Space Eater (20 page)

“...Don’t believe I can allow that. Sorry.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Your position’s compromised already. You’d cut no ice. You’ve been seen to take sides—“ He glanced at a wad of computer print on his desk. “That engagement
Silverfish
got into. New African party line says you helped blast
Eleutheria,
since one miserable Archipelago ship couldn’t have done it alone.

Won’t trust you anyway since you’ve been here—they’ll say you’re brainfixed.”

“There must surely be some way...” Rossa said, and sneezed again.

“There is.” He took up another report, a folder with wide orange chevrons down the cover, and flipped to the place he wanted. “Second reason you can’t be allowed over there: consensus is, you have at least some MT information. Now we started from nothing out here—we knew only that it could be done. We can detect ... disturbances associated with MT if they’re strong enough. Can even create them but not to any useful purpose. Yet. Same with the rebels according to our detectors. Pity we don’t have the directional aspect sorted out ... Now—and this alone is classified to the point that you don’t get out of this place till StraProgCom says so—we’ve been keeping track of rebel experiments this way. Like us, they can spare just so much effort for MT; in fact their team works only one shift, and though they sometimes run late we know their shift times pretty well from MT disturbances—even their meal breaks.

Could all be useful one day, that’s what Intelligence says.” He turned a page. “Yes, well, useful even in a negative way. Picked up some hellish big disturbances over the last years, clear out of the ordinary scale and time pattern, on a different band altogether. Our best guess now is that it was you, on your way; your people testing your ship; that sort of thing. Meaning, your ‘classified FTL drive’ uses some aspect of MT

physics. Meaning, there are more things you could tell us. Well?”

It was like a training ground run over broken country with mines planted in all the least likely places.

Ammunition running low, as well; how do you dodge and weave and keep up the nuisance fire when it’s all just words? Still, there was some natural cover right in the middle of all this security business—

“Remember we’ve got our own security troubles. Our government took this so seriously they
picked
us for not knowing any AP material. We can’t even spill how our own ... ship runs because we don’t know.” Did that sound right? Why hadn’t we thought through all the arguments before? Brain damage after all?

“Our space program has always tended to use military rather than scientific crews,” Rossa put in. “Pilots, military people, never physicists.”

“Irrelevant. Could take apart your FTL engine and find what makes that tick.”

“Comp will self-destruct if there’s any funny business,” I said.

The white mustache twitched, and he showed his teeth without really smiling. “Report concludes your onboard brain is relatively crude. A D-181 system-cracker brain would have a fair chance of penetrating and overriding its defenses. If not ... that’s an acceptable risk.”

“You’re out of your skull,” I told him. “About a one percent chance of getting anything, if that much, ninety-nine-plus percent chance of just one great fireball, and
that’s
an acceptable risk?”

“The chance of FTL delivery systems against a maximum loss of a few men and some machinery. Game theory weighs it that way, Jacklin. Game theory says we have to play it that way ... unless you can add a new factor to the equation.”

Rossa: “Since the FTL drive has flown the coop, you want to take that factor
out
.”

“Of course—right on,” I said, trusting her.

“Explain, please,” said Lowenstein.

“Now, General, your efficient little spy must have noticed the absurd size of our craft’s only airlock. This is because, as a final security measure, our ship systems jettisoned the FTL drive—I loathe that abbreviation—jettisoned the drive module far out in space. Its location is buried under impenetrable computer lock; you’d look silly if your software pirates tripped the scrambler and lost the drive forever—“

For that I wanted to slap her on the back and give her a round of applause. Hell, maybe there really was an FTL drive, maybe it had been dumped, maybe our not knowing about it was a final security lock ... I couldn’t size up Lowenstein’s reactions because he’d buried himself in his all-wise report again. By the thickness of the wad, Grainger must have been talking in shorthand. Then the general looked up and showed his teeth again.

“Good try. Very good try indeed. Afraid our boys up north already have an answer for the airlock red herring. Can’t fool those bright lads, though their grammar’s none too good—eighty percent certainty, they say, that the FTL drive was fitted aboard an orbital factory, and that your lot chose it as the most impressive ‘ship’ they had to overawe the poor colonials. Factory needs a big lock, of course; only surprised there’s no small personnel lock as well; as for the jettisoning, I still suspect that even if it was true we could pry the location of the missing unit from your computer. Can’t deny it, can you? Can’t deny it.”

I looked at Rossa. She looked at me. “Like your bright boy Grainger would put it,” I said, “we have our orders.” Another sneeze.

“Excellent. So now we know where we stand. Unlike you, or whoever instructed you,
I’m
not playing with cards I don’t have. You’re claiming diplomatic status: we’ll recognize that to the point of not brainfixing you, not handing you over to the interrogation boys, none of that. Might have to reconsider your status later on, but for the time being...” He popped another something into his mouth. A sweet, probably; even here they surely didn’t have lime-green medicine.

“Cards on the table, then. At first we honestly did decide you were a mere rebel ploy—afraid that’s what we thought of those ridiculous satellites, too. Naturally anything transmitting in clear was automatically neutralized, at the time. Seen your credentials now, very clever—“

(I found out afterward that the thin tube of “credentials” contained things like a $100 bill and $50 note from series after the Incident: the clincher was a microgram of plutonium from a 1990s weapon, from
before
the Incident—you could tell its age from nuclear decay, Pu not being a natural element, and no radioactives had been sent through the stargate, and so we came from Earth, QED. Also there was a message saying, roughly, “Jacklin and Corman are our ambassadors. Listen to what they tell you.

Essential that MT research stop right now. Signed, Supreme Council of United Nations of Earth.” Bleah.)

“Very well then: we’ll give you an embassy and it’ll be a suite in the basement of STRACEN-1 ... this complex. As neutrals in a war situation, you’ll be confined to embassy ground for the duration. Duration looks like meaning a long while, at present: we’ve dug in and settled to it like a couple of hoglice breaking teeth on each other’s shells. Local beasties.” He told us the size of a hoglouse by holding a hand out flat, half a meter over the desk, and left us to wonder whether he meant the height from the desk or the floor.

“Meanwhile, like the good hosts we are, we’ll give your craft a going-over, make it shipshape for when you finally leave. We really have no choice here. Matter of national, planetary security. As
I
see it, your only chance of fulfilling your own orders is to help tip the balance of the war.”

“No,” I said without much real force. You had to play these things to the last.

“If you’re correct and sincere in what you’re saying,
you
two are messing with the lives of everyone here and on Earth when you refuse to do what you can to end the war and make it possible for us to terminate MT research. It’s your responsibility.”

“That’s the logic of the Freedom gangs, the terrorists,” Rossa said sharply. “Hold the knife to some poor innocent’s throat and say ‘Unless you give me everything I want,
you’re
responsible for this person’s death.’ You simply cannot shift responsibility like that.”

Lowenstein’s mustache wriggled again. “Clever debating point. Debating, though ... debating isn’t the point. Like to remind you it’s everybody’s throat we’re discussing, and there are two knives, one of which we can’t control. I think you’d better go away and consider
Realpolitik
for a few hours.”

Rossa opened her mouth to say something, and instead sneezed hard enough to set papers flapping on the desk. “You’ve both been sneezing,” the general said with a sort of fierce calm, fingers dancing on a touch-panel set in the desktop. “Sneezing, yes. Sore throat too, by any chance?”

“Yes,” Rossa said, still breathless from the explosion. I nodded, wary.

“Well, well.” The teeth came into view like the sun from behind a cloud, and stayed glittering at us. “Not quite like Earth, you know, not quite like it at all, this place. Astonishingly close, mind you, but some very funny proteins here. Have to be careful what you eat. Most people need the anti-allergen shots, seventy percent perhaps. Sneezes and sore throat, very common, not at all fatal, they say you just wish you could die.”

The gentle smoldering in my throat flared into a crackling forest fire when I thought about it. Rossa sneezed three times and sat gasping. A knock on the door and a guard came in.

“Earth delegates Jacklin and Corman require escort to their quarters,” said Lowenstein. “You’d really be in for an uncomfortable time without the anti-allergen shots. Remind me to order some for you when we talk again. Must treat our delegates as well as we can, what with them being so cooperative.”

“Speaking off the record, General, you’re a bastard,” I said, and spoiled it with another attack of sneezing as I stood up. No mind-drug interrogation or anything that might be hard to explain if another gunboat came from Earth—just a little “accidental” pressure while they were waiting for medical supplies to come through. What really got up my nose, so to speak, was that when we’d talked it over, Rossa and I were going to have to give in. It was either that or sit in a room for God knows how many years, trying to win by not moving like some crazy Zen fighter. My head started banging again as I stood, as if I’d jolted something loose by moving. Rossa looked wobbly too, and we both sneezed hard as the white-uniformed escort held open the door.

Behind his desk, General Lowenstein was still twinkling happily.

Nineteen

One thing you could expect from the Archipelago mob was classy electronics—a concealed bugging system, for example, giving continuous 3D color images of our diplomatic suite. That was why, for the benefit of invisible cameras that might or might not be there, Rossa and I ended up twined around each other in one of the wide, soft beds. By now small novas were going off somewhere just behind my forehead, and a wad of sandpaper was stapled inside my throat; we’d both got used to turning to one side and letting out the sneezes when they came, and we added random grunts and bounces to say “hell, we’re enjoying it all really.” Rossa was warm to hold but kept shivering, and so did I.

“I really don’t know why we didn’t move into contingency two straight away in the general’s office,”

Rossa mumbled into my ear. Let them try to pick that up.

“Got to do it,” I whispered back. “I suppose I just wanted to keep the bastard waiting a few hours longer. Being so cooperative, I’ve got enough Force feeling left that I couldn’t stomach handing over the fiche straight after he got off his heavy line about allergic jollies.”

“_Yes_. For a minute I was hating so hard that my teeth ached. I wanted to switch plans, let the general’s researchers construct a nullbomb and wipe out their problems and ours in the same white light.

But that won’t do, not after the detail he let slip.”

“Hey, you could maybe argue me into switching even now—except I’m getting less keen on the dying business. Suppose after all the bad times I could use some more good ones before the terminus. What’d he say to louse up the Trojan Horse line of attack?”

“Really, Ken: he said quite clearly that the MT research center was ‘up north.’ Destroying it might leave this STRACEN place untouched, and ourselves as well, except of course we’d have some unfriendly questions to answer! And
that
might set the war almost back to an impasse again.”

“I hear you loud and clear. The islands are all strung out, but New Africa’s a good solid continental target. Yes, I get it. Be easier to sell Lowenstein the true facts anyway—he’s not so dim as I thought.”

Rossa sneezed so hard she set my ears ringing. “Oh dear,” she said aloud. “Thank you for your attentions, Ken, but really we’d better stop now ... I feel terrible.”

I had my nose buried in her hair, which smelled nice. “Me too,” I said in a muffled kind of way, and rolled out of the bed. The room was done in blue and silver, more color than I’d seen in any sleeping room. I padded through thick carpet to the shower and for a moment wondered if something was wrong: there wasn’t, quite, but approximately half a hard-on was jouncing between my legs. Not “at ease”

anymore, but still a long way from “attention.” Something was stirring under that heap of corpses in my memory, all of them me. That half-stiff way was the way it had been when I started being more than a boy, when I caught sight of the girl in the tight dirty jeans from the squatter family down the road. It had bothered me then. It bothered me now. If I was, sort of, losing the hard edge of my training, what the hell did I have left? All this without slowing down too much, and in the shower it blew out of my mind when I thought I’d turned the water on too fast, too hot: more of the lingering treatment with boiling oil or molten lead as Rossa slammed in another undetectable report. Wondered why she bothered, seeing as we’d practically junked the old orders. I did have the notion that you could get hooked on that clean pain without aftereffects, the way your tongue would go back to probe the loose tooth. The good thing about the pulsed torture this time around was the way it swamped the warning pangs in head, throat and sinuses, where some alien molecules were acting like grit in the works. That was us, two molecules that twisted the wrong way, dumped on Pallas to make it itch.