Space Eater (5 page)

The big artery that comes arching out of your heart is wider than that.

I slept, and the dream came sneaking up on me like a stealthy night attack. I don’t dream much, though heavy sessions at wargaming can leave me with battle plans and strategy maps twisting in front of my eyes for long nights when I’m not quite asleep or quite awake: but sometimes one of the bad ones comes along.

My first time out. The night forest training ground, where once again the game is to stay alive as long as you can. A rank, damp forest with the sweet-sour smell of vegetable rot. I was moving over this soft leaf mold, moving because the IR sensors would pick me up as a hotspot in the damp night if I held still more than a few seconds. I was moving very quietly, because there were sonic pickups too, wired into the same auto-fire systems. Little rustles came from every side, and there were itchy insects that crawled down your neck or up your nose. Somewhere in the square mile another dozen or so trainees were scattered: I heard one scream not too far away on the left, and I heard the flat crack as the machines fired on the sound without any hesitation ... The night was warm and close and prickly. I was gasping for fright and wondering why the sonics didn’t home in on that huge sound. Maybe it was safe to take a pace forward, a pace back, keep moving but stay out of trouble? I tried that strategy for a few thousand years, or it might have been a hundred heartbeats, feeling a clever fellow in the odd moments when I wasn’t just feeling a scared one, and something hit my shoulder hard and fast. The sound of the shot came flitting through the leaves as I fell, awkward, off balance. Got to crawl. No feeling in my left shoulder anymore.

Seems cold, clammy; but further down the sleeve’s getting wet and down there it’s lukewarm like mess-hall soup. Something screaming inside
I don’t want to die
. No use telling myself I wouldn’t get out of here till I was dead for the duration. Crawling ... right elbow slithering in the flaky mold ... just enough feeling coming back into the left arm to let me know someone had hammered a red-hot poker through the shoulder and turned it slowly around. A whiz, a bullet overhead. Crawling too slowly. Change direction, get off track, get into bushes. Is it really going darker? Hand parts the bushes and something in there bites. A kilovolt at least, the bastards. I want to lie there and cry. My shoulder’s blazing now, pain and acid running along the veins, it’s so hot I should be able to see my way by its red light. Die now, Ken, die and get it over with. Things can’t be any worse...

I take a deep breath for the next effort and things get worse, another shot like a mailed fist in the face which I find has whipped out two molars quicker than any slum dentist. Dribbling blood, cheek in tatters, jaw hanging ajar with a broken hinge ... The pain’s all over me now, radiating from the centers in shoulder and jaw, crosstalk on the nerves till I can’t tell the broken parts of me from the whole ones.

They all hurt now. There are tears running along my nose and dripping from the end, and somehow I’m still crawling, and things keep right on getting worse. Through thorn bushes that rake at me everywhere until even my good right hand seems just rags of gristle hanging off the bone, under some sort of wire stretched forty centimeters off the ground (missed
one
trap then), on and on with the feeble nova-spotted starlight getting dimmer and the insects bumbling and bumping until, as I scrape for a hold again with that battered right elbow, the ground under it opens up. Free fall for a gut-churning instant, and another tremendous bang between hip and groin, and ... Night.

That should have been the end of it, but the worst and longest part of the dream is the worst and longest part of the real memory: conscious again, hanging there in the dark, propping myself up as comfortably as I could with one arm, with no chance at all of comfort because the huge steel spike in the pit had gone through my pelvis. I was pinned like a butterfly, I couldn’t slide further down the tapered spike, I hung, head down, with the smell of damp earth and spilled guts, and I couldn’t die. When I moved, the pieces of bone that had been my pelvis grated against each other and against the steel. I stayed that way a long time before enough blood had run down my arm and down the great spike to let me forget it all, to let me die.

“You watch yourselves,” the sergeant had said before we went in. “There’s some little traps and surprises in there.” Yeah, sergeant. Thanks, sergeant.

Afterward it wasn’t so bad. Nothing’s quite so bad as dying that first time. I felt pretty cocky afterward in the tank when I heard I’d lasted longest of that whole batch; the monitors didn’t clock off my heart until the seventeenth hour, and I hardly wanted to run off at the mouth too much about how I’d spent most of that time leaking away in a pit. So sixty-something percent of that trainee batch got their psych discharge right then, and as usual they reckoned most of them would never be good for anything again; my mind was still ticking along, though I think not quite the way it had been, and I stayed on. If nothing else, the Force guarantees you food, and enough of it; you can’t rely on that outside.

But there is something about that dream of my first time out. Since then I’ve died many and many a time, and I don’t go through all that fuss now. I just take it as part of the job. But that dream ... once in a while it comes back. It’s not only that it’s the worst of things-chasing-you dreams and the worst of boredom-dreams run together with volume and chroma turned right up. Once in a while it comes back and I get a replay of how I felt that first time. I don’t have feelings like that now. They’re alien, they’re not real. My heart doesn’t bash against my ribs like something wanting to be let out, but in the dream it does. I don’t go crying my eyes out with pain, not even when I take a bullet through the palm of the hand (try it sometime—that’s a bad one), but in the dream I do. I can take dying in a proper, reasonable, businesslike way ... but in the dream I don’t.

There’s an old, weak Ken Jacklin down there somewhere. He’s not me. He’s not me at all. The worst thing about the bloodstained dream is that while I’m caught in it, I’m him again. And knowing that makes it a million times worse.

I crawled out of the bed, eyes sore and sticky, head feeling as if someone had put another steel spike clear through it and was wiggling the thing gently from side to side. The room had a basin: I set the cold tap whooshing away and leaned over, splashing water onto face and eyes, spitting the bad taste from my mouth in brownish gobs that whirled around and vanished down the drain. Afterward I got some sleep, that jagged and exhausting sort of sleep that leaves you without any actual memories of dreams, but with a feeling that all night you’ve been trekking over mountain ranges and running through broken country without knowing it.

Six

The Tunnel setup was a lot like a tunnel, yes, or a system of tunnels: there were no windows anywhere, and the damp heaviness in the rough-finished concrete passages to tell you it was way underground. Wui said over breakfast that it had been a U.K. government bunker that wasn’t used for more than a month because the big war went straight over the heads of the EEC people when NATO cracked; instead we had the collapse and the Force picking up the pieces. Behind every third door there were stacks of rusting tins, or crates of biscuits—“Sanctuary for three rare and almost extinct species of weevil,” said Wui—stocks that, like the place, were never really needed.

“Of course some of them in Central say Tunnel’s not needed either,” Wui said as he cut more slices of the gritty bread. “Word is, there are three official research establishments left on this bloody island—and a good minority of those buggers in Zurich Central think that’s three too many. Look around you ... see the enormous staff living here in idleness!”

He wanted a grin and I gave him one. Besides Wui and Corman and myself, and Birch at a table of his own in a corner, there were about twenty people sitting at the chipped plastic tables. Security ate with Security and Maintenance with Maintenance. Some of them sneaked looks at us. Add one: the dour cook behind the counter, ladling the porridge and measuring out sugar and salt. Add two or three more for the guardshift I supposed must be on duty at the entrance lift.

“The atomic energy research center down at Harwell used to have ten thousand staff before the collapse, I read it somewhere,” said Corman. (I still couldn’t think of her as Rossa or Wui asMick y, and I doubted Birch’s mother had ever been able to call him anything but Birch.) She was still frozen-faced, feelings tucked behind a scrambler lock. I’d have guessed the assignment ahead had her stiff with fright, only she’d looked much the same before our good friends spilled the messy details.

“They still run Harwell,” I said, remembering. “They turn out all sorts of stuff now. The Force medic tanks, they make those there.”

Wui said, “Don’t I know it. We had to requisition three for the plan—the first didn’t work after we’d taken it apart and put it together again. Rather small pieces, you see. Harwell were almost stroppy about supplying the second; I suppose they thought we were black-marketing the things. Can’t have the peasantry getting reserved medical privileges, and all that.”

“Of course not,” said Corman, deadpan as ever. “Central started out with ideals of building something from the ruins, they say, and now they’re as corrupt as any of the old governments.”

“Hey, careful, those is fighting words,” Wui said, nervous and joking at the same time. He looked off to one side and I could guess the table there was full of Security.

I pushed back my plate. “What now ...Mick y?”

“Now, yes, now you get the guided tour of the wonders of technology. See the decaying equipment.

Thrill to the incompetence of the whole operation...” He got up.

“Please,” Corman said. “This is a serious matter for one or two of us.”

“I don’t think it’s much of a joke myself,” I said as we left the canteen with that feeling of many eyes on our backs.

“Oh God. You think you’re the
only
ones with worries? Every time I go into the AP lab I know I could change three circuits and wipe this country off the map. Every time I use the minigate I expect something even worse. And all the time between shifts when I’m doing nothing, I know some sod 162 light-years away might be about to shout ‘_Eureka! It works!_’ over his little matter-transmitter while that goddamn instantaneous pulse goes out and this time one of those millions on millions of novas is the one right out there. Apart from that, I haven’t a care in the world. Ho, ho. Life is all one merry joke.”

“Do Security run stability checks here?” I asked; it was the right thing to say, or the wrong one, since Wui shut up and we went on a fair way with only the gritty sound of concrete underfoot. The corridor was low-ceilinged and dim; the yellowish lights high on the walls were set just too far apart, and some were missing, so the soggy yellow light kept fading and coming back all the way along. In one place the left wall was glistening with damp, and what looked like fungus was growing where it met the floor; all the way it stank of old cement falling to sand. Way behind us, I could hear someone following.

“Here we are.” There was a rough-welded steel wall blocking the way, with a small door set in the middle; the corridor was well made but old, this wall was new and shoddy. A plastic box carrying sixteen unmarked buttons in a square was hung askew on the door; Wui hunched himself over it and did things.

The footsteps came up behind us as he straightened up. A
click-buzz;
the door hinged in and light spilled out. Corman and I followed Wui through, stepping over a high doorsill; the follower behind came too, and turned out to be a woman in standard dun overalls, young, taller than Wui or Corman, and pudding-faced. Her features looked like they’d been stirred into the middle of the face with a big spoon.

“Oh, there you are ... missed breakfast again?” Wui said. “Cathy Ellan, our resident genius.” He reeled off our names. We were in a squarish space between two partitions, and the second looked massive.

There was an enormous round door like a bank vault—in fact it looked like professional work and probably
had
been liberated from some old bank. Another grid of buttons on the partition at the side, this one glowing with alphamerics, 0 to 9 and A to F. Fuse boxes and power switches on the concrete wall, and heavy cables. Ellan shut the first door while Wui tapped a code to unlock the second.

“Why the fortifications?” I asked.

Ellan had a squeaky, pedantic voice. “We had anticipated a gateway into vacuum; we did not want to evacuate the entire complex. Likewise, we
might
have emptied the North Sea or the Atlantic Ocean into our laboratory. Our fears were groundless, as it proved, but other undesirable things could still pass through the gate: we chose to install the safety locks and keep the option of cutting power from out here.”

She waved a hand at the switchgear on the wall.

“I sure am enjoying the guided tour,” I said not too loudly. Ellan looked sour; I was surprised to catch a tiny smile from Corman.
Good on you, Rossa
, I thought. Meanwhile Wui was grunting as he pulled on the big round door; it swung out slowly; it was more than two meters thick. Undesirable things, eh? The opening tapered from maybe two meters high and wide to the point where even Rossa had to crouch; we went in one by one, hunched up, and stepped down into the biggest room yet. Wui snapped switches and strip-lights flickered, came on full. It was an enormous hall, maybe designed for underground government sittings. It was an incredible mess.

The walls were clogged with racks of electronics; in a couple of places they pushed out into the room like library bays. There were sagging cardboard boxes stacked with electrical junk, trolleys and scar-topped benches littered with large and small parts, steel cupboards with still more stuff spilling from them and, all over the floor, bright blobs of solder, colored insulation and integrated circuits squashed like insects with lots of legs. There were computer consoles and printers, a traveling crane running on tracks up near the high ceiling, other pieces of machinery that meant nothing to me. And near the far wall, surrounded by meters and meters of the only clear space you could see, power lines thick as my arm vanished into a big gray case the size of an office desk. The one clean surface in the room was the flat, shiny, stainless-steel top of this thing, up there at the end like an altar. More or less centered in that surface there was a black spot. I guessed it might be 1.9 centimeters in diameter.