The Fleet-Book Four Sworn Allies Read online

  Laing grimaced. “This won’t be a pleasant duty. Understatement of the century.”

  Maclaurin gave him a close but gentle regard. “Yes, you do have to wreck the country where you lived and worked so long,” he agreed. “That entire continent will be in bad shape, and the background count will rise everywhere on the planet. However, we aren’t going to sterilize it. Not even this weapon can do that. Life is tough, tenacious.”

  Laing nodded jerkily. “I know. I didn’t sleep much last night. Lay there thinking the matter out, as best I could. “

  “I’m fairly confident you and your associates can go back in a few years and pick up your research. The Fleet is mindful of those who have served it well.”

  “Not the same,” Laing muttered. “The locale, Mozart Land, and the amadei we know—those won’t exist. We’ll have to begin all over again, among strangers, in a strange country.”

  “Uh, amadei?”

  “Our team’s informal name.” Laing found himself curiously anxious to talk about them, regardless of how it hurt. “Officially, chrysodonts. The most interesting animal by far on Christina. They became Tess’s, my wife’s, specialty. I observed them as often as I could manage, and made friends among them.”

  Maclaurin raised his brows. “Friends? There are no sapients on Three.” His voice roughened. “Are there?”

  The Fleet did not condone genocide.

  “No, no,” Laing answered quickly. “Likening the geological histories of separate planets is ridiculous, but as a crude catchphrase you might say Christina is at a stage similar to the late Cretaceous of Earth. Except on mountains, climates range from warm to hot. No polar caps. No dinosaurs, of course, but creatures with many analogies to reptiles dominate animal life and have evolved a marvelous variety of forms. The chrysodonts are bipedal, comparatively large-brained. The species we call the amadeus is the brightest of them. About like Terrestrial monkeys, if that means anything to you.”

  “I saw a documentary about Earth nature once. How do they get that name?”

  “Amadeus? They sing beautifully. It’s a nickname we field workers hit on, like Mozart and, oh, damn near everything else.” Laing tossed off his coffee and bashed the cup down on the table. “God, I want to weep for our amadei.”

  “Chances are the Khalians have killed those you knew.”

  “Yeah.” Laing looked elsewhere. “Maybe my mind-copy will enjoy his task, in a way.” Abruptly he wanted to think about that. “But must you really bring such a weapon to bear? Seems like overkill in spades.”

  “We have to make sure,” Maclaurin explained. “Nobody’s ever done anything like this before, and as the admiral said, we won’t get a second try. Exercising emergency authority, by writ of the High Command, our agents collected practically the entire supply of anti-lithium anti-hydride in the Alliance. It’s normally used in minute quantities as an industrial explosive where ultra-precision is necessary, you may know. The stockpiling was to free up the plants to produce heavier nuclei. Now it’ll take them ten years to replace those five tons.”

  “Lithium?”

  “The hydride. Solid, fairly dense, chemically stable, much easier to handle than anti-hydrogen or anti-helium, and more effective for our purposes. We’ve got it suspended by a tension field in a vacuum chamber inside our meteoroid. Impact will switch off the field generator and drive the stuff out, a ways down into the ground. Conversion of mass to energy will be total, of course. But we can’t predict how fast it will happen, or how efficiently from the viewpoint of what we want to do. Gobs of material will be flung far and wide by the initial reaction, blazing through the air. We’ve got to be absolutely sure that enough force hits the Khalian base to destroy it utterly: Therefore we’re throwing as big a lump as we could get together, and need a conscious pilot to make certain it strikes very near the target.”

  Maclaurin laughed. “What a fireworks display!” Maybe that was his defense against the expectation.

  * * *

  The hours of scanning were not a nightmare. Physical discomfort was minor, mainly due to prolonged immobility while connected to a labyrinth of tubes, Wires, monitors, meters. Maclaurin and his assistants were simpatico. The experience was eldritch, though. Forgotten moments of youth, childhood, infancy rose from the deeps to claim the whole of the universe and recede before others. Thought rambled dimly and without coherence, as it does on the verge of sleep. Emotions burst forth, objectless: love, anger, dread, lust, grief, mirth, primordial passions for which the waking mind had no name. They flowed into a oneness that exploded in a million whirling colors. Space-time dwindled to zero and stretched to infinity. Laing perceived the meaning of existence, but lost it again. He could not afterward remember any of those hours, except that he had dreamed such things. Finally a technician gave him an injection and he spun into oblivion.

  He awoke in sickbay. Drowsily he saw that the various punctures in his skin were bandaged. They should soon heal, faster than his hair would grow back. He closed his eyes and slept onward.

  At some later date he was more fully awake. Maclaurin came in, vibrant, and exclaimed, “It’s worked, it’s worked! Everything went top chop. The program’s in place now, and our weapon’s on the way.”

  * * *

  We will never know what the pseudobrain thought, bound for its destiny. We have nothing but that last stark message, and the fact of what happened next. Still less can we know what it felt, as sundered from ours as its existence was. Yet I heard much, that night in Wang Fang’s. Later, curious, I retrieved what I could from various databases whenever I was on worlds they occupy. And I already knew something about such machines. I had even talked with one. As said, I collect stories. So let me reconstruct this, believing I am not far wrong.

  Think of that rock, slowly a-tumble with hell in its belly on a long fall around the sun. The Laing mind does not see space as you and I do. It perceives through instruments attuned to the entire spectrum, to ghostly winds of atoms and ions, to force fields and pulses and the rhythms of gravity as the planets dance about their mother. It sees the solar fire ahead in full incandescence, while at the same time it sees the maelstroms that are spots, flame-tongues of flares and prominences, lacy nacre of corona, and the zodiacal light outspread in great vague wings. Undazzled, it sees the stars in their manifold hues, crowding Heaven wherever it looks, for to these senses myriads stand clear that are too dim for our eyes. Space is not dark, it is radiant. Nor is it silent. The atoms between the stars sing in radio voices through which throbs that deep chant that remembers the birth of the universe. Here and there nebulae glow with new suns or the death-gasps of old. Clouds cleave the Milky Way, but they cannot hide the furious heartbeat of the galaxy from this machine. Sister galaxies gleam afar, outward and outward to that edge of observability where we descry the beginning and foresee the end of all things.

  The Laing mind takes hours, days, to master its awarenesses. By itself it is merely human. It would be forever lost in bewilderment were it not conjoined to the computer that controls the whole. Given such a capability, the speed and volume of data handling, the immense library out of which it can draw whatever it needs in nanoseconds—given this, gradually it assimilates the flood of input. It understands and governs. Thus it can think afresh. No longer like a drunken god, but taking its godlike powers for granted, it recalls what it formerly was.

  No, it realizes, that isn’t accurate. It never was Arthur Laing. He is back on yonder ruddy spark in the sky. The mind makes an optical enlargement until Belisarius rolls big in vision, a desolation of rock and dust storms. Neutrinos from the power plants stream through detectors, but maximum magnification cannot give sight of the Fleet Base. Life is so small in the cosmos, so transitory, intelligent life so rare.

  Meanwhile the asteroid has orbited ever closer to Christina. Knowing that the Laing mind would need to settle down into its condition, the planners gave it plenty of
time. Furthermore, by starting their missile off on this trajectory at such a remove, they denied the Khalia any possibility of noticing anything suspicious about it.

  Christina waxes, at first a white star, then a tiny crescent, then a disc over whose dark part plays faint phosphorescence. The dayside begins to show a shadow-limned intricacy of cloud-play. Streaks come and go, blue, sight of the oceans, greenish brown when the skies clear above land, but they are soon gone again. The planet has known ice ages, humans have seen the traces, but this is its great summer, in which it has dreamed for fifty million years. Two moons, of less size than Luna, shine scarred upon the cloud deck.

  The Laing mind remembers.

  Tess gripped his hand. From their seats they saw the world swell before them. “Our home,” she breathed. “Oh, I know we’ll be happy here.”

  He smiled. “I wish I could carry you over the threshold,” he said, and felt how much he meant that. He wanted her in his arms, the dear weight and warmth of her. Well, they’d shortly be on the ground, in camp. There ought to be private quarters for them, if only a tent. There’d better!

  The spacecraft growled, braking. Mist blinded the viewscreens. Suddenly they broke through and beneath them reached forest, mountains, a river like a silvery snake.

  The Laing mind strains its instruments forward. Emanations from the Khalian base are discernible. They strengthen hour by hour, presently minute by minute, radio, infrared, neutrinos, out of a spot like an inflamed wound. A few little ticklings come from elsewhere, aircraft on errands—or on safaris? The Khalia seem to love killing in the way humans love sex. No matter. After the base is destroyed, hunting down any survivors will be a trivial chore.

  The Laing mind has no fear of obliteration. It does not envy its other, original, self. It lacks a body to savor the sweetnesses of life and long for them. Here is a duty to perform, a deed more useful than most in history, service to Tess and humankind and decency. It is able to take pride in that.

  Nevertheless, while existence remains and it is free of immediate demands, it wants to remember everything it can.

  The overcast was seldom gloomy, but pearl gray. After you had learned how to see when shadows were dim or absent, you felt that somehow the whole air had gone softly luminous. Mountains reared into it wherever you looked, blue majesties, their highest peaks lost in the clouds, bared to the stars. The valley floor was half glades, half woods. Laing stood in tall, tawny, rustling growth that was not actually grass, near the trees. Those towered coppery-barked, spreading out in violet-veined leaf canopies where drops of water glinted. Rainbow wings fluttered among them. A breeze took the curse off the heat, though he was long since used to that anyway. It bore odors evoking childhood whiffs of jasmine and ginger.

  The amadeus family was taking its ease at the forest edge. “Family” might be a purely human idea, but Tess had come to think it fitted. Amadei lived in groups, about half a dozen adult males and as many females plus their young. The couples appeared to be more or less monogamous. Extended family, you could perhaps say. From time to time several bands met, frolicking· and singing for days, while newly mature members found mates. Afterward the families went back to their territories.

  Laing was pleased to recognize individuals here. Often away studying different creatures, he hadn’t developed Tess’s intimacy with the amadei. (That was the reason for settling in Mozart; deep dales concentrated them, prevented wide wandering, and so you could observe them, win their trust, follow their lives year after year.) However, he’d gotten friendly with some.

  They were a handsome sight, the adults of a size with him, body slanted forward, counterbalanced by a gracefully waving tail. The head was large, round, blunt-muzzled, on top of a rather long neck; the eyes glowed liquidly dark; the golden-gleaming teeth had seemed alarmingly large at first, and indeed the amadei did sometimes hunt lesser animals, but in their own company they were generally sweet-tempered. Their skin was delicately scaled, its blue-black shimmer suggestive of chain mail. Laing was fascinated by their forepaws. Those digits seemed well on the way to becoming true fingers, with opposable thumbs.

  Gimpy hobbled about in search of berries. Tumtum, already sated, drowsed against a bole. Bella put food in the mouth of a hatchling, which she cradled in her left arm. Fussy made vain efforts to call two half-grown of hers down from reckless games in a tree. Another youngster poked a stick, sharpened with its teeth, into a myrmecoid nest and speared tasty bugs. Another adult watched—supervising?

  Joe was quick to notice Laing. He uttered a warble of delight and bounded toward the man. He always was brash. The rest hung back for a couple of minutes. Thereby they let Joe get the most and choicest of the treats, crackers prepared from local plants, that Laing had in his pockets. When they saw that, everybody crowded around.

  They started to sing. An amadeus had its personal songs, and Laing had never heard exactly the same twice. Their vocal range was a full seven octaves, and the variety of sounds they could make was incredible: trills, whistles, roars, thuds, clangs, ripplings, rushings. Each was melodious, and the whole became a composition, music that sparkled and rejoiced.

  Laing had also heard ominous cantos warning of danger; he had listened to males trying vocally for dominance, and courtship songs, and lullabies, and what he felt sure were laments for the dead. Tess believed the amadei communicated by music more than by signals and attitudes.

  “Hey”—Laing laughed—“don’t embarrass me. I’m out of goodies, and by now you should know I can’t carry a tune in a basket.”

  The planet stands huge, Auroras flicker over the poles. Instruments go to full amplification. It would be most unwise to feel ahead with radar, but passive devices reveal much. Magnetic field variations, mascons, beds of radioactive minerals, and similar clues sketch the country below the clouds.

  They are inexact. The radiation of the enemy base is more helpful, but fails to pinpoint it by too many kilometers. Deeply buried as it is, most of what comes out is weak and scattered. Also, the Khalia follow standard military practice in using baffler fields and planting dummy emitters far around. To everything but optics, the target is a broad, ill-defined smear. Light, including infrared, loses itself in the clouds, is absorbed and reradiated, comes forth essentially imageless. You must get below the vapors and look; and then you are within seconds of a missile strike, within less than a millisecond of an energy beam’s reach.

  Nevertheless the Laing mind, has wondered what its purpose is. Couldn’t a bomb like this burst half a continent away, and succeed? However, analysis of information from the databank confirmed what Maclaurin had said. The destructive power is known: e=mc2, five tons of antimatter annihilating with five tons of our kind. But the dispersion will be enormous, the effectiveness unpredictable. Not only are the Khalia dug cavernously deep into hard, geologically stable rock, and shielded and reinforced and shockproofed, but they are beneath a deep, small valley, surrounded by guardian mountains. Just which valley is unknown. To be certain of a kill, even this doomsday blow must strike the right one.

  The Laing mind will have a fractional second to identify the target, possibly through rain or haze, then calculate the thrust vector necessary to redirect its fall, and awaken the engine. Given its electronic senses and computer power, that should suffice—because it, the Laing mind, will see which of the green vales of Mozart has been so changed that the enemy must lair below. The Khalia have done a good enough job of restoration to fool outsiders, but Laing walked this land and flew above it for long, gladsome years.

  Happy indeed. Junie let Tess hold her new hatchling. It fluted and cuddled close; amadei liked mammalian warmth and smoothness. She gave it a cracker. It took the tidbit in tiny paws and nibbled daintily. Having finished, it wriggled half free of her clasp. Holding fast by its tail, it nuzzled into her shirt pocket. .

  “Oh, it knows where crackers come from,” Tess said.

  “Right aw
ay it knows. Don’t you, kiddums? Smart little devil you’ve got, Junie.”

  The amadeus caroled. Tess handed the baby back to her. “Eerily smart,” Laing said, and suddenly the forest around them was heavy with awe. “I do believe we’ve met the ancestors of an intelligent race.”

  “Why, I don’t doubt that at all,” his wife replied. “Give them, hmm, ten million years at most.”

  And they will make tools and poems, build, sow and reap, yearn, question, climb the high peaks and behold the stars, perhaps finally seek out yonder. And what of the music they will have made? If our spirits live on, will Bach and Beethoven and Mozart hear, and try to understand, and never quite do so, because that was not the peculiar genius of humankind?

  Christina has laid hold of the meteoroid. It hurtles inward. Ahead are the Khalia. Left to itself, the part of the meteoroid that is the weapon will break free of the rest and crash somewhere on that landmass, or perhaps in the ocean. Devastation will follow, wherever the fall occurs. But it must be the intended devastation. Mathematics marches through the computer. The Laing mind prepares itself. It is full of purpose, inhumanly steady.

  In the instant of vision, it shall decide on its target. The faster it does, the surer is victory. It reviews every aspect of the task.

  Hitherto the Laing mind has not thought in astronomical terms. Nobody has, really. This is an instrumentality of war. But now, in passing, it sees that the impact, the energy release, will equal that of a fair-sized asteroid crashing into the planet.