Red Lightning (46 page)

So what we're going to do is show y'all something. You'll all be able to see it, it's something your leaders won't be able to hide from you. It's going to be frightening, but no one is going to be hurt. We just thought we should show you what we
could
do, if we chose to. And what your
leaders
could do, if they ever got a hold of the Squeezer technology.

And a special message to the leaders. Both those obviously in power, and those behind them, pulling the strings. Like I said, we expected you to attack us, and that's what you're doing. We're going to take out your ships if they come too close. We don't want to, but we will. So here's your ultimatum. Call off the dogs, or lose them.
All
of them. And believe me, we don't know who all of y'all are, but we know some of you, and if you don't surrender,
immediately
, we are coming to get you. We know where you live, whether it's in presidential palaces or regular old mansions. We will squeeze you, you motherfuckers... sorry, Jubal!... we will squeeze you and anybody who's around you, and we'll keep coming, and keep coming, until you all are dead. And then we'll piss on your graves and sow them with salt.

So call your ships back,
now
, and pull all your troops off Mars. When I know Mars is free of invaders... then we can sit down and talk."

He paused and looked around at all of us. He had been sounding glib and even carefree, as he usually did, but his face was covered with sweat.

" 'Squeezer technology,' " he muttered. "That's gotta be the biggest lie I ever told. Far as I can tell, it's magic, if only Jubal can do it."

I'd had the same thought myself.

"Okay, friends. Now let's see if we can pull off the biggest bluff in human history. Jubal?"

We'd had to increase the dose of Jubal's medicine. This had all taken a lot out of him. He looked up, vaguely, then seemed to realize where he was.

"Oh, right," he mumbled. He turned to his own console as I watched the ships getting closer. The first few were about ready to turn and decelerate. That was important as a signal of their intentions. If they didn't turn, if they kept accelerating at us, that meant they didn't intend to capture us, they were going to come in shooting, with their missiles moving very fast. We would be very busy for a while, trying to fight them off with our Squeezer.

Jubal's console had been jury-rigged, as most of his things were, and not cleaned up nice and neat. He'd engineered the most important part into a single button, which would start a series of events that would be handled by a computer. His thumb hovered over the button. He looked up.

"Y'all sure this is the right thing to do?"

"Best we could come up it,
cher
," Travis said. "Nobody will get hurt."

Jubal sighed and pressed the button.

We had been hovering directly above the North Pole, which took only a little thrust. That meant the Earth was behind us, invisible. Ahead was nothing but black, empty space.

And then it wasn't empty. Right in front of us, seeming only a few thousand miles away, was another Earth. Half of it was almost blindingly bright, and even the dark side gleamed with lights. I could pick out Oslo, Stockholm, London, Paris... hell, the whole night side below the Arctic Circle seemed lit up. Lots of people down there. Billions and billions of people.

Travis let a few seconds pass, let people down there have a chance to take it in, then waited a few more seconds after that. Then he leaned into the mike.

"Any questions?" he asked.

And that's how I saved Mars and maybe the whole human race, and in the process kicked some of the most powerful people on Earth in the butt.

Well, I had some help. And of course, it wasn't as quick or as easy as that. It never is. But it
was
my idea.

What we did, Jubal built two of his famous little gizmos into two of Travis's bottle rockets, and we programmed them to fly to positions over the Earth's poles. The north one was right outside our window, the other four thousand miles over the South Pole. When the button was pushed, the Squeezer generators did that crazy thing they do: unraveled something that might or might not have been a superstring, something so tiny that we hardly have words or even numbers to describe how small it is, caused it to unfold itself a bit here, a bit there, through the seventh dimension, the eighth dimension, maybe the nine hundredth dimension (I'm as much in the dark here as anybody else), until a part of it that looked like a silvery sphere extruded itself into our universe... and kept unfolding it, and unfolding it, all in a time that Jubal said couldn't even be measured in the dimension
we
used for time in
this
universe...

...and they got bigger and bigger...

...and
bigger
, and
bigger
...

...
AND BIGGER
...

...and bigger...

...and bigger...

...and bigger...

...and bigger...

...and bigger...

...and bigger...

...until it was... well,
really
big. One million miles in diameter, both of them. Large enough that, if the Earth were inside it, it would rattle around like a BB in a battleship, according to Jubal.

Large enough to contain the sun.

Food for thought, we figured.

And then we skedaddled. Couldn't go north; there was the little matter of a million-mile bubble up there. So we aimed ourselves away from the closest group of ships headed our way and blasted at two gees.

I'd never done two gees before, for any period of time. After ten minutes or so, it begins to, well,
weigh
on you. Naturally Travis had provided his ship with the best acceleration couches money could buy. We nestled into them without our stereos – you don't want anything on your face that might suddenly weigh five times what it used to – and watched the ship's screen from our supine positions.

For a while, nothing happened. The ships hadn't started to decelerate, but they hadn't fired any missiles, either. That was not good news. We
wanted
them to fire a few.

"Missile away," Evangeline said. Travis swung his head in her direction.

"I got it. Locking on."

"Estimated time to impact, three minutes."

"Let's fire back at them, Ray."

"Okay." We had drilled extensively on this. Travis's missiles weren't armed with anything, but the black ships back there wouldn't know that. They did have seeking radar on them, though, and I locked a missile on each of the pursuers and fired them in sequence, five seconds apart. We watched them leave, pulling fifty gees.

"More launches," Evangeline said. "Four, five... six. Fifty gees."

"Okay, that's a few more than I wanted," Travis said. "So let's show 'em how far we can reach." He worked on his Squeezer control board. There was a joystick there, just like an old video game. He centered the cursor on each of them in turn and blip, blip, blip, they went away, wrapped in stopper bubbles that you wouldn't ever want to open.

No reaction at first, then the ships began sideways maneuvers, trying to evade our missiles. Their options were limited, with Earth on one side and the bubble on the other. I felt claustrophobic, with the real Earth visible out one window and the reflected Earth out the other. I thought it would be even worse for them, and wondered if they'd figured out yet what it was they were seeing...

A bubble a million miles in diameter presents a flat, mirrored face, for all practical purposes, the curvature being so slight you'd need a fine instrument to measure the degree of distortion of the image. With the Earth currently sandwiched between two bubbles that size it meant that everyone standing outdoors with no cloud cover was able to see the reflection of one of them. Folks close to the equator could see parts of both.

How big did they look? Well, they were four thousand miles away, which made the virtual image appear to be eight thousand miles away. At eight thousand miles the Earth covers forty degrees of arc. Compare that to Luna, which covers one-half degree. The image the people of Earth were seeing was eighty times the width of the full moon, and it was visible whether it was night or day where you were standing.

I'd call that a pretty impressive demonstration. It scared the hell out of
me
, and I'm the one who thought of it.

Getting there at the equinox was a bit of luck, but it would have worked pretty well even if we hadn't. At any other time, the sheer size of the bubbles would have blocked the sun entirely and Earth would have gone totally dark. Maybe that would have been even scarier.

Suddenly Evangeline shouted, "One of the ships is decelerating!"

We all had our eyes glued to the screens, where one of our pursuers was now showing a reverse vector. Our missiles were closing in... and in another few seconds they flew harmlessly by, as they'd been programmed to do.

"Another one is slowing," she said, tensely.

"Come on, guys, you don't want to die, do you?" Travis whispered.

And then, within a few seconds, all the others began showing negative acceleration. The distance between us began to increase. No more missiles were fired.

Travis waited a decent interval, and we all watched the curve of the Earth in case something nasty might be hiding back there waiting to jump us. But there was little chance of that. Finally, Travis sighed.

"My friends," he said, "I think that was the shooting match. I think the most powerful people on Earth just blinked."

We all cheered, and Travis cut the acceleration to half a gee so we could get out of our couches without the risk of breaking bones. Travis gave us all high fives, we shouted, we danced, Evangeline kissed Travis, then Jubal, then me.

Then Jubal threw up.

We kept on going in the direction we had been going, still on alert. Within fifteen minutes the invitations started to come in. People wanted to talk to us. Like reasonable people, most of them said. Never mind that we just tried to kill you... and anyway, it wasn't really us, it was those sharks over at... any number of accusations were made against countries, corporations, individuals. It was impossible to keep all the name-calling and finger-pointing straight, and we didn't even try. Travis had made a checklist of people he
knew
were involved, along with a longer list of possibles. Within an hour we'd heard from all of them. Same message:

Let's talk.

Only please, please,
please turn those things off
!

We didn't do it. We couldn't, and wouldn't have if we could. The original plan was to leave them in place for twenty-four hours, so everyone could get a nice,
long
look at a possible doom hovering over them.

Technical detail, revealed here for the first time:

There were a
lot
of those million-mile bubbles. As soon as one formed, the solar wind and sunlight pressure started pushing it away, just like a vagrant breeze stirred the first one that Dad found in Florida. A sphere with that much surface area and no mass is going to start moving. In fact, it's going to have a high velocity instantaneously. Before long, you'd notice the movement, even in something that large. So Jubal set the Squeezers to generate a bubble about once a minute. Then it would turn that one off and replace it with another, in a nanosecond, in the place where the first one had been. From the ground, or even up close where we were, you couldn't even tell it was happening.

There was some negotiating between Travis and people on the ground. Actually, not much negotiating; it was a matter of Travis telling them what they were going to do and them doing it, chop-chop, ASAP, right
now
!

They were instructed to remove all troops and ships from the surface of Mars, and to do it within two hours.

"Figure that gives 'em enough time to get off those Martian whores, pull up their socks, and get back to their ships," Travis said.

"Martian whores have better taste than that," Evangeline sniffed.

They were to take the ships to Phobos, land, tether down, and await further orders. When we got word from people on the ground that that had been done, Travis ordered everyone off the ships and inside Phobos, where they would peacefully submit to being disarmed. And they would surrender all space suits. No need to put them in prison if they didn't have suits; the whole big tourist bubble in Phobos became their prison. Another four hours and it was confirmed that had been done.

"Okay," Travis told his conference call audience. "Whoever those ships belonged to, company, nation, or individual, kiss 'em good-bye. They invaded Mars flying no flag, never revealing their identity, and under international law that makes them pirates. Well... if international law doesn't say that, it
should
. Anyway, the ships are forfeit. They are now part of the Martian Navy. The crews will be held for war crimes trial by the Martian authorities." He covered the mike with his hand and made a face at us. "Whoever
that
may be." Then back to the phone:

"Here's how it's going to go. You guys rely on bubble power for
everything
. I reckon you could go back to oil and gas and solar and nuclear and woodstoves, for a while, but that will take a lot of time, and it'll all run out soon. You don't even want to
think
about what will happen to your economies and your big companies without bubble power. Anybody out there who doesn't understand that perfectly well? Or should I explain it more?"

He waited for ten seconds, and no one on the other end had any questions.

"Right now, all the working Squeezers in existence are on Mars, and the only guy who can make more is with me, and we're going to Mars. As I've just demonstrated, you don't want to mess with us. Understood?"

Again, no objections, though I fancied I could almost hear the gears grinding in those powerful heads coming right over the radio, all of them trying to find an angle, an advantage... and a way to trip us up.