Fantastic Hope - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,3

posts from dummy accounts, and emails sent from internet cafés and fake profiles. The first one we knew about was nine months ago, and it wasn’t taken seriously—except in retrospect. It was directed at the government of India and was filled with political and quasi-religious histrionics. All about how the current world is corrupt and that overpopulation is proof of a deliberate desire to pollute and destroy the world. The viewpoint of the group amounts to the belief that humanity has become a kind of thinking virus on the skin of the living earth. What was once a symbiotic relationship, back when humanity could be counted in the tens of thousands, has been thrown out of balance by industrialism and overpopulation. The group consider themselves to be the voice of reason.

Their “reasonable” suggestion, sent via email to the heads of state of the fifty most populous countries, was for the leaders to initiate a lottery to pick ninety percent of their populations and systematically euthanize them. Failure to do so would result in the group launching a program of bioweapon releases. How they planned to do that, and where they would get these bioweapons, was something we were working on figuring out.

The limited releases were incentives. Kicks in the ass.

That’s why everyone with a gun was out hunting these freaks.

All we had for the group was a name—Silentium. Latin for “silence,” which didn’t tell us much. However, from the rhetoric in their messages it was pretty clear they were some kind of millenarian cult. Their rants were all about how mankind was corrupt and how a new age was going to dawn after the manufactured cleansing program. There were going to be seven years of violence, struggle, and death before the population was whittled down to a number in harmony with the earth.

Funny how these groups present a model of a societal golden ideal that is any rational person’s concept of a dystopia.

And the three of us seemed to be in the wrong damn place for the fight. Church said this was worth doing, and I had to take him at his word. But it felt like we were throwing punches at the wrong chins out here. Top and Bunny and I shared a long look, each of us knowing what was in the others’ hearts.

“Let’s get it done,” I said, “so we can go back to the war.”

The target was twenty-nine miles south by east from the LZ. We saddled up without a word and were gone.

3.

FINGER OF GOD OASIS

TéNéRé

SOUTH-CENTRAL SAHARA

As we drove, we each reviewed the intel. Details were sent to the left lenses of our Google Scout glasses, a proprietary bit of tech designed for Mr. Church by one of his friends in the industry.

Our destination was called the Lab. Nice and generic. Whoever owned it was doing a pretty damn good job of hiding behind fake identities and shell corporations. Had to be some money in play for them to swing that. Had to be some sophistication, too. Our computer team, headed by Bug, usually brushed aside most obfuscation, but these people were tricky bastards. Bug chopped through the underbrush all the way back to a nonspecific start-up in South Africa. There were no computer records of any kind to explain what they had started up to do. And the identities of the key players were nearly perfectly hidden, as Bug explained to us via radio as we drove.

“We tracked down two of the people involved,” he said. “Bongani Jiba, a woman from the Xhosa tribe, and Thabo Mahao, a man from the Sotho people. Jiba graduated from the University of Cape Town. Top of her class. Mahao earned a PhD in engineering from Stellenbosch University, having gone through school on a series of scholarships. Both of them are brilliant. Mahao’s family were carpet merchants and the Jiba family were bakers. No known political connections.”

“Anything suggesting they might be with this Silentium cult?”

“Nope. Not a whiff of that. No religious affiliation of any weight. No criminal records. And no clear connection between them.”

“Two black twentysomethings with advanced degrees from white-dominated schools,” mused Top. “Could have been radicalized on campus.”

“Yeah, maybe,” said Bunny,

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