Space Eater (22 page)

“That’ll do,” said the general. “Got them convinced we think this is a secure link between the research center and somewhere they can’t identify—dropped a few hints it was off-planet and within days they were running a discreet inspection of L4 and L5, so we know stuff that ‘leaks’ that way gets believed.

That’s Chicane. Was keeping it for something really big. I think, I very much think you’ve given us the something. But first we have to sell that entire package to StraProgCom.” He started to scratch his head, remembered official dignity or something, and changed the motion to straightening of his thin white hair.

“Convene extraordinary session,” he mumbled. “Full consultation. Might not vote to waste Chicane in this wild shot ... Time to eat now. I shall eat in the officers’ mess. Captain, before you do anything else, arrange for a UTS project name to be registered and have twenty hard copies of this fiche prepared—UTS again. And you two ... You two are hot property. Confined to quarters until further notice, I’m afraid.”

Another piggy-eyed escort appeared at the door almost before he’d finished talking, and it was heigh-ho off to the dungeon cell again, leaving the fiche behind us on that desk. It had been our biggest card and now we’d played it; maybe one day we’d know if we’d played it right and even won the odd trick. For now ... I felt low. Rossa and I sat on the well-padded chairs in our “embassy” suite and looked at each other.

“This isn’t the way to fight a war,” I said, not caring much about the cameras and recorders. “Sitting in a giant-size foxhole letting machines do all the work. Where does that leave a trained pro like me? Fighting with words in little white-walled rooms ... underground where it isn’t hot or cold and the canned air never smells good or bad, and nothing to do but wait.”

Rossa looked at me with her head a little on one side, and I poked myself into remembering that she was in the same hole. Only if she had a hankering for her work she could suffer all she wanted at the touch of a bracelet. She said: “I suppose you might start to write your memoirs, Ken. After all, when this war is over we’ll probably be declared heroes. They wouldn’t want to waste you in the armed forces even if there were armed forces...”

I had to grin at that one. “Mmmm, maybe heroes and maybe like whoever the guy was who designed those clever gas ovens in Auschwitz. Never mind that. Hey, they’ve got to have armed forces, you can’t hold territory with flights of clever cruise missiles—well, maybe they can here but I don’t believe it ... But they haven’t anything like the Force. I’ve lost that.”

“I
have
noticed that you don’t, or at least you don’t so often, size people up as though you were wondering how best to leap on them and tear their throats out with your bare hands and teeth. It used to quite worry me.”

“Oh. Did it show? Yeah ... you have to keep in training and I haven’t.”

She leaned over and patted my arm, saying “Poor Ken” in a tone that I couldn’t work out. She’d started off frozen and now she was getting complicated.

Food came. We ate it, not saying much. And afterward I fell half-asleep in the soft chair, wondering what was happening at StraProgCom and if the extraordinary meet had started, wondering if when the nullbomb went off on the far side of Pallas we’d feel it grumbling under our feet; gut still complaining at the offbeat tastes and colors of the food here, all the weight of things we had to worry about pushing my eyes shut—

Across the training ground again, only now it was faded and misty, bare wet rock underfoot, sky like lead. Across the training ground with something that paced me just behind in corner-of-the-eye flashes.

Laser streaks came through the fog in silence, which wasn’t right, and chopped pieces from me like fine-honed scalpels; it didn’t hurt. The bright thing behind me dodged and jinked and weaved, a better soldier than this Jacklin. It passed me when the bullets slammed me off my feet and the tall spike of the trap went through and through me without any pain, and I could see it was a stubby metal thing that flew with shrapnel glancing off it harmlessly, a cigar with tiny silly wings. It zoomed on through mist and defense fire to the target, an enormous pitted cylinder, and destroyed it in a silent spout of white light. It had won. I’d lost. Only I was still alive, and Rossa was there saying something caustic about heroes. I dreamed I was following her off the training ground.

Twenty-One

The paper was a pain to look at. It had an all-around border of diagonal bars in the sort of glow-orange that reaches deep into your eyeballs and starts tweaking the retina. As soon as Keeb brought it in I could tell it had to be paper for classified stuff; Rossa guessed the same thing out loud.

“Yes,” Keeb said. “This is a memo from General Lowenstein at the StraProgCom extraordinary meeting.” He put it on the chrome-legged table for us to look at, but carried right on talking to let us know what StraProgCom stood for and how it was called that because it was a committee that made final decisions on programming the strategy brain. Gripping stuff.

UTTER TOP SECRET, it said in that same painful orange at the top of the sheet. Under that was a rubber stamp in red that said CHICANE, and someone had put in a handwritten scrawl to make this CHICANE/COLOPHON. All this made enough sense, and Colophon had to be the project name we’d been saddled with. Then magic letters and numbers that probably didn’t mean anything except to some dimwit with a filing cabinet (I did guess that 26:03:95 was very likely a date, in a dating system that was all wrong). The actual message in the middle of this lot was like the contents of a joke parcel with thirty-three pointless layers of wrapping.

Query: the fiche supplied has label and identification implying it describes a form of operational
MT portal, rather than an explosive device. Why is this? Query: what is approximate energy
release of device? Please insert reply below and return via bearer. Lowenstein.

“Well,” said Rossa after thinking a moment, “I always assumed the labels were falsified as a security measure—a rough-justice safeguard against its falling into the wrong hands. That would seem to be the logical reason, wouldn’t it, Ken?”

“Dead-right there,” I said, managing to push the smile back where it belonged before Keeb saw it.

“Write that down. And, um, the textbook says something like ‘teraton range output depending on mass within sphere of influence.’ That do?”

“A million megatons ... I have no
idea
what it means, but it sounds adequately impressive...” Rossa gave Keeb his pen back, and he stayed around long enough to pass on the handy facts that StraProgCom only had extraordinary meetings in, well, unusual circumstances and that seventeen out of twenty-four members were sitting on the Colophon case right now. Then he took the paper away again, and the room went about three shades dimmer when he’d done it.

“Somebody here likes to play silly tricks with subtly meaningful code names,” Rossa said as though she wasn’t very interested in what she was saying. “Sometimes I wonder whether Wui or Birch have relatives up here, or is it down here? Oh, the name? If I have it right, ‘Colophon’ means ‘finishing stroke.’”

“Subtle it isn’t,” I said. “And me thinking it was something to do with intestines. At least they didn’t call it DEVOURER; now that one still bothers me.”

Rossa made a concentrated sort of face I’d seen a few times before, where she squeezed her eyes together and sucked in her lips. “It should be
the
DEVOURER,” she said slowly. “I can remember that but I can’t remember where the term comes from. A book, of course, but nothing to do with physics or computers or space or war...”

“Well then, it can’t be anything that’d help. Forget it.”

“Yes,” she said, “but half-memories are so irritating.”

We kicked our heels a while longer, and Rossa made a series of flanking attacks on her memory by free-associating out loud. Keeb was back within the hour.

UTTER TOP SECRET CHICANE/COLOPHON

Query: meeting would prefer data on ship propulsion system as more controllable than proposed
Colophon scheme. Am instructed to repeat this request for this information and to ask that you
reconsider. Please insert reply below and return via bearer. Lowenstein.

This one didn’t take a lot of thought, and we bounced back a reply in the same jolly style:
We do not
possess this information. Ship systems invulnerably defended, conceivably with nullbomb booby
traps. Classifications and defenses imposed by Earth government. Corman/Jacklin.

“Getting leery of nullbombs already,” I said when Keeb had carried off that one. Then I yawned. “This is what I meant about getting pushed around. We don’t get to
do
anything, just sit here or in the station or wherever, being operated on by other things. Christ, if I had to sit on my own all the time I’ve had to sit on this mission, I’d be braining myself against the walls just from boredom...”

A smile. “Thank you for the delicate compliment.”

“I didn’t mean—oh, I suppose I did at that. Tell you what, there’s a chessboard in this cupboard—“

As a trained Forceman with high ratings at wargaming, I had a job hiding how irritated I was when Rossa held me to a draw...

UTTER TOP SECRET CHICANE/COLOPHON

Meeting hostile. Point has been made that attacks on New Africa would have to be abandoned
once Chicane/ Colophon goes into operation, due to need to ensure nonambiguity of protocol
observation. This is regarded as unacceptable without further confirmation of data supplied.

Query: are you willing to undergo harmless drug interrogation, not repeat not brainfixing, to
verify data to StraProgCom meeting? Please insert reply below and return via bearer.

Lowenstein.

“There’s your chance to do something,” Rossa said brightly. “Another decision to be made. What do they mean by nonambiguity ... oh, I see.”

We both saw, but Keeb still explained to us how if New Africa’s research base nullbombed itself and a chunk of the continent right in the middle of a raid from “our” side, it would look a good deal like protocol violation. Meanwhile, the decision meant either doing nothing at all, or having things done to me—to us. That wasn’t much of a decision. Brainfixing, Keeb was saying, was a matter of small microcomps surgically implanted into the brain for use in conditioning or totally overriding what the brainfixed man or woman wanted to do. He looked about ready to tell us again what StraProgCom meant, so I grabbed for the paper and scribbled:
Agreed—Jacklin
.

“It would be best to agree now, before they choose to insist,” Rossa murmured, and added:
Agreed—Corman
. Nice not to be alone, anyway...

UTTER TOP SECRET CHICANE/COLOPHON

Meeting adjourned pending interrogation. My thanks for your support. Reply is not necessary:
return document to bearer for destruction. Lowenstein.

“If you could accompany me to PsychSec...” Keeb said, twisting at his finger-ring nervously while a couple of armed heavies watched from the doorway. En route to the torture chamber he cheered us up with a lecture on the interesting vegetable-based drugs of Pallas, and I forgot every word before he came out with the next.

In the corridor Rossa caught my eye for half a second, and flashed a look down to waist level. Right hand fiddling with bracelet on left wrist: so what? She turned or slid something, let both hands fall free to her sides, and all of a sudden I had a bracelet too—a hot little ring of pain clamped on my own left wrist.

The pickup never stopped being a surprise. So you could set the inductor for continuous output at low level; again, so what? I remembered Rossa might know a lot about what was going to happen ... A memory went click, but not the right one. I had a glimpse back into small-kid days; a place with nettles growing through rusty scrap iron, a pair of not quite so small kids twisting the skin on my wrist like someone wringing a cloth. Chinese burn, they used to call it. That was the way it felt now.

When they got moving, the STRACEN people didn’t waste time. Five minutes’ walk and one level up by escalator, into a door with no marking but a red cross, and thirty seconds later I was flat on my back in a small warm cubicle, jacket off, three tingling places on my arm where those hissing pressure-injections had hit. A bank of instruments hummed against one wall. Someone in a white gown and surgical mask that gave me the creeps was fixing cold damp things to my neck and temples. It was hard to keep track of what was happening, because lights were shining in my eyes, and the lights themselves were skidding out of focus as I lay there feeling very warm, the sort of early morning doziness when you’re not awake and not asleep but you could lie there forever. Dark skin and eyes over the pale green mask; a twinge of panic that made my belly hard and tense when for a second I was back on the cold slab with Ngabe moving in; but something chasing down my bloodstream sucked up all the worry, and this PsychSec person wasn’t as dark as Ngabe anyway, and it was so soft and warm I wanted to slither downhill to sleep right away. Hard even to hold my eyes open. The light was all splintered like broken glass and trying to focus was just too much trouble...

But the clear point of pain in my wrist was something to hold onto.

“...testing now. What is your name?” Had I been asleep? The voice was a sort of translation into sound of the way I felt, a voice you could sink into. A woman. Not a bit like Rossa, who sounded sharp and bright. Dozily I reckoned I preferred Rossa. Dozily I realized I’d said, or at any rate my lips had said,

“Ken Jacklin, temporary lieutenant U.N. Special Force.”

“_Very_ good. You’re an excellent subject. This won’t take long at all. Now of course you do come from Earth, don’t you?”

“Yes.” I didn’t have to
do
anything to say yes, I found. It came naturally as rolling downhill. If I’d tried, maybe I could have said “no comment,” or nothing at all, digging my heels in, maybe sweating a bit.