"Ready to run," one of them said aloud.
Gwen stepped to the display table. It was physically over the facility, more for symmetry's sake than anything else. Right now the graph-holos were showing standby power only. The molehole was represented by a line of white light. Her transducer was Draka class, and she slipped effortlessly into communion with the machines and their operators. It was not quite like artificial telepathy, but nearly. Tolya was directing them with crisp efficiency:
bringing it up. skip level four in thirty seconds, power on. mark.
this is the level the platform had trouble with?
Gwen asked.
yes, overlord, but we've reached it before without a problem.
Gwen nodded,
proceed, cautiously.
Seems steady enough,
the physicist thought.
one more level and then stabilize and monitor.
A technicians thought.
power overage.
Odd.
Tolya hesitated,
cut energy input, 10%.
To Gwen:
overlord, it ought to collapse in a
gravity field if we take it down, pity to lose the molehole, but—
Power overage. It's not contracting.
A pause.
Loss of symmetry, the metric is varying.
Gwen cut in.
put it on auto and evacuate.
She looked up. Tolya was staring at the console, wide-eyed.
overlord, we'll lose the facility!
Gwen spoke aloud. "Uplink the data, realtime." Crucial to get something of value out of this.
"Evacuate the settlement. And
get out!
"
Her voice took on the whipcrack of command. The others obeyed instantly, all but Tolya. The chief physicist halted for an instant in the shaft door.
"Overlord—"
"
Go.
"
Her mind grappled with the machines.
Get the data out.
The control systems were trying to shove the molehole back down into the quantum foam where it belonged, and failing. The danger was sudden, shocking, as unexpected as a grizzly heaving itself out of hibernation beneath her feet. It focused her, as nothing else had in generations. Get the scientists out; right now, they were more valuable to the Race than she was. Save the facility if she could.
That's not working.
The machines were trying to starve the molehole, but obviously the power input was coming from somewhere else. Once it rose over a tripping threshold it started expanding on its own, exponentially. Vacuum energy, perhaps.
All right, we'll try the other way.
She rapped out through her transducer:
maximize containment
fields.
If she couldn't starve it, see if it choked.
There was an almost-audible hum from beneath her feet. Several alarm systems began to indicate physical breaches in components; all this was taking place in a space smaller than her fist, ten meters or so below.
Well, that didn't work either.
Fear now, harsh and unaccustomed. The facility was lost, and her with it if she didn't get out in time.
"Out!" she rasped, and began the leap backward that would take her into the elevator shaft.
The ghouloon reacted with an equal, animal swiftness, reaching out to grab her and add the momentum of its arm to her bound.
Blackness.
***
Alarms flexed through the detection instruments of the USSNF
President Douglas.
The cruiser was waiting on minimal-power standby, most of the crew in stasis units, everything heavily stealthed. The passive sensors were fully active, however.
Captain Marjorie Starns, United States of Samothrace Naval Forces, looked down at the screen again; the implants gave her the same information, with the mathematical overtones. The images of others of the active crew appeared in front of her: her executive officer, Lyle Asmundsen, and the Strategic Studies Institute honcho, Menendez.
She called up data; Earth spun before them, as if the ship were orbiting the planet, rather than nearly a tenth of a light-year beyond Pluto. A grid lay across it, and a point flashed.
"Eastern coast of North America," she said.
"Certain it was a molehole?" The spook, George Menendez.
"Nothing else produces an event wave like that," she said. "Very brief; it cycled through its stability point, grew and collapsed. They're still working on the control—but they're getting closer. That one nearly worked. Of course, they evidently don't know what happens when you open one through a sharply-flexed spacetime matrix, but this'll give them an idea. They're not what you'd call really sharp theoretical physicists, but once you know something's possible . . ."
The intelligence agent started to shrug, then stopped and crossed himself. "Jesus," he whispered.
"That's another
Earth
they broke through to."
The captain nodded jerkily. "We've got a responsibility here," she said. "Samothrace is always uninhabited, to a very high order of probability. But any other Earth . . ."
"What was the degree of displacement?" Asmundsen said.
She consulted the machines; the theoretical breakthroughs behind them were recent, but capacity had grown swiftly.
"It'll take a while to be certain, but probably timelike negative, with a vertical temporal displacement of about . . . four centuries and a lateral of six hundred—close to the minimum possible. The event-wave track's quite clear. Something went through, and it was alive when it did."
Menendez nodded. "What can we do?"
Asmundsen smiled bleakly. "We
could
put the whole ship through on that track," he said. "If we moved farther into the solar gravity well."
Starns grunted laughter. "And put up a sign,
hurrah, we're here
for the snakes. They could follow us
en masse
in a couple of weeks. Anything we put through is going to be out of precise chronophase, and the more energetic the mass put through is, the more noticeable. Once the snakes realize what's going on . .
."
"Should we do anything?" Menendez said. "Our mission priority is information. Samothrace is waiting for this data."
The naval officers exchanged glances. "We'll have to leave now anyway," Starns replied. "They're going to detect us when we run for the transit molehole back to the Centauri system." Modern drives transferred momentum between ship and cosmos directly, but the process inescapably bled energetic quanta far above the level of vacuum energy.
"That would cover a minor insertion."
"Very minor," Menendez said thoughtfully. "We've got to be careful about giving them an extra energy source to detect. If they manage to trace whoever it was they lost, it'll give them a big jump on mastering the molehole technology."
"Besides a possible bolthole when The Day arrives," Starns said. "Plus . . . well, whoever's on the other side of that molehole doesn't deserve a live snake running around."
"It might have been a
servus,
not a
drakensis.
"
"Possible, but can we count on it? And even a
servus
might be able to set up some sort of beacon; they're not stupid just because they've been mind-gelded."
Menendez nodded decisively. "One agent, minimal equipment," he said. "I'll revive and brief my best operative—Lafarge."
"Sure he'll volunteer?" Starns said dubiously.
The spymaster smiled bleakly. "They all volunteered to be inserted on
our
Earth if necessary," he said. "Anything else will be a rose garden by comparison."
JANUARY 1, 1995 A.D.
EARTH/2.
Falling. Consciousness returned, and Gwen was falling, under gravity. Reflex snapped her hands out and they closed on rough metal, stopping her with a jar that clicked her teeth together. Something fell past her. She froze, eyes wide with shock. She keyed her transducer, but there was
nothing,
not even the location-signal from the navsats. She was out of contact with the Web; it felt like having two limbs amputated, or part of her brain.
Smells. The air was heavy with them, rank. Rusty iron. Burnt hydrocarbons, enough to gag you. A stew of chemicals, half of which she couldn't identify. Scorched metal; there was a thin hole burnt through the beam she held, as if by an energy weapon. The smell of old concrete. And—
Humans.
Many humans, and
close.
Their rank feral smell clogged her nostrils, thrumming along her nerves with remembered terror.
It was impossible, and it cleared her head.
Don't try to understand. React.
She was hanging by her hands from an iron walkway in a large dimly lit room, nearly ten meters up.
Grimy skylights overhead let in a diffuse light. Enough for her eyes to see clearly, and there were IR
sources down there, too. She could hear voices. The language had a tantalizing almost-familiar sound.
Gwen focused on it, filtering out the rumble of background noise.
"
Who dot?
" More incomprehensible shouting.
It was English, but very far from her dialect.
Samothrace? I'm in the Alpha Centauri system?
her mind gibbered. No time for that. Not the right mix, anyhow.
Figures below her; the scent grew stronger. Enough for her to distinguish between individuals, and that they were not only
Homo sapiens sapiens
but the African subspecies, and all males. Twenty-two of them. It had been four hundred years since she winded that particular scent, but perfect memory was her heritage. Heads turned up, and a bright electric light. More gabble. The light speared her, a moment of pain in her dark-adapted eyes. A shout from below, as her eyes glittered in the beam, shining cold green like a cat's—the designers had used feline genes for the nightsight system.
A weapon extended at her. Some sort of slug-gun. Another gabble of voices, and one raised in command.
Gwen took a long slow breath. No time to think, only to react. She watched the muzzle train on her, hung one-handed, then drew and fired.
The crash of a plasma discharge filled the empty building with actinic blue-white light for a second, thunder echoing back from the walls. She released her grip and fell, slapping the plasma gun back into its holster as she did.
Anything can pick up a plasma discharge.
Wherever she was, she didn't want detectors tracking her. There were about twenty of the humans, all of them with those archaic slug-guns.
But it would be pitch-dark to them . . .
Instead she drew the layer knife, a blade as long as her forearm and made of a sandwich of thin-film diamond between fillers of density-enhanced steel. The impossible strangers blundered about in their darkness, voices shrill with panic. Muzzle-flashes split the black, still directed upwards to where she had been. Jacketed metal pinged about, and there was a scream of pain as it struck someone.
Gwen landed, letting her weight drive her down into a crouch, then came erect. Poised. Began the movements of a dance taught her long ago, when she was first trained for war.
The Human-Killing Dance.
***
Detective Lieutenant Henry Carmaggio had seen a great deal in his two and half decades with the NYPD. This was a first, even since the posses moved into town back in the eighties.
"Christ," he said quietly.
The warehouse had been abandoned. That made it the perfect place for a big buy, in the opinion of the two groups who'd met here.
Bad mistake,
he thought, holding his handkerchief over his nose. He'd helped with bloaters—bodies found in apartments and whatever, some several weeks ripe—back in his uniform days. This was different, and worse, even though the . . . slaughter . . . couldn't have been more than six hours ago. It smelled like his uncle's butcher shop on East Houston back when he was a kid, only worse; his uncle would never have allowed brains to spill on the floor, or the heavy shit-stink that underlay the blood. He could identify cordite as well.
There were at least twenty bodies under plastic sheets, the basics of photography and sketching already completed—this looked like one of the times you weren't certain how many exactly until you put all the parts back together. Spent brass sparkled under the temporary lights. Everyone was here, but for once nobody who shouldn't be was walking around the crime site. Not quite everyone: the media ghouls and the brass weren't out in force quite yet. They would be soon, of course. Even in New York, this sort of multiple homicide didn't happen every day.
"Henry, we've got something very fucking
odd
here," the corpse-robber said.
Excuse me. Medical
Examiner.
The Insidious Dr. Chen herself. This crime scene was getting the full bells-and-whistles treatment.
He turned to her with a grunt; Mary Chen was a small woman, Chinese. Didn't usually use the f-word much. There had been a time, when he was new to Homicide, when he'd felt a prickle of interest at an unusual case. Now he just felt a sort of anticipatory tiredness. The ordinary ones were bad enough, and far too numerous.
"Take a look at this."
She pulled a plastic sheet back. Carmaggio squatted, shifting his Styrofoam coffee cup to his left hand, and gave a soundless whistle. He put the handkerchief back to his face.
"What happened to
him?
" Whatever it was, it'd opened up his skull and left nothing much above the eyebrows. There was a heavy cooked smell, and the inside of the empty brainpan was boiled-looking.
"Some sort of exploding bullet?" Damn, the punks always got the latest.
"Whatever it was, it splattered his brain and bits of his skull for twenty feet around," she said.
"Charred or parboiled. In fact, it cauterized the veins. Notice how there's not much blood around him? But this is the easy one. He was definitely shot with something; there's an entry hole just over his eyebrows."
She walked to the next, her feet making little
tack
sounds as the congealing blood on the bottoms of her shoes stuck to the concrete. That reminded Carmaggio, and he pulled on a pair of thin-film gloves. No sense taking chances. Christ, he remembered when only the live ones could kill you.