Space Eater (4 page)

systems.Mick y’s responsible for giving you a good smooth ride, ha ha.”

The “ha ha” sounded more like a nervous twitch than anything even Birch thought was funny. I scanned the newcomers. Wui with his wavy hair, stiff beard like a spray of fiberglass and blue eyes didn’t look Oriental; but, in a way, Corman did. She was small, with olive skin pretty near as smooth as that of some Forceman still babyfaced from the regrowth tank, and her eyes were narrowed as if ready for sunlight. I filed away details of her short, mouse-brown hair; Wui’s hearty smile; the tension that made Birch jerk like broken clockwork and Corman hold herself stiff while Wui didn’t seem bothered at all.

“I didn’t know there was a special auxiliary to the Force,” I said to defuse the silence that seemed to be building up.

“Another high-classification matter,” Birch said. “You’ll hear all about it in due course.Mick y, you’re the AP expert. I think you’re really the best one to fill in some background for Ken and Rossa now. Must have the background to understand the nature of the problem. Don’t forget the classification levels, please.”

Which reminded me: “There was a lot of fuss at Force South Bank about me not knowing AP stuff.

Does that still hold?”

“Oh Christ,” said Wui. “Another Security cock-up.”

Birch said, “No, Ken and Rossa are fully cleared for general information—just not the contingency plans and working details of AP hardware.”

That was a relief. I reckoned I could just about recognize AP hardware when I saw it but no way could I spill data on how to make it. The contingency plans ... I wondered what they were. There was a twist in Birch’s voice when he used my and Corman’s first names, as if he wasn’t really too happy with the first-name policy; there was something of the same tone when he said “contingency plans.”

Birch went and sat behind his desk, and waved his hands until he’d steered us all into pulling the hard utility chairs from the wall and sitting in a half-circle in front of the desk.

Wui pushed back his hair then, and shook his head. “This is all level-9 stuff, of course. You probably don’t know it, but after everyone got out of the space business around about the turn of the century, there was a big push to move into space with matter transmitters. The Americans had a lucky break and set a big instant-transit gate working. Project Hideyhole: the ultimate safety bunker that started making World War III thinkable again for them. Step in here, step out so many light-years away. It was a leapfrog development, they missed out all the logical steps to it and never realized the hazards of setting up anomalous-physics coordinate systems. Of course, what they were worried about back then was the world war everyone saw coming, the energy war. They wanted a hideyhole and, by God, they found one. They found another planet.”

This was throwing what I knew about history into a fresh sort of light...

“We don’t know very much about the planet because most of the records went with the eastern American seaboard. Poor sods had backtracked and found the nullbomb effect—and so they got their war after all. AP is most definitely not something to fiddle with. But a colossal number of NATO people had been shifted out through the stargate by then, out to this other place, supposed to be enough like Earth you could walk there barefoot after a few shots. Lucky them. They get to start again on a nice green planet out Corvus way, and we get the fag-ends of what they left behind...”

“Kindly spare us the personal opinions,Mick y,” said Birch in a tired voice.

“Why can’t people go there still?” said Corman. “Did they somehow lose contact after the East Coast Incident and the five days?”

Wui pushed four fingers through his hair again. “That was what shut them down, it’s thought. The AP

transient disrupted the gateway, but by then it had been open for eighteen months and they were beginning to see what the damn thing was doing.” He started telling points off on his fingers. “Stellar instability, they call it in the records. Solar flares. Skin cancer up 800 percent. We were the lucky ones.

The red shift was behaving oddly for those who were still watching it, and the 3 degreesK microwave background radiation in space was starting to
pulsate
. Meteors in swarms, we had: something was going wrong with big G, the gravitational constant. Imagine; you punch a hole that size through space and the whole universe ripples and shudders. We still didn’t know how lucky we were, but they were beginning to make connections by then, MT theory starting to catch up with practice. So they started playing with the hypothesis that their interstellar subway might have side effects. It was a big one, too, a portal nine or ten meters across, from the junk that’s on record as having gone through. A big cancer in space/time, sitting there metastasizing. They didn’t, you understand, they didn’t consider it
expedient
to shut down the gate by way of experiment. It had to be done for them. So that was the Superpower Incident when they invented the nullbomb and all contact was lost. Afterward theU.S. went isolationist and over here the Force—“

Birch was making cool-it signs, beating out imaginary flames with his hands. “We do know our history,Mick y.”

“Yes, well, after all the troubles, just when maybe someone might have considered giving the stargate another try, the nova light from Centaurus got here. Very pretty it was, they say—it’s cooled down a little now. And year after year, the others. Meckis and Canning tried to get it on a theoretical footing around

‘55; that gate jogged stars at certain points in the main sequence and
pow
! There’s some sort of random factor involved as well, but I think they guessed at six percent of suns as liable to be affected. A few hundred of the ones you can see with the naked eye out there, maybe more than a thousand million throughout the galaxy, God knows how many in the universe: the propagation seems to be damn near instantaneous and much as we’ve tried, no one can find any grounds for tying in the inverse-square law. If only I could look into the galactic core now...

“Welcome to your heritage, folks. Doesn’t it make you proud to be human?”

Birch had his elbows on the desk, his chin in his hands. “Doubtless you’re quite right about past thoughtlessness,Mick y, but I do deprecate all this
posturing
in what’s supposed to be a factual briefing.”

Wui shrugged, grinning.

“You’ve explained the lights in the sky,” I said, shifting uncomfortably on the hard chair. “Where does that get us? What’s the mission?”

Corman looked up, frowning. “Could you tell whether the sun of this second world was affected? The sun in Corvus?”

“I was coming to that. We’re treading much more carefully these days, with a lot more theoretical guidance than the wonderful, brave pioneers I’ve been telling you about. There are small uses of AP that don’t muck up the scheme of things in any significant way. Devices like the jammer—that simply has a local effect on low-energy e/m radiation and quantum levels. The nullbomb, though it’s hardly a small use, simply has a local effect on, um, atomic stability. We have a third AP application which we think is safe to handle—a somewhat limited matter-transmitter gateway, too small (the theory says) to set the continuum twanging the way Hideyhole did.

“It’s small. It’s restricted. It wobbles violently over large distances, unless you can anchor it at the far end. And so it’s next to useless for most purposes—push something into the tube underneath space, and the point where it comes out will be different every time. We thought it was sheer luck when we hit the Beta Corvi system first try. It wasn’t, unless sheer luck is what makes water run downhill. We—oh, you’ll have to ask Cathy Ellan for the maths, but effectively we homed in on a weak point in space.

Which means
they’re at it again
. There’s a world out there; the old records called it Pallas because Corvus is a raven and you know about the raven and the pallid bust of Pallas ... The people are not simply surviving, they’re experimenting with MT themselves. Making weak points in space and hanging out flags for us without knowing it.

“Central Command thinks they’ve got to be stopped. I suppose I agree ... Otherwise we might wake up one fine morning to see a nova rising in the east. And that’s the current aim of Project Tunnel. We started in search of pure knowledge, you know, possibly new energy sources. We end up, I’m almost ashamed to say it, we end up sending a gunboat to the colonies.
O tempora! O mores!
” Wui was enjoying himself no end; I was wobbling between enjoying his speech and wanting some discipline, when Birch cut in again.

“_Please_,Mick y. Ken, Rossa, you’ve heard enough to appreciate some of the background and the nature of our present problem. It’s imperative that these colonists be stopped, or at least persuaded not to continue MT experiments.”

“Have you tried asking them?” said Corman.

“Have we not?” said Wui, and he sounded bitter. “We lobbed in a mini-transmitter satellite, beaming warnings about AP and MT on a continuous loop. They couldn’t have missed it. In fact they didn’t miss it—as far as we can make out, they blew it clear out of orbit.”

“Could be your gadget malfunctioned, went into a decaying orbit or something,” I offered.

“Then so did the second
and
the third. Radio silence from Beta Corvi II except for gibberish which sounds machine-coded, plus intense microwave activity once in a while: and they knock out our satellites.”

“We decided we had to take decisive action,” said Birch. His eyes flickered as if he’d remembered something he’d rather not have. “We submitted a tentative plan of action to Central Command in Zurich...”

“Who piddled around for weeks,” Wui said with a bit of a rush, as though quick to lay down a smokescreen. “It seems the hawk and dove factions argued to the last semicolon. Never mind the fate of the universe, this is politics, this is the important stuff. Oh God: every decision a compromise. The mission plan’s already a botch. One lot wanted to nullbomb the planet right off, the others reckoned that even our radio messages were probably imperialist interventionalism,” he said happily.

Corman came back to the point in her thin, clear voice: “Perhaps now, then, could you tell me where I and Ken Jacklin come into this botched scheme?”

“I’ve been waiting to hear that too,” I said.

“Send a gunboat,” Wui muttered, wriggling his fingers.

Birch sighed. “Yes. A gunboat. We have a multiple plan, a compromise. The first thrust comes when a faster-than-light vessel from Earth moves into orbit about Beta Corvi II, about Pallas, and overawes the settlers into acquiescence. Or at least,
tries
to.”

Wui mumbled something that sounded as if it could have been “imperialist intervention.”

“But—“ I said after a pause.

“But there are no faster-than-light
craft
,” Corman said.

“No more there are. It’s a deception, a stratagem; the concept can’t be precisely unknown to you as Force members. If it fails, the plans provide for second and third lines of attack.” Birch was looking shifty again, and I noticed Wui carefully not looking at me or Corman. This was nothing at all like the machined-steel precision and discipline you get in Combat strike plans; it seemed wooly and treacherous.

The sort of thing Admin and Command would dream up behind their multilayered defense-in-depth of red tape. One thing in particular was nagging at me, the most gross and obvious thing of all.

“Why me?” I said. “Why a special comm auxiliary? Why not a couple of smooth-talking types from Admin or even Command? My training is to get in there and simply kill the buggers...”

Birch looked even more uncomfortable. Wui looked at Birch. I’d asked one of the right questions. Birch cleared his throat three or four times, noisily. “You are very highly qualified indeed for this mission, Ken.

You’ve taken forty-six deaths in Force training and combat; you’re hardened to the point where pain and trauma barely touch you. Believe me, this is very important to the plan.”

He stopped.

“Why?” I said again.

“The third safe MT application is what we call, ah, the minigate. AsMick ey was saying, it’s sufficiently restricted in effect to be completely safe to use. Completely safe. A portal in space connecting here with Corvus. Yes. There are certain problems still, of course, the power drain, oh, and the limited aperture.

What’s the figure, please,Mick y?”

Wui licked his lips. “The minigate opening is only one point nine centimeters across, Ken. Which is why we need you. Do I really have to put it in words of less than one syllable?”

Five

They gave me a room that looked as if it was meant to make me go soft. I had to tip the thick foam mattress off the bed and stuff it into a cupboard to get anything like the regulation Force bunk. And then it wasn’t so easy to sleep; the adrenalin was still gurgling somewhere inside, like in the waiting minutes before the training ground. I discovered something I hadn’t known about dying: you may not mind it when it’s all strobe lights, laser flashes, artillery and thunder, but there is something very different about—well, about what friendly Wui and Birch and Central had planned for me. They wanted to take me apart and put me through a hole one point nine centimeters across.

“You did volunteer for extreme hazard, after all,” Birch had said while I was still chewing it over. I couldn’t put together the right words to tell him there was a difference between taking your chances with guns or bombs in a big raid and the sort of dissection they were offering.

Wui had started to say something about the efficiency of anesthetics, and then he’d stopped. It looked as though there was a surprise waiting for me there, too.

The Comm woman, Corman, she’d taken it without even changing expression. A shade paler and she could have passed for something carved out of snow. Slipping over the dark edge into sleep, I had quite clearly a picture of her melting and running, one frozen bleak eye still watching me while the rest of her was a whirlpool being sucked down this hole that would be a tight squeeze for my middle finger...