by B. V. Larson
“Uh…” I said. “Where are we going now?”
“You can go anywhere you like. I’m going to the command center to watch this disaster unfold.”
“You mean the fleet action? That would be cool to see. I bet our boys will blow that steel beach ball right out of the sky.”
“It’s not made of steel,” she said, “not according to our spectro-analysis.”
“Well… titanium, whatever.”
“It’s not titanium, either. It’s something odd. Something with a reflective coating, but underneath that, we’re sensing a very dark surface. Like charcoal.”
She glanced at me about then. Her eyes were intent, and worried.
“Why exactly were you handcuffed to that chair?” I asked. “If you don’t mind my asking?”
“Because Drusus is an unreasonable oaf. He assumed that this visitation might have something to do with me—just because of past events. So, he had me arrested.”
“You’re talking about when the squids invaded Earth, and you wanted to help them?”
She shrugged and checked on the floor numbers. We were down in the one-hundreds now and still going strong.
“You got away with selling out Earth back then,” I said. “Why would that come back to bite you in the ass now, after all these years?”
“Because I don’t have the level of support I once had on the Ruling Council. They’ve become like you, arrogant and prideful. They believe Earth can beat anybody.”
“Uh-huh, I get that feeling too. You still think we should take a knee whenever a scary alien shows up? What about Rigel? Do you want to sign up for enslavement by those mean-ass little bears?”
Galina glanced at me again, troubled. “No… I don’t think so. You proved to me on Storm World that they can be beaten. It’s such a risk, though. You should understand me of all people, McGill. I’m thought of as a wild card—but really, I’m not.”
Galina was right about that. She was one of those people who looked for dangers ahead of time and took decisive action to avoid them. She was pathologically cautious, in a way.
“You’re right,” I said. “I know how you think. What do you say we should do about these aliens? Just let them come close and hope they’re in a good mood?”
She sighed. “I don’t know this time. Their approach is very threatening, I admit that. It just seems so final for us to attack them. At that point, war will be unstoppable.”
I nodded, and I reached out a clumsy hand to her shoulder. She flinched a little, but she didn’t snarl and pull away.
“Listen,” I said, “high level command is about making hard choices. Drusus is doing that now. He doesn’t know the perfect answer, but he knows he can’t let some trillion-ton alien ship roll right up to us and kill the planet without a fight. Sometimes, even a lowly skunk can fight off a wildcat by being ornery enough.”
She looked up at me wonderingly. “For a moment there, you were making good sense. But then, you lost me.”
I smiled, and she smiled back.
Taking a big chance, I gave her a light hug. I don’t mind telling you that my balls were crawling in fear as I did it. Galina could change her attitude and react violently when you touched her the wrong way.
But sometimes, a man has to take a chance, or nothing ever happens.
She went with it, and she even hugged me back. She rubbed her wrist and leaned against me. The handcuffs had left a red loop on her skin.
“I don’t like being arrested,” she said. “The moment they came to my house yesterday—I sent for you.”
Suddenly, things made a little more sense.
“That’s why you called me yesterday, huh? Because they were arresting you?”
“Yes. After that, all I could do was send you a few texts—you took forever to get here, by the way.”
Just texts… that figured. Galina was a master at working her tapper. She could fire off a text-wall with her hands tied behind her back if need be—I’d seen her do it.
“That’s when you messaged me and sent Winslade to pick me up. Why me?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I needed some protection.”
Looking into her eyes which were locked with mine now, I knew she was partly telling the truth and partly lying. She’d probably needed me nearby to throw to the wolves in her place if things went badly enough.
But at the same time, I could see that she had needed help. She had plenty of very serious enemies up here at Central. A big scary Moon-sized spaceship on a collision course with Earth might be just the thing an opponent would use to bring her down.
I gave her a light squeeze and let go of her. I naturally wanted to pick her up and kiss her—but it wasn’t quite time yet. I’ve grown an instinct for these things as I’ve gotten older.
By the time the elevator stopped and dinged, letting us out into the lobby, the energy between us had changed completely.
Galina and I had become more than casual lovers lately, but our relationship was still an on-again, off-again thing. For instance, when in public we tended to play it cool by reflex.
We stepped off the elevator, and I turned toward the big front exit. I was ready to go out on the town and get her some dinner—if she could be persuaded.
But she was already striding purposefully to the east, toward the darker, quieter quadrant of this giant building.
Sighing, I followed her. She glanced back and stopped, putting her hands on her hips.
“Where are you going?”
“To see this fleet action firsthand.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Look, Galina. Do you want some help or not?”
She frowned. “What can you do for me in the strategic ops room?”
I snorted. “Ask yourself this: how many of those officers down there really like you? How many would have your back in a crisis? Or, a better question might be, which one of those hogs ratted you out in the first place?”
That last question made her blink. Her fists came off her hips.
“All right. Follow me—but try not to do anything embarrassing.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, “this will be like Sunday school all over again.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
-5-
From the ground floor, you could take the elevators going up, or you could take the ones going down. We took the ones that sunk rapidly into the earth.
After about a hundred floors, and a few ear-cracking moments as the air pressure grew slightly, we got out. Next, we went through some very persnickety security people, losing all our weapons and electronic gear—then found a third set of elevators.
These went all the way down to the bottom—at least, I think they did. I’ve only been down about five hundred floors. Some people say there’s more below that, but I couldn’t swear to it.
At somewhere in the minus three hundreds, we came to a dead zone. It was a region under Central so deep the floor numbers stopped flashing—but we kept going deeper. For several seconds, I had the eerie sensation the elevator had jumped the tracks and fallen away into an abyss… but then right before I said something, the elevator slowed and stopped.
We’d come to our destination at last, but nothing happened. We weren’t moving, but the doors didn’t open.
“This is the War Room,” Galina announced, turning toward me.
“Uh… I don’t remember it being like this.”
“It’s been newly expanded. About thirty floors have been torn out and collected together into a large underground cavern.”
“Okay, but why aren’t the doors opening?”
“Because they’re watching us,” she said. “Checking us out. If we fail some test, we’ll be sent back up to the lobby—or worse.”
“Hmm… what would be the worst case?” I asked.
“If we’re determined to be a threat, this steel box will be our tomb.”
“That’s encouraging…”
So saying, I walked up to th
e video pickup and squinted at it. The camera was a tiny thing, but I knew it was very high res and contained countless other sensors as well. It was even reading the nature and quality of my breath right now.
“Hey! Hey you hogs out there! Can you smell my breath? There’s no booze in it, none at all.”
I blew a puff of steamy air on the pickup, and Galina kicked me lightly in the back of the knee. I ignored her.
“Get away from there,” she hissed at me. “I told you not to antagonize these people.”
To my mind, the hogs were antagonizing me. But I straightened up and waited impatiently. Getting bored, I considered resting a hand on Galina’s shoulder but dropped the idea as unworkable. There was no way she was going to warm up when she knew we were under scrutiny by a pack of hogs.
At long last the door opened. On the other side stood a team of guards in a chamber of rough-hewn rock and puff-crete. It looked like someone had dug a cavern in the midst of Central’s countless basement levels—because that’s exactly what had happened.
“About damned time,” I complained. “Were you boys eating donuts or something?”
I strode out into the midst of a six man squad of armed veterans. They weren’t smiling. No smiles at all.
A familiar voice spoke up from behind them. “McGill? What are you doing down here?”
“Primus Graves! Good to see you, sir.”
He frowned back at me. “You haven’t answered my question.”
“I’m here as Tribune Turov’s attaché,” I said.
Graves slid his eyes to Galina, then back to me. Shaking his head, he turned and walked away. “Follow me.”
We did so, and he led the way toward a roundish opening that gave us a view of an even larger chamber. As we passed through the opening, I realized we’d been in an elevator lobby, but now we were in the main hall.
It was huge. Easily as big and tall as the Mustering Hall in Newark itself. That was a stunner, considering the fact we were a kilometer or so underground.
The ceiling and walls were lit with LED panels, but the size of the place was so great it felt shadowy all the same. It was kind of like being in a football stadium at night.
On the main floor a thousand people and robots were moving around. They were operating workstations, updating screens—there were countless huge holographic screens all over the place.
“This is a restricted area,” Graves told us as we walked down some uneven puff-crete steps. We were several floors above the main hall.
There wasn’t a rail or even a handhold next to the stairs, and it was a long way to the bottom if you slipped. The modern military wasn’t big on safety. If you screwed up and died, well, they’d just print a new soldier and give him an earful for being dumb.
“I know the security rules, Primus Graves,” Turov said.
She outranked him, and we were all in the same legion. I could understand why she was getting irritated. By all rights, she was Graves’ direct superior in the chain of command.
“They made me leave my meeting and come up here to the elevator lobby to approve McGill’s admission,” Graves continued. “That’s not helpful at this critical time.”
Graves was slapping at Galina for bringing me—and she knew it, too.
“Since when did you become a hog, Primus Graves, sir?” I asked.
He stopped marching down the steps and turned to face me. “I’m not a hog, McGill. God willing, I never will be. But today Earth is in crisis, and I’m doing my part at the request of Praetor Drusus. Please try to be part of the solution rather than the problem, all right?”
“Uh…” I said, feeling somewhat chastened. “All right sir. Sorry sir. You’re no hog, I know that.”
We followed him in silence after that. He showed us to a station that had only one seat and one touch screen. I tried to sit down, but Galina slapped me out of the way and slid her small butt onto the chair instead.
Graves left, and I peered over Galina’s shoulder at the ops screen.
“All right everyone,” a voice announced over the PA system. “We’re about ten minutes from go-time. Our first beams should be landing sooner, but we won’t get measurable results until the T-bombs hit. We’re going get all our data at once. Be alert, and man your stations.”
My mouth sagged open a little. “The fleet is hitting that big steel marble out there? Right now?”
“Ten minutes…” Galina said, “it isn’t much time, is it?”
“It’s going to feel like forever.”
And it did. We watched the countdown, examining the placement of our ships and other assets.
Earth’s space forces had come a long way over the last decade or so. After Earth had been invaded by the Cephalopods, we’d launched our first destroyer-sized puff-crete abominations. Those early ships were like molded bathtubs, flipped over and filled with oxygen and weapons. They’d been slow, ugly and easy to take out with one missile or long-burn beam.
But we’d advanced a lot since those days. We’d been given license to do the job of the Skrull—our local ship-building species—as long as it was in the name of Empire defense. As a consequence, our vessels weren’t allowed to carry trade goods or play passenger ship—but they could be warships.
Our fleet designs had gotten much more sophisticated. I suspected this was due largely to the influence of the near-human scientists we’d captured from Rogue World. They’d built a ship on their own that had held off the Empire’s entire provincial battle fleet for quite a while—destroying perhaps twenty percent of the Imperial vessels.
That violation had nearly gotten humanity as a whole permed, but we’d survived it. Today, I got the feeling I was going to witness all the advances we’d made since then with the help of Floramel and other rogue researchers.
The invader was only about eight times as far away as our own Moon now. That was as close as anyone down here on Earth was willing to let them come before taking a shot at destroying the vessel.
Hundreds of our ships stood between Earth and the approaching super-ship. In addition to that, we had orbital platforms, bases on the moon, lots of mines and other things hidden out there in the infinite dark of space.
The fireworks started at promptly T-minus eight minutes.
All of a sudden, every screen in the place lit up.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“Enemy defensive fire,” Galina answered. “It has to be. She’s responding at last…”
We watched tensely, and the crowd quieted. Battles in space are pretty much silent, as there’s no air to carry a vibration from one spot to another. There was, however, plenty of energy and mass being thrown around out there.
Hundreds of missiles popped. Some discharged their warheads in glorious spheres of destruction, but many were disintegrated by defensive fire. They never blossomed into massive explosions, but instead became tiny pinpoints of light on the screens.
The crowd around us murmured, and there were some gasps.
“What?” I asked, leaning over to Galina’s chair. “What’s going on?”
“We’re not sure…” she said tensely. “Maybe it’s a force-field, or an aerogel—the missiles are running into something. They aren’t reaching the target’s hull.”
I straightened up and searched the crowd for a familiar face. At last, I spotted one—Floramel.
A lot of the spooks down here who worked in the darkest bowels of Central were near-humans. Sometimes, I wondered if it was such a good idea to rely on outside help here in our holiest of holy command-centers—but nobody gave an icy damn what I thought about it.
Striding away from Galina, I crossed the distance quickly. None of the hog guards tried to stop me, which was just as well for them. They were all gaping up at the big screens like everyone else.
“Floramel?” I asked.
She craned her long lovely neck around to gaze at me in surprise. “James? What are you—? Please, don’t disrupt my thoughts now.”
“Sorr
y,” I said. “I’m here strictly as an observer and advisor.”
Her head had turned back to a screen full of numbers, but she frowned and glanced back again. “An advisor? An advisor to whom?”
“Praetor Drusus of course. Not an hour ago, I was briefing him on this threat up in his offices.”
“James,” she said tiredly. “I don’t know how you got down here, but impressing me by name-dropping will not grant you sexual access. I’ve told you before—”
“Look,” I said, putting a hand on her chair. “Just tell me what’s destroying our missiles? Are they hitting force fields?”
“No… There’s been very little defensive fire, and we would have detected a repelling energy field of some kind. I’m suspecting it’s a smart-gel.”
“A what?”
“A cloud of nanites, microscopic in size, but programmed to mass up when a missile approaches to destroy the swarm.”
I nodded slowly. “That could be it… How are we going to get past that?”
“We’re launching T-bombs next—they’re already counting down.”
My face brightened. “What kind of warheads do we have?”
She nodded. “We’ve developed a new delivery system to use with our standard fusion bombs.”
I touched her shoulder, giving it a slight squeeze. “That’s good work, girl. I know it was you who helped with a lot of these breakthroughs. You’re saving Earth’s ass right now.”
She smiled, a flickering thing, but then she eyed my hand on her shoulder critically.
“James…”
“Sorry!” I said, pulling my hand off again like she’d burned it. Her kind considered any kind of touching as a prelude to sex.
Now, we were longtime friends and we’d been lovers once in the past, but a lot of time and lightyears had gone by since then.
“It’s all right, but please stop distracting me.”
I did my damnedest. I shut the hell up and stood there—hovering over her while she watched her screens.
A few minutes later, a series of flashes began to shower the hull of the great ship.