by John Barnes
I nodded. “How’s the supply of fléchettes?”
“One NIF is almost empty. I’ve given it a load of dirt, two candy bars, and an earring I didn’t want anymore, and I’m using the other.”
Because Crux Ops often operate in primitive conditions, far from supply bases, our weapons are always capable of manufacturing their own ammunition—but the worse the raw materials you start with, the longer it takes and the more waste it produces. “Is it giving you any numbers?”
“Looks like I’m short on copper and iron.”
Keeping my eyes forward through the SHARK, I pulled a spare clip of .45 ammo out, emptied it into my hand, and edged sideways to her, exposing myself for a brief instant as I did so. “Here, add these.”
She did, and the NIF reported it had everything it needed to reload itself completely. Meanwhile, she had the other one with a full charge. Since it had been a few minutes, she sprayed again; I was beginning to find the squeal of the NIF more than a little unnerving. But then I can’t imagine that anyone alive out there liked it much, either.
I waited in the silence. My shoulder was within an inch of Chrys’s; now that we were physically close together, given just how bad the situation was, it seemed too comforting to move away from her, and she seemed in no hurry to move away from me, either. At best our “cross fire” would be no more than ten feet of separation, anyway.
Time rattled on, marked only by our steady breathing. She checked her watch, fired the NIF again. No sound came from the slopes below, but that might mean only that they were under cover.
She kept firing at irregular intervals, but the intervals grew longer. Just before one, she explained, “I’m spacing them wider to give the enemy a chance to get overconfident and stick their heads up. Of course, if they’re smart—or all dead—they won’t take the bait.” She fired the squealing burst. There was no response after a full minute.
“You know,” I said, “we can’t stay here. If they’re still out there, they called for help, and it will get here sooner or later. And even if they didn’t, someone will come looking for them. The longer we stay here making sure there’s no one to shoot us, the less time we have to escape and get a long way from here.”
She nodded. “Yeah. Well, are you ready to try?”
I checked my watch. “Since the last time anyone screamed, they’ve had three hours to get up here, and it shouldn’t have taken them twenty minutes, even in a very careful buddy rush. Hell, if I were as ruthless as they are, I’d have let the screaming cover my advance and gotten here sooner. Even assuming they’re out there and really taking their time, there shouldn’t be more than three or so of them left, anyway. Why don’t we at least move back to our old front line?”
We did. Nothing happened.
Chrys wanted to flip a coin, but I insisted that since she was the one who was any good with the NIF, I be the one to peek out and see what happened. I crept a little distance from her, took my SHARK in hand, and peeked. I took a couple of long swallows to count the six visible corpses out there—against the dingy gray-white background they were not hard to spot. I pulled my head in, counted off a full minute.
My head did not explode in a nasty pink mist, and my body did not suddenly leap and jump with pain. I took a deep breath and did part two of the plan—I stood straight up.
It had been so long since I had done that, that I felt lightheaded, and my legs ached. I took a long deep breath; took two more; and let myself relax a bit. Chrys, still from cover, sprayed the landscape thoroughly. After the long shriek of the NIF died out, I stood and watched for some minutes; out there, I knew, the neural induction fléchettes were seeking, cross-cutting, patrolling a few inches off the snow for anything at human body temperature. In a few minutes they would begin to run out of whatever their fuel was (nobody ever seemed to be able to explain that to me, and I couldn’t understand even whether they were telling me that the information was classified or that I didn’t know enough physics to understand it). Then they’d glide down into the snow, bury themselves, switch off permanently (unless Chrys was setting them to function as mines, and she hadn’t been), and start the chemical process that would, within a day at most, turn all the tiny darts into indistinguishable little lumps of organic matter that would fade into the soil without much trace.
As I watched, hundreds of little puffs of snow popped up in the sunlit field; the fléchettes were gone.
Tentatively, Chrys stood. She, too, needed to stretch out a little. We reloaded our packs, made sure our weapons were ready to hand, stuck a line to the cave wall, and did a fast rappel down the face to get to the bottom as soon as possible. Nothing moved except tiny puffs of wind-driven snow; there was no sound but our breathing and the wind itself.
At the bottom we hurriedly stowed the climbing gear, unshipped the skis, and got ready for an afternoon of fast, hard skiing. With little hope that our pickup would be there for us, we were going to head off at almost a right angle to our original direction, both to put them off our track if possible, and to take advantage of the direction in which we could move farthest fastest.
“Well,” I said, as we strapped up, “here we go. With two days’ rations we ought to be able to make it to somewhere where we can start living off the land. I suppose eventually—”
“Eventually we’ll be dead,” Chrys said. “But maybe we can delay it a long time.”
I grinned; she was right. “Okay, let’s go.”
At least I wasn’t pulling a bag of rocks behind me, and we were moving in a direction that the ground favored. In a short time we had logged a couple of miles, and the future was beginning to feel just a little brighter. Chrys was puffing a bit, so I slowed the pace, figuring in a while she’d want to talk. After another mile, as we wound through a narrow defile, I ventured to say, “We seem to be doing all right. Want to get a few more miles?”
Before she could answer, a male voice behind us said, “Keep your hands away from your weapons. Now raise your hands. Now turn around slowly.”
3
They had us perfectly; we couldn’t do anything except what we were told, at least not if we wanted to stay alive.
We turned to find six men facing us in the snow—all of them in COTA coveralls and holding NIFs on us. There was a startled instant of realization—and then we recognized several of the instructors from COTA.
“You can put your hands down now, ja N’wook and Strang, if you’ve recognized us,” Captain Malecela said, grinning at us. “We don’t want to end up like all those Closers you dealt with back there.”
I wasn’t sure which was more remarkable—that Malecela was here or that he was smiling. He was commander of combat training at COTA, and most of us were more afraid of him than of anything the enemy could throw at us.
Physically a remarkably strong man, he would have turned a lot of heads on any beach in any timeline if it weren’t for the faint lines of scars that stretched across his face. I’d heard a lot of stories about where he got those, and I believed all of them. He was black, and from some timeline where Zanzibar was the capital of the Earth; it was said he was some relation to the Emperor there and had given up tides and wealth to enlist.
I had seen him do a number of things, physically, that I would have reckoned impossible. Malecela had caught two students trying to steal a bronze bust of the founder of COTA, as a prank, to move it onto the ad building roof. He had shown them “how to do it right”—tucked it under one arm and took it up the four stories one-handed, then brought it back down the same way, and then demanded that they either do the same, or give him a thousand situps. They did all thousand, then and there.
He had a standing offer that if there was any weapon of your home timeline and you gave him one day to practice, he could do better than you with it. It had only taken him half a day to shoot a better round than I did with the Model 1911A1, three hours to throw the razor-edged boomerang better than Simil Patapahani, and about a day to get better with the linea mortifera—k
ind of a cross between a lariat, fly rod, and garotte—than Marcellus Guttierez-Jenkins.
Of course we were relieved to see him there—but if it was going to be anyone from our side, it would be him.
“There are some minor details to discuss,” he said, “but you two did pretty well. It wasn’t the field problem we set you, but we think you improvised pretty well. I’ll give you a passing score, anyway.”
“The Main Base—” I asked.
“Completely untouched, so far. We’re getting an evacuation under way. But you two were the only ones actually attacked by Closers.”
Chrysamen looked as startled as I did, I’m sure, but Malecela just grinned some more—maybe he was just getting it out of his system before he’d have to be in front of other candidates again. “All right, the way for you two to look at this right now is that you’re going to get hot showers, real food, and comfortable beds a couple of days early, and that you’re about as safe as anyone else is right now. Let’s get you home.”
The liftwing turned out to be waiting less than a mile away, and in less than an hour we were flying back to COTA Main Base itself, not far from where Perth is in Australia in our timeline.
“We got the help beacon, and then no words, so we shot up a reconnaissance satellite, and it dropped a ground-observer package,” Malecela was explaining to us. “You can imagine our surprise. That was excellent shooting for nonhoming ammunition, by the way, Strang, and it’s good that you had the foresight to use nonlethal instructions in the NIF, ja N’wook, because the med teams tell me we might very well get ten or more for interrogation.”
“You did what?” I asked her.
“I wish I could take credit for brains,” Chrysamen said, looking down at her hands, “but it really doesn’t come easy for me to set a weapon to ‘kill’ unless I know I have to. It was just what I did naturally.”
Malecela shrugged. “Part of the secret of success is learning to take credit for your lucky guesses. And anyway, it probably didn’t occur to you, but once you won the fight and started to run, anyone you were leaving knocked out was going to be frozen solid by nightfall anyway.”
She shuddered. “No, I didn’t think of that.”
“Anyway, I would bet neither of you will ever let your more modern weapons get out of your reach again, if you can help it,” Malecela said, going on without acknowledging her reaction. “And thanks, by the way, Strang, for pushing to make the SHARK more programmable when it’s being used on remote sight. Clearly the Closers have figured out some way to home on its wireless communication. If they can hit the remote sight today, figure in two weeks they’ll have a way to hit the SHARK itself—which is going to be damned unpleasant if you’re holding it. I’ve been telling them about all that for years, and it’s good to be able to show them that any old candidate can see the same thing.”
He leaned back in his seat. “We have a big job ahead of us. Construction battalions by the dozen will be coming in to get COTA moved across to another timeline, and to convert this facility to a surprise for the Closers in case they turn up in force. But the situation is different for you two … you’re going direct to Hyper Athens, to the Crux Ops center there. We’ll be putting you two into the transmitter about an hour after we land. Orders of the high command.”
For the rest of the liftwing ride, we didn’t say much. After the ship had risen vertically, like an elevator, until the sky was black in the daytime, the stars were out, and the Earth’s curve showed below us, it began to accelerate at about a g; somewhere over Sumatra it whirled around and fired its engines to decelerate, then smoothly spun again to ride down like the space shuttle. It was one terrific ride, and since we had nothing to do but enjoy it, we did.
In this timeline, Australia had an inner sea, probably because the sea level was a lot higher, and there were thick forests around it, so the view down below us was pretty wonderful, and I was kind of lost in it when Chrys abruptly said, “If we’re supposed to go to Hyper Athens, why the delay here? You could have packed us and just thrown us in after our stuff.”
Malecela grinned again. “You’ll see.”
All right, so I’m sentimental. I still get a little choked up when I think about it. They held a special graduation for us, right there at the airfield, with all our classmates there, and gave us a little time to shake hands and accept congratulations.
But it was only brief. They had other things to get done, too, and in almost no time we were standing in the now-familiar boodi of the transmitter.
Malecela nodded one more time, and said, “That was excellent work, both of you.”
“All we did,” I pointed out, for some perverse reason, “was save our own lives.”
“You’re valuable ATN assets,” Malecela said. “So you prevented valuable assets from falling into Closer hands. I think that’s pretty respectable.”
Then he stepped back, and we got into the booth.
Then there was no light. The world fell away, as if we had dropped back into the weightlessness of space, and our surroundings were silent as vacuum. I had no sensation of being in my body for a long instant that might have been half a second or a thousand years for all the difference it made. Then I was facing an even, dim gray light in all directions, which got brighter, began to differentiate like a photograph developing, and abruptly burst through into color. As this happened there was a low humming that was about an octave lower than the sixty-cycle hum you sometimes hear on stereo systems.
The world started to take shape again.
We were at Crux Ops Central, on the giant space station of Hyper Athens, in the thirty-second century since Perikles founded the Federated Democratic Poleis; or if you want, what would have been in the twenty-seventh century A.D. if there had been a Christ in this timeline, or the twenty-first century since the hegira, if there had been a Mohammed. I had been here three times before, and though nothing quite equaled the experience of being dumped here unexpectedly after a firefight, as I had the first time, it still impressed me.
The platform we arrived on was open to the “sky,” the miles-wide space inside the great wheel that was Hyper Athens. From where we stood, we were on the roof of a low building, between what at first glance looked like great rows of mile-high skyscrapers, but were actually the working and living areas that formed the sidewalls of the huge structure. Far above us, we could see through the glass centers of the sidewalls, and watched as first the Moon, and then the Earth, rolled into our view. Hyper Athens rotated about every ten minutes, to supply a gravity of about one g at its edges; at that speed, you could see a lot of sunrises.
“Friend-daughter ja N’wook?” a familiar voice asked, “and I do believe Mister Strang, as well.”
I turned and smiled. “Citizen Lao. It’s good to see you again.”
“And you, Mister Strang. Someone had to meet you here, and since I was in the base, it seemed reasonable.”
Ariadne Lao is something over six feet tall and built like a serious triathlete. Her features are Eurasian and heavy-boned, extremely well formed but not at all the delicate kind of thing that’s in fashion in our timeline. Hollywood would cast her as a prison matron or the bad guy’s assistant, but they’d be wrong; she’s startlingly attractive with her ice-blue eyes and black hair, even if she does look like she could deck a bear.
“It’s a pleasure,” I said.
She nodded to Chrysamen, including her in the conversation. “It happened I was the Crux Op on duty when Mister Strang first got involved in crosstime affairs, and later in recruiting him into the service.” And turning back to me, she added, “I was absolutely delighted to hear that you had decided to join and that you were doing well in training. But this latest set of events absolutely justifies my faith in you.”
She might have said more except that at that moment the sky darkened above us; a passenger dirigible was coming in. I wondered how Chrys was reacting to all this; I knew her home civilization was spacefaring, but after some roaming around in th
e timelines you realize that’s a bit like knowing that a civilization uses counterpoint in music or the arch a lot in architecture—it isn’t the fact that they use it, but what they do with it, that really matters. Some civilizations—like the one I come from—just do engineering and stop there, so that our space facilities all look like industrial plants, with a lot of machinery slapped together any old way that fits. I’ve seen pictures from many that seem to do everything in very simple geometries—all spheres, lines, annuli, pyramids, triangles, and cylinders. And then there are the ones like this one, the headquarters of ATN, the place where the battle against the Closers began … where if something is worth doing, it is worth doing beautifully and gracefully.
The timeline was currently going through an artistic period that was a bit like our Art Deco, and so the inside of the dirigible, like the shapes of the “skyscrapers” surrounding us, was made up of Z- and S-curves, with a lot of rounding and simplifying, elegance for no other reason than that it was elegant. As Chrysamen and I sat over juice, and Ariadne Lao gave us the quick tour of the station, I noted once again what a spectacular place Hyper Athens really is.
Traffic was heavy that day through the center of the great wheel-shaped space station, so we went around the rim, between the walls of mile-high buildings. Hyper Athens is sixty miles around the outside edge, and our destination was about a third of the way around from the transmission station, so it would take us a little time.
Above the tops of the buildings, and well down into the space between them, I could see a dozen dirigibles and perhaps twice as many little silver airplanes. In a space station that uses centrifugal force for gravity, the gravity falls off rapidly as you move toward the center. Thus very little energy is required to fly, even though gravity in the “street” is Earth-normal.
Beyond the building tops I could see the great clear space of the windows, and through it, when the angle was right, the Earth on one side, covering almost a fifth of the sky, and the Sun and a crescent Moon close to each other on the other side. It’s a pity that kids have ruined the use of the word “awesome” to mean nothing more than “good” or “impressive,” because this view was really awesome.
