Probability Space (35 page)

“Tom,” Marbet said rapidly, “they showed me these things but I don’t know what they’re trying to tell me or what I should draw to tell them about Pierce bringing our artifact into Q System. I don’t think I connected. Can you hold this thing?”

Capelo’s voice sounded stronger than Kaufman had heard it yet. “What the hell are these bugs flying around for?”

Marbet smiled behind the clear plastic of her helmet. “I think they might be intelligent symbiotes. Part of the Fallers’ biology.”

“Intelligent? Am I drawing for the bugs or the bastards?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Kaufman said. “Just draw!”

Marbet dosed the fingers of Capelo’s good hand around the stylus. Everything drawn on the tabletop vanished. Kaufman hauled Capelo over to the table, and now Kaufman noticed something he’d missed before. Neither Faller wore a helmet, since this was of course their air, but both had what looked like plugs stuck in what Kaufman had thought was their breathing holes.

We smell horrible to them
.

Or maybe not. Marbet had speculated that the Fallers might be more sensitive to pheromones than even humans. Maybe the Fallers were blocking the smell of humans to damp down their own instinctive, overwhelming aggressive responses to human odor. The nose plugs might be a sign of cooperation.

Capelo leaned forward, staggered, and almost fell on top of the table. Kaufman steadied him at an angle so his good hand could draw. Ceaselessly the “insects” buzzed and circled and alit and hovered.

“All right,” Capelo said, evidently for his own benefit, “this is Tunnel Number Two-one-eight, you bastards. See the doughnut floating in space? How the fuck do I know what you see? Here, five planets on the Artemis side of the tunnel. Now over here is Tunnel Number Three-zero-one leading right to your home system. See the little teeny Faller I drew on your side of it? Ah, that got you, look at you look at each other. I’d like to laser you right where you stand.”

Kaufman said to Marbet, “Is there any chance these two understand English?”

“No. I tried it with them.”

Capelo said, “Here’s your artifact, right here in Q space in your big front yard.” He drew a sphere with the familiar seven protuberances on it.

One of the aliens made a loud screech. Kaufman saw Marbet jump and he felt himself tense, but Capelo barreled on as if he hadn’t even heard. He was a fantastic sight: A skinny naked man in a clear bulbous helmet, dangled precariously over a table, one crudely splinted arm flopping at his side and the other sketching frantically to save several worlds.

“Your artifact is set at prime two, isn’t it, you fuckers.” He scribbled hard on the setting with two tiny dots beside it. “All ready to detect our artifact if we’re stupid enough to bring it into Q space. Which Pierce is, but you don’t know that yet. But you’re ready anyway. So … watch!”

Now Capelo began to draw even faster. Where was he getting the energy? Pure adrenaline, Kaufman guessed, released by tension, by fear, by hatred. Capelo’s endocrine system might even be pumping out enough endorphins to deaden pain. But it couldn’t last, Capelo couldn’t keep it up much longer. The maddening insects buzzed and circled.

“See, this is our artifact coming through the tunnel from Artemis System … that got your attention, didn’t it? We set it off at prime thirteen—” scribble, scribble “—and you see—watch!”

Capelo abruptly drove the stylus at the tabletop, again and again, making thick black marks all over Q space, except on the artifacts themselves. “Kaboom!”

Marbet said, “Don’t make loud noises, Tom. It’s an aggression trigger.”

“Tough,” Capelo said. “Now, look, you assholes come in from your system—” delicately he trailed the stylus through the tunnel from the Faller world to Q space, “and you get to pick up both artifacts. See? Now, Marbet, blank the screen.”

“I don’t know how,” she said helplessly.

“Then we’re fried,” Capelo said. Kaufman slowly … very slowly, don’t trigger aggression … swept his hand over the tabletop, looking at what he had decided was the higher-ranking Faller. The alien did something and the table blanked.

“Good show, Lyle,” Capelo said. Quickly he redrew the two space tunnels, but this time he drew the alien artifact in the Faller home system, blackening in setting prime eleven. His hand trembled. He was tiring.

“Steady, Tom,” Marbet said, her voice full of encouragement. Capelo ignored her.

“Scenario number two. Are you listening, slimebutts? Your artifact is quietly doing its little job, protecting home sweet home. We come through with ours … see? We pass right by you in Q space because we’re on setting two, a nice shield … now, we’re inside your territory, we set off at thirteen … and nothing happens. See? Stalemate. So we go home.” The stylus trailed back through two tunnels to Artemis System. “Marbet, how the hell do I know if anything is getting through to these pricks?”

“It’s getting through,” she said.

“Fine, hate to waste a good tutorial … hate to…”

“I’ve got you, Tom,” Kaufman said. “You won’t fall. Keep going.”

“One more. Here are both … both…” Capelo slipped sideways against Kaufman’s body. The stylus fell to the floor.

“Take him, Marbet,” Kaufman said, and picked up the stylus. Would they let him continue in Capelo’s place? If Marbet was right, their aggression responses, so strong as to be barely controllable, were activated by men like Kaufman: big, used to command. They can tell, Marbet had said, and Kaufman waited for the unknown weapon to hit him.

It didn’t. But he didn’t have to be a Sensitive to notice the shifts in Faller muscles, the rise of neck ruffs. More unsettling, the clouds of insects buzzing at his face suddenly grew larger and louder.

“Crouch, Lyle!” Marbet said. “Don’t look at anybody and start drawing quickly!”

Kaufman bent over, dropping his eyes to the table, hating both actions. Human instinctive responses. He tried to copy Capelo’s style, drawing both artifacts inside Q space, blackening both settings prime thirteen. How did you show the tearing of spacetime? He settled for wavy lines obliterating everything, and this time he extended the lines on both sides of both tunnels, wiping out not just Q space but Artemis System and the Faller home world. Everything.

“Don’t look up, Lyle,” Marbet said. “I’ll tell them to clear the slate.” Carefully she swept her arm over the table. Again a Faller did something and Kaufman was looking at a blank screen.

This was the crucial part.

Capelo and he had shown the Fallers three scenarios: two Faller victories and a stalemate, and the enemy had seemed to agree. Or at least hadn’t done anything that Kaufman interpreted as disagreement, such as shooting him. Now he was going to show them a fourth scenario, and it had better be convincing because it was all lies.

He resketched Space Tunnels #218 and #301, with Q space between them and the Faller artifact floating in Q space. He put in the five planets of the Artemis System on the far side of Tunnel #218 and the teeny Faller figure on the far side of Tunnel #301. And then he drew in another tunnel floating in the Faller System, and coming through it he drew a human ship with the human artifact inside. He blackened setting prime thirteen.

We know another way in. We can destroy your home system while you’re off protecting your perimeter
.

Another screech, loud and piercing. Kaufman determined not to look up, but something so extraordinary was happening that he was forced to. All the insects in the room were diving straight into the mass of the heaving object in the corner. It, in turn, started humming at such a high frequency that Kaufman’s ears went into excruciating pain and he dropped the stylus. Then everything disappeared.

*   *   *

“Lyle. Wake up. Lyle!”

Marbet. Kaufman tried to open his eyes, failed.

“Come on, Lyle. You’re the only one that can fly this thing!”

Fly
? The word was so unexpected, so incongruous that Kaufman thought he was dreaming. Then he realized he wasn’t and with a Herculean effort opened his eyes. Marbet, still naked but without her helmet, leaned over him. And he lay …

Not possible.

“Get up, Lyle!” she said, and slowly he got up.

Around him were the cramped bulkheads, deck, instrumentation, seats, terminal—everything!—of a human military flyer, series XXPell3. A simulation? Holo or stage set? No. It was real.

Marbet was tugging him toward the pilot seat. On the viewscreen, a curved wall was sliding upward and disappearing, leaving stars. A shuttle bay.

“Ladybug, ladybug,” Capelo said from the seat where he was strapped in, several patches on his naked neck and chest. The patches were standard military-issue blue. Marbet had found the fighter flyer’s medkit.

“Where are we?” Kaufman asked. “What—”

“They had this flyer stored here,” Marbet said, still shoving him toward the pilot seat. “God knows where they got it. They want us to go through to Artemis and tell the humans there that the Faller artifact is being moved to the Faller home world. But you just wouldn’t come to, Lyle. I think they misjudged whatever they did to us, hit you too much harder than Tom and me because you’re bigger or carry more authority or something. Anyway, Tom and I can’t fly this thing and you’ve got to!”

“Strap in, Marbet,” Kaufman ordered. His hands felt for the terminal. It wasn’t coded for him, but he knew the overrides, and how to reconfigure them. It had been ten years since he’d flown an XXPell3, but this craft was at least ten years old, too. The Fallers must have captured it somehow, somewhere. Kaufman didn’t want to think about what might have happened to the craft’s three-man crew.

His displays came on-line. They registered two space tunnels and absolutely nothing else. Q space must have been swept to destroy every stray rock in it large enough to clog up a display screen.

Kaufman pulled out of the bay, and now the display registered two items: the XXPell3 and the Faller station. No, three. As he watched, another craft left the station, moving toward Space Tunnel #301. The Fallers were taking their artifact home.

“They believed us,” he said aloud. “The sons-of-bitches believed us.”

“And let us go,” Capelo said, “but why did they bother? The second we go back through Tunnel Number Two-one-eight to Artemis, our own military is going to vaporize us.”

“No,” Kaufman said. “Not in this craft. They’ll at least listen for a second, and we can ID.” He hoped he was right. But at least it was a chance.

“Oh, good,” Capelo said. “They’ll wait to hear what we told the Fallers before they kill us. Pierce is just going to love that we spoiled his great military coup.”

Marbet said, “Shut up, Tom.”

“Now she’s enlisted, too. General Grant. Where do
I
sign up?”

“Shut up, Tom! Let Lyle fly!”

Lyle flew, heading for Space Tunnel #218. But something didn’t make sense. The Fallers wanted him and Marbet and Capelo to tell their fellow humans that the Faller artifact was back in the Faller home system, protecting it. That’s what they’d told Marbet. But
why
did they want that message delivered? Why not just let Pierce’s troops bring the human artifact through, try to fry the Faller System, and find it impossible? If there was going to be a stalemate … blessed stalemate. The three of them had at least brought that much about. The two artifacts would not both be set off at prime thirteen in the same system. Spacetime would not tear, heal itself by a universe-wide flop transition, and so destroy spacetime as life now knew it. But if there was going to be a stalemate, why send Kaufman and Capelo and Marbet to announce it in advance?

So that no more humans would enter Q space. The Fallers were that xenophobic about their front yard.

A third blip appeared on the display screen.

Kaufman stared. No, it was what he’d thought. He’d really seen it, hadn’t misjudged it, couldn’t will it away. A third blip had entered Q space, coming through Tunnel #218 from Artemis. A fourth blip, a fifth, a sixth. Pierce’s forces were here.

And the Faller craft carrying their artifact home was too far from Tunnel #301 to reach it in time. Both artifacts were now in Q space, one of them controlled by a madman.

Kaufman was too late. Everything was over.

TWENTY-NINE

Q SPACE

W
hat is it?” Marbet said. She’d been watching Kaufman, and her Sensitive eyes had seen. Kaufman didn’t try to hide the truth.

“The navy is here.”

“With the artifact?” Capelo said quickly.

On Kaufman’s display, the Faller space station fired. The SADN ship continued on at top speed, unaffected.

“With the artifact. Set at prime two,” Kaufman answered.

“Can they reach the tunnel to the Faller home world before Pierce’s fleet—”

“No,” Kaufman said. “Prepare for acceleration and evasive maneuvers, if necessary.”

He flew the ancient craft toward the tunnel from which the navy ships had just emerged. No ID registered on his display for the ships; the small flyer’s records were too old to contain these navy models. Kaufman opened the comlink on all frequencies.

“Solar Alliance Defense Navy ship, this is Colonel Lyle Kaufman in a retired XXPell3. Request permission to fly alongside you.”

In the transmission lag Capelo said, “God, yes. If they set off both artifacts at prime thirteen there should be a safety zone around the … what am I saying? If spacetime goes into flop transition … Lyle, try to get permission to go through the tunnel! Fast! We still don’t know if the flop transition travels only at c or can go through the tunnels itself!”

“Who the hell are you?” came over the comlink. “Q space is restricted, Colonel!”

“I know. It’s a long story. Request permission to use Space Tunnel Number Two-one-eight. I’ll tell the story to Artemis System—it looks like you men don’t need me in the way.”

Another lag. Kaufman increased acceleration as much as he dared. Capelo’s ribs were only bound with Kaufman’s inept first aid. Finally the answer came:

“Get the fuck through the tunnel, Colonel. Pass code. ‘San Juan Hill.’ We’ll give you five minutes!”