Space Eater (18 page)

Another whispered talk: “Limited war, no nukes. That means they wouldn’t use nullbombs either.

Handing it over wouldn’t make any difference.”

“We must try to do
something
,” she whispered back. “Plainly both sides are rushing to develop some form of MT weapon—you heard the Lieutenant mention that it was classified before he stopped talking altogether—and someone could be about to connect the wires on the wrong sort of MT at any moment.

Can we simply stand by?”

“All my ideas look like ending with a lot of folks getting killed.”

A tiny snort. “_You_ should worry about that?”

“I know, I know, but this time it’s not all my fight. They’re not fighting
me ...
”

Rossa didn’t say anything for a bit. Then: “I suppose, sometimes, people have to be hurt for the sake of others. It’s started already --
we
have been hurt and badly hurt. If we don’t go on, even that will be wasted ... I must, I really must get some sleep.”

Hiding there in the dark behind my own eyelids, I imagined all the things there are, all in one glass ball held up by a single fine wire not even 1.9-centimeter across. The wire had been twitched a lot of times, and twanged hard when the stargate did its thing. On Pallas, in clean white-lit labs, people were shaving at that wire with surgeons’ knives. You couldn’t just leave them to it. You had to do something, even if it was the wrong thing, when your detachment was cut off and command responsibility came crashing down on you like a mortar shell. In my imaginary kaleidoscope, the colored fragments of plan fused into one lump. The decision was: We’d better use the nullbomb data somehow. We’d better throw in with the

“rightful” government and hope like hell it really was rightful. If Rossa agreed with it ... I had the ghost of an idea about how it could be pulled off, with cooperation and luck. And then, if the wire snapped and all the things there were went smashing down into the dark, at least no one was going to be able to blame me afterward.

Seventeen

Force life is more than 90 percent waiting, training, getting ready—then suddenly fifty things are happening all at once, the way it was when we hit the rioters or Freedom gangs in Copenhagen or Glasgow or Berlin. Only nearly all of it happened out of sight, this time.

“_Eleutheria_ to Earthcraft: we received your broadcast. Either you are collaborating with Gate Island’s illegal regime or you have been captured by their forces. Do not cooperate. We will honor your neutral status but if you assist our enemies, it will be an act of war. The New African war of independence is in the Earth tradition of free government—“

“_Silverfish_ to
Eleutheria:
if you respect the Earth expedition’s neutrality, do not approach closer.

Repeat, do not approach closer. We are escorting a neutral ship and closer approach will be taken as an act of war—“

“_Silverfish_ to expedition: please pay no attention to broadcasts from a state not recognized by the legally constituted world government. However, it might be advisable to strap yourselves down—“

“_Eleutheria_ to
Silverfish:
your threat is of itself an act of war. You are requested to surrender your hostage to New Africa—“

“Trying it on,” said Grainger sourly.

“_Silverfish_ to
Eleutheria:
alter course or be fired on—“

A universal hiss rose to choke off all sounds in the speaker. “They’ve started,” Grainger said without any special interest. P-suits on—neither Rossa’s nor mine fitted at all well—faceplates open to save suit air till the last possible moment. The computer faded out the hiss, but bursts of static came breaking through like spikes into the ears. Lasers, explosions?

“Will
Silverfish
be understrength without you?” Rossa asked.

Grainger looked at her blankly. “The captain only has to issue one order. How can he be understrength?”

The first thing I could think of was, “Christ! A kamikaze?”

“How do
you
fight? Swords, crossbows? The shipbrain moves into optimum battle sequence. We don’t interfere except to clean up after—“

Something clanged against the hull so violently I expected to see a huge dent, a miniature mountain on the inside of the cylinder; the shockwave slammed up from under our feet and a bulky chunk of machinery that might have been a giant lathe went sailing up from the curved deck, maybe seventy meters from where we were standing. It rose, skewed slowly in the air, drifted down ponderously onto something else that crumpled in slow motion. The big speakers stuttered with more jags of static. All of Corvus Station was still twanging and vibrating from whatever had smashed into us, and some harmonics were so low you felt them rather than heard them. I found Rossa and Grainger were both hanging onto the console, and I was clinging to them with a kind of death-grip: I loosened it a bit. What I was going to say next was a smartass reply to Grainger, telling him how his lot were the backward ones, bloody swords and crossbows indeed, we’d done away with machine brains in real time combat ever since the jammer ... OK. They didn’t have jammers. They didn’t
know
about jammers. Keep your mouth shut, Jacklin. Another impact, gentler than the first.

“_Why_ doesn’t this junkheap carry a display screen?” I heard Grainger muttering.

If we wanted to cut off this war in two months, all we had to do was hand over the jammer specs to one side or the other. Only we didn’t have any jammer specs. Funny joke. I could maybe recognize the circuit, but never build one—

We were standing there, locked together, tensed for another impact. I could imagine it: machine-controlled chemical missiles streaking between
Silverfish
and
Eleutheria
, invisible-in-space lines of laser light knocking out the guidance and detonators, metallic dustclouds to soak up laser fire. It might have been part of a disabled missile that struck, or maybe a chunk of one ship or the other, Christ we’d been lucky so far, when’s the next
clang
going to be, could hit anywhere because we’re still spinning...

And there wasn’t a clang. Instead—

An IR laser flash isn’t visible in space, and it shouldn’t be visible in air—but when the intensity is great enough the air breaks down, electrons ripped off atoms the way a lightning-bolt might do it. Which was how it looked, a shattering flash and bang of indoor lightning in a long chord across the cylinder, so bright it seemed to fill the universe and so quick you were looking at a purple afterimage before you realized anything had happened. Rossa’s lips were moving but I couldn’t hear anything—my ears were crammed to bursting with a sonic afterimage, the negative of a thundercrack. There was a whiff of something sharp, maybe oxides of nitrogen fixed by the ionization, NO and NO2, their formulae the clearest things left inside my echoing skull. Then Corvus Station jerked back into focus, with smoke rising from some half-slagged machine tool, and Rossa shrugging as she realized we couldn’t hear, and FACTOTUM

swinging in one of its slow giddy curves until it dangled “up” from the axis rail and started doing something to what must be the entry point of the laser flash. At last I started to hear: a hiss from up above, a puncture.

“—successful action,” the speaker was saying. “_Silverfish_ to expedition ship: we report successful conclusion of action. Are you hit. Please report without delay. Over.”

Grainger ... Grainger had sealed himself into his pressure suit. I still hadn’t got around to anything like that: different training. Neither had Rossa. The hiss overhead was dying as FACTOTUM welded some kind of patch in place; I drew an imaginary line between that spot and where the thin smoke was lazily piling up, and noted it had come close to hitting the axis rail and disabling approximately everything. No exit puncture: the smoke was just sitting there instead of whistling down a hole. “Looks OK,” I said to Rossa.

She lifted that eyebrow a couple of millimeters. “Some people have strange and eccentric ideas of what

‘OK’ means,” she said, and leaned over to whisper the key phrase into the mike. “Corvus expedition ship to
Silverfish
. Reporting minor structural damage only. Your laser or theirs?”

Silverfish
was not amused.

FACTOTUM finished its patchwork and prowled about, clucking to itself over the other damages to its brood of machinery. Grainger opened his faceplate and after a while took off the helmet. The purple afterglow changed color in my eyes, still slowly fading. I decided I didn’t much like the kind of war they went in for here.

There was another blank period, then. I whispered my personal decision on MT to Rossa, and she said:

“I don’t think there is any right answer. Every road leads down into the dark. This line is as good as any—and at least we won’t be committing an abuse of hospitality!” Which from Rossa was more or less a shout of enthusiastic approval.

So next time Grainger pulled the makeshift curtain around him in the lavatory area, I moved smartly to my cache and stuffed the microfiche there into one arm of my p-suit. Later it could go under the dungarees. A crazy idea popped up then: if I carried on around another sixty degrees or so of the cylinder, I’d be hanging upside-down, so to speak, over where Grainger was squatting. I could shout

“Hi!” across fifty meters of space, and when he looked up give him a friendly wave. The thought tickled me more than somewhat. When I’d got “up” there in the slow-motion jog that seemed best for moving about the station, I didn’t wave after all: I could look up, or down as the case might be, into the square curtained enclosure, and I could see Grainger not doing any of the things I might have expected. He had his left arm held rigidly horizontal, a little way in front of his chest, and the fingers of his right hand were tapping in a familiar sort of way on the left forearm. Soooo ... Grainger was reporting on us, just as we were on him. Maybe using AM radio, because our systems didn’t—he
had
asked about that. Fair’s fair. I couldn’t imagine anything terrible he could tell
Silverfish
about us, although they did seem a mite less trustful than I’d hoped.

In the last lap there were more hissings and tiltings, and one scary moment when some of the damaged equipment went slithering across the deck. Lucky for us the important systems were all up this end, handy—but not too handy—for the minigate across the cylinder.
Silverfish
told us a couple of times that they’d knocked out high-orbit killer satellites as a special favor to us: we hadn’t noticed. Comp started issuing warnings about gas depletion and a need for replacement after the completed maneuver. Already I had the notion that after this, the station wouldn’t be going anywhere else, ever. Then Comp announced ORBIT INSERTION FINALIZED and for its own reasons decided to add that there were sixty-three more orbiting objects of significant size within a hundred-kilometer radius; we cut it off before it could broadcast hideous warnings to them all. We were on our best behavior now.

“It seems rather crowded here,” Rossa said, holding on tight to the tube of “credentials.” “I have a strong feeling of being a sitting target.”

“Nah,” said Grainger. “Neutral zone in sync orbit.
They
have one too, on the far side of the orbit, over New Africa.” He sounded like someone who wanted to spit. I guessed
he
didn’t like any sort of truce agreement.

“And are we over Gate Island?” Rossa said.

“Port Island.” Grainger was getting almost chatty now, perhaps from relief that this crazy journey was over. But that was the last we coaxed out of him. We climbed back into the wretched p-suits when
Silverfish
told us to, and slammed a final block of orders into Comp: maintain radio silence except in emergency, defend itself and Corvus Station against any intruders bar ourselves (Grainger looked sour at that one), hold stable synchronous orbit along with all the other junk in this neutral zone, and, of course, cycle the airlock once in the outward direction. There was plenty of room for three in this lock, I noticed a few minutes later, or thirty at a pinch. I noticed Grainger noticing the same thing. What the
hell
was it for?

Then the outer lock opened to let in the hard white glare of a giant G4 sun, if I remembered the briefing right, and for the first time in all my weeks in space, I saw the stars.

Corvus Station’s spin wanted to throw us out and away, but someone from
Silverfish
in a lurid yellow suit was waiting: he had a golden line made fast by the lock, and he grabbed us and clipped us to it.

Everything was going around and around without any up or down as I slipped off the airlock’s rim, Pallas a huge misshapen circle of streaky blue-green-and-white, Beta Corvi itself so damn big and brilliant I had to screw my eyes shut and wish the idiots who’d decided on a clear crystal faceplate could give it a try now. The stars had gone out when Beta Corvi exploded into my retinas ... There were supposed to be sixty-three items of space junk floating around here, sixty-four if you counted our own contribution, but I could only see ours (pitted, ugly, in half-phase now, enough to make you ashamed of our “world government”) and something stubby up the twisting line that was hauling us in. It grew bigger, a not at all streamlined affair of tubes and girders that looked something like a half-stripped electronic chassis with one big crew pod—but it was very pretty in silver paint that caught the sun blindingly (laser defense?) and you could tell it was functional, battle-tight, no wasted space. I forgot about the outside world when I felt my leg going cold and started thinking the p-suit had a slow leak. We were yanked aboard like so many sacks of grain, and cycled through into sparkling white walls, spit-and-polish everywhere.

“Welcome to
Silverfish
,” somebody said.

“Prepare for zero point five gee,” a speaker announced, and without any hurry one of the walls slowly became a floor.

“Greetings in the name of Earth,” Rossa said, very deadpan, and I guessed her sense of humor was creeping out of its foxhole again.