Space Eater (32 page)

“Nice to know that. Any chance of hearing why?”

“Three things really,” she said as we swerved into the long messroom. “A minimum loss of life strategy, the thing Winkel supposes is impossible and the thing even Winkel doesn’t know. This ... this ouroboros plan
could
still work. But I’m terribly afraid. If by some impossible chance we should survive what’s coming ... I refuse to face going back to my old hell in Communications. No—don’t ask me any more, not now.”

It was a grim little party at the table; Fusco, Winkel, and ourselves, holding the wake in advance. Most tables were empty; most people were rooted in the War Room watching the screen the way rabbits are supposed to watch a snake sliding in for the kill. If it had been a rock we might have nullbombed it, if it had been a rock we might have survived the impact blast if it struck anywhere not bang on top of STRACEN-1 (and wouldn’t
that
have evened out the war balance?) ... but the mass of hundreds of Great Pyramids was squeezed into a deadly mosquito too small to swat, far smaller than a mosquito.

Hell. Fusco was shoving mounds of food down her, wanting to rush back there and stare at the snake-eye figures on the screen; Winkel looked almost sick after his big effort, and picked at vegetables without touching the greenish fishmeat at all. His eyes and Fusco’s kept meeting across the table, and then sliding away. I was in no mood to let him rest...

“OK. Now why, in detail, was that idea of ours impossible? Why not use the minigate from our craft against this thing?”

“Oh ... dozens of reasons. You can’t get near enough. Gravity—by the time you get to 10-centimeters approach the thing’s pulling with getting on for 1400 gravities. Radiation—the last power output figure I saw was over 700 megawatts, and peaking in the gamma too. Interesting to think it can radiate on wavelengths greater than its own diameter, like a radio aerial ... Communications is my third reason.

You’d have to radio-guide a device such as you suggest, or possibly use a modified brain missile, if only for course corrections. Those brains can strike within a meter of their target, but you’re asking a damn sight better accuracy than that. Where was I? All the wavebands swamped in that hellish emission, hard radiation to degrade any machine brain ... Did I mention the pair-production problem? Plenty of those gammas are energetic enough to form electron-positron pairs in the middle of your volatile memory. As my military friends like to put it, pow.”

“But ... shielding...” I said.

“Last and worst,” Winkel said with an evil look, “the jamming effect you’ve already told us about. A final spoke in the wheel for any electronics near your MT rig.” He sipped water as if not particularly interested in this tedious problem, not any longer.

I had all the pieces then, and from Rossa’s strained unhappy face it seemed she’d already put them together. It was like one of those I&I courses, initiative and intelligence, they used to run in Force recruit screening. Days and days of half-witted tests, sorting out prospective Combat from prospective Admin, Psych, Supply, Comm, the rest; you’re running around with a big plastic badge shouting your name to everyone, and they grade you all the time, even when you’re eating and probably on whether you snore.

The tests proper, though, were things like this:

You’re put in a room. The instructor says, “You are only allowed to use the apparatus supplied by the Force. I shall be watching at all times. Your task is to tie together those two pieces of string hanging from the ceiling—without at any time pulling them down or otherwise damaging them. Start now.” It’s nearly a bare room, you see, with these two strings hanging down to about waist level. You take one by the end and hold on with one hand while you stretch the other hand as far as you can toward string number two without letting go of string number one. You can’t quite reach it. The instructor makes a note. If you could leave string one hanging at an angle in the air while you went to fetch string two, the thing would be easy. But of course string one falls back the moment you let go. If it was good stiff rope you could set number one swinging, go for number two and catch number one at arm’s length when it swung back your way. But this is rotten, lousy, limp string. (They tell me some people take half an hour just thinking of the swinging idea.)

All right. You’re a fool. What you should have done was look at the “apparatus supplied by the Force”

first
, and the instructor would have given you more points. You look at it. There are two pieces of apparatus. One is a feather. The other is a weight labeled
25 kilograms
. First thoughts: hang that on the string and it’ll swing like a pendulum. Second thoughts: that’s the weight of a sack of damn potatoes, put it on the string and it’ll break. Third thought: you haul on the weight to make sure it really
does
weigh 25

kilos, and the instructor gives you points for checking. The feather’s no good, it’s only ten centimeters long and the string would have to be a meter longer to be any help. Crazy thoughts like stealing the instructor’s note pad and tying
that
to the string to make a pendulum weight. Instructor’s looking at his stopwatch again. He knows you’re stupid. Long pause. Apparatus supplied by the Force—oh the cunning
bastards
. And if you’ve thought of that in time, you whip off the plastic name badge and tie it to string one—set it swinging—and so on.

The idea is, they said afterward, you’ve got to be able to recognize all the resources when a problem comes up—and then you have to decide which resources not to bother with. Here, now, we had nullbombs, spacecraft, hordes of satellites, orbital factories, Corvus Station and
Overlord
, the research center and STRACEN-1 and whatever else in the way of resources there might be on the rest of the world ... and something over 493 hours. Push the bits of problem about. Which ones fitted into something that made sense? No sense came. Which resources, you stupid trainee, have you failed to recognize? Blank. I knew there were people around me but I didn’t notice them, as things whirred like broken clockwork in my head ... Nothing. But just as I began to relax, ready to give up for a moment, I remembered CommAux and the dream/ hallucination I’d had in the transit or after it. For good-enough reasons we didn’t use brain missiles on dull old Earth. And: General Lowenstein put too much trust in machines. And: What resources have you failed to recognize?

That was it. I wanted to say to Rossa, “You cunning
bastard
,” only she mightn’t have understood...

When I looked up they were watching me, plates empty; even Winkel had tackled his fishmeat at last.

Mine was cold. “We can do it,” I said slowly, and saw a terrible sick realization on Rossa’s face. She’d gone almost the foul color of the fishmeat. Then she closed her eyes ... opened them again ... and smiled.

“Expound,” said Winkel. “Hold forth. Explain. For God’s sake man, don’t just sit there looking like it’s the end of the world...” He thought about that and flipped one eyebrow up. “One does find oneself saying these things.”

“If you’ve thought of something it’s your duty to discuss it at once,” Fusco said rather loudly.

“There’s time, I think, plenty of time. Whatever happens we’re going to need a shuttle—so you take ten minutes getting one arranged while Rossa and I have a private word about
our
plan. No questions.” I found I rather liked ordering top brass about. I saw how it could get to be a habit. “See you in the War Room.” Rossa and I got up and headed across the gravy-colored floor to the exit. At the door we found Keeb coming in: he blinked when he saw us, then stuck out his hand. I shook it.

“Congratulations, of course. I knew Pareto was a clever sod; he loves a surprise. I could tell you—But this black hole business, I had an idea from the interrogation transcripts. (Really put you through it, didn’t they?) Suppose, just suppose, you could use the 1.9-centimeter gate that’s still aboard—“

“Join the club,” I said.

“There’s Winkel, all alone at his table,” Rossa said. “He’ll tell you precisely why the thing is impossible...”

In the corridor: “Sorry,” I said. “I know I’m forcing your hand a bit.”

“All right, I’m being selfish. I keep trying to make myself tell them how my talent can bypass all Winkel’s communication problems ... I keep trying, but there’s this awful thought that we might succeed. And then, forever, for the rest of my life, they’d want me in their version of CommAux—back in hell with those Morse messages of pain running through and through me. That’s selfishness.
Your
risk would be much, much greater—and, you know I’ve come to like you. I expect that’s selfishness too. And the alternative might leave us as war criminals...”

I put a hand on her shoulder. “Listen. Like they say in the gags, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news first; only it’s not news: they’re good on physics here but their biology’s lousy.

Remember? They couldn’t make that sensitizer juice if we tattooed the recipe on their forebrains. You transmitting to me is just a freak case, see? It’ll wear off, say, five minutes after the job’s done.”

“But the serum’s effects can last—oh. Thank you.”

“Bad news. You’re about to get blackmailed. Whether you’re going to help or not, I’m trying all I can to make that drop. Chances aren’t that good, but it has to be better than sitting here waiting for It to show up in the sky. Winkel reckoned it’d cover the last few thousand kilometers in under ten minutes...”

Rossa wrinkled up her forehead. “I wanted to have
time
... make the decision for myself. You’ve forced it on me now—and I’ll never know if I would have done justice to myself. Ken: you’re a chauvinist beast.

I hate you.”

“Pity. I was just going to say I quite liked you too. In a sort of selfish way, of course.”

Somehow, without any reason for it, we were wrapped around each other with a kind of desperation as though we were huddling against subzero cold. For a minute, two minutes, we stood like that in the bare white corridor on sublevel 6 of the most secure fortress on Pallas. Twice I heard footsteps, and they speeded up no end as they passed. I felt very different from that other Jacklin who wasn’t too sure of what you did in a cathouse—

Back to the War Room. We’d decided without having to say any more words. I was going to be a damn fool hero and take on the DEVOURER with my bare hands, sort of, and Rossa would shout useful advice all the way.

“Winkel thinks in terms of mass, length and time—machines and never people,” she said on the way back, echoing what I’d thought about Lowenstein. “Otherwise—No. It’s best that we tackle this thing ourselves. Politically, I mean.”

I chewed that over, not wanting to look stupid. I was still chewing when something else popped up in my memory. “One thing,” I said by the War Room door. “Why the hell is it an ouroboros plan? You called it that, or something like that, maybe an hour ago...”

“Oh, that. You soldiers are
so
uncultured, Lieutenant Jacklin. Ouroboros is the great serpent that coils around the world and bites his own tail.”

“Where do snakes come into it?”

“They don’t. It came into my head when I thought of fighting fire with fire—one MT
diabolus ex
machina
swallowed up by another. You see?”

“Oh,” I said, “well, it’s probably just as good a way of looking at it as the oozelum bird.”

We went into the War Room together for the last time, and I couldn’t tell from Rossa’s face whether she’d ever heard of the oozelum bird. Now we had to explain it all to Fusco and Winkel and Smith and Ronder and Skene and...

Twenty-Nine

...I was falling head-down into the DEVOURER, locked up in the craziest spacecraft anyone had ever built. It had two moving parts, a mechanical swivel affair and Lieutenant Kenneth Jacklin. It was free-falling into the tiny not-black hole, in the same way as
that
was falling into Pallas. Big fleas have little fleas on their backs to bite ‘em, and so on down ... There was a shaft running clear through
Birdcage
, which Rossa had called it because that was what this falling monstrosity looked like, and I was standing on the ceiling. The DEVOURER’s droptime to Pallas had been around five hundred hours, and three hundred of them had shredded away before I started my own slow fall. We were still more than a million kilometers out, me and the hole, but it had cranked up to something like a thousand meters a second and was still accelerating as Pallas reeled it in...

I’d separated from the good ship
Dragonfly
at a lazy walking pace, a kilometer or so out from that blue-white horror, and my drop-time was going to be something under seven minutes. You can get through a lot of thinking in seven minutes.

The first plan we’d had was to take Wui’s wizard’s staff out of Corvus Station, and simply drop it—with its eternal 1.9-centimeter MT gate—into the hole. Cleverer than it sounds, because if it fell dead straight, the hell pouring out of the hole would get shunted off through the gateway before it reached the potted circuits halfway up the pole; even a 1.9-centimeter disc casts something of a shadow. And in the last part of the drop the gravity would sort of lock the staff into a straight fall, one end getting pulled harder because it was closer, the rest trailing and holding it on course like the stick of a rocket. So the gate would come down like a candle-snuffer while the circuitry was still a good meter away, before the frightful g-gradient could tear it all apart (tidal force, Winkel called it). When it got there, the snake would gobble its own tail and the hole would fall through the hole ... if you see what I mean. You couldn’t rely on its working, though, because suppose the “staff” got turned around while it was falling? It had a long way to fall—even a kilometer away, the radiation was sleeting at dozens of watts per square meter, and no one wanted to get closer except fool Jacklin. If it twisted even slightly off the true vertical, then gammas and positrons would come sneaking around the side of the gate opening and maybe ruin the MT