The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [131]
“They never use electricity,” said Montalban, “because it makes them too easy to track. That fact is making me, and my big correlation engine here, into the largest electronic-warfare target in a hundred kilometers. There are Chinese hunter-killer teams wandering out there, with who knows what kinds of weaponry. They use the local civilian populations for target practice.”
For the first time, Montalban’s bodyguard spoke. He spoke in a stiffly proper Beijing Chinese, and he spoke to Sonja. “This man said, in English, ‘hunter-killer teams.’ ”
“Yes, he did say that, sir,” Sonja told him.
“Red Sonja, you should tell your friends in Jiuquan not to send any more ‘hunter-killer teams’ into these steppes. Because we hunt them and we kill them.”
“May I ask your name, sir?”
“I am Major General Cao Xilong, director of the army’s General Political Department.”
“You were a very able ideologist and military political thinker. You were a legend in your field.”
“That,” said Cao Xilong, “is why they have assigned me to oversee these fat Californian subversives in their ridiculous hats.”
Montalban looked on, smiling benignly. Foreign languages had never been an American strong suit.
Sonja smiled politely at Cao Xilong. “May I inquire why your colleagues found it necessary to attempt to liquidate me with a flying bomb?”
“Yes. That matter is simple. We cannot allow the doomed Chinese regime to unilaterally impose their first-strike capacity against us. Political violence and war must be reinscribed into the geographies and architectures of cities in ways that—while superficially similar to feudal Chinese walls against roaming Mongols—inevitably reflect contemporary political conditions. Important here are these distinctions.”
Major General Cao Xilong paused heavily, mentally searching for something he had memorized from a screen.
“•First, the demonstrated ability of the Jiuquan Space Launch Center to rival us in flourishing under postapocalyptic conditions.”
The general was actually speaking aloud in bullet points. Sonja had never heard such a thing done before. It was deeply alarming.
“•Second, the seamless, ubiquitous merging between security, corrections, surveillance, military, and entertainment industries within China, making conventional urban-guerrilla warfare useless.
“•Third, the proliferating range of postglobalist private, public, and private-public bodies legitimized to act against nation-states, among whom we of the World Provisional Survival Empire must number ourselves.”
The general stopped counting his fingers. “Contemporary cities are particularly vulnerable to focused disruption or appropriation, not merely of the technical systems on which urban life relies, but also to the liquidation of key human nodal figures who serve as the system’s human capital.”
The general then raised a fingertip. “The worst threats among those state running dogs are provocative figures who foment new relationships emerging from the long-standing interplay of social and urban control experiments practiced by the state elites against the colonized posturban peoples. Through continually linking sensors, databases, defensive and security architectures, and through the scanning of bodies, these running dogs export the state’s architectures of control.”
Sonja nodded. “I see. That’s all very clear.”
The general blinked, once. “You can follow our reasoning?”
“Yes I do. I know what you were doing when you tried to kill me, and the Badaulet. You wanted to kill our love.”
Cao Xilong said nothing.
“You didn’t need to kill me personally. I’m a former holy terror, but I’ve done nothing to you. You didn’t need to kill him, either. He’s just another cannon-fodder hero. But you did need to kill the pair of us, at the same blow, because we are together. You wanted to kill our love for each other, to keep us separate and polarized, because our love is dangerous to your plans. That’s