The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (6 page)

“You do have another option,” she said. “Save all of Humanity by performing a telepathic task no other could, and have all your many sins forgiven. Or you could spend the rest of your life in a small stone cell, with your mind trap bolted to your skull, alone with your own thoughts until you die. It’s up to you.”

“Money,” said Damnation Rue. “I want money. Stick your forgiveness. I want lots and lots of money and a full pardon. How much is it worth to you, to save all Humanity?”

“You shall have as much money as you can spend,” said the Lady Shard. “Once the mission is over.”

The Rogue Mind laughed. He didn’t trust the deal, and was already planning his escape. But no one escaped the clutches of the Lords and Ladies of Old Earth. The Lady Shard hid her smile. She hadn’t actually lied to him, as such.

And so the three parts of Humanity’s revenge on the Medusae came together at Siege Perilous, brought there by the Lord Ravensguard and the Ladies Subtle and Shard. Samuel DeClare, the very soul of song, looking fine and noble in his pure white robes, and only just a little disturbed, like a god who had come down to mix with men but could no longer quite remember why. And Christina Valdez, mostly hidden inside voluminous black robes, the hood pulled well forward to hide her face. Constantly wringing her hands, and never meeting anyone’s gaze. Now and again a tear would fall, to splash on the marble floor. And Damnation Rue, wrapped in new robes that already appeared a little shabby; a sneaky sleazy little rat of a man, picking nervously with one fingertip at the mind trap still firmly fixed to his brow. Still looking for a way out, the fool.

The Lords and Ladies of Old Earth were not cruel. They praised all three of them as though they were volunteers, and promised them that their names would be remembered for ever. Which was true enough.

“You will sing,” the Lord Ravensguard said to Samuel DeClare. “The greatest, most moving song you know.”

“You will mourn,” the Lady Subtle said to Christina Valdez. “The most tragic, heartbreaking weeping of all time.”

“And you will broadcast it all telepathically,” the Lady Shard said to Damnation Rue. “You will project it across all the open reaches of Space.”

“Just one song?” said the Man With the Golden Voice.

“I only have to mourn?” said La Llorona, the Weeping Woman.

“And after I’ve broadcast this, I get my money?” said the Rogue Mind.

“Yes and yes and yes,” said the Lords and Ladies of Old Earth. Who were not cruel, but knew all there was to know about duty and responsibility.

The three of them were taken immediately to the landing pads on top of Siege Perilous, where the starship was waiting for them. Specially adapted, with powerful force shields and a pre-programmed AI pilot. The ship was called
Sundiver
. The three of them stepped aboard, all unknowing, and strapped themselves in, and the AI pilot threw the ship up off the pads and into the sky, and then away from Old Earth and straight into the heart of the Sun.

The three inside knew nothing of this. They couldn’t see out, and the force shields protected them. The pilot told them that the time had come, and one of them sang, and one of them mourned, and one of them broadcast it all telepathically. That was a terribly sad song, reaching out from inside the heart of the Sun. Earth did not hear it. Humanity did not hear it; the Lords and Ladies saw to that. Because it really was an unbearably sad song. But the Medusae heard it. The telepathic broadcast shot out of the Sun and spread across the whole planetary system, to the outer ranges of Space where the Medusae heard it. That marvellous, telepathically broadcast, siren song.

The aliens moved forward to investigate. The Fleet fell back on all sides, to let them pass. The Medusae came to the Sun, our Sun, Old Earth’s Sun, drawn on by the siren song like so many moths to the flame. And then they plunged into the Sun, every last one of them, and it swallowed them all up without a murmur. Because as big as the swarm of the Medusae was, the Sun was so much bigger.

They never came out again.

The
Sundiver
’s force shields weren’t strong enough to last long in the terrible heat of the heart of the Sun, but they didn’t have to. The ship also carried that ancient horror, the Time Hammer. The weapon that could break Time. The AI pilot set it to repeat one moment of Time for all eternity. So that the siren song would never end. The Man With the Golden Voice sang, and the Weeping Woman mourned, and the Rogue Mind mixed them together and broadcast it, for ever and ever and ever. They’re in there now, deep in the heart of the Sun, and always will be.

We never saw the Medusae again. It could be that they died, that not even they could withstand the fierce fires of the Sun. Or it might be that they are still in there, still listening, to a song that will never end. Either way we are safe, and we have had our revenge upon them, and that is all that matters.

That is the story. Afterwards, we left Old Earth, that poor poisoned planet, our ancient home which could no longer support us. Humanity set forth in our marvellous Fleet of Dreadnaughts, looking for new worlds to settle, hopefully this time without alien masters. We keep looking. The last of Humanity, moving ever on through open Space, on the wings of a song, for ever.

ALL FOR LOVE

Algis Budrys

What if the military effort to overthrow a single alien ship should completely obsess what remains of civilization on Earth, giving a new twist to “total war”?

Algirdas Jonas Budrys was son of the representative in the USA of the Lithuanian government-in-exile, a strange political limbo which perhaps reflects in his second novel
Who?,
filmed eighteen years later, about whether a prosthetically rebuilt, and necessarily masked, man is the person whom he claims to be. Also outstanding as a novel of identity and obsession is his classic
Rogue Moon,
about successive attempts by identical teleported suicide volunteers to penetrate a lethal alien labyrinth, learning just a little more each time. “All For Love” is one of the most mordant and memorable of all his stories.

I

M
ALACHI RUNNER DIDN’T
like to look at General Compton. Compton the lean, keen, slash-gesturing semi-demagogue of a few years ago had been much easier to live with than Compton as he was now, and Runner had never had much stomach for him even then. So Runner kept his eyes firmly fixed on the device he was showing.

Keeping his eyes where they were was not as easy as it might have been. The speckled, bulbous distortion in front of him was what Headquarters, several hundred miles away under The Great Salt Lake, was pleased to refer to as an Invisible Weapons Carrier. It was hard to see because it was designed to be hard to see.

But Malachi Runner was going to have to take this thing up across several hundred miles of terrain, and he was standing too close to it not to see it. The Invisible Weapons Carrier was, in fact, a half-tone of reality. It was large enough to contain a man and a fusion bomb, together with the power for its engine and its light amplifiers. It bristled with a stiff mat of flexible-plastic light-conducing rods, whose stub ends, clustered together in a tight mosaic pointing outward in every conceivable direction, contrived to bend light around its bulk. It was presently conducting, towards Runner, a picture of the carved rock directly behind it.

The rock, here in this chamber cut under the eastern face of the Medicine Bow Mountains, was reasonable featureless; and the light-amplifiers carefully controlled the intensity of the picture. So the illusion was marred by only two things: the improbable angle of the pictured floor it was also showing him, and the fact that for every rod conducting light from the wall, another rod was conducting light from Runner’s direction, so that to his eyes the ends of half the rods were dead black.

“Invisibility,” Compton said scornfully from behind and to one side of Runner. Or, rather, he whispered and an amplifier took up the strain in raising his voice to a normal level. “But it’s not bad camouflage. You might make it, Colonel.”

“I have orders to try.” Runner would not give Compton the satisfaction of knowing that his impatience was with the means provided, not with the opportunity. The war could not possibly be permitted to continue the thirty years more given to it by Compton’s schedule. Compton himself was proof of that.

Not that proof required Compton. He was only one. There were many.

Runner glanced aside at the cadet officer who had guided him from the tramway stop to this chamber here, in one of the side passages of the siege bore that was being driven under the Medicine Bows in the direction of the alien spaceship that had dominated the world for fifty years. The boy – none of these underofficers were older than seventeen – had a face that looked as if it had been made from wet paper and then baked dry. His eyesockets were black pits from which his red eyes stared, and his hands were like chickens’ feet. His bloated stomach pushed against the wide white plastic of his sidearm belt.

He looked, in short, like most of the other people Runner had seen here since getting off the tram. As he was only seventeen, he had probably been born underground, somewhere along the advancing bore, and had never so much as seen sunlight, much less eaten anything grown under it. He had been bred and educated – or mis-educated; show him something not printed in Military Alphabet and you showed him the Mayan Codex – trained and assigned to duty in a tunnel in the rock; and never in his life had he been away from the sound of the biting drills.

“You’re not eager to go, Colonel?” Compton’s amplified whisper said. “You’re Special Division, so of course this isn’t quite your line of work. I know your ideas, you Special Division men. Find some way to keep the race from dehumanizing itself.” And now he chose to make a laugh, remembering to whisper it. “One way to do that would be to end the war before another generation goes by.”

Runner wondered, not for the first time, if Compton would find some way to stop him without actually disobeying the Headquarters directive ordering him to cooperate. Runner wondered, too, what Compton would say if he knew just how eager he was for the mission – and why. Runner could answer the questions for himself by getting to know Compton better, or course. There was the rub.

Runner did not think he could ever have felt particularly civilized towards anyone who had married his fiancée. That was understandable. It was even welcome. Runner perversely cherished his failings. Not too perversely, at that – Runner consciously cherished every human thing remaining to the race.

Runner could understand why a woman would choose to marry the famous Corps of Engineers general who had already chivvied and bullied the Army – the organizing force of the world – into devoting its major resources to this project he had fostered. There was no difficulty in seeing why Norma Brand might turn away from Malachi Runner in favour of a man who was not only the picture of efficiency and successful intellect but also was thought likely to be the saviour of Humanity.

But Compton several years later was—

Runner turned and looked; he couldn’t spend the rest of the day avoiding it. Compton, several years later, was precisely what a man of his time could become if he was engaged in pushing a three hundred mile tunnel through the rock of a mountain chain, never knowing how much his enemy might know about it, and if he proposed to continue that excavation to its end, thirty years from now, whether the flesh was willing to meet his schedules or not.

Compton’s leonine head protruded from what was very like a steam cabinet on wheels. In that cabinet were devices to assist his silicotic lungs, his sclerotic blood vessels, and a nervous system so badly deranged that even several years ago Runner had detected the great man in fits of spastic trembling. And God knew what else might be going wrong with Compton’s body that Compton’s will would not admit.

Compton grinned at him. Almost simultaneously, a bell chimed softly in the control panel on the back of the cabinet. The cadet aide sprang forward, read the warning in some dial or other and made an adjustment in the settings of the control knobs. Compton craned his neck in its collar of loose grey plastic sheeting and extended his grin to the boy. “Thank you, Cadet. I thought I was starting to feel a little dizzy.”

“Yes, sir.” The aide went back to his rest position.

“All right, Colonel,” Compton said to Runner as though nothing had happened. “I’ve been curious to see this gimmick of yours in operation ever since it was delivered here. Thank you. You can turn it off now. And after that, I’ll show
you
something you’ve never seen.”

Runner frowned for a moment. Then he nodded to himself. He crawled under the weapons carrier. From that close it was no longer “invisible”, only vaguely dizzying to the eye. He opened the hatch and turned off the main switch.

Compton could only have meant he was going to show him the ship.

Of course, he had seen films of it often enough. Who had not? The Army had managed to keep spy-drones flying above the Mississippi plain. The ship ignored them unless they took on aggressive trajectories.

Presumably there was some limit to the power the ship felt able to expend. Or perhaps the ship simply did not care what Earthmen might learn from watching it; perhaps it underestimated them.

This latest in the long chain of Compton’s command bunkers, creeping mole-like towards the ship, was lighted a sickly orange-yellow. Runner seemed to recall a minor scandal in the Quarter-master Corps. Something about a contractor who had bribed or cozened a Corps officer into believing that yellow light duplicated natural sunlight. Contractor and misled officer were no doubt long dead in one of the labour battalions at the bore face, but some use for the useless lights had had to be found. And so here they were, casting their pall, just as if two lives and two careers had not already gone towards settling the account.