by Lake, Jay
I reached the gate, picked my way over fallen wire mesh, then headed for the Primary Site.
I couldn’t run now. The broken slabs tilted crazily, in no pattern. I slipped, stumbled, but kept my feet. Behind me, headlights threw shadows across the slabs. It wouldn’t be long now before someone in Mallon’s task force spotted me and opened up with the guns—
The whoop! whoop! WHOOP! of the guardian Bolo cut across the field.
Across the broken concrete I saw the two red eyes flash, sweeping my way. I looked toward the gate. A massed rank of vehicles stood in a battalion front just beyond the old perimeter fence, engines idling, ranged for a hundred yards on either side of a wide gap at the gate. I looked for the high silhouette of Mallon’s Bolo, and saw it far off down the avenue, picked out in red, white and green navigation lights, a jeweled dreadnaught. A glaring cyclopean eye at the top darted a blue-white cone of light ahead, swept over the waiting escort, outlined me like a set-shifter caught onstage by the rising curtain.
The whoop! whoop! sounded again; the automated sentry Bolo was bearing down on me along the dancing lane of light.
I grabbed at the plastic disk in my pocket as though holding it in my hand would somehow heighten its potency. I didn’t know if the Lesser Troll was programmed to exempt me from destruction or not; and there was only one way to find out.
It wasn’t too late to turn around and run for it. Mallon might shoot—or he might not. I could convince him that he needed me, that together we could grab twice as much loot. And then, when he died—
I wasn’t really considering it; it was the kind of thought that flashes through a man’s mind like heat lightning when time slows in the instant of crisis. It was hard to be brave with broken bone ends grating, but what I had to do didn’t take courage. I was a small, soft, human grub, stepped on but still moving, caught on the harsh plain of broken concrete between the clash of chrome-steel titans. But I knew which direction to take.
The Lesser Troll rushed toward me in a roll of thunder and I went to meet it.
It stopped twenty yards from me, loomed massive as a cliff. Its heavy guns were dead. I knew. Without them it was no more dangerous than a farmer with a shotgun—
But against me a shotgun was enough.
The slab under me trembled as if in anticipation. I squinted against the dull red IR beams that pivoted to hold me, waiting while the Troll considered. Then the guns elevated, pointed over my head like a benediction. The Bolo knew me.
The guns traversed fractionally. I looked back toward the enemy line, saw the Great Troll coming up now, closing the gap, towering over its waiting escort like a planet among moons. And the guns of the Lesser Troll tracked it as it came—the empty guns, that for twenty years had held Mallon’s scavengers at bay.
The noise of engines was deafening now. The waiting line moved restlessly, pulverizing old concrete under churning treads. I didn’t realize I was being fired on until I saw chips fly to my left, and heard the howl of richochets.
It was time to move. I scrambled for the Bolo, snorted at the stink of hot oil and ozone, found the rusted handholds, and pulled myself up—
Bullets spanged off metal above me. Someone was trying for me with a power rifle.
The broken arm hung at my side like a fence-post nailed to my shoulder, but I wasn’t aware of the pain now. The hatch stood open half an inch. I grabbed the lever, strained; it swung wide. No lights came up to meet me. With the port cracked, they’d burned out long ago. I dropped down inside, wriggled through the narrow crawl space into the cockpit. It was smaller than the Mark III—and it was occupied.
In the faint green light from the panel, the dead man crouched over the controls, one desiccated hand in a shriveled black glove clutching the control bar. He wore a GI weather suit and a white crash helmet, and one foot was twisted nearly backward, caught behind a jack lever.
The leg had been broken before he died. He must have jammed the foot and twisted it so that the pain would hold off the sleep that had come at last. I leaned forward to see the face. The blackened and mummified features showed only the familiar anonymity of death, but the bushy reddish mustache was enough.
“Hello, Mac,” I said. “Sorry to keep you waiting; I got held up.”
I wedged myself into the co-pilot’s seat, flipped the IR screen switch. The eight-inch panel glowed, showed me the enemy Bolo trampling through the fence three hundred yards away, then moving onto the ramp, dragging a length of rusty chain-link like a bridal train behind it.
I put my hand on the control bar. “I’ll take it now, Mac.” I moved the bar, and the dead man’s hand moved with it.
“Okay, Mac,” I said. “We’ll do it together.”
I hit the switches, canceling the pre-set response pattern. It had done its job for eighty years, but now it was time to crank in a little human strategy.
My Bolo rocked slightly under a hit and I heard the tread shields drop down. The chair bucked under me as Mallon moved in, pouring in the fire.
Beside me, Mac nodded patiently. It was old stuff to him. I watched the tracers on the screen. Hosing me down with contact exploders probably gave Mallon a lot of satisfaction, but it couldn’t hurt me. It would be a different story when he tired of the game and tried the heavy stuff.
I threw in the drive, backed rapidly. Mallon’s tracers followed for a few yards, then cut off abruptly. I pivoted, flipped on my polyarcs, raced for the position I had selected across the field, then swung to face Mallon as he moved toward me. It had been a long time since he had handled the controls of a Bolo; he was rusty, relying on his automatics. I had no heavy rifles, but my pop-guns were okay. I homed my 4 mm solid-slug cannon on Mallon’s polyarc, pressed the FIRE button.
There was a scream from the high-velocity-feed magazine. The blue-white light flared and went out. The Bolo’s defenses could handle anything short of an H-bomb, pick a missile out of the stratosphere fifty miles away, devastate a county with one round from its mortars—but my BB gun at point-blank range had poked out its eye.
I switched everything off and sat silent, waiting. Mallon had come to a dead stop. I could picture him staring at the dark screens, slapping levers and cursing. He would be confused, wondering what had happened. With his lights gone, he’d be on radar now—not very sensitive at this range, not too conscious of detail....
I watched my panel. An amber warning light winked. Mallon’s radar was locked on me.
He moved forward again, then stopped; he was having trouble making up his mind. I flipped a key to drop a padded shock frame in place, and braced myself. Mallon would be getting mad now.
Crimson danger lights flared on the board and I rocked under the recoil as my interceptors flashed out to meet Mallon’s C-S C’s and detonate them in incandescent rendezvous over the scarred concrete between us. My screens went white, then dropped back to secondary brilliance, flashing stark black-and-white. My ears hummed like trapped hornets.
The sudden silence was like a vault door closing.
I sagged back, feeling like Quasimodo after a wild ride on the bells. The screens blinked bright again, and I watched Mallon, sitting motionless now in his near blindness. On his radar screen I would show as a blurred hill; he would be wondering why I hadn’t returned his fire, why I hadn’t turned and run, why ... why....
He lurched and started toward me. I waited, then eased back, slowly. He accelerated, closing in to come to grips at a range where even the split micro-second response of my defenses would be too slow to hold off his fire. And I backed, letting him gain, but not too fast....
Mallon couldn’t wait.
He opened up, throwing a mixed bombardment from his 9 mm’s, his infinite repeaters, and his C-S C’s. I held on, fighting the battering frame, watching the screens. The gap closed; a hundred yards, ninety, eighty.
Th
e open silo yawned in Mallon’s path now, but he didn’t see it. The mighty Bolo came on, guns bellowing in the night, closing for the kill. On the brink of the fifty-foot-wide, hundred-yard-deep pit, it hesitated as though sensing danger. Then it moved forward.
I saw it rock, dropping its titanic prow, showing its broad back, gouging the blasted pavement as its guns bore on the ground. Great sheets of sparks flew as the treads reversed, too late. The Bolo hung for a moment longer, then slid down majestically as a sinking liner, its guns still firing into the pit like a challenge to Hell. And then it was gone. A dust cloud boiled for a moment, then whipped away as displaced air tornadoed from the open mouth of the silo.
And the earth trembled under the impact far below.
X
The doors of the Primary Site blockhouse were nine-foot-high, eight-inch-thick panels of solid chromalloy that even a Bolo would have slowed down for, but they slid aside for my electropass like a shower curtain at the YW. I went into a shadowy room where eighty years of silence hung like black crepe on a coffin. The tiled floor was still immaculate, the air fresh. Here at the heart of the Aerospace Center, all systems were still go.
In the Central Control bunker, nine rows of green lights glowed on the high panel over red letters that spelled out STAND BY TO FIRE. A foot to the left, the big white lever stood in the unlocked position, six inches from the outstretched fingertips of the mummified corpse strapped into the controller’s chair. To the right, a red glow on the monitor panel indicated the locked doors open.
I rode the lift down to K level, stepped out onto the steel-railed platform that hugged the sweep of the starship’s hull and stepped through into the narrow COC.
On my right, three empty stasis tanks stood open, festooned cabling draped in disorder. To the left were the four sealed covers under which Day, Macy, Cruciani and Black waited. I went close, read dials. Slender needles trembled minutely to the beating of sluggish hearts.
They were alive.
I left the ship, sealed the inner and outer ports. Back in the control bunker, the monitor panel showed ALL CLEAR FOR LAUNCH now. I studied the timer, set it, turned back to the master panel. The white lever was smooth and cool under my hand. It seated with a click. The red hand of the launch clock moved off jerkily, the ticking harsh in the silence.
Outside, the Bolo waited. I climbed to a perch in the open conning tower twenty feet above the broken pavement, moved off toward the west where sunrise colors picked out the high towers of the palace.
* * * *
I rested the weight of my splinted and wrapped arm on the balcony rail, looking out across the valley and the town to the misty plain under which Prometheus waited.
“There’s something happening now,” Renada said. I took the binoculars, watched as the silo doors rolled back.
“There’s smoke,” Renada said.
“Don’t worry, just cooling gases being vented off.” I looked at my watch. “Another minute or two and man makes the biggest jump since the first lungfish crawled out on a mud-flat.”
“What will they find out there?”
I shook my head. “Homo Terra Firma can’t even conceive of what Homo Astra has ahead of him.”
“Twenty years they’ll be gone. It’s a long time to wait.”
“We’ll be busy trying to put together a world for them to come back to. I don’t think we’ll be bored.”
“Look!” Renada gripped my good arm. A long silvery shape, huge even at the distance of miles, rose slowly out of the earth, poised on a brilliant ball of white fire. Then the sound came, a thunder that penetrated my bones, shook the railing under my hand. The fireball lengthened into a silver-white column with the ship balanced at its tip. Then the column broke free, rose up, up....
I felt Renada’s hand touch mine. I gripped it hard. Together we watched as Prometheus took man’s gift of fire back to the heavens.
DANGLING CONVERSATIONS, by Edward M. Lerner
First appeared in Analog (November 2000).
CHAPTER 1
Dom Perignon flowed and beluga vanished. A chamber orchestra played Bach. Crystal chandeliers sparkled and gold-rimmed china gleamed. An indoor fountain sprayed upwards around an enormous ice swan.
The ITU knew how to party in style.
From a terrace kept comparatively uncrowded by the chill evening breeze off Lake Geneva, Dean Matthews observed the gathering. Inside the hotel’s Great Ballroom mingled dozens of international civil servants and hundreds of national delegates. There was an even larger number of “accredited industry observers.” Matthews was one of the lobbyists, representing NetSat, a broadband satcom company.
Completion of a World Administrative Radio Conference was cause for celebration. New wireless technologies, and the implacable growth of older ones, kept the demand for spectrum high. For reasons of historical interest only, many radio bands had differing uses in different parts of the world: a big problem as more systems went global. Users of old systems were entitled to replacement bandwidth when new applications supplanted earlier frequency assignments.
The International Telecommunications Union took the lead in reconciling the many competing claims. That made the ITU an essential, if underappreciated, part of the global economy. Multi-billion-dollar fortunes rose and fell with the outcome of ITU negotiations.
A waiter glided by with champagne. Matthews took a flute for himself and one for his companion. “Congratulations, Madame Secretary-General.”
They clinked glasses.
“You, too.” Fair enough: the WARC had just authorized a frequency range for new broadband services that was compatible with NetSat’s working prototype.
Bridget Satterswaithe, the Secretary-General of the ITU, turned to the lake. Great yachts bobbed at anchor, brightly lit by marina spotlights. She sipped her champagne. “Now that the conference is over, I look forward to some sailing. Maybe see my parents in London. Even a quiet … .”
Buzzing interrupted her; she retrieved the cell phone from her clutch bag. She appeared surprised at the caller ID on the display. “Please excuse me—I have to take this.”
He took the stairs from the terrace down to the marina, giving Satterswaithe some privacy. Waves lapped peacefully against the shore. The wooden pier creaked under his tread. He, too, anticipated some well-deserved rest.
She rejoined him, sans champagne. She seemed shaken. “You’re not going to believe why you won’t be getting that bandwidth after all.”
* * * *
Dean held a PhD in physics and an MBA in international trade. With ten years of telecomm experience, he was, in Internet years, a grizzled veteran. As VP of Strategy and Technology for NetSat, his job entailed much more than lobbying the ITU and its national counterparts for bandwidth.
None of that experience prepared him for Bridget’s news.
She had insisted that they go first to ITU headquarters, and would not discuss it—whatever it was—in the limo.
She now leaned against a corner of her desk. “This all becomes public knowledge tomorrow. It’s been predistributed to governments and the appropriate international scientific bodies. I’m bending rules only slightly by telling you tonight. I’m doing so because, in one very narrow sense, the biggest impact will be on NetSat.
“Of course, life as we know it will also change.”
She had his full attention.
Her call had been from the Secretary-General of the United Nations, parent body to the ITU. The International Academy of Astronautics and MIT were co-hosting a press conference in the morning. Dr. Sherman Xu, the discoverer, would give the first public announcement of a confirmed radio signal indicative of extraterrestrial intelligence. The ITU would immediately initiate an Extraordinary Administrative Radio Conference to fence off the frequencies used by the extra-solar signal.
; ET must be using frequencies near those sought by NetSat. Despite his months of effort to secure the desired spectrum, the professional and personal impacts seemed inconsequential. Intelligent alien life!
Satterswaithe extracted a decanter of amber liquid and two glasses from her credenza. “The formation of a UN task force will also be announced, reporting to the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Since ET uses radio, I’ve been asked to participate on behalf of the ITU.”
He accepted a glass. “I have a terrific job at a world-class company. As of two minutes ago, that doesn’t matter to me. This news is epochal. I want to be involved.”
“My impression is that the team will consist of national government and UN personnel, plus academics. Sorry.”
He canted his head thoughtfully. He’d been an RF engineer and systems architect before moving into management. He’d been a SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) enthusiast for longer. Perhaps he had the basis for an inference that would impress her. “Let’s see what I know about ET that you haven’t shared.
“I don’t need to tell you that the universe is full of radio noise, or that most of that noise is outside the microwave band. At one end of the microwave window, at a wavelength of 21 centimeters, is the neutral hydrogen line. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, so the SETI folks deduce that’s the radio-dial marker to listen near.
“The OH ion radiates nearby, at 18 centimeters. H plus OH equals H2O: water. That’s why the SETI crowd calls wavelengths between 18 to 21 centimeters the ‘watering hole,’ around which they theorize intelligent species will congregate.”
He tested the liquid in his glass: an unblended Scotch. Served neat: without ice or water. “Of course, that’s a water-chauvinist’s perspective on SETI.”