Space Eater (29 page)

Low and to the right, then, and fast. There was a loud clack somewhere like spring guns firing; a sound on the borderland between a buzz and a whine; a yelp that might have been Rossa as a terrible bright streak of pain speared my heart; the crash and bang of a heavy caliber gun; and a massive thud.

Something big had fallen; a huge plate of armorglass from the ceiling, slamming down onto Lowenstein’s desk to protect him from the gun I didn’t have. I couldn’t see what was wrong with Rossa. The glass starred slightly as Keeb’s next shot whined off it; I was on Lowenstein’s side of it now and the general was reaching for his own gun. But the glass only came down to desktop level and Keeb was already ducking under ... All my dreams of going death-happy in Admin were coming true now I didn’t want them, as I came up from the half-crouch, pivoting with right hand on the floor and swinging my closed left hand in a wide arc that took Lowenstein in the throat. You can feel the larynx give when that one connects properly. By now I wasn’t really thinking at all, and Keeb was still straightening up from under the glass partition when I hauled the limp general down off the chair and broke his neck backward over my knee.

He was half-right; you can
make
people act like machines, and I still had all the Force programming that sees you make sure of the kill.

Then Keeb was looking down at me, very tall and pale, a wisp of smoke trailing from his gun’s enormous black muzzle that for a moment looked all of one point nine centimeters across. “Don’t try it,”

he said very carefully, as though he was having trouble balancing the words on his tongue. The textbook movements were still flipping through my head,
cover your heart with one arm, always duck if the
weapon is pointing at your head, close at the earliest opportunity, and get your hand on the
weapon
. From this position, I saw as I straightened slowly, the textbook was a handy guide to suicide.

“You’re damned fast,” Keeb said. “I wouldn’t have believed it ... Is he dead?” He flashed a glance down at Lowenstein, who was on his side with the neck at a funny angle. There seemed to be an odd smile on the general’s mouth. I could have taken Keeb then, as he glanced down, but I’d no quarrel with Keeb.

“I should think so,” I said, and slowly remembered there weren’t any tanks here.

“This room isn’t bugged, you know; the general didn’t like it. He taped some conversations but not this kind.” A pause. “I can’t blame you for doing that, not really. It is a mortal sin and still I can’t blame you.

I’d never heard him ... gloat like that before. But what StraProgCom will say...”

I shook my head to blow out the red smoke of battle fever; my left hand throbbed and I might have stretched a muscle too far in one leg. Back through the cracked glass I could see a bullet hole, two holes, high in the wall opposite where Keeb had been standing. “You fired high. Either you’re a lousy shot or you fired to miss.”

“No comment. But StraProgCom would never have approved the brainfixing—except retrospectively.”

I was looking at the transparent plastic cube on Lowenstein’s desk. Some polarization trick—from this side you could see a 3D image in it, a plain-looking woman and a snotty kid.

Then I saw Rossa. She was slumped in the chair and a couple of wires were hanging down her; there were more on the floor, some of them straggling all the way to the far wall. “What’s happened to her?” I was ducking under the glass again before Keeb could answer. He followed me, explaining: “Emergency defenses for the general; he triggered them and the shield just as you came around the desk. They’re safe to touch now ... multiple taser installation, you see.”

Stungun. The barb-headed wires caught onto you like burrs and a heavy electric jolt came down the line.

The narrow panel had flipped open in the desk front and more than a dozen of these wires had come springing out—too late to help Lowenstein, who like half this damned planet put altogether too much trust in machines. But Rossa had taken a double dose from the two that struck her. She still had her arms folded, and her face was pretty calm, and, yes, she was breathing OK. When I held Lowenstein’s cube to her nostrils, it fogged just as it should. I pulled the wires off her then, feeling angrier about them than I had any right to feel, and turned back to Keeb.

“All right. Now what the hell do we do?”

Twenty-Six

Even when you’re playing at stage center, you seem to find later that you’ve missed great chunks of the action. When she came around in a roomful of Security, Rossa had winked at me; later she said, “I see you picked up the message,” and it turned out her lip-biting had been a transmission of advice in the usual code—advice to finish off Lowenstein. She was almost peeved when I mentioned that I hadn’t noticed or needed
that
suggestion; but after a while she smiled and shrugged.

“Then is this the happy ending?” she asked in the blue-and-silver locked room. Her tone of voice hardly called for a reply.

Everything had come to a point there in Lowenstein’s office, and I still thought I’d picked the right action—yet somehow life went dragging on instead of going into a neat fadeout at that point. It was

“confined to embassy” again, and StraProgCom was squirming like an eel with its head cut off, and out of shock they’d fallen back on mindless routine: a full-scale court of inquiry, no less. Another captain, a plump one called Pareto (straight black hair just longer than the bounds of Pallas military fashion, stains under his eyes as though something gray-green and nasty kept oozing from the sockets) drifted in and out to take notes for my defense. At first he sweated a good deal, perhaps wondering whether I might decide to send him after Lowenstein before the two guards at the door could squeeze their triggers; but after an hour or two during which I didn’t sprout fangs, he relaxed enough to pass on some rumors blowing about the bottom levels of STRACEN-1. One was that with Lowenstein’s platform as StraProgCom chairman gone ashes to ashes dust to dust, the revised committee was talking again about compromise terms with those bits of New Africa that were still rebelling. The second: word had gone out at last that MT research was a no-go area until further notice. Loud enthusiasm from Rossa and myself at that one—loud enough to cause a hasty leveling of weapons from the doorway. Pareto told us not to worry about anything, and edged out of the room.

Within two days that silly court was, as they say, sitting on me. If ever I find it hard to sleep I only have to remember that bare room and the days of grinding boredom I spent there: the thought of the wall clock and those squared-off steel chairs starts me yawning straightaway, and the snores begin before I can call up the three faces of the StraProgCom “judges” behind their long table. “It has to be StraProgCom people,” Pareto whispered, “because the issue’s so military, so specially important: and the Supreme Court topside is not cleared to hear the evidence, oh dear. Now don’t
worry
-- “

“The court is open,” the woman behind the long table said quietly after a glance at the man to her left and the older man to her right. On the far side of the room from my seat, a colorless man with a bony face and hair like dirty ice stood up and lifelessly intoned, “The charge is that Kenneth Jacklin deliberately took the life of General Felix Lowenstein the prosecution will show that this was an act of murder made more serious by the fact that the Archipelago was and is in a state of war and that General Lowenstein held a key position in its strategic councils call Captain Evan Keeb please—“

In the next three days there were endless statements from what seemed like half the population of this hemisphere: all one long gray buzzing. There were also a few disturbances that stuck in my mind. The first came just after Keeb had told his life story and the tale of what happened in Lowenstein’s office (much stress on how good my reflexes must be for him to have missed me when he fired; a dead little silence when the word “brainfixing” came up). The thing happened then, as Keeb was walking out through the ranks of lurking guards and Rossa had just been brought in. Suddenly ... everything in that room was a thin bright image painted on a brass gong, and somebody had struck the gong. Or it was a reflection in still water, and someone had tossed in a pebble. I’d felt that same ripple all those weeks ago when we were waiting for the curtain to go up in Tunnel.

Rossa turned her head my way, eyes opened wide; all I could do was nod a little to signal that I’d felt it too, shrug a little to tell her what she knew already—which was that I hadn’t a clue. Two of the three behind the long table shut their eyes hard, and the other shook his head as though bothered by flies.

Pareto felt his soft stomach carefully, pulled out a bottle of pills and swallowed two. The prosecutor didn’t blink. The skin was stretched over his face like plastic film over a skull...

The tall digits of the wall clock read 15:55.

Someone, somewhere, was playing again with MT.

When Rossa had said her piece, some PsychSec staff came on to confirm we’d been “interviewed at the second grade of inducement and questioning pressed to level four of insistence in the male subject’s case, level five in the female’s. This was carried out at the direct order of StraProgCom as relayed by General Lowenstein.” Much urgent whispering behind the long table, and much shaking of heads. Then all the general’s doings over the last months were reviewed in appalling detail: what had all that got to do with me? Pareto turned my way and winked.

Funny, I was thinking, that a game-theory worshiper like Lowenstein should take the risk of that last interview. I wondered if he had his own little glimmer of fairness, the great god Minimax telling him to brainfix me while somewhere he still felt he should give me a chance. A chance to die the clean way under Keeb’s or his own gun if I could be pushed into making a move; a chance that backfired when I moved too damn fast?

Certainly the dead general had worn a very odd-shaped smile.

A tall scientific fellow called Winkel was vaporing about MT and nullbombs when there was a second and smaller disturbance: somebody came in breathing hard, with a slip of that orange-barred paper, and laid it on the long table. The three StraProgCom members looked at it for a long while, and then took their turns to squint suspiciously at me.

More days and witnesses came and went, each witness standing in front of the silly chair in the middle of the room: no one ever sat in it that I could see. A procession of folk with glasses from Monitoring & Archives reported on everything audible that Rossa or I had said in our well-bugged room, and admitted that, actually, we hadn’t been heard to shout, “Hey, let’s kill General Lowenstein.” Finally the prosecution man ran out of witnesses and sent an icy shock through me by throwing in such phrases as “a clear case” and “must be found guilty and sent to the firing squad.” Somehow the awful boredom of the court had deadened the thought of what might come afterward.

Pareto smiled at me, stood, shuffled papers—and again a flustered messenger moved quickly up to the long table with a sheet of orange-striped UTS paper. The woman stared at it, frowned, smoothed her graying yellow hair. The men read it in turn.

Pareto coughed, and said in a tired voice, “This court has no jurisdiction. Lieutenant Jacklin is an accredited ambassador possessing diplomatic immunity.” He went on for some time, and before he’d finished, a third messenger with a third sheet of UTS paper was waiting at the long table like a dog hoping for scraps. “Two minutes,” I heard the older man tell him with a stop-bothering-me wave.

Whisperings behind the long table.

“Captain Pareto,” said the woman at last, “shut up.” Sinking feeling. “We agree. The case is dismissed by this military tribunal although it may later be reopened by the civil government. Court closed.” She bent again to the papers. The room began to empty.

“How come?” I said to Pareto as he passed.

“What? Come on, this inquiry was a farce from the start. Partly catharsis, mostly a way of looking officially into Lowenstein’s activities without the uproar of a full inquiry about
him
. You should have known you were out of danger when they focused on what
he’d
been doing lately.”

“Yes,” I said feebly. “...Thanks.”

He shook hands with me, greasily.

Rossa was back in the room. The prosecutor had gone. Pareto was going. The three were standing now behind their table and the woman was saying, “Come here, please, Lieutenant. Lieutenant Jacklin, could you please come over here—You too, I suppose.” The last bit was for Rossa.

When we’d come: “Congratulations on your legal victory, I suppose, Jacklin. You needn’t worry about a retrial—as a diplomat.” (Rossa patted my arm, smiling wide.) “No time for that sort of thing, woman.

Look. Something strange has happened. It concerns your damned craft—No, Greg, I’ll take the responsibility. I want their reactions to this.” She slapped down the memos. We bent over to look at them, a strange curdled feeling growing in my stomach...

The first said, after the usual headings:
Earth envoy craft radio activity logged 15:53 6:04:95. (1)
beamed signal into outer space (2) general transmission as follows: “Attention attention
attention. Earth expeditionary craft calling Beta Corvi II. This is a planetary broadcast. Please
relay. Regular MT disturbances have continued in this locality without pause in the generous
period of grace since the previous warning. We regret the measures we must now take. We draw
your attention to the point in space which on the mark will be at zenith at a point 37.8 degrees
from this craft’s location in the direction of planetary rotation, latitude 8.5 degrees north. Mark.

Our ambassadors were necessarily ignorant of this emergency measure and should not be
censured in what time there is left. This message will repeat. Ends.”

“You didn’t stop the MT research,” I said, and it wasn’t really a question. The room was cram-full with all the ghosts that had peeped out at us since the start; the final contingencies, and whatever else Corvus Station was built for, and DEVOURER.