by David Drake
“Sounds like I was right six months ago,” said the congressman, with a nod. “Overripe for the ax, exactly the sort of boondoggle that weakens the country in the name of defending it.”
“That’s the hell of it, sir,” Kelly said with a deeper frown, the honorific given by habitual courtesy to a man he felt deserved it. “Like you say, typical interservice wrangling. And you bet, the ferry went off like a bomb, she did that. But—” He shrugged out of his overcoat, his eyes concentrating on that for a moment while his mind raced with the real problem. When he looked up again, it was to say, “Damned if I don’t think they’ve got something useful there. Maybe useful, at any rate.”
“‘Hard-nosed Investigator Suckered by Military’?” said Bianci, quotes in his voice and enough smile on his lips to make the words a joke rather than a serious question.
“Yeah,” said Kelly, sitting straddled on a chair across the narrow aisle from his employer, the wooden chair back a pattern of bars before him, “it bothers the hell outa me to believe anything I hear from the Air Force. I remember—”
He looked up grinning, because it hadn’t happened to him and this long after the fact it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. “I remember,” he said, rubbing his scalp with a broad hand whose back was itself covered with curling black hair, “the Skybolt missile that was gonna make Russki air defense obsolete. Hang ‘em under the wings of B-52s and launch from maybe a thousand miles out beyond the interceptors and the surface to air missiles. . . .”
He was tired and wired and there were too many memories whispering through his brain. “B-52” had called up transparent images, unwanted as all of that breed were unwanted except in the very blackest moods. The Anti-Lebanon Mountains were lighting up thirty clicks to the east with a quivering brilliance, white to almost blue and hard as an assassin’s eyes: seven-hundred-and-fifty-pound bombs, over a thousand of them, dropping out of the stratosphere in a pattern a kilometer wide and as long as the highway from Kelly’s family home to the nearest town. The flashes could be seen for half a minute before the shock waves began to be heard at Kelly’s firebase; but even at that distance, the blasts were too loud to speak over.
“Damn, that was a long time back,” Kelly muttered aloud, shaking his head to clear it, and Representative Bianci nodded in agreement with what he thought he had heard, part of a story about a failed missile. “Early sixties, yes?” he said aloud, again giving Kelly the impression that he was being softened up for something on an agenda the congressman had not yet broached.
“Oh, right,” the younger man said with an engaging smile to cover an embarrassment known only to him. He couldn’t lose it with Carlo, couldn’t have his mind ricocheting off on its own paths in front of his boss. Kelly and Representative Bianci were as close to being friends as either’s temperament allowed, and his support—what he told Kelly he had done, and what the aide knew from the result he must have done—had saved the veteran from the very bad time he’d earned by the method of his separation from the National Security Agency. But Carlo couldn’t afford to associate with a psycho, a four-plus crazy like some people already said Tom Kelly was.
“Right, they tested Skybolt and they tested it, the Air Force did,” the aide continued. “Kept reporting successes and partial successes—to the Brits, too, mind, the British government was basing its whole defense policy on Skybolt—right down to the time the Air Force canceled the program because they never once had gotten the thing to work right.”
Kelly leaned back, flexing his big arms against the wood of the chair they gripped. “Turned out on one of those ‘partial successes,’ they’d detached the missile from the bomber carrying it, and it hadn’t ignited, hadn’t done anything but drop a couple miles and put a new crater in the desert. S’far as anybody could tell, the only thing the flyboys had tested successfully was the law of gravity, and that continued to perform up to specs.”
“Which is why you’re on my staff, Tom,” said Bianci after an easy chuckle. “But you don’t think the monocle ferry’s another Skybolt?”
Kelly sighed and knuckled his eyes, relaxed again now that he was back in the present. “Well, Hughes isn’t prime contractor,” he said, “that’s one thing to the good.”
He opened his eyes and looked up to meet the congressman’s. Kelly was calm, now, and his subconscious had organized his data into a personal version of truth, the most he ever tried to achieve. “Look, sir,” he said, “they’ve got a glitch in the hydrogen pulsejet mode they need from a hundred thousand feet to, say, thirty miles, Probably soluble, but on this sort of thing you won’t get guarantees from anybody you’d trust to tell the truth about the weather outside.”
The aide spread his hands, palms down to either side of the chair, forming a base layer for the next edifice of facts Bianci’s eyes blinked unwilled from Kelly’s face to the pinkish burn scars on both wrists. The man himself had when asked muttered, “Just a kerosene fire, price of bein’ young and dumb,” but the file Bianci had read carefully before he’d hired Tom Kelly spoke also of the helicopter and the three men dragged from the wreckage by Sergeant E-5 Kelly, who had ignored the facts that one of the men was dead already and that the ruptured fuel tank was likely to blow at any instant.
“If they do get that one cured,” Kelly continued, absorbed in what he was saying, “then sure, there’s a thousand other things that can go unfixably wrong, all along the line—but that’s technology, not this project alone, and the one guy out there in El Paso willing to talk gave me a good feeling. Don’t think he’d be workin’ on a boondoggle. And okay, that’s my gut and I’m not in the insurance business either.”
He looked at the print on the wall before him, then added, “But I think it might work. And I think it might be nice to have an alternative to Fortress.”
“Which works very well,” said the congressman. The only sign that his own emotional temperature had risen was the way his fingers , playing with the modem beside him on the desk, stilled. Belief in space-based defense, as embodied in Fortress, had more than any other single factor brought Carlo Bianci into politics.
The framed print on the wall behind Bianci was from the original design studies on Fortress. The artist had chosen to make the doughnut of shielding material look smooth and metallic. In fact the visible outer surface was lumpy and irregular, chunks of slag spit into Earth orbit by the mass driver at the American lunar base and fused there into armor for Fortress.
The space station itself was a dumbbell spinning within the doughnut. Living quarters for the crews were in the lobes, where centrifugal force counterfeited gravity, but the real work of Fortress was done in the motionless spherical hub. A great-winged ferry, launched like an aircraft from a Space Command base in Florida or California, was shown docking at the “north” pole—the axis from which the station’s direction of rotation was counterclockwise.
The array of nuclear weapons depending from the south pole had been left out of the painting. Three thousand H-bombs, each with its separate reentry vehicle, would have been too nightmarish for even the most hawkish of voters. That was often the case with the truth.
Mounted on the shielding were multi-tube rocket batteries intended to smash any warhead that came close enough to Fortress to do harm. The primary defenses were out of the scale of the picture, however: the constellation of X-ray lasers which orbited with the space station. Each was a small nuclear weapon which, when triggered, sent in the moment of its dissolution up to a hundred and forty-four simultaneous pulses, each capable of destroying any missile or warhead which had risen above the blanket of the atmosphere.
“It’s everything that President Kennedy dreamed of,” Kelly agreed, aware of what he was saying and too tired to more than wonder why he was now voicing an opinion that could cost him a job he needed. “An orbital arsenal defended by X-ray lasers and armored with lunar slag that can stop the beam weapons which the lasers can’t.”
Bianci nodded, both because he agreed and because he wanted to
be able to agree with his aide on a matter of such emotional importance to him. “A point in vacuum,” he said in a voice that carried a touch of courtliness with no sign of accent from his Italian grandparents, “that can be defended as regions smothered in an atmosphere can’t be. No matter how many missiles the Russians build, no matter how accurate they become, they can’t pierce the defenses of Fortress and knock out our retaliatory capability—as they could with missile silos on Earth.”
“And could with submarine launchers,” Kelly said, nodding in the same rhythm as his employer, “if they can find the subs—which we can’t prove they won’t be able to do tomorrow with hardware no more unlikely than radar would’ve seemed fifty years ago.”
“Then what’s the problem with Fortress?” said Bianci, relaxing.
“Fortress is the ultimate offensive weapon,” Kelly said softly, straightening his fingers and looking at the backs of his hands. Philosophy wasn’t something he really got upset about, and that’s all they were discussing here. If space weaponry ever became more than a matter of philosophy, all the survivors were going to get real upset. . . . “Well, nothing’s ultimate, say the ‘here-and-now maximum’ offensive weapon.”
“Defensive weapon in our hands, of course,” the representative said, more in correction than as part of an expected argument. His buttocks shifted enough that the desk scraped beneath him.
“Boss,” said Tom Kelly, standing and swinging the solid chair to the side rather than stepping around it, “it’s defensive because the Reds—or whoever the hell—know that if they attack us, Fortress’ll blast ‘em back to the Neolithic—with bone cancer. You think nobody’d do that, not a risk but a guarantee. . . .”
The squat aide had taken two absentminded steps deeper into the bull pen. Now he turned and smiled as he faced his employer. “And I ‘spect you’re right, Carlo, for the politicians. But I’ve met folks who weren’t going to back off whatever happened to them or behind ‘em.” He sighed, then added, “Hell, boss. On bad days I’ve been that sorta folks.”
Congressman Bianci looked at his subordinate and, as if he had no inkling of what had just been admitted, said, “Then we can agree that we’re safe so long as the politicians control the Kremlin—as they have at least since Rasputin died”—Kelly chuckled—“and that was true even under Stalin.”
“Oh, hell, yes, Carlo,” agreed Kelly easily and honestly. “Fortress is the most practical road to peace—bottom line peace—that anybody’s come up with yet.” He grinned in a way that would have been boyish except for the lines in and on his face. “There’s just a certain beauty to a fleet of mirrors up there”—he gestured toward the ceiling and beyond with his trigger finger—“reflecting laser beams into however many warheads’re coming over.”
“We’ll think about it,” said Bianci, straightening onto his feet again. “Specifically, you’ll have me a report in sixty days on the probable result of moving the project to Space Command. If we do decide to save it, there’s no point in making a ‘logical’ change that results in a balls-up.”
Well, he was still on the payroll, thought Tom Kelly as he nodded and said, “Yeah, like transferring ground-support aviation from the Army that needs it to the Air Force that isn’t interested in anything yucky like mud and Russian tanks.”
The veteran stretched, figuring that tomorrow was time aplenty for him to write up the report since he’d given Carlo the core of it verbally. “Well, boss,” he said—
—And Representative Bianci said, toward a far corner of the room, “There are two people who said they’d like to talk to you today, Tom.”
“My goodness, two of ‘em?” Kelly straightened deliberately from his back-arched posture and swept the room with his eyes: nobody but the two of them. He’d have heard breathing or motion if a team were hidden behind filing cabinets and privacy panels. . . . “What’d they want to talk about, Carlo?”
Bianci was not deceived by his aide’s voice, though it was as smooth as the lockwork of a fine revolver slipping to full cock. For all that, nothing in the congressman’s own background permitted him to translate data from Kelly’s file into the shock and flame of reality. “Not Fortress, I believe, Tom,” said Bianci. “Not—” He looked up with the appearance of candor, a politician’s look, but possibly real this time. “This appears to be a new development of some sort on which they think you can be of some help.” Everything Tom Kelly saw or heard stood out from its background for the length of time he focused on it. Representative Bianci was a figure with only a blur behind him—unless something should have moved in the periphery of Kelly’s vision—as he licked his lips and continued, “This isn’t in the purview of your employment with me, Tom. But it would be a personal favor to me if you agreed to talk to them.”
“Sure, boss, I understand,” said Kelly, and he did understand. Bianci had been too smart to give him an order regarding a subject on which Kelly took orders from no one; and the kind of pressure that could be exerted on an elected official, even a powerful one, even an honorable man like Carlo Bianci, whose eyes had been pretty well open when he hired a man who’d been training Kurdish guerrillas for the National Security Agency before he separated on very bad terms indeed. . . . “Where do they want to see me? Langley? Meade?”
“I told them,” said the congressman with the stumbling enunciation of a man thinking of the result of what he was saying rather than the specific words his tongue tried to form, “that I’d relay their message, and that they were welcome to wait in my private office, though I had no reason to expect you in tonight.” Bianci smiled. “I gather they had a better notion of your schedule than I did.”
“Better’n both of us, I guess,” Kelly said, unbuttoning his sportcoat and stretching again, bending forward at the waist and raising his hands locked behind his back. It was the position of a man being lifted to the ceiling in the cheap medieval substitute for the rack. The position loosened the great muscles of his shoulders—tension had locked them as tight as the cables winching in a whale for flensing.
If you watch a man carefully over a period of time, you do know him better than he knows himself, because the habitual activities that never reach his conscious mind stand out as statistical peaks in the summary of his behavior. Of course Tom Kelly would check in at Bianci’s office, because he always did after a tour—though there was no necessity to do so, and though Kelly himself thought he was flipping a mental coin in the airport to determine whether he went to his Arlington apartment or the office in the Longworth Building.
“Well,” said Kelly, massaging first his left hand with his right, then reversing the activity, “if they’ve been waiting this long, I guess it’s only polite to look in on ‘em.”
“You don’t have to, you know.” The congressman stood up faster than he had intended, his muscles reacting sharply to the charged atmosphere. “Believe me, Tom, that wasn’t an order.”
The veteran clapped Bianci on the shoulder with his left hand while the right clenched and unclenched in its own set of unconscious loosening exercises. “No sweat, boss,” Kelly said. “You’re a good enough friend to ask me a bigger favor’n that.” He grinned; and though he saw his employer cringe away from the expression, Kelly didn’t broaden the grin into something that might have been socially acceptable.
The two men walked into the front office, moving with tight, precise steps and resolutely looking at desks instead of each other. The door to the private office was covered in dark blue leather tacked down by brass studs corroded to a dull similarity. The chemicals used to tan leather were hard on brass, so you should never keep cartridges in leather belt loops for any length of time. . . .
Wrong thing to think about.
“Carlo,” said Tom Kelly as they stepped around the receptionist’s desk. Everyone was gone from the office but the pair of them and whoever was beyond the blue door, “I can lock up. Probably just as well if you went home and got some sleep yourself.”
“I can go in with you, you kn
ow,” Bianci said, pausing and touching Kelly to bring the younger man’s eyes to meet his.
There was sound of a sort, maybe voices, coming from the inner office. Kelly laughed, a barking sound because of the circumstances, but a gesture of real amusement nonetheless. “With all due respect, boss,” he said, “I doubt you’re cleared for whatever it is. Of course”—the feral grin came back and all humor fled—“the last time I checked, I had a negative security clearance, so it’s hard to tell. . . .”
He gripped the congressman by both shoulders, continuing to hold their eyes locked. “Go on home, Carlo; it can’t be too heavy if they only came with two of ‘em,” Kelly said. A part of him hated the operative portion of his mind for the care with which it examined Bianci’s face, looking for a reaction to “only two of them” that would imply there was a full team behind the leather door.
Nothing of the sort. “Right, Tom,” said Representative Bianci as he strode out of his office. He added over his shoulder, “And thanks. You know I appreciate it.”
Everybody’s got a handle, thought Kelly as he closed and locked the outer door behind his employer. Carlo had fewer than most; but everybody’s got things they don’t want to lose if somebody thinks it’s worthwhile to dig and to push.
Kelly shrugged again to loosen the cling of his jacket. Then he opened the door to the private office, using his left hand.
The sound within the office came from the television monitor facing Kelly above the desk, rather than the man and woman kitty-corner to it at the far end of the room. Gunfire, flattened and compressed by the signal, rasped from the set for a moment before the waiting man touched the remote control of the videocassette recorder. Sound and picture faded almost instantly, but Tom Kelly’s mind was bright with echoes and afterimages.
The man strode forward with his hand out and a professional smile on his face. He was a good-looking fellow in his early thirties, too young for his beefiness to become real fat. The dark blond hair was nicely styled, and the cotton shirt beneath his pinstriped three-piece suit had probably cost as much as Kelly had spent on his own sportcoat. The fellow stood six feet three inches, with shoulders to match—which made them as broad as Kelly’s. “Glad to see you at last, Mr. Kelly,” he said. “I’m Doug Blakeley, and this is Elaine Tuttle.”
