by John Ringo
* * *
“We’re opening another one?” Chief Miller groused.
“Yep,” Bill said. The current boson was located in Indiana, well out in a cornfield. A forty-acre section had been hastily mowed down and revetments constructed for units of the Indiana National Guard. A presidential order had been signed calling all units of the National Guard to federal service. There had been barely a squeak from Congress over the supplemental appropriation bill; at this point just about every state in the Union had one or more gates open in it and multiple identified bosons, many of them what the news media referred to as “Titcher bosons.”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Miller asked as Bill and Mark checked the alignment of the linear accelerator. The accelerator had been modified so that it could be pivoted over a narrow arc, both horizontally and vertically.
“Yep,” Bill answered. “You wanna go get suited up?”
“How do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?” Chief Miller muttered, but he went to get suited up.
“You gonna tell him?” Mark asked as soon as the SEAL was out of the building.
“Nope,” Bill answered. “I might be wrong. I don’t want him letting his guard down.”
* * *
They were looking at the screens on the same hastily cobbled together control panel. Mark had taken a few hours that were otherwise unoccupied to run up a CAD diagram of a properly designed gate opening system. Columbia had dithered for a few days about whether to patent it or classify it and decided on the former. Now a construction firm in Taiwan was working on a new and improved version. Given that Columbia had the patent on the process, if the next experiment worked his option shares were going to go through the roof.
“Initiating,” he said, flipping the switch. The Circular Inductance Generator, formerly known as the circular magnetic whatchamacallit, began to spin. The lights briefly dimmed. Nothing.
“No formation,” Mark said.
“Track it around a little,” Bill answered. “Our aim might have been off.”
The device, still operative, was tracked back and forth.
“We’re using a hell of a lot of juice,” Mark pointed out.
“The government’s paying,” Bill replied.
Then a looking glass appeared in the air.
“Formation,” Bill said over the radio as Mark started shutting down the systems. “Survey team in.”
They watched external monitors as a Humvee bounced down the hill. Then a group of five heavily armed men in environment suits, their body posture making them appear as if they were being hard done by, walked into the shed and then into the looking glass.
* * *
It was sort of like doing a tactical entry. Sort of. You never knew what was on the other side of the door. Miller knew that he should be getting blasé about it, but instead each successive entry was getting more and more on his nerves. And something about Weaver’s attitude, they’d been around each other enough at this point to tell when the Doc was planning something devious, had him worried.
So he took point. If it was going to be really bad, better that he be the one figuring out what to do about it than the newbie they’d just gotten in from Coronado.
He hefted the MG-240 that he had started carrying as a personal weapon and looked over his shoulder at the team, most of whom were similarly armed.
“Anybody head sweeps me and I’ll kill you even if we survive,” he growled, then stepped into the looking glass.
He automatically stepped forward to let the team out into the area around the gate then dropped to one knee. Sweep left, impressions, very earthlike, sweep right, green grass, blue sky, look outward, hill, guns, tanks!
He raised the MG-240, his finger going to the trigger, and then stopped.
“Everybody freeze,” Miller snapped over the radio. Then he looked around and swore as he lowered the machine gun. “I’m gonna kill that motherfucker.”
* * *
“Kansas!” Miller snapped over the cell phone. “I thought I was going to another fucking planet and you sent me to Kansas?”
“You’d have preferred another planet?” Bill asked.
“No, not really,” Miller admitted. “ ‘What did you do, today, Daddy? Oh, went to another planet. This one had a gravity that was high enough I got squashed flat which is why I look like a pancake.’ It’s gonna happen sooner or later.”
“Agreed,” Bill said. “Which is why we’re going to start shifting the bosons to internal gates. Instantaneous transportation! What man has been dreaming about for decades!”
“One or two persons at a time,” the SEAL noted. “From gates in some really odd places. It’s not going to take the place of planes any time soon.”
“Yeah, but we’re having more bosons produced all the time,” Bill pointed out. “Spreading out all over the world. We’ve already got the ability to open one, in say Virginia, and one in, say, France. And people can just walk in one and out the other. But movement can also be controlled. Set up customs, that sort of thing. And now there’s a direct link between Kansas and Indiana. Don’t know what use that will be, admittedly, but I could see a shipping company setting up a conveyor belt that shifts stuff across the gate. FedEx, maybe.”
“Yeah, open one up in New York and another in California and they won’t even have to look at ‘flyover country’ anymore,” Miller said, grumpily.
“I even know which two gates,” Bill replied. “They’re next on the list. The only problem will be crowd control.”
“Rental car agencies are going to love you.” The SEAL grinned.
“So does my boss,” Bill replied. “The contract with the DOD had a normal disclaimer about ‘civilian use’ of anything learned from my research. The accountants at Columbia are already having spasms. They’re looking at it as a license to print money. A fee for opening the gates and a percentage of any profits.”
“People from other countries opening up clandestine gates to the U.S.,” Miller noted. “The new illegal Zimbabwean problem.”
“You’re such a grump.” Bill laughed.
“Open up the Titcher gates, first,” Miller said.
“Oh, definitely,” Bill replied. “Just a question of from where to where. Once opened, we still don’t know how to close them. And moving them will be… difficult.”
* * *
Bill had called Sheila, finally, and told her that he was a little busy with some stuff he couldn’t talk about and that he wasn’t going to be in Huntsville any time soon. She’d taken the hint and dropped him an e-mail detailing all the reasons she was glad he was out of her life, including that his best friend in Huntsville was much better than he was in bed.
Columbia had a division that was supposed to handle civilian uses of any of their developments. They had taken over the gate opening system as soon as the first one was opened between a farmer’s field in the Hudson Valley and a suburban backyard in East Orange County, California. They were, in Bill’s opinion, handling it badly and the news services were paying more attention to that than the still quiescent Titcher gates. But Bill had figured out the theory; it was up to other people to mishandle the marketing and public relations.
He’d gotten sorely out of shape lately so he’d picked up a mountain bike in a sporting goods store in South Orlando and brought it up to the anomaly site. After reading the e-mail from Sheila he took the bike down off its rack, clipped his cell phone to his waist and went out biking.
Most of the remaining roads around the anomaly site had been closed but the majority of the TD area was still off-limits to unauthorized personnel. Which meant it was perfect, except for the terrain, for biking. He headed down a track towards the river to the west and rode along what had once been suburban streets. Nature had already started to prevail in the area. Grasses that had not been uprooted were starting to sprout green and along the river, which had been partially shielded, saplings were starting to grow. A few trees that had merely been pushed over were sprouting n
ew growth upwards. Life goes on.
But not if the Titcher came back. The Titcher would turn this all into their green fungus, if not their vast strip mines. The records from the Mississippi gate had been studied and the conclusion was that it was a world the Titcher had destroyed and abandoned.
He stopped down by the stream and looked at the water, thinking. The water had run brown with silt for the first few weeks after the explosion but now, with the majority of runoff that would occur having happened and the plants coming back, it was clear as gin. Clearer, he suspected, than before the explosion. There were fish in it, as well, big guppy-looking things, some of them with bright blue tails.
They had been unable to close the remnant Titcher bosons. The destabilization seemed to spread along the “track.” Which meant that besides the gates in Tennessee, Eustis, Staunton and Archer, presumably, they had to worry about thirty inactive bosons scattered from Northwest Florida to Saskatchewan. And he had no idea how soon the destabilization would go away. Just a pretty strong gut feeling, based on very limited theory, that it wouldn’t be long.
He got back on the bike and pedaled up the shallow hill towards where UCF used to stand. And the anomaly was still pumping out bosons, although they had limited it to three tracks at least: one, two and four. They were all over the western hemisphere at this point, except Tierra Del Fuego, and had spread as far as the Philippines and Tibet. They were coming out a shade more slowly, now, having lost nearly four seconds in the past month. Which meant the rate wasn’t going to change appreciably any time soon. In the meantime, since they weren’t closing them as fast as they were being produced, the bosons were a menace that might produce more things like the Titcher, or the Boca Raton anomaly, at any time.
The answer to that was to link the gates as fast as possible, which was one of the reasons that he was getting ticked with Columbia’s civilian applications side. The news media was getting huffy because they saw it as a money grab by Columbia, which was not only a big corporation but a, horrors, Defense Contractor. They hadn’t even touched on the fact that as long as the gates were open, they were available to any species that had the capability to open them, friendly or hostile. And despite his initial pronouncement, all the species they had encountered seemed to be hostile.
That was bothering the SETI folks no end, but they were blaming it on the way that the government had handled first contact. They seemed to be ignoring the fact that First Contact from the Titcher was the snatching of two innocent retirees.
Columbia’s civilian side, meanwhile, had gotten wrapped up by their lawyers. Gates gave instantaneous and unhazardous communication from Point A to Point B. But that wasn’t enough for the lawyers. They were trotting out all of the potential horrors that might be involved, litigation-wise. If someone tripped on the exit from the gate, who would get sued? Columbia, that’s who. If someone got hit by a truck, said truck delivering materials to a gate, who would get sued? That’s right, Columbia. If a gate was opened to one Point B and another Point B was considered to be more economically viable, who would get blamed? You guessed it.
So the gates remained closed while the news media howled about monopolies, the Congress held fact-finding commissions, the lobbyists ran around asking for bills and unknown potential aliens rubbed their hands in glee at all the available bosons.
And, oh, yes, transportation remained via car, truck and airplane.
Humans could not be the only sentient race in range to detect them that would sooner or later notice the available bosons. Someone was going to open one up. And, like the Titcher gates, Bill anticipated that it would be sooner rather than later.
* * *
“Boson fourteen is linking to a remote active boson; direction galactic hubward.”
Tcharl looked at the viewscreen and frowned at the face of his littermate, Tsho’an.
“Dreen?”
“Probably not; this is a Class Nine boson, not a Class Six.”
“It could be a remnant,” Tcharl said.
“It just started linking,” Tsho’an argued. “That seems to suggest that the remote was recently formed. We are not alone. Well, alone with only the Dreen for company.”
“Yes,” Tcharl replied, grunting in black humor. “We need Unitary approval to open a remote gate. Especially after the disaster with gate seven. I’ll submit a request.”
“Do you think we’ll get it?” Tsho’an asked.
“I really don’t know. I think that they would like to see all the bosons turned off. The transportation guilds have been complaining, again, about incursions on their authority. Move it as quickly as possible to Sector Nine, just in case it is a hostile entity. If it is, we’ll have to set up quarantine measures. I’ll send a message to the Unitary Council. We will see about opening it.”
“They could be friendly,” Tsho’an pointed out. “Any support against the Dreen would be useful.”
“I was going to bring that up,” Tcharl noted, closing the connection.
* * *
“It had been quiescent for two weeks,” the physicist from the French Academy of Sciences said. Bill knew him, slightly, from scientific conferences they both had attended prior to the opening of the Chen Anomaly. He and Bill disagreed on just about every major scientific topic that existed, especially if it had a political flavor. They cordially detested one another, in fact. But they were buddies compared to most of the aliens humans had encountered. “Then a gate formed. The farmer who owns the vineyard contacted authorities immediately, of course. Then they came through. Before our reaction team could arrive, I might add.”
They were five beings in armor that was marked with a muted, vaguely sand-colored camouflage. The beings were bipedal, nearly three meters tall, with three fingers and a thumb. Other than that it was impossible to determine what they looked like in their all-covering suits. They might not be that tall, if the suits were made like Wyverns.
One of the beings was talking in pantomime with a human wearing an environment suit. The aliens’ weapons, presumably weapons, that they had been carrying on entry were stacked up by the gate. They were large guns that looked similar to rifles but instead of a conventional barrel they had large bores that looked vaguely like a blunderbuss. Bill suspected that they fired something other than nails. The ground was torn with tracks from armored vehicles and the French Leclerc Mk2 tanks that surrounded the gate had effectively destroyed the vineyard.
Bill walked towards the group as the academic sputtered behind him. He touched the person in the environment suit on the arm and smiled as the woman turned towards him and widened her eyes in surprise that he was not similarly dressed.
“You washed them down, right?” Bill asked. “So far we haven’t found anything on any of the worlds which is infectious.” He reached into his backpack and pulled out a picture, holding it up so that it could be seen by the nearest of the aliens.
The alien let out a hissing howl that sounded remarkably like one of the dog-demons and could best be written as “Dreeen.” The picture had been of a dead dog alien.
“Yeah,” Bill said, nodding. “We call them Titcher.” Then he extracted his laptop and opened it up. He was no wiz at three-D modeling but there were various cartoon programs available in two-D that worked. He brought up a program and ran a short video he’d composed on the way over.
First there was video of the Titcher, taken at the attack in Eustis by a TV cameraman who would probably win some sort of posthumous award. Then there was video of Nyarowlll shaking hands with Bill, clearly in a friendly manner. Then there was some video of the nuclear attacks in Eustis and Tennessee and more video from the aftermath, centering on all the dead Titcher. Then there was a cartoon, poorly done, of Nyarowlll smiling at Bill and then, when he turned his back, sticking a knife in it. Then there was another cartoon of Nyarowlll with her arm around a Titcher dog-demon.
The alien he had been talking to waved at the other four and they crowded around while Bill showed the video again. They n
odded at each other, waving their necks back and forth, but didn’t seem to be talking although there was some sound coming out of the suits. It took Bill a minute to realize that they were probably speaking via radio or some equivalent.
The first alien, he seemed to be a boss, waved at the screen on the third run-through and Bill froze it on a picture of Nyarowlll.
“Dreeen,” the alien said.
“Mreee,” Bill replied. “That one’s Nyarowlll.”
The alien cocked his head to the side. “Nyarowlll, Mreee.”
Bill touched his chest. “Bill.” Then he pointed at the screen. “Nyarowlll.” He pointed at himself and the other humans around. “Human.”
“Oooman,” the alien replied. “Adar,” he added, pointing at his chest.
“Humans,” Bill said, then pointed at Nyarowlll. “Mreee. Bill. Nyarowlll.”
Bill backed up to the point that had Nyarowlll being friendly then to the rough cartoon of her putting a knife in his back then to the picture of her being friendly with a Titcher. Then he brought up another, a video of the suited aliens, the Adar, side by side with the Titcher, one armored arm over the back of a thorn-thrower.
There was a hiss at that from the boss alien and he waved it away, spitting, clicking and gabbling in apparent anger.
Bill showed the scenes with Nyarowlll again and then waved at the pictures. Then he held up a hand and shrugged. It was anything but a universal gesture, but the alien, the Adar, seemed to get the point. Humans had been bitten once, that was going to make them shy.
The aliens waved their arms at each other for a bit, then the boss reached out carefully and touched one of the controls on the laptop, starting the footage. He ran it forward to the nuclear blasts and stopped at the mushroom clouds.
“Dreeen.”
“Human,” Bill said. “We did that.”
“Adoool,” the alien said. “Adoool.” He pointed around at the tanks. “Adoool.”
