Space Eater (3 page)

Three

The thing we all hate about Security is the hit-and-miss way they operate. Sometimes you feel it’s like a bomb with a one-direction trembler; kick it
this
way and nothing happens, touch it with a feather on
that
side and blam. So when we had this bet back in my early Force days and smuggled out the IR laser to burn our names on a few walls in the no-go area south of Oxford street, it was all ho-ho and what naughty boys you are, don’t do it again. But the next week, Shuttle the Armorer left a sheet of weapon specs in the Force bar, real low-level restricted stuff—and at the court-martial they busted him back to trainee. There is a trick they use in grenade training, when you’re throwing clear over the training-ground rocks (or sometimes it’s the maze ground at what wasHampton Court ) and the other men’s grenades are coming back at you. You dive and dodge and throw, and once in a while someone forgets to pull the pin and you get a spare grenade coming over. If you like, you can arm it and throw it back. Only somewhere out there is an instructor with some very special grenades whose firing delay is not ten seconds nor five but about half a millisec, and he surely does not pull the pin before lobbing it gently to you. I heard this funny joke went right back to World War I. So you’re out of grenades and there’s one lying there and all you can do is grab it and ... Finding you’ve tangled with Security is very like that bright and clear-focused moment when you start to pull the pin.

In real life, of course, it’s worse than that: Security works backward when it wants to. There we were, the month beforeCopenhagen , wargaming the strike plan for the city cleanup, tinkering the creaky suggestions of Admin into workable shape—and Security got cold feet. Thump thump thump, they went, stamping SECRET/MILIT/LEVEL5 all over the working papers, and we were all in the retroactive shit for talking classified material with nonparticipant Forcemen who happened to be there at the time.

It wasCopenhagen that made me spend that week pulling myself together, as they say, after the riot-gun got me. Along came Skeld with the course material I was missing, mostly stuff on recognizing Anomalous Physics equipment (prohibited, dangerous, destroy on sight) with some notes on the few AP things safe enough to use. Keeping up made good sense at the time: now Security was coming from behind, the way they like to. Captain Sinclair, as subtle as a hole in the road, had made it pretty damned obvious that if I’d taken the AP-I course I wouldn’t be getting this big chance. Which was why I should keep very quiet and not even think about it. Which was why I couldn’t stop myself thinking about it.

It all came back to me so easily as I sat in the room that wasn’t the brig. My injuries had all been down in the belly, to put it gently (further down than that, they hadn’t been able to recover the pieces): the tank seal pressed against my collar bone and left neck and head sticking out as though I were an iron lung case. I could even lift my head and squint down through the slimy yellow to where rag-ends of me were floating free and growing slowly together. It was a mess. Skeld brought me the texts and turned the pages every night, and so I learned how AP was a dead-end branch of physics that had started out hunting for a matter transmitter, a gadget to flick your payloads from
here
to
there
without covering any space or time in between. (What a warhead delivery system that would be!) MT was impossible, everyone decided. It came flat up against special
and
general relativity, half a dozen conservation laws, and also common sense. This was where things got knotty, because MT worked in a perverse sort of way when it shouldn’t have ... what they reckoned after all the disasters was that the laws of physics and the universal constants were like settings on a big switchboard—condition codes for a computer that was the whole universe. MT worked by changing the settings, altering the laws, buggering up the universe. You can maybe just wiggle at the settings a little and something very odd happens to electromagnetic waves—that was the jammer we still used; it threw 99 percent of our battle electronics on the scrapheap and landed the Force with those missile guidance assignments we were supposed to keep in training for. Another loophole in the old physics comes when you tinker with the speed of light; quantum mechanical laws start falling like dominoes until all of a sudden it’s bye-bye to the traffic regulations that keep electrons from falling into the nuclei of their atoms and going blooey. The effect of this one, luckily for a lot of us, is localized, but it’s still close to total conversion of matter, total annihilation, the nullbomb. It was a nullbomb that cracked northeastAmerica last century when their Project Hideyhole researched a bit too far—and that was the end of the old superpower balance. Five days of World War III because the rest of oldNorth America blamed the Soviets for that megamegaton blast ... but the EEC went neutral and pulled through somehow—

There’s a section in the course book that really boggles me.

I’ve had the recall training, I can call up every page, but this paragraph always looks twice the size of the rest:

From the examples given above, it may be seen that the restrictions on functional AP systems are few in number. We can postulate a coherent AP system in which the velocity of light © tends to infinity while the major relativistic relations hold good. For such a system the possibility cannot be ruled out that by the familiar relation
E = mc^2
, a single energy-producing nuclear transformation would by virtue of the enhanced
c^2
factor release a quantum of energy which itself tends to infinity. (See also section xviii for a discussion of conservation-law failure in the context of hypothetical “over-space” external to our universe.) It does not seem possible to compute the effects of such a localized release of “infinite” energy into our accepted Einsteinian space/ time framework, but the consensus is that such effects would be at the least undesirable and potentially catastrophic.

Turn on an instant-transport gadget without turning off all of Einstein properly and ... well, I only hope nobody gets around to inventing that one, even by accident. A lot of MT/AP things were hit on more or less by accident, you see, which is a damn sight more worrying than, say, the Copenhagen city government’s worries. (All
they
had to bother with was Freedom gangs shouting “Fascist” and wanting to break up the few sticks of government they still had left. Some people.) After thishigh point , the textbook goes straight uphill into clouds of classification. There’s a hint about a restricted but workable matter transmitter—classified. There’s another hint of this less restricted, more useful MT that Project Hideyhole used once in space, which went very, very wrong—classified, but with a reference to “stellar instabilities.” Sure, I know what stellar instabilities are: you can see them in the sky every night.

And so on. It’s all a risky and a dodgy battlefield of science. If tangling with Security is like juggling booby-trapped grenades, MT research must be like slamming chunks of plutonium together to find whether you’ve got a critical mass. (Most people seem to think that’ll make an explosion—wrong! At point critical, plus just a bit, the chunks would melt and run out of your hands in a kind of blue glow, and as well as having cooked hands you’d be dead from r/a. No explosion. The guy in the next room has a chance.) Who was it that said, “the universe doesn’t just have more booby traps than we imagine, it’s got more than we
can
imagine...”?

Thinking about these things, trying not to think about them; I very much wanted not to blow this chance.

“Quick, Jacklin, what’s this?” “Why, it looks like the central hookup of an AP jammer system—“ (and the picture flashed up from memory as I thought this, even though I’d no idea what lived inside the central distortion tube), “OK, Jacklin, just as we suspected, get out of here and await court-martial.”

Besides my own thoughts, this gray room’s amusements consisted of a hand basin and a toilet. From time to time, I poured water in at one end, and sooner or later let it trickle out at the other. Maybe if I was going to be here for long I could count time by the trickles, the biological water clock.

Then there was a knock; a plump orderly unlocked the door and came in with a set of clean fatigues over one arm. He dropped them like someone throwing out the kitchen rubbish, and backed away without saying anything. At least I could climb out of that creaky full-dress with its death grip at collar and crotch. I noticed there was still no sidearm on the belt, though. Next came a crop-headed pair from Security—the story is they even visit the bathroom in pairs—with an ID camera. The uglier of the two leaned against the door and picked his teeth while the other worked the camera: out popped a plastic badge carrying a picture of someone enough like me to get by. I had to sign four copies each of an ID

receipt and a clearance acknowledgement form before they’d go. Total conversation: “Sign these.” The clearance form said how I accepted that Security had the inalienable right to hang me up by the testicles should I say almost anything to almost anyone. I blinked when I saw the classification levels the form said I could peep at now, though:

SECRET/MILIT/TECH/LEVEL9/EXCEPTIONS*AS*PER*PROJTUNNEL*ORDERS. It sounded great. I wondered what it meant.

This afternoon was just one excitement after another. The thrill of the Security visit had hardly worn off when the podgy orderly was back, this time with a tray of food, the mess-hall favorites we could only label as Brown Soup and Greenish Veg and Gray Pie.

“You have to be cleared up to Sec 9 to talk to me,” I told him as he gathered up my old dress uniform to take it away. (I never saw it again.) He took the hint and didn’t talk to me, which was a pity. More time passed. A secretarial woman visited and asked my autograph to prove I’d read and understood the form she had with her, which transferred me to Tech (ProjTunnel) under someone called Birch. The transfer was to last “until termination,” which you could take whichever way you liked. More hours went past.

Then it was time. Another Security pair rapped on the door, showed their authorizations—the story is that not only do they visit the bathroom in pairs but they also need an authorization, each—and walked me down the gray endless corridors to an out-transfer gate. There I was signed for by another pair, as though I were a precious weapons package, or at least a can of r/a sludge for disposal. Out through the high metal door, a breath of cold damp air and a glimpse of the stars, and into the back of an armored car without windows. The car lurched off before I or my good friends from Security could sit down, and then it was three hours without a break, jouncing about in the light of a tiny fluoro that flickered out at every pothole. From the first turns I guessed we were heading north on one of the cleared routes, maybe one of the old ring roads, veering around the black spots in north London; then I lost track and probably it didn’t matter anyway. I was going where I was going and what would happen was what would happen.

Kismet, as Sergeant Lall used to say (and “Allah akbar!” as well) before every strike until the firebomb got him for too long in that Irish peace action: sometimes there’s not enough for the tanks to work on, they need such and such a percentage of uncharred RNA.

Kismet.

Four

There was something funny about Project Leader Birch. I’d been dragged around half the country by Security goons, signed for and deep-searched before and after coming down the shaft to wherever this was, and the ranking officer was an oddball. I hadn’t met many techies, mind you ... No uniform. None of the hard, slick, efficient look you expect in Combat, not even the fussy neatness of Admin. I’d almost have thought—

“Forceman Ken Jacklin, I’m Henrik Birch, and as the man in charge I’d like to welcome you to the Tunnel project.” And he came around the desk, a plain desk with no defenses that I could see, and stuck out his hand. It was hard to believe, but this guy was as near a
civilian
as makes no difference.

Handshakes! I took the hand and he came on with a bone-crusher grip; I had to squeeze back a little.

We disengaged and separated as if our blades had been locked at fencing.

“Reporting for duty, Project Leader,” I said.

“No need to call me that. They call me Rik here; we run a tight outfit but it’s a friendly one.” He massaged his right hand gently.

He was tall, not quite up to my own 190 centimeters; he must have been fortyish, with lank black hair combed very straight, and pale skin. His cheeks were pitted like lunar landscapes, though, and there were purple smears under his eyes. He did not look like someone you called Rik. The office ... that didn’t seem like part of a friendly outfit, either: I couldn’t see any hidden weaponry, but the bare desk and the scrambler-lock dials on every drawer or cupboard in sight helped remind me that I was in the middle of a level-9 secret zone.

“But you’ll want to know more about the Kraz assignment,” he said before I could put together a question (at least he’d saved me the trouble of deciding whether I could stomach calling him Rik or not).

“It’s a diplomatic mission really, rather
awkward
, you’ll see what I mean, but with luck it won’t be hazardous.” He pressed his lips together and looked at his watch. “They should be here in a second ...

Yes, um, Ken, the affair really is of the highest importance. Matter of world security—revolting phrase.

We were in a sufficiently bad mess already, with only your lot keepingEurope from blowing up or falling apart ... the last thing anyone expected was danger from
outside
, for goodness’ sake! Sorry, mustn’t ramble. The position’s been a mite tense at Tunnel since we made the contact—here they are now.”

There were footsteps outside, a knock at the door; a man and woman came in. Birch aimed a flashbulb smile at them: “This is Ken Jacklin from Combat. Ken, this is Rossa Corman; she’s from the special Comm auxiliary and she’ll be the other half of your team. This isMick y Wui, Tech/1 in charge of AP