Marooned in Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  “Looks bad, General. They’re way ahead of our estimates. Some of them are already operating north of us.” That much was true.

  “My God. I’ve got to get back to command, lady. These interrogations will have to wait.”

  Lu smiled crookedly. The other still didn’t get the point. “You do that. Might as well leave these people alone anyway.” But the other was already walking away from her. He waved acknowledgment and got into the field car.

  To the north she heard tac air, scrambled up from the Livermore Valley. Something flashed white, and far hills stood in momentary silhouette. That was one bobbler that wouldn’t get them this night.

  Della looked over the civilian encampment as though pondering what to do next. She was careful to give no special attention to the banana wagons. Apparently, they thought their diversion successful—at least she remained unbobbled.

  She walked back to her personal chopper, which had come in with the interrogation teams. Lu’s aircraft was smaller, only big enough for pilot, commander, and gunner. It bristled with sensor equipment and rocket pods. The tail boom might be painted with LA paisley, but these were her own people on this machine, veterans of the Mongolian campaign. She pulled herself onto the command seat and gave the pilot an emphatic up-and-away sign. They were off the ground immediately.

  Della ignored this efficiency; she was already trying to get her priority call through to Avery. The little monochrome display in front of her pulsed red as her call stayed in the queue. She could imagine the madhouse Livermore Central had become the last few minutes. But, damn you, Avery, this is not the time to forget I come first!

  Red. Red. Red. The call pattern disappeared, and the display was filled with a pale blob that might have been someone’s face. “Make it quick.” It was Hamilton Avery’s voice. Other voices, some almost shouting, came from behind him.

  She was ready. “No proof, but I know they’ve infiltrated right up to the Mission Pass Gate. I want you to lay a thousand-meter bobble just south of the CP—”

  “No! We’re still charging. If we start using it now, there won’t be juice for rapid fire when we really need it, when they get over the ridgeline.”

  “Don’t you see? The rest is diversion. Whatever I’ve found here must be important.”

  But the link was broken; the screen glowed a faint, uniform red. Damn Avery and his caution! He was so afraid of Paul Hoehler, so certain the other would figure out a way to get into Livermore Valley, that he was actually making it possible for the enemy to do so.

  She looked past the instrument displays. They were about four hundred meters up. Splashes of blue-white light from the pole lamps lit the detention area; the camp looked like some perfect model. There was little apparent motion, though the pilot’s thermal scanner showed that some of the armor was alive, awaiting orders. The civilian camp was still and bluish white, little tents sitting by scarcely larger wagons. The darker clumps around the fires were crowds of people.

  Della swallowed. If Avery wouldn’t bobble the camp…

  She knew, without looking, what her ship carried. She had stun bombs, but if those wagons were what she thought, they would be shielded. She touched her throat mike and spoke to her gunner. “Fire mission. Rockets on the civilian wagons. No napalm.” The people around the campfires would survive. Most of them.

  The gunner’s “Roger” sounded in her ear. The air around the chopper glowed as if a small sun had suddenly risen behind them, and a roar blotted out the rotor thupping. Looking almost into the exhaust of the rocket stream dimmed all other lights to nothing.

  Or almost nothing. For an instant, she glimpsed rockets coming up from below…

  Then their barrage exploded. In the air. Not halfway to the target. The fireballs seemed to splash across some unseen surface. The chopper staggered as shrapnel ripped through it. Someone screamed.

  The aircraft tipped into an increasing bank that would soon turn them upside down. Della didn’t think, didn’t really notice the pilot slumped against his controls. She grabbed her copy of the stick, pulled, and jabbed at the throttle. Ahead she saw another copter, on a collision path with theirs. Then the pilot fell back, the stick came free, and her aircraft shot upward, escaping both ground and the mysterious other.

  The gunner crawled up between them and looked at the pilot. “He’s dead, ma’am.”

  Della listened, and also listened to the rotors. There was something ragged in their rhythm. She had heard worse. “Okay. Tie him down.” Then she ignored them and flew the helicopter slowly around what had been the Mission Pass Gate.

  The phantom missiles from below, the mysterious helicopter—all were explained now. Near the instant her gunner fired his rockets, someone had bobbled the Pass. She circled that great dark sphere, a perfect reflection of her lights following her. The bobble was a thousand meters across. But this hadn’t been Avery relenting: Along with the civilian and freighter encampment, the bobble also contained the Gate’s command post. Far below, Authority armor moved around the base, like ants suddenly cut off from the nest.

  So. Perfect timing, once again. They had known she was going to attack, and known precisely when. Tinker communication and intelligence must be the equal of the Peace’s. And whoever was down there had been important. The generator they carried must have been one of the most powerful the Tinkers had. When they had seen the alternative was death, they had opted out of the whole war.

  She looked across at her chopper’s reflection, seemingly a hundred meters off. The fact that they had bobbled themselves instead of her aircraft was evidence that the Hoehler technique—at least with small power sources—was not very good for moving targets. Something to remember.

  At least now, instead of a hundred new deaths on her soul, the enemy had burdened her with just one, her pilot. And when this bobble burst—the minimum ten years from now or fifty—the war would be history. A flick of the eye to them, and there would be no more killing. She suddenly envied these losers very much.

  She banked away and headed for Livermore Central.

  35

  “Now!” Wili’s command came abruptly, just seconds after Rosas had loosened the false wall. Mike crashed his heels one last time into the wood. It gave way, bananas and timber falling with it.

  And suddenly there was light all around them. Not the blue-point lights the Authority had strung around the campground, but an all-enveloping white glare, brighter than any of the electrics.

  “Run now. Run!” Wili’s voice was faint from within the compartment. The undersheriff grabbed Allison and urged her across the field. Paul started to follow them, then turned back at Wili’s call.

  An Authority tank swiveled on its treads, its turret turning even faster. Behind him an unfamiliar voice shouted for him to stop. Mike and Allison only ran faster. And the tank disappeared in a ten-meter-wide silver sphere.

  They ran past civilians cowering in the nebulous glare, past troopers and Authority equipment that one after another were bobbled before they could come into action.

  Two hundred meters is a long way to sprint. It is more than long enough to think, and understand.

  The glare all around them was only bright by comparison with night. This was simply morning light, masked and diffused by fog. Wili had bobbled the campground through to the next morning, or the morning after that—to some later time when the mass of the Authority’s forces would have moved away from the Gate they now thought blocked. Now he was mopping up the Peacers that had been in the bobble. If they moved fast, they could be gone before the Peace discovered what had happened.

  When Mike and Allison reached the armored carriers, they were unguarded—except for a pair of three-meter bobbles that gleamed on either side of them. Wili must have chosen these just because their crews were standing outside.

  Mike clambered up over the treads and paused, panting. He turned and pulled Allison onto the vehicle. “Wili wants us to drive these to the wagons.” He threw the open hatch and shrugged helple
ssly. “Can you do it?”

  “Sure.” She caught the edge of the hatch and swung down into the darkness. “C’mon.”

  Mike followed awkwardly, feeling a little stupid at his question. Allison was from the age of such machines, when everyone knew how to drive.

  The smell of lubricants and diesel oil was faint perfume in the air. There was seating for three. Allison was already in the forward position, her hands moving tentatively over the controls. There were no windows and no displays—unless the pale-painted walls were screens. Wait. The third crew position faced to the rear, into formidable racks of electronic equipment. There were displays there.

  “See here,” said Allison. He turned and looked over her shoulder. She turned a handle, firing up the crawler’s turbine. The whine ascended the scale, till Mike felt it through the metal walls and floor as much as through his ears.

  Allison pointed. There was a display system on the panel in front of her. The letters and digits were bar-formed, but legible. “That’s fuel. It’s not full. Should be able to go at least fifty kilometers, though. These others, engine temperature, engine speed—as long as you have auto-driver set you’d best ignore them.

  “Hold tight.” She grabbed the driving sticks and demonstrated how to control the tracks. The vehicle slewed back and forth and around.

  “How can you see out?”

  Allison laughed. “A nineteenth-century solution. Bend down a little further.” She tapped the hull above her head. Now he saw the shallow depression that ringed the driver’s head, just above the level of her temples. “Three hundred and sixty degrees of periscopes. The position can be adjusted to suit.” She demonstrated.

  “Okay. You say Wili wants both the crawlers over to the banana wagons? I’ll bring the other one.” She slipped out of the driver’s seat and disappeared through the hatch.

  Mike stared at the controls. She had not turned off the engine. All he had to do was sit down and drive. He slid into the seat and stuck his head through the ring of periscope viewers. It was almost as if he had stood up through the hatch; he really could see all around.

  Straight ahead, Naismith stood by the wagons. The old man was tearing at the side panels, sending his “precious bananas” cascading across the ground. To the left a puff of vapor came from the other armored carrier, and Mike heard Allison start its engine.

  He looked past the lower edge of the periscope ring at the drive sticks. He touched the left tread control, and the carrier jerked incrementally till it was lined up on the wagons. Then he pressed both sticks, and he was moving forward! Mike accelerated to what must have been six or seven meters per second, as fast as a man could run. It was just like in the games. The trip was over in seconds. He cautiously slowed the carrier to a crawl the last few meters, and turned in the direction Paul motioned. Then he was stopped. The turbine’s keening went on.

  Allison had already opened the rear of the other vehicle and was sliding the bulky electronics gear out onto the dirt. Mike wondered at the mass of equipment the Peacers seemed to need in these vehicles. All of Sy Wentz’s police electronics would fit in one of the carriers with room to spare. “Leave the comm and sense equipment aboard, Allison. Wili may be able to interface it.” While Allison concentrated on the equipment she knew, Mike and Paul worked to move Wili’s processor and the Tinker communications gear out of the banana wagons.

  The boy came out of the gutted wagon. He was off the system now, but still seemed dazed, his efforts to help ineffectual. “I have used almost all, Paul. I can’t even talk to the net anymore. If we can’t use the generators on these”—he waved at the carriers—“we are dead.”

  That was the big question. Without foreplanning there wasn’t a chance, but Paul had brought power interfaces and connector cables. They were based on Allison’s specs. If, as with many things, the Peacers had not changed the old standards, then they had a chance.

  They could almost fool themselves that the morning was quiet and still. Even the insects were silent. The air around them got steadily brighter, yet the morning fog was still so thick that the sun’s disk was not visible. Far away, much farther than the ridgeline, they heard aircraft. Once or twice a minute there was a muffled explosion. Wili had started the Tinker forces on their invasion of the Livermore Valley, but from the north edge, where he had told them to mass through the night. Hopefully the diversion would be some help.

  From the corner of his eyes, Mike had the constant impression of motion half-seen, of figures all across the campground working at projects similar to their own. He glanced across the field and saw the reason for the illusion: Wili had cast dozens of bobbles of varying sizes, all in a few seconds’ time after the big, overnight bobble had burst. Some must hold just one or two men. Others, like the ones he had put around the main civilian campsite and the Peacer outpost, were more than fifty meters across. And in every one of them he could see the reflections of the four of them, working frantically to finish the transfer before the Peacers down in the Valley realized that the one big bobble had already burst.

  It seemed longer, but the work took only minutes. Leaving most of the power cells behind, they didn’t have more than fifty kilos of hardware. The processor and the larger bobble generator went into one carrier, while their own satellite comm equipment and a smaller bobbler went into the other. It was an incongruous sight, the Tinker gear sitting small and innocent in the green-painted equipment racks. Allison stood up in the now-spacious carrier and looked at Paul. “Are you satisfied?”

  He nodded.

  “Then it’s smoke-test time.” There was no humor in her voice. She turned a switch. Nothing smoked; displays flickered to life. Wili gave a whoop. The rest of the interfacing was software. It would take unaided programmers weeks. Hopefully, Paul and Wili could do it while they were on the move.

  Allison, Paul, and Wili took one carrier. Mike—under protest—took the other. There was plenty of room for everyone and all the equipment in just one of the vehicles. “They expect to see rovers in pairs, Mike. I know it.”

  “Yes,” said Allison. “Just follow my lead, Mike; I won’t do anything fancy.”

  The two vehicles moved slowly out of the parking area, cautiously negotiating the field of mirrored tombstones. The whine of their engines drowned the sound of aircraft and occasional explosions that came from far beyond the ridgeline. As they neared the crest, the fog thinned and morning blue was visible. They were far enough from the parking area that—even without their electronics working—they might be mistaken for Peacers.

  Then they were starting downward, past the last of the outer defenses. Soon they would know about the inner ones, and know if Allison’s news, now fifty years old, was still the key to the destruction of the Peace.

  36

  Della Lu caught up on the situation reports as she ate breakfast. She wore a fresh jumpsuit, and her straight hair gleamed clean and black in the bright fluorescent lights of the command center. One might think she had just returned from a two-week vacation—not from a night spent running all over the hills, trying to pin down guerrilla positions.

  The effect was calculated. The morning watch had just come on. They were for the most part rested, and had none of the harried impatience of the team that had been down here all night. If she were going to exercise command—or even influence—upon them, she must appear cool, analytical. And inside, Della almost was. She had taken time to clean up, time even for a short nap. Physically, things had been much worse in Mongolia. Mentally? Mentally, she was beginning, for the first time in her life, to feel outclassed.

  Della looked across the ranked consoles. This was the heart of the Livermore command, which itself was the heart of operations worldwide. Before this morning she had never been in this room. In fact, she and most of the occupants didn’t know quite where it was. One thing was sure: It was far underground, proof against nukes and gas and such old-fashioned things. Almost equally sure: It was within a few dozen meters of the Livermore bobble generator and
its fusion power source. On some of the displays she could see command language for directing and triggering that generator. There was no point in having such control any more or less secure than the generator itself. They would both be in the deepest, most secret hole available.

  A situation board covered most of the front wall. Right now it showed a composite interpretation of the land around Livermore, based on satellite reconnaissance. Apparently, the driving programs were not designed for other inputs. Reports from the men on the ground were entered on the display by computer clerks working at terminals connected to the command database. So far this morning, the board did not show any conflicts between the two sources of information. Enemy contact had been about zip for the last hour.

  The situation was different elsewhere in the world: There had been no Authority presence in Europe or Africa for days. In Asia, events much like those in North America had taken place. Old Kim Tioulang was nearly as clever as Hamilton Avery, and he had some of the same blind spots. His bobble generator was just north of Beijing. The smaller displays showed the status of the conflict around it. The Chinese Tinkers hadn’t built as many bobblers as their American cousins, and they hadn’t penetrated as close to the heart of the Beijing complex. But it was late night there, and an attack was under way. The enemy had surprised K.T. just as it had the Livermore forces. The two bobble generators that were the backbone of Peacer power were both under attack, a simultaneous attack that seemed purposefully coordinated. The Tinkers had communications at least as good as the Authority’s. At least.

  According to the main display, sunrise was due in fifteen minutes, and a heavy fog covered most of the Valley. There were several possible enemy locations, but for now the Peace was holding off. The Tinker bobblers were extremely effective at close range; during the night, the Authority had lost more than twenty percent of its tank force. Better to wait till they had more information on the enemy. Better to wait till Avery let them use the big bobbler. Then they could take them on by the dozens, and at any range.