Killing Time (19 page)

"Why?" Larissa asked
with a laugh, linking her arm in mine and marching me through the ship's
corridors in that inimitably martial yet alluring way of hers. "Have your
romantic choices really been that bad? I can't believe it—not the brilliant Dr.
Gideon Wolfe!"

"Sarcasm is a genetically
inferior form of humor, Larissa," I said, grabbing her around the waist
and squeezing hard. "And whatever women may say about
respecting
men
who are devoted to their work, that doesn't mean they want them
around,
particularly."

"Nor should they,"
Larissa answered with a definitive nod. "Every worthwhile woman deserves
more than her fair share of attention."

"How fortunate," I
mused with a smile, "that returning to my former life is out of the
question—what with there being a price on my head and all."

Larissa suddenly stood still and
turned to me, looking unhappily surprised. "Gideon—you don't mean to say
that you've thought about it."

I shrugged. "Not really. But
it's only natural to wonder."

In the time I'd known her I'd
seen uncertainty flit into and out of Larissa's features only occasionally; yet
now it seemed to linger there. "Oh" was all she said as she looked
down at the deck.

"Larissa?" Perplexed, I
put a hand to her face. "It's not as though I've planned it—I've just
wondered." She nodded and, for the first time I could remember, said
absolutely nothing. There was something so unutterably ingenuous and sad in
her silence that I couldn't help but wrap my arms around her and pull her in
very close. "I'm sorry," I said quietly.

Of all people, I told myself
contritely, I should have known better than to make such a stupidly random
crack. Someone with a past like Larissa's could not have allowed herself many
moments of true emotional vulnerability; and during those exceptional episodes
she would have been, would still be, very alive to the possibility of betrayal.
In dealing with such personalities no comments about abandonment, however
offhand, can be considered anything other than callous. I therefore kept my
mouth shut and continued to hold her, hoping that my embrace would be enough to
undo the obvious effects of my thoughtlessness but fairly certain that it
wouldn't.

As was so often the case during
my time with Larissa, however, I was wrong. "It's all right," she
finally said, quietly but with real conviction.

"You're sure?" I asked.

"I do sometimes enjoy being
childish, Gideon," she replied, "but that doesn't actually make me a
child. I know you didn't mean to hurt me." Of course she was right; and as
I considered this latest reminder that she was unlike any other woman I'd ever
known, I couldn't help but let out a small chuckle, one that she automatically
picked up on. "What's so funny, you unimaginable swine?"

"Well, it
does
have a
certain ridiculous dimension," I answered quietly. "The idea that
I
would run out on
you"

"True," she said, her
lovely self-possession rebounding. "Now that you mention it, the idea's
absurd."

"Okay," I said, shaking
her gently. "No need to go to town with it."

She pushed her face harder
against my chest, saying, in a voice so low that I wasn't sure that she
intended for me to hear it:

"You won't leave me,
Gideon."

Had I known that this was to be
the last of the uncomplicated moments that Larissa and I were able to steal
from our extraordinarily complicated situation, I would have been far more
assiduous about prolonging it. I might, to begin with, have tried to ignore the
ship's Klaxon, which began with typically poor timing to sound at that very
instant. But as we stood there, all danger seemed in my foolish mind to be
emanating from, and be directed toward, matters other than my relationship with
Larissa; and so I loosened my hold on her, utterly failing to give the moment
the terrible importance it deserved. I can now recognize, of course, that this
was just one of several bad mistakes that I was then in the process of making;
but such understanding does little to dull the pain of the memory.

Several minutes after the alarm
began to throb, Larissa and I, once again moving along the corridor, heard
footsteps coming toward us from around a corner. We soon found ourselves
face-to-face with Colonel Slayton at the bottom of the ladder that led up to
the turret.

"We still haven't generated
the new signature," he said with something that vaguely—and
uncharacteristically—approached dread. "Too late, too
late
—have
you
caught sight of them yet?" His wording seemed to indicate that he'd
already asked the rest of the team the same question; yet he neither explained
what he was talking about nor waited for Larissa or me to reply before scaling
the ladder. "They can't have built the things," he said as he
ascended. "Not even they could be so stupid!"

We followed the colonel into the
turret, where he immediately went to one side of the structure and, putting his
hands against the transparent shell, fixed his eyes on the darkness above and
behind our ship. I could see nothing of any note on the arching horizon of the
stratosphere; and Larissa, scanning the same area, came up with a similar
result.

"Colonel?" she said.
"What is it, have you picked up something on the scanners?"

Slayton nodded, a motion that
quickly turned into a disgusted shake of his head. "A flock of
birds—that's what they read as. I'd love to believe it, but what the hell kind
of birds can survive up here?"

I moved around to his side.
"Maybe you could back up a little, Colonel. What exactly do you think is
out there?"

Slayton kept shaking his head.
"Death may be out there, Doctor. And the worst part of it is, it may be a
death of my own design."

"We started throwing the
idea around at the Pentagon quite a while ago," Slayton explained, never
taking his eyes from the dark, mist-banded horizon behind the ship. "For a
long time, you see, we'd been trying to work out the problem of modern
surveillance. Over the last fifty years every new system of electronic
detection has been matched by some new development in stealth technology—and
when computers got involved, the race picked up exponentially. All the major
powers were looking for some way out, some foolproof new answer, but the
technology hadn't yet appeared to make such an advance possible. Or so ran the
conventional wisdom. In fact, the seed of the solution had been planted years
earlier, during the drug war—the
police action,
as we were trained to
call it—in Colombia and Ecuador. And the planting was done by units under
my
command." Fleeting pride seemed to mix with the colonel's gloom for a
moment. "We took to using small flying drones equipped with multiple cameras
and microphones for recon work, and the tactic was highly successful—although
we really had no idea that we'd stumbled onto the answer."

"The answer how?"
Larissa asked. "Those devices didn't have any radar or stealth
capabilities."

"Exactly," Slayton
said, smiling just briefly. "They didn't need them, that was the beauty of
it. We'd all gotten so used to working with electronically generated information
that we'd forgotten the basic tools that God gave us—our eyes and ears, which
the drones effectively became. When the first experiments were successful, we
began to miniaturize their flight and audiovisual equipment enough to make them
capable not only of enormous range but of penetrating almost any detection
field without raising an alarm. After the war word got around the Pentagon, and
the drones became standard issue. Then, when major weapons miniaturization
reached full speed ten years ago, it became inevitable that someone would
eventually put forward the idea of armed drones. They could be guided into remote,
even hardened, sites and set off their payloads—conventional or nuclear—with
absolute precision. That was the theory. The advantages were
obvious"—Slayton's scar glowed hot in the faint light of the turret as his
tone became harrowing again—"but so were the dangers. A foreign operative
in an American lab could easily walk out with not just the plans but the
prototypes. Fortunately, there were tremendous design and system problems that
looked insoluble. We abandoned the project while I was still there. Apparently
they've revived it."

"Maybe not," I said.
"Colonel, for all we know the ship could be detecting a small meteor
shower. Or some kind of cosmic dust."

Such were admittedly paltry
attempts at an alternative explanation, and Slayton waved them off with
appropriate disdain. "Find me meteors that fly in formation and on an
intercept course, Doctor, and I'll—" His features suddenly went dead
still.
"There,"
he said quietly. I kept staring into the
distance and finding no apparent cause for alarm. When I turned to Larissa,
however, I could see that she had locked onto whatever the colonel was seeing:
her face bore the same expression of apprehension.

"Where?" I asked; but
in reply Slayton only turned, approached a keypad on the monitoring console,
and activated the shipwide address system. "This is Slayton," he
announced. "The drones are now one hundred and fifty yards off our stern.
We'll need to go as close to silent running as we can manage—no unnecessary
noises, and keep your voices low. Most important are the engines—Julien, we'll
need to take them down to minimum output. And Jonah, reset the holographic
projection."

The urgency of the colonel's
orders caused me to search the stratosphere all the more intently, determined
to catch some glimpse of the mysterious inventions that were causing him such
evident anxiety. That glimpse, when it came, was as intriguing as it was
frightening: the dozens of basketball-sized drones—which looked like something
John Price might have dreamed up—had large "eyes" that, I soon
learned, were actually housing units for sophisticated optical instruments.
Appendages that encased equally complex audio monitors and bodies that
contained flight and guidance equipment added to the drones' overall impression
of enormous insects, and each of them also bristled with spiny antennae:
programmable detonators, Slayton explained briefly, saving further elaboration
for another statement to the rest of our crew.

"Remember, please," he
said, "assuming I'm right, each one of those things bears a nuclear device
capable of vaporizing this ship. We will proceed with the greatest
caution."

As if in response to Slayton's words,
the drones suddenly shot forward and surrounded us, their many inquisitive eyes
now assuming a menacing quality. Pursuant to the colonel's orders, our ship
slowed down steadily until it seemed that we were going along at no more than a
crawl—a very nerve-racking crawl. Fear made it difficult to keep my voice to a
murmur, but I had to ask, "Would anybody really set off a nuclear device
at this altitude, Colonel?"

He nodded, matching stares with
the drones that were floating around us. "I'm assuming they've armed these
with X-ray lasers— they're powered by a nuclear explosion and have enormous
destructive potential, but the fallout is minimal."

" 'Minimal'?" Larissa
whispered.

"They evidently view the
threat we pose as worth the risk," Slayton said. "Even though they
obviously don't yet understand the exact nature of that threat. Not unusual
thinking for the American national security machine—as you yourself have
written, Doctor."

"And will the holographic
projector keep us safe for the moment?" I asked.

"It should," the
colonel answered. "To the naked eye our ship now appears to be a harmless
band of atmospheric mist."

Larissa nodded. "And the
projector works as well on these drones as it does on the eye."

"Thus turning the drones'
strength back into a weakness," Slay-ton said. "But as I say, we
still haven't started emitting a new radar signature—we can expect them to stay
locked onto the old one, waiting for some confirmation of human or mechanical
activity. We'll have to continue to be careful about how much noise we make—and
how much the ship makes, as well." Seeing that the devices outside were
continuing to make no hostile move, the colonel relaxed just a bit. "But
for the moment, at least, they appear fooled." He allowed himself one more
brief smile. "I wonder what my friends down below would say if they'd
known they would be pursuing
me ...
"

Despite the lessening of tension
permitted by the holographic projector, during the initial phase of our journey
among the drones we all moved very carefully and, following Colonel Slayton's
instruction, spoke in hushed tones. Half an hour of such behavior was enough
to loosen our mood a little, but no more than that; and I was still standing
motionless by Larissa's side when I heard her start to talk to her brother
quietly via their communication implants. She spoke in a soothing, sympathetic
tone, and from her words I soon got the impression that the pressure of the
general situation and the specific moment might be getting to Malcolm, at least
a little. This notion was confirmed when Larissa asked if I would join him in
his quarters, where he'd gone after suffering a bout of dizziness. Someone,
she said, had to try to talk him through the difficult transit, and she
intended to stay at her post, ready to fire on the drones should the
holographic system fail for any reason.

Moving in a deliberate manner, I
climbed down the turret ladder and crept toward the stern of the ship. On
entering Malcolm's quarters—which were styled after the captain's cabin of an
old sailing ship, with a wide, mock-leaded window set in the rearmost section
of the hull—I initially thought he must still have been in the observation
dome; but then I caught sight of his overturned wheelchair behind a rough-hewn
wooden table. His body was caught under the thing and sprawled out across the
floor.