Space Eater (6 page)

Wui moved fast, out to one of the cluttered trolleys not far away. “Sorry, security,” I heard him say. He grabbed a couple of assemblies from between the dirty coffee cups there, stuffed them into a cupboard and hit the red RANDOMIZE button of a scrambler lock. “One or two things I’m not supposed to let you see, that’s all. But feast your eyes on all the rest. Real tribute to our disorderly minds, isn’t it?”

Ellan said, as though she were talking in a lecture room: “We prefer to be judged by our achievements.

From this laboratory we have sent three messenger satellites into orbit around Beta Corvi II. We have constructed a functioning space station concealed at the L2 point of that planet-moon system. And once our specialist effort has arrived we expect no trouble in dispatching the, ah, manned mission.”

“The way Birch said it, ‘dispatching’ sounds like about the right word,” I said. I was even less happy now than I’d been. This was a long way from Force polish and efficiency: but maybe you shouldn’t expect it from research equipment...

“Now who’s making funny jokes?” said Wui. “See there—that’s the 1.9-centimeter hole of such fame in story and song. We’ve fixed it vertically because one big worry’s always been that the far gate would intersect a sun. If that happens, we
hope
there’ll just be a blast of radiation straight up ... see the cables strung up there? Cut them and everything shuts down. My God, though, think of how it would look from outside, you’re sitting there in the Fens and this, this
sunbeam
comes out of the earth like a geyser, solid light straight up into the sky. Probably blind you, of course; but just think of it. What a sight.”

Corman said, “Is this really relevant?”

“It is not,” said Ellan. “There is
no
question of that happening. We have a short-range gate permanently operational at the far station; this one is tuned to it and aligns at once when adequate power input is supplied.”

(I had a picture of Ellan with all her proud speeches bottled up for years because nobody new was ever cleared to hear this stuff. Now we were getting the full blast -- ) Wui snickered. “Yes, that’s right, you have to change trains now. This is the main line, takes you 162

light-years; the last few million kilometers you go by branch line. All seems one trip, of course.”

“That’s not very clear,” I said, liking it still less.

Wui stuck his fingers into his hair, rasped them through his beard, and tried again. “Look. This system here is a power eater—all the energy corrections for stellar and orbital motion show up as extra power drain here. We can’t afford to
keep
it turned on, but if we turn it off we lose contact and have hell’s own job synchronizing with a given spot at the other end. We’d never have hit the right solar system in the first place if
they
weren’t fiddling with MT and biasing the far gate their way.”

“The mathematical expression is perhaps more clear than the verbal—“ began Ellan. Wui shushed her and carried on. “Now we’ve worked through our long-range gate and put a short-range one on the far side. Low power drain, nearly zero in fact: just two MT portals connecting a couple of places with the same gravity potential and something like, what did I say, a few million kilometers apart. (There are reasons not to let them get too close together.) Now we’ve no problems: this MT here operates on the same wavelength, as you might say but Cathy wouldn’t, as the one we’ve hung out there. Turn this one on and there’s an instantaneous link between portal A here and portal B out there—that’s this MT

system. And all the time portal C out there is joined to portal D also out there. And the AB anomaly is tuned to CD; B and C go into synchronization. And so what we pump in here goes instantly ABCD and pops out where we want it to go.”

“How about if you drew us a picture now,” I suggested.

“I don’t think that’s needed,” Corman said. “Instant transit from here to there, you say. No unfortunate side effects except to the passengers.”

Wui licked his lips ghoulishly. “Yes, right on. When we can offer first-class travel with waitress service and all mod cons we’ll do just that. Meanwhile ... we call this route ‘second class.’ Probably not funny.”

By this time something had started turning over in my own head. I know I don’t always think too fast outside skill areas like combat and weaponry, but usually I get there in the end. “Pump,” I said. “You were talking about pumping things through that hole.” (Grim picture of minced Jacklin being shoved into the portal with an Archimedes screw.) “Does that mean there’s a pressure difference as well as everything else? If so, why?”

Ellan: “The question is not so much pressure as potential difference. Force must be exerted to displace objects into regions of differing potential.” She stopped, obviously convinced she’d handed out a full and perfect explanation. But Wui translated: “_I_ can’t understand that, Cathy. Look. Escape velocity from Earth is eleven-plus kilometers per second, so if we threw something into the hole at that speed it should come out standing still at the other end. We’re pushing things up a tall, tall hill, from the bottom of Earth’s gravity well, we have to do enough work to accelerate you to escape velocity just to get you out into free fall.” He made pushing movements with both hands. “Like Sisyphus. All the work of pushing you up an infinite hill to shift you the few centimeters apparent distance from one side of the portal to the other.

Once, our pusher piston, it’s the thing like a boiler there—see? Hanging from the crane? Yes, that’s the one. Once, it broke down before a structural component had been pushed through. The part fell back from infinity and came out at something close to your actual eleven kilometers per sec. Smashed the crane to hell. But don’t worry. The pump’s foolproof now, we think. And for special cargoes like yourselves we
can
cut down the potential hill by pouring in energy at this end. Don’t ask me how that works. It’s AP and nobody knows...” He sagged a little when he got to that part.

Great. Now I could imagine pulped me squirting all over the lab if the pump wasn’t quite as foolproof as Wui wanted to believe. Even Corman had something to say, with her usual frozen voice: “Second class sounds a little optimistic as a description of this form of transport, don’t you think? Even the Scottish mail coaches don’t often break passengers’ ribs.”

Wui seemed to be thinking. Maybe the cold and damp of the silent lab was getting to him the way it was getting to me. “Look,” he said. “I don’t want to overwhelm you with technicalities.
You
won’t have to worry about the transit—we’ll see you through safely and that’s a promise. For God’s sake let’s forget about the gadgetry for a minute.” He kicked a large capacitor out of his way as he walked to another rust-flecked steel cupboard and rummaged inside, in a dusty cardboard box labeled NYLON

GROMMETS. “Here. I liberated these from some of the old stores in this dump. They’re not bad—have one.”

Silently we all, even Ellan, took the bars of chocolate he handed around. It was so very damned easy not to think about what these friendly lunatics had in store. So much easier to forget everything, go death-happy, see if I could take everyone in Tunnel before they got me. Corman looked at me again as she stripped off a faded purple wrapper, and I caught another ghostly smile on her strained face. I saw how her hair came to a point, what they called a widow’s peak. I smiled back. The chocolate had powdery white patches on it here and there, but tasted very good. I found myself chewing each square into very small melting pieces, and sucking at the pieces, thinking about A and B and C and D.

Seven

Those days in the Tunnel bunkers switchbacked between a crazy rush and times of shattering boredom when all I could do was sit in the damp room and brood. More equipment kept arriving and being checked down the entrance shaft. Birch let us know he thought the story was leaking back at what in his old-fashioned way he called UN Central Command: level-9 secret or not, there was a panic blowing up.

“Push this Kraz operation through bloody fast before we all get fried,” was pretty much the gist of the notes from Central, though they used longer words. Birch must have seen the question when it was still halfway up my throat, because he carried on, voice getting higher and faster:

“They have cleverly saddled us with the name of Kraz so nobody will connect the operation with Beta Corvi, Kraz merely being another name for that very star. I have it here quite clearly in writing. Corvus, the Raven or possibly the Crow, is a southern constellation, which means you cannot see it, and the name Kraz for Beta Corvi is of uncertain meaning but is taken to refer to some part of the raven’s, or it might be the crow’s, body. Unquote. Write it down, do not forget it, and ... never mind. Your next stop is Dr.

Ngabe.” And he rang for an escort to take us away.

“Think Birch is showing the strain,” I said to Corman as we followed the shaven-headed Security goon to medical quarters.

“Of course he is; they all are. Birch and the AP staff must have been years at this business, and they’re acting like caricatures of real people. The air down here is full of an endless scream that you can’t quite hear.”

“I suppose you could put it like that. You always look calm enough yourself; maybe it hasn’t got to us yet.”

A pause. “I envy you, Jacklin, did you know? I have had to control myself so tightly for so long, I’m not sure that I could laugh or cry if I wanted to. You ... you’re so solid and stoical, it’s obscene.”

For a moment there I wanted to tell her all about the dreams and old memories, and how I was afraid they got in the way of me being a first-class Forceman. But it wasn’t the kind of thing I could squeeze out into words, not offhand when walking with someone I didn’t understand at all. We came to Medical without either of us saying any more, and the stolid guard opened the door.

Dr. Ngabe was large and black, perhaps thirty-something, his dense hair just starting to die back at his temples. He was also the specialist effort someone had mentioned, a surgeon brought in from central Africa and (I supposed) some proof of a hint Wui had dropped: that there was African money behind Central for this operation, isolationism or no, and that Africa was quite happy that any little mistakes like nullbombs should stay on foreign ground...

Dr. Ngabe smiled whitely, and another old memory tweaked at me—right back from when we were street kids through the famine days, and food or clothes parcels came from Zimbabwe and the other places. We’d sneered at the senders, rich and smug and (mostly) black: I’d forgotten all that till now, when up floated hazy reasons for not liking this Ngabe. Maybe Corman was feeling the same. The hell with that.

“Dr. Ngabe?” I said with a bit more of a smile than I might usually put on.

He gave a sort of almost-salute, one hand flipped vertical and down again. “Mr. Ngabe ... if that matters. You must be Forceman Jacklin and Force Auxiliary Corman.” I nodded, biting back a snappy

“_Lieutenant_ Jacklin, thank you...” Rossa nodded. Ngabe rubbed his stubby-fingered hands together and asked me to come into the surgery.

“The facilities here!” he said as he closed the door. “I have never seen such, well, inadequacy. Do you know, I had to have one of the technicians weld up three holes in the autoclave before we could even sterilize instruments ... Now take off your clothes and lie down, please.”

Just wait, I thought as I stripped. Just wait till you see the AP lab where you’ll have to work. I got up on the couch.

“Extraordinary,” Ngabe muttered as he worked me over. “I very rarely have the opportunity to study patients resuscitated by tissue regeneration ... the technique is used only sparingly in my country, we have such problems of birthrate, alas ... Yes, I feel I could have predicted the characteristic complexion, the atypical callousing ... Of course this mole can have no malignant tendencies?”

“_No_. None. We don’t talk about that much,” I mumbled. That was one of the risks, you get a few rogue cells multiplying and, well, it had happened to my big-mouthed drinking buddy Hoare in the tank next to mine once. Hard to forget waking up from a night of regrowth, turning your head to say “Hi there”

and finding something man-sized but quite shapeless in the tank next door. The thing had been still alive, they said. I don’t know what they did with it.

Ngabe drew rapid lines with a blue spirit-pen, down and across my body. “Well, it seems I can do nothing for your health. Quite the reverse.” He chuckled uneasily and asked me to get off the couch and onto the scales. “Hum, yes, this is the important measurement. The logistics problem of reducing, what is it, 176 kilos to transferable form. More than once I have thought a butcher might be better qualified for this special task. But never fear. You won’t feel a thing.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Now stand here, against the height scale. I must record the planned pattern of incisions.” He produced a Polaroid camera and took half a dozen shots. “Thank you so much,” he said.

He sat down and made notes in a small book, shaking his head once or twice, while I got dressed. Then he thanked me again, showed me where the door was, and added: “Do ask Rossa Corman to come in now...”

I waited out there for her, wondering whether her examination really was taking so much longer than mine. In the end she came out; the man from Security grunted as though someone had just turned on his power supply, and said “Briefing now in Room 17.” Which, it seemed, was back where we’d come from. I decided this particular Security person had a face which made my own look delicate and sensitive.

Aside to Corman: “Got some pin-ups of you, did he?” No reply. Well, I hadn’t expected her to fall down in paroxysms of hysterical laughter. But thinking about her as a woman as well as someone from Comm set me wondering again about there being so few women in Combat. A fellow from Psywar had had a theory, full of things like the life force and the death wish and something he’d invented all on his own called the Valhalla Complex, but when the dust had settled you didn’t really know anything you didn’t before.