Priam's Lens

by Chalker, Jack L

  “Yeah, but if somebody’s getting nervous down there, they might be looking for another candidate,” Kat suggested nervously. All she wanted to do was get out of there.

  Using the windswept trees as cover and the light reflecting from the great Titan base, they managed to get almost halfway up before the rains rumbled in, the low hills being no barrier to them.

  Even knowing that the rains were more than mere rains, and noting their altered behavior, Kat and Harker couldn’t help themselves. When the rains rumbled, they broke cover and went out nearer the road and sat, exposed, so that they could be fully bathed. It wasn’t something they thought about or something they could fight. It was an irresistible impulse even as their minds told them it was not the thing to do.

  From the Titan base below, the electronic thumping noise that they’d heard before, with a varying pace that rose and fell but still seemed to go right through them, was particularly loud and active. There was no question that their position could be detected; it probably could be detected at any time via the grid. The problem for the Titans was that they could not tell humans apart unless they had been selected and marked in the data stream. And if you weren’t theirs, you were just one of the mass.

  After the storm passed, there was always a feeling of wellness accompanied by lethargy; the trained guards were always able to overcome this, but most never fought it. Now, though, it was taking all the willpower of the exhausted trio to keep going, to keep from settling in, from finding a spot for the night and sleeping.

  “Is it particularly strong because we’re so close or because they just did something?” Kat wondered.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Harker told her. “We have to push on if we can, we have to fight it. And if they did anything extra, or if two baths this close to the source of the programs did an extra job on us, we’ll have to live with it, too. It’s done. Right now we just need to run.”

  Nobody was up to running through that brush up the rest of the hill, but walking was something they could force themselves to do.

  Something down there was more excited than usual, and the energy tendrils from the various facets on the base seemed hyperactive. They would sweep not only the plain but also up the hills as well, and it was getting difficult to dodge them.

  Now, though, the trio, worn out, barely able to think, was nearing the summit of the pass. A few hundred more meters and they’d be on the other side, able to rest, as protected as they could be under the circumstances. Now they did find that last bit of adrenaline, and they started to move fast.

  Leading, almost at the very top, Harker was struck by a flickering pastel red tendril of energy from the base.

  “Gene!” Kat screamed. He was suddenly frozen in place. Then he turned and started looking straight at the base, where new sounds began to pulse, sounds like they hadn’t heard before. Like electronic whistles punctuated with a twanging noise, and the tendril seemed to be pulsing in time with them.

  Kat Socolov fought down panic and summoned up rage. She raced up to the zombielike Harker, hauled off, and punched him in the jaw with every bit of strength she could muster.

  He went down, and the tendril broke off and seemed to flail away in midair for a moment, then began a new pattern to see if it could find him again.

  By this point Kat and Spotty had dragged the unconscious Harker back into the underbrush and out of a direct line of sight with the base.

  This was as far as they were going, that was clear. Whatever was going to happen, they couldn’t drag the man that last measure to and over the top. They could only hope that he had been merely tagged and that the aliens had not yet received any data they could understand or use.

  • • •

  It was only a single plate for a genhole that would have been assembled in space out of such plates and that would have eventually been large enough to swallow a full-size spaceship, but the mentat thought it was sufficient and they weren’t going to argue with such a machine.

  The trick was to get up on the catwalks and pound on one end of the damned thing so that it was in position to do maximum damage. The giant crane had been frozen in place for decades and could not be powered up. However, to minimize potential damage it held the plate at just one central and balanced point. That point, effectively a ball joint, did not want to move after so long, but Littlefeet was very strong. He managed to budge the thing, much to his surprise and delight.

  “The direction is now within acceptable limits,” the mentat told him. “It won’t strike dead center, but it will strike the main complex and it will do damage. You’ve done very well, my boy.”

  “I’d like to see it,” Littlefeet told the computer a bit wistfully. “I’d really love to see it hit the demons. Nobody has ever seen demons die.”

  “We do not know what will happen, or even if it’ll work like this, but I agree with you,” the mentat told him. “Besides, perhaps there should be someone to sing the legends of Colonel N’Gana’s grand last stand.”

  N’Gana was keeping himself going by sheer force of will. He was a dead man and he knew it, but he was not going to die of a heart attack just before the final blow.

  Littlefeet was confused. “What do you mean, ‘sing the legends’? I shall be in heaven with the others.”

  “I have been thinking about that,” the mentat told him. “And I have been dwelling on a people who, reduced to nothing, nonetheless retain all that is good in humanity. Duty, honor, courage... These are rare things that get obscured or forgotten by modern life. And love as well. I cannot really know that emotion, but the observable qualities make it a central part of all the rest that is good and perhaps holy in people.”

  It paused, as if listening for something in the silence, then continued.

  “There is a great deal of additional activity up there. I am getting surges of power radiated into the old power grid at levels that are almost off the scale. They know something. I had hoped to give the others another few hours, but I do not think we can wait.”

  “Then this is it?” Littlefeet asked, nervously steeling himself.

  “Yes, this is it. I do not think you have much of a chance to survive this close in, but you have twenty minutes if nothing else happens. Go! Use it!”

  He stood there a moment, uncomprehending.

  “Go, I said! You may barely make it out! Stay low and in the culvert! Do not look at the demon palace until after you hear us shoot! The shot may blind you. But, as soon as they shoot, run like the very devil!”

  “But—but you said I may—”

  “If you don’t start now, you will die here! Go! I give you a chance, however slim, at surviving! By the time you get into that culvert it won’t matter what they pick up! Move!”

  Littlefeet started to say something to the two who remained, but N’Gana just smiled and pointed to the catwalks.

  Hamille raised its bizarre head and croaked, “Get the fuck out of here, you asshole!”

  Littlefeet started running.

  • • •

  They had been on Hector long enough now that Juanita Krill was beginning to worry that they might run short on some supplies before anything happened below. The temporal shift was always in the minds of those who planned this expedition; new air generators, water reprocessors and traps, and fresh food should be coming in by small automated shuttle on a regular basis now, but the timing to pick up the modules and get them to Hector was dicey.

  Van der Voort and Takamura didn’t care. They were in a kind of heaven in the place, with a whole new area of physics suddenly open to them, a whole new kind of mathematical approach to problems involving genhole communications. There were years of work here done by large teams of brilliant people and state-of-the-art artificial intelligence agents as well, work virtually forgotten in the slow lethargic collapse of The Confederacy. Years more of work would be needed to figure it all out, to document and test each and every revolutionary idea, but the potential here was mind-blowing. Nobody, but nobody, had
been able to lick the temporal shifts of the genhole, but this came very close.

  Equally stunning had been the recordings of the initial tests of the weapon based on the effects from Priam’s Lens. Asteroids shattered, a small moon literally sliced in two... Incredible power, power that had terrified those who had built it. What purpose, they’d asked, to kill the Titans if at the same time you destroyed Helena and all upon it as well? There was hope, they argued. There was no other way. There had to be another way. It had gone on and on until the great white spacecraft of the Titans appeared in-system and the power was sucked dry and there was no way left to get down to the surface and get the codes and transmit them back up.

  It must have haunted George Sotoropolis most of all. He had been the main roadblock, and he had been here, unlike the other two, to see the ships come in, to understand that he could have hit the ships before they devastated his beloved Helena if he’d just let them have his part of the code.

  It was such a simple problem to solve, at least on a theoretical basis. The data stated that the bursts had to be incredibly short. No more than three bursts on a target, no more than thirty nanoseconds per burst, and you kept the damage localized, focused. And the best part was, you only had to hit the target, not necessarily dead center or in a vital area.

  The computer models said it would work. They had spent several days running programs through the Control Center command and control computers and they had a ninety-seven percent certainty.

  Only nobody’d had the opportunity to find out for sure. By the time they’d determined it, they had already been essentially overrun.

  They also knew that Helena’s installations and Titan ships and bases had to be first. They had to take them out and quickly. They had to do it right the first time, and they had to do it without any serious damage to the planet or the moon they were on would no longer be held in a planetary grip-

  They had the initial targets picked and locked in using the genhole gates scattered around the system. As soon as any of the gates activated, it would be pinpointed by the Titans, but they would be harder to reach than they seemed, spitting an unknown but deadly stream.

  They had the targets all mapped out, and the order. All they needed was the go codes. If it all worked, if they were still alive, still viable when it was over, and if at least one master genhole gate were still intact, then they could turn their attention to other conquered worlds. Not all, of course—there hadn’t been time. But there were a lot of targets out there. Targets that, the early data suggested, against all plausibility, could be automatically hit by commands that would somehow arrive very quickly indeed.

  Van der Voort had been working on how that could be so, since it defied established physics. The key, he was certain, was in the properties of whatever that string or stream or whatever it was that the holes captured and transmitted. It had to be something unlike anything they had ever seen before, something that, somehow, took its time from both ends of a wormhole simultaneously without breaking up.

  Those earlier scientists had tried to determine the nature of this strange phenomenon coming from the small lens and its trapped and looped singularity. The strings were not true strings; they simply resembled them in the way they registered on instruments and the way they seemed to move. They had no measurable mass, but if they were energy, they did not register as such on any known measuring device. But they were as destructive as hell.

  Quite rapidly, van der Voort had come to a conclusion that a number of long-dead project scientists had also considered, but put aside for the more immediate engineering problems.

  “Not strings,” he told Takamura. “Not matter at all, or energy, either.”

  Takamura frowned. “Not matter and not energy? No mass, no energy transfer, yet destructive. What can you mean?”

  “I think they’re cracks,” he told her. “Cracks in the very fabric of space-time emanating from the collapse of the boltzmon. Because it is caught in a loop, the cracks heal as quickly as the thing cycles, and the forces in our own universe aid this to maintain integrity.”

  Takamura saw it at once. “And since the genholes create holes in our own space-time fabric, it is a natural attractor and conductor of the cracks. They don’t heal inside! They’re maintained! Inside, the crack expands instantly but is held inside the field! Yes! Oh, my! That’s why it shattered planets, and could possibly destabilize stars! Nothing could withstand it until it healed over. Whatever it struck, even if it were a hair-thin sliver, would fall instantly out of space-time itself. Oh, my! I can see now why they were so afraid to use it!”

  Krill had been adamant about that. “We will not hesitate again! There won’t be a third chance! When we get those codes, we shoot! And the consequences be damned!”

  • • •

  Littlefeet thought he wasn’t going to make it. The entrance was just ahead, but he’d slipped and fallen several times in the rubble. Now, though, he was determined to come out, even into the darkness lit only by an alien glow. He had been given a second life, and he was not going to forfeit it lightly.

  • • •

  “Colonel?” the mentat called.

  “Yes?”

  “You are still here?”

  “I have no place else to go,” he responded, chuckling.

  “You were murmuring unintelligibly. I was worried.”

  “You needn’t be. I was just seeing a lot of faces all of a sudden, as if a large crowd of men and women stood with us here. It was quite strange. I knew them all, too, and they knew me. I can still almost make them out in the gloom. Soldiers, mostly. Good people, the finest. Everyone I ever ordered to their deaths. It’s almost a reunion, really. They seemed quite pleased to see me, and not at all holding a grudge. Not anymore.”

  “I do not—”

  “Let Colonel have who he wants here!” Hamille croaked. “Bigger the crowd for the end of the contest, the better the sporting victory!”

  The mentat started to say something more, then decided not to. It did not understand what they were saying or thinking, but its logical brain also understood that whatever it was was now irrelevant. If it made it easier for them, so be it.

  “They’re running traces on the energy leak,” the mentat told them. “Hector is in the sky, a bit lower than I would like for optimum accuracy but it will do. I am transmitting the codes now!”

  The colonel smiled and looked into the darkness.

  “Send them to hell for me, Colonel,” Sergeant Mogutu called from the shadows.

  The colonel raised his hand unsteadily and gave the victory sign.

  A tremendous surge of energy sprang for less than three seconds from a point near the cliffs just beyond the old spaceport area. Almost immediately three egg-shaped craft of the Titans raced from the complex and zeroed in on the exact spot, focusing their energy drains first, then opening fire with full blasts of energy until the entire area for half a kilometer square was turned first red, then white hot, liquid and bubbling.

  Their reaction time was incredible; they were at the spot in under ten seconds and had it reduced to molten rock within a minute.

  Much too late.

  • • •

  The command and control board suddenly lit up with hundreds of fully active targets. It so startled Takamura that she failed to act for several seconds. Then it dawned on her what she was seeing and she screamed, “Krill!”

  Juanita Krill was awake in an instant; she walked swiftly to the board. Van der Voort was not far behind, yawning.

  “Take it easy,” Krill told the nearly hysterical physicist. “So far we’ve only received the codes in a broad beam. They still don’t know that we are here. To do that we’re going to have to power up our genholes and read in our optimum targets. Takamura, let me take the controls. Any of us can initiate the sequence on the bases but I’m going to have to take the initial ships manually until the command and control AI unit can get the hang of things and go automatic.”

  She sat in the
chair and pulled the command helmet down on her head. The whole system was now within her purview, a three-dimensional model that, unlike all the other times they’d done this in modeling, now glowed with both active targets in order and potentially active gates.

  She had been prepared to wait until she had at least some of both continents of Helena in view, but she found that she didn’t have to. They were both there, although she’d lose one within forty minutes.

  Well, she thought to herself. All this time you’ve played your security games and fooled with your codes and computer systems and let others fight and die. Now the whole thing is in your lap, Krill. And the only companions you have can’t help you because they don’t even believe in God.

  “I’m powering up five and nine,” she told them. “Here we go!”

  All targets hit in turn, order of battle gamma delta epsilon, she sent to the C&C computer. Five and nine on. As soon as they are energized, fire at will.

  Far off, more than a dozen light-years away, a signal came through the genhole to shut down the transfer and divert to a new location. Helena five and nine, in turn, now!

  • • •

  Colonel N’Gana screamed out into the darkness. “Goddamn it! Why don’t they shoot?”

  “Have patience, my old friend,” responded the shade of Sergeant Mogutu. “It won’t be much longer now.”

  “They are firing at the ground not far above us,” the mentat told them. “I think we will miss the final show. Just a minute or two more and they will be through to here, and they will also be finished tracing the energy surges. I am sorry.”

  There was a sudden buzzing and then the entire ancient charged genhole plate, still on the crane above them, crackled with sudden life.

  “C’mon, Krill, you beautiful bitch!” N’Gana screamed. “SHOOT!”