Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

Knox nodded. “You never know” about summed it up. On those occasions when inspiration did strike, it wasn’t because he’d consciously set out to find it—if anything, it found him.

  “Jon?” A touch of Marianna’s hand on his arm. “I’m getting a busy signal on Pete’s reach number. That can’t be right; this is a priority patch-through.”

  “Let me listen,” he said. She handed him the handset and he put it to his ear. “That’s a fast busy. Means there’s a trunk overload. Pete’s line isn’t tied up. The problem’s local—whatever cellular switch serves this area is getting hit by more traffic than it can handle.”

  He glanced at his watch: shortly after noon. It was the lunch-hour spike, when everybody returned the morning’s calls in hopes the other party will be out and they can just leave voicemail.

  But that was in Manhattan, not the backwoods of North Carolina. The cell-phone density wasn’t high enough around here to tie up the lines like this. And there was that DSL outage just a few minutes ago. Oh, shit.

  “Mycroft,” he said slowly, “I don’t think this is just a normal trunk overload—”

  “Denial of Service?” Mycroft looked blank for a moment, his typical reaction to one of Knox’s sudden context-shifts. Then his train of thought started to roll down the new track. “It would be easy enough to do.”

  “Jon, I’m sorry,” Marianna said. “What is it you’re saying?”

  He turned to her and smiled grimly. “It’s beginning to look like we’re under attack.”

  “Attack?” Marianna wondered if she’d heard right. “Just because the phone’s busy?”

  “Not just the cell phone, the high-speed data line too. The two systems are entirely separate—what are the odds against them both being out?

  “It’s called a ‘Denial of Service’ attack,” Jon went on. “Hackers do this sort of thing all the time, against switches and Internet sites. Normally, it doesn’t buy the attacker anything but bragging rights on the outlaw bulletin boards. Here, though . . .”

  “Here, it cuts us off from the outside world,” she finished for him. “And from Pete!”

  “You see the problem.”

  “What can we do? Get in the car and drive out from under?”

  “That could be a long drive,” Jon said. “No telling how wide an area they’d have blanketed if they’re really serious. And all the time, the clock keeps ticking. But there may be another way.”

  He turned to Mycroft. “Does that satellite receiver of yours have enough juice to transmit?”

  “More than adequate for what you’re thinking, Jonathan.”

  Jon looked at Marianna again. “That’s it, then. We’ll bypass the local switch entirely, hack the satellite uplink and establish our own call direct from here to the COMSAT transponder.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Well, Mycroft can. It’s really just coding up the SS7 call-setup header and wrapping it in a COMSAT message envelope. Dead simple.” He smiled reassuringly.

  Not reassuringly enough for her taste. “Once more, only in English this time.”

  “Trust me,” he said, “it shouldn’t take Mycroft more than five or ten minutes to hack. Then we’ll establish your call to Pete and you can take it from there. Uh, it’s going to involve Weathertop setting up shop as an unauthorized COMSAT ground station, though. I assume CROM will square things with the FCC if it comes to that?”

  Marianna nodded numbly. Mycroft knows everything and Jon can figure out the rest. So what did that leave for her to do?

  Find a way to get this across to Pete, that’s what. She shook her head, imagining his reaction. He hadn’t even wanted to hear about mini black holes, so now she was going to call him back with time machines? Phrased in standard bureaucratese it all sounded just plain wacky. There was no way she could hope to explain it in terms Pete would understand. Would he just take her word for it for? Hold off the attack at least until . . .

  Attack—there was that word again. Jon had used it just a moment ago to describe the problem they’d experienced getting through to Pete. She blinked. If Weathertop was under some sort of virtual assault, could a real one be far behind?

  She looked over to where Jon was sitting halfway across the room, waiting for Mycroft to finish his hack. She rose, just in time to hear a muffled roar echoing off the surrounding hills, rattling the glass of the window doors.

  She opened her mouth to speak.

  Having framed out the functionality, Knox went and sat on the sidelines while Mycroft coded it up. He tried to relax, make his mind a blank, but to no avail; now that there was nothing to talk about, there was nothing to hold the thoughts back. Leitmotifs of relativistic physics, Siberian ethnology, and Soviet political economy glided unbidden across the retina of his mind’s eye. And behind them all, the void.

  He took a deep breath and slowly released it. Now that he wanted to turn it off, his subconscious had gone into overdrive, churning up grandfather paradoxes, pivot-points in time, half-forgotten rumors, George Orwell . . . and where had that one come from?

  He looked up. Marianna was rising, turning to look out.

  She had just begun to say “Jon?” when something went Whump! and the glass doors lining the front wall of Mycroft’s greatroom imploded.

  Knox felt the flash and the blast, but what imprinted itself on his memory was the warm breeze suddenly stirring his hair, and the hundreds of tiny tempered-glass cubes now covering his lap—as if a rock had hit the windshield of a BMW doing one-ninety.

  Ears ringing, flare afterimages dancing before his eyes, Knox shook his head and looked around. Smoke from the rocket’s near miss was pouring into Weathertop’s breached greatroom. The black blot of a helicopter gunship hung against the noonday sky. How in hell had Grishin found them? They’d been so careful. Marianna had even filed a bogus flight-plan—

  Marianna! Where was she?

  Okay. She was crouching, gun drawn, behind an upended marble coffee table, looking shaken, disheveled, and almost . . . elated, as if she’d finally found a problem she could sink her teeth into. She motioned Knox and Mycroft down, then opened fire at the body-armored invaders now rappelling out of the hovering gunship and into the smoke.

  Knox needed no invitation to take cover; he was already hunkered down behind the couch. Mycroft was another story. He had risen from his seat and was standing there paralyzed, eyes darting, like a deer caught in the headlights.

  “Mycroft! Get down!”

  Shit! He wasn’t listening. The men outside had begun returning Marianna’s fire with a fusillade of outsized, slowly tumbling canisters. Mycroft, still a perfect target, was a good fifteen feet away.

  Knox took a deep breath. Keeping low as he could, he sprinted across the open space and dived.

  “Jon!”

  Knox heard Marianna’s warning shout just as he slammed into the still-frozen Mycroft—and something slammed into him. He felt a sudden stab of pain in his thigh. He tried to ignore it long enough to shove Mycroft into the well of the workstation desk, then looked down. No blood, thank God! Instead, there on the floor lay the olive-drab canister that had hit him. About the size of a beer can, and pouring out clouds of bilious yellow-gray smoke.

  “Tear-gas!” Marianna coughed, but Knox had already caught a whiff. He fought the reflexive gasp for breath, forced himself to exhale instead. Beside him, Mycroft was wheezing and gibbering in fear and fumbling with some sort of catch recessed into the wall behind the desk.

  Knox’s lungs were screaming for air. He obliged them, only to gag on the acrid smoke. Stimulating the tear ducts was the least of the gas’s effects: with his second breath, Knox was violently sick to his stomach. Heaving and retching, he raised his head in time to see a gasmasked figure marching toward him through the choking fumes, pointing an evil-looking gun-muzzle at his heart.

  In the instant before the gun fired, before the void could finally claim him for its own, it came to Knox at last: what the shadow KGB would do with a time machine.
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  Jon was down. Marianna couldn’t tell how bad. Too much smoke.

  Too much gas! Her eyes were stinging fiercely now, sinuses on fire. She tried to make out the forms of Jon and his attacker, but they were lost in a blur of tears.

  She fought down an urge to cough lest she give away her position behind the coffee-table barricade. Tear gas went straight for the mucus membranes; the only variation in physiological response was due to attitude and motivation. Marianna had plenty of both. Breathe shallow, hang on, tough it out.

  Maybe not for too much longer. Weathertop’s climate control was smart enough to respond to the influx of noxious fumes. High-speed ventilators kicked in, sucking clean, cool, humid air in through the gaping hole in the deckside wall.

  Marianna watched six gasmasked raiders, wraithlike in the smoke, take up position just outside, establishing a free-fire zone covering every inch of the room. Saw the textbook perfection of their formation disarrayed as a seventh figure barged through.

  On he strode, a black, body-armored form gaining solidity as he emerged into the clearing air of the greatroom. He stood there at the threshold, one arm in an off-white cast held stiff across his chest, the other hand clutching a machine pistol. Behind tinted assault goggles, cold black eyes tracked across the room, the pistol muzzle tracking with them. Searching for something, searching for—

  “Where is she?” Yuri’s shout echoed off the beams. Marianna’s rudimentary Russian sufficed for most of it. “Where is the little shlyukha? She’s mine!”

  Marianna gauged the distance to where Yuri stood amid the flinders of Weathertop’s window-doors. A good twenty feet away. Too far for a take-down. Yuri would be ready this time anyway. She’d make a perfect target flying through the air at him.

  She took quick inventory: nothing in the way of protective gear; her blouse barely stopped light, much less lead. Weaponry? Only the Glock she’d taken off Compliance’s lifeless body last night, and no more spare magazines, dammit! One bullet left, then, if she hadn’t miscounted. And judging by how ineffectual the others had been against the invaders, she’d need a lucky shot to do Yuri any damage at all.

  Think, Marianna! What can take down a heavy-armed man in full body armor?

  Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of a lighted screen down at the other end of the greatroom. The kitchen! Mycroft’s words came back to her: no blades, no machines, certainly—but, still, a slim chance. If only Jon hadn’t hit the reset.

  One way to find out.

  She tucked the dock in the belt of her jeans, sprang up and sprinted the length of the room. At the last instant she vaulted over the butcherblock and into a tuck-and-roll that fetched her up against the kitchen range. She scrambled back onto hands and knees and peeked up over the countertop, half expecting to see Yuri grinning down at her. But he was still halfway across the room, arguing with one of his blacksuited friends. Looked like—could that be Sasha?

  If Sasha could slow him down enough, this might have a chance of working yet.

  She looked up at the Replicator’s catalog screen. Still on the same page she’d left it, thank God! She exposed a hand just long enough to tap her selection and hit enter. The prototyper acknowledged her order. She heard a liquid hiss that she hoped was the extrusion process kicking off. The console displayed a countdown: thirty seconds.

  Thirty? She had maybe five at most.

  She had to buy more time somehow. She flung her body flat out on the countertop, arms extended, the pistol in a two handed grip. Saw Sasha moaning on the floor, and Yuri advancing confidently toward her, not even troubling to use the cover afforded by Weathertop’s freestanding oak pillars. Aim for the cast, the cast! He couldn’t be bulletproofed there.

  She pulled the trigger. And heard the click of an empty chamber.

  She straightened and hurled the pistol directly at Yuri’s head, then hugged the floor behind the counter again as a hail of fire tore through the space she’d just vacated. She could hear shouts coming from the other end of the room, could hear Yuri’s footsteps quicken. The Georgian was pursuing his own unsanctioned agenda, and his compatriots were taking exception. But not in time to save her.

  She looked pleadingly at the Replicator’s countdown display. Come on, come on! 3, 2, 1, Yes!

  The unit dinged. Heedless of the residual heat inside, she yanked the door open to see her only hope.

  It didn’t look like much: just three small heavy spheres connected to a common center by thongs of pliable plastic. In particular, it didn’t look much like the bolas she’d trained with in her six-week Indigenous Weaponry course, but it’d have to do.

  She grabbed the makeshift weapon, then ducked aside just as a second volley tore into the Replicator’s innards.

  Got to remember how this works. It can’t be all that hard if gauchos do it from horseback. Let’s see: right hand grasps the centerpoint where the three thongs come together, left hand holds one of the balls. Deep breath, then—quick!—stand. And—quick!—one horizontal whirl of the two free weights, then—hunh!—expel the breath and throw! Now hit the deck as the shots bored into the butcherblock.

  Yuri must have guessed something was amiss: he hastened to close the remaining distance to his quarry. As he did, the bolas, spinning like a three-bladed helicopter rotor, flew straight to meet him. And if she’d done it right . . .

  Yes! The whirling weights caught Yuri in mid-stride, wrapping their trailing cords around and around both legs. With his knees lashed together and no way to kill his forward momentum, the Georgian went down as if poleaxed, crashing to the floor not ten feet from where she huddled. Jarred loose by the impact, his machine pistol skittered to a halt up against the ruined Replicator.

  Extra added bonus: all of Yuri’s weight had landed on his already injured arm. He howled in agony. One fewer black hat to worry about for the moment.

  Plenty more on the way, though. Marianna was just reaching for Yuri’s machine pistol when the nets got her.

  Through a miasma of pain and nausea, Knox realized he was still alive. His long-term memory was missing several key minutes in there, though, and was frantically trying to spackle over the gaps with a montage of freeze-frames: The blacksuited invader pulling the trigger. The strangely-flared gun-muzzle ejecting some sort of sticky netting, ensnaring him. A bumpy view of a burning Weathertop, shot as he was carried on his captor’s shoulder out to the waiting Merlin and dumped unceremoniously on the copter’s floor. A wave of relief as another black-clad figure deposited Marianna—cursing, kicking, wrapped in not one but two coats of adhesive webbing—alongside him. That wave of relief being followed by another wave of nausea. And then . . .

  He remembered the rest of it now. Remembered wrenching his head around to peer out the open hatch as the gunship lifted off, hovered fifty feet off the deck and fired salvo after salvo of incendiaries. Remembered Weathertop’s autonomic systems countering with fire-suppressant foam. Mycroft, looking hazy as the smoke somehow, stumbling out of the wreckage, clambering over—or through?—the fallen timbers of the erstwhile greatroom.

  A figure in black body armor, its darkness contrasting with the off-white of a badly-damaged cast on one arm, standing in the hatchway. Raising an automatic pistol, aiming it one-handed, firing at point blank range.

  The mountains echoing the staccato gunfire. Mycroft’s limp body falling backward into the rubble. Someone—Sasha?—shouting in protest from the cockpit. Yuri’s voice making laconic reply, “Grishin gave no instructions regarding that one.”

  Oh, God, Mycroft! I’m sorry, so sorry.

  “Is the woman secure?” Sasha’s shout could barely be heard above the roar of the engine. “Arkady Grigoriyevich did give you instructions regarding her, I believe?”

  Yuri scowled. “The medic sees to her now, the bitch!”

  “And Dzhon?”

  Yuri reached down with his good hand and rolled Knox onto his back. “Your friend has puked all over himself,” he said, grinning unpleasantly. “
Otherwise, he is unharmed.”

  “See that he remains so.”

  A stranger in a white coat knelt by Knox’s side, rubbing at his neck with a cotton swab. The reek of alcohol, a sharp jab in the carotid, and oblivion claimed him again.

  37 | Dry Run

  GALINA GLANCED THROUGH the control room window at the time display suspended above the darkened observation gallery. 4:15 A.M. Up above on the surface, it was the cold, gray hour before dawn. Here in Antipode Station, in the heart of a mountain three kilometers beneath the sea, all times were the same.

  She checked the confinement-field readouts for what must be the hundredth time since arriving twelve hours ago. All nominal: the forces pinning Vurdalak to the center of its spherical prison were holding, holding as they would tomorrow, and next year, and forever. Straight ahead through the gloom, she could make out the curve of the ten-meter containment sphere itself, or at least the section of it intersecting the forward wall. The section containing the Portal.

  And, off to the left, filling one-third of the hall, an enormous cranelike mechanism crouched in the shadows, silent and immobile for now. But soon, very soon, its spidery robot arm would reach out bearing a gleaming message-probe, and, as it did, the Portal would crack open . . .

  What could be keeping Sasha? He wasn’t going to leave her to do this, this impossible thing all by herself, was he? He had promised.

  “Galya?” Sasha’s videoconference window popped open on her workstation’s display.

  “Sasha! Glory to God! It was growing so late. I was becoming afraid.”

  “No need, no need. I told you I would be back in time, yes?” Sasha smiled, but it was a tired smile, worn thin with care and exhaustion. “Now, have you reviewed the insertion procedures?”

  “Yes, yes, I have been over and over the materials ever since arriving. The designs, the documentation, the simulations, I know them all by heart now. But . . .”

  “But what, Galya?”

  “But this has never been tried, none of it. There is no way to test any of it short of actually doing it. How can we possibly be sure it will work?”