Killing Time (12 page)

Larissa was cut off when the
entire ship suddenly shook more violently than it had at any time since I'd
been aboard. I spun toward the tinted transparent panel in the hull near the
bed and saw dim, eerie light outside: apparently, we'd once again climbed to a
very high altitude. Against the mists of the stratosphere and the darkness of
space beyond I could see dozens of glowing objects streaking toward us. Most of
them were fairly small, I saw as they passed; but some, as they approached,
grew to a considerable and disturbing size.

A second explosion lit up the sky
around us and rocked the ship again, knocking me off the bed. When I righted
myself I saw that Larissa was already halfway into her bodysuit and had one
hand to her throat, activating the surgically implanted communicator that
linked her to Malcolm. "Yes, Brother dear," she said, looking more annoyed
than concerned at the peril into which we'd suddenly been thrown. "I can
see them—it would be a little difficult not to. I'm on my way to the turret now
with Gideon. Tell Julien to divert whatever power he can to the external
fields—you know how damned unpredictable these things are."

I started to hurry into my own
clothes. "What's happening?" I said, trying to match her calm.

"Our admirers in the Defense
Department," she muttered, looking outside. "One of their pilots
must've caught sight of our ship in Afghanistan. Looks like they've deployed
their whole collection of toys: EKVs, LEAPs, ERIs—there's even an SBL out
there."

"Larissa," I said,
doing up my coveralls, "arcane acronyms really aren't going to reassure me
right now."

Even in the midst of such an
attack—or perhaps because of it— Larissa became playful and coy: "No, but
you'll need to memorize these things, Doctor," she said, giving me a quick
kiss. "Believe me, there
will
be a test." She began to point
around the sky at the streaking objects. "Lightweight exoatmospheric
projectiles, or LEAPs—they're the smaller ones. Then there are the extended
range interceptors, or ERIs, and the exoatmospheric kill vehicles—"

"EKVs," I said,
watching the wild display outside.

"And the really troublesome
bastard," she finished, pointing to some sort of satellite or platform in
the distance. "An SBL— space-based laser. All part of THAAD, the 'theater
high-altitude area defense' against ballistic missiles. You know, the Star Wars
nonsense." She grabbed my hand, and we rushed out into the corridor.

"How accurate are
they?" I said.

"It's not their accuracy we
have to worry about," Larissa answered, moving toward the ladder that led
up to the ship's turret and the big rail gun inside it. "The THAAD boys
have never managed to hit
anything
intentionally. But that doesn't keep
them from throwing all that firepower around the atmosphere like they're in
some kind of high-tech spitball fight—and an accidental hit could do real
damage."

We reached the ladder and started
up. "It's a little like skeet shooting," Larissa said with a laugh as
we entered the turret to find Eli Kuperman waiting for us. "And don't
worry, they're all unmanned vehicles, so you won't actually be killing
anybody." She climbed into the seat of the rail gun and smiled at me in a
devious way that hours earlier would have seemed very disconcerting.

Now, however, I found myself
smiling back.

As Larissa began to direct the
rail cannon's fire in every direction, pounding away with glowing bursts at the
midsize and larger interceptors that were being sent against us (the ship's
magnetic fields deflected the smaller ones), the stratosphere was lit up by
dozens of explosions, as well as by the indiscriminate but no less dangerous
fire of the space-based laser. My job during the encounter was to help Eli try
to determine just which long-range radar station was giving our position away
to the American THAAD command. Apparently there were only a few monitoring
sites sophisticated enough to be able to thwart our ship's stealth technology
by doggedly fixing on the confusing combination of wave reflections and
absorptions that the vessel was orchestrating (and that the Americans had
presumably tagged as ours after they'd made visual contact in Afghanistan).
Using the banks of equipment in the turret, Eli—operating in that cool but no
less energized and sometimes even jovial manner that I now accepted as normal
for everyone on board the ship—finally determined that a remote English base
was the most likely culprit. His hypothesis was confirmed by Leon Tarbell, who,
working on a lower deck, managed to intercept and descramble a series of
communications between the English and American air forces.

We needed to know all this, Eli
explained, because now that our ship was definitely being tracked, once we
dropped back down out of the stratosphere, we could expect to be greeted by
more conventional but no less deadly air ordnance than was currently being
thrown against us. If we could determine what and whose planes they were going
to be, Colonel Slayton could program our ship's computers to fly in an
appropriately evasive pattern at a requisite speed. Eli seemed quite confident
that this represented no overwhelming challenge, and as we talked over the
prospect of going up against warplanes—be they human- or computer-piloted—I
found myself being infected by his eager, slightly piratical enthusiasm.

This surprising reaction was only
heightened when the ship's alert system went off, letting us know that we were
beginning to descend and needed to get ready for a new and perhaps deadlier
kind of action. Our enemy now would be not some antiballistic missile system that
since its deluded inception had been destined for failure, but attack craft
fully intent on shooting us down. Apparently there had been other such
encounters; indeed, according to various radio transmissions intercepted by
Tarbell in months past, Malcolm's ship had assumed a sort of mythical status
among the world's air forces and navies. And given the very powerful ordnance
that the warplanes of such countries as England and the United States were now
routinely carrying, along with the skill of the pilots who both flew them
personally and—as in the case of the American raid on Afghanistan— guided them
from the remote safety of theirs ships and bases, escape had sometimes been a
near thing.

So it would be on this occasion.
As we dropped into the cloudy skies over the North Sea near the fifty-ninth
parallel, we were almost immediately intercepted by Royal Air Force fighters.
The planes struck dark, angular silhouettes against the setting sun, giving
them a very intimidating appearance. When I turned to Larissa, I saw her sizing
them up with a nod and a defiant smile; but concern was evident in her look,
as well.

"Gideon," she called to
me, "see if you can find out what's happening forward, will you?"
She clutched the control handles of the cannon tightly but did not fire.
"My brother doesn't like to use lethal force in situations like this, but
if those things don't actually have pilots I'm going to indulge myself..."

Rushing down the ladder and
through the corridor, I entered the nose of the ship to find Malcolm and
Colonel Slayton at the control panels, Slayton calmly but quickly tapping
information into one of the guidance terminals. "They're the new Joint
Strike Force ultra-stealth models," he said. "First-day-of-war,
highly survivable aircraft, armed with AIM-10 Predator missiles that can carry
biological, nuclear, or conventional warheads."

"Manned?" Malcolm
asked.

"I'm afraid so. They haven't
worked the kinks out of the remote guidance system on this model, yet."
Slayton turned to give Tressalian a very serious look. "We may not be able
to get out of this without returning fire."

Malcolm—who, I now noticed,
looked somewhat feverish— seemed deeply troubled by this statement; before he
could answer it, however, Tarbell's voice came over the shipwide address
system. "They're hailing us," he said. Then he patched the voice of
one of the pilots through: "Unidentified aircraft: you are in violation of
British airspace. Accompany our escort to the nearest field or be fired
upon."

Touching a keypad on the console
in front of him, Malcolm replied pointedly,
"'English
aircraft: as
far as we're concerned this is Scottish Republican airspace. You therefore have
no authority to challenge us." He turned to Slayton. "Can we outrun
them?"

Slayton shrugged. "We haven't
come up against this model yet. We
should
be able to, but they've got a
signature lock now— wherever we go they'll be able to track us, and if we head
for the island they'll come after us with a lot more than just a squadron. We
could dive, but we'll have to slow down—not much, but it would be enough to let
one of the Predators catch up to us. And over the open sea I don't think they'd
hesitate to go nuclear. The only choice I can see is going back up, but—"

There was a moment's silence,
leaving it to me to step in: "But what?"

Malcolm, whose face was
definitely growing paler by the minute, tapped a finger impatiently.
"Colonel Slayton is attempting to be tactful, Gideon. The truth is that
we've been away for an unusually long stretch, this trip, and it's becoming
somewhat urgent, as I'm sure you've noticed, that I get back to our medical
facilities on the island." Beads of sweat began to form on his brow, as
had happened before: clearly another attack was coming. Knowing the origins of
his mysterious illness and the circumstances of his past as I now did, I was
filled with even greater sympathy than I had been on the first occasion. I also
felt heightened respect for his stoicism: "This really is
irritating," was his summation of the situation. "All right, then,
Colonel, if we must—" He stopped suddenly, listening; then he held a hand
to his collar. "You're sure?" he said over the link to his sister. He
began to crane his neck, looking all around the transparent sheathing of the
hull. "How far? I can't see—wait, there they are!"

Slayton and I turned with him to
catch sight of another squadron of planes descending from behind and above us.
Their silhouettes were more conventional than those of the British planes, and
they weren't as fast—clearly, these were much older models. But they nonetheless
swept in to engage the superior craft of our pursuers courageously. As they
passed close by, I could see that they had large crosses of Saint Andrew
painted on their fuselages.

To my puzzled look Slayton said,
"Some of our friends in the Scottish Republican Air Force, Dr.
Wolfe."

One of the results of England's
international redefinition following the controversy over the
Churchill-Princip letters that had "revealed" British leaders to
have been responsible for the First World War had been a decision by the
Scottish Parliament to formally declare its nation's independence. What was
unknown to the world was that Malcolm's team, having forged those letters, had
been indirectly responsible for that momentous vote. In addition, when Malcolm
had sold his controlling interest in the Tressalian Corporation so that he
could devote himself fully to his disinformation campaign, he'd used some of
the fantastic proceeds to secretly purchase a group of small Hebridean islands from
the Scots. The price had been substantial enough to allow Edinburgh to launch
an effective armed resistance to England's efforts to resubjugate its northern
neighbor, and in the years since, Malcolm had continued to contribute generously
to what London insisted on calling "the Scottish rebellion" but the
rest of the world had dubbed "the Scottish war of independence."
Some of the practical results of his generosity were apparently now on display
in the air around us.

"But will they really attack
the English planes?" I asked. "They don't look like they'd stand a
chance."

"They wouldn't,"
Slayton said. "They're flying old Harriers, armed with Sparrows—too slow,
and not enough punch. But that's not the point. All they have to do is keep the
English planes occupied long enough to give us a chance to dive."

So they, and we, did: within
moments our ship was once again under the waves. We cruised quickly through the
Pentland Firth and westward into the Atlantic, then southwest, at a shallow
enough depth to be able to tell that the ocean surface above us was extremely
agitated. I was nevertheless unprepared for just how rough the waves were when
we shot back up into the air: it was fortunate that we didn't have to ride them
but could cruise along at an altitude of some fifty feet.

In a matter of minutes our
destination became visible: seven small bits of land dotted the water ahead. As
we approached, I could see that they were marked by high, dramatic rock
formations, hidden coves, and windswept green fields.

"Well, Gideon," Malcolm
said, his discomfort alleviated at least somewhat by the prospect of an end to
our journey, "welcome. Welcome to the Islands at the Edge of the World
..."

Such, apparently, was the
sobriquet long ago given to the little archipelago that was collectively known
as St. Kilda. Protected most of the year by waters so rough that ships did not
even attempt to approach it, St. Kilda seemed the perfect haven for Malcolm
and his team. It had been uninhabited by humans since 1930 and was now home
primarily to a fantastic assortment of seabirds—gannets, kittiwakes, puffins,
and the like—which flocked so densely at various points that they changed the
very color of the landscape. But what was most striking about the islands was
their air of almost palpable mystery: the sea-sculpted rocks, remnants of an
ancient volcano, bespoke a shielded past full of dark secrets and perilous
adventures. A romantic assessment, perhaps; but then, by the time we landed I
had become possessed by every kind of romance.