Space Eater (8 page)

Corman looked up. “You mentioned contingency plans, plans in the plural, when we first talked about this. Now we have one plan of action—‘overawe them’—and one contingency plan—‘give them a minigate.’ What are the other contingency plans?”

“They are entirely dependent on feedback from your contact operation,” Birch told her blandly. “It would not be profitable to discuss such remote contingencies at this stage.”

“What’s important now is that you get your lines right,” said Wui. “Right from the first ‘Hello, we’re from Earth, stop your MT experiments because we’ve got something better’ to the final ‘bye-bye.’ We’ll go through some possible scripts after mess—you be you and I’ll be a mean, distrustful Pallas colonist.”

I shook my head, trying to free it from the webs they were all spinning. “Mean and distrustful is the way
I
feel,” I said. “This whole plan of action is wooly ... disconnected ... feeble. If CC approved it there must be teeth somewhere, but I can’t see them and I don’t like any of it, one little bit.”

Corman clapped her hands very slowly and silently, still staring at the floor.

Birch’s lips wriggled around. He leaned forward, looking frozen and savage. “Forceman Jacklin,” he said, “I have no doubt that you are an infinitely wiser strategist than the whole of CC and their computers.

Have you considered the small, strategic point that sending you to Corvus is part of a compromise to please the nonaggression lobby in Central? Have you considered that if we can’t make these ‘wooly’

makeshifts work, there is a faction that would be delighted to abandon the minimum-loss-of-life guidelines and sweep the whole problem under the carpet in the interests of ‘Earth security’?Mick y can tell you how we could do exactly that to the whole damned untidy
planet,
to ten dozen of them if CC

gives the word. Every problem solved ... at ... a ... stroke.”

Wui nodded with something like sympathy. But was Birch’s speech just a shade overdone, the angry look in his face too good a performance to be true? I thought about that textbook passage on infinite energy release, and shut up for the time being.

Eight

I was on my own in the dark, with cold feet. The damp air creeping from the old, crumbling parts of Tunnel; it sneaked under my door, across the floor and straight through the bunk’s flimsy sheets. But my face felt hot ... feverish? The days had rushed past too quickly to count. Now, tomorrow, they were opening up that tiny doorway in space (Wui had giggled, said something about Alice in Wonderland, shut up as suddenly). Tonight was still T minus one, which was what they called it in the formal reports Birch put together for Central; and I was in the dark. Everything here was too complicated. Every datum had two meanings, with the important one hidden. People said things and thought different things. Worst,
I
was thinking thoughts I didn’t quite want to say out loud. My brain turned things over and over like an old petrol engine that never quite fires but goes around tired and gasping until at last the power gives out.

I didn’t want to be a person whose thoughts were all complicated, tangled, sick: at the far end of a tunnel years and years long I couldn’t remember having been that way. It had been a bad time before the Force.

In the Force I got killed every once in a while. In the Force I felt safe. Peer group, the shrink called it, all of us thinking much the same way, all of us saying just about what we thought (except to Admin, but that’s different). Sure there’s lots of technical stuff, courses to soak up, strategy plans, weapon drills ...

that’s all fun and games like the wargaming, it’s not
complicated
. And then there were the good times, the jokes, crossing the wires on Security. Even when it all gets out of hand—I remembered Alan going berserk with an
axe
, for God’s sake, an axe because the quartermaster wouldn’t issue him a jacket that fitted, he caught up with him in Admin, secretaries passing out everywhere, hacked through his thigh and shouted, “Ho ho, the leg is off!”, we all laughed at that one ... Yes, even when it gets out of hand it’s something we all share. This mob in Tunnel lived behind high walls of their own, or in tunnels. And in the Force there was one special time we never talked about much, and that might have done a lot to hold us together: the times in the regrowth tanks after a D. There is that old gag about beating yourself with a gunbutt because it’s so nice when you finally stop. Maybe that was part of it. You’re strung up on pain like high-tension wires, red-hot corkscrews hauling at your gut; then there’s the blackout and you’ve notched up another D, and
then
... that time just floating there in the yellow gunk, no need to think, no way to move, so sleepy and so good. If the tanks weren’t expensive and restricted as well, you could clean up a lot of minds better than the shrinks with a regular dose of the big D and the tank. Might even stop people like the Tunnel staff being so goddamn complicated and knotted-up.

Maybe I’d already been away from Force South Bank too long. I was getting hungry for that old, clear-cut Force feeling; when you start thinking around and about it the way I was doing now, it has to be a sign that things are changing, going wrong. I was changing and I didn’t want to change. I was a happy, efficient fighting machine, but the damp air down in Tunnel was creeping in the corridors, into my reflexes, into my bones.

The reflexes were still mostly there, I found as a muffled thud came from the door and I was suddenly on my feet in the clammy dark. My hand was enough used to going without weapons that it barely twitched toward where my belt should have been. Instead it found the light plastic chair and hefted that as I moved to the bolted door. Another low thud, not dull enough to be a fist beating on the door, not sharp enough to be knuckles: a bunch of fingertips, then. Someone whispered through the door: “Ken? Ken?Mick y here. Are you awake, Ken?”

“What’s the matter?” I said to the crack between door and jamb, not standing where the door would hit me if it burst open. One hand held up the chair, the other slid along the wall to the light switch:
click
and I blinked as the glare took hold of my dark-adjusted eyes.

“Party,” said Wui none too clearly. “Coming out party for the Project, just a few of us, last chance we get. Come
on
!”

Well: I hadn’t been sleeping. And whatever happened now was going to be canceled when the door opened tomorrow on that twisty tunnel 162 light-years from end to end. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die,” was what one Admin major used to say to us, smiling wide to show any number of not-too-good teeth; he’d always looked disappointed when we just nodded. Maybe he thought his nutshell version of the routine was some kind of joke you laughed at.

“Sure,” I said into the crack, put the chair down, and went for my clothes. You learn to dress fast in the game, and in a moment I was whipping the door open, checking up and down the dim passage—OK.

Wui gave me a grin. He was carrying a cardboard box that clinked.

“Where’s this party?” I said.

“Ssshhh! First we get Rossa.” He moved down the corridor and I followed; he was swaying very slightly, maybe just tired. In the yellow nightlights it was hard to tell. Two doors down: “Ssshhh!” again, and he tapped with the ends of his fingers. “Rossa?Mick y here. Come to a party, Rossa?”

She answered soon enough to convince me she hadn’t been sleeping either. I could imagine her lying with her strained face looking straight up into the dark. Soon she peeped carefully around the door (not even bolted!), shrank a little as Wui dropped a friendly hand on her shoulder, and fell in behind when he moved on. “What sort of party is this? Anything is better than lying there, but it had better not be psychoactives. With my job I daren’t touch them—“

I filed that one away for future reference. “Don’t know,” I whispered back. “Wui’s got bottles in there: juice, maybe. You don’t think he’d have alcohol?”

“Why not? That’s not supposed to be psychoactive in the way I meant. I used to rely on it a good deal in the bad times.”

Forceman Jacklin would have said: “What bad times? What’re you talking about?” I was thinking differently enough now to keep quiet. Rossa Corman was wound up very tight inside and I didn’t want to hit the wrong lever. The picture in my head came from when we were rigging clockwork timers for another improvised-incendiary test: someone had poked too hard with the long-nosed pliers and six feet of coiled spring had whipped out to slash his cheek. Got a big laugh. I still remembered that whiz and twang...

Then we were at a door where Wui didn’t knock: he pushed straight in, and white light spilled from the doorway. The low voices inside turned out to be Ellan and Ngabe talking together on the bunk; over in a corner there was Patel, a tech/4 from the AP lab, sitting cross-legged and staring into an empty plastic cup.

“Started already, eh?” said Wui cheerfully, putting down his box against the wall. Inside were dusty bottles. “Did themselves proud, those government planners—all the necessaries for a five-year piss-up while the war burns itself out overhead. I’ve got Scotch and vodka and gin and rum and orange juice.

Plenty more where that came from.”

“Medical stores?” said Ngabe, smiling.

“Well, no. There’s this storeroom on level 2 with PRIVATE: EMERGENCY RATIONS on the door, and I never figured why anything as revolting as emerg rations should have two locks on it. The Science of Deduction, aided by the resources of the AP lab. Do I hear applause?”

Ellan’s mouth was hanging open. “If you used a welding torch on that lock—“ She sounded almost satisfied at the thought of Wui getting himself in bad.

“Security would bust me, yes, I know. The ancient family of Wui has more subtlety than that. No, I wheeled down the FACTOTUM, used the micromanipulator arm and didn’t leave a clue. Now, for God’s sake, let’s drink it.”

There were more cups on the table. Wui splashed brown liquid into one and took a swig. “Ahhh. This stuff would burn holes in space without any MT gear. What are you drinking, friends?”

“Juice,” I said automatically. Wui looked at me with his head on one side.

“For myself also,” said Ngabe. “Tomorrow, after all...” He stopped. Maybe surgeons don’t discuss fine details of their attack plans in front of the, so to speak, battlefield.

Corman had juice with the white stuff called vodka in it. Patel filled his cup to the very top with Scotch and took it away to his corner like a kid who doesn’t want to share. Ellan tried the gin. Two, three more techs drifted in. Wui sank his drink and poured another, bigger one. “A toast,” he said after a short gap of silence. “A toast of victory or glorious death to our brave pioneers.
Lechyd da
.” He waved his cup in the air; so did Ellan and Patel; Ngabe lifted his up about five centimeters, very precisely, and let it down again.

“The science of deduction,” said Ellan sourly, “tells me that you have already taken a statistically significant sample of the liquor.”

“It’s the responsibility,” said Wui. “The re-sponsibility. It’s not just some storeroom, we’re picking the lock that holds the universe together and if you do that you need to get drunk once in a while. You like efficiency. You should know this is a more efficient way of drinking than goddamn fermented fruit juice.

You, Ken, why aren’t you drinking? Have a drink. Might be your last.”

“Thanks, but it isn’t something you do in the Force.”

“Waste of opportunity. Best hangover cure in the world you’ve got, damn zombie tanks, opportunity like that and you don’t drink.” He shook his head droopingly and seemed to remember something. “I had a friend,” he said.

“When was that?” Corman asked without any particular emotion.

“I had a friend got cut up by a Freedom gang. They put the knife into him quite a few times—not efficient Cathy, do it right and you only have to do it once.” He rambled on, pouring more liquor into the cups one by one. “Bleeding, peritonitis, all that, he died in forty-eight hours. Put him in a zombie tank, he’d still be here, but he wasn’t
privileged,
was he, oh no.” He leaned over suddenly, slopping vodka on top of my orange juice. “You’re privileged. You get the super, restricted hangover cure. Now drink.”

Ngabe sipped gently at his own cup. “I should remind you, Mr. Wui, that Mr. Jacklin’s combat training would probably permit him to dissect you quite thoroughly without the need for surgical instruments.”

“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll try it.” I tried it, and choked at the bite. (“Stir it in,” Ellan said. “The spirit floats.” I put my finger in and stirred.) The first time for this hard stuff, and maybe the last. Outside the Force you couldn’t afford it, inside you mustn’t. It wasn’t too bad, anyway, and made me feel a bit happier about not being the same person I’d been before Tunnel.

”
Lechyd da,”
Wui said again, and I asked him what it meant. “Welsh for ‘good health,’ you
saes
,” he said with a grin. “Wui’s a good old Cardiff name.”

We talked about liquor in general, and Patel explained how he made something he called fruitjack from

“liberated” juice. The techs talked about Security and Wui came up with some stories about them (“So I looked at the piece of secret equipment they’d impounded from my room and put under double guard, and you know, it was the spare light socket I wanted to put over my bunk—“) that had even Corman grinning. By then we’d all taken a refill or two, and even Ngabe had decided to try just one after all, and the atmosphere had shifted into a friendly haze with everyone talking loudly about different things. Cathy Ellan came and flopped by me on the floor, looking more puddingy than ever: “This project is so tremendously important to me,” she said. “I’ve always had pure mathematics as a hobby, and Tunnel lets me work with it...” In two minutes she’d explained without actually saying so that she was the only worthwhile theoretical brain in Tunnel, and Wui was over her just because he was a glorified technician who happened to be good at converting something called AP matrices into solid hardware. “...Can you imagine the matrix calculations in cases where the fundamental physical constants can all be treated as variables, and none of your small fiddly Einstein corrections either? It’s absolute freedom, you should be able to set up any AP framework you like within the limits of consistency and quantum connectedness.