A blare of martial music echoed throughout the construction shack to reveal that Athena had obeyed her master. The same pictures would be on every com terminal in Probe Station. The sounds would bellow from every outlet, with or without a screen.
The music fell silent, and then there were words:
“Orbitals! Come back to Earth! You are needed here more than you can possibly know! Bring back the machines, the resources, the assets you have stolen from us. Bring back the scientists and technicians who might replace them. Bring them back, and we will forgive your crimes.
“We demand your help in recreating the technology of the Machine Age. If you dare to withhold it…”
The screen showed a scene of ragged prisoners, both bots and humans, many of the latter modified in some way. They were surrounded by blue-clad soldiers holding leveled weapons. The sound of gunfire began. The prisoners fell in ragged, bloody heaps.
“We will kill them all.”
There was silence. Then the Station Director said, “That just came in. Now…” The screens in Frederick’s office subdivided to show a dozen, twenty, thirty faces wearing expressions of shock, outrage, fear. Several the computer had subtitled with “Nexus,” “Hugin,” “Munin,” “Moon,” and other labels. Most were marked “Probe,” and some of these were familiar: both the Nickers, Narcissus Joy, Jeremy Duncan, Walt Massaba. Hannoken’s own face remained at the center of each screen.
“We need…” Donna Rose’s voice was anguished.
“An all-out rescue effort?” Hannoken nodded soberly, his heavy jaw grimly set. “I agree. We’ve begun, and we have to continue. But there are some…”
“We can’t save them in any other way,” said Massaba, Probe Station’s security chief. “We can’t make them tolerant. “We can’t even conquer them and take away their guns. We don’t have the troops to takeover a whole world.”
“We cannot intervene!” said a Nexus face. “It will mean war!”
“What can they shoot at us with?” asked Renny.
“Look,” said Hannoken. A screen blossomed with spysat photos. “They’ve found a few undamaged spaceplanes. And we’ve intercepted messages that make it clear they know where to find the rockets, the missiles, that the world mothballed a century ago. They can do it.”
“War is inevitable,” said Frederick. “We already have it.”
“And we’re right up front,” said the Nexus face. “In low Earth orbit, the easiest for them to reach.”
“No!” cried a Hugin face after a moment’s time-delay. “It’s all your fault! You and Director Hannoken. If you hadn’t let that creature, that dog, of yours go down there…Mechin’ cavalry to the rescue! Nothing would have happened! The gengineers would be safe.”
Renny snarled. “Bots too,” he said. “The killing had already started, long before I ever met Freddy. Even before Dr. Hannoken made me.”
Frederick nodded. “Long before,” he said, remembering his own first encounters with the Engineers’ rabid attitudes. “And they’re clearly ready to bring it to us, if they can.”
“They are mad,” said Narcissus Joy.
“They will not stop,” said Sam Nickers. “Until everyone who does not agree with them is dead.”
“Can you stall them?” Frederick asked Hannoken. “Buy us time, while we…?”
“Freddy!” said Donna Rose. “No! You can’t…!”
“That is not enough!” cried Jeremy Duncan. “We have to rescue all of them, all the slaves, as many as we can. We cannot afford to stall! Every moment of delay means more deaths.”
“Yes!” said Donna Rose. “We can’t afford to stall. If we might have saved them, then all those deaths must be on our conscience. If we let them die, then we are just as much their killers as are the Engineers.”
“But we cannot save them yet,” said Frederick. “We have no room. The ships aren’t ready. And if we try, the Engineers will begin the slaughter.”
“We have to try,” said Donna Rose. “We have to threaten them…”
“Hit them,” said Duncan. “Hit them as hard as they hit us, or their slaves.”
“With what?”
Narcissus Joy was nodding in agreement with her kin. So were others, while those few fell silent who objected to any rescue effort, who thought it would lead to war as surely would an attempt to invade and force peace upon the Engineers.
“I know.” Hannoken hesitated briefly. “We have to do what we can. But first, we do need more places to put those we rescue. Frederick? Can you coordinate the effort?”
Frederick nodded. “We’ll need that plastic.”
“Then go ahead. Send Renny after it. Even if it starts a new bloodbath.”
“No!” cried Donna Rose.
“We have to,” said Hannoken. “Lois McAlois is almost home, and she can fly the Quentin. The other pilots should be ready as soon as their ships.”
“A week at most,” said Frederick. “Maybe ten days. How many can they slaughter in that time?”
“I’ll stay away from them,” said Renny. “I’ll land in isolated areas. Where refugees have hidden. The Engineers may not even see me, and I should be able to bring back a few bots at the same time, while the rest get the next load ready.”
“They’ll see you,” said Frederick.
“What about those missiles?” said the Hugin face. “What can we do if they launch them at us? What if they send up troops in the spaceplanes? We have no weapons.”
“Of course we do,” said Walt Massaba, Probe Station’s security chief. “Weaponry is easy. We get most of the raw materials we need from lunar rock and gravel. We already mine it, package it, and use mass drivers to send it into orbit where we smelt it with focused sunlight. We can use the same material to make large lumps, artificial asteroids of many tons. We can equip them with small Q-drives. Then, if we have to, we can crash them into missile launchers, airports, armies. They will do more damage than nukes.”
“Yes!” cried Duncan. “I’ll work on that!” His eyes widened, almost glowing at the prospect of fighting back.
“Director?” asked the security chief.
“You can have him, Walt.” The look Hannoken sent Massaba might have meant he hoped the security chief could keep Duncan reined in.
Frederick shook his head sadly. The idea seemed likely to be both economical and effective. It would divert materials they needed for other things, but the Q-ships were nearly done and the quarters they would have to build for the refugees would need more plastic than metal. Worst of all…“Won’t using these things endanger precisely those we wish to save?”
“That’s a chance we’ll have to take,” said Massaba. “We can’t do any good if we can’t protect ourselves.”
“We’ll need more miners,” said Frederick.
“The bots, Freddy,” Donna Rose reminded him. “They can dig trenches as they mine, and then line them with the plastic to make new quarters.”
“They’ll be barracks,” someone commented. “Cheerless places. Prison camps. As bad as those on Earth.”
“No,” said Jeremy Duncan. “Not that bad.” Narcissus Joy’s nose wrinkled as if scent had just billowed about her. A voice was a mutter behind her screen. “The Eldest agrees,” she said. “Here we are not slaves, for here we work for freedom.”
When Frederick returned to his quarters the next day, he found Donna Rose once more bent over her pet honeysuckle shoot. Yet she was not planting, cultivating, or fertilizing it. Instead, she held a small jar in one hand, and she was digging with the other.
“You left early this afternoon,” said Frederick. “What’s up?”
She froze. After a moment, her hands resumed their motions. She did not turn to look at him. “I’ve found a replacement for me, Freddy. Narcissus Joy—you’ve met her—will be in tomorrow.”
“What?”
“I’m leaving, Freddy. Leaving you.” The tendons on the backs of her hands were rigid with tension. “Look,” she said. “It’s already begun to bra
nch out, from the roots. I’ll leave you a piece.” She had the shoot free of the soil now and was packing it into her jar. A second shoot, smaller, still sprouted from the pot.
“But…” He could not speak. He could not move. He could only feel anew the paralyzing shock of loss. At the zoo, all the friends he had ever had, almost. Again, when he had found his road home, back to BRA, cut off behind him. And now…
“You want to stall,” she said. “You’re a temporizer, an appeaser. You want to let my people die.”
He managed to speak one line: “What else can we do, until we’re ready?”
“Jeremy wants to fight. He’ll force them to stop the slaughter, and he’ll save everybody. At least, he’ll try.”
“It won’t work.”
“Of course it will. The Engineers are human, aren’t they?”
Almost reluctantly, he nodded. “That doesn’t mean much. Make them mad—worse, scare them—and they’ll…”
“Then we’ll kill them. Kill them the way they’re killing us.”
“You’ll kill bots too.”
“Eggs and omelets.”
“You’ll kill more than would die if you waited for us to prepare new quarters.”
“At least we’ll be doing something.”
“But we’re doing something too,” Frederick told Renny later. The German shepherd had often come to visit since Lois McAlois had left on her long flight. Sometimes he had even stayed the night.
Frederick was sitting on the edge of his bed, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands. Renny squatted on his haunches, bandaged tail still. Both were facing Donna Rose’s trough of soil, now empty of all but that single sprig of green she had left behind.
“She wants action,” said the dog. “She has to know we have to prepare the ground first, but that doesn’t satisfy her or Duncan. She’s as human as he in that way.”
“She’s a plant,” said Frederick. “A mechin’ flower!” A murderous flower, he thought, and he almost laughed at the oxymoronic irony, the inherent contradiction, of the phrase.
“But human too,” said Renny.
“All too human,” Frederick agreed. He stared morosely at the trough. Eventually he spoke again: “Going to stay tonight?”
The German shepherd heard what Frederick had not said, that he wanted company, but he shook his large head. “Uh-uh. Lois is docking.”
He needed to say nothing more. His tail was as eloquent as words could ever be, even though pain and bandage kept it from moving as vigorously as it might.
Later, waiting in the docking area, watching through a porthole as Lois’ little Quoi slid out of blackness into visibility, Renny made out a pair of cargo pods held away from the ship on the ends of a long boom, like buckets on the ends of a water-carrier’s shoulder pole. Each one carried Gypsy workers rotating home on leave. The ship’s Q-drive spouted glowing plasma, and it slowed. It released the pods and nudged them within reach of the Station’s docking tubes.
The dog ignored the people that flooded out of the tubes and past him. He ignored the spacesuited workers who drew the emptied pods to one side and anchored them to the Station’s structure. He had eyes only for the Quoi and the pilot it concealed, and his hands grew sweaty when he saw the ship approach its own docking tube.
Why hadn’t he told Frederick that he had been looking forward to this night for weeks? He knew the answer. He was as excited as any man who had ever been about to reunite with a traveling lover, but his friend was in no condition to hear such news. His feelings were as bruised as feelings got, and hearing of Renny’s joy would not help.
There was the sound of hands touching the wall of the docking tube. His hindquarters began to quiver, and suddenly he realized that Frederick must have seen exactly how he felt. He was not always conscious of his tail, even when it hurt.
He dropped the thought as Lois came into sight. And yes, she had legs, short ones, childlike, useless still anywhere but in space. And yes, she was grinning to see him. And yes, his hands were on her shoulders, hers on his ribs, his tongue on her chin, her laughter in his ears. And yes, and yes, and yes…
* * *
PART 4
* * *
CHAPTER 21
Nuclear weapons had lost their appeal as weapons of war not long after it was generally realized that they destroyed far more than their targets. However, it was not the threat of radioactive fallout and death by immediate radiation poisoning or later cancer, nor even the threat of mutant children, that removed the missiles and bombs from the world’s arsenals. Rather, it was the discovery that even a small nuclear war would have enormous effects on world climate, filling the air with so much dust and smoke that sunshine could not reach the surface, causing a nuclear autumn or winter, a months-long, crop-killing chill that would starve many who survived the actual explosions. A similar event—not nuclear, but the geysering of dust and smoke and steam that followed the impact on the Yucatan peninsula of a meteorite some ten kilometers across—had extinguished much of life on Earth, including the last of the dinosaurs, some 65 million years before.
Yet the sense of vulnerability that accompanied these discoveries did not lead to the destruction of all nuclear arms. The bombs were dismantled, yes. The submarines and ships and airplanes and other vehicles that had carried missiles were scrapped or converted to other uses. As for the missiles themselves, wiser heads prevailed, pointing out that the asteroid or comet that destroyed the dinosaurs was not the only one to strike the Earth. Such impacts had happened before, and since, and there were a great many more potential cosmic cue balls orbiting the sun. It was only a matter of time before fate once more took aim. When that day came, humanity’s only hope would be to have the wherewithal to ward off the blow.
Today it would be a relatively simple matter to install a Q-drive and steer the asteroid or comet away from Earth, or even to park it in a convenient orbit for mining or other uses. But then that option had not been available. The nations had stored many of their rockets and warheads away. Their leaders swore they would be used only in time of direst need.
No one was sure that war would not bring the warheads back into play. Perhaps because of that uncertainty, wars stayed small and local. But now Earth’s leaders had identified an external threat. It was not an asteroid or comet. It was not even attacking them. But it denied their dreams and defied their power.
The missiles came out of storage. Silos were reopened. Rockets were inspected, and where the Engineers had the necessary technicians, slave or free, some were refurbished and refueled. Heavier warheads were replaced with lighter ones the rockets could carry all the way to lunar orbit. Older warheads had their tritium refreshed. Guidance computers were reprogrammed with celestial targets.
Jeremy Duncan wore nothing except a pair of bright red shorts. He was bare above the waist, the pink slits of his gills plain to see along his sides, the skin now as healthy as it had ever been, free of sores and bruises though still tender to the pressure of overlying cloth. A small squeeze bottle of lotion jutted from one of the pockets in his shorts.
He hovered before a bank of veedo screens. One showed the rock factory in lunar orbit, where lunar soil was melted, shaped, cooled, and fitted with Q-drives. Others showed the small—too small!—clusters of finished rocks near the Munin and Hugin habitats, near Probe and Nexus and other stations; more rocks were scattered in low Earth orbit, waiting. Still other screens showed spysat views of Earth, of silo mouths in North America and Siberia and China.
Duncan’s Orbital Defense Center was a metal bubble floating in space a few kilometers from Probe Station. The idea was that if a missile destroyed the Station, the ODC would still be there, still be functioning, still be able to coordinate the defense of all the other Orbitals and their homes. There was no porthole, not even a small one to admit sunlight, filtered and reflected, for Donna Rose. There was only a wall screen aimed toward the Station, showing its can-within-a-can configuration, the bulb of the construction shack to o
ne side, the cup of the radio telescope beyond, the idle Quoi, the larger Quiggle and Quimby. The rest of the Q-ships—Quincy, Quentin, Quito, and Quebec—were gone, on their ways to or from Earth, fetching biomass and whatever refugees could fit around their cargos.
A bell rang to summon attention to the screens. “A launch,” said Donna Rose. Her leaves were parted slightly from her chest as if to intercept a little more of the control room’s artificial lighting. The lights were brighter in the ODC’s living section, though not as bright as she had enjoyed in Frederick’s quarters. Yet she could not leave in search of better light. The demand for workers elsewhere was so great that there was no one to relieve her. She and Duncan had to be there all the time, incase Earth tried…“The first one today. Near Yeniseysk.”
“Thor,” said Duncan. “Estimate target.” He had named his artificially intelligent computer system after the Norse god of thunder and strength, the defender, the one with the magic hammer that went where he willed and then returned to be used again and again.
“No target.” The computer’s voice was much more obviously synthesized than those of Hannoken’s Athena or Frederick’s Minerva. The screen that had revealed the Siberian launch flashed for their attention. As they watched, the rocket’s exhaust plume suddenly ended in a billow of white.
“They didn’t replace the fuel on that one,” said Donna Rose.
“They must have thought it hadn’t deteriorated enough to matter.”
The bell rang again, activated as before by the ever-watchful computer. “Minnesota,” said the synthetic voice, and they turned their attention to another flashing screen. Blinking circles surrounded the mouths of three newly opened silos. From two of the gaping mouths, missiles erupted, rapidly accelerating, climbing toward space atop pillars of smoke. From the third, a flash, a billowing cloud, a rising mushroom viewed aslant.
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