On the multiple screens, live from Southmost, Smith passed through the Great Doors of Parliament Hall. Even here, the rowdiest public house on the Strip, the clientele was suddenly very silent. Thract settled his head upon the bar, and felt his stare become glazed.
And then his telephone began ringing. Rachner hauled it out of his jacket. He held it by his head, stared at it with uninterested disbelief.Itmust be broken. Or someone was sending him an advertisement. Nothing important could ever come over this unsecured piece of junk.
He was about to throw it to the floor when the cobber on the next perch whacked him across the back. “Damn military bum! Get out!” she shouted.
Thract came off his perch, not sure if he was about to follow the other’s demand, or defend the honor of Smith and all the others who tried to keep the peace.
In the end, house management decided the issue; Thract found himself out on the street, cut off from the television that might have shown him what his General was attempting. And his telephone was still ringing. He stabbedACCEPT and snarled something incoherent into the microphone.
“Colonel Thract, is that you?” The words were jerky and garbled, but the voice was vaguely familiar. “Colonel? Is your end a secure comm?”
Thract swore loudly. “The bleeding hellno !”
“Oh thank goodness!” came the almost-familiar voice. “There’s a chance then. Surely eventhey can’t meddle with all the world’s idle talk.”
They.The emphasis cut through Thract’s fizz hangover. He brought the microphone close his maw, and his next words came out almost casually curious. “Who is this?”
“Sorry. Obret Nethering here.Please don’t hang up. You probably don’t remember me. Fifteen years ago, I taught a short course on remote sensing. At Princeton. You sat in.”
“I, ah, remember.” In fact, it had been a rather good course.
“You do? Oh good, good! So you’ll know I’m not a crank. Sir, I know how busy you must be right now, but I pray you’ll give me just a minute of your time. Please.”
Thract was suddenly aware of the street and the buildings around him. Calorica Strip stretched around the bottom of the volcanic bowl, perhaps the warmest place left on the surface of the world. But the Strip was just a faded memory of the time when Calorica had been a playground for the super-rich. The bars and hotels were dying. Even the snowfalls were long ended. The snow piled up in the alley behind him was two years old, littered with fizz barf and streaked with urine.My high-tech command center.
Thract hunkered down, out of the wind. “I suppose I can give you a moment.”
“Oh, thank you! You’re my last hope. All my calls to Professor Underhill come up blocked. Not surprising, now that I understand…” Thract could almost hear the cobber collecting his wits, trying not to blather. “I’m an astronomer out on Paradise Island, Colonel. Last night I saw”—a spaceship as big as a city, its drives lighting the sky… and ignored by Air Defense and all the networks. Nethering’s descriptions were short and blunt, and took just under a minute. The astronomer continued. “I’m no crank, I tell you. This is what we saw! Surely there are hundreds of eyewitnesses, but somehow it’s invisible to Air Defense. Colonel, you’ve got to believe me.” His tone segued into uncomfortable self-realization, an understanding that no one in his right mind could buy such a story.
“Oh, I believe you,” Rachner said softly. It was a floridly paranoid vision… and it explained everything.
“What did you say, Colonel? Sorry, I can’t send you much hard evidence. They cut our landline about half an hour ago; I’m using a hobbyist’s packet radio to reach rout—” Several syllables were jumbled into incoherence. “So that’s really all I had to tell you. Maybe this is some Deepest Secret plot on the part of Air Defense. If you can’t say anything, I’ll understand. But I had to try to get through. That ship was so large, and—”
For a moment, Thract thought the other had paused, overcome. But the silence continued for several seconds, and then a synthetic voice blatted from the telephone’s tiny speaker: “Message 305. Network error. Please retry your call later.”
Rachner slowly tucked the telephone back in his jacket. His maw and eating hands were numb, and it wasn’t just the cold air. Once upon a time, his network intelligence cobbers had done a study on automated snooping. Given enough computing power, it was in principle possible to monitorevery in-the-clear communication for keywords, and trigger security responses. In principle. In fact, development of the necessary computers always lagged behind the size of the contemporary public networks. But now it looked like someone had just that power.
A Deep Secret plot on the part of Air Defense? Not likely. Over the last year, Rachner Thract had watched the mysteries and the failures encroach from all directions. Even if Accord Intelligence and Pedure and all the intelligence agencies of the world hadcooperated, they could not have produced the seamless lies that Thract had sensed. No. Whatever they faced was larger than the world, a grander evil than anything Spiderly.
And now at last he had something concrete. His mind should climb into combat alertness; instead he was filled with panicked confusion.Damnthe fizz. If they were up against an alien force so deep, so crafty—what did it matter that Obret Nethering and now Rachner Thract knew the truth? What could they do? But Nethering had been permitted to talk for more than a minute. He’d spoken a number of keywords before the connection was chopped. The aliens might be better than Spiders—but they weren’t gods.
The thought brought Thract to a halt. So they weren’t gods. The word of their monster ship must be percolating across the civilized world, slowed and suppressed to one-on-one contacts between little people without access to power. But that couldn’t hide the secret more than a few hours. And that meant… whatever the purpose of this vast fraud, it must be headed for consummation in the next few hours. Right now the chief was risking her life down at Southmost, trying to bail them out from a disaster that was actually a trap.If I could get through to her, to Belga, to anybody at the
But telephones and network mail would be worse than useless. He needed some direct contact. Thract ran a weaving course down the deserted sidewalk. There was a bus stop somewhere beyond the corner. How long until the next one came through? He still had his private helicopter, a rich cobber’s toy… that might be too network- smart. The aliens might simply take it over and crash him. He pushed the fear away. Just now, the chopper was his only hope. From the heliport he could reach any place within two hundred miles. Who would be in that range? He skidded around the corner. Grand Boulevard extended off beneath an endless row of trichrome lights, down from the Strip and through the Calorica forest. The forest was long dead, of course. Not even its leaves were left to spore, the ground beneath being too warm. The center had been cleared flat for a heliport. From there he could fly to… Thract’s gaze reached across the bowl. The boulevard lights dwindled to tiny sparkles. Once upon a time, they had ascended the caldera walls, to the mansions of the Waning Years. But the truly rich had abandoned their palaces. Only a few were still occupied, inaccessible from below.
But Sherkaner Underhill was up there, back from Princeton.At least that had been the word in the last situation report he had seen, the day his career had ended. He knew the stories about Underhill, that the poor cobber had lost it mentally. No matter. What Thract needed was a sidewise path into Lands Command, maybe through the chief’s daughter, a path that did not pass through the net.
A minute later the city bus pulled up behind Thract. He hopped aboard, the only passenger, even though it was midmorning. “You’re in luck.” The driver grinned. “The next one isn’t until three hours after noon.”
Twenty miles an hour, thirty. The bus rumbled down the Grand Boulevard toward the Dead Forest Heliport.I can be on his doorstep in tenminutes. And suddenly Rachner was aware of the fizz barf that crusted his maw and eating hands, of the stains on his uniform. He brushed at his head, but there was nothing he could do about the uniform. A madman come to see a senile old coot. Maybe it was fitting. It also might be the last chance any of them had.
A decade earlier, in friendlier times, Hrunkner Unnerby had advised the Southlanders in the design of New Southmost Under. So in a strange way, things became more familiar after they left the Accord Embassy and entered Southland territory. There were lots of elevators. The Southland had wanted a Parliament Hall that would survive a nuclear strike. He had warned them that future ordnance developments would likely make their goal impossible, but the Southlanders hadn’t listened, and had wasted substantial resources that could have gone to Dark Time agriculture.
The main elevator was so large that even the reporters could get aboard, and they did so. The Southland press was a privileged class, explicitly protected by Parliament law—even on government property! The General did
