Fata Morgana

by Steven R. Boyett

  Samay looked surprised. “You’re not coming back?”

  “Sten and Arshall will. But no, I’m not coming back.”

  Samay accepted this with a nod. “Well. I know better than to try talking you out of it. But we certainly could use you.”

  “Should I stay and help strategize his downfall?” She shook her head. “He’s still my father. It’s better this way.”

  “I understand.” Samay shrugged. “We’ll still miss you.”

  Wennda frowned. “He’ll keep communications offline,” she realized. “Except for his people. He’s probably already got a subroutine ready to go.”

  Berne smiled wickedly. “Jorn cloned the key servers onto salvaged units a few years ago,” he said. “He’ll bring them online for us if the mains go down.”

  Wennda smiled but her eyes glistened. “Uncle Jorn,” she said. “Tell him goodbye for me and I’m sorry I had to go.”

  “I think he’d be the first to say you should.” Samay turned to Farley. “We’ll jam the airlock,” she told him, “but we can’t stay here and hold them off.”

  “You’ve already done plenty.” Farley held out a hand. “Good luck.”

  Samay looked at the offered hand. “Strange,” she said. “We’ll never know what happened to each other.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” said Farley.

  She clasped his hand. “Good luck,” she said.

  “Sammy,” said Broben. “You can’t do this to me.”

  “Oh, lieutenant.” Samay gave him a sympathetic smile. “You can go back and be an agent for change without me.”

  “Sure I can,” said Broben. “But it won’t be near as much fun.” He beckoned her to him and held out his arms. She slid her rifle aside on its strap and stepped into his awkward hug. He patted her back and then let her go. “Keep your fuses tight, all right?”

  “And you remember to sign your work.”

  He chuckled. “You got it, kid.”

  Farley looked at Wennda. “You ready?” he asked.

  She snorted. “No. But that’s never stopped me.”

  *

  The canyon floor was at least a mile wide, but the fissure seemed narrow because the cliffs were so ungodly high. Indigo sky and blazing sun, cliff shadow stark along the flat and barren wasteland of the valley floor. Not one rabbit, not one bug. A heritage of weeds.

  The party had been quiet since they’d stepped from the concealed accessway and into honest daylight, squinting as they went from the dark passage to the scree-filled slope that led down to the canyon floor. For the last hour the only sound had been their rhythmic bootfalls on the hardbaked ground.

  Plavitz had point and Martin had tail-end charlie. Just ahead, Garrett slowed down to let Everett come up beside him and hand off the heavy Browning. Arshall and Sten ran near them. The four big men again were taking turns lugging the Browning and the ammo belt.

  Broben stared at the ground and devoted every ounce of energy to putting one foot in front of the other. Shorty hooked his thumbs beneath the straps of his duffel. Yone trotted along near Martin, apparently having little trouble keeping up with the doubletime pace.

  Farley’s hastily assembled bundle of fatigues, A-2 jacket, and minimal gear bumped in time with his jog as he and his crew made their way single file in the cliff shadow along the ragged fissure edge. He barely even noticed the body armor he wore. The stuff was some kind of mesh weave, matte black and a quarter-inch thick, lighter than cotton and feeling as if it contained liquid. He would never have believed it could stop a bullet if he hadn’t already seen it stop several of his.

  Beside him—unexpectedly, unbelievably—ran Wennda.

  *

  Farley called a break just before the fissure opened out onto the broad expanse of crater.

  Garrett set the Browning on the ground and flopped down beside it, chest heaving. Boney sat down, took off his boots and socks, and examined his feet. Broben practically fell down, then dragged himself up to sitting with his back against a rock. Francis had not wanted a smoke since his release from the infirmary, so he handed out his remaining cigarettes.

  “No smoking in the crater, boys,” Broben wheezed.

  Farley was winded, too, but he knew better than to let it show. He remained standing and made himself take deep breaths. The sun was nearing the western cliff edge and soon the fissure floor would lie in twilight shadow. A thousand feet to the north the black canyon walls abruptly ended, framing the bright rectangular entrance to the crater bowl.

  Farley ordered Martin to climb a nearby rockfall slanting from the cliff wall and look back to see if they were being followed. Wennda gave Martin her digital recording binoculars and showed him how to operate them. “Magnify, record, night vision, infrared,” she pointed out. Martin frowned at the flat device as if he were being given a crash course in how to fly a spaceship.

  “We should head left when we get to the crater,” Wennda told Farley. “Assume there’s a team coming after us. Stay in the shadows, but remember they can see body heat. So your crewmen who aren’t wearing smartsuits have to keep something between and themselves and the people coming after us, if they can.”

  “Can we make the Redoubt before daylight?” Farley asked Plavitz.

  “It’s about ten miles across the crater,” the navigator replied. “So call it fifteen going halfway around the rim. Maybe six from the north fissure entrance to the Redoubt. A twenty-one-mile hump.” He shrugged. “We ought to get there with a couple hours to spare, if the guys coming after us don’t cut across the crater and get there ahead of us.”

  “If they cut across,” said Wennda, “they’ll go by the well and the Typhon. So I don’t think they’ll get there at all.”

  Martin came back and reported that he hadn’t seen anything. “These binoculars are something,” he said.

  “I thought you people just put your ear to the ground,” said Garrett.

  Martin nodded solemnly and cupped a hand to his ear. “Me think maybe twenty, twenty-five cavalry, kemosabe,” he said.

  Farley waved him away. “Jerry,” he called. “Mission briefing.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  Farley led Broben away from the others and lowered his voice. “Listen, Jer,” he said, “you need to know what the labcoats told me about how to get back, in case you’re the one doing the flying.”

  Broben frowned. “Okay.” he said. “I guess it’s good to know they think we can get back.”

  “Well.” Farley put his hands on his hips and looked at the men taking advantage of their five-minute break. “They’re not a hundred percent about it.”

  “I wouldn’t trust it if they were.”

  “I hear you.” Farley frowned. “They said I shouldn’t think of the vortex as a tunnel between here and 1943. They think it’s more like a hub of a wheel. The wheel itself is time—all time, from Creation to Armageddon and everything in between.”

  “I’m already getting a headache here,” said Broben.

  “It’s like a roulette wheel,” Farley tried again. “Only the numbers are years, and the Morgana’s the ball.”

  “And where she stops, nobody knows?”

  “Where the ball lands depends on how and where and when it gets dropped in. So we can improve the odds quite a bit.”

  “Now you’re speaking my lingo.”

  “Here’s the dope,” said Farley. “You have to come in level at sixteen-five altitude, bearing one sixty-eight degrees, at two two five knots.”

  “Sixteen five, bearing one sixty-eight, speed two twenty-five.”

  Farley nodded. “I don’t know how much wiggle room you have, but the white-coat boys went out of their way to stress that you want to go in as close as possible to the exact spot where we came out.”

  Broben looked worried. “We’ll be doing great to be less than a couple hundred yards off the mark,” he said. “What kind of difference are we talking about here? Miss by an inch and end up waving down at dinosaurs?”
>
  Farley shrugged. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and come out after the Germans surrender.”

  “Shit. Maybe I’ll get luckier and come out before I ever joined up so I’ll know better next time.”

  “You’d still join up.”

  “Yeah, I’m dumb like that.”

  Farley grew serious again. “It’s a hell of a gamble, I know. But you’re a hell of a gambler, Jer. And if there’s any ship in the world I’d bet on, it’s the Morgana.”

  Broben smirked. “That is lucky,” he said. “’Cause it’s the only ship in the world you can bet on.”

  *

  Farley was taking one last look at the enshadowed western edge of the canyon floor when Wennda came up beside him. “You can’t see them,” she said, “but they’re coming.”

  He nodded. “I know.” He looked into her eyes. It felt like a long time but it wasn’t.

  Finally she smiled. “Time,” she said.

  Farley nodded. He turned and clapped his hands. “All right,” he called, “everybody out of the pool.”

  *

  They ran beyond the mile-wide portal of the fissure’s end and out onto the vast and rippled surface of the crater. They turned left and followed the western perimeter, keeping to the thickening crescent of shadow as the naked sun sank in its damaged sky.

  They were hard pursued.

  twenty-five

  The Technician First Class made a final adjustment to the hydraulic array framed above the ball turret slung in the belly of the captured warplane. He stepped back and nodded at the Class One Weaponry Officer who stood waiting with obvious impatience, even though the proper functioning of the turret was in the WepOff’s best interest.

  At the nod, the WepOff immediately brushed past the Tech One and set his hands on the side edges of the little opened hatchway and lowered himself carefully into the tiny ball. The guns had to be pointed straight down before a man could enter the hatch from inside the plane, so the mod biobots had carved a divot from the stone floor below the aircraft to give the turret free rotation in all directions.

  It was hard to believe the man could fit himself into the space. When they had first examined the turret, they had assumed it was an autonomous weapons node, or was controlled either by the ship’s command center or by an interfaced pilot. When it became clear the ball had been built to contain a human being, they had assumed the operator interfaced with the onboard command center. When they could find no interface connector and no command center, they realized with fascination and not a little horror that the armed ball was meant to house a human operator who manually and independently controlled the steering, targeting, and weaponry—at altitude, without pressurization or climate control. Like virtually everything else on the aircraft.

  When the Weaponry Officer One was situated in the ball turret, the Tech One sealed the hatch and touched his right collarbone. “Ready to power up,” he said.

  Across the cleared-off staging area another Tech One activated a power inverter that fed from the main solar array. The panel on his palm readout showed green. He touched his collarbone and said, “Power feed is on.”

  “Azimuth power clutch engaged,” the Weaponry Officer replied immediately. “Main power on.”

  The Tech One on the warplane examined the ball turret hydraulic rig one more time, then glanced around the fuselage and shook his head in a combination of wonder and pity he had never felt before. What these people had done with the little they knew was simply ingenious. Water compressed in metal tubes that pistoned to drive crude whole-body aiming mechanisms on two axes. Metal cams that physically prevented chemically powered projectiles from firing into the body of the aircraft itself. And combustible fossil fuels powered all of it—the motive engines that drove the aircraft to lift speeds, the dynamo generators that supplied electricity to power communications, instrumentation, and the hydraulics that rotated the turrets. Everything was mechanical, analog. It was like learning that ancient humans had traveled to the moon using hot-air balloons.

  And yet this machine had gone against the Typhon and survived. For all his people’s technology, they had nothing that could match that feat.

  The Tech One was eager for the aircraft to become operational again. Everybody was. This machine could be the catalyst of a long-desired chain reaction, the start of an event cascade that changed everything. Return the warplane to fighting condition, and use it to destroy the Typhon. Destroy the Typhon, and recover the locus. Recover the locus, and defeat those diluted culls huddled in their failing Dome. And then, free of their stalemating presence, begin the long and noble work of re-establishing the rightful empire of man. The grand dream had been the goal of his people since they had sheltered here centuries ago. A common cause, something to live for. But it had remained mostly dream until four days ago.

  A diagnostic biobot scuttled by on spindly legs. The Tech One barely glanced at it. A dozen of the scurrying hemispheres were busily examining the warplane. Where they had already surveyed, another dozen mod drones tirelessly repaired, upgraded, modified. Modernized. When they were finished, this machine would still be an ape ancestor to the modern machines’ Homo sapiens, but that ape would be smarter, more evolved. Ape sapiens.

  The WepOff’s voice again sounded in the Tech One’s head, transmitted by bone conduction from his occipital interface. “Weaponry Officer One. Gun selector switches on. Main sight on. All turret systems are powered up. Rotation mechanism check on your command.”

  A new voice sounded. “Begin.”

  The Supreme! The Tech One felt his pulse surge and immediately suppressed it. Central received all biometric telemetry, and he did not want to give any cause to be removed from this assignment. Of course he knew that the dream of resumption would be realized by the collective labor of all. Every action was designed to push them forward, so every action counted. What does not advance, hinders. But this labor was direct. Its impact was immediate. Its consequences were demonstrable and dramatic. If it succeeded, the work he performed at this very moment would be instrumental in enabling the cascade that would lead to resumption.

  Yet the voice of the Supreme had been unexpected. Of course he would be observing. But participating? Could he be physically present outside in the staging area? Somehow the notion was more intimidating than the idea of the Supreme observing the proceedings from Central. Failure would not be watched on a screen, it would happen in front of the Twenty-Seventh Supreme Commander General. Failure could not be part of the equation. The humiliation could not even be considered. No.

  In the floor by the Tech One’s feet the turret spun. The hydraulics whirred and clacked. The turret stopped and then reversed direction.

  “Manual operation is imprecise and inefficient,” the Weaponry Officer reported.

  “Just fire on the target,” the Supreme ordered. The Tech One thought he sounded irritated.

  “Short burst,” said a new voice. The odd thick accent nearly indecipherable. “Thumbs on the red buttons and don’t pull left or right.”

  “Acknowledged,” said the WepOff. “Targeting.”

  He doesn’t sound the least bit nervous, the Tech One thought.

  The turret rotated again. The Tech One pictured the twin bores swiveling toward the low-functioning clones propped up across the staging area. They had been repurposed from the organ tank and were considered expendable for this experiment despite their medical value. Anyone who needed a liver or a lung in the next few weeks would be out of luck. Those who sacrifice also advance us.

  The Tech One glanced at the left-side gun port in the waist of the fuselage—a rectangle open to the elements, simply unbelievable. If he took two steps back he would be able to see the target. And the turret hydraulics would still be clearly in his view.

  “Targeting is very coarse,” the Weaponry Officer reported.

  “You want me to come do it for you?” the third voice said. “Maybe hold your hand?”

  The turret made a minor adjustment. “Targe
ted,” the Weaponry Officer reported. The Tech One thought he sounded miffed.

  “Well? You want an engraved invitation?”

  The Tech One tried to control his breathing. He didn’t think he would get into trouble for standing only two steps from his post. The turret would not move again, it would only fire on the targets. The hydraulics would not engage.

  He took the two steps back. Through the waist-gun window he saw the upright clones across the stone-floored staging area, the high-speed cameras and ruled velocity scales beside the bullets’ anticipated trajectory, the knot of Engineer Threes standing off to one side, their faces blued and shifting in the bioluminescence of their palm displays.

  “Firing,” said the Weaponry Officer.

  The deafening staccato that pounded from beneath the airplane made the Tech One think the primitive equipment had exploded in the turret. He realized it was the ammunition’s explosive propellant just as he saw two bright tracer rounds streak across the staging area.

  One of the clones became a red eruption above the waist. The joined and naked legs stood a moment longer and then toppled.

  The line of fire swept right as the chudder of the twin guns continued. Only two or three seconds more, but it was time enough to slag the measuring equipment and then tear into the clustered Engineer Threes. Even from here the Tech One could see pieces flying off them. Two of the E3s fell backward. A third toppled slowly, as if chopped down at his base.

  One technician remained standing, amazingly untouched, mouth gaping, covered in bloody chunks. His readout hand still glowed before him.

  “Abort,” came the calm voice of the supervising Tech One, outside.

  The Tech One in the bomber stood frozen a moment, trying to absorb what he had just seen. Medtechs rolled silently toward the shredded Engineers. The one still standing looked no more comprehending than the noncog clones.

  The turret rolled until the hatch slid into view. The Tech One stared dumbly until he heard pounding from inside the hull. He shook himself and hurried to it. He knelt and undogged the hatch. It flipped back, and the Weaponry Officer surged out and knocked him backward onto the deck. The WepOff put his hands on the frame of the hydraulics rig. His foot groped until it touched the combination steering and trigger mechanism. He had not powered down the turret or closed the hydraulic valve, and when he set his weight on the left-hand grip and started to hoist himself out, the turret smoothly rotated and slammed the Weaponry Officer into the hydraulic rig’s frame. The ball kept turning but the Weaponry Officer’s torso stayed in place, and the moving hatchway cut him in two at the waist.