by David Drake
“You aren’t human,” Henry Layberg said bluntly. He did not want to say the words, but the situation demanded that they be said.
Both Travelers turned to look at the doctor. Before either could speak, Sara Jean laid a palm inside her husband’s crooked elbow and said, “I think they are, Henry. For good and bad. But I think they are.”
Layberg glowered in exasperation, thinking that his wife misunderstood him. Sara Jean forestalled her husband’s explanation by kissing him at the corner of the mouth. Then she turned back to meet Selve’s smile.
“Louis,” said Selve, “I think you may have been right about the chance for peace, not so many years ago.” Astor glared in amazement at her colleague, but the look only tugged Selve’s expression a little more wryly askew. “There’s no chance now, even I am certain. The—pistol hammers are falling. For either party now to pause, to turn aside, Louis, would be only suicide. You would not be better for the Vrage surviving.”
“That will not happen!” Astor said.
“That will not happen,” her colleague agreed. He stepped to the terminal and began keying in a set of commands to replace those he had begun minutes before.
Lexie Market had watched Mike step back among the instrument chassis to strip off his atmosphere suit. That was fine for the moment, anyway, though the night wasn’t over. Shunting her thoughts into a different track, the blond physicist said, “What do you propose to do to them now that you wouldn’t have done before? What changed by their—drive coils being damaged?”
Neither Traveler responded to the question. Even the humans in the room seemed more concerned with their own thoughts or whispered conversations. Louis Gustafson was holding his glasses in one hand and slowly rubbing his eyes with the other.
Market walked into the enclosure. Selve was quite obviously busy with the computer terminal, but Astor appeared only to be waiting to take the orange suit from Mike Gardner when he got it off. Lexie touched the female Traveler’s wrist. In a clear voice she repeated, “What are you going to do to the Vrage that you couldn’t while their tr-transport apparatus was working?”
Astor’s ingrained habit of secrecy stiffened her back and her face at the question. The big female would not have been part of a Contact Team had she been wholly inflexible, however. The notion of treating procedure as a god minutes after she had shot a Portal Four Monitor seemed so obviously absurd that Astor clapped out a laugh. Then she said, “These”—a wave toward the twin pillars dominating the room—“are a focusing device. They’re controlled and fed from all this”—a wave toward the hulking transformers and instrument frames stretching to the far end of the enclosure—“but act only as a lens to shape a bubble in the planetary magnetic field.”
All eyes but Selve’s were on the big Traveler now. Isaac Hoperin held the cigarette which his fingers were now steady enough to light. Professor Gustafson listened with the grim interest of a man being told the details of how his cancer has spread. The old man was not angry, but his hurt was as obvious as his resignation.
“That’s true of every Portal in the column,” continued Astor, “except for Skius itself. The magnetic field of Skius drives every transport. All this or any other set of drive coils does is tap a path for that channeled power to sweep through.”
“And Vrage is the same?” prompted Charles Eisley. The military implications were more clear to him than they were to the others in the room.
Astor nodded, a gesture to which she had been trained for her duties on the Contact Team. Out of her human persona, she would have flicked up a thumb and forefinger to signal assent. “We both had located the other’s homeworld. We both had built an assault base, to hold a few square miles of the other planet just long enough to be able to implant a bomb between the mantle and the core.”
“But that would take years,” blurted Mike Gardner in amazement.
“Hours,” corrected Astor, “and I’m sure too long even at that. We can no more fight them on Vrage than they could fight me at Portal Thirty-one.”
Selve made a last entry. “They put their base at a crossover point,” he said as he stepped back from the control panel. “In transport column both with Vrage and with Skius. Ours—Portal Four Base—is in column only with Skius. Our crossover point is here, more work but much safer; they couldn’t have stumbled over our base the way we did theirs. Of course, there are disadvantages.”
“We were the bridgehead for your attack on Vrage,” said Eisley. “Whatever happened to your own planet, whatever happened to your base, the bridgehead itself was going to be destroyed. Wasn’t it?”
“There would have been rebound attacks, Charles,” Astor replied with a candor which was more disarming than evasion could ever be. “That won’t happen now.”
Selve squinted and bent closer again to the oscilloscope, part of the instrument panel’s array, as it began dancing with a pattern of signals. They were not, as he had first hoped, harmonics of the transport he had just programmed into the school’s mainframe computer. “Astor,” he called. The situation was suddenly outside the realm of Selve’s own special competence.
“That’s not enough,” said Lexie Market. Astor had glanced away from her, but the physicist’s hand recalled the Traveler to the question. “Why is their base so important?”
“Because,” said Astor, giving the flat answer she would rather have avoided in front of Louis Gustafson, “it’s their only way of striking Skius directly. If we destroy their base, we can take as much time as we need to blast Vrage till it glows—and then set the World Wrecker.”
“Astor, we’re about to get company!” Selve shouted.
“I don’t—” began Isaac Hoperin, then realized that the factors included human survival as well as the morality of war and peace. His mind wavered from death camp to napalmed baby to a world shattered into asteroids. In a universal scheme, it would not have mattered whether that last image were of Earth or some world unimagined by men until this moment. In fact, and despite his repugnance at the realization, Isaac Hoperin did care very much that the broken world not be Earth.
Hoperin looked at Louis Gustafson, who whispered, “None of this would have happened here, except that I made it happen.”
Astor was only two steps in a straight line from the locker and the guns she had put away—a straight line that would have taken her through the docking area. The banks of fluorescents hid the faint excitation glow, but the Traveler’s skin tingled even beneath her suit in warning that the circle was indeed the target area. The turn and extra step meant that Astor was still reaching for the door panel when the six Monitors appeared.
The newcomers faced out from a common center like the petals of a flower, each Monitor with a pistol raised. The Monitor closest to Astor shouted at the Contact Member in Skiuli, “Freeze! Freeze!”
Deith whirled and fired across the circle. One of her fellows screamed and dropped his own gun. The shot had passed close enough to melt and blacken the sleeve of his tunic against his right arm.
Astor slumped. The pistols had a thirty-millisecond burst control to keep their miniaturized components from melting down. The white flash was too brief for the onlookers’ comprehension, coming as it did without warning and on the heels of the Monitor Group’s appearance. The energy transfer might not have stopped a Vrage in armor, but it was quite enough to burn a fist-sized hole in the back of the Traveler’s atmosphere suit.
Astor’s fingers scrabbled at the front of the locker. They found no purchase on the smooth synthetic to keep her from sliding down. Bubbles in the gray panel at chest height showed where the locker had stopped such of the blast as Astor had not.
“Wait, don’t move!” Selve shouted in English as the humans in the basement reacted each in his or her own way.
Charles Eisley reached for Sue with both hands to shunt her behind him. The tall woman was fractionally off-balance because she was reaching for her hip pocket and the knife folded there. Her mind had gone white, and she had no idea in the
world as to what her next step might have been.
Dr. Layberg reacted in accordance with his training. He swung around and knelt beside Astor, just in time to keep her face from striking the concrete. The shot’s intensity was a violet dazzle across his retinas, forcing him to blink and use his peripheral vision to examine the wound. It did not matter, except to Layberg himself. The charred edges of the suit were exuding their protective film, just as Keyliss’s suit had done, although there is nothing important to protect when the victim’s heart has been burned away.
Sara Jean stepped sideways, putting herself between the guns and her husband. Her eyes were panicky and on Selve, though one of her hands reached down to Henry’s shoulder to reassure her of his presence.
Gustafson and Isaac Hoperin were within arm’s reach of the Monitors, both of them too shocked by Astor’s final statement to make split-second decisions in the present. Mike Gardner had just stepped forward with the orange suit held out. Market saw him poise to spring back behind an instrument cabinet. “Mike!” she screamed, for she saw also a pair of Monitors taking final aim at the motion. Gardner froze.
The Monitors were not wearing atmosphere suits. Mike knew that meant they had not come through Portal Four, but the fact carried no implications for him. Only Selve realized that if the Monitors came by way of Skius, then the present madness was not merely some aberration of Deith’s.
It was madness all the same.
The Skiuli in pastel-patterned uniforms herded Selve and the humans together against the enclosure fencing. Deith watched, grinning like a crocodile, her pistol held slanted across her chest in her remaining hand. Two of the Monitors holstered their weapons and walked to the controls of the transport equipment. One of them was pursing and pushing out his lips, the equivalent of a worried grimace in a human.
Isaac Hoperin looked across at the body of Astor. Minutes before she had been his personal symbol of overbearing authority. He said, “Who are these people, Selve? Are they arresting you?”
In Skiuli, Selve said, “We’ve got to report home at once, Deith. The Vrage base is not only located at Portal Thirty-one, their coils have been knocked out of service. If we attack at once, they won’t be able to warn Vrage itself.”
“We’ve reported to the Directorate,” Deith said. She laughed, a sound beyond the edge of tittering madness. Her right arm waved. The sleeve was neatly capped below the elbow instead of being pinned. “I should thank your friend for this,” the stocky Monitor went on. “It was the proof we needed that you were quite mad and far too dangerous to be entrusted with the safety of the race. Quite mad.”
She walked over to Astor’s body and kicked it. Muscles spasmed. Astor’s back arched and her throat drew a grating breath. “Thank you, Astor,” Deith said.
The Monitor with the shot-burned sleeve pawed for his gun on the floor for a moment. Then he threw up on the concrete.
“Deith, you don’t know how to use this equipment,” Selve begged in Skiuli. “We’ll go back together and explain to the Directorate about the Vrage coils. Deith, it isn’t us, it’s Skius.”
The female of the pair of Monitors at the controls glanced up before resuming her work. She and her partner spoke in low voices as they checked and keyed instruments. The two were awkward, but they were clearly familiar with their task. Their three fellows with guns trained on the captives seemed a great deal less certain of themselves.
“I knew you’d screw up,” Deith gloated. “I knew I’d have to take over.” Selve wondered if shock from her wound had driven the Monitor over the edge, or if Deith had always been madder than any of the Contact Team had dreamed. “You filed complete plans of this—tangle—at home. We built a mock-up, so Sehor and Kadel could practice on it every day for the past month. Practice for this.” She waved the stub of her arm toward the controls and the pair at work setting them up.
Isaac Hoperin stepped forward, his mouth slightly open and his eyes on a future far beyond Deith. He did not understand the language or any of the details of the situation. But while the humans with him feared and waited, the physicist’s own mind had connected one fact to its unstated corollary. The fact was that Selve and Astor had a plan which would prevent the destruction of Earth as a side effect; the corollary was that the plan had been countermanded by someone utterly ruthless. Hoperin would not stand by and watch that happen, even though his death would not stop it.
Professor Gustafson caught the younger man in a bear hug even as Hoperin’s foot lifted for his first step. The project director wrapped Hoperin up with a strength not far short of hysterical, crying, “No, Isaac, you mustn’t make me have killed you!”
The shock of contact and his colleague’s words jarred Hoperin back to the present. He gaped at the Monitors. Their gun hands were tight and their faces frightened. Embarrassment at being manhandled by a fellow faculty member subdued the physicist as the guns could not have. “It’s all right, Louis,” he mumbled. “It’s all right.”
“When they rebound,” said Selve in English, “set the apparatus for, ah, the Mesozoic, Portal Thirty-one, and engage it at once. In case I’m not here to do that. Don’t make any trouble now, please don’t, it’ll be all right.” He could not help but stare at Astor whenever his eyes fell from Deith’s. Selve could not help the tears, either.
“We’re ready,” said one of the Monitors at the controls.
“Go ahead, then!” Deith snarled in a return to her normal style of interaction with her colleagues. It was in triumph, however, that she added to the prisoners, “Perfect timing, two minutes before we rebound.”
The main switch slapped into its live position. The pair of Monitors sidled away from their handiwork, glancing first at the controls and then toward their one-handed colleague.
“Did you think you were going to reset the Portal after we were gone, Selve?” Deith asked through a smirk.
Selve sidestepped once, then again. He struck a brace as he waited for the blast that would kill him. He was standing far enough from the other prisoners that none of them would be caught by the shot as well. He knew that the Monitors—that Deith—could not afford to leave him to undo their own settings. What Selve hoped and prayed, for the sake of Skius and of Earth, was that Deith did not realize the locals could save the situation.
Even if Selve had already gone the way of Astor.
“The Directorate isn’t going to change plans now on the word of madmen,” Deith continued in grim echo of Selve’s own thoughts as he watched the hand and watched the gun. “The assault force will attack as soon as we return to tell the Directorate that Portal Eleven is open and tuned.” The nervous buzz of the coils rose through a set of blackboard-scraping harmonics. The Monitors were all keeping carefully clear of the docking area.
“Deith, you’re sending them all to die,” the Contact Member said. “We can win the war if you’ll just direct the force to Portal Thirty-one. Even without warning the troops, they’ll be able to slaughter the Vrages instead of being butchered themselves.” His voice rose of necessity to be heard over the vibration. There was no doubt that strain was forcing it into a squeak as well.
“You’ve forgotten your duty,” the Monitor sneered. “We haven’t forgotten ours.”
The drive coils tripped in a blue flash as stunning as the pistol bolt Selve knew would follow in the silence.
Deith turned and fired into the center of the left-hand pillar. The Lucite shell dimpled away from the bolt in concentric circles. The superheated plastic ignited in a ghostly red flash, a sphere two feet in diameter. Only at that point had the wave front broken up enough to mix with the oxygen needed for fire.
The coils themselves died less obtrusively than the cover sheet did. The circuits carried ultrahigh voltages, but their current was too low for spectacular arcs. There was a violet lambency, almost a fluid drifting from the sagging ruin. Copper burned green in the direct path of the shot. Some of the insulating lacquer smoldered for a moment or two afterward.
Deit
h licked her lips in satisfaction. The glowing muzzle of her weapon waggled for a moment toward the other pillar.
Mike Gardner had invested over a hundred hours of coil winding in each of the pillars. The destruction of the first had been a shock greater than Astor’s murder. The student had never seen someone killed before, so the murder was an act without any real-world referent. When the gun pointed toward the other half of his laborious construction, he lunged into Lexie Market. The physicist had set and braced herself, knowing that Mike’s instincts would drive him toward the weapon.
Market put her arms firmly around him. “Hold still,” she said. The blond physicist had always been good at anticipating irrational behavior … except when it affected her directly. “Got to work on that,” she muttered. She stepped aside when Mike relaxed, keeping her right arm around his waist.
The one-handed Monitor did not bother to fire into the second pillar. The first set of coils had been pierced through the phenolic mandrel on which it was wound. The odor of carbolic acid was bitter and overpowering, even among the other effluvia of destruction. That deterred Deith from a needless follow-up shot.
“We’ll see you back home in the half hour or so it’ll take you to rebound, Selve,” Deith said. She smirked. It was notable to Selve that the other Monitors did not speak aloud, except in terse reply to Deith. How had the Directorate ever listened to this mad thing, who terrified even her closest colleagues? Were the best minds on Skius so desperately afraid?
They were right to be afraid. It was their decision which was so tragically wrong.
“You’ll be arrested there,” Deith was saying. “Treachery affecting the state. Unless they choose to dismiss the charges because of the victory celebrations.”
“Twenty seconds,” called a Monitor who until then had been only a guard with a trembling gunhand.
“I know that!” Deith shouted.