Blood of the Scarecrow: Book 3: Solstice 31 Saga

by Martin Wilsey

  Cine was now covered with cuts as well. A deep one in her right thigh. It all stopped as quickly as it started.

  “She told us to lay in wait and when you said the word ‘Now’, do our best to kill you or die trying. We refuse. We surrender.”

  Dr. Shaw came down the ramp with Wex.

  “Thank you,” Barcus said.

  “Po persuaded us,” Jude said, before she sat, heavily.

  “How. No man has ever...”

  “Needed it.”

  Dr. Shaw knelt.

  “Barcus. What are you doing?”

  “Yes. Tell us,” Hume said, as she and Rand appeared out of the darkness, with sidearms drawn, pointed at Jude and Cine.

  “I needed to blow off steam; and they needed some training, according to Wex,” Barcus said. “Plus, I needed to test something.”

  He then put his hands on his knees, bending over. His torso convulsed a bit, but he didn't throw up.

  “See what I mean?” Wex said, with no further explanation.

  “Dammit, Barcus. You could have killed them!” Rand yelled at him. She holstered her guns and knelt to lower Jude to the floor, gently.

  “Jesus, you could have taken her head off with that thing!”

  “No. It's alright,” Jude said, from the floor. “Live blades are better teachers.”

  “It's true, my Lady,” Cine said, as Dr. Shaw moved to her. “He sees and can be...precise.”

  She looked down at her clothes. There were cuts in a dozen places. Most just barely scratching the skin, drawing blood.

  “What happened?” Jimbo asked, over the HUD comms.

  “Good question,” Barcus replied.

  ***

  The STU was loaded. They would deliver the newly repaired PT-137 to the surface, as well as two of the Warmarks, and lots of other weapons to secure the Salterkirk Base.

  AI~Stu cracked the hatch while they were still above the atmosphere; and the PT-137 launched into a slow glide down, on manual, with Hume driving. She and Rand both had their security uniforms on, with helmets. These could function as pressure suits in a pinch.

  When they were well away, DS-04 and DS-05 stepped up to the edge of the apron.

  “Are you ready?” Barcus said to Po.

  “You know that already,” she said, and stepped off.

  She looked to her left, and the other Warmark was about 200 meters away. Po could hear no sound other than her own rapid breathing. “Why does it seem like we are not moving, at all.”

  “It will take us one hour and eleven minutes to get down there. Try to stay awake. It will get plenty exciting at the end.”

  The PT entered the Salterkirk hangar, arriving first. The STU was just after that. Everyone, including the reception party, turned out to watch the Warmarks land.

  They came in at an angle, trying to land on the lower pad, just outside the hangar opening. The first drop suit came in a little short of its target and landed on the rocks, by the water’s edge, causing a great splash. The second Warmark landed in the center of the pad. It waited, as the first made its way up the bank; and then they ascended into the hangar, together.

  DS-04 opened first, and Barcus climbed out. DS-05 opened, and Po could not hide her joy. She had landed in the center of the pad. A perfect landing.

  Climbing down, she threw her arms around his neck. Her smile was infectious.

  “Stu, can you please bring the Warmarks in and secure them,” Barcus said.

  Elkin was already speaking with Rand and Hume, in excited tones, about the placement of all the automated sentry gun emplacements.

  They were unloaded and gone in two hours.

  ***

  “Barcus, Echo says there are no longer kinetic wars between planets, really,” Po said, as they lay in their bunks on the Sedna.

  “I guess that's true.” He shifted to wrap her more deeply in his arms.

  “Wars of annihilation, anyway. Because you could fly the Sedna into a planet at the speed of light, and the amount of energy released could destroy the planet. Wars are now for domination, not annihilation.”

  “I don't care, you know,” Po said, absently. “I'll do what needs doing as it comes, but none of it matters. This is enough for me.”

  “I know.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Lies and Scarecrows

  “Thirty-two years later, we discovered that there were lies all around us. Lies I would believe again as long as our planet, our people survived. We did what we could, what we had to do.”

  --Solstice 31 Incident Investigation Testimony Transcript: Captain James Worthington, senior surviving member of the Ventura deep space survey ship.

  <<<>>>

  Barcus was alone on the bridge of the Sedna. The shutters were all fully retracted, and the hangar bay was in full view before him. The grays with their work lights, still crawled over the Memphis. They were like pinpoints of stars and had a kind of beauty all their own.

  “Staying in the moment makes for a restful life.”

  He had not heard Wex enter.

  “I found that kind of peace in music.” She stood next to him.

  “I know. I will find it. In music, in stories, in making beautiful things.” Barcus looked at her. “But not today.”

  She ran her hand along the wood shelf just below the window. The teak glowed it was so clean. The thick glass was polished clean and almost invisible.

  “I know what the lies are. The important ones, anyway. The other ones will not matter to me. Or him,” she said. “You will use this all as a lesson to show you how you can be deceived, even if you can see the future,” Wex said.

  “I'll never enjoy chess again,” he lied.

  “Show me the engineer’s console. I still need you to explain it.” She smiled.

  He showed her the way the ship flew. He showed her the status system bypass, the false green lights on the board. He told her exactly how it lied to keep the ship doing what was necessary. It used an old log file to feed the status board in a loop. Always systems green.

  He created additional layers of lies that, in the end, built the final truth.

  Just the way she wanted.

  ***

  “Why would he allow himself to be taken, if he can see the future?” asked Dr. Corbin, from beneath dramatic white eyebrows. “How long did you say he has been in our custody?”

  “Just over a hundred years,” Chancellor Dalton said to Corbin, from behind his chair.

  Dalton didn't usually allow anyone to sit while in his presence, but he made an exception for Corbin. He was that useful.

  “And I am just finding out about this now?” Corbin sounded insulted.

  “It was need to know,” Dalton said, as if explaining it to a child. “When he was helping us create modern AIs, nanites, and new longevity treatments, you had no need to know. Weapons are another matter.”

  “How long has this...man been leaking technology to us?”

  Corbin changed the view in his monitor. It showed a man with a real book, reading while in a box of clear material. A cell with no privacy.

  “He says it started in the 1600s AD,” Dalton began. “He seemed to have had spikes of productivity and boredom over the centuries. He didn't have any serious focus until the 19th century and ramped it up in the 20th.”

  Dalton activated a monitor that made it obvious he had become impatient. For thousands of years, men never expected to be anything except what their ancestors were.

  “See here,” he pointed to a chart. “Simple flight invented, here. Man walking on the moon, here, in just fifty years.” Dalton pointed. Quantum computers to modern Artificial Intelligence in another fifty, here.”

  “We thought we were so smart, so innovative. And don't forget the social aspects.”

  Corbin nodded, uninterested in the topic.

  “I presume he manipulated the population as well. Increased population stress to encourage colonization of the solar system. Another fifty years, FTL, and another fifty after that, the invent
ion of artificial gravity and grav-drives.”

  “Was the mass exodus from Earth part of this plan?”

  Corbin brought up another visualization of time and population growth.

  “Every time the population seemed to level off, another nudge and another spike, until it was all spike.”

  “Look, here. Population density was being limited by disease, by a periodic pandemic. Meds invented, methods improved, tech invented, and suddenly we reach 30 billion, here.”

  Corbin indicated another point on the graph.

  “And war suddenly scatters the seed of humanity far and wide. In no time, we are 300 billion without trying, 300 billion fools. Tools for this one being. But why? Why does he need all these humans?”

  ***

  “The actual course plotting information will be displayed here, nowhere else.”

  Barcus set the controls, and Wex saw it. She sat in the pilot’s command chair.

  “I know it's difficult,” Wex said, as she stood and placed a hand on his shoulder. “It's like you have no choice in the matter. But you do.”

  She walked back to the window that looked over the hangar.

  “You only see one future, the future you picked.”

  “What about the futures I cannot see? The ones I considered but didn't choose?” Barcus asked, out loud. “Just like everyone else.”

  “The long white is just fog on the road ahead. It will stop you from seeing beyond. It will happen at random intervals. It’s the only rest you will get. But it can also be used against you. So, tell no one when you approach the white, the not knowing. Tell them nothing. It never helps in the end...unless it does.”

  “I have spent my whole life forgetting my past. The same skill can be used on the future,” Barcus said.

  Then, the greatest lies were delivered by omission. He knew Miles was still alive on Baytirus. He knew the blood of the Scarecrows was not all spilled.

  Yet.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Injuring Eternity

  "I was acting under direct orders from Chancellor Dalton. None of this is my fault. Yes, I lied. I had to lie. The prisoner had to believe we were on Earth and not a moon around Saturn. These weapons we were developing were not allowed on Earth."

  --Solstice 31 Incident Investigation Testimony Transcript: Thomas McDonald, Senior Research and Development Engineer, Material Sciences, Artificial Gravity Specialist.

  <<<>>>

  Tom McDonald stood on the grav-plate apron just outside the hangar. He hated putting on a pressure suit. He always wanted to take a piss or scratch his nose as soon as it was sealed.

  Without it, though, he would not step off the apron that maintained a perfect 1G feel. Some people liked low gravity. Not Tom. Tom hated it, which was odd, considering he was an expert in artificial gravity (AG) technology. The moon of Saturn, called Rhea, where the R&D facility was located, had full facility AG. It must have cost a mint.

  He turned and looked back at the enormous opening to the hangar behind him. Well, at least, it appeared to be open. It was ninety meters wide and thirty meters tall. A band of light encircled the opening and marked the line between vacuum and atmosphere. There was a field, ten millimeters thick, of gravity chaos in that wall plane that he could just walk through. The light had nothing to do with the field, though; the light and the field would still be there, even if the base lost power. He had designed it that way. He still had no idea how it worked, even though he’d been credited with inventing it.

  Today was the final test of his latest project: the g-rail gun. It was an amplified, gravity-based, directional weapon. It was the most expensive thing he had ever created. Now, it was in final testing. Only the full power test remained.

  His three assistants called it Grendel because it was a monster that could kill a lot of people. The chancellor liked to call it the grail. Tom was uncomfortable with the name ‘grail’. It held too many religious connotations.

  “Alright, you bunch of monkeys, are you ready?” McDonald asked. The techs were in the lab, monitoring the test.

  “Yes, sir. All systems are standing by,” Kristin Vittori replied.

  She was the team leader. Tom thought about her as he listened to her voice. She was a professional, stone-cold bitch with no interpersonal skills. It was too bad, because she was beautiful in that modern 2G way. Super fit. McDonald couldn’t help but remember how great she looked naked. Fortunately, none of the rest of the staff suspected how she’d gotten herself promoted to team leader.

  “I’m firing it up,” McDonald said, as he activated the weapon.

  It was the same size and same basic shape as a Frange carbine, but the damn thing weighed more than eleven kilograms when not powered up. The onboard inertial dampeners had the benefit of making it feel weightless when the power was on. The biggest problem was that the higher the power settings, the slower it was to move; so that it felt like you were dragging it through wet cement at the upper settings. It fought you.

  A change made to the software, however, seemed to have solved this problem. Now, as he selected the firing solution power, nothing changed until the moment he pulled the trigger. The standard Heads-Up Display (HUD) targeting had also been employed, making usage even easier.

  This very same issue made it impossible to use this weapon on the higher settings, in a craft in motion, near a planetary body big enough to have its own gravity well. In fact, Watkins had been killed when the system tore itself out of the shuttle he was flying. It wasn’t recoil. It just stopped dead in space, relative to the moons gravity well, and the momentum of the ship tore it away from the suddenly stationary grail cannon. He was another casualty of rushing.

  “Here we go, you chicken shits. Target number one test. Power set to four of ten.”

  Tom had to remind them that they had all refused to do any full power tests. The first target was an old surface tractor that they had towed to the target range for this purpose.

  “Firing.”

  Tom raised the weapon and squeezed the trigger. There was no sound, no recoil, no nothing. The invisible impact struck the tractor just above the driver’s side wheel. A perfectly round, basketball-sized hole appeared in the fender, and the entire engine block and front right side exploded out, sending debris all the way to the distant mountainside, two kilometers away.

  The weapon moved, quickly and easily, acquiring target number two. It was the remains of Watkins’ shuttle, parked at the base of a cliff about 0.4 kilometers away.

  “Power settings to six,” he said. “Firing.”

  Again, no sound, no recoil, not even a vibration; but this time, he felt a momentary freeze of the gun, in midair. It was as if he just hung there, suspended from it.

  The entire shuttle disappeared; and in its place, there was suddenly a gaping hole in the cliff face.

  “Did you feel that, sir?” Vittori said, with a hint of fear in her voice.

  “Damn right I did. Through my boots. I just punched a ten-meter wide hole in that cliff face. That hole must be twenty-five meters deep. What’s left of that shuttle, lines the back of that new cave.”

  McDonald laughed as a slow avalanche fell in Rhea’s low gravity.

  “Cranking it up to eight. Send the target drone.”

  A drone, the size of a supply container, hovered into view. Tom knew it was full of rocks and other material, and it had way too many strobes on it. It wasn’t tough to see. White was easy to see, even this far from the sun.

  “Target altitude is 4.2 kilometers,” Vittori said.

  The targeting software ran and tagged the drone. He raised the rifle and pulled the trigger. He knew nothing would happen until the targeting software tag was aligned.

  The rifle froze, in place, for a full two seconds. Then, the drone just disappeared.

  “Holy shit. Did you see that?” McDonald said.

  “Sir, the sensors indicate that the drone and all its mass has been reduced to a fine powder. Forty-two metric tons.” Vittori was in awe. “Power is dow
n to 30%. I recommend replacing the power cell before the full power test. You would be so dead, if the Grendel's dampeners failed for lack of power.”

  McDonald powered the rifle down, knowing she was right. It was consuming power exponentially at the higher settings. The rifle became heavy again, when he powered it down; and he let it hang from the sling, as he pulled out a fresh power cell magazine. They had cleverly made them the same form as the Frange carbine ammo magazines, so soldiers could carry spares in existing pouches.

  Tom slammed in the fresh cell and powered the rifle back up. It became weightless in his hands again.

  “Another drone, please. Full power test,” McDonald said. He could not keep the fear from his voice.

  “Sir, we were thinking,” Vittori said, in an uncertain voice. “If the power pack does not have enough juice to drive the inertial dampener, there could potentially be a massive recoil, or even some kind of catastrophic failure.”

  McDonald already knew this.

  “Sir, please move to the edge of the apron and turn, so the base is not directly behind you or in front of you.” Vittori sounded like she was about to cry. “Are you sure you don’t want to study the data first?”

  He shook his head. They were too far behind schedule.

  “Tom, don’t shoulder it.” It was Matthews who spoke. “I’m suited up and already in the hangar. Use the HUD to target. If it rips your finger off, your smart suit will seal the glove with an automatic compression tourniquet.”

  “Dammit. Let’s do this.”

  Tom walked to the edge of the apron and turned ninety degrees. It was a smart precaution.

  “Adjust the drone path for the new vista, Vittori.”

  “Yes, sir. Adjusting.”

  McDonald saw the drone coming around. It was lower this time. He tagged it in his targeting HUD, brought the g-rail to bear on the drone, and pulled the trigger. He wasn’t perfectly on target; and when he went to adjust the weapon to be on target, it wouldn’t budge. He let off the trigger, so he could move it again.