by Larry Niven
“There’d be no point saying it now,” Mycroft said, sounding huffy.
“I’m not used to being the dumbest one in the room,” said Alice. “Say what?”
“‘Have some gum,’ or words to that effect,” May said. “This man is always On.”
“Not really. He prefers under.”
Even if Toby cut his microphone and opaqued his helmet, May would have seen him shaking. He held it in.
“Et tu, Alice?” said May.
“Actually—”
“Let it go,” said Mycroft.
Toby still held it in. It occurred to him that after this exercise of will, levitation might be worth a try.
“They’re still about ten miles away,” May said. “Close enough to have shot us with something by now, so I’d say that confirms they want Toby alive.”
XXXII
Oaths are but words, and words but wind.
—SAMUEL BUTLER
1
“As I see it, our best course is to take control of the other craft and dump LOX until they have just enough to get home,” said Sam.
“General, have you considered taking the crew aboard as prisoners and having one of us fly it back?” said Stephen.
“Why not just make them walk the plank?” said Jack.
“I was making a suggestion. Do you have to be so nosy?” Stephen said.
“You forgot to say ‘you people,’” said Marty.
“I have had about enough of you reading things into what I say.”
“You forgot to say ‘you people,’” said Marty.
“Listen—”
Sam cut everyone’s mikes. “Now hear this,” he said in a voice gone dangerously quiet. “When we have matched course, we will grapple, close, and take control of the other craft. We are here to prevent the world from being taken prisoner. In the course of this, we are obliged to set an example of lawful behavior. If anyone has any doubts about what constitutes lawful behavior, say so and you will be relieved of duty. Are there any questions?” He turned the mikes back on.
Edmundson kept his mouth shut. Jack wished he had his cell camera. There were astronauts who would pay to see that.
2
Foundry’s surface was pretty well covered with a phase-coordinated telescope array, much less vulnerable than a single mirror, vastly larger in aperture, and far easier to aim. Set had been disturbed by the exchange of radio messages earlier, and was now even more disturbed by the deliberation of the second ship’s approach. The concept of bluffing was known from monitoring broadcasts—a job that grew constantly bigger as they got closer to Earth—but the examples of how stupid it was to assume someone was doing so were numerous, and most of them were not fiction.
The messages they had had to decode from military “encryption”—as the senders considered it—had always been disturbing, but they were getting worse.
More disturbing yet was the fact that, if the ships maintained their courses, rendezvous would occur while they were on the other side of the Earth from Foundry. It was as if the pursuers had planned that.
Set passed on his concerns to the rest. Shortly after the message had been sent to Forge, a reply came from Socrates:
Send your own intercept craft.
A design suggestion followed almost ten seconds later; clearly it had been given a lot of thought. It was simple and could be made from parts on hand.
It was launched in twenty minutes.
XXXIII
[He] had heard of fighting fair, and had long ago decided he wanted no part of it.
—TERRY PRATCHETT
1
As Envoy was closing with Firebird, Mycroft said, “I can hit their windshield from here.”
The U.S. ship was about a quarter of a mile away. “With what, your new nanos?” said May.
“Some of them, certainly, but most would just end up adrift, and I’d rather not. I was thinking of using one of the guns Alice was thoughtful enough to collect while I was doing first aid. They’d have to rely on us to get them home.”
May turned to look at each of them in turn, then settled on Mycroft. “I didn’t see her do that.”
“Neither did I, but her bag was about sixty pounds heavier than it had been. Not every kind of intelligence shows up on an IQ test.”
“Huh,” said May, as Alice looked pleased. “Wouldn’t that be an act of war?”
“They’re not asking permission to come alongside,” Mycroft said. “And their cargo bay is opening. QED, they are engaged in piracy.”
May turned swiftly and checked her screen. He was right. Four astronauts were visible coming out of the cargo bay, and they were all carrying equipment. She narrowed her eyes. “That’s all right,” she said. “I’ve got this.” She tapped her keyboard and sent a message to the other ship’s BIOS.
The reentry shield on Envoy’s belly detached and began moving away from the spaceplane.
When May turned to look at Mycroft again, he was watching his own screen in silence, his mouth hanging open. “You’re not the only one who prepares for emergencies,” she said. She switched to voice transmission and hailed the other ship.
2
Charles Stuart Loomis had always had a curious advantage over most members of the astronaut corps: he never showed any trace of bone loss no matter how much time he spent in free fall. He’d also spent five of the past six years concealing a severe and progressive combination of rheumatoid and osteoarthritis—the same trouble that had driven his mother to suicide. Early in ’51 he began suspecting a decline in mental clarity as well. While pain wouldn’t stop him from doing a good job, hiding a lack of alertness would have been criminal, so he’d started giving himself regular intelligence tests. The results had been equivocal … until he took an IQ test the day after Thanksgiving, and scored thirty points higher than he had two weeks before. Five days later, he’d been about to take his morning ketoprofen and suddenly realized the redness, pain, and swelling in his knuckles were gone.
He was also having no more trouble keeping his weight down—everything he ate wasn’t automatically put into storage. His wife Jennifer thought it might be due to her renewed interest in him … or his increased energy may have been the cause of that interest. Or both. In any case, it was like being kids again; if they had an important appointment somewhere, they didn’t dare change clothes in the same room.
Charley thought it had something to do with nobody getting AIDS anymore.
When he learned about the mission, to rendezvous with what had been the target of a nanotech probe, he’d realized immediately that Toby Glyer would be trying to get there any way he could too; and Charley Loomis resolved not to let anything bad happen to Toby Glyer.
In the course of twenty years in the astronaut corps, he had overheard what turned out, when he thought about it, to be a staggering amount of dirt on any number of influential people in the NASA and Navy hierarchies—all of which he now recalled with a clarity that still amazed him. He’d gone to have a few little chats with some of them, and had ended up being the first man chosen for the Envoy mission. He’d also been promoted from captain to commodore, a rank typically used only in wartime. As a flag officer, he’d have been mission commander, if not for the fact that President Foster was an Air Force fighter jockey. Still, for someone who was a pilot rather than an aviator, Brigadier General Samson Quinn was steady enough.
Unfortunately, that meant that Charley, as second in command, had to wait in the truck.
Of course, in the present circumstances, perhaps that wasn’t unfortunate. The other four had all gone back to the hold to gird up their loins or whatever, and Charley sat watching the instruments.
There was a little bump.
The heat shield light went red.
He tapped keys at high speed. It had jettisoned. “Jesus H. FUCK!” he yelled, and hit the command link. “General, our reentry shield has just separated, and the computer says it was our idea. I wasn’t touching the board. I think it’s an override co
mmand.”
“Good day, gentlemen,” the woman piloting the other ship said into all their earphones. “I am certain you will be relieved to learn that you are still able to land without burning up. It requires only that you turn your ship, burn just about all your fuel coming to a halt relative to the ground, and fly your craft down as an airplane. Of course, you only have enough fuel to do that with an empty cargo bay. I suggest you dump it out now.”
* * *
“That’s the first shot,” Sam said.
Stephen had a recoilless, and he started to put a rocket into it.
Jack and Marty had chosen adhesive-restraint launchers, whose ammo was popularly known as “booger bombs.” Two of them hit Stephen just about simultaneously, and began foaming up and forcing his arms away from his torso. “What is wrong with you two?” he demanded.
“Don’t know about Marty,” said Jack, “but with me it’s that whole ‘thou shalt not kill’ thing.”
“Works for me,” said Marty.
“Take him back in,” said Sam, taking the launcher.
The two of them each had one hand on Stephen and one hand on their lines when Sam locked on and put a shaped-charge target-seeker through Firebird’s LOX tank.
“Jesus, Sam!” said Jack.
“I have very clear orders from the president,” said Sam, not sounding like he objected to them.
Then his helmet burst.
They got him into a survival bubble, because that’s what you do, but Jack didn’t expect much. Sam’s head was charred, and his body was hot enough to feel through Jack’s gloves. He could feel brittle crackles as they bent Sam’s arms enough to get him into the bubble.
Something caught his eye, and he looked up to see a thing like two fat metal donuts on a meshwork pipe come apart between the ships. One of the donuts shot itself along the pipe and disappeared ahead of them. The other one, still on the pipe, took up station above the open hold, and pointed a lot of thin rods at Envoy.
Jack was keenly reminded of why this mission was so important. Firebird was not the threat.
XXXIV
Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.
—PROVERBS
1
“Looks like our ride’s here,” said Mycroft over the radio as he headed for the cargo lock. The rest were staring in horror at their screens. “Good, NASA will assume the bots had something to do with it. —Spontaneous human combustion,” he added. “Or, in the words of Alex Cox, ‘People just explode.’ I once worked out that if all the potassium-40 in the human body decayed at once, it would reduce the carbon in the tissues with superheated steam, and the hydrogen that was produced would be hot enough to ignite spontaneously. In a pressure suit the fire is confined to your head and lungs. The bots are perfectly capable of aligning atoms so their nuclei are orthogonal to solar neutrinos, which are likewise perfectly capable of inducing decay. I have no idea how it happens naturally. Never been able to reproduce any psychic phenomena under controlled conditions, so—”
“Will you shut UP?” Toby half screamed.
Mycroft grunted. Then Toby heard him say, “Got your first job for you, ladies. —Can somebody else get back here and hold the other light? The hole is all the way through.”
“I’ll do it,” Toby muttered, and unstrapped to follow Mycroft.
It wasn’t as easy as Mycroft had made it look. By the time Toby reached the access hatch at the rear of the cargo bay, sweat was soaking through the fabric of his suit. As soon as he opened it, however, his heaters switched on.
Mycroft was shining searing violet light down one side of the tank. There was oxygen frosted against most of the surfaces Toby could see, except where the light shone directly. “Got the other light? I can’t turn right now.”
“Yeah,” Toby said, and went to the darker side of the tank. He could see where LOX was boiling out of the hole, freezing as its pressure dropped. “You got some more nanos?”
“They’re all over the tank.”
“Okay.” He switched on the light he’d picked up in the bay, and started getting warmer at once. He aimed it at the leak.
In all these years, he’d never gotten to watch nanos at work.
At first, he still didn’t. The glare of his light was too dazzling. After a minute or so his eyes had adjusted enough to see that there was a black splotch flowing into the hole, and that the spray was slowing. He adjusted his aim. “You brought in more metal?” he said.
“Ruthenium steel, twelve percent,” Mycroft said. “I had it in my bag, for just such occasions. They’ve got it.”
“Pricey.”
“Not for much longer. —I’ve got the exit hole here. Your side should be closing up sooner, so when it does, bring the light over. Slow, so they follow.”
“Right.” They were silent for a while, then Toby said, “I don’t see any more fog. I’ll give them time to finish up here.”
“No, they can do the outer shell when the leak’s stopped here. Come now.”
Toby moused the black patch over to the other side, then said, “Holy crap, dude.”
“Yeah. Says something about May’s taste in tank liners that we’ve got any oxygen left at all. Lost about a third, I’d guess.” The hole in the outer shell of the LOX tank was big enough for May to have slipped through without scratching her tanks. Oxygen was still coming out the inner shell, but it slowed visibly as the second splotch arrived.
“Do we have enough to get home?” Toby said.
“Not an issue. Even if the bots on the Rock haven’t hung on to any oxygen, I hardly think May’s going to let Envoy go anywhere. And they’ve got plenty.”
When the venting stopped, the big splotch moved outward and began closing the outer shell of the tank. “Now you can move them back,” Mycroft said. “Sunlight should be enough for them to handle the hull. May can roll the ship.”
“Mycroft, I’m sorry I flipped out like that.”
“Why?”
“Hell, the man’s head exploded!”
“I know. I meant, ‘Why are you sorry?’ It was the most shocking and inexplicable thing I could come up with. I want people to flip out when someone pulls that crap. You’ll notice they haven’t tried anything else.”
“At the moment it’s not them I’m worried about,” Toby said. “The Briareus nanos still aren’t talking to us, remember?”
Mycroft gave him a funny look, but said only, “I’ll stay here and collect these after.”
“Mycroft,” Alice’s voice said, “I’ve been thinking.”
“Hardly unusual,” he said. “Interesting subject, I take it?”
“The jihad threat. That’s a bluff.”
“Hell it is. Bots separate isotopes just fine.”
“Yes, but all the people who are willing to send credulous idiots out as human bombs are dead by now, aren’t they?”
After a moment Mycroft’s breathing could be heard again. Then he said, “I am hampered in expressing myself by the lack of a sufficiently vehement expletive in the English language. I never thought of that. Alice?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t you dare call yourself dumb in my hearing again.”
2
After they’d been chucking the armaments out of the cargo bay for a few minutes, Stephen said, “Spray me off, I’ll help.”
Jack found some solvent and turned him loose.
“That would have been me,” Stephen said once he got a look at Sam.
They closed the bay and left Sam there, moored to a bulkhead. There was plenty of room.
Envoy’s cargo bay air lock readout had a melted screen. So did all their suits’ wrist monitors. Their radios still worked, and Charley cycled the lock for them.
The cockpit screens were okay. Whatever they’d been hit with was localized.
“Helm doesn’t respond,” said Charley. “I think we may have to rely on charity for a ride home.”
“Might be worth asking, Commodore,” said Stephen. “They d
on’t want us dead.”
“How do you know?”
“We’re not dead.”
Jack took a long look at him. This did not sound like the Stephen Edmundson he knew. Come to think of it, that one would have been ranting and assigning blame from the moment Sam Quinn blew up.
Evidently it wasn’t the one Charley Loomis knew either. “When did you get all calm and analytical?”
“When two guys I never got along with saved my life by accident. And didn’t say a thing about it. Not even that they should have let me go ahead and do the shooting. That’s kind of hard not to think about. After a while it seemed to me that there were other things I should be thinking about too.”
“The hole’s closing up,” said Marty. They all checked their screens. Firebird was looking pretty good.
Stephen said, “That thing out there could have sprayed nanomachines at them, or they might have brought some along. Or, hell, they could be built in. I think that could be a popular idea after this.”
“NASA’s administration won’t like it,” said Jack. “Gray goo scenario.”
“The Holy Roman Emperor might not like it because it gives the peasant class too much leisure time,” Charley said. “There still is an heir, you know. Saw a news item. He makes model animals. Glassblowing. The idea of NASA having any authority left at this point seems like a pretty weak joke.”
“Hello again,” said Firebird’s pilot. “The way I see it, you owe us some LOX.”
Charley said, “We didn’t bring a pipe.”
“We should have one by the time you get here. You’ll need a ride after that. You want to come along, or shall we come back for you?”
“We’re not that attached to this ship,” Charley said. “I have to say, that was a pretty slick move with the reentry shield.”
“Can’t take credit,” she replied. “Got the idea from the old Soviet cosmonaut program. There was an automatic landing system that kicked in if they tried to land in another country. As a precaution to keep them from overriding it, it also cut off their air. Remember all those ‘tragic accidents’ they had back in the sixties? That they stopped having once they started including an armed political officer in every crew.”