Space Eater (15 page)

When the echoes had stopped playing tag up and down the big cylinder, Rossa went on: “What I see as the redundancy in the scheduled plans is the way in which we’re to try big lie number one, ‘we’re an FTL

ship, Earth has sent a gunboat’ and all that, but should that not seem to be working we’re to hand over,
actually hand over
an MT device to ‘show the limitations’ of it. Why trouble with the first if the second is so convincing? Why such careful preparation for the second if the first is supposed to convince at all?”

Sometimes I wondered why Rossa had been in Comm and not Central Strategic. OK, OK, I knew, she had her special talent. She’d had a good look at the case of stuff for our number-two story, as well. I opened it and gave the two items the once-over again. It didn’t tell me anything new.

“It’s like Birch said, a compromise,” I offered. “Hawks and doves pecking bits out of each other in Central, and Comp putting a bit of every plan suggested into one big package of snafu. What else d’you expect?”

“I don’t really know. But I’ve been a carrier for some extraordinarily high-level messages: they play them straight into me on the nerve inductors, sometimes ultra-coded, occasionally in plain Morse.” She stroked the heavy band on her arm. “Can you imagine what it’s like to be strapped down in Comm with the messages playing through you, trying to scream in Morse code, only your voice isn’t able to keep up?

Never mind that. I’ve seen behind the scenes; I know that Central is horribly devious and cunning, and that you can’t trust any assumption when they set a computer-vetted plan into motion. We are assuming, as you say, that we are in the Beta Corvi system, that there is a colony world testing MT out there, that we’re needed as ambassadors, that that device in your lap is no more or less than what we’ve been told...”

“We can check some of those,” I said. “First let’s bore a hole in the hull and take a look outside.” That didn’t sound like a wildly brilliant notion, as we were afraid the damn station could be a bit leaky already.

The floor had patches and seals everywhere like pockmarks, some lumpy enough to trip over: seemed FACTOTUM could do just about anything but not always very well. “Then I can put this under the microscope and find out how it’s really designed to turn everyone’s MT rigs into chewing gum ... I did take a sneaky peek at some AP manuals I wasn’t supposed to see, so I can tell it’s the right
sort
of gadget all right.”

I lifted out the flimsy little circuit board with its precise pattern of whatsits around the central distortion tube you found in all AP circuits—or all their photographs, anyway. More fizzing deep down behind my eyes. I’d looked at all the photos in the book; I could even remember all their captions if I pushed hard enough, surely, if my recall still worked, if enough of those gray cells had survived the knife.

The trick of recall is to let go of the memory you’re holding onto, and to make quick grabs into the gray fuzz on one side or the other—

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

Rossa lifted one eyebrow, a trick of hers I envied a little bit. “It’s some kind of fake after all?”

“No. Well, it could be, maybe, but ... Jesus Christ. It’s not a minigate circuit board at all, the pattern’s all wrong. It’s a nullbomb.”

A very long pause.

“I do believe I should have been in Central Strategic after all,” she said almost gaily. “Now isn’t that absolutely right, doesn’t that make such exquisite sense? Phase one, overawe them and tell them not to be such naughty children. If that fails, your conscience is clear and it’s phase two, let them ‘test the limitations of MT’ ... and what happens then, Ken?”

“They lose a big chunk of continent. I mean
big
. Little place like Britain wouldn’t be worth salvaging after a nullbomb incident. Christ, total conversion, I still can’t believe it. And the bastards didn’t tell us.”

“They could hardly ask us to annihilate ourselves as part of their little cautionary lesson, could they?

No—we were supposed to remain up here. They didn’t want to sacrifice us after all—even Wui had qualms there.”

“If the orders finished me with the enemy I’d have gone in and done it, maybe ... except I’m not getting too happy with CC’s orders and what they do to people. Clever sods, the whole problem tidied under the rug at one go. All makes sense now; well, all but one thing.”

“You mean the size of this dreadful place,” Rossa said. “The size, and all its machines. Really I incline to your theory, that our good former friends used it for dangerous experiments—didn’t I hear Cathy Ellan mention black holes once?” She looked around as if expecting to see one pop out of a cupboard somewhere.

I wanted to believe that was all we had to worry about; I couldn’t quite. “There’s another thing they let slip in Tunnel, only they clammed up bloody quick. There’s
more
in the way of contingency plans.

Wasting half a continent isn’t their last trick—what d’you do for an encore after that lot?”

She shrugged, impatient. “I should imagine they’d return to square one and send more ambassadors, possibly with a threat of nullbombing from space. That, thank goodness, should not be our problem. Our problem is what to do about
this
infernal machine.”

“ATTENTION. TWO HOURS TO ORBITAL SEPARATION, REPEAT, TWO HOURS. THANK

YOU.”

“We had a group leader once in Comm, who sounded very like that machine,” Rossa said. “He was loud, and he spoke slowly, and it was still almost impossible to understand him.”

“Yeah, sure, change the subject ... Look, we might just smash this thing now, or we could use it to frighten them, say how Central can drop these in dozen lots any time it wants—“

“Don’t smash it, by any means; this is a kind of bargaining tool, Ken. Mightn’t the threats make our colonist friends work twice as hard on their own MT research to duplicate the weapon, though, or manufacture a counteroffensive? Mightn’t it be more effective to follow that original schedule and have them destroy themselves—end their troubles and ours?”

I clamped my teeth together. “I hate to say this, but ...
no
, I won’t hand them a nullbomb and go for wipeout on that kind of scale. I might have done it if I’d been ordered in clear, but Central’s really got up my nose with this double-bluff business where you don’t even tell your own troops. The hell with Central.

I say we play it by ear and do the best we can.”

A big sigh, the sort that makes you sag like a deflated punchball, and Rossa clapped her hands very slowly and silently. “Perhaps I’ve misjudged you. You sounded almost human then. I think I agree.”

“So all we’ve got to do is get there, or get from L2 into orbit anyway, and see what they think about us.”

We sat there. Nothing else to do while waiting; very definitely the station wasn’t built for people. I’d have been happier if I could even press a button on the console to start us moving—but I wasn’t even allowed that.

“ATTENTION. ONE HOUR TO ORBITAL SEPARATION, REPEAT, ONE HOUR. THANK

YOU.”

I started prowling around again; Rossa sat where she was and a few times I caught her looking at me.

What I’d thought of was something that might cheer her up a good bit more;
there
was the minigate receiver all this had grown from: in five minutes I could unclamp the whole thing and smash it. No gateway, then, between here and Point Arbitrary all those millions of kilometers away; no operating gate for Tunnel to tune into; if I’d caught hold right of what they were saying back there, no gates working in this part of space meant they’d never be able to lock onto us again. Like childbirth—I could cut the cord and cut us off forever. All we had to do to say goodbye was turn off this gate
and
stop MT work on Pallas. That was all. No sweat.

Of course, the advertised booby trap might tend to blow holes in the deck, and if we were smeared now there wasn’t any coming back, not now that FACTOTUM had tied up one security item by slicing the tanks into tiny pieces. Well, it was something to think about.

“ATTENTION. THIRTY MINUTES TO ORBITAL SEPARATION...”

“ATTENTION. TEN MINUTES ...”

“ATTENTION. FIVE MINUTES ...”

After five it counted down by minutes; at the one-minute mark it changed to a counting off of seconds.

“That damn thing just loves the sound of its own voice,” I said, wishing I could pour something into the speakers. Rossa nodded, but I saw she was nodding in the compulsive rhythm of this stupid seconds countdown.

At zero we had an exciting anticlimax, a smallish hissing, and Corvus Station tilted: the walk to the darker end wasn’t a level one anymore, but just a little uphill. We were on our way. Again.

Fourteen

Imagine this huge twirling cylinder thousands of kilometers out behind the moon. It’s rough, it’s lumpy and in general a godawful mess to look at, because it was all built from inside through a 1.9-centimeter keyhole. It’s spinning around the long axis every half minute or so, that’s where our miserable little ration of gravity comes from; it’s twirling very slowly end-over-end too, because all the nudges this way and that it’s had from kicked-out satellites or through the gate haven’t quite summed to a zero spin on
that
axis. Good thing really: wait long enough and sooner or later Corvus Station is going to be pointing any way you like to name—so that’s when you give the gas tanks a squirt and nudge the whole ugly contraption a little further onto a curve that falls away around the moon...

You
have
to imagine all this, as a passenger; I had to imagine it; there were still no windows (hull flimsy enough without them), no videoscreen with a view of outside (too much trouble to have FACTOTUM

make video tubes as well as all the rest, maybe). Sometimes it was enough to make you wonder if we really were tumbling about in our own backyard, out there with the other junk like the L5 hull they never finished and the power satellites that had been breaking down one by one over the last eighty years.

Nothing much seemed to change inside the hulk, except that as days passed I tended to sit or stand further and further away from Rossa. I was ashamed to come close. The cretins who stocked this place hadn’t bothered with frivolous stuff like soap or a water recycler. After my time in a crack Combat platoon I wasn’t happy about letting myself stink.

Being grimy seemed to worry Rossa less than me, although she wasn’t used to it: or perhaps that was why. Her life story came spilling out in one of those sudden fits she had, when she seemed afraid to stop talking—as though the words were making some huge wild beast keep its distance.

While I’d been a slum kid looting old wood, upholstery, and books to burn in the cold weather, she’d sat on good chairs in warm rooms and
read
books. “My father was in Government service and we lived in the Kensington enclave—we could even use electric fires on some nights.”

“Why the hell’re you in CommAux if you’ve got ties
there
?”

“Oh, a silly thing: I broke my ankle. A Pott’s fracture, they said; at the time I thought it must be the worst pain in the world. I was very young then. For days and days I was wailing in hospital because there was an anesthetics shortage; then CommAux came on their routine ward check with a gray man they called a sensitive, another branch of the talent. He touched my hand and fell over writhing with a broken ankle he didn’t have. So I was a transmitter; and that was the end of my life story, really, until Tunnel.”

“They drafted you, classified you, locked you up in CommAux?”

“That’s about it. Father tried to pull his strings, and they snapped in his hands; Central was too big for him...” Her eyes looked different, softer, as they stared back through the years. I offered her some dredged-up bits of my own life by way of trade, the first D and the time in the pit...

Then the plans that had started to go wrong—when we found the nullbomb—went on to go even more wrong.

“ATTENTION. UNSCHEDULED OBJECT INTERSECTION IN ESTIMATED THIRTY-ONE

HOURS NINETEEN MINUTES. REPEAT, UNSCHEDULED...” The electronic growl seemed even more distorted, as if what it had to say was so unexpected that the voicemaker couldn’t cope. At that it was doing better than Rossa or myself; after pouring out our bad times over each other, we were both trying hard to say something cool, analytic, the spot-on right thing to say—which is how we ended up staring at each other in a sort of echoing silence for nearly half a minute. (Which doesn’t sound long, maybe: time it someday and find what a gaping hole in your life it really is.) There was another hiss, and the cylinder tilted again.

“Let’s play lists again,” I said. “One, it’s a nuclear missile or whatever got those satellites. That means the end of all our worries, and no need for much subtle strategy planning except deciding whether we shut our eyes when it hits. Two, it’s a chunk of floating rock and we take our chances with the override.

Three, it’s a shipload of those buggers we’re looking for.”

“Agreed,” Rossa said, and started methodically tucking her legs into lotus position on the scarred deckplates. Her face was icing over again, like a clear pool on a frosty night. She looked terrible. “I’ll defer that decision as to whether I really want to follow orders to the letter. Reporting back to our dear friend Birch will be a pleasure.”

I was making my way to the console and the override mike—mike rather than keyboard to make construction easier for that damned FACTOTUM—when a ladle of molten iron splashed down my left arm, once, twice, three times, a triple blast of pain that must have had the nerves crawling back into their holes to die. I looked back quickly: Rossa was gray-faced, eyes tight shut, lips squashed together so hard their color was bleached away. She was poking knobs on that damned armband—nerve inductor—God, what a job. I kept staring at my own unmarked arm, expecting it to glow bright red and drop off any second, as two more triple bursts went out on Rossa’s pain waveband. The console winked at me. Lucky machines, can’t pick up
this
signal. Finger down on the OVERRIDE button, lean over mike, try to ignore the situation report throbbing in nova pulses of Force code along my arm...