"Division HQ to Squad Bravo Eight, Bravo Eight, come in, over."
"Division HQ, this is Bravo Eight, go ahead."
"Our aerial surveillance has four civilians in your sector. Report your current position, over."
"Oh, sh...Uh, we are at coordinates on master grid 114 north by 31 east, over."
There was a few seconds pause.
"Bravo Eight, civilians are at coordinates 116 north by 32 east, get to them immediately, over."
"Hey! Men! This way! Now!" Sergeant Brown bellowed, leading them back north and east at a jog. He lifted the radio and spoke into it again, at a run. It was difficult to hear over the sound of clattering flamethrower tanks. "I don't know how we could've missed them, HQ. We were just up there...Do they have suits? Over."
The squad had covered about half a block before the radio crackled to life.
"Uh, negative on that, Bravo Eight, civilians do not have suits. Lieutenant Gonzalez said they were 'standing around in the street'. Over."
"What a bunch of dumba...Uh, what do we have on spaspie positions?"
"Bravo Eight, there is a swarm heading for them, now! Move, now!"
"RUN!" bellowed Rembrandt Brown, leading his squad in an all-out sprint up the street. They had covered about a block when a huge, dark swarm began to pour around the corner and over the boarded-up store on the corner. Rembrandt hesitated; this was the kind of call he hated making. If he ordered his men to keep running, their suits would probably get them through all right; it usually took hours for the spaspies to eat through the hard suits. But sometimes suits were defective, or the spaspies got lucky. But if they locked in formation, the civilians would be dead before they could get there.
"No, keep 'em down!" he shouted as his men tried to raise their flamethrowers. "Move, move, move!"
"Bravo Eight, Division HQ, be advised that Lieutenant Gonzalez has clogged intakes, has had to retreat," squawked the radio, back on his hip. "We cannot provide intel on the situation, over."
Sergeant Brown, swearing a lot more than he ever had in his old life, even when it had all fallen apart, kept running. A few men paused a step or two to blast their flamethrowers at dense clouds. Spaspies swarmed him, coating his suit. Several landed on the Plexiglas of his face mask, and began trying to eat through it. Their horrible skittering legs, inches from his eyes, reached for him. He screamed and swore and waved wildly at them, crushing one against his helmet and knocking off the rest. More promptly landed. He knew it would take them days to get through that stuff, but that didn't really help.
"I HATE SPIDERS!" Sergeant Brown yelled to no one in particular.
They dashed around the corner. One man slipped on a crushed spaspie and had to be hauled up by two comrades. But there was no one in the street, just more spaspies. They were for some reason grouped over a random patch of pavement, but then they saw the squad, and came speeding in their direction.
"Standard formation! Fire on my call!" He barked out. "Now!" he added as his men hesitated. His words got through to them, and they began scrambling into a circle, M2A1-8's raised. Those outside crouched or knelt, flamethrowers a couple feet off the ground; a second ring took aim higher. Those inside the circle lofted their flamethrowers to various heights.
A few were starting to land on them, but Sergeant Brown knew that if they fired too soon each time, they would run out of fuel before reinforcements could arrive. He hesitated, one, two...
"FIRE!" he bellowed, much louder than necessary. Maybe his singing had gone nowhere, but he could still belt out, which seemed to be an important qualification for a sergeant. His men pulled their triggers, and clouds of billowing fire leapt from their tubes.
The M2A1-8 flamethrower was a modified version of the M2A1-7, which they'd used against human targets in Vietnam. It had a much shorter range, burning slower, but could be fired much longer without being refueled, which was much more important fighting spider wasps. The M2A1-7 gave you less than a minute of continuous flaming, but the new model could go five minutes without refueling.
"And off!" The fire ceased about a second and a half after it had begun. Continuing to fire just caused the spaspies to edge back away from the flames; the idea was to draw them in, then incinerate them. A couple men on the inside of the circle armed with heavy-duty flyswatters, according to procedure, lowered their flamethrowers and began whacking at the spider wasps already in the circle.
The spaspies swarmed in again.
"Fire!"
Flame leapt up, charring them to ash.
"And off!"
The spaspies were deadly and scary, but they weren't smart. You could do this a thousand times and the ones behind would never realize that they, too, would get incinerated if they tried to attack.
"Fire!"
Brown's radio crackled. "Sergeant Brown, HQ. What's your status?"
"Off! Corporal Vasquez, take over!" Brown yelled, then raised his radio to his mouth. Corporal Vasquez, his Hispanic face set and determined, began calling the bursts.
"HQ, this is...this is Sergeant Brown," he said, trying to get himself under control and not really succeeding. He was shaking uncontrollably and sweat was stinging his eyes; the pad on his forehead must already be soaked. "We found no civilians, no civilians, anywhere in the street. We're, uh, we're engaged with a big swarm, we need support! Over."
"Confirm, you found no civilians? Over."
"Yeah, there's nothing in the street, I don't know what the guy saw, but there ain't no - anybody here. Look, man, we need some help, we got a crapload of them on us and we ain't got no reserve tanks! Over."
"Roger that, Bravo Eight, we'll send some reinforcements your way. Over and out."
TWO WEEKS LATER
President Bill Clinton sat down at the conference table. He looked grim and haggard, but so did almost everyone else in the room. TV monitors showed footage (from automated cameras and Army flamethrower tanks) of spider wasps swarming over the lush crops of southern California, purposelessly attacking any animals they encountered, just flying away once their victims were dead. They had been designed to kill any and all pests, so they killed everything, even though doing so was completely useless to them.
"Well, people, it looks like Operation Angelic Firestorm is pretty much a failure," he said.
"I'd have to agree, Mr. President," his chief of staff said slowly. There had been some shakeups recently; people seeing that they were closing in on the only remaining alternative and not wanting to be there for it. She had only had this job for four weeks.
"The basic problem, Mr. President," said William Perry, Secretary of Defense, "is their sheer numbers. We simply do not have sufficient trained personell to sweep the entire California basin at once. Some of the waspers attack and are incinerated, but some go up to high altitude, where we have no way to target them, and bypass our attempts to make a stand." He examined his papers. "We swept Los Angeles and San Francisco twice. The spider wasps simply return as soon as the sweep is over, or are hidden in buildings and other structures. Then we implemented Angelic Firestorm. We subjected Los Angeles to incendiary aerial bombardment. The city is essentially destroyed, but the spider wasps were in there again as soon as the fires cooled, and most of the shelters within the city were rendered unusuable by the fire."
"Mr. President!" Mike Espy, the Secretary of Agriculture, barked suddenly. "This cannot continue! We have to use nukes. We have to use them, now!"
"Will," Clinton said to the Secretary of Defense calmly, trying to keep the team working together, "what is the status of Operation Fuss and Feathers?"
The name, from Winfield Scott, who had thoroughly conquered Mexico in 1848, had long since ceased to produce any snickers.
"We have done as much as we can do without announcing the plan, Mr. President," he said. "The Joint Chiefs have made a variety of plans: one assuming that we're getting support from the other nuclear NATO and aligned countries, one for support from them and former Warsaw Pact, and one for neither."
"We should be able to get the NATO support at the very least," Allbright, who had recently replaced the resigning Christopher, put in. "I wouldn't expect anything from Russia. They are in no personal danger, and they are still suspicious of our motives. But China's just as threatened by these things as we are. Worse, if anything, they're more southerly."
"I should point out," said the Secretary of the Treasury, "that the sooner we stop this, the sooner we can resume trade through our southern ports. The entire Gulf of Mexico and all of California up to about 35 degrees latitude are, essentially, embargoed. No one will accept shipments from those ports."
"But what do we do with the Mexican refugees?" Clinton asked. "The Republicans are all over me about that. They say I'm letting the South be conquered, or something like that. I've even heard accusations that I'm deliberately trying to wipe out the southern states because they vote Republican. None of it makes very much sense."
"If Mexico is rendered uninhabitable, permanently, they will have nowhere to go," said Mr. Reich, Secretary of Labor. "We cannot assimilate them, no one else will be willing to accept them in large numbers, and it is creating an immense strain on our resources supporting them."
"How bad is it?" Clinton asked.
"Well," the Treasury secretary admitted, "it's bad. We were hoping for a surplus in '98 so we could start paying down the debt. Now, with that, the military operations, and all the lost revenue, I'm trying to find a way to keep the deficit down to a few hundred billion."
A silence followed.
"Could we just sit tight and wait this out?" Shalala suggested finally. "That is, these things cannot survive less than 55 degrees, so they've expanded pretty much as far as they'll be able to."
That was enough to trigger a chaotic argument. Everyone began shouting at once, mostly in opposition to the idea. President Clinton let this go on for a few seconds, then began demanding quiet, which ensued.
"All right, Mr. Babbitt. What is wrong with this proposal?"
"First of all," he said angrily, "those things can fly quite a distance. They couldn't have sustainable populations in those latitudes, but they could get as far north as, I don't know, I-70 in the summers. We can't abandon that much of the country to these things."
"Economically infeasible," Treasury agreed.
"We couldn't produce enough food," Agriculture opined.
Silence fell again.
"Fuss and Feathers, then?" President Clinton asked finally. "But I still cannot find a solution to the refugee problem."
"Mr. President," Defense said hesitantly. Clinton nodded at him. "This is still all very speculative, and it could all be completely wrong. But there was an incident in San Francisco that we think indicates that it is possible. We have consulted various physicists and they think that it might be possible."
"That what might be possible?"
"Well, uh, Mr. President, this is going to sound insane. Our speculations indicate that we might be able to transport people to alternate worlds. A...multiverse is a consequence of superstring theory, and an implication of quantum mechanical equations is a kind of...bridge between universes."
"What is the evidence for this exactly?"
"Well, Mr. President, there was an odd incident during Operation Clean Sweep. An aerial surveillance plane reported seeing four civilians in the middle of a street. A squad immediately headed that way, but when they arrived, there was no one there. Even a solid mass of spider wasps takes five minutes, at least, to completely consume a person's body, and there was nothing. They called in backup and searched all the buildings around. There was no one anywhere. Then some researchers called and told us they had picked up these very odd bursts of radiation from the city, stuff at a cosmic ray energy level. It was almost exactly the same time, and at about that location, as close as they could triangulate. I'm told it's all consistent with a bridge across higher dimensions."
"How long would it take us to accomplish something like this?" Clinton asked, sounding suspicious but intrigued.
"Mr. President, that's a good question...I really don't have any way to know. There's a guy by the name of..." He shuffled his papers. "...Arturo, from England, professor of physics up in Oregon, thinks it might be possible. We also found some equipment and papers in an abandoned house in San Francisco that indicate someone was working on this. The guy's name was Quinn Mallory, he was a student at UCal, but we don't know where he and his mother went after the city was evacuated. He wasn't very far along, he seems to have been spending the last couple of months working on a chemical to kill the spider wasps instead of his project."
"I'll give the FBI orders to help find him. I take it we're keeping this classified?"
"For now, yes, Mr. President."
Clinton sighed, then stared into space, thinking, for a long time. Finally he spoke. "We can delay Fuss and Feathers for a while. Defense, I want Arturo and Mallory to be found and brought here as soon as possible. I'll start making phone calls about Fuss and Feathers. Get the Mexican government in exile in here in an hour."
He stood up, signaling the meeting was over. Everyone began to get up and leave.
"God," Clinton said to himself, "I wish all I had to deal with was something simple. Like Lebanon. I'd even take being impeached for, I don't know, lying under oath, over this."