by Bill DeSmedt
“Andropov,” he said.
He heard a sharp intake of breath. Her hand hovered indecisively over the keyboard.
“Galina, we’ve got to do it. Otherwise there is no future. Think of the children, all the children.” Knox burned with shame at manipulating her like this. Just this once he almost wished he hadn’t intuited exactly the right word. No matter if it was true.
But it worked. Le mot juste always works. With a sob, Galina hit Enter, initiated the retargeting procedure. Gears shrilled as the arm began shifting into the new position. At the same instant, a shout went up from the viewing gallery three tiers below them.
Too soon! Knox had been expecting Grishin and company to come around once the hellish hallucinations let up. That wasn’t the same as knowing what to do about it.
Marianna shook off the remnants of the nightmare. Turned to where Jon had been sitting. He was gone. She scanned the hall for him, finally spotted him in the control booth with Galina. What was he doing up there?
A shout to her right. Grishin was rising from his chair, pointing at the main display screen. She took a look herself. And stared in disbelief at the target in the crosshairs.
Andropov!
She looked down the row of seats. Nobody else in the VIP section was stirring yet: the geriatric Council members still looked pretty dazed. But Grishin was making up for the rest of them. He was on his feet, waving his arms, shouting out commands.
“Sasha, stay here and keep watch on Bonaventure! Yuri, see to them!” His finger stabbed in the direction of the control booth, even as he himself began moving toward the crane-arm. “I will manually abort the insertion!”
Yuri heaved himself to his feet and lumbered to the aisle. Then he turned and stood there, not moving. His grin widened as he drew his ceramic pistol and aimed it at Marianna’s forehead.
Oh, shit!
Suddenly, something blocked her view of the gun muzzle.
Sasha! Sasha was rising from his seat to stand between her and the Georgian hitman.
She heard Yuri say, “Move aside!” Heard the pistol being cocked.
Sasha flinched but did not budge. The moment stretched out. Two seconds. Three.
“Yuri!” Grishin’s shout echoed through the bay. “Forget the woman! Stop them!.”
Yuri scowled, but he turned away and began hauling himself up the stairs toward the control room.
Sasha turned to her, pale as death, breath coming fast. He licked his lips. “Marianna, I—”
“Sasha, thanks. I . . . I owe you one.”
“Was nothing.” He looked like he was about to faint. Then he was too busy watching what she was doing.
Twisting round in her chair till she’d bent over the arm, Marianna brought her hands close enough to the waistband of her jeans to reach in and extract a small bottle from its hiding place in the utility pocket. Unscrewing the lid, she poured its contents over the adhesive webbing that bound her wrists to the chair frame.
Sasha looked at her quizzically. “How did you get that past the strip-search?”
“Shhh!” she explained.
“Galina? Lock the door again, please,” Knox said. “And get down.”
He waited while she keyed in the command, then hustled her to shelter behind the heavy desk.
Yuri, at the control room door now, was aiming the muzzle of his ceramic pistol in their direction. Sure hope this glass is bulletproof! The first shots stitched a row of little starred holes into the glass of the door; a mated set of pockmarks appeared in the wall opposite. Guess not!
“Careful, Yuri!” Grishin could be heard shouting from below, “You’ll hit the controls! Key in the combination—it’s 314159! And hurry!”
Yuri reluctantly transferred the pistol to his other hand and turned to study the keypad set into the adjacent wall. He punched in the combination, then cursed. Not good with numbers, evidently.
Knox and Galina looked out from behind the desk. “How long to launch?” he asked her.
“Arm is repositioning now. Maybe five seconds more.” She cast a fearful glance over to where Yuri was pounding at the keypad, swept her gaze down into the observation bay, to the—
“Look!” she cried.
They had bigger problems. A hush fell over the room. Even Yuri stopped hammering away and turned to watch.
Grishin had reached the probe-launcher and climbed out onto one of the struts of its arm. Clinging to the rungs running down it, he began descending hand over hand toward the launch tube containing the last message probe.
Why was he doing this, when he’d seen what would come of it? Or had he? Had he ever managed to close his eyes long enough to look?
Knox turned to Galina. “Is the added weight going to knock the arm out of alignment?”
“Should not do, Dzhon. Launcher must endure far greater stresses.”
Sure enough, the crane-arm was holding rock-steady. Overengineered, no doubt. After all, the business end of the launcher had to come within two or three meters of Vurdalak’s singularity, with gravity increasing by leaps and bounds as the distance diminished.
Grishin was hanging on to a rung and kicking at one of the struts, trying to dislodge the timeprobe. No go—that arm had to be built to withstand maybe fifty or a hundred gravities. He’d have to go down and physically pull the probe out of the insertion tube if he wanted to abort the launch.
He didn’t just want to; he had to. If there was even a trace of residual radiation on the containment chamber’s interior walls, Grishin had already taken a lethal dose. He was a dead man now, unless he could climb down and change the past.
And that was proving not so easy. Along about now Grishin was probably wishing he’d paid more attention at Sasha’s physics briefings. Especially the one about how drastically your weight would increase the closer you got to a gravitational point-source.
Already he’d been forced to swing his body around and work his way down the crane-arm feet first. His eyes sank deep in their sockets, runnels of sweat coursing down cheeks distended like those of a jet pilot in a power dive. His knuckles whitened with the effort needed to hang onto each next rung against his body’s increasing weight. His labored breathing echoed loud in the silent chamber. He was almost at the launch tube.
“Why isn’t it firing?” Knox whispered.
Galina frowned. “Launcher must be reading movement on crane arm and thinking reconfiguration is still in progress. It will not launch probe until alignment completes.”
“Is there an override? Tell me how.”
“No, Dzhon. Command sequence is too complex, would take too long to tell.”
She looked into his eyes. Her face took on an almost ethereal tranquility. “I go. Like you say, is for the children.”
Before he could respond, she was out from behind the desk and into the operator’s chair. Her fingers danced frantically across the workstation’s keyboard. All the while her lips were moving, silently forming words. To Knox, it looked as if she were saying “Gospodi, pomilui”—Lord, have mercy upon us.
The glass door exploded.
Yuri dropped the fire axe with a thud and strode into the control room, transferring the ceramic pistol to his good hand again as he came on.
Galina lifted her face to look him in the eye . . . and hit the Enter key.
The launch tube coughed, hurling the stubby message cylinder on its predestined trajectory into the Singularity’s timefield. The tough metal keened as tidal forces stretched the probe near its breaking point. The sound cut off abruptly as it vanished in a silent starburst.
A single shot rang out. Grishin had told Yuri to be careful. The soft-nosed slugs inflicted minimal collateral damage, all their insult being absorbed by the target, and Yuri had only used one of them.
Galina expelled a breath and slumped sideways, a red stain spreading across her blouse. Her chair tipped over and dumped her sprawling into Knox’s arms. He cradled her head, barely noticing as Yuri’s shadow fell across them where they hu
ddled on the floor.
A scream echoed through the bay. Grishin! Vurdalak had him!
Grishin scrabbled for purchase as the vortex left by the probe’s passage reached for him. His shriek rose in pitch and volume, then suddenly cut short. It was all over in an instant as he sailed in past the Singularity and vanished down the same rabbit hole as the message cylinder before him.
Knox averted his face and reflexively squeezed his eyes shut. Bad move, as it turned out, since Singularity-light showed him what he had sought to avoid seeing and could not otherwise have seen.
All over in an instant, perhaps. But Grishin was under constant acceleration throughout his headlong plunge into the Singularity’s gravity well, and general relativity dictates that a distant observer would see something quite different. As the Comrade Director approached lightspeed, his metabolism, his awareness—indeed, time itself—ran slower and slower. Though the gruesome sight grew dim and dimmer, faded to black, still, from the perspective of the outside world, Grishin’s final moments stretched out into an excruciating eternity.
Even as he himself was stretching. As he neared the Singularity, Grishin’s six-foot height was enough to put his head and his feet in entirely different gravitational regimes. It was the same force-differential as powered the tides of Earth’s oceans, played out on a scale of millimeters. And human tissue could not withstand Vurdalak’s tides the way the tungsten steel of the timeprobe cylinders could. Muscle and bone and nerve fiber gave way in a series of bloody discharges as Grishin’s body elongated far beyond what flesh was meant to endure.
A long, thin filament charred black by friction was all that was left of him by the time Arkady Grigoriyevich departed the present for the morning of February 9, 1984.
“Insertion complete at thirteen minutes twenty-two seconds,” the synthesized announcement heralded the closing of the Portal.
Just before it went dark, the forward display showed an old man, thrashing feebly in pain and clutching at the long thin metal needle which had suddenly materialized deep within his chest. And, on the floor beside his bed, a mound of scorched, braided flesh, ground exceeding fine.
The mission-control computer began speaking again. “Warning: one minute thirty seconds to cryostat shutdown. Awaiting command to reestablish event horizon.”
Knox barely heard. He held Galina’s head in his lap and stroked her forehead. Two friends this damned assignment had cost him now. It hadn’t been enough to reach the last row; he’d had to go upend the chessboard and scatter the pieces all over the floor.
“Warning: sixty seconds to cryostat shutdown. Awaiting command to reestablish event horizon.” There it was again. Would somebody shut that damned thing off?
Galina looked up into Knox’s face. Her eyes misted over with pain, then widened. He turned to see what she was looking at.
The countdown stood at 00:48, still running.
She struggled to rise, fell back. “Please, Dzhon, event horizon must be closed, and power restored, or cryostats stop running . . .”
“It’s okay, Galina,” Knox soothed. “The computer will do all that; the whole sequence is automated.”
“No . . . not automated . . . For so far into past, had to disengage safeties, go to manual . . .”
“Warning: thirty seconds to cryostat shutdown,” launch control informed them.
Knox swallowed. He remembered now; Sasha had said something about the omega sequence requiring a human operator. “Quick! What do I have to do?”
Galina’s voice was fading. He had to lower his ear almost to her lips to hear. “Casimir rectifier queued up, ready to go, but could not release before probe launch . . . Just . . . hit Enter.”
Knox looked up. Out in the bay, the overhead display was reading 00:24, 00:23, 00:22 . . . He turned toward the console.
And saw Yuri standing there, his face swollen with fury, his pistol aimed between Knox’s eyes.
Galina seized his arm with desperate strength. “Please, Dzhon, hurry . . . In fifteen seconds, containment fails . . . Vurdalak . . . falls through to center of Earth . . . Will be . . . end . . . of everything . . .”
Knox gauged the distance. Could he make it before Yuri gunned him down? Yuri was looking him straight in the eye, smiling. He wanted Knox to try it.
“Warning: ten seconds to cryostat shutdown.
Yuri’s finger tightened on the trigger, his eyes not moving from Knox’s face . . .
Nine
. . . the second time he will have made that mistake.
Eight
A flash of ruby light from behind him. A sizzle and a sudden puff of steam. The pistol falling from his hand, the hand falling from his arm. Yuri stood there in shock, staring at a blood-gouting stump where his gunhand used to be.
Seven
He whirled in time to see Marianna re-aim her commandeered laser rifle a notch higher. “You!” he began.
Six
That’s all he had time for. Her second blast took off his head.
Five
Knox vaulted over the decapitated corpse . . .
Four
. . . and stabbed a finger at the Enter key.
Three
Two
“Command acknowledged. Reestablishing event horizon.”
Knox looked out into the bay, where the countdown had halted at 00:02.
He turned and knelt again beside Galina. Her eyes burned fiercely for a moment. “Did you . . . did you . . .”
“Not me,” Knox told her, as the bright eyes slowly dimmed. “You did. You saved the children.”
“Jon?” Someone was trying to get his attention.
Marianna. She was crouching at the door, aiming the laser rifle out into the bay. “Check if Yuri’s still got my handheld on him.”
For a moment, Knox wondered why. The little battery-powered unit wasn’t going to transmit through the two miles of seawater that separated them from the surface. Then he remembered: Grishin said he’d had it rigged to piggyback off Antipode’s own communications link.
He rolled the headless body over. Averting his eyes, going mostly on feel, he found the communicator in an inside jacket pocket. He yanked it out and handed it to Marianna.
“Thanks.” She glanced down just long enough to enter a key sequence. “I’d have done it myself, but I’ve kind of got my hands full right now.”
As if to underscore that, she raised the rifle and pulled the trigger, then ducked as return fire gouged the wall behind her.
“How many?” Knox asked.
“I count five. The guard detail, minus the one I took out to get this.” She hefted her weapon again and fired back.
“This help?” Knox scooped up Yuri’s discarded pistol and aimed it awkwardly.
“Careful where you point that thing! Yeah, get over here!”
He joined her at the door. Now he could see the ring of guards advancing cautiously, using the auditorium seats for cover, slowly tightening the noose. He stole a glance at Marianna, seeing again the naked ferocity, the wildness in her. Seeing something else, as well. “Marianna, you’ve got less than half the charges left on that rifle!”
“Tell me something I don’t know. We’ll just have to make them last till Pete gets here!”
If he gets here, Knox thought. If he even gets the signal.
Marianna fired again, then said, “One less.” Knox wasn’t sure if she was referring to the remaining charges or the remaining guards.
It didn’t matter. Best case, it was going to take Aristos and company an hour to cover the ten miles between the perimeter of Grishin’s exclusion zone and Antipode Station, and they had minutes at most before their ammo ran out and the guards rushed in.
Worth it, though, he thought as he raised his gun to fire. Definitely worth it.
There came one final, blinding pulse of light, and, on its heels, an ear-splitting crash.
45 | Mopping Up
“JONATHAN? CAN YOU hear me?” The familiar voice seemed to be coming from the s
ame direction as the glaring green afterimages.
“Mycroft?” Knox could barely hear his own words over the ringing in his ears.
“Yes, Jonathan, it’s me.”
Knox shook his head. That didn’t seem right somehow, unless . . . “If you’re supposed to be guiding me toward the light, you’re going to have to talk me through it. I can’t see a damned thing.”
“Yes, I am sorry about our son et lumiere entrance. I managed to convince Euripedes that barging into this facility with conventional guns blazing would have been ill-advised. The effects of the flash-bang grenades should begin wearing off in a minute or two.”
“Mycroft, if I’m not dead, what are you doing here?”
“The people that CROM sent to pick up Marianna, ah, persuaded me to accompany the Antipode Expeditionary Force. It meant doing my biofeedback exercises six hours running just to survive the trip, but when Euripedes explained—rather forcefully, I might add—that the alternative was indictment for violations of the Homeland Security Acts, well, I—”
“Wait a minute—Euripedes? You mean Pete? Pete Aristos?”
Knox’s vision had cleared to the point where he could make out a fuzzy gray outline: Mycroft’s head nodding a yes. “He’ll want to talk to you himself, Pm sure, but he’s rather busy just now with the mopping-up operations.”
Knox blinked again. He could see now, sort of. Well enough to tell he was still in the control room of Antipode Station. Well enough to watch as several black-garbed SWAT-team types rounded up Grishin’s stunned guards and Council-critters, while others fanned out to take up positions along the rim of the observation gallery.
“Pete’ll keep,” Knox said, struggling to his feet. “Give me a hand here.”
Mycroft helped him up. Knox turned to look back down at the control-room floor. Galina’s body was nowhere to be seen. He hoped that she wasn’t being treated as just another detail to be mopped up. That, wherever she was, they were taking good care of her.
He turned back to his friend. “Jesus, Mycroft! It is you!” Knox was about to grab him and give him a hug, when he remembered whom he was dealing with. He settled for saying, “When I asked what you were doing here, I didn’t mean here specifically, I meant anywhere.”