Space Eater (28 page)

Jacklin, you’re supposed to be the soldier. State the constraints, man.”

I was starting to see where this was going, and I didn’t like it. “You want to smear those last rebels—or destroy the nullbombs at least, that’s got to be the prime objective—without smashing up the oil wells.

Or starting any big tidal waves—someone mentioned that, didn’t they?”

“Better, much better. Nullbomb’s an imprecise weapon, it annihilates in three dimensions. Sunbeam operates along one dimension only, one single line of super-hot radiation-plus-plasma.” He rubbed his hands together, a smug schoolteacher. “Problem, to destroy an unknown number of nullbomb units, with or without their operators, in unknown locations scattered over two dimensions in New Africa. A plane, or the surface of a sphere if you want to be pedantic. Solution, the sunbeam. Afraid we need it, and we’re going to have it.”

Rossa still hadn’t put it all together. I liked her for that. “I don’t quite—“ she said.

“Our friend the general,” I said carefully, “wants to sweep sunbeams horizontally over New Africa, fast, a good many units to make sure of covering all the curvature—and burn the whole damn continent to scorched earth and rock. That’s what.”

“The main logistics problem would be the capping of the wells as soon as the ground is cool enough; we would have to assume they would all be ablaze, at least where there’s a fluid pressure margin—“ Keeb was using a dead voice I’d heard from him before. Colophon had hit him badly enough; what was going on behind those dog-eyes now?

There was a pause as Keeb trailed off. We were all looking at the same picture: perfect mathematical lines, thin and horribly bright and thousands of miles long, shaving off the surface of New Africa the way you might slice polystyrene with a hot wire. (Or would they be thin lines? How did diffraction work at the edges of a minigate? The sort of question only a pedant like Ellan went asking, until -- ) If that was what we were all seeing, only Lowenstein seemed to like it much.

“Energy beams,” he said, nodding his head slowly; his hair was working loose where it was combed over a bald spot. “No protocol restriction whatever on energy beams.
Limited
war potential is what the textbooks say.”

“What is the actual population of the continent?” Rossa asked.

Keeb: “Relatively small, as a matter of fact; a few millions; we’re much more concentrated in the Archipelago.” He squeezed his lips together. Maybe he didn’t like having to say the number that’d be getting roasted if this plan went through. Now I thought about it, nor did I. War is something you do to, well, military targets. At least (memories of “police actions” over Europe), this sort of war should be like that...

But then, if the Force had told me to, I’d have happily gone driving through central London letting people have it with a semiportable laser, watching their guts explode as the beam flash-boiled the stuff inside—wouldn’t I?

“...atrocities in history,” Rossa was saying. “You simply cannot plan a horror like this. I know the military mind is supposed to occupy itself with ‘thinking about the unthinkable,’ but really—“

“No choice,” Lowenstein was saying, not looking specially worried. He was keeping an eye on Keeb, but mostly he was watching me.

I was looking at a mental picture of my own, nothing like as fancy as one of whole continents being seared clean by imported sunpower. I was seeing the truth about the Force, and it was a mess. You got killed again and again, and they put you back together again and again, until dying didn’t really matter very much any more. Death’s OK. Death’s just something that happens and doesn’t get in the way of life. For you or anyone else. So you don’t care about people, and you do to people whatever the Force tells you to do, because it’s all a game anyway and deep down you know nobody gets hurt. Sure I’d have gone killing at random in the city, if they’d asked. I’d have queued up for the chance, interesting outside duty, break in routine, all that.

Rossa was still talking, white-faced, losing ground. “You’ll pass into the language, General, like Lynch and Guillotin—or like Hitler and the Rippers. You and all your unspeakable strategy committee...”

Never catch him that way, I thought. He’d love the idea. Rossa ... Rossa was about ninety percent of what had happened to me. She was a friend, somehow; her snapping at me just now had sort of pulled that into focus. Forcemen don’t have friends. Forcemen have messmates and games partners. Forcemen don’t ever care about people ... Go around thinking about people and by God you might start getting ideas like not wanting to kill them.

“General,” I said. Rossa had already petered out; Lowenstein hadn’t even been paying much attention to her but he still kept flashing looks my way. That was it. “General, I know why you’re sneaking peeks at me. You can’t break Rossa, but you broke me all right, and now you think I’m going to hand you the minigate. Let me tell you—that comp’s coded to take instructions from me and her
only
. I don’t know if I let out the password -- ?”

“You did.
Twll d’un bob saes
,” said Keeb. “A Welsh oath, I’m told.”

“Wonder what damned idiot thought that one up,” Lowenstein said with his eyes still narrowed.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. (Wui again, I thought.) “One of us two has to give the instructions
personally
.

Got that? The comp system is one hell of a lot cleverer than you think ... it can tell all right. And if you reckon you can make us hand over something as classified as the minigate when we need it to get back home...” I stopped then, thinking maybe I’d said a word or two too many. When I talked I must have made it clear that going home through that hellhole wasn’t exactly number one on my priority list.

“Clears the air, doesn’t it?” said Lowenstein with something like satisfaction. Keeb was looking even more unhappy. “Cards on the table again, then. I now know—and StraProgCom will know in an hour or two—just what MT weapons Earth actually holds. Pitiful, isn’t it? Nullbomb: we have it. Sunbeam: we
will
have it. Minigate: ditto. Jammer, now there’s an interesting one, and one thing we have learned from our research is the odd way e/m radiation behaves near the source of an MT disturbance. Imagine we’ll have the jammer in a year or two, now we know it’s possible. Cards on the table, and your people don’t have a card we can’t equal. So much for imperialism.”

“There is still one,” said Rossa, playing it casually. “There
is
still the final contingency plan, and DEVOURER.”

“Bluff. We turned Jacklin inside out and all he knows is the name.”

Rossa said, “Obviously the rest was kept from us so we couldn’t jeopardize plans should the worst happen. You, General, are presumably the worst ... My own guess is that DEVOURER will operate if ...

if MT research continues.”

“Bluff again. Been running ‘safe’ MT bursts to check our detectors, daily, all along—matter of security—need the detectors to watch the rebels aren’t still MT researching in some blasted hole. And where’s your contingency plan? I say bluff.”

“Some kind of time delay—period of grace,” I suggested, but it sounded feeble. Anyway, Lowenstein looked as though
he
thought it was feeble.

“Cards on the table,” he repeated to clear his throat. “Trying to play this game clean and fair and by the rules, but now my hand’s been forced again. Again I have no choice.” A pause while he stuck a finger in the corner of his mouth and gnawed; a couple of times there was a small noise as his teeth slid off the fingernail and clicked together. Then he took the finger out and pointed it at Rossa. “_You’re_ never going off-planet again. Can’t break you with PsychSec and so I can’t trust you. Now you, Jacklin, you’re something else. Expect you to open-sesame that protection and hand over the minigate like a good boy. In the best interests of everyone...”

Except a million or three people on the other side of the world who were going to be dead if the general sold his latest operation to StraProgCom. But I’d been thinking on a new line since the news that I was so broken and wretched as to be someone Lowenstein could trust. I could see the easy way out, and no more thinking to do.

“Sure you can have the thing, General,” I said, trying to sound not just frightened but like someone trying not to show fright. “You’re bloody right about grade-two questioning—I’ll hand over half a dozen sunbeams before going in for that again. Sorry, Rossa.”

It was natural enough, I reckoned, to look her way when I reached the end of that speech. She blinked, took a sharp breath that I could hear hissing in—and then let it out very slowly. Her face didn’t change one bit. Maybe she’d guessed.

And Lowenstein was laughing; it was a smallish laugh that shook him gently and came out in tiny snorts as if from a steam engine a long way down in his belly. “Very good try, Jacklin,” he said after a while.

“Quite the little hero. Don’t think you properly took in what I was saying a minute ago—about how it doesn’t matter anymore what Earth thinks. You’re not going to play hero, trip the traps in that hulk and send our neutral zone the way you sent
theirs
. Not stupid, you know. By then you’ll do what you’re told and be glad to—or maybe ‘you’ isn’t the right word because it won’t be the same person any more. Do what we like with you now, and the hell with what Earth government thinks. Not that I want to do all this.

Matter of security, world security, you do understand?” He’d sagged forward a little; he
still
thought he could con us into getting sympathetic about his problems.

“Afraid we’ll have to brainfix you, Jacklin,” he said slowly and sadly.

Keeb jerked even more rigidly upright than he was already, as if someone had connected a few kilovolts between his head and boots. “Sir! The protocol—“

“Think about it, Captain. Protocol applies to
Pallas citizens:
right? Now you explain to our guests what we’re being forced to arrange for Jacklin. Corman too, possibly, but definitely Jacklin.”

The captain’s face was strained, and he stared straight ahead of him without looking at anyone or anything except perhaps the wall, as he said: “A microcomp module is implanted under the skull and multiple electrodes run into sensory areas of the brain. We—they find the best or most ‘pleasurable’

pattern of electrode stimulations, empirically, and lock this program into the microcomp. Also an immobilizing pain pattern, but that’s seldom used. Subject is programmed to require regular applications of the pleasure-pulse, which can only be triggered externally by a coded radio signal...” He shifted his weight slightly, and added something about being sure we were acquainted with the details.

Rossa said, in a matter-of-fact tone, “That’s inhuman.”

“Fighting a war just now, in case you’d forgotten.” Lowenstein looked at me then. “Got that, Jacklin?

The biggest pleasure-jag you’ve ever felt. We brainfix you and inside three days you’re a thing. Give you the radio button and you’ll sit there pressing it and pressing it, thousands of times every hour, not moving, until you’re nine-tenths starved, swimming in your own shit and too weak even to press a button. Psywar ran one brainfixing experiment where the button only gave you your jolt if it hadn’t been touched for a full five minutes. Turn the power off after a week of that and they still kept sitting there, pushing the button every five minutes whatever else they were doing, check your watch by them. People are just machines really. Think of that when they go on about freedom and humanity and the rest ... Think of that when we take your button away from you until you lift the computer overrides. Even money, you don’t hold out more than a few minutes. Any questions?”

The question was, could I take that sort of treatment and still blow the ship when the time came? I didn’t know. I didn’t know at all.

Rossa: “Is there anything we can say or do to change your mind about this now?”

Lowenstein: “Up to you to think up something convincing. Hard to convince me of anything now after all your lies and evasions. Your own fault.”

I remembered his sermon on game theory and saw this was a sugar-coated “no.” Still, I found myself thinking, Lowenstein was playing fair in his own terms—he put his cards on the table himself, to use his favorite line. As far as that went, he
did
do his own dirty work—

Rossa had turned to Keeb. “Does the StraProg committee know General Lowenstein’s latest decision to use illegal methods, Captain?”

“Keep your mouth shut, Keeb. Damned committee can take the
fait accompli
, they’ve done it often enough before.”

I had the feeling of being forced into a corner. Too many things were still changing inside my head, options blinking off the screen one by one until there was going to be no choice left at all. Then Rossa gave me the final push:

“As I said an hour or two ago, Ken,
you
have other talents altogether.” And she folded her arms very calmly, smiling at General Lowenstein. I could feel her nibbling on her lip again. His hand had been going up to his mouth with another of the bright green sweets; it slowed halfway and almost you could hear wheels turning inside his head (“people are just machines really”). The room tilted into a kind of slow motion as the green light went up over my last option and I snapped upright from the chair as: (a) Lowenstein’s fingers dropped and went running like spiderlegs across the desk to that recessed control panel;

(b) little points of pain danced on my underlip as Rossa chomped harder on hers; (c) Lowenstein’s voice said loud and clear, “Cover him, Keeb!”

(d) Keeb’s hand dropped in slow motion to the bulky holster on his belt.

What was actually in my head was all mixed up together: a dive to the right and the desk would be plenty of cover against Keeb on the left and ten to one the defenses if any were in the front of that mechanized desk or in that clear cube and they couldn’t be automatic if Lowenstein had to press a button and this is piffling stuff after Admin office defenses and anything’s better than the brainfix and sometimes no matter how terrible a thing it is you do you really do have to kill people as the only way out of a problem—