by John Barnes
“Thus,” Thebenides was finishing, “we must be aware of the wide range of possible dangers and opportunities and be ready to move in any direction.”
I was a little disgusted that my fellow Crux Ops seemed to applaud him more than they had Citizen-teacher Zouck, but maybe they were just more psychologically ready for it.
“What was that all about?” Chrys whispered to me.
“What was what all about? That speech? Hell if I know except—”
“I’m talking about the way you behaved. People noticed.”
I blinked, hard, and realized my wife was angry at me, and obviously I had embarrassed her. “What did—”
General Malecela was back at the podium, and he was doing the usual things, thanking everybody and assuring us all that we had just heard things we really needed to hear. I did my best to pay polite attention to that, gesturing to Chrys that we would talk in a minute. I figured there would be assignments announced, and if I’d already embarrassed myself somehow, I didn’t want to compound the problem by not knowing where I was supposed to be.
Malecela finished the platitudes and handed things over to Ariadne Lao, who gestured at a large screen that appeared behind her. “As you can see—”
At that moment the screen blew into bits, and a fusillade of projectiles roared into the room. I could see bodies falling over; something or someone was firing on us, and even in this heavily guarded room, we were under attack.
I was firing back at whatever was coming through the space where the screen had been before I even had time to note that so was everyone else; the big auditorium rang with the fire of a thousand weapons.
3
Where the screen had been there was the blank grayness of a gate, and a dozen figures in black uniforms, masked and goggled, each firing a long, spidery gadget that looked more like a broken-off television antenna folded into a child’s idea of an Uzi than anything else. My NIF was aimed and firing before I thought it in words, but I recognized the weapon—Closer standard issue, a gadget something like our own SHAKK—and I sprayed the lot of them with neural induction fléchettes in less than a heartbeat.
So had a lot of other people, I realized, before my finger was entirely off the trigger, and as my eyes probed desperately into the grayness of the gate, watching for whatever might come in next.
Each of those initial dozen raiders must have been hit by at least a hundred rounds from SHAKKs alone. I could hear the deep bass whoosh from a vast chorus of them—all of those rounds had homed in at Mach 10, found the bodies of the Closers, entered them (with more than enough speed and force to kill with the internal shock wave alone, even if they entered a hand or foot) and then spiraled to a stop within the body. The Closers had simply, instantly, turned into bags of red jam.
There were probably a hundred-plus NIF rounds in all of them, too, but none of them had enough nervous system left to feel them with, and it takes twelve times as long for a NIF round to get there—probably the set of fléchettes arrived an entire eyeblink late.
My thumb found the selector on my NIF—I was still set for temporary unconsciousness, as I had been in New York—and naturally flipped toward instant death before a better thought struck me, and I flipped it to severe convulsion.
Holding the trigger down on full auto, I sprayed a deadly stream of the tiny, gnatlike projectiles directly into the grayness of the gate. Gates are two-way, and if there was any unprotected human flesh on the other side, the fléchettes would find it and burrow in.
I pictured what would happen to the Closer then. The muscles of the body would lock against each other with sudden, brutal force, hard enough to shatter the bones and tear them out through the flesh, the jaw smashing the teeth to red ruins and driving them up into the sinuses, the scalp muscles crushing the skull, arm, and leg bones ripping out through flesh and clothing in great, sharp splinters, hands and feet bursting into shredded meat, all in an instant before the heart locked down and burst from internal pressure, and the chest muscles collapsed the rib cage. The ripping, dissolving figures would emit one unbearable scream as the air and blood from the chest was pushed with enormous force through slammed-shut vocal cords and crushed jaws.
It was a horrible noise and a terrible sight, which is why I was trying to cause it over on the other side. If that starts to happen around you, even the toughest fighters tend to suffer a loss of morale. And if they began to hesitate—
There was a scream from the screen that cut right through everything else—one of the Closers coming through must have stopped one of my rounds, and air-foamed blood sprayed everywhere for an instant before everyone else’s SHAKK rounds tore him apart.
The second rank had managed to arrive in a body, stepping out all at once and diving and scattering, so they returned some of our fire, but now that their surprise was gone, the advantage was all with us—we could see them coming out before they could see to shoot, and they were only coming through one narrow aperture.
They got off a few stray rounds, and because both sides have homing hypersonic ammunition, some of their rounds found targets. Perhaps a dozen more of us died, torn to bloody rags around us. The man in front of me, a tall guy with Oriental features who had been pumping SHAKK rounds at the screen in a steady rhythm, suddenly burst apart backward, his heart and lungs driven out through his rib cage and coat to spray Chrys and me.
I wiped my face, but I kept sending fléchettes into the hole where the screen had been.
Still, even though they scored on us a few times, and much as I was sorry anytime one of us died (or one of them didn’t!), they lasted for only a few seconds before they, too, were mowed down; they looked more like criminals trying to make a break from in front of a firing squad than a body of organized troops. Their bodies flopped around and sprayed blood, and they were still.
Whatever the third rank was supposed to do, all they did was die. I don’t think many of them even made it out of the gate—there was a storm of SHAKK and NIF rounds pouring in there by then, and what it must have been like on the other side is hard to guess.
I saw General Malecela rise cautiously from the deck up there and toss two things through the gate before he fell down, hugging the dirt again.
A moment later, the surface of the gate—with shadowy figures still half-falling through it—glowed red, and then there was only blank wall where it had been. There was a long moment while we all checked to make sure that all the Closers who had come through were dead; then another burst of activity as people grabbed their fallen comrades, hoping—though with the weapons of that future, it’s hopeless—that someone had somehow survived a hit.
I suppose I should give the Closers some kind of credit—obviously it was a suicide mission, which takes guts, and they certainly kept coming. But after the initial explosion into the room, and the first hail of deadly projectiles that killed sixty of us, they barely managed to get forty fighters through the gate they had opened, and our total deaths were under a hundred. I call that amateurish and sloppy, and since I wasn’t used to seeing either from the Closers, it told me in part how desperate they must be.
Within a minute or so, the ATN staff were back in action and had opened an emergency gate. We all filed through it in quick, silent order; they were popping us to a concealed base deep inside an asteroid in an uninhabited timeline, one of many sanctuaries that ATN maintained for times when absolute security was imperative.
As I stepped through the gate, I glanced back and saw that a detail was taking the bodies out; there were several bodies lying in the aisles or in seats with living Crux Ops kneeling or sitting beside them. I thought of how I might have felt had Chrys died in the attack, and realized I’d have been doing the same thing—saying good-bye, getting it into my brain that she was gone. As we went through the gate, I shuddered.
It got gray, weightless, and soundless; as always, light came back first, color last. At the end of the process we were walking on a seemingly endless steel walkway that curled around ove
r our heads; the asteroid was spinning to provide artificial gravity, and the walkway ran around the outer edge.
The assembly hall here wasn’t nearly so comfortable. There were no refreshments, but I doubt that anyone was hungry or thirsty.
We milled around for a moment, and then General Malecela came in. When he took the podium, everyone fell silent.
“Let me begin,” he said, “by asking you all to take a moment to reflect on your fallen comrades, to ask any deity in which you believe to take care of them, and to calm yourselves and get ready for the next step.”
The room was plunged into excruciating silence for a long time; finally Malecela spoke again. “First of all, I want you all to know that I’m proud to be one of you. Collectively your quick reflexes and speed in maneuver held our casualties far lower than they might have otherwise been, and, moreover, the returned fire was very intelligently executed—some of you may have noted that I tossed two PRAMIACS through that gate. I had set one for ten megatons, to go off whenever the gate closed, and the other for a couple of tons of explosive in hopes of destroying the generator. I discovered that the rest of you had already tossed in at least forty PRAMIACS set for the maximum, to blow off when the gate closed, and, moreover, several of you tossed various charges and fired various programmed rounds in there that collectively must have ensured that the gate generator would fail. In other words, we couldn’t have done that better if we had planned it.
“Another detail is more significant, if you think about it. There has been no further attack on the base on the back side of the moon, and our probes into the immediate future show none as far as we can trace. Yet, having lost the battle, why did they not toss a bomb through at us? It would have taken almost nothing at all, compared with their known resources, to open another gate from a military facility somewhere, push through a nuclear bomb or a large mass of antimatter, and switch off the gate.
“The answer to that can only be one thing. They didn’t do it on the first shot because they wanted to capture at least some of us—several of the bodies had stun weapons among their equipment. They know by now that we don’t negotiate for hostages, so they were looking for someone to interrogate—and they chose to try to get prisoners from the most dangerous possible time and location they could have picked. That means that, from the standpoint of whoever planned this thing, the prisoners had to be taken from that meeting—probably the only place they could identify where the information they needed could be found.
“Moreover, there’s only one reason we can think of that the Closers would mount such an inept expedition, and then not even follow up with a bomb … we think that it’s because they couldn’t. What we were attacked by was something thrown together at the last moment, a last-ditch effort by some isolated Closer base. Which, thanks to you all, just received about four hundred megatons in return.”
There was a very long, stunned silence.
“Yes, you are thinking accurately,” Malecela said, repeating himself, then looking up and grinning at us. “That attack was from the last Closer base capable of mounting an attack. The evidence is that sometime very soon—and god knows we don’t know how just yet—we are about to win this war.”
The place broke into the wildest applause I’ve ever seen in my life; even people whose faces were still streaked with tears for their dead were cheering. It took a long time before there was enough quiet for Malecela to be heard again.
“Now,” he said, “we’ve managed to get enough staff and personnel into this base to get some sort of quarters ready for all of you. We’ll give you a couple of hours to settle in and clean up—which also gives us a little time to do some planning and arranging—and then, after that, we’ll be meeting with you individually and in small groups. Right now I don’t have the foggiest idea of what you will be doing, but I do know that given the number of timelines we must investigate at once, there won’t be enough of you.
“That’s all for now. If you’ll file out to my left and place your thumbs on the reader, you’ll receive directions to your rooms.”
There wasn’t much to say, but everyone was saying it loudly and rapidly. Chrys and I could barely hear each other and gave up trying, figuring it would be easier to talk once we got to our room.
The thumbprint reader told us that we were on Level 8, Wing 4, Room 80; before we had time to ask where that might be, we saw a bank of escalators, labeled with “Level 2” up through “Level 8.”
“They put us in the penthouse,” I said.
“Not much of a view here,” Chrysamen pointed out. “That means eight levels up from the outer edge of the spinning asteroid. We’re deeper inside than anyone else.”
“People get penthouses either for the view or for the privacy,” I pointed out.
“You’re incorrigible.”
The escalator ride was a strange sensation because when you use centrifugal force for artificial gravity, the gravity falls off very rapidly as you move in toward the center, and at the same time the apparent Coriolis force gets more noticeable. The total effect was that if you shut your eyes, it felt like the escalator was twisting upward to the left, about to curl right over and dump you off. We both hung on, though Chrys seemed to be getting a kick out of shutting her eyes and letting go momentarily.
But then she enjoys parachute drops and roller coasters. Chrys is close, but nobody’s perfect.
“You really ought to try this,” she said, grinning at me.
“No thanks. I prefer only to be scared to death when there’s actually something to be scared of.”
She shrugged. “Think of it as staying in practice.”
At the top of the escalator, there were moving sidewalks like the things they have in airports, fanning out from the escalator head, and one of them was clearly marked for “Wing 4.” It was enough to make me wonder if all this had been sitting here waiting for centuries (it might well have been) or if they had suddenly realized they would need it, dropped a construction team back five years in time, and then built it right after the attack on the back side of the moon. In principle the only way to tell would be by asking.
The room was in that gray range between hospital, barracks, and hotel, clearly not a place intended as anyone’s home but not entirely devoid of comfort either. They had provided us with some simple tunic-and-pants uniforms, since we had no bags—those were “still” back at the Wellington in New York in my home timeline, god knows how many years crosstime but at least 850 years back. Supposedly after this mission we’d be returned to that time and place—where Paula was on her way to cover Porter, where Robbie was in a hospital bed in Oslo, where with Paula gone, the second team would have to cover my son, father, and sister.
Time travel costs a lot of money; probably if it hadn’t been for the Closers, it would have been millennia after it was discovered before anyone did it regularly. In principle they could have sent back a probe to see how it all came out and let me know whether my family and friends were all right. In principle, if it’s before noon, you could be in Paris tomorrow morning from almost anywhere in the United States. It would merely cost you so much that you wouldn’t think of doing it. In the same way, unless there was a remarkably good reason other than the nerves of two senior Crux Ops, they weren’t going to do that. And being able to know is not at all the same thing as actually knowing.
I was about to work my way up into a fine fret, since there was nothing else to do until they called us, and I don’t respond well to having a lot on my mind and nothing I can do. So I took a shower and changed, as Chrys did, and then I started to work on developing a fine fret.
Maybe because she recognized the warning signs, Chrysamen abruptly asked, “So, just before the meeting was extremely rudely interrupted”—the funny twist in her mouth told me the joke was supposed to make me a little more relaxed and easy to talk to—“you were acting like there was a snake in your pants leg. And you were focusing a lot of your strange squirmy energy, my dear husband, on Citizen-senat
or Thebenides. So I think you didn’t like what you were hearing, but unfortunately I think you made that very clear to everyone else.”
“Hmmm.” I sat down on the bed, kicked off my shoes, and stretched out. She did the same and lay in my arms. After a couple long breaths and a false start, I began, “So I suppose that if I start out by admitting that it’s just a funny feeling, even if it’s a very intense funny feeling, you’re not going to be pleased?”
She made a face, twisting her mouth a little sideways, and then said, “Mark, you know I know you, and you know I love you, and by now I know you don’t act up in public without a good reason. And you were really acting up, and I really couldn’t see the reason. So if it’s purely a gut feeling, I assume it’s a very strong gut feeling, and if it’s something more than that, it’s probably important, but anyway—what I want to know is, what did you see that bothered you so much? You and I stay alive on our hunches and our feel for evidence, sweetheart. If there’s something the matter, share it. I trust you.”
I hunched up onto one shoulder so I could look at her face more closely, which also gave me an excuse to push some of her dark curls back from her face a little. She was so beautiful, even now … after all those years, after all the usual marital hassles … and, of course, after more than a dozen dangerous missions together. We’d seen each other shot and bleeding, fought side by side in worlds you can’t imagine, and all I had to do was explain to her that Thebenides gave me the creeps. How complicated could that be? As she said, if I couldn’t trust her …
“Look,” I began, “I think part of it is a matter of where and when I grew up. In my time and timeline, we weren’t great trusters of politicians. I know that nobody is, but us particularly. We knew a little too well that when someone starts talking about how principles are all very well, but you’ve got to be practical, he means that he’s going to do something he thinks you won’t approve of, and he wants to head off your argument. Nobody ever says, ‘Look, let’s just get practical here’ if he’s talking about feeding or housing people, or about giving good jobs to vets or something. The ‘I’m just a practical guy—let’s all be practical together and not pay too much attention to those pointy-headed intellectuals’ dodge usually only comes along when a politician is cooking up something so disgusting that it can’t be justified in the normal way. It’s the way Truman talked about dropping the bomb, the way Johnson talked about getting into Vietnam, the way Nixon talked about law and order, and the way Bush and Clinton talked all the time.”
