by MadMaxAU
— It’s not tuned for this! It’ll shake apart! —
Carl thumbed over to telescopic. All up and down the hillside, plumes of vapor spouted as pellets struck.
“A Comm auto override. Jeffers, left!”
—Yo. —
The small gouts of fog leaped high, several a second.
A blue flash from the hilltop, brighter this time. The enemy, too, was zeroing in. Carl turned and saw the ice not far behind him flare and suddenly explode into pearly mist.
“Higher!”
— Gotcha! —
A line of bursting fog walked tip the hillside, erratic but rising, steadily rising toward the specks who manned the big, cumbersome tube.
Two antagonists, each wrestling with weapons too big and powerful to be used deftly…like fighters flailing at each other with steel beams. The first to score a hit . . .
Carl wondered what would happen if the laser struck him fully. His suit would reflect some, and at this angle the beam was spread over a much larger area . . . still; he didn’t want to find out.
“Go right! And higher!”
The jittering gouts of fog leaped, swerved, steadied and struck the milling specks.
Soundless destruction. Carl lay on the ice and watched the pellets pound endlessly into the targets— mere writhing dots and splintered, rolling parts of the laser— as the fog of the assault gathered, spread, and finally obscured the scene.
“Okay. You can . . . shut it down.”
— We get ‘em? —
“Yeah. Yeah, we did.”
Carl felt no elation, no zest. It had all happened so fast, so abstractly. A bunch of dots moving on a hillside. Brilliant, sudden flashes of blue. Then the distant spurts as streaking casings struck ice, struck steel, struck yielding flesh and cracking bone. A science of strict geometry and easy death.
— Hey, we did it! That’ll teach the suckers! — The launcher fell silent. Jeffers leaped out of the trench, exuberant.
“So . . . so we did.”
He heard Virginia’s voice, and others, and with the returning babble running in his ears Carl walked slowly toward the hammered hillside, not wanting to see what was there but knowing he should. It was part of his job.
Suddenly his mind cleared and he remembered the rest of the poem, the lines that he had idly recalled only a few minutes before…a time that seemed months in the past, now.
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
VIRGINIA
Spacesuits were aggravating. They reminded Virginia of how out of shape she was— of the passage of years.
She struggled with the adjustment bands, loosening some and tightening others in all the wrong places. Flab! No wonder Saul’s been so . . .
Virginia clamped down on the thought. Anyway, she was sure their troubles had little to do with her recent lack of exercise.
Maybe nothing was meant to last, she thought. Perhaps everything good self destructs in the end.
The image of a red world, new volcanoes bursting forth to greet the dawn . . .
For the first time since the abortive Arcist attack, Carl had given permission for her to come up and see him in person. Being indispensable had its drawbacks. With human guards and watch-mechs standing in layers around her lab to protect her, she had lately begun feeling like a queen ant, a slave to her own royalty.
Though a queen ant, at least, creates eggs . . . .
Another bad thought. Why were these things all coming to the surface right now?
Because we’ve begun killing each other, here and now? Is that why I’m so depressed?
Or is it because I’m lonely, and no longer young?
Virginia finished dressing and slipped a worn tabard over her suit. She didn’t even have one of her own— had never bothered designing one. This one— depicting a sheaf of wheat above three gold balls— had belonged to Dr. Evans, a Hydroponics man firmly dead for twenty years, now. The suit matron had reregistered it to Virginia and she had decided to live with it.
I wish it weren’t necessary to come up here in person at all, she thought as she began cycling through the lock.
But this business was too important to discuss over any comm line. It wasn’t just fear of being tapped. She wanted to watch Carl’s face when she confronted him.
The outer doors opened and the scene was briefly obscured by a fog of condensing vapor. The snowflakes blew away into space and she looked out across the open icescape.
In a sense it was a bit disappointing. Her linkage with remotes had grown so good that her vision on the surface actually seemed better in surrogate than in person. Skim walking carefully out onto the grimy crust felt somehow more removed than controlling a mech out here.
There was a fluttering sensation of nakedness, too. After all, she had many mechs, but only one body. And it was out on the surface now, under the unwinking stars.
The landscape was less scarred, out here by Shaft 6, than where her mechs and Jeffers’s factory hands had gouged and rutted the ancient comet. Here the dominant feature was a looming edifice that looked something like a cross between a glass Ferris wheel and a web spun of liquid spider’s silk.
A number of spacers were gathered at its base, gesturing from it to a point in the glittering blackness. She recognized the tabards of Carl Osborn and Andy Carroll, as well as several others— mostly members of the Plateau Three and Survivors’ factions. Virginia mumbled command phrases until she was able to latch on to the frequency they were using. It was child’s play to break their coding.
—. . . tell you I think the thing is just too damn small! They may have made advances since we left, sure. But even that hot fusion torch can’t have pushed more than twenty tons at that kind of acceleration for so long. —
— Yeah? Well, even if it is just twenty tons, think of all that could include. Faster logic quips for better computers and mechs. Hybrid seeds to improve our hydro. And tritium fuses! Twenty tons of stuff like that could make all the difference. —
They were talking about the Care Package, obviously. As she approached, skirting a cracked area in the ice, she heard Carl’s voice cut in.
— You’re hoping the Christmas gifts will change the Arcists’ mind Andy? —
— Or give us something to use to wipe ‘em out. I don’t really care which. Anything that’ll shake them out of the south pole so we could go back to the Jupiter maneuver and save the original mission. Th’ Mars fling’s all right, as a second choice. But Captain Cruz would’ve wanted us to . . . —
The words stopped as Andy Carroll noticed that Carl had turned to greet Virginia.
— Osborn, open channel to Herbert. Hello, Virginia. —
His stained spacesuit was a mixture of cannibalized parts. Over it was draped a dingy white cloth emblazoned with a picture of a red crustacean. His visor cleared and she saw his face. Gray at his temples and lines on his brow had not robbed Carl of his strong-jawed, boyish charm.
—It was good of you to come up, Virginia. There is something special we’d like to ask you to do for us. —
She nodded, then remembered that she was facing the distant sun. Although it was not much more than a very bright star now, her visor might still have automatically dimmed and hidden the gesture.
“I’ll help any way I can,” she began. “But . . .”
— That’s great. ‘Cause we’re getting concerned about the first Care Package from Earth. Don’t want anything to go wrong when it arrives. —
“What could go wrong?”
— How ‘bout it fallin’ into the wrong hands? — Carroll suggested.
Carl shrugged.
— Quiverian denies responsibility for that attack down at the equator. Says they were renegades, acting without sanction. Still, I see your point. I don’t think we want the Care Package coming down at the south pole by mistake. It may be better to have a mech go out and e
scort the cargo vessel in. —
Virginia understood. It wouldn’t do to have the rescue package hijacked. Then the Arcists would have a total lock. They’d be in complete control.
“Fine. I’ll start working with Jeffers on the details,” she said. “There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about, though.”
— Sure. What is it? — When she shook her head and remained silent, he turned to the others.
— Be right back. guys. See if you can tune this antenna better, will you? I want a good fix on that thing as it gets nearer. —
— Right, Carl. —
He led her over behind a great pile of mine tailings. Making sure she could see him do it, he reached up and switched off his transmitter. Nodding, she did the same. He bent over to touch helmets.
“What’s bothering you, Virginia? You seem so . . . subdued. Is it Saul? I’d heard—“
“No,” she cut in hurriedly. His face was so close. The double layer of separating crystal seemed to pass a warm breath. “No, that’s not it, Carl.”
At least it’s not the reason why I came up here.
“But there is something the matter, between you two,” he insisted.
She nodded, a quick, short jerk. “Nothing, really. Just, well, one of those things. Time— “
“Time changes all of us, Virginia. I never did apologize to both of you for the way I behaved, so many years ago. I was an idiot.” There was an earnestness in his eyes.
“You were young, Carl. We were all younger.”
Except for Saul. With the perfect immune system, won’t he live forever? Is that, maybe, a source of friction between us?
Carl looked down for a moment, then met her eyes. “That doesn’t mean my basic feelings have altered, Virginia. If you’re ready for a change . . .” Carl let his sentence hang, and Virginia suddenly could see something deeper than earnestness, deeper even than the sternness of command. Her gloved hand came up, touched glass.
“Oh, Carl. You’ve hurt so much.”
He shrugged, caught between conflicting feelings.” You came up to see me because— “ There was hope in his voice.
Virginia shook her head, blinking aside the weakness that threatened her determination. “Carl . . .” She swallowed. “Carl, I want to know why you are planning to kill us all.”
“Uh.” He stared. “How . . . What do you mean?”
Her hand dropped. “Oh, you were always a lousy liar, Carl. At least to me you were. The others seem to have swallowed your Judas goat act, thinking Earth really plans a rescue, all that crap about a tight flick past Mars, then on to Jupiter and Venus, then back to Mars and quarantine . . . .”
“What are you— “
“Come to think of it, though, Jeffers and his bunch would back you even if they knew the truth, wouldn’t they?”
Carl broke contact, stepping back before she had even finished. His lips were drawn tight. When he spoke, the movements of his mouth seemed to convey a pungent if silent, bitterness. Virginia gestured at her ears. With an impatient shake of his head he brought their helmets back together jarringly.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
At least Carl did not insult her intelligence with further pretense. He knew she would have run simulations a dozen different ways before ever accusing him like this.
“What am I going to do?” Virginia asked. “First off, I’m giving you a chance to explain. I want to know why you’re fronting for this trick of Earth Control’s, sending us on a direct collision course with Mars!”
Carl’s eyes closed briefly. “There are factions back home, too. There were . . . tradeoffs. We had to make agreements in order to get the Care Packages.”
“So that we can smash into planet in forty years?” Virginia couldn’t help laughing bitterly.
“Forty long years, Virginia. Even with Saul’s serums, we’ll have to keep so many people awake that we’ll all be old by that time.’
“There are children, Carl.”
“Those poor babies the Orthos have been having? They hardly even merit calling human, Virginia. You know that. Anyway, they and all of us will live better and more comfortably with the goods we’ll be getting in these rockets from Earth.”
“Comfort!”
“Yes, that counts for something. But there’s a more important reason.”
“What’s that?”
“Honestly, Virginia, can’t you see that this is the only way anything good can emerge out of this entire fiasco?”
She shook her head. “What good will come of all of us dying?”
“Well, from Earth’s point of view, the end of a threat. And in that I can see the Arcists’ point of view.”
“You can?”
“Yes. Of course. They’ll do anything to protect the homeworld from Halleyforms, and you can’t blame them for that.”
“And from our point of view?”
He shrugged. “We spark life anew on a dead world, perhaps. With our deaths we can begin the long process of bringing Mars alive.”
Virginia couldn’t help sneering. “You’re beginning to sound like Jeffers.”
“Maybe I am at that.” He looked away. His voice dropped. “I might have tried to think of something else, no matter how unlikely, if . . .” His voice trailed off.
“If what, Carl?”
“Never mind. It’s not important.”
“Carl! You have to talk to me.”
He shook his head. “Saul told me, a while back, that he was working on a cloning system. In ten years or so, we might be able to produce a generation of healthy children, slightly modified to be healthy and breed true in low gravity. There may actually be something to that idea some Sergeov’s Ubers talk about, of telling Earth to go to hell and trying to colonize Triton.”
Virginia blinked, realizing what might bring him over to accepting such a plan. “You mean . . . me, in particular, don’t you?”
“Yes. You, me, the children only you and I could have together. I…I might be persuaded to see another point of view, if that seemed possible.”
Inside Virginia’s mind and heart, winter blew. It was a numb incapacity, n unwillingness to understand this. Dimly, she knew that this was Carl’s own unique version of the neuroses they all had, by now— no worse than normal, but highly unusual. It was a curse of hypertrophied romanticism. The wistful teenager in him had, in one respect, been frozen in time.
She knew that a simple confession might solve this . . . a frank admission that, no matter how great the technical miracles science made available, she would never have children by any man. The universe had decided that long ago.
The numbness was too great, though, Too much like a weight of ice she could not lift, even to be kind to a dear friend.
“I won’t tell anybody about Mars, Carl.”
“You won’t?” He blinked. “But I— “
“You’ve convinced me that you’re right. It will be better this way . . . to die bringing life to a dead world. Better than a pointless extinction, the way we’re headed.”
She backed away and turned her transmitter back on. “Tell me when and where you want to meet the first Care Package, and give me a support team. I’ll begin running simulations for a rendezvous right away.
“I’ll be seeing you, Carl.”
She tried not to look at his eyes as she turned away, but she felt his gaze on her back as she picked a narrow, solitary path back down into her crypt, far below the cold stars.
SAUL
It was a sophisticated beast, the vehicle that had traveled so far to bring them gifts from distant Earth, and it had blazed a daring path to reach them here in only five years. Swooping three times past the sun, it had gained terrific speed, until now it streaked outward into the black depths below and beyond the solar system plain.
During each whipping solar passage it had ridden the blazing sunlight on giant gossamer sails. Then, when distance had dimmed the fires behind it, the great sheets folded away and the machine�
��s own flame burst forth. Bits of antimatter met in a tiny combustion chamber, releasing energy that was an early collimated light, propelling the craft faster still.
Only three passes were needed to bring its orbit into the plane of Halley’s— but much faster than the fleeing comet. Technology made it possible, and the hot flux of reawakened public opinion demanded speed. To the popular press of a new generation, this was an errand of mercy that would brook no delay.
To others it was something else altogether— a down payment on a bribe to persuade the strange, time cast, and infected colonists to keep to their agreement, an agreement to stay away.
Did some hope, in this way, to assuage their guilt over the burning of the Edmund Halley? Or to slake their shame over the years of silence and neglect?
Saul watched the screens, along with selected representatives of all the clans, in the cavernous Central Control Room. For once the chamber was actually full, though he would have wagered that the architects had never imagined such a crowd . . . glowering figures wearing tattoos and clothing woven of Halleyform lichen fiber, bearing scars from illnesses never seen on Earth and muttering to one another in strange dialects.
Even Joao Quiverian was here, frowning with arms folded in a corner, with three bodyguards and a recently cloned weasel watching ferally from his shoulder.
Representatives of all the clans were here to observe while Virginia Herbert guided the colonists’ mechanical envoy into a matching orbit with the still decelerating Care Package.
“They’ve sure made advances. That torch is fierce,” Andy Carroll said from the ballistics console. “But it’s still not slowing down fast enough to suit me.”
“I’ll match it,” Virginia muttered drowsily. “Don’t fret, Andy. We’ve made some advances of our own.”
A black cloth covered her eyes as she lay back on the webbing by the waldo controls. The neural tap cable snaked out from the back of her skull, and her fingers gently touched a set of knurled knobs.