I wrote this back around 1998 or 1999 on a rock discussion mailing list… found it again and decided to post it here for posterity… Obviously, some things have changed, but it was true to the spirit of the times. And I like it, so there.

******

Tony owns the name for Black Sabbath, right? Well, what would happen if he needed some cash and sold it off to the highest bidder, who then tried to put together a band made up of guys that had played with Sabbath before, even if he couldn’t get the original members.

So he can’t get any originals, but he finds Dio, Bobby Rondinelli, and Don Airey have somehow become available. Bob Daisley crops up as well. For a guitarist, he has some tough shoes to fill. It would have to be a top-notch guy (or at least someone with a reputation for being top-notch), who can play really loud… someone like… RITCHIE BLACKMORE!

YES! Ritchie Blackmore is the new guitarist for Black Sabbath. He’s got a very appropriate name for it, after all. The good news is that he’s used to being the boss of everyone else in this lineup, as they’ve all been in Rainbow with him. The new album title is, of course, “Ritchie Blackmore’s Black Sabbath Featuring the Rainbow All-Stars.” Dio quits after the release of the album and Joe Lynn Turner steps in to do vocals for the tour.

The tour set list includes:

– Death Alley Driver
– Smoke on the Water
– Mistreated
– Eyes of Fire
– Man on the Silver Mountain
– Blackmore Throws Down His Guitar and Storms Off the Stage as He Shreds His Japanese Tour Visa
– Really Awkward Silence…

Seeing as how #6 wasn’t planned, our enterprising owner of the Black Sabbath name has to get a guitarist to fill in for Blackmore. Satriani says he’d love to, but contractual arrangements prevent him from joining up. Joe Turner recommends Yngvie “Dare to Spell That First Name” Malmsteen, who steps in to critical praise, although the fans say it just isn’t the same.

Daisley and Rondinelli quit after the tour. For a bassist, Neil Murray gets recruited, who then recommends David “Duck” Doyle as a drummer. Don Airey leaves in confusion and Joe Lynn Turner decides to see if Blackmore needs a replacement singer in his new band. To make things worse, Malmsteen can’t get out of Sweden because nobody knows how to spell his name on his passport renewal form, so he’s out. Murray and Doyle hook up with Bernie Marsden and Mick Moody to cover guitar duties and approach David Coverdale about doing vocal duties. He accepts and Black Sabbath Featuring Whitesnake is born. (Geoff Nichols plays keyboards, but is not credited as a full band member.)

The tour set list includes:

– Come On
– Might Just Take Your Life
– Mistreated (including “Rock Me Babe”)
– Fool For Your Loving
– Rusty Angels
– Closer to You
– Rock’n’Roll Doctor
– Hard Road
– Space Trucking
– Encore: Take Me With You

The tour and album are moderately successful, but Coverdale leaves for a chance to work with Jimmy Page again. That doesn’t quite work out, so Jimmy Page comes to work with Black Sabbath. The band is recorded playing on a club stage in a movie, revealing some killer triple lead guitar work, but Marsden and Moody soon leave the band, citing irreconciliable musical differences. Coverdale loses interest and Murray and Doyle wander off. Page is left with the name of the band and before you can say, “deja vu,” has recruited some band mates for the upcoming tour of Denmark. The group is called “The New Black Sabbath” and includes longtime session man John Paul Jones on Bass, singer Robert Plant and Jason Bonham on Drums. They don’t have any set list, but just sorta wander around on the stage doing their own thing.

When Page discovers that Geoff Nichols is somehow still with the band (he hid in the tour baggage and played keyboards via a remote control device hidden inside his steamer trunk), he becomes disoriented and gets Puff Daddy to rearrange all the old Sabbath tunes and sell the re-arranged lyrics to Michael Jackson. Page then buys them back for half of what he sold them for and carries on with the band.

Jason Bonham, however, decides he’s had enough of this and so Robert Plant gets Phil Collins to play drums. When Plant subsequently leaves as the vocalist, Collins moves in as front man and Ian Paice from Deep Purple guests on drums. Collins and the rest of the band (except Geoff Nichols, who has taken to wearing an odd mask and hanging out in Paris sewers), decide they don’t really want to be in a band called “The New Black Sabbath Featuring Bits and Pieces of Bands That Never Were with Sabbath in the First Place”, leaving Paice in a very awkward position.

Legally required to tour under the Black Sabbath name, Paice gets the rest of Deep Purple to play in the band, and the clever lads decide to make a festival arrangement of the whole thing: Black Sabbath and Deep Purple in a co-headlining tour. The set list draws heavily from the “Born Again” album, with the bass and guitars mixed unusually low. Ian Gillan, when questioned about this, merely grins and mumbles something about “revenge” and “bass players mixing albums.” The tour is hugely successful in Europe, and plays to mid-size crowds in America. Things fall apart before the Japanese leg, though.

The breakup starts quite unexpectedly when Jon Lord decides to check why his keyboards keep making extra sounds during the concert. He nearly has a coronary when he realizes Geoff Nichols has hollowed out Lord’s Hammond Organ and has been living in it for the last 7 months, performing uncredited keyboard duties all the while. Unable to tour, Lord checks into a Florida beach for much needed rest and relaxation. When the other band members of Deep Black Purple Sabbath see Nichols’ wretched conditions, they, too, freak out and head for Daytona to join Jon Lord. Only Ian Gillan remains, being quite used to the sight of a tour-disheveled Geoff Nichols.

Still required to finish off the tour, Gillan gets former Sabbath bandmates Terry “Geezer” Butler and Bill Ward to fill in on bass and drums, respectively, and even convinces Tony Iommi to come out of semi-retirement and help finish off the tour. After the Japanese tour, Gillan leaves the band graciously, expressing a desire to join his bandmates in Daytona. Ozzy Osbourne fills in on vocals.

Before the next tour can begin, however, ownership issues raise their ugly head. Michael Jackson, it seems, still owns the performance rights to much of the Ozzy-era material and is unwilling to relinquish the rights for a resonable price. Having to tour to fulfill contractual requirements of their own, the newly re-united Black Sabbath Mark Id (Nichols is still with the band, in spite of being forced to ride on the outside of the airplane and tour bus), tour with the following set list:

– Neon Knights
– Lost Forever
– Mistreated (by now a Sabbath standard, thanks to Dio, Blackmore, and Coverdale)
– Bark at the Moon
– Waiting For Darkness
– Die Young
– Heaven and Hell
– Demon Alcohol
– Blow on the Jug (Bill Ward singing)
– Close My Eyes Forever (Ward and Ozzy duet)
– Smoke on the Water
– Encores: Flying High Again
– Crazy Train
– Dirty Women (Michael let this one go, claiming he didn’t like Technical Ecstasy all that much)

And they all live happily ever after until Ozzy decides to go solo again…

Vernon Washington punched the call button for a fleet car. Per regulations, he set his watch for atmospheric sampling. Planes were on fire, fuel dumps had been hit, who knows what else was fouling up the air? External drives in the pockets, camera in the contact lens, radio in the earpiece, everything else was ready for gathering information.

Vernon stepped out of Terminal D and into the waiting fleet car. “Datacenter, evasive.” Debris everywhere, smoke hovering over the eastern terminals, psyops staff walking around with man-portable loudspeakers, alarms sounding, fire and emergency crews everywhere… the only thing missing from the scene were the screams of the mourners. Vernon wasn’t in that response crew, though. Those sights were for someone else’s nightmares.

The car made its way deliberately to the datacenter building. It was almost totally new, shining in its energy-efficient, up-do-date architecture. Vernon made a silent bet with himself about how many old problems were simply moved from the old DC into the new that were involved in this breach. He was pretty sure there were thousands of problems, but how many were involved in today’s disaster? Vernon counted on his fingers… five.

The car pulled up to the curb. Vernon got out and the car went to go park itself. A guy with a DFW staff badge was there to greet Vernon. “You the guy with [REDACTED]?”

Vernon tapped the badge above his left shirt pocket. “I’m a federal agent. Are you my escort?”

The guy went from cocky to sheepish in a flash. His name badge read “Edwin Lu”. He badged in and held the door for Vernon. Vernon rolled his shoulders and walked up to the reception desk. “Do you need me to sign in?”

“No, we’re just coming up to my office.”

Wrong answer, Edwin. Vernon stayed by the desk. “I wasn’t really asking. Where’s the visitor ledger?”

Edwin smirked in puzzlement as he produced a ledger. “You’re not auditing us, are you?”

“No, I’m not. But you probably should expect one very soon in light of today’s events. Security is all the rules, all the time, documenting when they’re bent or broken.”

Edwin’s expression indicated that the business culture here hadn’t been stressing security for at least some time…

As they approached Edwin’s cube, Edwin grabbed a chair out of a conference room. “This is more comfortable.” Vernon was thankful for the comfy chair, but felt a little uneasy about how the “Do not remove chairs from conference rooms” sign was ignored. Still, he only expected five problems for this breach.

“OK, Edwin, do you use a RADIUS server for authenticating your wireless devices?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s take a look at the configurations. See if there are any new entries on the MAC bypass list.”

“OK…” Edwin started up a console to look at the RADIUS server. “Uhm… how will I be able to tell if the entries are new? They’re all sorted alphabetically.”

“How about a change log?”

“Um, OK…” Edwin clicked on Tools > Security > Admin Log.

The screen filled up with times, dates, usernames, and changes. Edwin and Vernon leaned forward and squinted. As they read, another log entry popped up at the top of the screen. Vernon asked, “Do you have circular logging enabled?”

“Ah… well, I dunno.”

Vernon assumed that meant yes. “Copy all the admin log files to a backup directory. Now.”

“Well, we do backups every night at 3 AM.”

“This is different. Copy them now. As in now.” Vernon didn’t want to say NOW: it was better for the working relationship if he didn’t go all caps on the guy. “It’s for forensics.” Vernon felt better when he added the why.

“OK then, just a sec.” Edwin went to the directory on the RADIUS server where the logfiles were kept and did a CTRL+A CTRL+C move and then did a CTRL+V to copy them to his local PC. “Yeesh. This is gonna be a while.”

“True. But now we have a copy of them from this time.” Vernon looked at the three newest entries in the logfile. They were identical, each 90 seconds apart. Unable to reach device at 10.9.177.12. Most likely a switch or wireless controller that had been deactivated long, long ago and nobody bothered to tell the RADIUS server. “Edwin, any way we can filter those out?”

“Well… I only know how to find stuff in this interface, not unfind them.”

“All right then, page down. We gotta read this over until we know what we’re looking for.”

“Why not check the SOC for unauthorized access events?”

“Because I’m betting dollars to donuts this is authorized access.”

“What, one of us did it?”

“Keep it down, Edwin. I’m not accusing anyone. I have no data, for starters.”

Page down. Page down. Page down. Page down. Those 90-second intervals really pile up, don’t they?

Hang on… “OK, highlight that.” Vernon pointed at a line on the screen that had nothing to do with 10.9.177.12. Edwin clicked on it, putting a nice blue tint on the text. The text noted that WANNA.SAMUE added a few addresses to the MAC bypass list.

The voice said in Vernon’s ear, “We’re getting it just fine. Maintain distance.” Good, the camera was working.

Edwin asked, “Sam did this?”

“Who’s Sam?”

“One of the security admins. Sam Wannamaker. That’s his account.”

“OK, noted. But let’s not jump to conclusions. That’s his account, probably wasn’t him. Look at the timestamps on those events.” Those addresses were added around 6:15 AM, last Saturday. “This guy Sam, when does he usually work?”

“9 to 6, like most of us. We didn’t have any changes scheduled for Saturday.”

“Is he in today?”

“Yeah, you want him?”

“Not yet, what’s the IP of where Sam logged in from?”

Edwin scrolled to the right on the logfile display. 10.1.1.15. “That’s our jump box for DC access.”

“OK, we need to check the event log on that box for where someone logged in with Sam’s account.”

“You want to do that now?”

“Yes, now. Can you hit that box from here?”

“Sure, just a sec.” Edwin fired up an RDP session to 10.1.1.15. A little while later, he had the event viewer up and filtered for logon events. 6:15 on Saturday showed that WANNA.SAMUE logged in from 84.246.99.90.

“Hold the screen there, sir.” Vernon awaited the voice in his receiver.

“That’s the University of Zagreb Computing Center.” Thank you, voice.

Chances were, Sam wasn’t in Croatia over the weekend. And whoever was in Zagreb or connected to a device in Zagreb, that was for the people next to the voice in the earpiece to resolve. Vernon was here to document what had gone on at DFW. For that, he asked Edwin, “Do you guys remote in to this jump box normally?”

“Yeah. Makes it easy for us.”

“Do you VPN in for it?”

“Well, no, not always. Our choice of VPN differs from your choice of VPN and so, has been really unstable for the last, like, year… and we don’t always want to have to drive in to do work.”

“So…?”

“So it’s opened up on the firewall.”

That was one. Sam’s account was two, dollars to donuts. “Let’s go see Sam. He sit near here?”

“He’s two rows over.” Edwin led the way. When they arrived, “Hey, Sam, this is…”

“Vernon Washington.” Let Edwin give the rest of the info.

“Vernon Washington, a federal agent. He’s here investigating, the, uh, thing today.”

Vernon smiled. “Hi Sam. I want to get directly to the point. Can we take a look in your email?”

Sam was too confused to be scared about that question. “Umm, OK.” Sam brought up his email client. “What do you want to look for?”

“Can you search for emails with links in them?”

“Ummmmmm… yeeaaaaaah… yeah. Here we go.” Sam typed the filter into the search box. Tons of marketing emails popped up in the results.

“We need to look at all of these, from before this last Saturday morning. Say before 7am.

“OK.” Sam’s cooperation was pretty natural, not typical for a suspect. Which made sense, since Vernon didn’t suspect Sam the man. Just Sam the account.

The procedure was straightforward: look at the link in the email. Ask Sam if he clicked on it. Hover over the link and see if it goes to where the email claimed it would go. If nothing noteworthy came up, move on to the next email. As it turned out, Sam ignored almost all of the marketing stuff. Lots of looking, lots of scrolling…

Then there was the email from Rhonda, the group coordinator. Sam had clicked on the link and the hovering mouse said it was to an IP address that was nowhere inside the company.

The voice in the earpiece said, “Nothing there now, but it was in Argentina.”

Vernon counted the third problem. No spear phishing training. Or if there had been training, Sam here was in the 1% of computer users that training had no effect on. Sam had clicked on the link, provided a credential, someone used it to try the RDP box open to the Internet, got in and set up the MAC addresses of the grenade launchers to be permitted on the wireless network… and this jump box would also be a likely point of origin for the signals sent to the passenger vans and grenade launchers alike.

Two more openings to find.

First, Vernon collected pertinent files on his external drive. As he made the copies, he asked, “Who’s in charge of the passenger vans?”

Sam and Edwin looked at each other. Sam said, “Facilities?”

That wasn’t going to get anywhere. “How about the IP range for the vans?”

Sam clicked around and brought up the IP management interface. A few more clicks and he had the answer. “10.100.100.0/24.”

Vernon asked, “How about doing an SSH to an address in that range?”

Sam tried. He got a connection refused error message.

Vernon groaned inside. “Try telnet.”

When that made a connection, Vernon asked Sam, “Do you know the username and password to use?”

“No.”

“Try admin/admin.”

Sam typed and got in. Everyone felt ashamed that it had worked, and on the insecure telnet protocol, to boot. Vernon figured whoever was able to send commands to the vans didn’t even have to try – just being in the area would allow anyone to get an unsecured copy of everything sent to the vans. Not just the default, unchanged username and password, but also the commands used to maneuver the vehicles. Pretty darn handy.

And that default credential set was problem number four. One more to go, and that would be no limitation on what devices could send commands to the vans. Obviously, that was wide open.

There wasn’t much more Vernon could do. He made some small talk with Sam and Edwin, handed out cards, asked them to contact him if they had any more informa- say, the lights were flickering.

Then they went out. The air conditioning also cut out. But the computers and monitors didn’t. Vernon made a guess that the power wasn’t cut – something else was getting messed up.

Edwin asked, “What the hell’s going on?”

Vernon made a guess. Given the state of security there, it was a pretty good guess to make. “You guys got licensed hardware?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, check your licenses. Betcha someone’s zeroed them out. You really need to change those default admin passwords.” Vernon figured he’d gather some more data while he was here. It wasn’t his first license blasting case to investigate, that was for sure…

The man opened his laptop and entered his password. His hard drive spun and programs flicked back on. The laptop re-established its network connection – wired only, the man didn’t trust wireless – and packets began to flow between his PC and the rest of the world. One consequence of that traffic was a notification that he had new email. The man noted that, while he had 12 new emails in his inbox, he had 2 in his “Action Items” folder.

As he was about to open the folder, he heard a crash of dishes from the kitchen. Without getting up, he demanded, “What is going on in there? Is anything broken?”

“Maddie opened the dishwasher too hard!”

“Nu-uh!”

“Uh-huh!”

The girls continued to argue as the man minimized his email and went into the kitchen. His voice was probably too stern for the occasion, but the man was under pressure. He had action items to address. “Get the dishes done, and get them done quietly. I am very busy and I don’t want any noise. Maddie, be more careful when you open the dishwasher. Laney, you are the older sister, so you should keep a better eye on Maddie and help her more.” The girls were about to cry. The man’s heart softened. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have yelled like that. I love you all. Let’s hug.”

And so, they hugged. Maddie, Laney, and the man resolved their issues through reassuring human contact and then went back to work. The girls on their dishes, and the man on his action items.

He first opened a text file. Then he opened the action item emails. In turn, he copied the contents of the emails and pasted them into the text file. Then he deleted the emails. Then he emptied out his deleted items folder. The man knew that this wasn’t a complete deletion of that information, since a digital ghost of it existed on his local hard drive, in addition to whatever the [REDACTED] picked up in its [REDACTED] program. And, since the emails came from Minsk, there were other agencies besides [REDACTED] that would have their copies.

But the data in motion on the Internet and the data at rest was encrypted, so the man knew that nobody would try to break into it unless it was on somebody’s radar, and that wouldn’t be until someone put the pieces together to a very difficult puzzle. After all, it wasn’t against the law to receive emails from Minsk.

That was the fun part about the United States legal system. The whole thing was built around either catching someone in the act of committing a crime, or amassing enough evidence to prove that a criminal act had been committed by a particular criminal. Just as corporations were more efficient at doing business than single proprietors or partnerships, they were also more efficient at committing crimes: no single person did anything that, of itself, was a crime. Instead, the actions of dozens of people had to be connected in order to demonstrate a pattern of behaviors that produced criminal activities. But could the law catch those people? Or did it want to keep to the easier crimes?

The man laughed to himself. Wall Street got the King’s Pass to perpetrate financial crimes on a grand scale, while those mom-and-pop operations, be they corner grocers or corner meth labs, got crushed by legal regulations and the big boys alike.

The man knew he was part of a big operation. He just didn’t know what it was. He liked doing the work. Criminal operations tended to be very libertarian and very agile. He felt empowered to make decisions, was glad his compensation was 100% salary, and had access to the best tools money could buy. The man didn’t need to submit expense reports but did so, anyway, as part of his cover story. The best part was that the cover story was no cover at all – he really [i]was[/i] an IT security consultant that worked from home.

There was the matter of who, exactly, the employer was. The man did not know and did not care. It was like the Algerian FLN. The man got messages from one source and sent his messages to another source. Given the level of obfuscation between the sources, the man felt it highly unlikely that he would meet the same fate as the FLN in Algiers after the French forces broke into the movement’s structure and methodically tracked down each cell.

Time was money. The girls had finished their post-lunch chore and were watching purple dinosaurs engaging in situational ethical discourses with red furry monsters or something like that. The man returned to his task.

The text file showed a list of IP addresses with notations beside them, a handy comma in between the addresses and the comments, in case he needed to view the information as a spreadsheet. The man just liked the text file because it loaded faster.

The information came from the boys in Minsk that scanned and probed IP address ranges. They asked no questions and desired no answers. They just ran their NMAP scans and followed up where they found interesting things, like open RDP ports or SMTP relays, both of which were of interest to the people that had employed the man to use that information.

The man was involved because some people were interested in employing someone with very good English language skills to send emails to some native English speakers. Since the man was both a native English speaker and in possession of an email client, he was a perfect fit for the job. The man also knew a thing or three about how to customize search strings and gathering intel from social media networks.

The man started to scroll through faces and resumes of men and women that worked at the two airports mentioned in the action items. Open RDP ports at DFW and LAX meant his employers would gain remote access to IT systems at those airports if they knew the accounts and passwords to use. Brute force attacks would fail, generate alerts, and generally lead to undesired consequences. The man disparaged such methods, as his were far more elegant and productive.

And that’s where the SMTP relay came into play. Thanks to small businesses constantly starting up, there was an infinitely regenerating supply of unsecured email servers that would allow anyone accessing them to impersonate anyone else with only a minimal knowledge of how to configure an email client. Yes, it could also be done from a command-line interface, but the man needed to send rich content with links and documents – it was a total pain to try and cobble those together in a command-line environment. The man hated programming and wanted to be as far from it as possible, preferring to send his carefully-worded emails from a GUI. It was simply more elegant that way.

As the girls shifted from animated philosophy to that damn game with the irritating soundtrack, the man tried to block the annoying tune from his consciousness as he looked over org charts for DFW staff assignments. The link to those PDFs had been deleted, but not before Google found it, indexed it, and indexed the document so linked, which was still open to the Internet even if the page that once linked it was now a 404 page not found…

And there she was! The man had the name he needed. He highlighted it, pressed CTRL+C, went back to the text document and –

– he saw his wife pulling into the carport. She was back from the grocery store, so the man knew he only had seconds. He clicked at the end of the text block, hit CTRL+V, then comma, and then “admin asst dfw”. CTRL+S saved the info and Windows+L locked his laptop.

The man got up to open the door for his wife, who had two handfuls of plastic bags. She said, “There’s ice cream on the back seat. And milk. Get that first.”

Once the groceries were in, the man went back to his PC while his wife put away groceries and got the girls started on sorting laundry. A password later, and he was ready to get started on his background research for his first email. Rhonda Emerson had a number of promising interests, wine tasting the most promising of them all. It was most promising because the man already had a bogus wine tasting club website set up, along with websites that dealt with beers, cigars, whiskeys, chocolates, travel, running, golf – all the vices. Funny thing was, a username and password to get into one would get into all of them, since they all had the same database driving them. The man didn’t mind. They were only there to gather usernames and passwords.

The best part was the follow-up email. That potentially gave him one of the most important pieces of information: the business email signature of his target. If the target didn’t put a sig on replies, he had another ruse to get the target to send a new email, but most people had a sig on every email.

Rhonda Emerson must have been thinking about the weekend, because that email and account info showed up awfully fast. The man copied and pasted the sig into a draft email that was going to bounce off the relay and into the inbox of one of the people that she served as an administrative assistant/coordinator to.

Hello Ryan,
Harvey Wright would like us to update his SharePoint with all the accounts we use for access to jump boxes, network gear, servers, etc. This is part of the Integrated Account Management initiative. The link to the SharePoint is here.

Kind regards,
Rhonda Emerson
IT Group Coordinator
214-555-1212

The man had composed this email in a second email client. In it, he specified the SMTP relay as his server and Rhonda’s address as the “to”. The man didn’t care about the replies. He just wanted the info to be sent to the SharePoint that was set up on a typosquatting website, and hoped that the admin would fall victim to the spear phishing.

Just to make sure, the man copied and pasted the email body to several other emails, each going to a member of the team that Rhonda supported – taking care to edit the name after “Hello”. The first one to submit the info would be the winner.

As things turned out, Samuel Wannamaker was the most prompt at supplying the information. He just posted the spreadsheet that he kept with all the system names, IP addresses, and shared accounts for getting into them. Thank you, Samuel.

The man got that info at 4:23. The wife leaned into the open doorframe and asked, “You almost done in there?”

“Just wrapping up a few things, hon.”

“You want to pick up something for supper? I’m tired.”

“Sure, what do you want?”

“Food. I don’t care. I’m going to go lay down for a while.”

“OK, I’d like to snooze a little myself before going out.”

“How about Chinese?”

“Sounds good.” The man started to drift back to work.

The wife moved into the foyer. “I’ll go ask Laney and Maddie what they want.”

As the wife asked the kids, the man already knew the answer. Chicken fried rice for Laney and beef lo mein for Maddie. He copied and pasted Samuel Wannamaker’s spreadsheet into an email from his first email client and sent it to someone who was interested in usernames and passwords for systems at DFW airport. The man didn’t know what exactly what was going to happen with that information, or the information he’d already collected for Atlanta or for the information he was about to collect for LAX. The man just planned on not flying anywhere for any reason for a few months.

The man responded to a few more emails and then watched a cat video on YouTube. Life was good, working for people that liked to collect usernames and passwords.

It was a busy day at [REDACTED]. Any day that four major airports experienced coordinated attacks would be a busy day at [REDACTED], given how it handled [REDACTED] for the entire [REDACTED] in the US of A. Shuttle van mortar attacks at LAX, DFW, and Atlanta; taxi car bombs at Reagan International. It was going to be a busy day for many, many days at [REDACTED]…

Dinah White left the briefing room and glanced at her tablet. Cube FR-227C. She was going to work with whoever was in that cube on DFW intel. Full network packet captures, courtesy of [REDACTED].

OK, FR-227C… that was on this floor… a check of cube numbers… and they’re going that way, so the cube is on the left. She turned left and walked past five rows, then turned right and went all the way to the last cube on the right, just before the wall.

The nameplate said “Chandni Kapoor.” Cool, another woman. Dinah did not spend much time contemplating this victory for women in the IT workplace because she had a job to do. So she knocked on the metal on top of the cube wall. Chandni finished the last two words of her email, sent it, and swiveled in her chair to face Dinah.

Dinah smiled. “You ready for this?”

Chandni nodded. “There’s nobody in the cube behind you, so you can grab that chair.” Dinah grabbed said chair and moved it into Chandni’s cube. Chandni fired up her Wireshark and loaded the capture file from the DFW Airport shuttle van SSID. It was a beast-size file, six hours of capture, 137 MB of TCP, UDP, EAPOL, ICMP, and beacon frames. This was no teevee show dealing with h4xx0rz. This was reality, all 137 MB of it.

And Chandni knew how to deal with it. “How do you want to slice this up? Hour by hour?”

Dinah had another thought. “I’d like to filter on a MAC address of one of the vans, see if we can find suspicious traffic, and then see if it matches on other van MACs.”

Chandni inspected her screen. She highlighted frame number 20. No particular reason. It just looked like a good frame to start with. “Start with this one?”

“Sure.”

Chandni right-clicked the destination MAC address and selected to filter on it. “OK, let’s get lunch.” They both laughed a little. This was going to take a while. Chandni didn’t like dead air. “Who do you think did this?”

Dinah shook her head. It didn’t pay to speculate at [REDACTED]. “No idea. I like to keep my mind clear. We don’t want a preconceived notion to color our results. We deal with the evidence that’s here, not the evidence we want to be here to prove our hunch right.”

Chandni looked a little beat-down. Dinah immediately regretted coming down like a hardass. “It could have been anyone, really. You know how these vans run, so you’ll tell me who did it, when you know. I’m just here to be another pair of eyes for management.”

Chandni smirked a tiny smirk. Dinah went for a closer. “And, hey, if you really want to find something in a mess, send two women, am I right?” That got Chandni to laugh and the working relationship on better footing.

Wireshark finished its work and then Chandni went to the filter field and typed in the || to add the condition to also filter on that MAC address as a source. Wireshark thrashed accordingly. Once the filters were complete, she exported the packets – about 2% of the total capture – to a new PCAP file. She closed the original file and opened up the much more manageable 3 MB capture.

There were still over 100000 packets, but that was much more preferable than what was packed into the original capture. Chandni started paging down through the packets, focused on source and destination addresses. It wasn’t three pages before she noticed something. “It’s all coming and going from that address there.” She pointed at the address in question. “What is that, the main control station or something?”

Dinah scrolled through her briefing materials on her tablet. “What are the last four letters in that address?”

“45CB.”

Dinah found an address that ended with those letters and squinted back and forth from Chandni’s screen to her tablet to confirm that, yes, it was a wireless tower. “Go ahead and cut that from the capture. Both source and destination. See if there’s an outside source sending instructions.”

Chandni filtered and then they both went through the remaining packets, filtering further on conversations with legitimate DFW towers. They got to the last 2300 packets, and they were all to and from the tower in Terminal D, where the van’s movement had been halted by an agent with an EMP gun that had happened to be on the scene. Chandni let go of her mouse and leaned back in her chair. “All the traffic was from the towers. Nothing outside.”

Dinah didn’t like that, either. Outside source of transmissions would have made things easier. She did not relish trying to sort commands from authentication and keepalive traffic in this stream and then seeing if there was a matching pattern in the other vans’ traffic. Ugh.

“Umm… what about the grenade launchers in the vans? When did they start firing?” Chandni had a great idea.

“Load up the main capture, and let’s take a look at the moment everything started firing. Better, chop off the last 20 minutes and look there. If the things weren’t integrated in the van systems, and I’ll bet they weren’t, I’ll say you’re right in about half an hour, when we see the commands.”

Chandni never loaded a massive capture file with more enthusiasm than she did at that moment. She went to the end of the capture, scrolled up to 1200 seconds before the time of the last packet, highlighted a frame, hit SHIFT CTRL END and became crestfallen when her keyboard shortcut-fu failed to highlight the packets she wanted to export.

She left the last packet highlighted, scrolled up to the packet 1200 seconds before the last one, SHIFT-clicked and got the right packets selected. Stupid Wireshark. Deep down, she knew the program wasn’t to blame, but, like everyone in IT, felt better about things when she cursed the computer.

Dinah read off known MAC addresses of the passenger vans and Chandni filtered them out, one by one, until only a few hundred packets remained. Communications to and from the grenade launchers. Chandni exulted, “High five!”

Dinah returned the gesture, taking special care to look at Chandni’s elbow, so as to not mess up the celebrations. But, in that moment of analytical-mindedness, she had a realization. “Hang on, how did the grenade launchers get on the shuttle van SSID?”

Chandni and Dinah pored over the re-authentication traffic that happened as the weapons moved between tower coverage areas. That traffic was more fascinating to them than the commands sent over the wireless to activate them. These things were getting RADIUS-Accept packets from the wireless controller, like they were supposed to be on that network. Who set them up with that kind of access? And the command and control IP address – that was somewhere on the inside of DFW sending the commands.

Filtering on the C&C IP address, Chandni showed it was the source of all the communications, vans and weapons alike. How did that get set up?

For all the network captures at [REDACTED], Dinah figured that not one of them would answer that question or any of the others that came up after the high-five. Someone was going to have to get into DFW’s RADIUS server setup and look over its settings. Hopefully, whoever permitted the weapons on the network didn’t erase the admin logs. And then, there was the matter of the C&C server embedded in DFW’s infrastructure…

But that was for someone else to dig into. Dinah kept focus. “Get the capture of the C&C traffic off to [REDACTED] and let them see if it’s a pattern anywhere else in [REDACTED] or anywhere else we’re [REDACTED] the routers.”

“Is it usable? I mean, it’s encrypted and there’s no guarantee the guy sending it didn’t use Tor or a randomizer on the order the packets were sent. Or stuff like that.”

“Oh, it’s usable. Have you had a class in side-channel traffic analysis?”

“No.”

Dinah smiled. “You should sign up for one. Amazing stuff. Everyone at [REDACTED] should take it. Be sure to get [REDACTED] as your instructor. I had him, and he’s [REDACTED].”

Chandni, thankful for the career advice nodded and said, “[REDACTED]” And then, she emailed the C&C traffic to [REDACTED] while Dinah placed a call to the lead agent on the scene at DFW.

Najib Khan saw it happen with his own eyes and still didn’t completely believe that it had happened. Not one, not two, not three or even four… at least ten… autonomous passenger vans with holes in their roofs, firing off a full magazine of grenades. He’d used a Mk19 grenade launcher before, fighting the Naxalites, so he didn’t have to count how many grenades each van fired off. It was either 32 or 48, most likely 48, given where he stood.

He didn’t stand long in his room in the DFW Airport Hyatt Regency, with its view of the gritty service roads and the parkway that ran through the middle of the airport. He was already in the hallway when he heard the first screams of horror and in the elevator before anyone hit the fire alarm. Let the others take the stairs.

It was obvious, so obvious… automatic grenade launchers in passenger vans. Nobody checks the shuttle vans as they go back and forth from the terminals to the remote lots. They’re so boring, so predictable, so beneath the contempt of the CISOs and security architects. When hackers hit, they figure, they’re going to come at us right through the firewall, you can bet your boots on that. Trouble is, when physical security is compromised, those vans are the weakest link in the security chain.

The elevator opened out to the lobby where there were people milling around, wondering if it was just a drill or the real thing. Most of the staff were disoriented, not expecting alarms to go off in the middle of the day. Nobody expects alarms. They’re either showing up once in a million years or so often they’re ignored. Najib made his way to the parking lot entrance, hoping to get out before somebody noticed the Muslim from India at the scene of a terrorist attack. If he took time to flash his badge, it would possibly mean the difference between life and death for some innocent.

Najib did a little math in his head as he jogged towards his rental car. If those vans were cruising at normal speed, they would have fired all their grenades over a length of 2 kilometers – two terminals, one grenade per 40 meters or so from each van. Ten vans meant a grenade every 5 or 6 meters, spread out over the length of the airport.

Najib’s car had been backing out to meet him. It stopped near him and opened a door. Najib got in and said, “Terminal E. Arrival gates.” He took a chance that the vans would double back into the airport after their southbound grenade run. Whether they were programmed or under remote control, it didn’t matter. Job one with a rogue vehicle was shutting it down before it went into a crowd like a vengeful bull in Pamplona. Forensics would figure out the how after men like Najib put an end to the what, thereby limiting the how much…

Najib rolled down his window and then reached for the large suitcase next to him. Just his luck, he was in Dallas to show his wares in a training session for a local cadre of federal security agents. Time for the live demo. He pulled out an EMP gun and put a suction cup on the back of his phone and mounted it so it would have a good view of whatever he took a shot at.

It would have been ideal for the rental to be able to go against the flow of traffic, but rentals were always sticklers for traffic laws regarding that sort of thing. But there was one edge he’d have over the passenger vans. A single word, uttered by a human. “Emergency.”

Now the thing would drive faster than permissible. Najib was in for a rough ride if a pedestrian stepped in front of his vehicle, but at least the walker would live. If the pedestrian avoidance system was deactivated in those vans, the same person wouldn’t stand a chance, even at low speeds.

Najib’s car pulled up near one of the vans in the arrival level. It was making straight for a family entering the crosswalk. Just in time. Najib yelled out “Slow!” and as the rental slammed its brakes to match the speed of the van, side by side, Najib fired his EMP gun at pointblank range. Two seconds of rattling electric sounds, and the passenger van failed closed, slowing down to halt gently in front of the crosswalk. The family had halted, not knowing what to do, and Najib barked out “Terminal C, Arrivals. Emergency!” Off the rental sped.

As the rental lurched around a corner, it came up directly behind a passenger van, leaving E on its way up to C. Najib waited until the road joined with the main artery and his car could pass it and then – whammo! Directional EMP at its finest as a second van rolled off to the side, immobilized.

As the rental entered the curve for Terminal C, Najib heard a collision and the tt-cheh, tt-cheh! sound of antipersonnel rounds ahead of him. Smoke rose from the arrivals area. Najib knew he was too late for Terminal C, so he shouted, “Terminal D, Arrivals, Emergency!” and the rental swerved away from what Najib knew would be a grim scene of twisted metal and bodies both crushed by the van and then ripped into by the flechette of the explosives.

The rental sped across the overpass to D and Najib could see more smoke coming up, both near and far. Given the density of the ordnance, it was likely that multiple planes were on fire along with their gates, luggage, and anyone unfortunate enough to be onboard. Further off, what was most likely a storage tank fire belched particularly acrid and odious clouds of doom.

But there was no time to think – Najib’s rental was pulling alongside another roofless van and Najib nailed it from 50 meters. It was stone cold dead by the time the rental passed it. Najib had one more shot and he wanted to make it count. Terminal D hadn’t been hit, and it was the furthest along from where the vans had been. The rental parked at an available spot near a pickup area and Najib rolled down the other window and shifted to fire out of the left side of the car. No van appeared, so Najib took a chance and moved his camera to cover that back angle.

Luck was with Najib, no question. Not ten seconds after his camera was in place, another van of death came around the curve. Najib saw the mines mounted on its sides and bit the inside of his lip. It approached at normal speed… 100 meters… 90… 80… 70… 60… good enough.

TATATATATATATATATATATATATA, and it was all over for that van. Four for four for Najib. That was all he could do, so he took his phone down and left his rental for the nearest security station to report on what he had seen and what he had done.

Given the state of alarm, Najib held his federal badge up high, as that was the best way to reduce the chance that a supervisor would have to explain to the FNG why it was best to not shoot at fellow government employees…

Dr. Negron-Omikon wrought his hands with unconcealed glee. “Well, H.P., you’ve outdone yourself this time!”

He gloated over acres and acres of tanks, robot tanks, that surrounded his observation tower. The testing had been a huge success and now his robot army was ready to smash into the Swedish army, fortified along the high banks of the Parana River.
How the Swedish army was on the Parana River, fighting the combined forces of the USA and Indonesia was a funny enough story in and of itself, but Dr. Negron-Omikon had no time for geopolitical musings. This was his moment, the zenith of his career, no doubt, and he was about to be rewarded handsomely for it.

General Ludd stood behind the gifted genius. “So, these robot tanks gonna do the trick?”

Dr. Negron-Omikon turned with the grace and pleasure of a billionaire, which he was about to be. “They will do the trick, and more, General Ludd. They will not only take the high ground on the opposite bank, they will shatter the entire Swedish army. This,” he stamped his foot and pointed downward with gravitas, “will be the decisive battle of the war, and you,” same stamp and gravitas, but now with a finger pointed at the general, “will be the victor that history will celebrate.”

General Ludd chewed his gum. “What about you?”

“The funds that will be deposited into my accounts will be reward enough.”

“I’m sure they will be.” The general looked suspiciously at the robot tanks. “These things immune to, uh… tampering?”

“Absolutely. We learned the lessons of unmanned vehicles of the past. Because of my patented system of communication via spontaneous subatomic particle pairs, the enemy will be unable to jam, intercept, alter, or fabricate any instructions we send them.”

“So nothing like the drone debacle at Poughkeepsie last year?”

“No sir.”

“And no disaster like the failed assault on Mt. Pinatubo?”

“No, nothing at all like that. These aren’t even armed with tactical nuclear weapons, for starters.”

The general kept up his interrogation. “How about the betrayal at the Battle of Yakutsk? We gonna see that happen?”

“Again, sir, because of our absolutely secure means of communication, nothing like that will happen.”

The general chewed his gum in silence, then, “So you say.”

“So I know.” Dr. Negron-Omikon held his head high, ready to defend his creations to the hilt.

“All right then.” General Ludd shrugged. “Commence the attack.”

Dr. Negron-Omikon nodded and pressed the big red button in front of him, the one labeled START.

Countless hordes of robot tanks rolled forward. Swedish cannons poured armor-piercing rounds at the tanks, but both their armor and nuclear dampers prevented both conventional and nuclear shells from doing significant damage. And those tanks that were damaged got pushed into the river, creating the basis for a bridge.

General Ludd frowned. “Pontoons would have done the job, and been cheaper, as well.”

The scientist had a ready answer: “This is combat engineering at its finest. You think the Swedish dogs would let us build a bridge in peace, prior to the attack?”

“They did at Second Budapest.”

“And then what happened?”

“Well, they shot everyone that crossed over the bridge. Point taken.”

Meanwhile, the bridge of tanks had grown rapidly. Soon, it touched the far shore. When that happened, the tanks revved their engines and plowed ahead at 100 kilometers per hour. When they hit the cliffs, they collided with them, forming the base of a wedge.

General Ludd watched on, disbelievingly, as the wedge grew tall enough to reach the height of the cliffs.

Dr. Negron-Omikon said, “Now, get ready for some real action.”

The robot tanks roared into even higher gear and blasted a breach in the Swedish lines. A cloud of dust rose over the battle.

Mingled in the dust, some larger particles seemed to arc through the air.

General Ludd asked, “What’s that in the dust?”

Dr. Negron-Omikon handed the general a pair of binoculars. “Why don’t you look for yourself?”

The general brought the binoculars to his eyes. He saw, to his horror, that the larger things were actually human legs and arms!

“Dr. Negron-Omikon, what in the name of Mars is going on?”

“Ah, that, my good general, is how we win the war.”

“Explain!”

“Certainly. The robots are programmed to decimate the enemy.”

“Well I can see that!”

Dr. Negron-Omikon bore the interruption with the patience of a very rich saint. “Decimate, as in the original sense of the word, to kill one of every ten men.”

“Wait, only one of every ten? How do we win if we don’t kill the enemy?”

“The robots wound horribly the other nine, that’s how. Every participant in this battle on the enemy’s side is either dead or a huge burden on his nation’s health care system. We won’t bleed them dry: we’ll keep them donating blood until judgment day!”

General Ludd chomped on his gum. “I see.”

“And those arms and legs that aren’t from wounded soldiers are from the bodies of the deceased. The robots make it a special point to desecrate the bodies of the fallen.”

“That’s a war crime, you nutcase!”

“Only if we lose the war, my good general. Besides, with the terror such a series of acts will create, the enemy will be ready to surrender, leading to the saving of lives from future battles. It’s only humanitarian to fight a war in such a way.”

“I see,” said the general. He nodded understandingly and looked through his binoculars again. “I see that the robots are returning. Good job, Doctor.”

“Wait, what?” Dr. Negron-Omikon’s smile became a bit false.

“They’re returning. They’re on their way back.”

“Oh dear. May I see those binoculars?”

“Uh, sure, uh… say, what’s going on?”

What was going on, to Dr. Negron-Omikon’s horror, was the disobedience to his orders. He had ordered the robots to take and hold the heights, nothing else. If those robots were coming back, it could mean only one thing…

No, that would be too impossible! The testing had some aberrations, but nothing like this!

Well, maybe something like this was possible… with the numbers being used… the scientist did some quick calculations in his head… oh dear, yes, that was a sufficient number, after all, especially if the cybertronic units in the fallen tanks weren’t totally out of commission.

General Ludd asked rather loudly and rudely, “Say, they didn’t develop some kind of hive consciousness and decide to turn on their human masters, did they?”

Dr. Negron-Omikon said nothing and stood absolutely still.

General Ludd spat out his gum. “I knew it! Dammit, Negron-Omikon, this wasn’t supposed to happen!”

“Well, general, no accidental development of self-aware machines is supposed to happen.”

“I don’t know whether to kill you now or wait for the robots to do it!”

“Probably better for us both if there’s one of us to decimate and the other one left to survive.” Dr. Negron-Omikon gulped. “If you don’t kill me, then we both have a 50-50 chance of only being horribly mangled instead of a 100 percent chance of being killed outright.”

The first few tanks had begun to fall off the edge of the cliff, just a few meters from the wedge of broken tanks that they had climbed up.

“What the?”

Bewildered, the general and the scientist watched as the tanks flowed over the edge to their shattered doom below.

Dr. Negron-Omikon said, “Well, it looks as though there may be a slight error in their GPS navigation.” His speculation was borne out as a few tanks that had managed to survive the fall limped into the river and sank just a few meters away from where the tank bridge crossed the mighty Parana.

The flow of tanks slowed to a trickle as the most advanced elements made their way back, where they invariably fell or drowned. All that was left of the battle were hundreds of thousands of injured Swedes and two completely unscathed Americans in an observation tower.

General Ludd ran the after-action report meeting.

“All right, Doctor. Let’s run over the successes and the opportunities for improvement. First success: your robots did a real number on the Swedes. Good job with that.”

Dr. Negron-Omikon hesitated to bask in glory, knowing that the failures were about to be summed up.

“However, I don’t care for the waste in building a bridge and scaling a cliff. Get some specialized units that can engineer that stuff under fire. Apart from that, good stuff, here.”

Dr. Negron-Omikon was confused. Where was the verbal abuse? Where was the threatened firing squad? Didn’t the general threaten to kill him just a few minutes ago?

General Ludd said, “I know what you’re thinking. Didn’t I threaten to kill you a few minutes ago? Yes, I did. I’m sorry for that. It was a momentary lapse of discipline, and I apologize for that.”

“So, you’re not mad?”

“I’m not mad. I’m thinking clearly, now. These robot tank armies of yours have great potential.”

“Even though they formed a hive mind and turned on us?”

“Well, that’s why I didn’t complain about the GPS errors. I see that as a mitigating factor when they mutiny. We could probably also stand to deploy them in smaller numbers. You got a winner here, doc, and you can expect your check… as soon as the war with Sweden is over.”

On the one hand, Dr. Negron-Omikon was happy that he hadn’t been summarily executed. On the other hand, he was a bit impatient for the money. He had just ordered a pool to be put in at his home. Now he was going to have to take out a loan to cover the costs.

Ah well, all is fair in love and war.

And, thanks to the battlefield prowess of Dr. Negron-Omikon’s robot army, the war with Sweden lasted only five more days. Sixty days after the cease-fire, a letter arrived in Dr. Negron-Omikon’s mailbox with “United States of America Department of the Treasury” stamped on the return address.

Greedily, Dr. Negron-Omikon tore open the envelope. He looked at the check inside, and his eyes widened abnormally. He then looked at the accompanying accounting statement and his eyes widened even more.

Then he blinked.

He looked at the check again.

It was for seventeen dollars and thirty-seven cents.

He then looked at the accounting statement.

Out of his payment of thirteen billion dollars, exactly twelve billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty-two dollars and sixty-three cents had been subtracted… for destroyed and damaged robots.

For, with the advent of entirely automated forces, not only could the precise cost of war be calculated… it could also be deducted from wages, tips, and other income.

Dr. Negron-Omikon had an overwhelming urge to exact an ironic revenge, but the US Army owned the big red START button, so there wasn’t a lot he could do except chalk it up to experience and hope that he got another idea as good as the massive robot army.

And soon, too. That pool wasn’t gonna pay for itself.

The alert in the silo went off.

The duty officers, Lieutenants Kestrel and Taggart, looked up at the light. Kestrel reached for his key. Taggart hesitated.

Kestrel put his key into his station and turned it. He looked over at Taggart, who was still looking at the light.

“Let’s go, Taggart. We’ve got the order.”

Taggart didn’t budge.

“Come on, Taggart, we got the go order.”

Taggart kept looking at the light. “Why?”

“Doesn’t matter. Light goes on, we turn the keys, press the buttons, launch the missile. We’ve done this before. We do it now.”

“But those were drills.”

“We didn’t know at the time. We launched and found out later. Time to do our duty again. You need to get your key, Taggart.”

“But…” Taggart looked back at Kestrel. “What if this one… is… real?”

“Makes no difference.”

“It could mean the whole world is destroyed.”

“No one lives forever, Taggart. Get your key.”

“This missile we’re supposed to launch. Where is it going to go? How many people will it kill?”

“Don’t know, doesn’t matter. We have orders.”

“I can’t be a murderer.”

Kestrel drew his sidearm. “Lieutenant Taggart, I am ordering you to comply. You know full well what can happen next if you do not.”

“Why didn’t you threaten me sooner? You don’t want to kill, either, do you?”

“Not you, I don’t. But I will, if I have to, in order to complete the mission.”

Taggart looked back at the alert. “Complete the mission… then what? What’s your endgame beyond that?”

“Probably die, if it’s real war and not a drill. And I will meet my maker and account for this launch without remorse.”

“And if it is a drill? And you shoot me?”

“Lieutenant Taggart, I am currently of the opinion that this is not a drill, as I have pointed my weapon at you. Drill protocol would be to suspend the exercise in the case of a reliability failure on the part of one or more participants. The alert is still on, and I do believe that this is the real thing. Produce your key – slowly – Taggart.”

“All right. I’ll get my key.” Taggart slowly reached into his shirt to produce his key.

“Now insert it.”

Taggart held his key above the lock in the console. Kestrel had a good argument. This could very well be the real thing. Missiles already on their way to the USA, complete destruction of… how many cities? Taggart remembered looking at a list of US cities by population. Texarkana was number 1000, population 37,225.

There were over 4400 Russian warheads. 4480, best estimate. What if each one was going to a city, in order of population? Number 4480 by population was a tie between Colby, Kansas and Connell, Washington, both population 5388. Highwood, Illinois had a population of 5387. One less person, and it’s not even in the running to get directly nuked. And how would a targeting officer choose between Colby and Connell? Would it make a difference after 62 and a half million people in the USA were already killed in the largest 100 cities?

So maybe Colby and Connell were off the hook, since missiles had to meet their marks on bases and European cities. Nobody would have to flip a coin to decide which one would take a direct hit and which one would deal with the aftermath. There was also the law of diminishing returns: the next 100 cities would net another 30 million casualties and the next 100 after that, maybe another 10 million, maybe 11. Where to stop? Number 300 is Flint, Michigan, population 99,002. 301 is San Angelo, Texas, population 98,975, a difference of 27 people. To Taggart, that seemed as arbitrary a difference as one.

About a third of the US population in just 300 cities, of population 99,000 or more… and there were quite probably missiles to spare after that.

And the US has its missiles, along with China, France, England, India, Pakistan, and Israel. Maybe even North Korea could lob off one or two, just to join in on the historical moment when humanity decided that there should be no more history. 4800 in the USA; between 200 and 300 each for China, France, and England; 110 in India; 120 in Pakistan, and; 80 in Israel. North Korea had less than 10. Just over 10,000 for the world, much reduced from the peak of 64,000 in 1986 – today’s number was the lowest since the 8200 in 1958.

1958… 7300 of those warheads were in the USA, and we were terrified of the 860 in Russia. Today, a few thousand less in the USA, a few thousand more in Russia, and everyone seemed to be used to the terror by now. And the top 1000 cities in the world by population reached all the way down to Rasht, Iran, population 519,418. Total population in those cities came out to 1.2 billion. Even if the next thousand were all population 500,000, that would only be another half a billion – those diminishing returns, again.

And yet, those 10,000 missiles all had a target, superfluous though it may be. Some targets had 2 or 3 missiles for them, just in case there was a misfire or other malfunction.

“Come on, Taggart. I need you to put that key in there.”

Taggart’s thoughts continued to rush through his mind: the facts, the figures… surprisingly few feelings. Taggart realized that lack of feelings and figured it must be shock. If it had been a minute since the alert came on, then the missiles heading toward the USA were already 6 minutes into their flight… unless this was a first strike, which meant those Russian missiles would be launching in 9. The sub-launched missiles needed only ten minutes to get to their targets. The ground-launched would need about half an hour. Bombers would reach their destinations in 7 to 9 hours, looking for targets that escaped destruction via missile.

Electromagnetic pulses would wipe out communications for most people outside the silo. That could wind up being their only warning that something was about to happen. Within 2 hours, about 5% of the land surface area of the involved nations would be on fire, predominantly in areas associated with cities over, what? 99,000 population? 50,000 population? Maybe three-fourths of the world’s manufacturing was about to be destroyed. Smoke from those fires would drop the global temperature like an outbreak of massive volcanoes.

Within 12 hours, there would be no effective government left in the combatant nations. Hospitals would be cruel jokes. Radiation from the fallout would be delivering lethal particles onto the exodus of survivors to the rural hinterlands. In about five days, the temperature would be down about 13 degrees Fahrenheit. In about two weeks, radiation sickness would be raging among surviving populations. Epidemics and crop failures would follow. World population would drop by about 20% after the first few months. Things would get worse as global agriculture collapses due to a lack of pesticides and other chemicals most farmers were dependent upon. Another 20% of the global population would die within a year.

And then?

Mankind would recover, more or less. Maybe the die-off would continue until the world population was down to pre-industrial revolution levels, maybe it would level off in the 50-60% range and then grow again.

This missile’s potential casualties would hardly make a difference in the total, one way or another. Another missile would likely do the job of this missile, if it failed to launch. His participation in this mission was completely meaningless, succeed or fail, from an overall military perspective. One warhead of 10,000 failing to launch would be merged with the other 10-15% that failed to launch, for whatever reason. What difference would it be if only 39.9999375% of the global population died instead of 40%?

And so, Taggart asked himself if he could face God and state that it was right to launch that missile and, in so doing, be accountable for the deaths of whoever it slew. Just because they were going to die was no reason to be their executioner instead of some other person.

Speaking of executioners, Taggart looked at the weapon in Kestrel’s hand. Then Taggart looked within himself and placed his key on the table in front of him. It was too big to swallow and there was no place to throw it, but there was no way he was going to put his key to use.

Maybe another thirty seconds had passed. Maybe 10. Judging by the hardening resolve in Kestrel’s eyes, Taggart knew that he likely didn’t have long to live.

But Taggart also knew that, when the time came, he could walk peacefully into the light.

To be sure, space travel sure is a lot easier, now that humans don’t need food, water, or even air. Immortality means precisely that – not dying, no matter what. But space travel being easier doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily something to look forward to.

I still remember the day I returned to life, when I got this body that never needs and, as a result, never dies. Truth be told, I was hesitant about returning to life. I didn’t have such a good run, my first time around. Lots of regrets in that life, even if I didn’t experience those regrets until after I returned to life. I wasn’t a good person in my mortal life, not by a long shot. But, still, they found a way to give me that so-called great gift that everyone else received. And now I’m here.

Artificial intelligence isn’t necessary if a human intelligence can be surrounded by a form-fitting capsule and then launched into space, that great deficit of matter and time. My perfect recall is now the new instrumentation array for this space probe, and it’s all free of charge to the powers that be. The only mechanism is the radiation filter. And what does it do? Why, it filters the visible light from distant stars, all of it, so that if there is any visible light to be seen in this void, I will know of it.

There is no light in my capsule, not a flicker. Frozen but unable to die, the cold pierces my bones, but I am beyond physical pain. I am conscious, however, and the mental pain… I never got used to that. How long have I been traversing the Great Void? My mortal self would have forgotten long before perishing. My immortal self knows exactly the time spent here: but the years and days of my home on earth mean nothing in this emptiness. I am somewhere between the beginning and the end of time, and I have eternity to search for light. In the meantime, I have only my memories as companions.

And I thought it was dark before I entered the void… pinpricks of starlight growing fainter and farther as I plunged ahead into this absence of matter and time. Anything further than 10 megaparsecs, that light I do not see. I’m told that this void is close to 400 million parsecs in diameter, and I get to cross the whole of it. There’s supposed to be a small bubble of 17 galactic clusters in a 50 million parsec area somewhere in this void, but I don’t think my trajectory will be within 10 million parsecs of any of them.

They knew who I was when they brought me back to life. My victims were alive before me. Dead men tell no tales until they’re resurrected, and then it truly is Judgment Day. I couldn’t argue, not with them there before me, those innocents… those little innocents… It’s like I’d already been convicted before being brought back to deathlessness, and my punishment decided upon.

They’re fairly certain I won’t find anything out here. I’ll be here for billions of years – and then what? I don’t know. And what if I do see something? How do I let anyone know? Why would they want to hear anything from the likes of me?

My perfect eyes never shut, and I never sleep. I am always at rest. My perfect mind never hallucinates or delves into delusion, so I always have my reality before me and within me. I do wonder about the end of time, where that would place me. Will I even know when time ends? Or will I eventually move beyond the gravity of any other body in the universe, and rip away, my matter to never again participate in the fabric of life?

I guess I’m already in such a state. I am rejected by the human family for my crimes, and I now exist outside that vibrant, joyous community. My victims didn’t hate me, but I couldn’t stand being around them. I suppose I can’t really be around anything alive, such is my punishment. Dead, my spirit still knew the earth and its haunts. Alive once again, and I am the lord of all that I survey, for 10 million parsecs all around me. There is nothing to oppose me, nothing to stop me, nothing to impede me in any way. I can reach for the stars, but they shall forever be beyond my grasp.

I am ruler over the darkness outside the universe, and I would never know if any other being laid claim to the radius of nothing that extends from my person. My infinite, timeless kingdom is also my prison cell where I face the darkness to equal the light I once extinguished. If I could live my life over differently, I would, but I am the only matter for 10 megaparsecs because I did not live my life the way I should have.

If only I did not have a perfect ability to experience regret, perhaps I could rejoice somehow in being master of the void!

If only…

Sir Philip called down to the peasant on the road. “Hoy! Be thou from Daneshire town?”

The peasant made a half-bow and responded, “Aye. I be from yon Daneshire township. Who be thee?”

“I am Sir Philip, late from the courts of King Richemonde, the Wise. I am on an errand from my lord, the king, and it doth bring me to these parts.”

“Oh? On errand, eh? And what errand might this be?”

“I seek the dragon of the lands north of Daneshire.”

The peasant’s face took on a similarity to a recently-plowed spring field. “Why?”

Sir Philip’s head recoiled from the directness of that question. With frown emblazoned across the base of his face, he said, “Impertinent one! Knowest thou to whom thou speakest?”

The peasant shrugged. “Apologies, sir knight. Forgive mine surprise in hearing thou seekest the Dragon of Daneshire. Why, sir knight, seekest thou the dragon?”

Appeased, Sir Philip responded, “To prove my virtue in arms.”

“What, thou plans’t kill ‘im?”

Sir Philip tolerated no more of the peasant’s uncivility. “Out of my way, varlet, I would pass thee now!” He spurred his horse as the peasant made clear the way to Daneshire.

“Ignorant peasant!” Sir Philip couldn’t get the bumpkin’s lack of respect out of his mind. The three miles to Daneshire were thoroughly unpleasant, full of reflections on the peasant’s churlishness and villainy. When finally Sir Philip did arrive in the unremarkable town of Daneshire, he was at least able to distract his disgust in the search for the reeve of the town. Daneshire existed at the far reaches of King Richemonde’s demense, and, as such, there was no manor nearby to appoint a bailiff over the settlement. Such a mannerless and uncouth realm!

But Sir Philip hoped to make a change to all that. With the hoard to be had in the cave of the dragon, why, he could build a strong, walled manor and become a landed knight with Daneshire as the beginning of his barony. Would that it could be less a forsaken borderland was the wish of Sir Philip, but ’twas only in the forsaken borderlands that new nobility could be made.

There being not many souls in the town, the search for the reeve was brief and conclusive. A clean, well-dressed peasant presented himself. “I am Fastulf Huldriksen, reeve of Daneshire. At thy service, good sir knight.” Fastulf made the proper half-bow for due deference to a mounted knight of the king.

“I would dismount and converse with thee, reeve.”

Fastulf gestured to several men to approach Sir Philip, to assist him in dismounting. The reeve motioned for the visitor and the men bearing his arms to enter the town hall, while a pair of men took Sir Philip’s horse to provender it.

Sir Philip pointed to a suitable corner and Fastulf nodded a the men with the arms, who placed them in the corner with care. Sir Philip’s black hair topped his scalp, its length a sharp contrast to the shaved back and sides of his head. His clean-shaven face made him stand out further from the bearded, blond rabble of the peasantry.

With the weapons in a corner, Fastulf ordered two chairs be brought to set facing the central hearth and that a fire be stoked there. The knight seated himself first and Fastulf took the chair of second preference. He then asked, “What bringeth thee to Daneshire, good sir knight?”

“Reeve Fastulf of Daneshire, I am here on errand from King Richemonde the Wise.”

“Long live the king.”

“I am here to bring gentility to this wild land. I am of a mind to do great works that would earn for me a barony.”

“Very good, sir knight. And how may the people of Daneshire be at thy service?”

Sir Philip appreciated the manner in which the reeve observed protocol. “I would know more about the Dragon of Daneshire.”

Fastulf nodded and leaned towards Sir Philip. “And what would thou wish to know?”

“Tell me first of its habits. How does it move about? What does it eat?”

Fastulf surmised from Sir Philip’s questions that the knight intended to hunt the dragon. “The great beast, though capable of flight, uses that mode infrequently, preferring to roam its territory on legs. We have seen it walking with stately gait, and striking its prey from cover with a pounce most rapid. Its prey is typically the deer or elk of the forest or the ram of the mountain. Rarely will it strike a bison of the plain.”

“And how did the people of this town come to see the dragon do these things?”

“Good sir knight, we travel to the lands of the Cumbri for trade in amber and tin, and the road to the Cumbri passes through the territory of the dragon. For many years have we seen the dragon and its ways.”

“And has it ever slain a man or the horse of a man?”

“Nay, good sir knight. Nay. Never has the dragon given us cause to fret or worry.”

“But what of hunters in that area?”

“We hunt not in the territory of the dragon. We hunt not where the king claims his woods and neither do we hunt where the dragon claims his lands.”

Sir Philip raised an eyebrow. “So would thou sayest that the dragon is rival to the king?” Already, Sir Philip entertained designs on the tribe of the Cumbri and how they might be conquered after he slew the dragon.

Fastulf looked into the fire, which did fill the hall with its warmth. He did ponder Sir Philip’s question carefully. He spake, “The people of Daneshire know the benevolent rule of King Richemonde. Him do we serve, and none other.”

Sir Philip wanted a different answer. “Nay, reeve, doth the dragon possess a mighty power, that the folk of this land do fear, even as they would fear the king?”

Fastulf nodded. “Aye, good sir knight. The people of Daneshire dare not to take their flocks into the borders of the land of the dragon. Why, only one man that I know doth live in the lands of the dragon.”

“Hold, Fastulf. Thou sayest a man liveth nigh unto the dragon?”

“Aye, Rolf Klintsen, he is the man. He maketh his home upon a cliff that overlooks where lives the dragon, where the quiet alloweth him to know better his Maker.”

“A holy man, this Rolf?”

“Aye, good sir knight. A holy man, indeed. He doth offer up prayers and supplications on our behalf, and we have known the blessings of his devotions.”

Sir Philip looked into the fire. “I would meet this holy man, if he would be able to speak more to me of this dragon. Comes he oft into the town here?”

“He doth, from time to time, as it pleases him to get grain or paper, or to mind his letters to and from the Father Superior of the monastery in Ogham.”

“Then I should have a room here in Daneshire, that I might be present when returns the holy man.”

“As you wish, good sir knight.”

And so, Sir Philip did reside two days in Daneshire, in wait for Rolf Klintsen, the monk of the dragon-lands. On the third day did Rolf arrive in town, and the reeve did introduce him to Sir Philip. Rolf did give his assent to converse with Sir Philip, on condition that the two would be seated in a garden plot.

“What, among the vegetables and the worms?” But Rolf would have it no other way. Being a man of God, he was not subject to the command of the knight. Sir Philip did relent, and the two sat where they did overlook the cabbages, carrots, and turnips.

Rolf asked the first question. “Sir Philip, do you mean to hunt this dragon? And to slay him?”

“I do, indeed.”

“Then I would dissuade you from such a task, for it is fraught with danger and promises little reward.”

“My king does not permit me to consider danger.”

Rolf allowed Sir Philip’s bravado to pass over him. “So it is. What then, dost thou know of the dragon, Sir Philip? For whatever thou knowest to be true, shall be one less thing I would be needed to teach thee, and whatever thou holdest as truth, but is false, that I shall be able to correct, that a falsehood not prove to be thy undoing.”

“Fairly said, holy man. Here is what I have heard of the dragon, that it is a mighty hunter of beasts, and that it doth hold sway over its lands, as does a lord. And the bards of the court sing of the vast treasures that it has amassed in its cavernous home, where dwarves beat its gold into grand jewels; that the dwarves are enslaved not by the dragon, but by their love for the grand hoard of gold. Their songs tell of how the dragon once did battle with the king of the sea-raiders, and how the dragon did slay that king, with breath of fire; that the dragon did bind the servants of that king to place the king’s treasures on ships and sail them back to his cavern, lest he slay them with breath of fire, as befell their lord and master. Heard I the song of the fall of the Darini, who did anger the dragon when they paid not their tribute of ten virgins one year; that the dragon did lay waste their lands with fire and violence; that the Woluntii followed in the wake of the dragon and did take hold of the lands of the Darini, that the name of that people is known no more. Truly, the dragon is a rich and powerful beast, full of cunning and malice. That he troubles not these lands is plain: they are poor, and the people trouble him not – there is nought to be gained in plundering…” he motioned over the garden “… cabbages.”

Rolf smiled. “Well, good sir knight, there is much that you do know. And verily, the dragon is a mighty hunter, and, yea, it doth hold sway over its lands. But it lives not in a cave.”

Rolf motioned outwardly from his person, describing a great circle. “It maketh a great ring for its lair, a wall with no gate, for it doth fly over the wall as it sallies forth to hunt its prey. Sheer are the walls, half as thick as they are tall, and fully the height of two men are these walls.”

Rolf held two fingers up. “Dirt and dung, these are the stuffs of which the walls are made of. The dragon mixeth his dung with the dirt and useth its tail to beat the mixture into shape. The sun baketh this mud, and it becometh like unto stone in durability. Safe from man is the dragon in his lair, lest a man bringeth a ladder and a bow, or two ladders and a lance.”

Sir Philip did not like this learning. What use was a lance without a horse to deliver the power needed in the blow? Would he have to lay siege to a dragon’s fort? Or, perhaps… “What of the dragon as it hunts and feeds? Doth it show any vulnerability? Wouldst I be capable of striking it then, from my mount?”

“The dragon is quick to respond, good sir knight. It sleepeth not outside its lair and it, like thee, feareth not the dangers of battle. Truly have I seen it brave the antlers of the bull elk and prevail. And especially ferocious it can be when a rival enters its territory.”

“A rival?”

“Aye, sir knight, a rival. There is a she-dragon as well as a he-dragon in these lands, and I have seen, twice, a rival enter these lands, for to claim the she-dragon for its own. Twice have I seen the dragon of Daneshire send his rivals flying to other lands, after battle fierce with claw, bite, and fire.”

Sir Philip had secretly been hoping that the dragon-fire detail had been but a legend. That it was actually true troubled his heart and clouded his mind. “So you have seen this dragon fire, holy man?”

“Yea and verily, sir knight, yea and verily. As sure as I have seen the dragon in its lair, asleep like unto a cat on a hearth.”

“Like unto a cat, say thee? So he sleeps well on his mounds of gold?”

“Nay, good sir knight. There is no gold in the lair of a dragon. There is but the ground where he maketh his bed and a spring from which he drinketh.”

“Egad! No gold?”

“Nay, good sir knight. The tales of dragon’s gold are but stories told to fill the darkness of night with the illuminations of imaginings. Likewise, I am certain that no dragon has wrought the downfall of a kingdom, nor has any exacted a tribute of virgins, or any other sort of tribute. Again, such things are the stuff of fancy, meant to entertain, but not educate.”

No gold meant a serious obstacle to Sir Philip’s plans to fund the building of a manor house. Still, if the dragon could be slain, such a feat could still earn him a baron’s title. Then, plunder from the lands of the Cumbri might produce enough for the beginnings of a noble estate. “No matter. The dragon is a worthy foe, and honor shall I bring to my king with its head presented as a trophy.”

“Hm. The time for a dragon hunt is not opportune, for it is their mating season. The dragon of Daneshire tends to be in the company of his lady. A fight with one dragon, I would not want to have, and a fight with two would be foolishness, indeed, even for a score of men-at-arms.”

“When ends the mating season?”

“In thirty days or so, good sir knight. Following that time, they become solitary, though the sir will bring his dame gifts of food, to sustain her and her young, who stay with the dame for five years. One would never wish to hunt the dame, for she is always in the company of her brood, and they are as fierce as she.”

“Then hunt the sir, shall I, a knight for a knight.”

“Ah, good sir knight, but even then, I would not think such a course to be wise, and I would inform you sufficiently to stay thee from this course.”

Sir Philip adopted a condescending tone. “Oh, holy man, great is thy wisdom and learning, and I thank thee for the profit I have enjoyed of’t. But leave unto me mine own knowledge of the hunt, for skilled am I in such arts.”

“Well, good sir knight, wouldst thou approach him from the front?”

“Nay, holy man, for he doth bite.”

“Wouldst thou approach him from the side?”

“Nay, for fierce are his claws.”

“Then wouldst thou approach him from behind?”

“Yea, for his defenses are weakest in that quadrant.”

“I would advise against that, good sir knight.”

“And why sayest thou such a thing, holy man?”

“Well, good sir knight, that is the matter of another falsehood of the bards.”

“And what is that?”

“Verily, verily I say unto thee that a dragon doth not breathe fire… ”

When a sudden storm drove a group of fruit-pickers into a cave for shelter, they had no idea that they were to discover a Nah’wadass document cache from the Late Decline period. When historians then found this document in that cache, they realized that a far greater source of documents would never be found. We have since discovered additional documents regarding the destruction of the Great Library of Wedemetess. Although that city was no longer the capital of the Nah’wadass nation, we know that Wedemetess retained a symbolic importance throughout the Decline periods. The loss of the Great Library, therefore, had to be of signal importance, communicating to one and all in the Nah’wadass nation that, without question, the remnants of the nation were not going to be regenerating lost glories.

The reference to the Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse would place this document confidently around 1250 years after the earliest known Nah’Wadass writings. The author’s tone and style indicate that he was at least a Scribe-Master and possibly even a Scribe-King, quite likely in hiding, seeking shelter from the political and cultural storm that drove him to that cave.

In the third year of the Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse, a great contention arose among the people. A famine had begun and the plague from the south was in its second year. And though there was peace on our frontiers, the Kinnikanhi being sore defeated, the Shizrek being recipients of our tribute, and the Ouliloulaei nearly dead to a man from the plague they brought from the south, the people turned upon themselves to visit agony, woe, and the shedding of blood to get gain. Truly, they did murder to get gain, forming this band of bandits or that in order to gain violent rulership over their neighbors or to protect themselves from rivals.

Among these bands of bandits, there were two main parties, those that acclaimed the Merchant-King D’jamanass Rindasse, cousin of the Law-King, and those that acclaimed the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene, whose brother was the murdered Law-King who did precede the Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse. Both of the Merchant-Kings who led the parties promised great riches to their followers, should they prevail, and they did struggle one with another mightily. Those who had no stomach for murder, they did then make their slaves. And thus was the nation plunged into riot and bloodshed over riches.

For the Merchant-Kings themselves had once been as brothers, and they had unified in their use of secret murders to destroy those that opposed them in trade and commerce. But they did have the thirst of greed, and no green under the snows could satisfy them. All had to be in their grasp and they did have no hope for the future save in what they could lay their own hands upon. They could not be content to be two rivers, flowing in parallel: they demanded that they be as honored as oceans.

They and their followers held no respect for neither Masters nor Kings, save those of the Merchant order. Even the Soldier-Masters and Soldier-Kings did they disparage, for the few in number of that order that did serve to keep peace were dedicated to the service along the borders, and the ones who kept peace in the cities and in the provinces they did overwhelm with their many bands of bandits. And so peace that should have been the nation’s by right by way of battle, tribute, and plague, did depart from the land, and the lamentations of the meek and humble did pour from their hearts.

And the bands of bandits and the Merchant-Kings who did call them up into their service did proclaim that there was no god that we know and that there was no custom of old to restrain the actions of a man. Truly, they did proclaim that a man rose and fell according to his own strength and cunning and that life did begin at birth and that it did end at death. Truly, they did proclaim that a man would only judge himself according to whatever standard he did set for himself. Truly, they did proclaim that a man with great power and great wealth would know no judge other than himself, and that he would be truly free to do the deeds that pleased his desires.

And even though the people who did still remember the god that we know did not interfere with their murders and their enterprises, the Merchant-King D’jamanass Rindasse and the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene did openly punish the thoughts of those that did remember, proclaiming that they were offended by such foolish and illogical practices. And even though the people who did still respect the customs of old did not interfere with their murders and their enterprises, the Merchant-King D’jamanass Rindasse and the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene did openly punish the thoughts of those that did respect, proclaiming that they were offended by such restrictive and unenlightened practices.

And though they did murder one another openly and in the streets and in the fields, they did unite in the destruction of both rememberance and respecting. Truly, they did deny that there was green under the snows, for what was unseen to them did not exist.

(The first fragment of this document ends here. The next part was written on a different type of leather, but the hand in which it was written matches that of the first document. Historians generally agree that the two documents combine as one and that both were written by the same person, most likely at around the same time. It is possible that there was a period of time that passed between writings, but we do not know if that period was a matter of moments or of years. Nevertheless, the chronicle does seem to be continuous.)

In the days of the first growths after the thaw, the supporters of the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene did move to strike against the Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse and did openly reject his rule. This did cause great commotion amongst their enslaved supporters, who did threaten themselves to set aside their desires for peace and to themselves kill those who had become as masters over them. The Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene then did declare that he needed no man in service to him that had rebellion in his heart, and he did move to have his bands of bandits slay those that did speak openly of the need to respect the Law-King, even if he was a corrupt and filthy Law-King, for such was the fear of the nation, that the Law-Kings they knew would be in the service of Merchant-Kings, and not in the service of the nation.

Truly, the bands of bandits did murder those who did speak openly, and this did quell the spirit of rebellion amongst those who were loathe to murder to get gain. This did then embolden the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene, who did proclaim that he would make war upon the history and the traditions of the nation, and that he would send forth his men to burn the Great Library of the ancient capital, even the hill that was no more a mountain of Wedemetess. He did proclaim that his men would burn all the records that they did find that did not pertain to the order of the Merchant, for he did proclaim that there was no value in such records, other than to stir the hearts of men into disobedience to the power and wealth of those that did hold such things. Truly, one does not respect power and wealth of men when one knows of things greater than the power and wealth of men.

And as the first growths began to wither in the heat of drought, the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene did march his bands of bandits to the place of Wedemetess, to make war upon the whole of the place, and the people who did remain in the hill that was no more a mountain did flee, for they did not want their blood to water the ground that was soon to be level where once there was a hill and where once there was a mighty mountain, with green under its snows. Truly, they did not want their blood to water the ground that would be a barren waste, and the bands of bandits that did serve the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene did march forth to a place of buildings once known as Wedemetess, where not even the spirits of ancestors would seek refuge.

But then did the Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse proclaim that he needed no ancient writing to justify his power and that he would himself demand the destruction of those writings, that he would prove with his continued retention of the seat of the Law-King that all he needed to hold that power was his own strength of mind and might. And so did the bands of bandits that followed after the Merchant-King D’jamanass Rindasse make a forced march to the place of desolation once known as Wedemetess, where now not even the spirits of the ancestors of the ancestors would seek refuge.

And thus did the mobs of bandits meet in the place of sorrow once known as Wedemetess, and they did commence to make war with each other over the power to take fire, acid, and water to the records of the Great Library of Wedemetess. Truly, many of the Scribe-Masters and Scribe-Kings of the nation did take what records they could carry, and did hide them in their places of hiding, even as I have done with the records in this place. And not even a small trickle could we save of that mighty flood which did course through the halls of the Great Library.

For I myself have seen with my own eyes the mighty halls of the Great Library of Wedemetess, and I myself have seen with my own eyes the mighty words kept in the mighty halls of the Great Library of Wedemetess, and I honor those halls and those words as I keep the traditions of old with my continued writing, and I honor those halls and those words as I remember the god that we know with my continued writing.

Truly, we are now hunted men in our nation, and our families dare not claim kinship to the Scribe-Masters and the Scribe-Kings, for fear of their own lives. I will not be a murderer of my kin, so I shall not claim them. I will not be a murderer of my ancestors, so I shall not mention the other places of hiding. I know of judges other than myself, and the writings that we place in secret places and the writings that we continue to write will keep the green under the snows that will one day endure to bear fruit once again.

But, truly, the fires did burn, the acids did dissolve, and the waters did make muddy sands, and the bands of bandits murdered each other as ferociously as they did murder the past and as ferociously as they did murder our ancestors. The Merchant-Kings that made war upon the nation did offer rewards both for the slaughter of leaders as well as the destruction of records. Great was the bounty of money paid out for those who did bring forth records for to be burned in the open, with slaves forced to watch, that they might report to their fellows that this had indeed happened and that, yet, the Merchant-Kings did rule with their wealth and their power.

And the slaves did lament that the god that we know made no miracle to save the writings, as he had made miracles to save our ancestors in days long ago. But the Speakers of Wisdom among them had no words of comfort, for the nation had long ago forgotten the traditions that must be observed as a nation for the nation to be blessed with miracles as a nation, and that only a man or a family might be so blessed with miracles of preservation, and only as that man or that family did observe the traditions necessary for preservation.

And as the dusts did blow across the lands and the famine grew even more sore, the bands of bandits that did follow after the Merchant-King D’jamanass Rindasse did declare that they had destroyed the greater part of the Great Library and that they had driven back the bands of bandits that did follow after the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene, that they could destroy no more that Great Library, but that the power to be found in its destruction would be all theirs.

This did cause the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene to rage and that rage did cause him to proclaim that those who did not take up arms for to murder would no longer be slaves, but would be dead. And he did order the arming of his own slaves, and his bands of bandits did slay many who refused to take up arms, even slaying of their own number who chose to lay down their arms rather than slay those with no defense.

But, truly, the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene did increase many fold the size of his army, and he did lead them unto the city of ruin and fire, even the barren desolation of Wedemetess, and his army did encircle that of the Merchant-King D’jamanass Rindasse. The army of the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene did raise the earth around the place of desolation, and they did fortify the earth that they had raised, that they might destroy the army of the Merchant-King D’jamanass Rindasse through siege and starvation. They delighted that they would destroy the Merchant-King D’jamanass Rindasse himself in the siege, for he had come unto the place of desolation that he personally would be one who murdered the ancestors in the destruction of the Great Library.

And, truly, as there was a famine in the land and little food to be had already, the bands of bandits entrapped in the desolation did soon turn upon each other, eating the flesh of the slain in order to sate their hunger. Few were the messengers that did escape the riot of violence in the desolation, and fewer still were the messengers that brought word to the Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse.

But word did travel to the Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse, and he did call forth to the soldiers on the frontiers, from all the borders around the nation, and did raise a call to the slaves of his cousin, the Merchant-King D’jamanass Rindasse, giving them command to destroy the bands of bandits of the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene. The soldiers from the east and the soldiers from the west did heed the call of the Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse, for the eastern borders were quiet and the Shizrek from the west were sated with tribute. But the soldiers of the north did not heed the call, for the Kinnikanhi would not be defeated in the absence of strength. The Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse did call for the head of the Soldier-King of the North Gibetemes Hararegha, but no man would heed that call, and thus did the Soldier-King of the North Gibetemes Hararegha keep peace in the lands of the northern borders.

No man did respond to the call to the soldiers of the south, so great was the plague in the lands of the southern borders. Not even the messengers sent unto those lands did return, and great was the fear that they did perish in the plague.

But, truly, the Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse did bring together an army of soldiers from the east and soldiers from the west and from volunteers among the slaves of his cousin, the Merchant-King D’jamanass Rindasse, and the Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse did march at the front of the army, even though a Soldier-King he was not. He did care little for the very traditions which had made him a Law-King, choosing to rule through despotic force rather than accept the legitimacy which did flow from his predecessors unto him. Such was the woe of our nation!

When the army of the Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse appeared on the high ridge of Itememe, which oversees the whole of the land around the desolation of Wedemetess, they did raise high their standards and called aloud to their fellows still alive, who did respond with a shout of their own, though it was weak in strength and number. The bands of bandits of the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene were thrown into disarray at the sight of the army of the Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse, and they knew not whether they should maintain their siege or deploy in strength to face the bands of bandits encircled or the army on the high ridge.

The Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene then gave the order to fall upon the band of bandits in the desolation of Wedemetess, giving the call to destroy them, then to retreat in the face of the army of the Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse. Truly, his men did rush over the mounds of earth that they had raised around the desolation of Wedemetess, and they did make savage battle upon the weakened bands of bandits that followed after the Merchant-King D’jamanass Rindasse, putting them to death by the ten, and by the hundred, and by the thousand.

At the sight of this, the Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse did order his army to rush to the rescue of his cousin, the Merchant-King D’jamanass Rindasse, but truly did his army loathe the men that they were ordered to rescue. As the Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse stood, shouting at the army which he had raised, the Soldier-King of the West Agamnos Eretemoas, drew his sword and smote the leg of the Law-King Nedetar Weketem Rindasse. Truly, the men of the army cheered the smiting of the despot, and the Soldier-King of the West Agamnos Eretemoas removed the mask and the robes of the Law-King and Weketem Rindasse was a Law-King no more.

The Soldier-King of the West Agamnos Eretemoas called for any Law-Master that might be in the ranks of the volunteers, and one stepped forward. The Soldier-King of the West Agamnos Eretemoas did hand over the mask and the robes of the Law-King to the Law-Master Kepemess Harakamos and gave him a charge to rise to the stature necessary to truly honor the title of Law-King one day. But, truly, on this day, the nation had no Law-King. Only three times had this disaster befallen the nation, and this was the fourth, as the forces of the warring Merchant-Kings destroyed each other in the desolation of Wedemetess.

And so, the Soldier-King of the West Agamnos Eretemoas ordered the army to march slowly to the desolation of Wedemetess, to destroy the abominations of the Merchant-Kings.

But, in the meantime, the Merchant-King D’jamanass Rindasse had fallen to the arms of the bands of bandits that followed the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene. As the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene held high the head of the slain Merchant-King D’jamanass Rindasse on the tip of a spear, he pointed to the descending army, marching from the high ridge of Itememe, and called to the bands of bandits that now had no more leader, proclaiming that they would be slaughtered no more if they would go up to battle against the descending army. Truly he did proclaim that if they fought for their freedom and lived, they would be numbered among his own forces. But they were made to march at the front of the forces of the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene, which did cause them to fight with a sore desperation.

As the Soldier-King of the West Agamnos Eretemoas observed the cessation of slaughter in the desolation of Wedemetess, he did order the army to return to the crest of the ridge, as the army was small in number compared to the mobs of bands of bandits. Truly, they had hoped for the bands of bandits to destroy each other before facing them in battle, but now they faced them united in their desperation and greater numbers.

When the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene saw that the army had retreated, he ordered his bands of bandits to first complete the destruction of the Great Library, for that was the delight of his plan, to block the source of the tradition which he did revolt against.

As the bands of bandits under the rule of the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene toppled the stone and burned the wood of the Great Library of Wedemetess, the soldiers of the Soldier-King of the West Agamnos Eretemoas dared not move from their crest, lest the bands of bandits overtake them in their march and overwhelm them with their greater numbers.

After the destruction of the Great Library was complete and all its documents destroyed with fire and with acid and with water, the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene saw that he could not prevail against the army on the high ridge of Itememe, and that truly that army could not prevail against him in the field. He marched his men back to the capital, from where they would make slaves of those that had served under the slain Merchant-King as well as those that had served under his cousin, the Law-King that was no more.

As the Soldier-King of the West Agamnos Eretemoas saw the bands of bandits of the Merchant-King Danaweka Ketemene leave the desolation of Wedemetess, he made an offer to the volunteers that had marched with him. They could choose between returning to the eastern borders or the western borders in the escort of the soldiers returning to those regions, or they could go to the north or the south and fare as they might. None desired to return to the lands that would be under the rule of a Merchant-King who had forgotten both the god we know and the traditions that guide us.

Our nation is now divided: with the south yet lost in plague, the borders of the west, north, and east no longer respecting the center, and the center ruled by the bandits of the Merchant-King.

I was a witness to these events and I did receive reports from others who witnessed them, so I know this record is true. Truly, this is true and may my ancestors be pleased with the work I have done in their honor.