The Goliath Stone (24 page)

—PROVERBS

1

“Looks like our ride’s here,” said Mycroft over the radio as he headed for the cargo lock. The rest were staring in horror at their screens. “Good, NASA will assume the bots had something to do with it. —Spontaneous human combustion,” he added. “Or, in the words of Alex Cox, ‘People just explode.’ I once worked out that if all the potassium-40 in the human body decayed at once, it would reduce the carbon in the tissues with superheated steam, and the hydrogen that was produced would be hot enough to ignite spontaneously. In a pressure suit the fire is confined to your head and lungs. The bots are perfectly capable of aligning atoms so their nuclei are orthogonal to solar neutrinos, which are likewise perfectly capable of inducing decay. I have no idea how it happens naturally. Never been able to reproduce any psychic phenomena under controlled conditions, so—”

“Will you
shut
UP?” Toby half screamed.

Mycroft grunted. Then Toby heard him say, “Got your first job for you, ladies. —Can somebody else get back here and hold the other light? The hole is all the way through.”

“I’ll do it,” Toby muttered, and unstrapped to follow Mycroft.

It wasn’t as easy as Mycroft had made it look. By the time Toby reached the access hatch at the rear of the cargo bay, sweat was soaking through the fabric of his suit. As soon as he opened it, however, his heaters switched on.

Mycroft was shining searing violet light down one side of the tank. There was oxygen frosted against most of the surfaces Toby could see, except where the light shone directly. “Got the other light? I can’t turn right now.”

“Yeah,” Toby said, and went to the darker side of the tank. He could see where LOX was boiling out of the hole, freezing as its pressure dropped. “You got some more nanos?”

“They’re all over the tank.”

“Okay.” He switched on the light he’d picked up in the bay, and started getting warmer at once. He aimed it at the leak.

In all these years, he’d never gotten to watch nanos at work.

At first, he still didn’t. The glare of his light was too dazzling. After a minute or so his eyes had adjusted enough to see that there was a black splotch flowing into the hole, and that the spray was slowing. He adjusted his aim. “You brought in more metal?” he said.

“Ruthenium steel, twelve percent,” Mycroft said. “I had it in my bag, for just such occasions. They’ve got it.”

“Pricey.”

“Not for much longer. —I’ve got the exit hole here. Your side should be closing up sooner, so when it does, bring the light over. Slow, so they follow.”

“Right.” They were silent for a while, then Toby said, “I don’t see any more fog. I’ll give them time to finish up here.”

“No, they can do the outer shell when the leak’s stopped here. Come
now
.”

Toby moused the black patch over to the other side, then said, “Holy crap, dude.”

“Yeah. Says something about May’s taste in tank liners that we’ve got any oxygen left at all. Lost about a third, I’d guess.” The hole in the outer shell of the LOX tank was big enough for May to have slipped through without scratching her tanks. Oxygen was still coming out the inner shell, but it slowed visibly as the second splotch arrived.

“Do we have enough to get home?” Toby said.

“Not an issue. Even if the bots on the Rock haven’t hung on to any oxygen, I hardly think May’s going to let
Envoy
go anywhere. And they’ve got plenty.”

When the venting stopped, the big splotch moved outward and began closing the outer shell of the tank. “Now you can move them back,” Mycroft said. “Sunlight should be enough for them to handle the hull. May can roll the ship.”

“Mycroft, I’m sorry I flipped out like that.”

“Why?”

“Hell, the man’s
head
exploded!”

“I know. I meant, ‘Why are you sorry?’ It was the most shocking and inexplicable thing I could come up with. I
want
people to flip out when someone pulls that crap. You’ll notice they haven’t tried anything else.”

“At the moment it’s not them I’m worried about,” Toby said. “The Briareus nanos still aren’t talking to us, remember?”

Mycroft gave him a funny look, but said only, “I’ll stay here and collect these after.”

“Mycroft,” Alice’s voice said, “I’ve been thinking.”

“Hardly unusual,” he said. “Interesting subject, I take it?”

“The jihad threat. That’s a bluff.”

“Hell it is. Bots separate isotopes just fine.”

“Yes, but all the people who are willing to send credulous idiots out as human bombs are dead by now, aren’t they?”

After a moment Mycroft’s breathing could be heard again. Then he said, “I am hampered in expressing myself by the lack of a sufficiently vehement expletive in the English language. I never thought of that. Alice?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t you dare call yourself dumb in my hearing again.”

2

After they’d been chucking the armaments out of the cargo bay for a few minutes, Stephen said, “Spray me off, I’ll help.”

Jack found some solvent and turned him loose.

“That would have been me,” Stephen said once he got a look at Sam.

They closed the bay and left Sam there, moored to a bulkhead. There was plenty of room.

Envoy
’s cargo bay air lock readout had a melted screen. So did all their suits’ wrist monitors. Their radios still worked, and Charley cycled the lock for them.

The cockpit screens were okay. Whatever they’d been hit with was localized.

“Helm doesn’t respond,” said Charley. “I think we may have to rely on charity for a ride home.”

“Might be worth asking, Commodore,” said Stephen. “They don’t want us dead.”

“How do you know?”

“We’re not dead.”

Jack took a long look at him. This did not sound like the Stephen Edmundson he knew. Come to think of it, that one would have been ranting and assigning blame from the moment Sam Quinn blew up.

Evidently it wasn’t the one Charley Loomis knew either. “When did you get all calm and analytical?”

“When two guys I never got along with saved my life by accident. And didn’t say a thing about it. Not even that they should have let me go ahead and do the shooting. That’s kind of hard not to think about. After a while it seemed to me that there were other things I should be thinking about too.”

“The hole’s closing up,” said Marty. They all checked their screens.
Firebird
was looking pretty good.

Stephen said, “That thing out there could have sprayed nanomachines at them, or they might have brought some along. Or, hell, they could be built in. I think that could be a popular idea after this.”

“NASA’s administration won’t like it,” said Jack. “Gray goo scenario.”

“The Holy Roman Emperor might not like it because it gives the peasant class too much leisure time,” Charley said. “There still is an heir, you know. Saw a news item. He makes model animals. Glassblowing. The idea of NASA having any authority left at this point seems like a pretty weak joke.”

“Hello again,” said
Firebird
’s pilot. “The way I see it, you owe us some LOX.”

Charley said, “We didn’t bring a pipe.”

“We should have one by the time you get here. You’ll need a ride after that. You want to come along, or shall we come back for you?”

“We’re not that attached to this ship,” Charley said. “I have to say, that was a pretty slick move with the reentry shield.”

“Can’t take credit,” she replied. “Got the idea from the old Soviet cosmonaut program. There was an automatic landing system that kicked in if they tried to land in another country. As a precaution to keep them from overriding it, it also cut off their air. Remember all those ‘tragic accidents’ they had back in the sixties? That they stopped having once they started including an armed political officer in every crew.”

“Where did you hear that?” Charley exclaimed.

“I didn’t. My father couldn’t figure out how so many could go wrong the same way, so he bought a bunch of old Soyuz capsules from museums and took them apart. They’d forgotten to take it out of one.”

There was a silence.

“I think I’m sick,” said Jack.

“Could be,” said Stephen.

Jack stared at him. This was a very different man. Hearing a joke that was actually funny from him was just
weird,
like being mauled by a pack of hamsters.

“We’ll be right over,” Charley said, and started the thrusters. Now they worked.

“
Firebird
’s rolling,” Marty said. “Damn, the shot went clean through! —The nanomachines must run on sunlight.” He used his magnifier. “Yeah, the hole has black edges. I wonder why JNAIT isn’t selling electric power? They’re not like silicon cells, they wouldn’t have a problem with the doping getting sloppy before they generate enough power to build another.”

“We’re trying not to ruin anybody that doesn’t insist on it,” said a man’s voice.

“How the— I’m not on an open channel.”

“It may have come to your attention at some point that our pilot knows everything about how these vehicles work. You’d be Martin Tillery, right? I liked your paper on heat reclamation. I’m Mycroft Yellowhorse.”

“The skydiver,” Stephen said.

“And that’d be Stephen Edmundson, who broke an elbow qualifying for the U.S. team in ’48. It’s my guess that it was Samson Quinn who took the shot at us; fighter pilots have judgment issues. That leaves John Bernstein and Charles Loomis. Dr. Bernstein, if you’d joined the military your promotions would have been held up by the Pentagon and you’d never have made astronaut, which would be a damn shame since you’re the smartest man in the corps. Commodore Loomis, the thing I find most interesting about you is that you were an extremely large baby.”

“Ten pounds four ounces. You have that on
file
?”

“Not as such. Your middle name is Stuart, and you’re the youngest in your family. Charles Stuart was the only king to be beheaded by the English. It’s my guess you were overdue and a difficult birth.”

“Three weeks. Nine hours followed by a Caesarean. I can see why they named you Mycroft.”

“I chose that name. The name on my birth certificate was Guillaume Olivier Connors. Ten pounds seven, six weeks, more than thirty hours, no Caesarean. Sounds like your mother was nicer than mine. Of course, so was Medea. But I’m sorry I didn’t have the bots ready for yours in time. You’ve suffered all your life from an illness inherited only through the maternal lineage. It’s what I set out to cure when I started fooling with Toby’s work. Say hi, Toby.”

“Hi, Toby,” said another man’s voice.

“Gracie Allen lives,” said Yellowhorse.

“Ohh
kay
then,” Charley said, “braking now.”

When they’d come to relative rest, Yellowhorse said, “Hang on a bit. I have to round up the help.”

“Sure,” said Charley.

Jack noticed Charley was slowly opening and closing his hands, looking at them.

“I didn’t know you tried out for the Olympics,” said Marty.

“Didn’t just try out. Qualified. Only thing I ever had that wasn’t handed to me, and it was taken away because I tripped over my own feet after I was down.”

“This personality change of yours is making me want to check your pack for pods,” Jack said.

Stephen looked at him. “I think I’m getting a rash where you sprayed me. It’s all your fault. Does that help?”

“In a terribly wrong way, yes.”

XXXV

They come to see; they come that they themselves may be seen.

—OVID

1

The entities aboard the interceptor watched with interested suspicion as
Envoy
disarmed itself and maneuvered close to
Firebird
. Sortie parties gathered the discarded materiel, which was examined with great care. Energetic and otherwise useful chemicals were separated and packaged, and the metals were stored for later processing.

Firebird
stopped rolling. The two ships now had their bellies toward one another. Humans slowly got out of both ships, sending radio signals back and forth, and one from
Firebird
moved to attach a flexible connector between the ships’ bellies. The connector presently altered shape in a way that indicated internal pressure.

The relative motion of the ships showed that
Envoy
was losing mass while
Firebird
gained it.

The interceptor had been designed to reach the ships, destroy
Envoy
if it attacked, repair
Firebird
if it was damaged, and get
Firebird
to Foundry safely.
Envoy
had attacked, but the sole attacker had immediately died, and none of the other humans had attempted further aggression.
Firebird
had been damaged, but manifestly had its own operators aboard, and was now intact.
Envoy
’s behavior indicated that the crew had surrendered to
Firebird
’s crew.
Firebird
was now refilled with oxidizer, though it would not have proportionate solid fuel to go with that.

The entities of the interceptor had been occupied with observation and preparedness for war. The value of having assigned some of them to construction of a communication system was now apparent. Lasers intended for making holes through
Envoy
were unsuited to the purpose, and in any case each could produce only one overwhelming shot before being remade, since it would destroy its own core as it fired.

A plan was formed as the humans from
Envoy
were making their way into
Firebird
. A chunk of metal from the discarded armaments was flung ahead of
Firebird
’s nose, then destroyed by a laser pulse, emitting light visible to humans. While the entities waited for the humans to respond—human movements were so slow as to be tiresome to watch—all entities not currently engaged in operations formed up in a layer on the side of the interceptor facing the ships.