Space Eater (19 page)

“Anyone got a puncture repair kit?” I asked, and had to explain that this lumpy thing was just an emergency suit, of course...

It was all go then.
Silverfish
transit to
Overlord
with hardly another word spoken; when we saw
Overlord
through the porthole it was a wall of silver metal too huge to take in: their main CCC (comm, comp, coord) center in orbit, smack in the middle of the neutral zone with all those hundreds or thousands of satellites dangling from its puppet strings, as someone told us later. It seemed satellite reconnaissance was a high card in the pack, here—at home the budget wouldn’t let us orbit new ones (maybe our Africans could), though some old U.S. and Russian gear up there still answered the remotes.

There was hardly time to do anything more about my patched suit in
Overlord
-- we pretty well took it at a dead run through its long curved corridors to
Meson
, the shuttle they’d laid on to take us spiraling down forty-two thousand kilometers to Port Island where, surprise, surprise, there was a port. A dozen or more empty seats took up most of the shuttle space, the passenger list consisting of Rossa, myself, and an escort who made Grainger seem friendly and talkative. An eyeball-popping approach run with multi-g deceleration; jarring bursts of vibration as if we were sitting on a giant speaker playing static at two hundred dB; and with the old deep ache of the transit waking up again in my bones, we were down. It wasn’t long before the lock doors opened together and daylight slanted in.

Strange how different things get to you—Corvus Station had never seemed 162 light-years from Tunnel, and for all their smartness the interiors of
Silverfish
and the rest looked more or less homegrown. The first time my guts chimed in to tell me we really were far away was when that light fell through the lock and it wasn’t quite the color sunlight should be; maybe the smell of the air had something to do with it too. It wasn’t anything special, but again it wasn’t anything I’d smelled before. All that was before we’d blinked and staggered our way down the metalled steps to stand on steaming hot concrete under a sky that was too green, a sun that was too big and bright even when shining through puffy cloud, a wind that came by sluggishly carrying a smell you knew was sea but wasn’t the right smell for a sea...

Almost together, we both sneezed good and loud. There were smart white towers and blockhouses all around the horizon, bluey-green things that had to be trees out near them, and a good many planes, shuttles, copters and the like parked well off the landing strip complex. I saw a sleek jet tilt up into the air as our escort said “_This_ way, please,” and opened the door of a car three times the size of the London street-wrecks I remembered. Nice to be down at last and getting the VIP treatment, not so good to think that after all these weeks caught in the works of Central’s plans, we were getting shoved around in exactly the same way by a system that was altogether different. And here, nobody was on our side.

“Don’t act like they worry too much about energy budgets,” I said to Rossa almost under my breath as the car’s acceleration pushed us hard in the back.

“When we had the surplus,
we
never worried. They say the richer Africans still don’t.”

One thing about being caught in the works—you got a good ride. We went screeching off at something like a hundred kph across the aerospace port and out beyond the buildings at the rim, with only one halt where passes were flashed and white-uniformed guards nodded. We were expected—messages must have been whizzing up and down from the sync orbit. (A corner of my brain offered the suggestion that folks here weren’t as surly as they acted: it was just that we’d tried to discuss super-classified things you probably got shot for mentioning, and lesser ranks would be leery of us because of that.) Down a crazy twisting road, clouds of dust boiling up behind and blue-green fronds like long fingers whipping past on both sides, until the notch at the end of the road went blue and we realized we were careening down to the sea. Something that wasn’t a bird flapped low overhead. Houses, square-built, flat-roofed, whitewashed like something in the tropics. If we were under a sync-orbit station we had to be on the equator so we had to be in the tropics, unless this place didn’t tilt the same way ... I sneezed again.

Rossa had been sneezing too. It could have been the harsh sunlight after weeks of relative dimness.

Now there was nothing in front but sea and shore. I wondered whether I could connect the narrow, rough-shingled beach with the smaller and further-off moon. More guards waved us onto a concrete jetty and we pulled up level with some kind of boat moored there, engines idling.

“Where’s this thing going that a plane wouldn’t go quicker?” I asked escort.

“The air is too risky. Have you forgotten there’s a war on?”

I sneezed twice more as we went down the gangplank; we’d hardly got below when the engine note went up half an octave and the boat or ship or whatever was accelerating a sight faster than Corvus Station at its best. Below, there was a thick smell of oil and paint, almost as thick as the smell of us must have been: the first thing escort did was assign us a cabin apiece and say, “You probably want to clean up.”

I bolted the door and was already stripped down and into the little shower when the boat tilted up, the engine note rising to a scream. Hydrofoil. Maybe the plane wouldn’t have been that much faster after all.

I soaped myself again and again, attacking the Corvus Station dirt that had sunk in over the weeks, watching the water run away gray-green and greasy for the first five minutes. I must have been starved for good things lately if it felt so good simply to get clean. They’d laid on shaving gear too, and fresh clothes that by some weird guesswork actually fitted—or had Grainger been padding out his sneaky reports with estimated inside leg measurements? I found an inner pocket and put the fiche in its envelope there: it didn’t bulge visibly. Now what?

There was a porthole with sea flowing past outside; watching it a while, I decided the sea at least was the right color in this cockeyed place. Or one of the right colors. A couple of times something flipped in and out of the water too quickly to take a good look at. This was the first time I’d been alone in weeks

... in all but a few hours of my life if you wanted to look at it that way. I didn’t like it. Being washed and shaved and dolled up almost as well as Force dress uniform—only white, like all the others here, and no insignia—somehow added to the broken feeling underneath, the touch of aching cold in bones and guts.

And my feet hurt: this place had a fair gravity. And as well as the spasms of sneezing I seemed to have the beginnings of a sore throat. Out in the corridor I found escort standing watchfully; he didn’t say anything when I tapped on Rossa’s door and went in.

The first thing she said was, “I’d forgotten what you looked like without the beard, Ken.” Then she dropped her voice. “We must get out of the habit of talking things over, even in whispers. There is a war.

They will not be scrupulous.”

“Yes—we’d better keep quiet about secrets like the FTL drive,” I said heartily. A tiny frown flickered across her face and got chased away by a tinier smile. We chatted about personal feelings like how much better it felt to have your feet on a solid planet at last, even if the solid bit was a kilometer of water away just now. A flunky brought in food after we’d been moving an hour, and that was as much of a new experience for the taste buds as Tunnel rations had been—only thankfully in a different way. The good times were so far apart that we tried to make the meal last ... or it could have been that we both ate slowly because the new flavors made us feel queasy.

At journey’s end—Gate Island, they told us—we had a replay in reverse of our ride to the sea. Only the port was bigger, the houses and installations were much bigger, the car was bloody huge and must have sucked up the output of an oil well all by itself. After ten minutes’ drive we slowed down for a security-controlled gate, and then another and another—all the familiar feeling of wading through treacle you get when going through Security routine. Then down a ramp to where the road ran underground—“Tunnel again,” Rossa said gloomily—through a maze by car and another on foot, going downhill all the way until our ears popped...

Caught in the machinery was about right. Only the machinery on Pallas was much, much brighter and better kept than at home. What lunatic programmer in Zurich had rigged the statistics until Central Command actually thought two people and a couple of bits of data that seemed to be the wrong ones could do anything at all against this lot?

I supposed we had to try.

Eighteen

In brighter moments I’d pictured talking to someone with a title like Supreme Commander of Land, Air, Sea and Space, and having him or her grovel on the carpet in front of us: “Yes, yes, I cannot argue, it shall be as you say.” When I felt gloomier, the picture had been of a bored junior clerk in Admin, who jotted down half a dozen lines of notes and threw them into the bin before we even left the room. In the end we hit somewhere in between, closer to scenario number one, spilling the first version of our story—“please stop because we say so and we know more than you”—to a General Lowenstein. He was in his mid-forties, maybe, but his short hair and mustache were pure white. Small pointy face, slate-blue eyes; one of those clipped-speaking people with, as they say, a mind like a steel trap. (What they also say is, have you ever tried to teach anything to a steel trap?)

“Appreciate the position. Appreciate it fully. But how does this alter our situation? I can’t see that it does.”

Rossa said: “The strategic position needn’t be changed at all, General. If your government is researching anomalous physics, though—“

“Haven’t admitted that we are, you’ll note. I’ll allow you the assumption.”

“Please. Ken Jacklin has described some of the horrifying potential of this line of research. The possibilities are too terrible to be adequately dealt with in our language. We simply ask that any such research be halted. Only that one line of research which, we tell you,
cannot
produce a usable weapon—only horrors.”

“Evidence? I should take your word for it?”

I leaned forward in my chair. “General. Our best bit of evidence you can look up and see every night—those bright stars that went bang all at the same time when they turned on the big gate this place was settled through. How about that? Do yourself a good turn and stop it happening here.”

Lowenstein drummed on the desk with his fingers. “Some risks in every line of research. It’s been put to me that that might only be a one-time risk—certain susceptible stars, and so on. Remember, there’s a war on.”

I found myself making the old calculations about Lowenstein’s possible defenses. There was the outline of what looked like an opening panel on our side of the desk, maybe with something unfriendly behind.

I’d already noted a dark line on the ceiling, from wall to wall over the desk, and a transparent cube on the desktop that made no sense at all...

Rossa: “The fighting is at an impasse; you explained that yourself, your technological edge and their unlimited fuel. Do you have the right, simply in the futile hope of breaking an impasse, to threaten every human being alive?”

Me: “Anyway, what good’s a matter transmitter in this fight? You’ve got planes, shuttles, cruise-missiles...”

“Delivery system! What we haven’t got, a reliable delivery system. The protocol,” (I could tell that like Grainger he didn’t think too much of it) “the protocol forbids nuclear weapons, offensive fuel-air-explosive weapons, exoatmospheric ballistic missiles—not that
they’d
pass the laser satellites—and orbital bombing. Stuck with brain missiles and the rest you mentioned. Our missiles and interceptors think better;
they
can put more into the air. Standoff. But precision bombing via MT—“ He spread his hands. “You see?”

The nullbomb would be tagged a nuclear weapon. I couldn’t quite see whether that cocked up our second-line plan or not.

I sneezed and said: “Well, don’t you believe what we tell you about how that’s never going to work?”

He leaned back, elbows on desk, fingers steepled. “...Not the point. Please to remember this is an
arms
race
. We’re back in the twentieth-century trap. Take it as a hypothetical case: I believe you. Even remotely possible that StraProgCom and the strategy brain would believe you too. We still couldn’t stop.”

“Why not?” we said almost together.

“Game-theory view. There’s an advantage and there’s a risk. Present strategy is to accept the risk and hope for the advantage. Proposed strategy, your proposal, is to scrap both as far as MT goes. Only we’re left with the risk.” He rummaged in a pocket and found something that he put in his mouth. He leaned slightly forward again, sucking on whatever it was. “Advantage local, risk universal, yes, you made that clear. The risk is there, precisely the same universal risk, if we stop. Because whatever I say or do, whatever you persuade us to believe, those infernal bloody New African rebels will
not
abandon
their
research. Is that clear? The risk remains—only we’d have thrown away our chances of advantage, and even, assuming for one moment you could be mistaken, made it possible for the rebels to gain the advantage.” A moment’s vigorous sucking. Maybe he wasn’t as stupid as I’d thought at first. “Really think it’s impossible to spell it out clearer than that. Now, what d’you say?”

I’d been ready to shout right back at suggestions on the lines of how an infinite explosion or chain or novas was “acceptable risk.” The last thing I’d expected was to have it tagged as an inevitable one...

“An interesting debating point,” Rossa said sweetly. “To preserve the symmetry of the situation, we simply need to visit your opponents under flag of truce and put to them the same arguments. A prohibition on all MT research could very easily be added to your famous protocol, I’m sure.”