Killing Time

'We still haven't generated the new signature,' he said with something that vaguely — and uncharacteristically — approached dread. 'Too late, too late—have you caught sight of them yet?' His wording seemed to indicate that he'd already asked the rest of the team the same question; yet he neither explained what he was talking about nor waited for Larissa or me to reply before scaling the ladder. 'They can't have built the things,' he said as he ascended. 'Not even they could be so stupid!'

We followed the colonel into the turret, where he immediately went to one side of the structure and, putting his hands against the transparent shell, fixed his eyes on the darkness above and behind our ship. I could see nothing of any note on the arching horizon of the stratosphere; and Larissa, scanning the same area, came up with a similar result.

'Colonel?' she said. 'What is it, have you picked up something on the scanners?'

Slayton nodded, a motion that quickly turned into a disgusted shake of his head. 'A flock of birds — that's what they read as. I'd love to believe it, but what the hell kind of birds can survive up here?'

I moved around to his side. 'Maybe you could back up a little, Colonel. What exactly do you think is out there?'

Slayton kept shaking his head. 'Death may be out there, Doctor. And the worst part of it is, it may be a death of my own design.'

CHAPTER 32

'We started throwing the idea around at the Pentagon quite a while ago,' Slayton explained, never taking his eyes from the dark, mist-banded horizon behind the ship. 'For a long time, you see, we'd been trying to work out the problem of modern surveillance. Over the last fifty years every new system of electronic detection has been matched by some new development in stealth technology — and when computers got involved, the race picked up exponentially. All the major powers were looking for some way out, some foolproof new answer, but the technology hadn't yet appeared to make such an advance possible. Or so ran the conventional wisdom. In fact, the seed of the solution had been planted years earlier, during the drug war — the police action, as we were trained to call it — in Colombia and Ecuador. And the planting was done by units under my command.' Fleeting pride seemed to mix with the colonel's gloom for a moment. 'We took to using small flying drones equipped with multiple cameras and microphones for recon work, and the tactic was highly successful — although we really had no idea that we'd stumbled onto the answer.'

'The answer how?' Larissa asked. 'Those devices didn't have any radar or stealth capabilities.'

'Exactly,' Slayton said, smiling just briefly. 'They didn't need them, that was the beauty of it. We'd all gotten so used to working with electronically generated information that we'd forgotten the basic tools that God gave us — our eyes and ears, which the drones effectively became. When the first experiments were successful, we began to miniaturize their flight and audiovisual equipment enough to make them capable not only of enormous range but of penetrating almost any detection field without raising an alarm. After the war word got around the Pentagon, and the drones became standard issue. Then, when major weapons miniaturization reached full speed ten years ago, it became inevitable that someone would eventually put forward the idea of armed drones. They could be guided into remote, even hardened, sites and set off their payloads — conventional or nuclear — with absolute precision. That was the theory. The advantages were obvious' — Slayton's scar glowed hot in the faint light of the turret as his tone became harrowing again—'but so were the dangers. A foreign operative in an American lab could easily walk out with not just the plans but the prototypes. Fortunately, there were tremendous design and system problems that looked insoluble. We abandoned the project while I was still there. Apparently they've revived it.'

'Maybe not,' I said. 'Colonel, for all we know the ship could be detecting a small meteor shower. Or some kind of cosmic dust.'

Such were admittedly paltry attempts at an alternative explanation, and Slayton waved them off with appropriate disdain. 'Find me meteors that fly in formation and on an intercept course, Doctor, and I'll—' His features suddenly went dead still. 'There,' he said quietly. I kept staring into the distance and finding no apparent cause for alarm. When I turned to Larissa, however, I could see that she had locked onto whatever the colonel was seeing: her face bore the same expression of apprehension.

'Where?' I asked; but in reply Slayton only turned, approached a keypad on the monitoring console, and activated the shipwide address system. 'This is Slayton,' he announced. 'The drones are now one hundred and fifty yards off our stern. We'll need to go as close to silent running as we can manage — no unnecessary noises, and keep your voices low. Most important are the engines — Julien, we'll need to take them down to minimum output. And Jonah, reset the holographic projection.'

The urgency of the colonel's orders caused me to search the stratosphere all the more intently, determined to catch some glimpse of the mysterious inventions that were causing him such evident anxiety. That glimpse, when it came, was as intriguing as it was frightening: the dozens of basketball-sized drones — which looked like something John Price might have dreamed up — had large 'eyes' that, I soon learned, were actually housing units for sophisticated optical instruments. Appendages that encased equally complex audio monitors and bodies that contained flight and guidance equipment added to the drones' overall impression of enormous insects, and each of them also bristled with spiny antennae: programmable detonators, Slayton explained briefly, saving further elaboration for another statement to the rest of our crew.

'Remember, please,' he said, 'assuming I'm right, each one of those things bears a nuclear device capable of vaporizing this ship. We will proceed with the greatest caution.'

As if in response to Slayton's words, the drones suddenly shot forward and surrounded us, their many inquisitive eyes now assuming a menacing quality. Pursuant to the colonel's orders, our ship slowed down steadily until it seemed that we were going along at no more than a crawl — a very nerve-racking crawl. Fear made it difficult to keep my voice to a murmur, but I had to ask, 'Would anybody really set off a nuclear device at this altitude, Colonel?'

He nodded, matching stares with the drones that were floating around us. 'I'm assuming they've armed these with X-ray lasers— they're powered by a nuclear explosion and have enormous destructive potential, but the fallout is minimal.'

' 'Minimal'?' Larissa whispered.

'They evidently view the threat we pose as worth the risk,' Slayton said. 'Even though they obviously don't yet understand the exact nature of that threat. Not unusual thinking for the American national security machine — as you yourself have written, Doctor.'

'And will the holographic projector keep us safe for the moment?' I asked.

'It should,' the colonel answered. 'To the naked eye our ship now appears to be a harmless band of atmospheric mist.'

Larissa nodded. 'And the projector works as well on these drones as it does on the eye.'

'Thus turning the drones' strength back into a weakness,' Slay-ton said. 'But as I say, we still haven't started emitting a new radar signature — we can expect them to stay locked onto the old one, waiting for some confirmation of human or mechanical activity. We'll have to continue to be careful about how much noise we make — and how much the ship makes, as well.' Seeing that the devices outside were continuing to make no hostile move, the colonel relaxed just a bit. 'But for the moment, at least, they appear fooled.' He allowed himself one more brief smile. 'I wonder what my friends down below would say if they'd known they would be pursuing me…'

Despite the lessening of tension permitted by the holographic projector, during the initial phase of our journey among the drones we all moved very carefully and, following Colonel Slayton's instruction, spoke in hushed tones. Half an hour of such behavior was enough to loosen our mood a little, but no more than that; and I was still standing motionless by Larissa's side when I heard her start to talk to her brother quietly via their communication implants. She spoke in a soothing, sympathetic tone, and from her words I soon got the impression that the pressure of the general situation and the specific moment might be getting to Malcolm, at least a little. This notion was confirmed when Larissa asked if I would join him in his quarters, where he'd gone after suffering a bout of dizziness. Someone, she said, had to try to talk him through the difficult transit, and she intended to stay at her