Space Eater (33 page)

circuitry: blackout. While I was thinking about my old Force tests, I’d even had the idea you could lower the thing down on a kilometer of string—but how d’you stop it acting like a pendulum?

Boiling-oil pain washed up and down my arm,
pulse, pulse-pulse, pulse
in the old Force code. I wanted to grab the arm and nurse it, but the p-suit I wore wouldn’t let me. First course correction—so soon?

Plus 20 centimeters X axis, plus 15 centimeters Y axis
. I moved the right number of centimeters in the right direction along the grid painted on the ceiling/floor of
Birdcage
. This was nothing but a circular plate of hull metal with shiny steel rods set every half-meter all around the edge, holding it to the heavy part of this craft up “above.” Beta Corvi was beneath me somewhere, and its hard light showed tinsel-fragments floating in vacuum, threw up squatty shadows of the bars onto one side of the concrete disc overhead. It and the two yellow battery lights in the cage weren’t so bright I couldn’t see the starlight between the bars, all the lights green-tinged by the golden shielding of my faceplate. The rest of the furniture ran to a couple of slim machined tubes running from floor to ceiling, a few centimeters apart with a swivel to line either of them up with the handy 1.9-centimeter (plus) holes dead-centered in floor and ceiling. The one that was lined up now was the sighting tube, hollow and empty. On the far side of it from me, a big lumpy counterweight was fixed down to the hull metal. And up above, beyond a ton of concrete with a hole in it, a point of hell that should have been too small to see was burning away, waiting for me. Ten thousand times smaller than an atom. I stood very still, boot magnets holding me down—there was hardly any feeling of gravity, not yet—trying not to let my body lean or tilt and shift
Birdcage
’s center of mass before the next correction.

Center of mass ... It had been funny, the preliminary balancing in sync orbit—you could set the whole of
Birdcage
spinning in free-fall with the spin axis dead-centered and lined up with that 1.9-centimeter shaft that went clear through: and
then
they remembered me and how I’d be riding it down. Which was why, across the floor from me now, there was this ugly great counterweight balancing the Central Jacklin Position. In theory I’d move a little to start a tilt, then just as far from center in the opposite direction for the same time to stop it, and then back to center again. In practice it didn’t work quite that way, because my drag on
Birdcage
kept changing as we moved closer and closer, faster and faster. Jacklin, the stick of the rocket.

There was a thing about that weight: it was the last piece they put into
Birdcage
, and whoever welded it there used his or her laser to leave a message in bright runny lines on the metal. GOOD LUCK, JACKLIN, it said. I needed it.

Oh, the fun we’d had convincing them about Rossa and myself. Fusco had frittered away hours, demanding tests, and more tests, and double-blind tests of Rossa’s ability to throw her pain across space at me. “Trickery,” she’d said, and: “Radio ... accomplices ... muscle-reading ... coincidence?” All the while, a couple of million kilometers away, the Final Solution was drifting closer.

“I think we really must accept this evidence,” Winkel would say cautiously in the War Room after another trial, and Fusco would fly out at him like an angry cat. “Don’t you get above yourself, Chris! The responsibility isn’t yours!” And she’d demand some even more complicated test with locked rooms and secretly written-down numbers randomly generated by the computer; Winkel would take a deep breath, flick a swift apologetic look my way or Rossa’s; I’d wonder again whether his “gullibility” made him a better or a worse scientist than Fusco. Then we’d all get down to the
next
absolutely final conclusive test, so Fusco could disbelieve it again. Meanwhile the computer voice reeled out its newest impact guesses, handy figures like a 90-percent probability of impact in the Eastern Ocean—as if the exact spot where the worm gets into the apple mattered a damn.

The hedgings and safeguards of those last tests were too silly to believe or remember. Suddenly Fusco’s skepticism cracked wide open, and with Winkel egging her on she swallowed the whole ridiculous plan.

Mere hours later she’d sold it to a quorum of StraProgCom ... which meant that at last we could risk our necks for Fusco and all the other Fuscos. Gosh, that really made us feel good.

...When you go falling a long way in space it’s not like an ordinary fall. In the long drop the gravity changes—inverse square law—the closer you come, the stronger the pull. The center of mass of this flying hearse was a meter or so over my head in that slab of steel-banded concrete that kept off the gammas; I was further away from Winkel’s near-as-dammit point source and I wasn’t being pulled in so hard. So far the difference wasn’t much, but the ceiling where I stood
was
accelerating faster than I was, on account of its being welded and bolted to the rest of
Birdcage
. The feeling was of being pushed with a feather touch to the steel ceiling/deck: all the gravity pull was coming from the DEVOURER, but in a faint way, more a drift than a pull, “down” was definitely in the other direction. I wanted to laugh. I was falling up.

There was a carefully machined hole, lined with steel, that came through the concrete base, up through the hollow tube and through the matching hole in the plate I was standing on—a straight skewer hole running through the whole
Birdcage
contraption and its theoretical center of mass. Somewhere under my feet was a ship called
Dragonfly
as near a twin of
Silverfish
as makes no difference, holding itself dead-still in space as far as the DEVOURER was concerned ... That’s not too hard when you’ve a handy computer and a gravity pull so low that you could go into stable orbit at less than 5 kph. On the ship they mostly couldn’t see the blue-hot hole because I was in the way—if they hadn’t been in my shadow they’d have been toasting gently in those few dozen watts per square meter of gammas and suchlike. But the hard rays did shine through that long narrow sighting hole, and made a hotspot somewhere on the ship hull, a hotspot that wasn’t supposed to move even a fraction. We’d spent fifteen hours lining up and balancing
Birdcage
for its fall. If it tilted, the hotspot on
Dragonfly
would move and change as it got a different sort of light from the cloud we’d made around the hole, and the comp worked out what center-of-mass shift would correct
Birdcage’s
fall, and Rossa told me in pain waves so I could walk my own mass this way or that on a painted grid that in my eyes was furred with visual static from the MT thing on board ... If the hotspot went out, then probably
Birdcage
had tilted so far that we were all dead. The others would have a long while to think about that. I only had a little over four minutes.

My left arm shrieked as Rossa did things with her bracelet. Another correction, and thank God it took me back close to where I’d started. Too many corrections one way, and sooner or later I wouldn’t be able to move the center of gravity further. The bars would stop me and it would be the end of the world.

...Into space had been another transit where we didn’t see the countryside. I had the thought that when this was over I’d like to lie for years and watch a blue sea sloshing to and fro. To lie watching those delicate greens in the sky, and try to forget Keeb’s explanation about the green tints being from some mucky airborne algae. A tunnel with moving pavements whipped us from STRACEN-1 -- one way or the other, I guessed, we wouldn’t be visiting that place again—onto a bare concrete airstrip with gray rain coming down like machine-gun fire, continuous lightning all around the horizon as though the laser barrage was fighting off another maximum strike. A smart, fast VTOL plane sliced through the foul weather, lifting us for too short a while into sunlight; at Port Island the half-repaired ruins were muffled in fog and we didn’t recognize our shuttle till halfway up the ramp to the access lift...

I’d borrowed a lurid yellow p-suit, the one I was wearing now, and Rossa had a lime green one that fitted her. The trip down kept on unreeling like a film played backward until we were hanging on by the closed airlock of Corvus Station, twirling with its slow spin and locked outside until we thought of touching helmets against the acoustic pickup to shout the override words. After polished places like STRACEN-1 the station looked even more of a mess than before, which was saying a lot.

“We could stay safe in here and forget them all,” Rossa said with a smile.

“Till the eats run out.” Both of us pretended not to remember the heavy-duty lasers mounted on
Dragonfly
, hanging so lazily in space outside.

We repeated the override at the console; I unclamped Wui’s magic staff from its safety blocks of explosive while Rossa put some queries about other MT cargo: “no other minigate devices aboard.”

“Attention. Are there others, then? List, please.”

“AFFIRMATIVE. ITEM: AP DISTURBANCE MONITOR, ONE. ANY OTHER ITEM OR ITEMS

TOP CLASSIFIED, NO DATA AVAILABLE.”

“Nullbombs,” I called, threading my way back across the cylinder with the—gatepost, I suppose you could call it. One end hissed furiously, air being sucked into the ever-open 1.9-centimeter hole and making a cloud somewhere out there with the stars. “Maybe we ought to—“

The speaker went crazy, “GRAAAAAAAAAK!” it shouted. The static noise drowned out the hiss of my handy spaceship vacuum cleaner. FACTOTUM twitched all its arms.

“Ken! Take that
away
!”

“Oh bloody hell...” I ran for the airlock with the pole, to dump it far from the touchy computer circuits.

As if I needed to be told what MT did to electronics, after the last few weeks. But before I came back ...

there was one thing I wanted to try. In the twilight by the lock, keeping my eye well back for safety, I lifted the MT staff and looked directly into the 1.9-centimeter sucking hole at its end. All I could see at first was blackness, but as I tilted the pole this way and that I caught a glimpse of a star. There was one window in Corvus Station, after all.

“GRAAAAK. EMERGENCY STATUS. SYSTEM CRASH. HARDWARE FAILURE. PLEASE

WAIT. ANY ATTEMPT TO INPUT OR TAMPER WITH SYSTEM AT THIS STATUS LEVEL

WILL ACTIVATE PLEASE WAIT. RELOAD AND HARDWARE CHECK PROCEEDING—“

“What I was saying,” I said when I got back: “We
guessed
there’d be a nullbomb self-destruct on this thing. Let’s push it out of the way of traffic, eh?” (After that mistake, I wanted to change the subject quickly.) So when the system was operational again we told it to start drifting and to take up sync orbit in what used to be the neutral zone around the other side of Pallas. Nothing there to get hurt if Corvus Station took it into its microchips to self-destruct...

Before we left for what turned out to be the last time, Rossa asked a last question. “Attention. List in reverse order all major programs invoked in the last three days.”

“AFFIRMATIVE. RELOAD. PASSWORD, PASSWORD, PASSWORD, DEVOURER, MTMONITOR.”

“At least we were right about
that
,” Rossa had said...

Through the thin bars of
Birdcage
I could see a vague fog, a haze of tiny lightpoints out there with the stars. As well as hauling the dead weight of
Birdcage
a million kilometers out, we’d brought extra stocks of the aluminum dust they used for radar fogging and soaking up laser bolts in open space. Tons of it were floating free to spread out the DEVOURER’s light into decent target size, drifting in big swirls to the place where, as Winkel put it, curved space came to a point and the bottom fell out of the universe.

What you could see from the one-kilometer range was a pinpoint of hellish blue-white with a pale haze around it, like the ring you see around the Moon when a frost’s on the way. The falling aluminum powder was all lit up by Beta Corvi anyway, and I couldn’t decide if it was already a whole lot brighter from backscattered hole-radiation. The idea of the dust was that when
Birdcage
did tilt, some light still shone through to
Dragonfly
from the glowing cloud around the thing itself—and the changing of the light spot on the hull was data enough to program the new course correction. I’d shifted ground four times now, getting nearer to one side of the cage. Rigid, bolt upright, trying not to think, trying to be a good moving part. The MT interference ran its spiky fingers through my brain. What kept me happy was remembering I was doing a job the computers couldn’t handle, not without going GRAAK!

A minute left, perhaps? There’d be some real gravity—“tidal force,” that is—in the last twenty meters, meaning the last just-over-a-second. That was going to be the worst time. Meanwhile, it was surely getting brighter out there. The word was that the A1 dust didn’t have dense enough nuclei to scatter much really hard radiation my way. Feeling hotter might only have been imagination. But yes, it
was
much brighter now—the stars were fading away. Must be within two, three hundred meters now, going faster all the time.

I tried tongueing the switch of my suit’s radio. “GRAAAAAK!” it told me.

The machined tube that
wasn’t
lined up with the holes above and below had a trigger mechanism about shoulder-high. I checked I could reach it easily, and swung the arm back fast before the tiny center-of-mass shift could do anything. Inside the p-suit I could feel sweat crawling under my arm. More pain. A course of correction so tiny I only had to edge centimeters sideways. Then another fast-coded sequence of pains in my arm that made me see Rossa’s thin fingers dancing on the bracelet that hurt her so much.
Thirty seconds
. Well inside the two-hundred-meter radius, then. Maybe a thousand, two thousand watts per square meter soaking into the other side of the concrete, power-level rising faster and faster. Too late, surely, for more course corrections...