The World Game

by Allen Charles

  “Oooh! Peepers! You swore!”

  “Since when did that stop you, Charonelle?”

  “You’re the one who said buzzing was a waste of time at this stage.”

  “It was a lone stand of individual protest.”

  “Against what?”

  “Against boring, copycat performances that don’t come close to the last two.”

  “But Peepers, you’ve completely missed the beauty of this act. This was a group act that was driven by completely different emotion sets than the other two, which were purely motivated. This orgy had elements of violence, hate, lust... well just about everything you could name, except love.”

  “Exactly, Charonelle, and in experiencing it I was not entertained in the common sense of the term. I felt like I was licking out the dregs from a filthy trash can, had I only a tongue. I can handle a good, messy death, or a predetermined rape and murder, but this was just not my cup of tea, so I buzzed it in protest.”

  “Ohhh... Peepers, if you had a head I’d tell you to pull it in! Look at the warning board. All green and just normal chit chat on the network. You must be the only one who took offence at the orgy.”

  “Charonelle! I was not offended, just disgusted and in fact the only high light of the whole rancid event was the way Sheila and her team put a stop to it, so their estimate has gone up even more in my eyes.”

  “What eyes!”

  “You know what I mean, you cow!”

  CHAPTER 58

  On the fragment

  “Look! There!” Shaw pointed to a tiny ripple in the aggregated sand, a small fountain erupting and curving away into space, even as he spoke.

  “Zardooz is being very cautious as he breaks through the surface,” Said Fuller. “I’ll bet that he is crying inside about even this small disturbance that reveals his intentions.”

  The bore head of the RABI slowly revealed itself until the exit hole was about a foot in diameter. The plume of debris was a sure giveaway, but Zardooz had not anticipated that issue. All he could see was his schematic of the node area based upon the last known surface conditions and the sensory feedback from the RABI telling him that the foremost bore heads were clear of rock.

  He withdrew the RABI back down the bore hole and hoped that the surfacing of the RABI had not been noticed by the Americans.

  The repair bot was ready to go, but it had an extra little surprise as its first job. Zardooz had loaded a small anti personnel grenade in the bot’s manipulator arm and positioned it ahead, arms up, so a flick of the bot’s articulated joint would toss the grenade ahead, out of the hole. Just in case.

  Fuller and Shaw had not been sitting by idle. Fuller was anticipating that Zardooz would do something violent to ensure the node area was clear. The hole was distant enough from the node that whatever Zardooz would come up with would not further damage the observation post. Fuller did not want to scare Zardooz back down the hole. He wanted the bot and the node replacement it carried.

  The pair took the cover of the nano fiber case they had put over the obs post and wedged it down next to the new bore hole. Two cables were attached to the corners and now the pair moved well away from the hole and waited, ready to drag the cover over the hole to prevent the bot from escaping. They lay prone behind rocky outcrops as protection from whatever Zardooz may throw at them.

  “Shaw, head down. He may do a recce first or just blast away blind. I’m betting a scope first, otherwise he might damage his obs post. Look for any tiny movement around the edge of the hole. If you see it, pull back into cover.”

  “He may see the cover on the obs post, sir. And possibly the trap over the hole, even though we put sand on it with static charge. The mono filament cables blend right in, but there are enough tell tales to warn him.”

  “Doesn’t matter, we’re committed and he has to make a move or remain blind... There! Head down!” Fuller commanded.

  They both ducked behind their cover rocks as a tendril of fiber optic slid over the rim and peered around like a curious caterpillar. First it looked away from the obs post, then made its way around the rim of the hole. It actually slid over the disguised cover and Zardooz missed the textural change. He wasn’t concentrating inches or feet in front. He was looking for the enemy. He ran the full circle and then the tendril stopped moving as he saw the cover over the obs post. They were there. Where? Where?

  The tendril started around again more slowly. There! He saw scuff marks in the sand aggregate leading towards a large rock outcrop. “Got you!” he said to himself.

  There was no gravity to return a lobbed grenade to the surface, so he had to calculate the detonation delay and angle of projection to take the grenade past and over the back of the rock before it showered its deadly shrapnel in all directions. The bot would make short work of the cover on the obs post, but now he thanked his enemies for protecting it from the shrapnel. The node was already damaged and it didn’t matter if he damaged it further in ridding himself of some Americans. He prayed that the US President was behind the rock.

  Calculations completed, he instructed the bot and trained the tendril on the outcrop. The bot flicked the grenade in precisely the correct direction. In slow motion the grenade travelled across the terrain until it exploded in a blinding, soundless flash beyond the outcrop, causing a huge dust cloud and ricocheting shrapnel to jettison off into space. He looked for evidence of shredded bodies but could discern nothing. He was committed now and started the bot out of the hole, activating two other cameras on its carapace as it emerged.

  Behind two other outcrops perpendicular to the false trail Fuller had put down, the pair hauled on their cables and covered the hole. The bot appeared to swivel frantically, looking for the source of the threat, but not transmitting to Zardooz the reality of the entrapment.

  It rolled about trying to get back to the hole which was now solidly blocked. Zardooz watched the three views, scanning between them. He saw the exposed cables that had flicked up dust trails and the two outcrops where Fuller and Shaw were concealed. He had no more weapons to deploy, just the bot’s tool set, which could be used defensively at close range. He had to get the Americans close in. Then he would slice them with the welder.

  While he kept his enemies occupied he would bring the RABI back up to cut through whatever covered the hole and then recover the bot as well. He commanded the bot to back up to the node and replace the camera as intended, all the while surveilling for any threat from the Americans.

  The bot raised its cutting arm to slice away the container cover that Fuller and Shaw had dropped over the obs post. The carbon nano fibre was designed to resist the most extreme conditions imaginable. The Iranian regime had not seen anything like it and the little bot’s cutting torch was no match for the impermeable covering. The patch heated white hot but retained its integrity. In fact the structure of the covered post was being damaged by the intense heat and Zardooz was losing his cool in frustration. Instead of stopping and backing off, he continued attempting to cut through and ignored the fuel warning for the repair bot’s torch. Designed for small jobs, it flamed out and left the bot defenseless.

  Fuller was hoping and watching for this. “Move now!” He yelled in his comms to Shaw. They jetted up and swept across to the bot, maintaining constant altitude despite the fragment’s spin. They netted the bot with a cargo net Fuller had brought along for the purpose, all the while Zardooz trying to make the machine run away, an impossible task under zero gravity.

  “Gotcha!” said Fuller. The pair put down anchor pitons and cables then turned off their suit thrusters. The bot was popping out all sorts of tools trying to cut free from the net. A few strands started to part as an exceptionally hard bladed cutter was deployed.

  “Oh no you don’t!” exclaimed Shaw as he whipped a piton weighted cable around in an arc to connect with the bot’s articulated arm behind the net. Like wrestling a lion and avoiding the sharp cutting claw, Shaw held the netting to the arm as he wound the piton cable round and rou
nd. Now trapped by the net and the grounding cables, the bot was going nowhere and its cutting arm was trapped.

  Fuller picked up the tendril camera and pressed it to his helmet for sound conduction.

  “Zardooz! Give it up! We cannot be fighting any more. There is nothing left to fight over. There is no one left to fight! Join us and live!”

  On the bot a small cover slid up revealing a view screen. Zardooz looked out at Fuller from the screen. Words started to appear. Zardooz typed, “I can hear you. You cannot hear me. You know I am here so there is no point in my hiding the fact. As far as I and all the people down here with me are concerned, the war will never be over, even if it is just one of us and one of you. The Great Satan will be destroyed and Allah will bring back all the faithful. Leave this place or I will destroy your vessel and you with it. I will detonate our last nuclear device and become a martyr for the sake of Allah. You have one hour to leave.”

  Fuller and Shaw looked at each other astonished. This fanatic was going to blow everyone to bits when there was nothing left? Fuller called up Zardooz’s profile on his suit screen and quickly looked it over again. There was nothing that indicated suicidal tendencies and to the contrary, Zardooz exhibited an uncanny knack for staying alive in a dangerous environment and a tendency towards corruption and the gathering wealth and luxury. This was a bluff. It had to be. He was betting their lives on it.

  CHAPTER 59

  Aboard Sheila’s shuttle.

  Sheila concluded her explanation to the assembled passengers who were looking somewhat shamefaced in the main. “... and that will give us several months of survival time aboard this ship while we look for a more permanent solution. Questions?”

  “You have made some huge assumptions in your plan. What if you are wrong?” A small woman from the Space City maintenance team asked.

  “Then we are just as dead then as we would be by doing nothing now.”

  The woman screwed up her mouth and then admitted, “I guess you have a point there.”

  “Every one either strap in or take the position I assigned you. We get one shot at this.”

  Sheila buckled into the pilot’s seat and looked over the controls. There was just a minute amount of reaction mass left in the main tank. Then there was a small auxiliary tank, like the last emergency gallon in an old internal combustion car, that had been overlooked because it had never been called upon in all the decades of space travel.

  Fortunately the shuttle was facing the right direction for the attempt and there would be nothing wasted on thruster adjustment. She was going to move in close to the anti-matter coated fleet. All the particulate anti-matter had now been coalesced by the fleet or attracted by the gravity of the moon. The fragments were long gone past as had the flailing Skyhook remains, so they were safe as long as they kept some distance from the fleet.

  She was going to take her time over the approach, using the little remaining in the main tank to decelerate relative to the fleet until it ran out. She had calculated that the auxiliary tank would be sufficient to complete the stop and the remainder would be used for a very slow approach back to the fleet, with enough mass left to stop them relative at about one kilometer distance.

  This journey was going to take them some days, so during that time they were going to find a way to get past the anti-matter coating on the ships. With no comms from the fleet she had no idea if they were trapped inside alive or all dead.

  Getting past the anti-matter. Now THAT was the rub!

  It was four days into the plan. Sheila sat with a group of scientists and engineers as they analyzed the problem from the beginning and evaluated the properties of anti-matter. If one had to be stranded in space and facing such a problem, there was no better brains trust than these multi-discipline trained Space City scientists. They all had mundane daily tasks to perform on the city, like assistant cook, but they were all Doctorate level qualified professionals in at least one or more mathematical, science or engineering areas.

  Even the big troublemaker had relented and apologized to Sheila. He was out of the diaper and back in youniform with his buddy and all his friends had followed suit. It was he who launched the conversation.

  “I had some contact with the people who built the AMD. There was discussion about an instability in the matter-anti-matter self annihilation equations. They found a small factor that would not balance. The guys I was drinking with were worried about it and as I was cleared for Space City and we were looking at alternative power for the City using MAM as an energy source, they asked me to go over their calcs against our Space City math.” He paused for a squirt of water. “Our process was fully internal and totally controlled, I guess you would compare it to a nuclear reactor of old times. We could theoretically control the process inside a magnetic bottle. Their idea for the AMD was simply crude. Throw anti-matter at matter and duck, so yes, there was an imbalance in their calculations. That error caused, for want of a better analogy, the equivalent of a nuclear meltdown that consumed everything in its path. That’s where the analogy stops.

  My recommendation to them was to stop and go back to square one.” He shrugged his huge shoulders. “I guess they didn’t take my advice.”

  “Thank you Graham,” Sheila gave him a warm smile. “Is there any insight you have that could head us towards a solution?”

  “People, I kinda let go when the shit hit the fan and for that I apologize. I guess I am carrying a load of guilt that I didn’t stop them, but I never believed they would build an AMD let alone use it. I got sauced and lost it badly, so keep the booze away from me. That said, our research actually reached a practical test at particle level. We successfully collided one atom of positive matter gold with one of antimatter. The resultant energy release was contained in a powerful magnetic bottle effect using the almost absolute zero of space to cool the superconductor windings, also of pure gold, of the field generators. That collision delivered enough energy to power New York city for a week and then some.

  What we did discover however, that may be useful here, is the behaviour of anti-matter when in contact with noble metals, such as gold, compared with its destructive effect on minerals and lower metals. The astonishing result of our experiment was that the collision did not destroy the two atoms. They reversed themselves and we still had two particles AND all that energy. The anti-matter became positive matter and vice-versa. We could not explain the phenomenon. When we introduced a pure gold surface to the inverted anti-matter atom it behaved like a ferrous magnet and was repelled away, even though one would think the opposites would attract.”

  Sheila was thinking intensely and blurted out, “But we could use that here.” She tapped a stylus on her pad as she synthesized the boolean logic patterns that could tame the anti-matter. “If we can reproduce on a larger scale what Graham has described, then not only can we penetrate the anti-matter and survive, but we could power our systems for all eternity with the energy released.”

  “We need to understand what is happening first. This phenomenon is possibly the imbalance in the first set of equations. They never saw our results or had a practical test. We could make things worse.”

  “I think we have concluded that we couldn’t be in a bigger mess in all creation.” chided Sheila, “But we have a little time in hand. Let’s insert these variables and do the math again.”

  The group were heads down over a dimage of a cylindrical shape large enough to hold a second cylinder that itself could hold one man.

  Once they had adjusted the equations by allowing an illegal mass retention factor that flew in the face of all known physics, the equations balanced. With working math loaded into the ship’s small computer, Sheila had run a synthesis on one more important unknown that was critical to their success. The question was the interactive behaviour of the inverted anti-matter when placed in contact with first generation anti-matter. She ran the calculations three times, changing variables as they might change in reality. The invert anti-matter would intera
ct with regular anti-matter like the real world of positive matter. It would be “normal” to its counterpart. The attempt could proceed.

  First task was to make the two cylinders out of pure gold. Fortunately for Sheila and her group, gold foil was the main component of solar reflectors that gathered the light of the sun for energy. There was no shortage of these aboard and on the skin of the shuttle. Sheila went EVA with one of her team and stripped two of the panels from the outside of the ship. The panels were too large to fit through the air lock so she stripped out the gold foil and let the framework drift away with a gentle shove.

  “Littering!” she laughed.

  The engineers constructed the two cylinders out of the thin foil. They reinforced the flimsy shells by rolling excess foil into more substantial wire and fusing it solid with laser torches. They made the wire into circular hoops that fitted snugly into the outer cylinder to hold its shape. There was no question of welding it in as the foil was too thin to take the risk. Finally, they had two solid looking cylinders that would collapse at the slightest bump.

  Sheila and the now very helpful Graham shifted the cylinders outside the shuttle and tethered the smaller one. The pair took the larger cylinder and jetted slowly toward the fleet, shiny with anti-matter coating one thousand meters away. They would launch the cylinder towards the nearest ship at very low relative velocity. Upon collision with the ship the gold cylinder should, in theory turn into anti-matter gold and stay attached to the ship. The anti-matter gold effect should be, in theory, a surface effect that would not enter the open end of the cylinder, contrary to the behaviour with mineral and base metal contact. In this respect the anti-matter behaved like a traditional electric charge when in contact with noble metals.

  Once in place, Shelia was going to climb in to the smaller cylinder and be launched into the mouth of the larger cylinder. In theory, that’s three “in theories”, the regular gold cylinder should hold exactly in the center of the outer cylinder by the repulsion effect of the outer layer which was more like a non ferrous magnetic effect than an electric charge. The whole thing was full of contradictions but the equations worked. Once inside the larger cylinder, Sheila would be able to use a laser torch from a central point on the cylinder end and burn through into the air lock of the ship where they had placed the cylinders. She hoped not to kill anyone still alive on board.