Priam's Lens

TWENTY-ONE The Ghost of Hector Rises

It was no easier getting out than it had been getting in, but at least in daylight the activity of the Titan base was far less and there weren’t those energy tendrils to deal with.

Harker, Kat, and Spotty said almost nothing while making their getaway. There wasn’t anything else to say. It was good to be able to stop at a depression filled with water and at least fill that need.

There was still traffic in and out of the base; the ships didn’t stop coming and going day or night, and in place of the strings they could see what appeared to be large numbers of humans or humanlike creatures wandering, apparently aimlessly, across the expanse of the old city, never straying too far from the front of the crystalline base.

“Hunters?” Kat wondered when they reached some cover.

“Doubtful. Not that passive or that many together. Other kinds of experiments, probably. The people they use to determine what to do with the rest of us, or what they can do. Even so, I wouldn’t like to meet up with any. At the very least, what they see, the Titans see, too.”

The jungle area didn’t provide a lot of food, but Spotty was able to round up some squashlike growths and an acidic but spongy leaf that she insisted was edible.

“Nightfall, after the storm, we should try and make the hills,” Kat told them. “I don’t think the mentat’s going to give us a whole lot of grace time, and if anybody or any-thing, even by accident, wanders down that culvert, it won’t wait ”

Harker frowned and nodded slowly. “If I know Krill, she’s had them drilled and checked and double-checked again and again up there and somebody sitting in the command chair on shifts at all times. Yes, the moment those codes come in, whoever is in that chair is going to take a few seconds to react, a few more to realize what they’ve got is a live system, maybe another minute or two to notify the others, and then it’s shoot time. The targets will be at least one base on each continent just to collapse the grid, then the rest before the Titans can regroup and move. If it’s done right, then there could be just enough shock and confusion as those nets go down to allow for a whole series of positioning shoots before the Titans even realize where they’ve been hit from. By that time there could be enough impulse energy bouncing around, along with God knows what other bizarre effects from both the Lens energies and the collapse of the Titan nets, that they may be unable to get a fix on Hector. Remember, the commands to shoot will be short numerical commands sent in nano-seconds through the orbiting genholes’ out-systems. Titan ships will go after those gates first, and probably be even more confused when they see only gates. Krill knows she needs a fast clean sweep. I expect her to do her job.”

Spotty stared at the two of them. “They will do this—thing as soon as they can?” She didn’t understand anything about the weapon, but the idea of throwing lightninglike spears into the hearts of demons was good enough.

“Yes, they will, dear,” Kat replied.

“Then we cannot wait for nightfall. We must go now or we will not be able to make it to the top. The demons are most active at night, and they must expect something. No matter how we feel, we must go now or remain right here until it finishes.”

She was right and they knew it. All those survivor’s instincts and upbringing in a world of constant threat made her the expert. Both offworlders suddenly realized that they had been treating the girl like some poor native guide in a bad play. They were in her world now, and she was the expert, the natural leader, among the three of them.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Harker said, and they rose to go.

They had to move as much as possible through the overgrown sections, and they had to keep down in what appeared to be slowly increasing activity at the Titan base, so it was nearing sunset when they reached the point where the Grand Highway rose gently to reach the low pass between the hills.

Even before darkness fell, there were loud noises coming from the Titan base, and lights and energy tendrils were everywhere. Harker was nervous about climbing up in the face of it, but he saw no choice. “If that thing explodes or whatever, it’s going to at least take most of this coastal plain with it. We have to be over the summit!”

“I don’t understand why a race that sophisticated didn’t pick us up when we came in,” Kat commented. It had been bothering her from the first. “We can set up defenses even i cockroach can’t get through.”

“Not true,” Harker told her. “Otherwise there would be no more cockroaches. They would have gone extinct when Earth became uninhabitable. We can set up a general roach barrier that works most of the time, but not if we’re targeting individual roaches. In this case, we’re the roaches, and I don’t think they can comprehend total individualized behavior. No, they’ve been waiting for us to reappear all right, but what tips them off is the roach with the electronic implant. Its the only reason Jastrow got in and out, the only reason we got in and out.”

“Yeah, but if somebody’s getting nervous down there, they might be looking for another candidate,” Kat suggested nervously. All she wanted to do was get out of there.

Using the windswept trees as cover and the light reflecting from the great Titan base, they managed to get almost halfway up before the rains rumbled in, the low hills being no barrier to them.

Even knowing that the rains were more than mere rains, and noting their altered behavior, Kat and Harker couldn’t help themselves. When the rains rumbled, they broke cover and went out nearer the road and sat, exposed, so that they could be fully bathed. It wasn’t something they thought about or something they could fight. It was an irresistible impulse even as their minds told them it was not the thing to do.

From the Titan base below, the electronic thumping noise that they’d heard before, with a varying pace that rose and fell but still seemed to go right through them, was particularly loud and active. There was no question that their position could be detected; it probably could be detected at any time via the grid. The problem for the Titans was that they could not tell humans apart unless they had been selected and marked in the data stream. And if you weren’t theirs, you were just one of the mass.

After the storm passed, there was always a feeling of wellness accompanied by lethargy; the trained guards were always able to overcome this, but most never fought it. Now, though, it was taking all the willpower of the exhausted trio to keep going, to keep from settling in, from finding a spot for the night and sleeping.

“Is it particularly strong because we’re so close or because they just did something?” Kat wondered.

“It doesn’t matter,” Harker told her. “We have to push on if we can, we have to fight it. And if they did anything extra, or if two baths this close to the source of the programs did an extra job on us, we’ll have to live with it, too. It’s done. Right now we just need to run.”

Nobody was up to running through that brush up the rest of the hill, but walking was something they could force themselves to do.

Something down there was more excited than usual, and the energy tendrils from the various facets on the base seemed hyperactive. They would sweep not only the plain but also up the hills as well, and it was getting difficult to dodge them.

Now, though the trio, worn out, barely able to think, was nearing the summit of the pass. A few hundred more meters and they’d be on the other side, able to rest, as protected as they could be under the circumstances. Now they did find that last bit of adrenaline, and they started to move fast.

Leading, almost at the very top, Harker was struck by a flickering pastel red tendril of energy from the base.

“Gene!” Kat screamed. He was suddenly frozen in place. Then he turned and started looking straight at the base, where new sounds began to pulse, sounds like they hadn’t heard before. Like electronic whistles punctuated with a twanging noise, and the tendril seemed to be pulsing in time with them.

Kat Socolov fought down panic and summoned up rage. She raced up to the zombielike Harker, hauled off, and punched him in the jaw with every bit of strength she could muster.

He went down, and the tendril broke off and seemed to flail away in midair for a moment, then began a new pattern to see if it could find him again.

By this point Kat and Spotty had dragged the unconscious Harker back into the underbrush and out of a direct line of sight with the base.

This was as far as they were going, that was clear. Whatever was going to happen, they couldn’t drag the man that last measure to and over the top. They could only hope that he had been merely tagged and that the aliens had not yet received any data they could understand or use.

It was only a single plate for a genhole that would have been assembled in space out of such plates and that would have eventually been large enough to swallow a full-size spaceship, but the mentat thought it was sufficient and they weren’t going to argue with such a machine.

The trick was to get up on the catwalks and pound on one end of the damned thing so that it was in position to do maximum damage. The giant crane had been frozen in place for decades and could not be powered up. However, to minimize potential damage it held the plate at just one central and balanced point. That point, effectively a ball joint, did not want to move after so long, but Littlefeet was very strong. He managed to budge the thing, much to his surprise and delight.

“The direction is now within acceptable limits,” the mentat told him. “It won’t strike dead center, but it will strike the main complex and it will do damage. You’ve done very well, my boy.”

“I’d like to see it,” Littlefeet told the computer a bit wistfully. “I’d really love to see it hit the demons. Nobody has ever seen demons die.”

We do not know what will happen, or even if it’ll work like this, but I agree with you,” the mentat told him. “Besides, perhaps there should be someone to sing the legends of Colonel N’Gana’s grand last stand.”

N’Gana was keeping himself going by sheer force of will. He was a dead man and he knew it, but he was not going to die of a heart attack just before the final blow.

Littlefeet was confused. “What do you mean, `sing the legends’? I shall be in heaven with the others.”

“I have been thinking about that,” the mentat told him. “And I have been dwelling on a people who, reduced to nothing, nonetheless retain all that is good in humanity. Duty, honor, courage… These are rare things that get obscured or forgotten by modern life. And love as well. I cannot really know that emotion, but the observable qualities make it a central part of all the rest that is good and perhaps holy in people.”

It paused, as if listening for something in the silence, then continued.

“There is a great deal of additional activity up there. I am getting surges of power radiated into the old power grid at levels that are almost off the scale. They know something. I had hoped to give the others another few hours, but I do not think we can wait.”

“Then this is it?” Littlefeet asked, nervously steeling himself.

“Yes, this is it. I do not think you have much of a chance to survive this close in, but you have twenty minutes if nothing else happens. Go! Use it!”

He stood there a moment, uncomprehending.

“Go, I said! You may barely make it out! Stay low and in the culvert! Do not look at the demon palace until after you hear us shoot! The shot may blind you. But, as soon as they shoot, run like the very devil!”

“But—but you said I may—”

“If you don’t start now, you will die here! Go! I give you a chance, however slim, at surviving! By the time you get into that culvert it won’t matter what they pick up! Move!”

Littlefeet started to say something to the two who remained, but N’Gana just smiled and pointed to the catwalks.

Hamille raised its bizarre head and croaked, “Get the fuck out of here, you asshole!”

Littlefeet started running.

They had been on Hector long enough now that Juanita Krill was beginning to worry that they might run short on some supplies before anything happened below. The temporal shift was always in the minds of those who planned this expedition; new air generators, water reprocessors and traps, and fresh food should be coming in by small automated shuttle on a regular basis now, but the timing to pick up the modules and get them to Hector was dicey.

Van der Voort and Takamura didn’t care. They were in a kind of heaven in the place, with a whole new area of physics suddenly open to them, a whole new kind of mathematical approach to problems involving genhole communications. There were years of work here done by large teams of brilliant people and state-of-the-art artificial intelligence agents as well, work virtually forgotten in the slow lethargic collapse of The Confederacy. Years more of work would be needed to figure it all out, to document and test each and every revolutionary idea, but the potential here was mind-blowing. Nobody, but nobody, had been able to lick the temporal shifts of the genhole, but this came very close.

Equally stunning had been the recordings of the initial tests of the weapon based on the effects from Priam’s Lens. Asteroids shattered, a small moon literally sliced in two… Incredible power, power that had terrified those who had built it. What purpose, they’d asked, to kill the Titans if at the same time you destroyed Helena and all upon it as well? There was hope, they argued. There was no other way. There had to be another way. It had gone on and on until the great white spacecraft of the Titans appeared in-system and the power was sucked dry and there was no way left to get down to the surface and get the codes and transmit them back up.

It must have haunted George Sotoropolis most of all. He had been the main roadblock, and he had been here, unlike the other two, to see the ships come in, to understand that he could have hit the ships before they devastated his beloved Helena if he’d just let them have his part of the code.

It was such a simple problem to solve, at least on a theoretical basis. The data stated that the bursts had to be incredibly short. No more than three bursts on a target, no more than thirty nanoseconds per burst, and you kept the damage localized, focused. And the best part was, you only had to hit the target, not necessarily dead center or in a vital area.

The computer models said it would work. They had spent several days running programs through the Control Center command and control computers and they had a ninety-seven percent certainty.

Only nobody’d had the opportunity to find out for sure. By the time they’d determined it, they had already been essentially overrun.

They also knew that Helena’s installations and Titan ships and bases had to be first. They had to take them out and quickly. They had to do it right the first time, and they had to do it without any serious damage to the planet or the moon they were on would no longer be held in a planetary grip.

They had the initial targets picked and locked in using the genhole gates scattered around the system. As soon as any of the gates activated, it would be pinpointed by the Titans, but they would be harder to reach than they seemed, spitting an unknown but deadly stream.

They had the targets all mapped out, and the order. All they needed was the go codes. If it all worked, if they were still alive, still viable when it was over, and if at least one master genhole gate were still intact, then they could turn their attention to other conquered worlds. Not all, of course—there hadn’t been time. But there were a lot of targets out there. Targets that, the early data suggested, against all plausibility, could be automatically hit by commands that would somehow arrive very quickly indeed.

Van der Voort had been working on how that could be so, since it defied established physics. The key, he was certain, was in the properties of whatever that string or stream or whatever it was that the holes captured and transmitted. It had to be something unlike anything they had ever seen before, something that, somehow, took its time from both ends of a wormhole simultaneously without breaking up.

Those earlier scientists had tried to determine the nature of this strange phenomenon coming from the small lens and its trapped and looped singularity. The strings were not true strings; they simply resembled them in the way they registered on instruments and the way they seemed to move. They had no measurable mass, but if they were energy, they did not register as such on any known measuring device. But they were as destructive as hell.

Quite rapidly, van der Voort had come to a conclusion that a number of long-dead project scientists had also considered, but put aside for the more immediate engineering problems.

“Not strings,” he told Takamura. “Not matter at all, or energy, either.”

Takamura frowned. “Not matter and not energy? No mass, no energy transfer, yet destructive. What can you mean?”

“I think they’re cracks,” he told her. “Cracks in the very fabric of space-time emanating from the collapse of the boltzmon. Because it is caught hi a loop, the cracks heal as quickly as the thing cycles, and the forces in our own universe aid this to maintain integrity.”

Takamura saw it at once. “And since the genholes create holes in our own space-time fabric, it is a natural attractor and conductor of the cracks. They don’t heal inside! They’re maintained! Inside, the crack expands instantly but is held inside the field! Yes! Oh, my! That’s why it shattered planets, and could possibly destabilize stars! Nothing could withstand it until it healed over. Whatever it struck, even if it were a hair-thin sliver, would fall instantly out of space-time itself. Oh, my! I can see now why they were so afraid to use it!”

Krill had been adamant about that. “We will not hesitate again! There won’t be a third chance! When we get those codes, we shoot! And the consequences be damned!”

Littlefeet thought he wasn’t going to make it. The entrance was just ahead, but he’d slipped and fallen several times in the rubble. Now, though, he was determined to come out, even into the darkness lit only by an alien glow. He had been given a second life, and he was not going to forfeit it lightly.

“Colonel?” the mentat called.

“Yes?”

“You are still here?”

“I have no place else to go,” he responded, chuckling.

“You were murmuring unintelligibly. I was worried.”

“You needn’t be. I was just seeing a lot of faces all of a sudden, as if a large crowd of men and women stood with us here. It was quite strange. I knew them all, too, and they knew me. I can still almost make them out in the gloom. Soldiers, mostly. Good people, the finest. Everyone I ever ordered to their deaths. It’s almost a reunion, really. They seemed quite pleased to see me, and not at all holding a grudge. Not anymore.”

“I do not—”

“Let Colonel have who he wants here!” Hamille croaked. “Bigger the crowd for the end of the contest, the better the sporting victory!”

The mentat started to say something more, then decided not to. It did not understand what they were saying or thinking, but its logical brain also understood that whatever it was was now irrelevant. If it made it easier for them, so be it.

“They’re running traces on the energy leak,” the mentat told them. “Hector is in the sky, a bit lower than I would like for optimum accuracy but it will do. I am transmitting the codes now!”

The colonel smiled and looked into the darkness.

° “Send them to hell for me, Colonel,” Sergeant Mogutu called from the shadows.

The colonel raised his hand unsteadily and gave the victory sign.

A tremendous surge of energy sprang for less than three seconds from a point near the cliffs just beyond the old spaceport area. Almost immediately three egg-shaped craft of the Titans raced from the complex and zeroed in on the exact spot, focusing their energy drains first, then opening fire with full blasts of energy until the entire area for half a kilometer square was turned first red, then white hot, liquid and bubbling.

Their reaction time was incredible; they were at the spot in under ten seconds and had it reduced to molten rock within a minute.

Much too late.

The command and control board suddenly lit up with hundreds of fully active targets. It so startled Takamura that she failed to act for several seconds. Then it dawned on her what she was seeing and she screamed, “Krill!”

Juanita Krill was awake in an instant; she walked swiftly to the board. Van der Voort was not far behind, yawning.

“Take it easy,” Krill told the nearly hysterical physicist. “So far we’ve only received the codes in a broad beam. They still don’t know that we are here. To do that we’re going to have to power up our genholes and read in our optimum targets. Takamura, let me take the controls. Any of us can initiate the sequence on the bases but I’m going to have to take the initial ships manually until the command and control AI unit can get the hang of things and go automatic.”

She sat in the chair and pulled the command helmet down on her head. The whole system was now within her purview, a three-dimensional model that, unlike all the other times they’d done this in modeling, now glowed with both active targets in order and potentially active gates.

She had been prepared to wait until she had at least some of both continents of Helena in view, but she found that she didn’t have to. They were both there, although she’d lose one within forty minutes.

Well, she thought to herself. All this time you’ve played your security games and fooled with your codes and computer systems and let others fight and die. Now the whole thing is in your lap, Krill. And the only companions you have can’t help you because they don’t even believe in God.

“I’m powering up five and nine,” she told them. “Here we go!”

All targets hit in turn, order of battle gamma delta epsilon, she sent to the C C computer. Five and nine on. As soon as they are energized, fire at will.

Far off, more than a dozen light-years away, a signal came through the genhole to shut down the transfer and divert to a new location. Helena five and nine, in turn, now!

Colonel N’Gana screamed out into the darkness. “God damn it! Why don’t they shoot?”

“Have patience, my old friend,” responded the shade of Sergeant Mogutu. “It won’t be much longer now ”

“They are firing at the ground not far above us,” the mentat told them. “I think we will miss the final show. Just a minute or two more and they will be through to here, and they will also be finished tracing the energy surges. I am sorry.”

There was a sudden buzzing and then the entire ancient charged genhole plate, still on the crane above them, crackled with sudden life.

“C’mon, Krill, you beautiful bitch!” N’ Gana screamed. “SHOOT!”

Although within seconds Krill was quite confused at having not two but three shoot orders in her sequence, something not in the plan, the important thing was that it all happened.

They shot.

The plate suspended above cracked like thin ice. The jagged rupture spread through the side of the underground complex, and up into the left side of the Titan base itself. The one shot was too much for the small plate, which was never intended to be used in any way, much less like this, and it fell and shattered on the factory floor below.

The crack continued to spread. Where it struck the Titan base, the crystals shattered like so many thin glass bulbs under pressure.

From high on the hillside, two women, mouths open in awe, forgot their unconscious charge and watched as an indescribable sliver of something shot out of the very earth and shattered a large segment of the base. It was followed by a sonic boom the likes of which not even most space pilots had felt before—a boom that deafened them, flattened some trees on the plain below, and knocked both women down.

The base itself was in serious trouble. It flickered and shimmered as popping and crackling sounds were heard inside, and the whole center structure, all twenty-plus stories of it, began to collapse in on the already ruined left section, which could no longer provide structural support.

Two more Titan craft flew out as it collapsed, but they were unsteady, wobbling, and both crashed to the ground in front of the disintegrating base.

The towers anchoring the grid fell in as the structure imploded in dramatic slow motion. For a brief moment the grid shone brightly in the sky in spite of the glow, as if it had suddenly received more power than it ever had carried before, and then, just as suddenly, but completely, it winked out.

“They did it!” Spotty cried, still not sure she could hear after that big explosion but too excited to remain scared. “They killed the demon city!”

The plain was slowly dimming, going dark, as the base continued to collapse. A multitude of tiny figures were moving like excited insects all around in front of it, but from this distance it was impossible to tell who or what or how many they were.

A good dozen ships, however, had already left before the shot was taken or had managed to break out before the impending collapse; these now hovered over the area, save only the two finishing off the transmitter and the two others now turning to molten rock an area between the old spaceport and the base.

Spotty watched, and her joy was suddenly muted. “Littlefeet,” she muttered, an agonized expression replacing the jubilant one.

Harker groaned in back of them, then opened his eyes and cried out, “No! I—”

He suddenly realized he was on his back and in the trees and that the two women were there and paying no attention to him whatsoever.

He tried to get up, failed the first time, then managed to sit up and feel his jaw and the back of his head. He tried to remember what had happened but it was all a confusing blur.

“Kat! Spotty!” he called.

Spotty continued to look at the spectacle, which was now becoming harder and harder to see as most of the illumination faded, leaving only that from the surviving ships and the areas they had transformed to magma. Kat, however, turned and bent down. “You okay?” she asked him.

“What—what happened?”

“Oh, they took the shot,” she told him. “The base is no longer.”

He tried to get to his feet in a hurry and, with her help, he managed it. “You mean I missed the damned show? After all that?”

“You got caught in one of their beams. The only way not to have you turned into one of their spies was obvious, so I knocked you out.”

“You knocked me out?”

“Well, you were kind of spaced-out, you know. Easy target.”

He felt his jaw and then the back of his head once again. “I think you got lucky. Feels like my head hit a rock or something when I fell. Damn! Was it worth seeing? Help me to where I can at least look at the rubble!”

“C’mon, helpless! Not much to see anymore, though. And stay out of the way of those ships. They’re reeling but they’re not finished yet!”

But, they were finished, at least at Ephesus. The ships patrolled the area, back and forth, and occasionally one of them sent out a searchlight of some kind, checking on something below, but there was little more they could do. They seemed aimless, confused, unable to accept that they’d just suffered a tremendous blow and that something was definitely out there hunting them for a change.

Harker watched it, and something in the back of his mind understood.

“They don’t have any connection with the rest of the network,” he commented. “They can’t consult, they can’t get orders, they can’t make collective decisions at the speed of light. One thing’s sure—they didn’t trace the shots to space. They’re not going up in a hurry to take on Hector, Krill, and her gates.”

She shook her head. “It didn’t look like it came from there,” she told him. “For some reason, sheer luck, I was staring down at it when it happened. It was like it came out of the ground. I expected a bolt from the blackness, and it came from out of the ground. Go figure.”

He looked up at the night sky. “No grid. No giant continental neural net. Now it’s the flowers that’ll be going mad.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. I’m not even positive myself what it means, but I can tell you that they are hurt bad.”

Spotty turned and looked at him. “Will they build it again? Will it come back?”

He sighed. “I don’t know, Spotty. I honestly don’t. I hope not. If they don’t, at least we’ll know that Krill reclaimed this system. How they do this in places where they’re not orbited by a peanut moon like that I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter to us anymore.”

Kat looked back at the now darkened scene. “Now what?” she asked.

“Now we’re out of the battle and out of the war,” he told her. “Now we get to go someplace where I can sleep off this pounding headache, where we can all eat and drink and relax. Maybe, when we get back to the Styx, we’ll take some time and teach Spotty how to swim. She’s already got an oversized flotation collar on her chest. Two of ’em. Shouldn’t be too hard for somebody who walked into a demon city and walked back out leaving it a pile of rubble.”

“Okay, then what?”

“Well, we find a really pretty place near the coast with a nice view of the ocean and no monsters under the sand and with lots of food and water and good wood, and we work up some tools. We live there and we do the best we can and see about building a boat. We defend the place and protect it. If they find us before I finish the boat, well and good, or if I finish the boat first, well, maybe we’ll go find out who won the war. There’s nothing but time now, and there’s no hurry at all.