Engine City (30 page)

“We didn’t,” said Matt. “None of us did.” His glare focused on the saurs. “Am I right?”

“We did not know that there was a god in the world,” said Salasso. “And we did not know what it was capable of.”

“All right,” said Matt. He turned again to the Multiplier. “What I thought we were doing was surveying the planet and simultaneously generating a degree of paranoia and mass hysteria which would at least weaken the credibility and unity of the New Babylon regime, and thus give us more possible points of contact and support. What did you think we were doing?”

“Very much the same,” said Mr. Orange. “With the addition that we knew that the mind of the world New Earth would generate many real and virtual images which would be quite unpredictable and uncontrollable and which could result in much military and political instability such as coups and wars and so forth, thus degrading the system’s defenses to a point which would enable an easy assault by your and our main forces.”

“
That
was your idea of an elegant invasion plan?”

“Yes,” said the Multiplier. “It would have led to large numbers of deaths on the opposing side without great risk to our forces.”

“We were kind of hoping,” said Matt, “to accomplish our objectives without large numbers of deaths on any side.”

“Ah,” sighed Mr. Orange. “That makes a difference.”

He scurried back to the other aliens and rapidly conferred by touch, then rotated to face the humans and saurs again.

“Death is different for us because our memories are distributed. It is not easy for us to bear in mind at all times that this is not so for you.”

“Oh yes,” said Ramona. “You’ll have noticed how careful humans are to avoid killing each other in large numbers. Just out of idle curiosity—I had the impression you had picked up from Matt’s memories some idea of something similar that happened on Earth—all kinds of strange phenomena that taunted and baffled the military forces and excited the populace. How did that not lead to wars and coups and so forth?”

“Did it not?” said Mr. Orange. “We had not formed from the Matt Cairns’ memories an impression that the twentieth century was a period of political and military stability. However, as you have been told, the past is not of great interest to us. We may have misunderstood the probable causes of events.”

A babble of speculative conversation ensued. Mikhail Telesnikov stood up and raised his fists to his forehead.

“Friends,” he said, “let’s agree with the Multipliers that the past is not a priority. The only history I’m interested in right now is the history that is happening right now, and that we can do something about.” He waved a hand at the radio. “Armed clashes are beginning already. New Babylon and its neighbors could be at war within minutes or hours. We have to intervene right now to calm things down.”

“Yes!” shouted Ramona. “Tell us a way to intervene that won’t make things worse, why don’t you!”

“I have an idea,” said Susan. “We could just land somewhere real public, and tell them the truth. By the time the rest of the Bright Star Cultures arrive, we might well have convinced them it wasn’t a threat.”

“In principle that’s a good idea,” said Telesnikov, surprising her. “Unfortunately I don’t see any of the major powers giving us mass media access to put our case, or even access to the political leaderships. We’d more likely just disappear instantly into the maw of the security apparatuses.”

Matt slapped Mikhail’s shoulder. “Brilliant!” he said. “That’s exactly what we have to do.”

“What?” asked Mikhail, voicing the general feeling.

“ ‘Disappear instantly into the maw of the security apparatuses,’ ” said Matt. “Now
that’s
a way of getting their undivided attention.”

“It’s not one I care to try,” said Telesnikov. “We need to think this through very carefully. These plasma-cannon bolts are obviously—or at least ostensibly—aimed at what seem to be skiffs. Now there is no way I can think of that the forts in New Earth geostationary orbit—there are three, as far as I know—can be spotting them directly. They must be responding to information relayed from ground observation, probably radar. If we could take out these radar stations, we could blind the forts to anything happening in the atmosphere or on the surface. That’s one vulnerability. Second, New Babylon has a launch facility on the coast of Genea, at the equator. If it’s put out of action the orbital forts will eventually run out of supplies, and the farthest away—the ones out on the moons and asteroids—are likely to run out fastest.”

“Other way round,” said Matt. “They’re likely to be more self-sufficient. Also, they’ll have local resources, maybe even water ice.”

The three Cosmonauts went into a brief technical bicker.

“All right,” said Telesnikov, “we don’t know. My point stands—the launch facility is a choke point. We should consider ways of taking it out.”

“Before we do that, assuming we can,” said Ramona dryly, “we’d do well to think through the politics. New Babylon’s Space Defense may be aiming at skiffs, or what it thinks are skiffs, but it’s actually hitting towns and villages and bits of random countryside in Illyria. It’s risking war with Illyria. That strikes me as one hell of a big step to take in response to a few UFO phenomena, especially as Illyria seems quite ready to pick up the gauntlet.”

Susan and Telesnikov nodded.

“They certainly are,” Susan said. “And the guy I spoke to was pretty skeptical about the skiffs being from what they call the Spiders. I don’t think he was in much of a minority. He sure didn’t think he was.”

“Okay,” said Ramona. “So what else do we have to go on? New Babylon’s Senate, no less, isn’t afraid of antagonizing Illyria. That strongly suggests Illyria doesn’t have nukes. But still, there’s a sort of paranoid intensity about this reaction that strikes me as being about more than a few skiffs and so forth—ours or otherwise—seen over Illyria, and even over New Babylon’s own territory. They’re worried about something we don’t—”

“Hey!” shouted Ann Derige, who was sitting closest to the radio, which had become unregarded background noise to everyone else. “Listen to this!”

She turned up the volume. It was the same news channel as Susan and Telesnikov had tuned into an hour or two earlier, in Junopolis.

“—Minister responded immediately to the news just in of a devastating explosion in downtown New Babylon with the following statement: ‘We deplore the damage and loss of life in the capital of our neighbor and stand ready to offer all necessary humanitarian assistance on request. The present defensive mobilization of Illyrian armed forces is suspended by Ducal decree and with immediate effect. The Ministry of Defense strongly rebuts initial suggestions in New Babylonian reports that Illyrian forces are responsible for the explosion and repeats its longstanding categoric assurance that Illyria does not possess, and does not seek to acquire, nuclear weapons and supports the monopoly of such weapons by New Babylon’s Space Defense Force. The Illyrian armed forces are hereby ordered to take no actions other than in immediate self-defense and to await further orders.’ Now we go live to our correspondent in New Babylon, where—I’m sorry, the line appears to be down. Please stay tuned for further news flashes.”

The voice was replaced by somber music.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” said Matt. He looked utterly dismayed, his face pale and running with sweat.

Ann was already turning the dial.

“—small nuclear device aimed squarely between the HQ of the Ninth and the Space Authority building, both of which are now completely destroyed along with approximately two square kilometers of the eastern end of the island, which until half an hour ago was the administrative and business center of the entire Republic. So far, all known potential opponents have denied responsibility and—”

“—initial radioactivity readings confirm suspicions that—”

“—pointed out that the sole possessor of nuclear weapons is the Space Defense Force itself and strongly hinted that this may be related to an internal power struggle rather than current international tensions—”

“—possibility of a Spider attack has not been discounted, sources close to the Patriarch have averred—”

“—continuing emergency launches from the rocket base at Kairos—”

Telesnikov stalked over and turned the radio off. “Shut up, everyone!” he shouted above the chorus of protest. “We need a few minutes to think without all that speculation. Oh, all right, Ann—plug in your phones and tell us when any
news
comes in, okay?”

Ann glanced at Phil Johnson; the captain nodded.

“Suppose we believe the Illyrians,” Telesnikov went on. “If it wasn’t them, who was it? We can rule out the Lapithians and the lesser powers of the Genean League, they don’t have the capability. I very much doubt that our own forces—unless the Bright Star Cultures have changed fundamentally in the past century—would do that even if they were here already, and I still think we would know if they were here already. They’d make some effort to contact us, and they could detect the presence of our skiffs. That leaves the only power we know for sure has nukes or equivalent—kinetic-energy weapons, heavy-duty plasma cannon or whatever—the New Babylon Space Defense Force itself. And there’s only one reason I can see why they’d do something so drastic as to take out their own official headquarters—they believe that the enemy, the aliens, the Spiders—us—have somehow subverted it.”

“There is another possibility,” said Salasso. “You mentioned kinetic-energy weapons. It’s possible that this was not a nuclear strike but a large meteor which was too fast for the orbital forts to stop, or too small for them to detect until it was too late.”

“Yes,” said Telesnikov heavily, “that’s a possibility. But if it was a meteor strike the SDF would be saying so loud and clear. If they do, fine, in a sense. We can actually help if the gods are attacking, and it’s help they’d be likely to accept. If it’s the SDF itself that’s attacking, we have to stop them before they do more damage, and stop them without destroying the orbital forts. That means jumping Illyrian troops into the forts.”

“How do we let the Illyrians know about this offer?” Ramona asked.

“We do what Matt suggested,” said Telesnikov. “We vanish into the maw of their security apparatus. Volunteers?”

Susan jumped up. “I’ll go, in case they need convincing about the—about what happens when—”

Telesnikov nodded. “Understood. Matt? It was your idea.”

Matt shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I think this is all my fault, and I’m pretty useless for the moment.”

“Okay,” said Telesnikov. “Take it easy.”

If Mikhail and Susan hadn’t reported back by the end of the day, or if general war broke out, the others were to use their initiative; if all else failed, as Telesnikov pointed out, they could always navigate a jump to the nearest habitable system in the Bright Star Cultures’ likely path, and warn them off. Some of the Multipliers took this as a hint to start constructing astronomical instruments from improbable materials.

Less than half an hour after the plan had been finalized, Susan found herself looking down at the garish rooftops of Junopolis.

“The building from which the greatest density of encrypted microwaves emanate is over here,” said Mr. Blue, guiding the invisible machine toward a large yellow office block on whose roof—and, Susan guessed, unnoticeable from the street—dish antennae bristled.

“Are you sure it’s not the television station?” she asked, half joking.

The Multiplier rattled some fingers like a bunch of twigs. “Television is not a major medium in Illyria. The population seem to have retained the traditional saur prejudice against it. In any case, the television tower is there.”

She looked where it had pointed, to a tall building on whose roof meter-high neon letters spelled out “Television Tower.”

“Oh, right,” she said, somewhat abashed.

The rooftop stabilized a couple of meters below her feet. Her knees were knocking. She could see them. The plan was brutally simple. They were to gain access to the building from the top, find the most senior person they could, and tell him or her their story, producing their concealed weapons if necessary. They both had their tracking and comms devices rigged with hidden throat mikes, set up to maintain continuous contact on their own encrypted channel—if they called for help Mr. Blue would simply jump the skiff into the building right beside them. The skiff’s emergence from a jump in a space occupied by other objects would damage the other objects, but not the skiff. It was, he assured them, something to do with the exclusion principle. Susan hoped he was as certain as he sounded, and also that any falling brickwork or whatever didn’t fall on her skull, which as far as she knew, was not protected by the exclusion principle.

“Ready?” said Telesnikov.

They were both wearing the black suits—faked up from plant cellulose by the Multipliers—that they’d used earlier on what Matt had called MIB work. If they looked like intruders, at least they would look like respectable intruders, not Nova Babylonian commandos.

“Yes,” said Susan, loosening her tie above the throat mike and patting her shoulder holster.

“Okay.”

The hatch’s opening was indicated by the inrush of hot city air. They jumped down. The skiff stayed where it was, like part of the mirage off the flat roof. Beneath it some gravel and grit on the tarpaper had been swirled into a complex circular pattern. Telesnikov cast about and led the way through the electronic shrubbery to a two-meter-high wooden box with a door in it.

“Not even locked,” he said, and opened it. An alarm shrieked immediately.

“Dammit to hell!”

“Keep going,” said Susan.

Telesnikov descended the ladder, looked around and beckoned. When she closed the door behind her, the alarm stopped.

“I don’t think that’s a good sign,” said Telesnikov. “Shutting off when the intruders are inside strikes me as what Matt would call
a feature.
”

They were in a corridor dimly lit with caged electric lights and a red light at a metal door at the end. The door was thick and it was locked from the other side.