“Look, I don’t get it,” he began. “When we first came across some indications of the Illuminated Ones—which isn’t as good a name as the Illuminati, so I figure you screwed that one—it was mixed up with what Mildred told us was the counterculture, the young people who figured that the ruling sec were screwing up and wanted to build some kind of alternative. I don’t see them going for your shit.”
Taschen threw back his head and roared with laughter. He stopped, looked at the expression on Dean’s face and laughed again, this time louder. Finally, he stopped and explained, using the kind of tone that suggested they were more stupe than he had realized.
“That was my finest touch, I feel. I had to allow myself a little humor in what was, after all, a fairly humorless environment. It seemed a splendid jest to recruit so-called subversives and counterrevolutionaries into a movement that was allegedly opposed to the prevailing military culture, but was in fact using that very thing to manipulate it toward its own ends. Those who believed they were fighting for a freedom from such—as they saw it—oppression were in fact upholding the very ideals and complexes that they opposed. It was merely that it carried another name. My foot soldiers were the very people who would gladly have spit on my grave. And it did, of course, also serve the excellent double purpose of keeping them off my tail.”
“That’s pretty sick,” Krysty commented. “But then again, what would I expect. Are you happy with what you’ve made?”
“Ah, no—not me,” Taschen countered. “You must remember that I did not begin the nukecaust. In point of fact, my reason for building this was in knowing that it was inevitable, and in waiting for what would happen afterward. And that’s exactly how it happened. When the nukecaust came, and the long, hard nuclear winter began, I retreated to my redoubt and ordered my people to do the same. The cloning project was at such an advanced stage that I was assured of my own future. There was, over the ensuing decades, some diminution of my forces—natural wastage, and the necessarily limited gene pool have taken their toll, but there are still several bases left across the world, keeping in contact via mat-trans and comp Links. The tech is still there, and so are we.”
Ryan was alarmed. How many of these bastards would they have to chill before their task was done? “How many bases are there?”
Taschen allowed himself an indulgent smile. “You think I would really trust you with that knowledge? As with everything, only I know the true answers. Even the other redoubts are not fully aware. Nor, come to that, are they in full knowledge or contact of their true numbers or purpose. I would not be that stupid. Knowledge is power, and I aim to retain that power. When they are required to act, they are told…but the basis is strictly need-to-know. Without me, they would be survivors of another age, isolated in this new world. With me, they are a force that will run this world. Even those who came here from the redoubt you ruined, like the barbarians you are, have been dispersed among the other bases, awaiting their new orders when the time is right.”
“And just when will the time be right?” Mildred asked.
“When the likes of you have fulfilled your little task, and spread my disease across the land, making it clean of scum and fit for the new order to come forth and achieve dominance.”
“Over an empty world ravaged by a disease that will chill everyone, including your descendants?” Doc cannily posited.
Reveling in his supposed ascendancy, Taschen took the bait. “You surely do not think that I would leave my own people unprotected? Of course they are inoculated, so they can walk freely over the land above. Naturally, the shrinking gene pool and the encroachment of time will lead to their eventual demise, but I shall still be here, like Ubu roi—a character in fiction I always admired—cloned forever and bestriding my domain like a colossus. I believe I may have mentioned that fact before.