Hunted Earth Omnibus

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Hunted Earth Omnibus Page 72

by Roger MacBride Allen


  But despite feeling they had it all wrong, she still had no idea what was right. She had no alternative explanation. What other motivation could there be besides a Binge?

  Well, no point in wondering. There was enough else on her plate to keep her busy. The latest from the cryptographic section, for example, with a new analysis of the transmissions from the Lone World—

  A discreet little beep tone from her calendar roused Ursula from her thoughts. Damnation. Time to phone in her report to Wolf Bernhardt.

  Why couldn’t he just accept a written report, instead of interrogating her twice a week? She hated his questioning. Of course, Bernhardt was not likely to be in top form today. Not after getting Sakalov killed the day before.

  She reached out a tired hand and pushed screen panels marked place scheduled call and audio link button. She hesitated a moment, then punched up the video link as well. Normally, she didn’t like the additional intrusion of someone seeing her as well as hearing her, but she wanted to see what sort of shape the man was in.

  Besides which, it might be no bad thing if he saw that she was nearly at the end of her tether. Wolf had a tendency to forget that people needed sleep.

  “Yah. Bernhardt here,” said a voice from the console, speaking before the video display had gotten his image up on the screen.

  Then the announcement screen faded and she could see Wolf Bernhardt, sitting at what looked like a console station in some sort of command center. She could see a vague, mousy-looking woman just at the edge of the frame. Where was he? Still at Kourou, according to the infostrip across the bottom of the screen. She had assumed he would be back here in New York long ago. Ah, well, good thing the phone system could keep track of where he was. Ursula certainly couldn’t.

  Bernhardt looked drawn, tired, and pale, but not nearly so much as she expected. The man never wore out—or at least he was determined to make it seem that way.

  “Wolf. Good morning.” Strange. She thought of him by his last name, but always addressed him by his first. Somehow, the two of them had always simulated intimacy, without actually having it.

  “This morning is anything but good,” Bernhardt replied, a hard edge to his voice. “Last night was nothing but disaster. How could this morning be good?”

  Damn the man, kicking her in the head for a commonplace courtesy. As if she were to blame for Yuri’s death. Ske had not sent him out in that death-trap permod. But still, she must say something. “I mourn his death as well, Wolf. I am sorry.”

  “Yah, yah,” Bernhardt replied, ducking his head and running his fingers through his hair, avoiding eye contact. Ursula allowed the moment and the silence to linger.

  But then it was over. Wolf cleared his throat, adjusted the papers in front of him, and moved resolutely to new business. “Now, your report and analysis. Have you got anything new? Any revised behaviour analysis on the COREs or SCOREs?”

  Ursula punched a panel or two on her menu screen. “Text and data on their way to you now. There is something new in it, too.”

  “New in what way?”

  “Something a little hard to put down in numbers and charts.” Ursula blinked, covered her mouth as she yawned. She felt the need to get up and stretch.

  “Well, what is it then? A behavioural change in the SCOREs, perhaps?”

  Ursula shook her head no. She was feeling restless, cooped up. She threw a switch that moved the image of Bernhardt over to the main wall display, and cut from the desk camera to the one over the wall screen.

  She stood up, came around to the front of the desk, perched on its corner, and addressed the wall screen. “No change on the SCOREs, Wolf. We’re still tracking them heading toward the Moonpoint Singularity.” She hesitated, tempted to say something more about her thoughts on that. But no. Leave it for now. Talk about the rest of it instead. “But I’m starting to see something else in all the data. Nothing I can define absolutely, nothing I can hang a number on, but it’s there, all the same.”

  Bernhardt gave her an odd look. “What is where, please?”

  Ursula gestured vaguely. “The COREs, Wolf. They are becoming increasingly aggressive.”

  Wolf shut his eyes and nodded. He was more tired than he looked. “Yah. More intercepts.”

  “I am afraid it goes deeper than that. They are not just more aggressive. They are more erratic.”

  “What do you mean?” Wolf demanded, looking up at the camera, his expression hard and sharp.

  Ursula Gruber paced the floor. She knew that she was going in and out of the pan limits of the cameras, and knew how irritating it could be for Wolf when she wandered out of the shot, but she couldn’t help it. She was too keyed up, too edgy.

  “There are more attacks, but there is less logic behind any given attack. Launch-window constraints meant we had to send some cargo via high-risk trajectories—but the COREs aren’t taking the bait. Cargoes we almost expected to be smashed are getting through—and the ones sent via the safest routes and launch windows are getting hit far more frequently than they should be.”

  “We have enough ships and routes and attacks to know it isn’t just some slight skew in the numbers, a hiccup in the statistics. It’s a real change. Based on the numbers we had a week ago, Dr. Sakalov’s ship should not have been attacked.”

  “And the other two, Sturgis and Colette, are still en route, in the middle of it, on those ‘safe’ trajectories,” Bernhardt said in a bitter voice, a note of anger and blame there as well. But one look at his expression made it clear he was blaming himself, not her. Well, if she felt guilty enough to think he was pointing the finger at her, no wonder. “I gave you the trajectory data, Wolf,” she said. “His death is on my hands as well.”

  “Ursula, we are fighting a war here. Yes, one man has died, and two others might, but the fate of the planet is on the line. We made the mistake together, Ursula, if you like. But his blood is not on our hands. The enemy killed him. Not us.”

  “But the other two are on the same sort of safe trajectories. Now all my calculations turn out to be useless and we don’t dare change their courses for fear of attracting the COREs’ attention. I could get them all killed, to no purpose.”

  “Then they will be killed!” Wolf said. “We got them killed. I assure you, the nightmares came every time I lay my head down even before Yuri’s death. Now they will come even worse. I know that. But we must move on. If the other two are on dangerous trajectories, it’s too late now. There’s no way to recall them, no way to save them. If at least one of them survives, then that will be enough. The knowledge, the experience we have here at MRI will get to where it needs to be.”

  “And if they both die? If the COREs get them both?” Ursula asked.

  “If the COREs get them both—” Bernhardt began to answer, but stopped abruptly, as if to calm himself and collect his thoughts. “If the COREs get them both, I will review the situation and decide what to do. We may attempt to send someone else out. By that time it may no longer be within our power to do anything at all. It is not, thank God, a decision I must make now.”

  “Have you—informed—either of them?” Ursula asked. “Do they know what happened to Yuri?”

  “No. They are not to be informed until they arrive at NaPurHab. No good purpose could be served by telling them now. Cooped up in those damned tin cans, what good would knowing do them? Besides, the panic could kill them.”

  “You’re right, I suppose,” Ursula conceded, “but that doesn’t make it feel any righter.”

  “No, it does not.” Bernhardt was silent again for a moment. He just sat there, staring down at his hands. Ursula found it in her heart to pity the man, even if he did seem more than half robot most of the time. This was hard on him, harder than he ever let show. “But let us move on,” he said at last, in a brisk, efficient tone of voice. “How goes work on the Lone World transmissions?”

  “We’re learning fast,” Ursula said, trying to sound equally brisk and efficient. “We’re seeing a lot of new synta
x and vocabulary, but the underlying structure is very similar to the message traffic we’ve been reading for years.”

  “Excellent,” Bernhardt replied. “That is going to be the key, Ursula. If we can read the Charonian’s basic commands, perhaps we can still survive.”

  “We’re working around the clock, I promise you. But there’s something else that might be of more immediate concern. We have tracked what seem to be two incidents of—well, I am not quite sure how to describe it.”

  “Two incidents of what, Ursula?”

  “Of what look very much like COREs attacking each other. And another of a CORE attacking a SCORE.”

  “Charonians attacking each other?” Wolf asked.

  Ursula nodded. “Suicide attacks, in fact, but that much at least makes sense. An impact powerful enough to kill one would pretty much have to kill the other.”

  “But they are attacking each other?”

  “We’ve seen it before, occasionally, in the vicinity of some of the other Captive Worlds. Never more than one at a time.”

  “Are you sure they were attacks? Might the incidents not be something else you are misinterpreting?”

  “One CORE moves in on another, crashes into it, and both of them go dead in the water. No further movement or radar emissions, and a cloud of fragments and debris. What else could it be?”

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” Wolf protested. “Why would they attack each other?”

  “I don’t know,” Ursula said. “Why the hell do they do anything? Any explanation I can give comes down to projecting human emotions and motives onto a bunch of flying rocks and mountains. But something is different about the way they are acting. That much I can say for sure. A few incidents of one crashing into another could just be malfunctions or accidents, or a result of more traffic causing congestion. It’s more general than that. Their movements are more sudden compared to even a few weeks ago. There’s something rather abrupt in the way they move, something that wasn’t there before. I’ve seen a few COREs start in toward a target and then abort, brake to a halt almost before they start. They’re jumpy.”

  “But why?” Wolf asked. “What sort of orders could they be getting that would make them act that way?”

  Ursula shrugged. “We’re just at the beginning stages of being able to read Lone World command sets, but I don’t think they are being ordered to do anything. Besides, the shift in their behaviour is too subtle a difference to be caused by orders. It’s a question of tone.”

  “Tone? Ursula, what the devil are you talking about?” Wolf said.

  Ursula sighed. “All right. I think they’re sensing panic from higher up, and the panic is spreading. That’s the short form. They’re trigger-happy because the Lone World is nervous.”

  “That’s a lot to read into one asteroid crashing into another.”

  “Wolf, I know these particular, individual COREs. They’ve been in near-Earth space for years. I’ve been tracking them since they arrived, watched them the way a behaviourist watches herds of animals. And they do have individual behaviours. Certain COREs are more aggressive, other more cautious. If two COREs got within a certain distance of each other, one would give way to the other—and I could predict which one. I have files and data on every move they’ve ever made.

  “These COREs are acting scared. Something has them spooked. The best I can describe it is that they are like hunting dogs who start acting nervous when their master is edgy.”

  Ursula walked back behind her desk, dropped into her chair, and stared up at Wolfs face on the wall screen. “Which, of course, brings us back to the old, old question. What is frightening enough to spook the Charonians?”

  Boredway Car/Come/CarGo OpCent

  (Formerly Broadway Cargo Operations Center)

  NaPurHab

  The top of the permod swung open and Wally Sturgis sat up, feeling more than a little pleased with himself. He knew for damned sure that you weren’t supposed to be able to open the things from the inside. He counted the fact that he had managed it as a major victory.

  His head felt a little funny, unaccustomed to any sort of movement after three days in the mod. He felt his stomach lurch just a bit as well, as he found out the hard way that sudden movement in a micro-gravity environment could be most disorienting. About a hundredth of a gee this close to the axis. Enough to tell him which way was down, more or less, but not much else. Welcome to NaPurHab, he told himself.

  He took a deep breath to steady himself, and thus got a lungful of air that did not smell like Walter J. Sturgis, another novel experience after the last three days.

  That led him to realise precisely what flavour Walter J. Sturgis had become in the last seventy-two hours. Perhaps a shower might be in order. Wally set to work detaching himself from the permod’s plumbing attachments, and got out of the permod, moving very carefully.

  “Hey! You there guy! Get outta that mod now-right!”

  Wally looked around to see who was calling to him.

  A small, peppery-looking woman bounced up to an overhead guideway about twenty meters away. She was dressed in rather grubby-looking purple-and-orange pants and a torn pullover with a tiger-stripe pattern. Her hair was shaved in a tonsure, and her skin was dyed, not purple, but a rather striking shade of yellow. “Get outta that thing!” she said again, pulling herself along on the overhead stanchions.

  “I’m getting, I’m getting,” Wally said, scrambling out of the mod, feeling more than a bit woozy.

  “Those supplies are everybody’s, buddy,” the woman shouted, hurrying over, swinging along, arm over arm. “Cargo headhoncho don’t want no lib’rating without his okay…” Her voice trailed off as she got close enough to get a whiff of permod. She looked down into the permod, took another look at Wally, and said, “Oh.” She let go of her stanchion and drifted slowly down to floor level, landing after a leisurely five-second fall.

  “You been in that thing?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh,” Wally said.

  “Not sposed to be outgetting alone,” she pointed out in a rather accusing tone, but with something less than crystalline clarity as to what she was accusing him of. Was she saying it wasn’t allowed? Or unsafe? Or commenting on the fact that it was supposed to be impossible?

  “Sorry,” Wally said. “Should I get back in until you’re ready?”

  chapter 20: Blood in the Sky

  “There’s an ancient, ancient joke in which a man has made a hash of his business and is being interviewed in the aftermath. ‘Have you learned from your mistakes?’ the man is asked. ‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘I’m sure I could repeat them exactly.’

  ”This, when applied to the Charonians, sums up their response to our tactical and strategic failures— and successes. They will do tomorrow what they did yesterday. So long as they continue to follow this practise, we will have at least some whisper of hope.“

  —Gerald MacDougal, journal entry, November 5, 2430

  Terra Nova

  Deep Space, Approaching Near-Earth Space

  Slowly, slowly, the big ship moved in toward Moonpoint.

  Dianne Steiger sucked on her bulb of coffee and considered just how much she hated zero gee. Not for herself, mind. After an adult lifetime spent in spacecraft of one sort or another, a shift from this gravity to that meant little to her. The medical problems caused by zero gee were no great challenge, either, if people paid attention and took care of themselves—and she made quite certain that everybody on a ship of hers took care of themselves. Zero-gee debilitation was to spaceflight as scurvy had been to sea travel five or six hundred years before—completely preventable, and fatal all the same, for anyone fool enough not to take precautions.

  It was the headaches that zero gee caused in managing the ship. Terra Nova had been designed for operation either in zero gee or in roll mode, rotating along her long axis to produce artificial gravity via the centrifugal effect. The TN could function either way, but roll mode was preferred for almost everything on board,
from drinking coffee to flushing the toilets, from pumping coolant to controlling the ship’s thermal load. There were ways to do everything in no-grav, but most of them were awkward and inconvenient, work-arounds rather than straightforward procedures.

  To make it harder, they were trying to operate at minimal power

  Every use of electric power, by definition, generated electromagnetic radiation of one sort or another, including radio emissions—not good around things like COREs, designed and built to detect radio frequencies.

  So no hot food, no hot showers. Large areas of the ship were in darkness, while sections in active use were using half their normal lighting. It was getting damned depressing.

  Nor did she greatly enjoy standing four-eight-four-eight watches, but she didn’t see much choice in that matter, either. There just weren’t enough command and ops personnel available to keep the ship running on alert status any other way. Four hours of general supervision where needed in the ship, eight hours on bridge duty, then four hours of dealing with whatever low-priority matters and office work had cropped up during the day. Then—in theory—eight hours to eat at least one decent meal, wash, and grab some kind of sleep before starting it all over again. Not that she had gotten eight hours of downtime since they had started the approach to Earth.

  Something always came up. Last night, for example, she had spent half the time she was supposed to be sleeping sweating out the closest approach of CORE 219.

  Terra Nova‘s course had taken her within six thousand kilometres of the CORE at one point. But the CORE had done nothing, and Terra Nova had drifted past it in the darkness of space.

  All in all, a lot of trouble just to get the two surviving MRI specialists—assuming they did survive—and Terra Nova‘s share of the supplies sent from Earth.

  Ah, well. Back to business. Dianne started checking the repeater displays, in effect looking over the shoulder of her crew.

 

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