by John Barnes
“Not a thing. The harness works fine. It’s just that between the bag and the sled, I feel like a reindeer.”
That got us into a half hour conversation about Santa Claus, Christmas trees, hanging stockings, and mistletoe, none of which her home timeline had. We talked about a lot of things like family traditions and holidays and so forth while I got the ski stuff stowed and she got the climbing stuff out. Apparently in her timeline Ramadan was a fast, just as it was in ours, but it was followed by a feast that commemorated a bunch of miracles that had something to do with world peace.
“How did your people ever beat back the Closers and join ATN?” I asked. “It sounds like you were pacifists by the time you were invaded.”
She nodded. “We had been for fifteen hundred years. We’d already settled large parts of the solar system and had probes on their way to the stars. Then the Closers crashed in. We call it the Bloody Generation—the thirty years before ATN found us. Fortunately we at least had a long tradition of nonviolent action.”
“How can you passively resist an army that never takes prisoners and kills for fun?”
“Mostly we just died. There were only about a third as many of us by the time ATN agents showed up. By that time tradition had weakened, a lot. The rebellion was pretty ugly, and my grandfather, who fought in it, still won’t talk about it. The Closers, the collaborators, all the people who had gone over to them in the slightest way … well, it was gruesome. How about your timeline?”
“The Closers just started infiltrating about twenty years before I got into it, and ATN was maybe ten years behind the Closers,” I said. “But we’re still very divided politically—there are about 180 countries, most of them armed to the teeth. And the operation in which I was recruited destroyed the timeline the Closers were planning to stage their invasion from—or destroyed it for them, anyway—I expect they’ll eventually join ATN. So my guess is they’re going to be looking for a softer target … besides, Closers don’t want timelines with nuclear energy, they’re phobic about it. My timeline has more than a thousand reactors running worldwide, and what with all the testing, several hundred nuclear bombs have been exploded in my timeline.” I figured I’d better not tell her about Hiroshima and Nagasaki … it seemed like bad publicity somehow. “From the Closer standpoint we all glow in the dark.”
“I’d have said ‘spoiled meat,’ but it’s the same idea. The signal to start our rebellion was nuking a big Closer holiday celebration on the Riviera.”
“Nice job,” I said.
She grinned. “Thank you. Perhaps we can do a massacre together someday. Okay, if you’ve got all the ski stuff packed away, I’m all set to rig us—and the Lama, here—for climbing. I suppose we should get on with it before they think of something else for us to do.”
“You’re the captain, Captain,” I said. “I’d a lot rather climb with what you rig than with what I come up with.” Supposedly all of us can do whatever is needed, but reality is a bit different. Most of us have seen most things done and are willing to try, all of us have several things we are experts at, and a very few of us—those with twenty years in, those teaching at COTA—really can do anything.
Vertical face climbing was in my “seen it and willing to try” category, but it was one of Chrys’s strongest points, so as far as I was concerned, she was in charge for this next leg of the trip. (She had a bunch of other strong points, too—notably parawing. In our line you’d better not be a narrow specialist!)
Thus the job of getting us and the Lama down was all hers, and she went about it a lot more quickly and efficiently than I could even understand what she was doing. ATN climbing harnesses are made out of some miracle stuff that hangs on to you wherever it can get a grip and knows how not to hurt you, so you put them on by stuffing them down the neck of your clothing and pressing a button. An instant later you feel exactly like a marionette on a string. The little “walker” that comes down the cliff face above you steers itself and the climbers it’s belaying according to the captain’s orders; the whole thing looked like two toy soldiers and a bag of garbage hanging from one of the Willie the Wall Walker toys I had as a kid.
The first thing for which I was really useful was hefting up the Dalai Lama and pushing him over the side after Chrys had tied him off to the walker. “Oooogh,” I gasped, “couldn’t we just decide he’d lost, oh, say, thirty pounds of blood, and pull out the rocks?”
“People don’t have thirty pounds of blood.”
“Okay, we had to amputate his legs.”
Her eyebrow was up, and I could tell she was teasing, but all the same she seemed a little irritated. “Does your culture have the concept of ‘sportsmanship’?”
“Uh, yeah, but we also have a concept called ‘Nice guys finish last.’”
She looked startled, then thoughtful. “I just heard you say something like ‘Decent people are there to be eaten,’ which is a pretty strange translator error.”
“I’m afraid that all that got lost in the translation was the politeness,” I said.
“Hmm.” She seemed thoughtful, and I was afraid I had offended her, but whether I had or not, her attention was now all on the steep descent in front of us. It was a series of cliffs and ledges, like a steep staircase, with the ledges cutting deep into the face, so that we were actually shooting for only very small patches of accessible, level ground, and there was a great risk of fouling a line from the walker. I suppose she must have wanted all her concentration for the job at hand.
Then she reached over to my harness and said, “If you’ll excuse me, I do want to check you out as well. Partners falling to their deaths is just the kind of thing that could get me a bad grade.” She ran her hands over the harness, and then said, “Now, what could this huge thing be? Could it be the thing Mark Strang is most known for at COTA?”
I snorted. “You can make fun of it all you want, but it makes me feel secure just to be able to get my hand on it when I need to.”
We were talking about my Colt Model 1911A1, the .45 automatic I carry with me everywhere. I had carried it in my job as a bodyguard in my home timeline, carried it through three years of being accidentally stranded in another timeline, and I had lost count of the number of times that this little habit had saved my life.
“I wouldn’t dream of depriving you of it,” she said, “but you know the harness only accommodates itself to your living body, and it doesn’t realize that it can’t attach to your shoulder holster. I’ve got it pulled away now, but if it slips back, it may bind and cause trouble. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather just put it in your pack with your SHARK and NIF?”
“Call me superstitious, but no. I know perfectly well that there’s nothing dangerous anywhere around and that we’re the only people for a thousand miles in any direction. And I don’t care. I’d rather have it at hand.” I was doing my best to smile as I said all that—while, of course, carefully not relaxing on the basic point: I wanted the Colt to stay where I could grab it.
She sighed. “I’ll just have to think of it as a religious object. All right, let’s go.”
We didn’t talk at all as we started the descent. With the ATN belay, you really just climb downward as if it were a free climb, but taking more chances because your belay is perfect and has electronic-speed reflexes. If you hit a stretch where you need to descend on the line, you just speak to the walker via your mouthpiece, show it where you’re trying to go with your optical designator, and it will pay out for you as you push out, keeping your speed reasonable and helping you steer to your target.
I had asked once what we would do if the climbing equipment failed us, and they explained that it failed safe—if anything went wrong, it just worked like regular climbing gear. The next day we started a week of practice with plain old “dumb” climbing gear. All of the other trainees blamed me for that. I decided that after that experience, I wasn’t going to ask any questions unless I was fairly sure the answers did not require demonstration.
It wa
s actually a good season for climbing—late summer, with most of the stuff, snow and loose rock, that was going to fall, already fallen. We made quick progress despite our lack of sleep.
By around 8 A.M. local solar time, we were most of the way down, just about twenty meters above the level area on which we planned to camp before resuming our skiing the next night. We were most of the way down to the next ledge, and I was already trying to think of something clever to amuse Chrys, when the walker blew to pieces.
The bag of rocks that represented the Dalai Lama plunged past me and dropped onto the rocks below; it was only then that I realized that when the walker dropped my line, my line promptly snagged the rocks and shortened up enough to catch me before I fell far. I now had a belay line twenty feet over my head with about fifteen more feet to go. I hit the emergency reel—I didn’t understand how that worked, either, there was no actual spool, but it seemed to take up or pay out a few meters of line as needed into a small black box—and sank rapidly to the ledge below, Chrys running out her line beside me less than a meter away.
As our boots touched the narrow, boulder-choked ledge, and we found our balance, the thought finally formed. “I think they blew up the walker as part of the test,” I said, looking out at the vast empty plain in front of our cliff. “I guess we’re supposed to—”
There was a slim dart of silver in the morning sun, high above us in the blue vault of the sky. It was falling, and though it wasn’t big, it was coming very fast. I hadn’t yet thought about it in words when I dove on Chrys and pressed both of us back behind a large boulder, against the rock face behind us.
A great shock leaped through the stone to our bodies. A huge clatter of stones, some bigger than our bodies, fell past our opening in the cliff and into the empty space beyond. “Missile,” I shouted in Chrys’s ear.
“Closers!” she responded, and I realized she was right. The stuff that had been thrown at us had not been the kind of thing they do in training, at all. This had been stuff that could easily have killed us, even just by accident … and that meant hostiles. Which meant Closers.
They had found the timeline of ATN’s secret training base, and they were after us. For all we knew everyone at COTA was dead. If we were going to get out of this, it would have to be just the two of us.
I pulled my .45 from its shoulder holster and started looking for a target, or at least for whatever had shot at us. Out beyond the rim of boulders, the sky and land were empty.
-2-
I didn’t have to wait long. There was a strange low-pitched thrum in the air, and then I spotted the small aircraft coming in low. I said “helicopter” and Chrysamen said “ornithopter”—what it would have been in our home timelines—but it wasn’t either of those.
It flew on four spinning plates that pumped up and down on their axles beneath it, and the axles came out of four long spidery arms that extended out at right angles from the cab. The cab itself was a windowed box of what looked like yellow plastic, and inside it, three guys, with firearms (or at least it looked like they had a stock and a barrel) slung on their shoulders, held on to straps like the ones on a city bus or subway. A fourth guy standing at the back was hanging on to a horizontal bar, pulling it back and forth and twisting it.
Since then, for the heck of it, I’ve asked six engineers in a few timelines how such a thing could fly. I’ve gotten three different explanations, plus three other explanations of why it couldn’t possibly have worked and how I could not have seen what I did.
As the gadget swept in toward us, I leaned forward across a boulder, braced the Colt in both hands, made the guess that the guy holding the horizontal stick at the back was the pilot, and put four rounds in the direction of his chest, hoping one of them would connect.
I don’t know if I got him or just scared him into letting go of the tiller. The little flying machine veered sideways in a spin, then abruptly flipped over and plunged cab-first onto the frozen ground below.
I braced for an explosion. There was none. Maybe it didn’t have fuel tanks, or maybe it just happened that nothing caught fire. Anyway, nothing came out of it alive, and the cab seemed to have smashed like an egg.
That was comforting but no help. I had gotten myself behind a rock as soon as I’d fired my last shot—if you’re fighting anyone with homing AP ammo, you never get exposed at all if you can help it.
If they’d been on the ball, the two seconds it took me to use the automatic would have been my last. But the good thing about fighting Closers—maybe the only good thing—is that they have very little initiative and little ability to get off the plan.
The plan must have been that the missiles—the one that got the walker and the one that followed it—would kill or disable us, and the guys in the bizarre flying machine would then land and confirm we were dead, or make sure of it, or maybe take any survivor prisoner. The others out there in the plain were just there as backup or to do scut work afterward, and no one had told them to provide any covering fire or retaliation. By now, of course, some Closer officer was screaming orders at them, but it was too late.
The Closers teach their slaves, even their very highly trusted ones in their armies, not to make decisions without checking first, and always to do exactly what they’re told. It makes for great slaves, but lousy improvisers. And in combat, there’s a lot more call for improvisers.
The delay not only gave me time to get back under cover after having gotten a good look at the landscape; it also gave Chrysamen enough time to get into the packs and get out the SHAKKs and NIFs.
The SHAKK is my favorite gadget in all of future technology. When I had gotten stranded in another timeline, I practically won World War II all by myself with a SHAKK. The initials stand for Seeking Hypersonic Ammunition Kinetic Kill, and the weapon itself looks a bit like one of the super squirt guns painted silver—but there the resemblance ends. Point it, squeeze the trigger, and the ammo—a spherical translucent bead about half the size of a BB shot—finds and hits whatever was in the sights at the time you pulled the trigger, out to about six miles, at Mach 10. You have two thousand rounds in the magazine, and on full auto it fires four hundred of those per minute.
I unclipped the remote sight from underneath my SHARK and cautiously crawled over, staying under cover, to set it on a boulder a few steps away. Now I could look through the little screen in the recess the remote sight had left, move a cursor, squeeze the trigger, and as long as I had left a meter cubic space for the shot to turn around in, let the shot find its way to the target.
How does it work? You got me. I just use it. My sister Carrie, the physics prof, says she can see nine ways it might work, all of them impossible. But then she also thinks she can prove that time travel and multiple timelines are impossible.
Possible or not, I love the SHARK. I didn’t expect to see anything at first—they’d probably all been told to stay under cover, and they were probably more afraid of their officers than they were of us. Sure enough, nothing moved for a while.
The remote sight scanned back and forth over the broken country below, all rock, snow, and hillocks, much too high up to have trees. There were no signs of life for two long breaths, so I flicked to infrared. Another three long breaths went by.
A hand glowed for a moment as it set a remote sight up on a rock. I moved the cursor with the tiny slides until it overlapped his hand—indeed, thumbing the enlargement upward, I took the shot specifically at his wrist. When I squeezed the trigger there was a sound like a whip cracking, another like a furious hornet, and then a high-pitched scream, all in less time than it takes to blink twice.
The sound the SHAKR makes is not from the pressure released from the muzzle as the projectile is expelled, like the guns of our timeline—what you’re hearing is the sonic boom as the tiny engines on the shot propel it up to Mach 10 within less than a meter. The high-pitched scream, a little like a ricochet from an old movie played on a sped-up turntable, came from the engines braking and curving the shot almo
st 180 degrees within that short distance, then reaccelerating it.
Sis assures me that that can’t be done either, and that the reason they told me that the shot doesn’t leave a glowing tail like a meteor—that it recovers and reuses most of the energy from atmospheric heating of its surface—is even more impossible. I fall back on the position of flying-saucer nuts and miracle-cure enthusiasts: but it did.
The scream of the departing shot had not yet faded out when I saw the hand in the sight fly up into the air, jerking as the round entered his arm, and steered up through it (the shock wave making the arm first bulge and then collapse, like a toy balloon hooked to a compressed-air line).
Too fast to see that it happened at different times, blood sprayed from the shattered wrist, burst from his shoulder as the shot crossed to his head, sprayed once more as the shot went in through the eye. Then, in less than a hundredth of a second, it used up its remaining energy spiraling around inside his head. The shock wave in that confined space turned everything from his spine up into runny jelly.
I had to imagine that last part, but I enjoyed imagining it—if that sounds too horrible, well, Closers are horrible, and I like to see bad things happen to them. I knew that the watery goo that had been flesh, bone, blood, and brains would spray in a fine mist out through his nose, mouth, ears, and eye sockets, leaving his head to collapse into a bag of skin.
First time I saw that I upchucked. After I got to know Closers … I could do it over dinner and still order dessert.
My remote sight vaporized in a bright flash-and-bang.
An instant later Chrysamen’s NIF was spraying fléchettes in a black streak like a swarm of wasps into the open space before us. It occurred to me I was a bit of an idiot—the NIF was a much better weapon for this situation because the fléchettes home on human bodies within the target area and thus can find their targets without being aimed.
Maybe I’m just a caveman—die SHARK is a much higher-powered weapon, so I prefer it. But by using the NIF in this situation, Chrys was probably taking out 90 percent of the enemy.
