewish autonomy, but only if it remained under his sovereignty. A Jewish Agency negotiator named Golda Meir was pained to disappoint her good friend the king, but she had to reject his offer. After all the Jews had suffered, especially in the Shoah (or Holocaust), it was simply not enough to be represented in a foreign parliament.

This led directly to the declaration of the State of Israel on May 15, 1948. Eleven minutes later, President Truman officially recognized the state by cable, before he even knew what the name of it would be.

On the same day, the Egyptians bombed Tel Aviv from the air, and destroyed all the small aircraft parked at the Tel Aviv airfield. But with little choice remaining to them, the Jews carefully rebuilt them, and they flew again. It would be two weeks before real warplanes would begin to arrive from Czechoslovakia. In those critical weeks, Jill, Hunky, Dory and Lilith flew mail and medical supplies between the city and isolated settlements.

At that time the country's army boasted nearly 37 thousand troops, but 1,200 had already been killed in combat. Britain opened the detention camps on Cyprus and thousands streamed into Israel by ship, many having already been trained in the camps by the Haganah.

On the first full day after Independence was declared, Iraqi troops crossed over the Jordan River. Simultaneously, Israeli troops raided Lebanon to delay their entrance into the war. Syria came down from the Golan heights with thirty tanks and advanced to the sea of Galilee. Two 65 mm artillery pieces checked the Syrians at the kibbutz known as Deganya, then the guns were rushed south to attack the Iraqis besieging the old British police fort overlooking Gesher on the Jordan River, causing them to flee.

On the second day, Transjordanian and Egyptian troops joined the assault. Saudi Arabia sent a company of troops who fought with Egypt. And Egypt even landed troops on the beach at Majdal between Gaza and Tel Aviv.

The first Egyptian attack was against the kibbutz of Kfar Darom, seven miles south of Gaza, where thirty settlers held off elements of the Muslim Brotherhood with grenades. When their grenades ran out, they put explosives in bags and hurled them at the attackers. When Egypt rolled in tanks, the settlers fired anti-tank weapons at the lead tanks, destroying them, and causing the other tanks to withdraw.

Then Egypt bypassed Kfar Darom and moved to kibbutz Nirim, five miles away. Twenty defenders were killed but they held on. Not even an air attack the next day broke their will.

But Lilith Gervasi's own kibbutz of Yad Mordechai lay just west of the road that linked Gaza to the Egyptian beachhead at Majdal. Egypt hurled two infantry battalions, one armored battalion, and an artillery battalion against them at dawn on May 24 for an attack that lasted five days.

This was Lilith's baptism by fire, the battle that forged her into the most fearsome warrior the IDF would ever know. Later known as "Bravo" for her command of Bravo Battalion, she would fight in every one of her country's wars for more than a century.

Much enemy armor was taken out with the PIAT (Projectile, Infantry, Anti- Tank). Those tanks which managed to breach the Yad Mordechai perimeter were set alight at close range with Molotov Cocktails or attacked with hand grenades whose fragments would enter the tank through the view slit, wounding the crew and forcing them to retire. Other tanks were taken out with mines, and still others broke down and were dragged out of range by armored cars.

But there were just too many Egyptians, and the shelling never ceased. After five days the ammunition was spent. Dory and Jill took the worst casualties out by saucer while Hunky stayed behind to help Lilith carry the rest of the wounded through the Egyptian lines under the cover of darkness, along with the remaining settlers.

Yad Mordechai was abandoned, and in the morning the Egyptians burned it to the ground. But during those five days of resistance Tel Aviv was saved from being overrun. The stubborn defense at Yad Mordechai gave Tel Aviv time to bring in reinforcements and firm up the defensive line on the road between the city and Gaza.

On May 31 the Haganah merged with the Irgun and Stern Gangs to form the Zahal, the Israel Defense Force, and this new combined force was hard pressed to keep the Egyptians from breaking through in the south on the road to Tel Aviv. Two Egyptian troop transports and a warship were turned back by an air attack as they drew near to the city.

On June 11, a truce called by the United Nations went into effect and lasted until July 9. In nearly one month of war Israel had lost 900 soldiers and 300 civilians.

• * * * *

With the death of Ed Conley, the DECON director Earl Roland put all thoughts of torturing Robyn out of his mind and tried being friendly with her for a change. He found it to be a far more lucrative course.

One time he showed Robyn his pride and joy, the electronic computer with 20,000 tubes DECON used to maintain its data base of potential subversives. Robyn complained the room was too hot.

"Those tubes you're using use too much power," she said. "They're too big. How many do you have to replace every day?"

"Too many," he admitted.

"There's a better way to make an electronic switch," she said. "Germanium, or silicon, with gold foil contacts. You can make a voltage-controlled resistor. Tell your research boys that, see what they come up with."

Roland did indeed tell his people about Robyn's suggestion, and in a few months they created the first transfer resistor, or transistor, probably the most important invention of the 20th Century after the atom bomb. Not even Gorpai, which was at least a century ahead of the Earth in technology, had embarked on a digital revolution.

Robyn's suggesting kick-started what would later be known as Moore's Law, where transistors would be halved in size every eighteen months, until by the close of the century IBM was offering an eight million byte thumb drive, and no end to the steady progress of this technology was in sight.

Unfortunately, Robyn saw no end to her captivity as well. But she knew her girls would never give up trying to bust her out, so the least she could do was avoid falling into despair.

• * * * *

During the first truce a new road was constructed to supply Jerusalem with food while bypassing an Arab strongpoint at Latrun that had not fallen after two fierce Israeli attacks, and would survive two more. The Arabs in turn built their own road to reinforce Latrun from Radar Hill, which allowed them to keep the fortress in Arab hands until 1967.

Between the first truce and a second one was ten days of fighting. The IDF captured Nazareth, the home town of Yeshua.

The second truce lasted until October 15, and was followed with one solid week of fighting against Egypt. On the first day Israeli warplanes bombed the Egyptian air base at El Arish on the Mediterranean coastline of Sinai, and cut the railway from El Arish to Rafa.

Some of the most intense fighting of the war occurred at the Arab village of Huleikat, surrounded by six fortified hills, and when the Israelis pushed through the road to the Negev was opened to them.

From thee they bypassed the stubborn Egyptian troops holding Faluja (who remained in place until the end of the war) and with just twelve hours remaining before the scheduled cease-fire, the IDF took Beersheba, the capital of the Negev region.

After the third cease-fire took effect on October 22, Lilith and the Polish settlers who took her in moved back into the ruins of Yad Mordechai. There would be renewed fighting in the winter, and a fourth and final cease fire, but Lilith judged the existence of her new nation was no longer in doubt. She told Hunky and the other girls she was ready to break Robyn free from her captivity.

• * * * *

"They're going to call this another Pearl Harbor," Dory said, from a mile directly above the DECON building.

"I think Robyn has suffered enough indignity," Lilith said as she flipped the switches that would release the bomb. "Let DECON learn who it really is they dare to hold hostage."

A phantomizer bomb was really something. It was the size of a ninety pound 105mm shell, but it weighed nearly a full ton. Water was packed into it in a superimposed phantom state, until its density was twenty times normal.

Water absolutely refused to be compressed. When it degenerated to a non- phantomized state it would seek its normal density almost instantly.

Detonation was simplicity itself. Impact destroyed the phantomizer. The shell penetrated the top floor of the six story DECON building and bounced off the fifth floor which was occupied entirely by the computer and it's air conditioning system.

Almost seven seconds later the shell exploded with a punch far above its weight, even its weight in high explosives. Its power approaching the destructive power of a fuel-air bomb. The top two floors of the building were essentially vaporized.

Fortunately, these two floors were not as thickly occupied as lower ones. Forty-nine people died instantly from the overpressure produced by the bomb, which caused organ failure by hydrostatic shock. Some were clobbered by debris, and others were flung off the building into the air.

Shrapnel from the blast blinded some people for life. It killed other people quickly by slashing their arteries and still others more slowly by merely opening veins until they bled out. There were eighty-six people who had to be dug out from collapsed debris on the fourth and fifth floors and few of these were unhurt.

Earl Roland was one of the lucky survivors. He managed to work himself free from a collapsed wall panel which had deflected most of the shrapnel. His office, on the fourth floor on the southwest corner of the building, was now torn in half, open to the elements.

The computer room and DECON file archives one floor above it had been utterly obliterated. Everything Roland had accumulated on the American power elite, all the embarrassing dossiers that he and his predecessor had compiled on nearly everyone with power in the United States was gone. For him, he knew, there could be no recovery from this disaster. He was a dead man.

Considered as an act of terrorism it was by far the deadliest in US history, not to be surpassed until the federal building bombing on Oklahoma City in 1995. Considered as an attack by a foreign element (Lilith), not since 1812 had the American mainland had suffered the like except for a few ineffectual shells fired by a Japanese submarine off the Oregon coast in WWII. But one thing was clear: by this one strike Lilith had changed the face of American politics forever.

With the total loss of his threat over the bureaucrats and lawmakers inside the Beltway, DECON was about to be subject to the scrutiny of congressional oversight to a degree that it never contemplated before. Soon the American people would be screaming for heads to roll.

But Earl remembered he still had Robyn stashed away in the basement levels of the building. As he picked his way down on the unstable debris he was thinking only of revenge.

He ordered two guards armed with plasma rifles to follow in his wake as he strode toward the cell where Robyn was being held. "We have a prisoner who will try to take advantage of what just happened," he told the men. "In our confusion she will try to escape. Despite giving her every warning to stop in her tracks, we shall be forced to shoot her. Do you follow what I'm saying, gentlemen?"

One nodded. The other said, "You make yourself perfectly clear, Mr. Roland."

• * * * *

Ron Primas, the Deputy Director, had been in the DECON complex when the bomb hit, but two levels under ground level, so he survived without injury, but the elevator shafts were damaged and blocked with debris, so negotiating to the surface required some backtracking and a stair climb. When he stepped over the broken glass and emerged onto the courtyard behind the building he got his first look at what had been done.

It was a bizarre thing to look at open sky where there had been the top two floors of a sturdy government building. The level below that was a smoking, jumbled pile of broken concrete, bent steel, and shattered glass. His mind had a hard time grasping the reality of it.

Even more unreal was the silvery flying saucer descending straight down from the sky into the debris of the partially intact fourth floor.

Ron Primas stepped back inside and went to the security command center roughly at the center of the first floor, where he said to the duty harried officer, "Lokken's friends are attacking while we are still confused by the blast. ThreatCon Yellow should have been set right after we got hit."

The officer turned to see who he was, recognized him, and said, "I'm sorry Mr. Primas."

"Don't apologize to me, go to ThreatCon Yellow!"

"Yes sir!" And yellow rotating lights began to glow and twirl in every space and corridor, signalling a higher state of readiness. Guards on every level of the South Cube took the safeties off their weapons and began to patrol their assigned routes within the building.

"Did the Director make it? Is he still alive?"

"Sir, the big board shows him to be in this complex."

"Show me."

The duty officer walked to one wall, pointed to the name Earl Roland, and translated the glowing orange neon numbers next to it, using a brand new and expensive type of vacuum tube that would be mass-marketed as Nixie Tubes five years later.

"He's in the stockade, sir. One floor beneath us. Cell 31."

"Checking up on our guest, I imagine. Very good."

• * * * *

The flying saucer was flown by Hunky, and carried Lilith officially as a passenger, but in truth she herself was ordnance no less deadly than that bomb.

After they landed, cockeyed, on the fourth floor, they both rendered the guts of the saucer into oblivion with their phantomizer blades, which in Hunky's case was a faithful copy of the Golden Gift. In Lilith's case, she had the original.

Lilith cut herself a hole in the floor to access the third level. She dropped into this hole, caught the edge with her hands to break her fall, then released her hands to drop the rest of the way. Hunky copied this trick.They did the same thing, floor after floor, until they reached the basement level where Jill said the DECON torture chambers were located.

• * * * *

"You fucking bitch!" Roland snarled as he started to unzip his pants. He told his two companion to hold her down so he could "get some."

He didn't feel inhibited by the presence of the guards, who wrestled her to the floor and sat behind her shoulders with her slender arms twisted and locked in their powerful arms. Lovemaking cries out for privacy but rape flourishes under mindless gang approval.

So Robyn was subjected to one final indignity, a rape, but only briefly, for Lilith and Hunky soon arrived, and Lilith screamed, "What the bloody hell?"

The two guards released Robyn and went for their own guns.

Hunky stepped in front of Lilith and blossomed her phantomizer blade to full umbrella mode, causing a great wind to start. She used this to absorb the bullets of the guards.

In a perfect dance, as though they rehearsed it, Hunky collapsed her blade and slipped behind Lilith again. And Lilith fired exactly two rounds, killing the two guards.

Then she cocked her rifle again and pointed it directly at Earl Roland.

"Stop!" Robyn told her, getting to her feet again. "He doesn't die here. Someone else will find him and do a far better job."

Orders were orders. So Lilith secured Roland's arms behind his back with wire and shoved him back into Robyn's cell.

"That's not so you escape, you understand," Robyn told him as she leaned over him to get his photo-badge with its unique pattern of holes punched into it. "They will find you no matter where you go. That's so you don't take the easy way out before they do. And I am confident that when they do, I will be suitably avenged for the rape."

On the way out Robyn asked Hunky, "Where's Joy?"

"Safe with your mother. In the Land We Don't Know."

• * * * *

Ron Primas was actually glad the records on the top floor and the computer floor one level down had been blown away. Roland had held those images of him having sex with another man over his head. Now the blackmail was be over. Turning to the duty officer, he said, "Give me a visual of cell 31."

What he saw was a blood-smeared corridor with two dead security guards, and Roland alive but hog-tied and left on the floor of the cell.

"God damn it! Go blue!"

At the orders of Primas the yellow rotating lights ceased and blue lights came on throughout the undamaged floors of the DECON building. On the intercom the duty officer said, "SECURITY ALERT, THREATCON BLUE. REASON FOR SECURITY ALERT, ESCAPED PRISONER. TARGET IS A CAUCASIAN FEMALE NAMED KIM SHY BEAR. DETAIN ALL SUSPECTS. DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED."

Now the highly compartmentalized DECON building began to slam down tight and no one could move after two minutes. Airtight doors slid shut. Elevators locked on their tracks. After two minutes everyone should be at their posts but there were always laggards.

For the next fifteen minutes then only the DECON Internal Police could move. Individually and in squads they fanned out through the complex taking names and questioning tardy personnel. If their excuses were halfway valid they would personally escort them to their units. If their excuses were lame, there were always guys aspiring to be just like Ed Conley, with their gadgets.

Earl Roland had clearance to move about in ThreatCon Blue. And Ron Primas had no idea Robyn was using his badge to move freely about the complex.

They ascended one level up a partially painted stairwell that was empty of personnel and looked to be little used. Still, the swipe of Roland badge to open the door at the top of the stairs registered on the Big Board.

"What's that movement?" Primas wanted to know. The duty officer didn't wait for him to spell it out this time, and quickly put up a visual of the corridor Robyn, Hunky, and Lilith were entering from the stairwell. "Aha! There she is!"

And as the three passed under the security camera and out of view Primas got a good look at Robyn, who held up Roland's badge and stuck her tongue out. He was incensed. "Go to ThreatCon Red! Now! Shut it all up tight!"

The blue lighting shifted over to all red, everywhere. Now none of the doors in the complex would work at all unless Ron Primas personally authorized it from where he was, on a case by case basis. He pointed at a section of the Big Board where the a force of ten security men were now trapped in a section of corridor. He said, "Get ahold of these guys and tell them to drop two levels and work their way east. Release the doors in front of them in such a way that they run smack into where the Shy Bear girl is trapped. No one else moves."

"Yes sir!"

After a few minutes the duty officer was scratching his head and having trouble. "If the Director is in Cell 31," he began, puzzled over the anomaly, "what's he doing making his way to the helicopters?"

Ron's mouth flew wide open. Not so much at what he said, but at his belief that his stupid computer panel, tracking thousands of ID badges, had more substance than reality itself. Roland was tied up? No, there's his name and the numbers are still changing. "Get me a view of that corridor!" he barked.

It was Robyn, Hunky, and Lilith, proceeding out of the building as rapidly as before. They were cheeky. Very cheeky.

"Seal them in there!" he screamed. "Purge their access from the system!"

"My apologies, sir, but Mr. Roland had unrestricted access anywhere in the Complex. It's hardwired in!"

• * * * *

The DECON building was built on a gigantic concrete platform that was flush with the parking lot on the west side but stepped down vertically on its east face with eight large four-story high helicopter hangers opening on a large landing area. Here was where DECON's dreaded Sikorsky H-5 "Black Helicopters" were maintained and stowed. Robyn noticed that close up they weren't really black at all, but dark green.

A small company was guarding the hanger Lilith and Robyn emerged out into, about fifty alert troops. Lilith squeezed Robyn's hands to assure her, then stepped out to try a supreme bluff.

"Report!" Lilith snapped to the company commander.

"Lieutenant Ross, Ma'am. Hangar Six all secure. All personnel present and accounted for." He did not question her IDF sergeant's uniform or her British accent. After all, it was THREATCON RED. If she was still moving around, then she obviously had the authority to do so no matter who she was. But Hunky's Yankee baseball uniform raised eyebrows.

"Do you recognize this civilian?" she barked, pointing at Robyn.

"Yes Ma'am, it's Kimberly Shy Bear."

"The alert was called away because Director Earl Roland is dead," Lilith told him. "The enemy is already here and they want the Shy Bear girl. Do you understand?"

"Yes Ma'am!"

"They will try to get Mrs. Shy Bear come hell or high water as you Americans say."

"I understand the danger, Ma'am."

"Then I turn her and this other prisoner over to you, lieutenant."

"What?" Robyn wailed as Lilith turned away, thinking that this was some kind of double cross. But Lilith looked back again, her attention caught by the appearance of the company commander's M-1 rifle. She came strolling right back and ordered the man to present arms.

Lilith did a thorough inspection of the exterior, with sarcastic military flair. Then all kidding aside, with practiced motions she broke the weapon down to it's component parts while muttering "Mm-hmm...mm-hmm..."

Finally she turned back to the officer. "Lieutenant, tell me why is there light machine oil all over everything in your rifle except where it belongs?"

"Ma'am, I have no explanation."

"How about your men? Round them up. Let's have a quick personnel inspection."

They left their posts in the nooks and crannies of the hangar and formed up on Lilith's makeshift parade grounds right in the middle of the hangar. Lilith, Robyn, Hunky, and the company commander got halfway down the first rank before Lilith stopped and shook her head sadly. "Lieutenant this is a major safety hit. I won't have any of your soldier's half-assed work, inspired by you, causing a hang fire."

"My apologies, Ma'am. I can offer no excuse."

"If this was a drill I'd let it go. But this is ThreatCon Red! It's the real thing! Instruct your men to disassemble and quickly clean their weapons. Handguns too! Everything!"

"Yes sir!"

"It's a disgrace. And in front of civilians too! Tell you what, Lieutenant Ross. I'll make you a deal. I won't report this."

"Thank you, Ma'am."

"But I am going to take the Shy Bear girl and her friend to Hangar Seven. For their own safety."

"I understand, Ma'am."

Robyn, Hunky, and Lilith were all the way across the hangar floor when the squad of ten security men finally caught up and entered, anxiously looking for them.

What they saw defied belief: Lilith was using Roland's badge to start rolling up the large hangar door leading outside to the landing pad. And fifty soldiers had let them slip past them because they were all sitting flat on the floor, legs spread out, with their weapons disassembled in tiny pieces all around.

Primas was watching it all on the monitor. He screamed for an override on the door, and got it. The door began to shut again after opening only three feet.

The bursts from the ten security men's rifles began to hit around them, some very closely. Under fire, Robyn, Hunky, and Lilith dropped and rolled under the closing hangar door just before it slammed shut.

They were safe for perhaps one minute.

The third and last remaining saucer arrived on the landing pad, piloted by Jill and Dory.

"I was about to give up on your ass," Robyn said as she and Lilith sat in the webbing slung across the central core. With five women aboard it was crowded, and too heavy to hover as an air gulper. But Jill had a little water in the tanks and used that.

Their stomachs clenched as the saucer accelerated sharply upward, and the ground dropped quickly away.

"I had the little matter of a war to attend to first," Lilith told her. "But I am glad you are safe, my good friend." And she gave Robyn a kiss. Jill didn't see it. Dory did, and she smiled.

Jill set them down at a nearby baseball field where two identical white sedans were waiting. Lilith jumped in the one sedan and took off east while Robyn took the other one and drove west. Jill and Dory flew away in search of water for the saucer. Not until Robyn managed to get herself onto Highway 50 did she start to relax but the girls had come through for her this time. She was free.