Eater (27 page)

This gave Benjamin time to think, so that he broke into the pointless jibes with, “It will be under stress—electromagnetic ones, not psychological—when it uses its jet, though. That’s the time to hit it.”

This got their attention. The DoD woman stalled for time by reviewing their own thinking. Actually, the term was undeserved. They had cooked up a bigger nuclear warhead attack, counting on Channing to deliver the knockout at the end. This she presented in eager-terrier style, looking eagerly back and forth along the table like a girl scout bringing home a prize. Kingsley guessed this strategy’s primary asset was that it would allow DoD to claim the victory, should there be one, since Channing would certainly not survive to do so.

Swatting down this notion consumed a full hour. Such trench warfare was interrupted by news that the third loop had landed, again quite neatly, on Beijing.

“Seems our Chinese friends did something nasty, too,” Arno said with dry relish.

This shook everyone. Kingsley found Arno’s remark chilling, for reasons entirely separate from the China attack.

Those in the room were getting more rattled. They drank coffee, ate some spongy tropical kind of donuts, and murmured like a Greek chorus uncertain of their song. But Arno would not call for a break. Instead, the lady from DoD came forward again and kept saying in various uninstructive ways, “Leave the fighting to those who know.” To this, the physicists rebutted, “Sorry, you are plainly outgunned and need new ideas.”

It was a predictable collision that needed to get worked through. Institutional thinking was on the hedgehog model, knowing one solid thing. Kingsley preferred the fox model, as he had leaped over several hedgehogs in his life. Only toward the end of the hour did he manage to get a word in and derail the slow-motion train wreck the meeting was evolving into.

“I recommend using Channing and her Searchers alone,” he said. “During the time the jet is on, if it chooses to use it.”

This simple suggestion took another hour to thrash through in classic committee fashion. Kingsley had to defend the use of antimatter, first carefully defining it and reviewing the decades of research that had led to a packet the size of a wallet containing the explosive power of a hundred hydrogen fusion warheads.

Not that technical arguments carried the day, of course. He was dealing with Americans and so played out the accent bit, using “shedule” and “lehzure.” To buttress the tactical side, he slid a few recognizable names past at the right speed to be fully caught, yet not so slowly that they would suspect he was trotting them by deliberately. All these he had conferred with—briefly, of course, but no one need know that.

In the policy dust-up that necessarily followed his presentation, he called in Benjamin again, Amy twice. Each time they provided the right scientific detail and fell back to let him drive the point home. Sketches of the Eater interior. Routes into it while avoiding magnetic turbulence, and most importantly, the accretion disk. Old methods he had first learned on Cambridge committees came into play. Knowing that his foes lay in wait, he paused to breathe in the clearly defined middle of his sentences. This let him rush past the period and into the next sentence, allowing no one to make a smooth interruption.

The next hour meandered on until Arno struck. This was lamentably often the best way to settle an issue. Exhaust everyone, then cut through the Gordian verbiage with an Alexandrian sword. He was de facto in charge here, bar word from Washington. Therefore he took command of the military resources and ordered them to stand down, awaiting further orders.

Kingsley was reasonably up on American constitutional law, but this looked doubtful to him. Arno’s appointment was through DoD, and the secretary of that massive agency could assume the presidency should the true President be unreachable. Plus the Speaker of the House, president pro tempore of the Senate, Secretary of State, and so on.

This entire argument seemed wobbly, but Arno sold it to the room in short order. The thin veneer of bureaucratic calm had dissolved about an hour before, and now the panic among them made them reach for any seemingly solid solution. Rule by Arno apparently played this emotional function.

Kingsley shook hands with him afterward, murmuring congratulations sincerely meant. He had never seen as deft a maneuver carried out at the airy heights of power. Though of course he did not say so, he ardently hoped that he never would again.

Into the living tree of event-space
.

At the ragged red rim of the magnetosphere, she felt the first crackling electrical discharges, alive with writhing forks. With her all-eyed view, she could see the fretful working of the magnetic intelligence. It reminded her of many natural patterns: pale blue frost flowers of growing crystals. The oxygen-rich red in bronchi of lungs. Whorls of streams, plunging ever forward into fractal turbulence.

Pretty—and quite deadly. With an agonized shriek, one of her leading Searchers flared into a cinder.

Ripples of intense Alfven waves told her that the Eater was sensing/thinking/moving. All those functions were linked in its world. The cybertechs had explained all this in their arcane lingo. To her it was not dry theory but
experience
—the restless slither of magnetic fields around her like a supple fluid.

She was gaining a sense of it, an intuition fed by her swimming through the invisible thing-that-thought. How strange her former brain now seemed! She had caught portions of the Eater’s thought and now could see human intelligence anew. Compress a life onto a sheet, paper-thin. Crumple it. Stuff it into a bony carrying case. With that, primates had evolved to store a hundred billion neurons, all firing like matchheads in a webbed array still only poorly understood.

No more, for her. Now she was a slab of silicon, being mated to—
thunk
—a cylinder of death.

The attachment complete, she dove.

She vectored a swarm of missiles into the outer swelling of the magnetosphere. To her, the Eater was an enormous blue blossom of spiderweb-fine lines, each snarled with innumerable knots.

Time to go to work. She began the attack upon the magnetic equilibrium. Deftly she guided nuclear-tipped plasma bursts to the spot where the fields could be forced to reconnect.

Behind her, an enormous cloud of bright barium exploded into billows. The solar wind blew around the Eater, fended off by its magnetic pressure. The beast was like a small planet, defending itself against the solar bath. But the barium was far denser than the thin wind. She watched the Eater retract field lines, avoiding the prickly energy of the high plasma flux.

“You’re on it!” Benjamin’s excited voice came.

“I always wanted to fly a fighter against the fearsome enemy,” she said. “This is better.” To show him, she did a tight turn, airy and graceful on her ion plumes.

“The package made it?”

“It’s riding on my right.”

“Try the other methods first. That’s only a last-chance backup.”

He was trying to keep his voice level, businesslike, but it wouldn’t work with her. She could read him. That was the downside of using Benjamin as intermediary, but Arno probably hadn’t thought of that. Benjamin was supposed to steady her up here, and he did. And it worked both ways, thank goodness. She wondered if she had ever loved him more, back when she had a real body to express it.

“Things tough down there?”

“It got the house.”

“What?!”

“The electromagnetic induction from that field loop
slamming into the island. It blew the transformer at the end of our street. The fire spread all the way to Hakahulua Street. When I got there, the house was just smoldering black stuff.”

Her heart sank.
All gone
—“Damn!”

“It’s killed a lot of people, some in our neighborhood. Pacemakers went out. There were a lot of effects nobody can explain.”

She started to cry and the wrenching sobs were utterly real, coming up from her nonexistent lungs and through a clenched throat. She let the spasms run. Part of her agonized. The other basked in the fleshy feel of living. Mind-body again.

“I…God. I guess I was never going to go there again…but…”

“Yeah. I’ll miss it, too.”

“Everything we had…”

“Not quite. After you…left…I took all the photo albums, our wedding stuff, and put it in a safe deposit box.”

A gale of joy blew through her. “Wonderful!”—and she was back aloft again, bird swooping, spirit rising.

“Whoa, girl, tune it.”

“Oops, my mood swings are going over the top.”

“You have reason to.”

She made herself slow down. No fighting the body, no intellect arm wrestling with hormones. She simply concentrated and the gusty spirit blew away, leaving a precise, analytical glaze over her mind. Not that it would hold for long, she wagered.

“Ah!” A sharp crack in his background sounds. “We’re getting heavy weather here on top of all that. I—”

“The Eater’s sending that.”

“What? How?”

“I can sense it from here. It’s acting like a voltage source, driving the global electrical circuit. Currents running everywhere up here.”

“Why’s it after us?”

“It must’ve figured out where our command centers are.”

“That fits.” He grimaced. “We just lost even the supposedly secure links with Washington.”

Alarm resounded in her like a hollow gong. “You’re getting cut off?”

“Every other channel died hours ago. We’ve got only the antennae here, that’s it.”

“They’re locked on the satellites below me?”

“Those few are our only targets now. It’s eaten everything else in the sky.”

“If you get blanked out—”

“Yeah.” A strumming, pregnant silence hung between them. “It seems to be making a big ionized layer right over the island.”

“Putting a conducting plate between me and you.”

“So far, it’s failing. Feels like Zeus throwing thunderbolts down here.”

“I’ve got to do something.”

“Operations says they don’t have all the Searchers within range yet.”

She fumed. “I’ll go with what I have.”

“No, don’t. Look, the black hole theorists, they’ve got some new input for you. I’m sending it on a sidebar channel—”

And here it blossomed in her spherical view: a 3-D color computer simulation of the black hole itself. An orange oblate spheroid, spinning hellishly fast. A sedate sphere, fattened by its own rotation until it grew an ocean-blue bloat at the equator.

Benjamin said, “Point is, the ergosphere—that’s the midrift bulge, in blue—has zones with so much rotational energy, you can fly through them safely.”

“Oh sure.”

“Do I detect sarcasm?”

“No, realism.”

“They’re saying you could bank in over the accretion disk, drop your donation, and then veer in. That’ll give you the energy to escape.”

“All this at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“Do you?”

“They say it’s your only chance.”

“And what order of magnitude would those odds be?”

“Not great, right.”

“Well, send up the trajectory, anyway. I’ll log it in.”

“Remember, there are relativistic effects this close in—”

“Yeah, so I’ll have slowed time to deal with.”

“And it’ll help you a little. Give you more time to execute the maneuver.”

“And catch up on my reading. Did you know they stored the whole goddamned text of
War and Peace
in my buffer?”

“Huh? Why in the world?”

“Something to do with buttressing my long term memory.”

His face clouded and he obviously struggled for words. “Look, this is the only way, they say…”

“I register. I’m not really what I once was to you. I can’t be.”

“You
are
.”

“I’m as much as I can be, that’s all.”

“Enough for me.”

“I’ll try to make it back out.”

“I…guess that’s all I can ask for.”

His face broke into rasters, lost color. “I’m having trouble with the link here—”

“The lightning, it’s—” His lips moved, but no sound came through.

“Benjamin, don’t—”

A spray of gray static showered across his image. Then that froze…stuttered…and was gone.

“Benjamin!”

She coasted alone in a suddenly eerie silence. Alone.

She close-upped the globe below. Hawaii lay in view, just emerging from the dawn line. Angry blue-gray clouds shrouded the Big Island. She could make out the forks of de
scending electricity. Not just local lightning, but the larger discharges as well: sprites, the vast thin glowing sheets that climbed down from the ionosphere.

Alone. Shepherd to several hundred Searchers. Mother hen to an egg that rode in its cylindrical majesty beneath her tail.

She had not thought she could carry out the complexity of all this by herself. Operations had agreed.

Now she would have to try. Preparation would—here her subself, full of calculation, provided a fast estimate—take at least another day. Then she could begin.

Without Benjamin. The leaden realization dragged at her. At the back of her mind, something else was vying for her attention. Presiding over her inner self was like keeping an unruly grammar school class in order…

A quick blip of information squirted through her filters.

A message, digitized Eater-style, but riding to her on the magnetosonic waves she had slowly learned to decipher.

“Oh yeah?” she muttered to herself. But it chilled her all the same.

Lightning tore at the dark-bellied clouds with yellow talons, ripping rain from them in shimmering veils. Kingsley watched out the narrow windows, still feeling in his English soul that rain should properly be accompanied by cold. Here, sheets of it swept through cloyingly warm air.

Great crashes rattled the prefab walls of the Center. The crowd of people around the big screens flinched as the hammering booms rolled unceasingly over them.

“Bit dicey, I’d say.” Kingsley turned away from the static-filled screens. “There’s no hope of reaching her using the high frequency bands?”

Amy shook her head. “The techs say it’s got an ionized blanket over the island now.”

“Even in the 96 gigaHertz band?”

“As soon as they start at that frequency, it runs up the plasma density in a spot above the transmitters.”

Benjamin said shakily, “A huge current discharge, right down a funnel from the ionosphere. How in the world can it do that from so far out?”

“‘How in the world’ is precisely it.” Kingsley sized up the disarray he saw in the faces around them. “It has had practice on other worlds. It knows planetary atmospheres the way we know our backyards.”

Amy said, “Or better, the way birds know air.”

“It cut her off so
fast
,” Benjamin said.

“It knows she’s there. Senses what we plan, probably,” Amy said somberly.

Kingsley ground his teeth. “It’s seen a lot of tricks, I’ll wager.”

“We’re checkmated,” Amy said. “Those Searchers, they’re like pawns, cut off without even a knight to—”

“Ah, that’s the point, isn’t it?” Kingsley thought rapidly. A fleeting idea had scurried by.

While he gazed into the distance, Benjamin said flatly, “It’s got to be worried. Why bother to cut us off from her and the Searchers? It’s concerned.”

Kingsley nodded. “A compliment, I suppose.”

Amy roused from her depression slightly. “So it knows that we can do it real damage this way?”

Benjamin visibly rallied himself. “It moves to cut her off from Operations, right? Which implies that it works kinda the same way? With a managing center.”

Kingsley liked to frame ideas as he thought them through, and so said out loud, “It’s searching for our command center. We never said we had one. It assumes we do
because it does.
!”

Amy brightened. “Those interceptions Channing got—they were magnetic wave transmissions inside the Eater’s magnetosphere. If we could trace their routes—”

“—we’d get a clue to its central command, right,” Benjamin finished.

“Quite a job,” Amy said. “We’d have to—”

“Never mind how tough it is,” Arno broke in. “Get on it.”

Kingsley had concentrated upon the exchange so intently that he had completely missed Arno’s eavesdropping. He was pleased that Amy and Benjamin had pulled the same idea out of their gray matter that he had been vainly pursuing. Somewhat reassuring, when others believe a passing notion has substance. What had his examiner muttered, long ago at Oxford?
The universe is under no obligation to make sense, though a doctoral thesis is
. People craved order, meaning, some certainty in the face of immense mystery. No matter the price.

The others chattered on, plainly glad to have something to do. There was perhaps shelter in numbers. In primate talk—a form of grooming, hadn’t the Eater said?

As yet another rattling hammer blow fell upon the Center, he felt the need of whatever shelter—even intellectual—he could find.