Space Eater (24 page)

Now, when the door opened for meals and such, you could catch whiffs of a stink of tension, or even a stink of fear.

UTTER TOP SECRET CHICANE/COLOPHON

Deteriorating situation. Three strikes since C/C went into effect. STRACEN-1 endangered. No
retaliation. StraProgCom requires further interrogation. Am instructed to request permission for
this. Please insert reply, etc. Lowenstein.

“I’d rather not,” I said, trying not to get twitchy. A touch more in the way of intelligent questioning and I might spill far, far too much. “We said all we had to say last time around, that’s right?”

Rossa nodded gravely and silently, and wrote:
Permission denied. Repetition is not necessary; see
previous interrogation transcripts
.

We wondered how long that would hold them for. We told each other loudly that if they persisted in this barbarous and illicit demand—Rossa’s phrase—we’d sit tight, concentrate on something else and refuse to say anything but “no comment.”

“Lie back and think of England,” Rossa murmured.

It was a long wait. The room still didn’t have a clock.

UTTER TOP SECRET CHICANE/COLOPHON

For your information: unexpected development. Interrogation request shelved. Implications
under discussion. Reply is not necessary, etc. Lowenstein.

“They’ve surrendered, perhaps?” said Rossa.

Keeb said, “My lips are sealed. In point of fact I don’t yet know precisely what the new development
is
, but there’s a rumor that Chicane/Colophon has achieved something. StraProgCom’s buzzing like a tree roach chorus. Of course it’s possible that ‘unexpected’ simply means that it’s worked as planned but that StraProgCom never really expected it to be successful...”

He was still talking when the door closed. A whiff of cheerfulness had definitely come along the sublevel 6 corridors with that particular orange-barred note: which was nice, but what the hell did it mean?

“What the hell does it mean,” I said, shifting the problem to Rossa.

She closed her eyes, stood up dramatically, and put one hand on her forehead in some kind of pose. “I see it all,” she said with a throb in her voice. “The mists are clearing and I see it all. Yes ... yes ... I see that there has been an unexpected development?” She flopped back into the chair and added sweetly,

“How the hell should I know either?”

Another wait, eight meals’ worth, ten...

UTTER TOP SECRET CHICANE/COLOPHON

For your information: (1) The STRACEN-1 security restrictions are now relaxed to normal
maximum level. (2) I am pleased to inform you that you are no longer confined to the embassy
suite—again, apologies for this necessity. (3) You are invited to come upstairs and take a look at
the sky. Reply is not, etc. Lowenstein.

Reality was doing funny things all right, today. We read the note through twice: Keeb watched us with a big grin. “I have been authorized to escort you up topside,” he said. “Are you ready?”

“No, got lots of other things to do,” I growled.

We’d come down the slow route through the maze and what felt like about fifty security checkpoints.

We went up, now, the quick way—an express lift, two hundred ear-popping meters from sublevel 6 to the surface and then up further still. “I think it’s reasonably subtle, putting a standard optical/radar obbo tower like all the others, right on top of STRACEN-1,” Keeb said chattily. “The idea is, of course, that the tower’s a low-priority target. You understand these towers are the ground-based, local part of the defense information system, more a supplement to the satellite watch than anything autonomous—“

“Will somebody please turn this gentleman off?” Rossa said in my ear.

The lift opened onto warm scented darkness, a high place that swayed in the breeze. We were on a metal platform with spidery grids attached, radar, radio; a crow’s nest with half a dozen people in it, talking in low voices or leaning on a handrail that didn’t look too safe. The platform was three, maybe four meters square, with one dim red light over the lift door. An ear-splitting noise was coming from the dark underneath, a noise like frying bacon or electrical interference on a massive scale. Keeb said:

“That’s insects ... quite a bit like the ones you have at home.” I’d never heard “tree roaches” at home; I took his word for it.

General Lowenstein came into sight, turning away from the handrail and looking fiendish in the red light.

He came to us with his hand stuck out. We shook it in turn, warily. “Congratulations, I suppose I ought to say.” He waved at a sky where I could see nothing but stars. “Think it’s not too soon for congratulations, myself. Not the blow we were expecting, but could still be decisive.”

Rossa said: “General, we’re very glad to have been so helpful—but we would be even more pleased if you could tell us how.”

“Watch,” he said. “Watch the sky.”

I looked; we all looked, up into a warm night sky. Only stars, surely? With some of them bright enough to be the locally visible novas, others all ready to flare up when the century-old nova light got here ... I could see people brooding over what looked like cameras clamped to the handrail. I tried to steal a march, get some idea of which way to look from which way they’d pointed their lenses ... but they seemed to go all ways. ”
There,”
said the general. Damn—missed something. There was a long, stiff pause.

“And there,” said Lowenstein. That time I saw it: a meteor? The thing was just a narrow, bright streak that flashed across a quarter of the sky and vanished, brighter than the stars, not bright enough to afterimage.

“Hey, General, you’re not saying we blew New Africa so high it’s only coming down now? What have meteors got to do with it?”

A chuckle from Lowenstein. I was playing him up just right. I was being the straight man. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. “Not meteors, of course,” he said. “And you know, New Africa’s still there untouched, every lovely wellhead of it.” Another pause to set us guessing again.

“Makes a man believe in providence,” Lowenstein said after another streak had flashed right overhead.

“Satellites, that’s what. Fast, low orbit ones going first—need most in the way of course correction, with the outer-atmosphere drag. Of course we both have thousands of satellites up there, the laser network and the solar network, and recce and comm, and the killers. You’d see flashes sometimes when a killer took out some other sat ... now they’re dropping without the killers. Higher orbit ones’ll be decaying, too, with luck, with time. Rebel sats dropping out of the sky like scalies at the end of summer. Incredible sight...”

It was dark and the tree things kept up their mass electrical discharge noise: nobody said anything. If they were all like me they were thinking:
Why the hell do satellites drop out of orbit?
-- Oh God, don’t let it be what happened when the big gate opened, the gravitational constant shifting, that would cock up orbits all right, wouldn’t it? And New Africa untouched? Bloody hell.

“Still haven’t guessed it, eh? You’ll be interested in some of the film records we’ve had back from our own satellites: come on now. All will be revealed!”

I was following my own offbeat track of logic, and I’d just decided big G must be safe and sound if Archipelago stuff wasn’t dropping too. Then what the hell -- ? It didn’t help one little bit when Rossa said, “I see. Of
course
.”

Returning wasn’t quite so easy, as I could have worked out if I’d thought about security for a moment.

Four times the lift slammed to a stop and locked in place, four times the door flipped open and we got the once-over by guards and what looked like computer scanners. At the bottom—“Getting it piped through to the War Room display,” Lowenstein said as he strutted ahead of us. “That’s the best.”

This time the room was even thicker with ribbons and brass, not so thick with lower ranks; there was a confused muttering when we came in, and one little round fellow pointed at us knowingly. The old zoo exhibits must have felt the way I did then—almost wanted to squint into a mirror and make sure I didn’t have UTS CHICANE/COLOPHON in flaring orange across my forehead.

“Record from scanning satellite R-64283,” said an impersonal voice from over the big display, and while the voice reeled off dates, times, and orbits, the picture came on with a curve of streaky blue-white up and to the left; the rest was dark. Might have been Earth from space, but of course it had to be Pallas.

There were points of light, not enough to be the stars unless only the brightest ones showed. The lights were moving very slowly, and so was the segment of Pallas: it stayed where it was on the screen but if you watched a while you could see it was turning. Which meant it wasn’t a sync-orbit camera picture—

Low down there was a group of bright points, a cluster of them. That was where it happened.

Something flared brighter than anything else on the screen, as if it was all a sheet of black cardboard lit by candles, and now someone had made a pinhole to let through the sun. The something swelled fast, a point, a tiny disc of pure white light. The planet’s image went dimmer and faded to a ghost as an automatic intensity control struggled to cope with that expanding circle of dazzle. At the high point the display simply had what might have been a picture of the sun, Sol, Beta Corvi, dealer’s choice, lighting up all the War Room with everything else faded to black. But the circle kept growing bigger, and now paler, and Pallas faded back in, and then—just as the glowing cloud lost out to Pallas and vanished into the dark—you started seeing some of those little light points come back, the ones that must be satellites. The whole business had been very quick, and maybe I didn’t take it all in on the first run; they played it again a few times in slow action, and then changed to other and not so good views of the whole sequence. But that dense cluster of light points, where the pinhole of fire had first come through ... no matter how long you waited, they never came back.

“Their research center was in orbit,” I said in Keeb’s ear while the show was still on. I said it loud enough that Rossa could hear too, and she tapped the side of her nose very solemnly.

“That is correct, absolutely correct,” Keeb said. “It really was clever; by keeping it in their sync-orbit zone they made it safe from our strikes. You might have gathered that we hid our center under ... an obscure island. Could almost say that because they didn’t have remote islands; they went ahead and built their own up there. But now—the neutral zones were established as spheres 150 kilometers in radius located above equatorial points on opposite sides of the planet. That fireball must have hit 200-kilometer radius and still carried a good deal of authority. Teraton would be underestimating it.” He was talking faster and faster. “It’s funny. It’s damned funny the way this crazy war works. You launch a massive strike with 3000 precision missiles, explosives, pseudoshrapnel, incendiaries, the lot. A few hundred casualties, maybe. But this, this ... transmit something no one can understand on a comm system no one knows about, just leak a little data and see what it does. How many men and women?”

It came to me that I hadn’t really known anything about Keeb at all. Rossa said gently from the other side of him, “At least you know it was quick for them.”

Over the p/a system the calm machine voice was ticking off the installations destroyed, probable functions of unknown bits of orbital junk up there, estimated loss of hardware in the form of shuttles, orbital maintenance craft (I think that’s what
Silverfish
must have been) and the rest. The voice didn’t mention people. It did mention, first of all and most often, that the central coordination brain of the rebels’

satellite network was definitely kaput. Likewise its back-up, if it had had one. No wonder the ones that needed most course correction had already started to drop.

“But is it a decisive blow?” Rossa was saying. “The idea of Colophon was that it should be a finishing stroke, something which ended the war simply by being such a horrifying blow...”

“The way the first nukes turned off World War Two in no time at all,” I said.

Keeb blinked. “It ...
could
be decisive. See, there’re two major missile varieties, inertial-guided and satellite-referring. Inertial brains are more complex and even with the killer sats taking out some of what’s up there, there’s always been a complete sat comm&control network, a network on each side, interpenetrating—so sat-guided missiles, um, predominate. The programming allows for the jinking and evasive action in general within a satellite guiding context ... Attack would be severely hampered, I’m sure. Defense too.” He jerked a thumb at the big screen, frozen in another replay. “The battle map comes from up above and
Machiavelli
integrates the data into defense planning. It could be decisive, then, if the rebels work the same way. I hope it’s decisive. This damned awful business can’t be allowed to go on any longer.” His lips worked soundlessly, and he closed his eyes.

In the room I could see a few others, most of them younger officers (or was that just a trick of my mind?), who seemed to be sagging the same way as Keeb.

General Lowenstein wasn’t sagging—he was expanding. This was his big day and he was enjoying it all he could. An orderly was opening dark bottles of something that frothed vivid pink, and tipping the stuff into scores of paper cups. I got handed one; it tasted foxy and not even as good as Wui’s powerful rotgut. Rossa made a face at me over her cup. From the buzz of talk we heard how a surrender ultimatum had gone around the world via the one remaining comsat network. The general was holding up a glass, no paper cup for him: “To Colophon,” he called out, and the crowd repeated it after him like little kids. Out in space the high-energy gas that used to be a lot of hardware and a lot of people must still be expanding, faintly glowing, like the Crab Nebula.

The ache in my bones had come back a little. I badly wanted to crawl away and sleep.