Space Eater (21 page)

The microfiche was still safe inside the smart white jacket when I climbed back into it. Rossa had gone for the shower after me, and a few minutes later she was pulling on her own jacket and trousers: I found myself looking away when she did it, which was a silly thing to do after all our times together.

Somebody else was probably looking, a thought that annoyed me when I had it a little later, because fifteen seconds after we’d cleaned up there was a
beeeep
from the door. Two more escorts, a lumpish man and woman with small eyes, definitely the Security and not the Combat type.

“General Lowenstein’s compliments and will you come to the War Room.” It wasn’t a question and the piggy woman didn’t bother to tack on a question mark.

The corridors were as before, featureless white walls that might have been designed to make sure you lost your sense of direction three turnings into the maze. The War Room was something else, high and wide with half a dozen concentric arcs of screen consoles focused on a wall that was one big colored map of what had to be the Archipelago. Integrated satellite picture, probably, scores of scattered islands, green on blue, growing thicker to the north. The room was like something I’d only seen on video, from tapes so old the picture had sprouted static like thick fur: a space mission control center. Lowenstein came heading for us out of the thin crowd, along with another man whose face reminded me of a stray dog that’s been kicked a lot. Droopy, downbeat, reddish look in the eyes, permanently shaggy black hair. He had a habit of turning a ring on his finger.

“All right, guards. Don’t need you here: dismiss. Envoys Corman and Jacklin—Captain Keeb. The captain will look after you during this action. Thought you ought to look in on the latest brilliant stroke of stalemate. Made any decisions yet?”

“Yes, we—“ I said and sneezed.

“Not got a handkerchief? Remind me to have some issued. Use the sleeves of your jackets for now, there’s good people. Take over, Captain.” He bustled off.

Keeb seemed to have decided we were idiot children. “This is the War Room,” he said slow and clear.

“The battle screen shows most of the island chain, and you’ll see Gate Island about one-third of the way up. Satellite data indicate an attack wave of NA brain missiles coming over the south pole—“

We learned a lot from him. Most of the console chairs were empty because strategy was run by a program called
Machiavelli
. Lowenstein chaired the Strategy Programming Committee. Color in the red-orange-yellow band showed altitude for blips on the big display, with “friendly” ones flickering, ground defenses purple, other installations white. The Archipelago’s offshore oil rigs were
there
and
there

. STRACEN-1 was the most heavily defended hideyhole in the world. The multiple missile carriers would release their nasties somewhere our side of the south pole. What we were suffering from could probably be cured by a simple anti-allergen shot...

A thin two-tone whine came cutting through Keeb’s blather, an ear-pricking electronic siren. The lights were turned down so the tall display seemed to brighten; the picture swelled off-screen to concentrate on a clutch of green island-blobs to the far south. Some of the purple spots were already spewing out blips that climbed the spectrum through reds and oranges as the interceptors rose in the air. There seemed to be many hundreds, hard to count because they kept eclipsing each other as they spiraled up. It looked like a ridiculous number: this whole place was wasteful, from their cars and space shuttles right down to the white uniforms that needed cleaning a damn sight more often than Force drab...

But New Africa was playing spendthrift too: when their first wave came into view I thought it must be a screen malfunction. The picture started to break up from the bottom as if thousands of ants were crawling up it, or maybe not ants but fireflies glowing all the colors from deep sea-level red to stratosphere primrose. They came weaving and jinking and switching colors, blotting out the sea-blue underneath the crawling and climbing swarm. All brain missiles, all able to fly fifty times better than me on my simulated kamikaze runs. I kept telling myself that all this was out of date thanks to the jammer, that they might as well be fighting with pikes and halberds: but deep down the other idea wriggled like a worm. My training was wasted here, where machine brains did all the fighting and—like everyone in this room—people only played spectator.

“The purple spots in the sea are laser buoys, mostly,” said Keeb. “The white sea-spots are dummies to soak up part of the attack wave. See the reds going out in groups, there and there? The dummy buoys have big FAE charges to knock out anything in the area when they’re hit...”

The colored swarm crawled north, red blips winking out as they were suckered by the dummy targets: I guessed that when the higher flying orange lights went dark it was the lasers picking them off, and that the yellows, higher still, were flying out of laser range—the air really soaks up IR bolts. By now the flickering

“friendly” lights were strobing from the north, sometimes taking out an enemy yellow or orange in a particle-antiparticle wipeout that left nothing behind. It didn’t seem that anything could stop that colored insect-cloud from the south. At the first islands, with their fringes of purple defense lights, blips started getting swept off the board as they came too close. Others went up to yellow, soaring out of laser range; down again to orange and red heights inland, some blinking out as they sank through the air and the spectrum but others going deeper and deeper red...

Memory from the handbook. ”
In times of high military budget the standard strategic answer to any
defense of less than 100 percent effectiveness is to increase the level of attack until said defense is
saturated.”

Purple lights were starting to die as presents from New Africa crept up on them from behind. Lasers and interceptors were still bringing the interlopers down like flies around the shorelines, but further inland the deep-red blips were settling to lay their eggs. Keeb droned on about how
this
island and
this
was undefended because it was volcanic; and here was Port Island coming into view at the top of the screen as the action moved north. A smooth machine-synthesized voice was calling off the score,
estimated
initial strength 2310 plus or minus 15, active interceptor expenditure 448 plus or minus 2, laser
installations inactivated 92
... You had to stand there in the War Room and watch your topside stuff get clobbered. Sweating gently, I caught a scrap of chat: “...not half the performance they put on four months ago—“ Christ. Nearly 2500 in the attack and it was a minor skirmish.

Port Island held, swarms of blips buzzing impotently around it. Others took more or less of a beating; the biggest swarm of all broke hard against Gate Island. You could tell how Gate was top defense priority: the crawling blips were evaporating wholesale long before they came near the place. I counted four, five blips sneak through and drop to ground-level red over the purple sprawl that was STRACEN-1, and the first time I almost took a dive expecting fireballs through the ceiling; but nothing happened.

“We’re two hundred meters down in a hardened site,” Keeb said with a trace of smugness. “The terminal defenses would need a near-to-ground level nuclear strike to take them out of action, and even if one could get that close—with
Machiavelli
operating it’s next to zero probability—the Protocol forbids...”

“Tell me,” said Rossa, breaking in, “do you ever
wonder
about fighting a war from a hole in the ground?

Suppose your machines don’t give the full picture of what’s happening up on the surface?”

Keeb seemed lost for an answer; Rossa shrugged and started sneezing again; I found myself joining in.

We’d managed to forget that little problem while watching the war on the big board. Now the fight was in mopping-up phase, the cloud of missiles blown to wisps, “our” pulsing blips chasing the steady ones out to sea in all directions, pairs moving closer and closer together in a drunkard’s walk like flies catching one another to mate. But when the pairs coalesced there was suddenly nothing left of either, nothing at all.

General Lowenstein was back, walking tall as if he’d fought off the attack wave all by himself. “Trust Keeb’s been looking after you,” he said with a thin smile. “Now I expect you’ve something more to tell me—“

Twenty

The general peered at the microfiche on his desk as though it was a dead rat that had lingered a good while in a sewer. “A
nuke
,” he said again, breathing hard. “Don’t
care
if it’s a giant, superefficient, total conversion job. Protocol says no nukes and StraProgCom would never swallow our being first to break it.”

I said: “What we were thinking—“

“That’s it, is it? You come here, sit in my office and offer me a nuke. Know perfectly well how to construct the blasted things. Only you go one better,
you
hand me a nuke so over-killing it can’t even be tested. ‘Demonstration of the hazards of MT.’ Expected something a little better from the technology that got you here, I must say. No chance of converting the thing to an FTL missile delivery system, now?”

“General,” said Rossa. “Firstly, please listen to our suggestions for using this information. Secondly, please order the anti-allergen injections you have mentioned so very many times. Thirdly, kindly stop jumping to conclusions.”

Lowenstein sat blowing air for a few seconds, and I thought I saw a smile flit like a transverse wave from one end of Keeb’s mouth to the other. He was standing a little to one side and it was hard to be sure.

Then the general shrugged again: “Why not? Haven’t anything to lose, myself. Unlike you.” He played with the panel set in the desk; almost at once a medical orderly arrived (same white uniform, red cross on breast pockets) and put a featureless cylindrical thing against Rossa’s neck and then mine. It hissed, and there was a feeling like sleet driving against a spot on my neck. The sinus itch started to clear up almost straightaway, but I reckoned the ulcers in my throat would take longer...

“Our suggestion is very simple,” Rossa was saying. “You have there a fiche of AP information which is misleadingly titled, as you’ll see. We are suggesting that you duplicate the information under some such title as...”

“FTL delivery system,” I said.

“Something like that,” said Rossa. “We suggest that you leak the data to your enemies. We suggest that if all goes well, the result will be that the New African research center will become g-ground zero of the nullbomb explosion.”

All of a sudden Lowenstein was paying attention.

I tried to encourage him. “The way I understand it, the satellite networks keep tabs on everything that flies on Pallas—otherwise you’d never be able to feed that War Room display. OK. So they’ll
know
you can’t have sent over a nuke and bust up the protocol—they’d have seen it coming. OK. So—“

Keeb: “Even assuming that this device works, to hand it over to the rebels would be to risk its being used against ourselves—“

Lowenstein waved him away rather testily. “Nonsense. Don’t use nukes, do they? Shit-scared of protocol and what we might contrive in the way of nuke technology. That’s clear. Only need make the leakage convincing.”

“Then there’s a chance you’ll go through with this?” I asked. He narrowed his eyes as if I’d reminded him of the dead rat on his desk. “Possibly,” he said. “Have to put it to StraProgCom. Can’t tell you at all what the results will be—matter of forward planning. How d’you balance the oil embargo we have today against the chance of destroying or contaminating the New African wellheads with this scheme tomorrow?”

I came back with a line from the manual I shouldn’t ever have seen: ”
Total conversion is arguably the
cleanest mode of ‘nuclear’ energy release. After the very high energy flash the residual
contamination is minimal...”

“You sound like a parrot,” Lowenstein said. “Sound like Keeb. Ah, sorry, Captain. My dear envoys, what makes me so unnaturally suspicious of this scheme is that it dovetails far too well with something we’ve been hatching ourselves. Hard to believe; matters don’t arrange themselves so conveniently in real life. On the other hand, have to seize opportunities when they come. Tell them about Chicane, Captain.

Try and keep it down to an hour or two.”

Keeb didn’t need encouragement. “Project Chicane is a long-maturing plan for the dissemination of false data to rebel ears. Over the last year our research center has found it possible to code signals into MT

disturbances...” (I shut my eyes at the thought, and Rossa muttered something like “might as well transmit in coded nova explosions.”) “The original concept was to use this for ultrasecret message transmission, but of course we then found that the opposition were able to create similar disturbances and therefore, assuming that they advanced along the same line and with slightly less speed than ourselves, they would recently have acquired the ability to detect such transmissions. For their benefit we’ve been running a series of AP disturbance transmissions using one of the supposedly uncrackable trapdoor ciphers,
but
one which we’d taken some pains to compromise in an incident involving the selling off of blank computer tapes which—“

He paused for breath, and I had a chance to put in: “How does a blank tape compromise anything?”

Keeb started up again. “Proper treatment can extract as many as three data sets from a tape—that which an ordinary recorder could pick up, plus the first recording ever made on the tape, plus possibly another recording ‘fixed’ when the tape underwent certain temperature changes. It was subtle enough that we only
suspected
the erased cipher key, a couple of hundred-digit primes plus a standard coding algorithm, had leaked as planned to the opposition. Thus—“