So It Begins (23 page)

  On the last stroke there was a pop, and a fireball engulfed the structure under surveillance.

  “No!” Coop yelled, silence no longer an issue. On the monitor, in the camera-view window there was nothing but snow as the comlink with the packbot was severed. He gulped at the final entry in the log window:

<>

  His fingers flew over the keyboard, frantically trying to call up the final transmission made by the ’bot, which was programmed to back up its system data prior to self-destruct. As he did so he couldn’t help wondering, was he imagining things, or had he just lost his lieutenant . . . for the second time?

  “Go! Go! GO!” the squad leader barked into the comm.

  The order pinged her transceiver, a sharp reminder of many missions past.

  She jerked to awareness with a start, her nerves tighter than a well-set tripline. In one instant she went from drifting through oblivion to combat-ready.

  There were large gaps in her memory, or at least she presumed there were, seeing as the last thing she could recall was deciding blow up a room full of Demons… and preparing to die…again.
So who the hell’s cock-up was this?
she thought, as the ’bot was powered up and tossed through a nearby gapping hole that used to hold a window.

  “Treybot deployed, Sarge,” Coop subvocalized into his bonejack. “She’s transmitting at . . . 100 percent optimal.”

To Spec

Charles E. Gannon

Mendez, the newest guy in the squad, had been jumpy ever since the worsening weather updates started coming in. The most recent message—that Priestley’s replacement wouldn’t show up for at least another three hours—just made him more anxious. As Eureka command post signed off, Grim saw Mendez hold his new rifle—a flimsy piece of experimental junk known as the Cochrane XM 1—a bit too tightly. So, in an effort to take the newbie’s mind off his anxiety, Grim asked him, “So, what’s on the ‘other’ radio today?”

  A tentative grin twitched at the right corner of Mendez’s mouth. “It’s against regs to listen to—”

  “I’m not a snitch, Mendez.”

  Mendez needed no further encouragement: broad, short, and compact in his pint-sized vacc suit, he made a fast, flat zero-gee hop over to the control panel. Steadying himself on a handhold, he pushed a preset button, jumping the radio over to the Commonwealth Armed Forces frequency.

  But instead of plaintively wailing guitars, they heard a painfully jocular deejay working his way through the end of the news. First, Mendez looked like the kid who got coal for Christmas—but then he went rigid as the announcer segued into the weather:

  “Hey, here’s a CWAF flash from our siblings-in-arms guarding the Big Secret out at Eureka. “Quaff” this one, grunts: they tell us that it’s another beautiful February day out at the Mars L-5 point, with the mercury peaking at minus 215 Celsius. There’s good visibility despite average dust densities and a continued surge of downstream trash sent by some unknown admirers near Mars. But for everyone out here in the fourth orbit, remember: that huge solar storm-front we’ve been watching will move on through in just an hour or so. So come on inside before the weather turns and send a shout out to the folks back home. Don’t let those 2.1 AU stop you.”

  Great: now Mendez looked more anxious than ever. Grim reached out a brown, blunt-fingered hand to shut off the radio, reflecting that this might be the right moment to employ some of the conversational and psychological subtlety for which sergeants have always been famous.

  Grim looked directly into Mendez’s eyes. “What the hell is wrong with you, Mendez?”

  Mendez looked gratifyingly startled, then abashed. “Well, sir—”

  Grim sighed. “Mendez, don’t offend me with that ‘sir’ crap: I’m not an officer. I work for a living.”

  “Yes, si—Master Sergeant Grimsby.”

  Eldridge Grimsby—who was never called anything other than Grim—grunted at the narrow margin by which Mendez had avoided a repetition of the original slur, and nodded for him to continue.

  “I don’t know, Sarge; it just makes me nervous—guarding the Big Secret they’re building on Eureka.”

  “Why?”

  “Well—because it’s a secret, I guess. And if it’s as important as all the security precautions seem to indicate, that means that someone out there”—he swung an arm at the space beyond the bulkhead—“could have us in their crosshairs now, this very second.” When Grim failed to respond in any way, Mendez added, “Sarge, we could die without warning—and without ever knowing what it was we were guarding.”

  Grim stared at him. “And your point is?”

  “Well—that’s an awful lot of risk without an awful lot of information.”

  “Mendez, if the spacesuit you’re wearing hasn’t tipped you off just yet, you’re in the ExoAtmospheric Corps, and we don’t get information; we get orders. And bad food and worse pay. What part of this have you failed to understand?”

  But Grim could see, from the way that Mendez’s gaze wandered away, that his fear wasn’t as general as he had made it sound: there was something more specific behind it. And Grim had a pretty good idea what that might be. “Okay, Mendez, spill it. What have you learned about the Big Secret? Why are we more at risk now?”

  Mendez folded his hands and stared at them. “Sarge, I was floating watch outside the comcenter yesterday and heard the staff officers getting briefed by a pair of civvies.”

  “Okay, Mendez, I’ll bite: who was briefing the staffers?”

  “I heard two names, Sarge. One was some kind of spook, I think: a Mr. Wilder. Darryl Wilder. Mean anything to you?”

  Grim felt his stomach contract. “Yeah; security specialist. Ex-Air Force. Then ex-FBI.”

  “Who’s he with now?”

  “Wish I knew.”

  “Private contractor?”

  Grim emitted a rumbling set of amused grunts; he was secretly proud of having a laugh that sounded like an irritated crocodile. “Mendez, guys like Wilder don’t retire. Ever.”

  “So—”

  “So he’s interagency, or an errand boy for the Joint Chiefs, or carrying out an Executive Order.”

  “How do you know about him?”

  “Right after we started setting up shop out here, he was on-station for about a month: always sniffing around, like a security inspector or engineer. Didn’t talk much, never gave an order, but always looking, examining, watching. I think he was the one who suggested building the Big Secret out here on Eureka.”

  “Well, he sure as hell picked a crappy place.”

  “Which was his intention, I’m sure: easy enough to get to Mars from here, and vice versa, but not really on anyone’s flight path, so you see intruders well in advance. Now, you said you heard a second name?”

  Mendez looked sideways at Grim. “This guy was not military or security; sounded like he was involved with building the Big Secret itself.”

  “I ain’t playing twenty questions with you, Mendez: who is he?”

  “You know that guy Wasserman, the professor who—”

  Grim leaned forward before he could stop himself. “Robert Wasserman? The physicist?”

  “High-energy physicist—and engineer. Nobel nominations last two years in a row.”

  “You think they’re really—?”

  “Could be a starship, Sarge—just like the minority scuttlebutt says.”

  Grim leaned back so energetically that he almost floated into a backwards somersault out of his “seat.” Robert Wasserman. And Darryl Wilder. Both out here in the Martian L-5 wasteland. What besides a secret FTL project could explain their presence? And it would also explain why the other blocs were having trash-heaving hissy fits about being kept at arm’s length. If they knew that the Commonwealth was getting close to achieving faster than light travel—

  But Mendez wasn’t done. “And everyone at the debrief was worried, Sarge. Real worried.”

  Hearing Mendez’s tone and words, Grim suddenly felt the first creeping fingers of contagious anxiety. “They were worried? About what?”

  “About this solar storm.”

  Grim tried not to scowl, failed. “Jee-zus; what the hell is it with this storm? With these hourly updates on expected EMP and rad levels, you’d think we’d never seen a flare before.”

  “Sarge, if you check the text of those updates, you’ll find that HQ has never used the word ‘flare’.”

  Grim blinked: that was strangely, and unsettlingly, true. “Then what the hell aren’t they telling us?”

  “Sarge, this is a CME. A big one.”

  When transferring to the ExoAtmo Corps six years ago, Grim had managed—blissfully—to sleep through all the space science crap served up by the rear-echelon weenies, so he was compelled to ask: “What’s a CME?”

  “A coronal mass ejection.”

  “And that means?”

  Grim immediately regretted asking the question, because Mendez—otherwise a good kid—sat a little straighter, and readied himself to deliver A Recitation of The Facts, as was his wont: he was bucking for OCS so hard that Grim wondered if he sometimes got whiplash from the effort. “A coronal mass ejection occurs when the sun actually heaves out a jet of plasma. Much worse than a flare: lots of EMP, hard radiation, and—” Mendez actually shivered “—a big increase in cosmic rays.”

  Now, finally, Grim understood Mendez’s anxiety. In the flippant vernacular of the Service, radioactive emissions—and particularly those of the most energetic, non-particle variety—were collectively known as ‘zoomies.’ Cosmic rays, however, had their own special category: they were ‘ultra-zoomies.’ Unless you were safe inside a (fantastically expensive) electromagnetically-shielded hull or habitat, you just prayed that one of those little nano-scale laser beams didn’t hit a chromosome and clip one of your telomeres too short, thereby kicking off runaway replication. Or, as was the more prosaic diagnosis of a cell gone stupid, cancer. Fortunately, that kind of damage was beyond prediction or control and was, therefore, just part of the random nonsense of the job. So Grim—a hardened veteran—wasn’t disposed to worry about it. Much.

  However, it meant they might have to wait out the storm and hunker down for a very extended watch in their one-room rad shack: a small, pressurized hab module that got its name from what its occupants really cared about: its multi-layered radiation shielding. Designed to house—barely—a three-man team for extended watches, its interior was an inhumanly cramped collection of long-range guidance and tracking computers, sensor and drone control consoles, and a single bunk. Its head was a constant source of black humor and savage derision: by comparison, the fresher of a commuter jet seemed positively palatial. On extended watches in its claustrophobic interior, even Grim had found himself beginning to reconsider the hazards of a spacewalk in exchange for a little extra room to stretch, and a change of scenery. Not that Grim was a fan of EVA ops: he had come late—and unwillingly—to zero-gee maneuver, tactics, and training. And now, to his even greater delight, he was about to find himself the middle of the biggest solar storm on record. He sighed, and found a way to conceal the rest of his ignorance: “So, Mendez, let’s see how much of your training you remember: what are the special protocols for a CME?”

  “Well, we’ll have to pull the sensor and comm array in all the way: if we don’t, we’re sure to fry something. Maybe everything. Not much reason to leave ’em out, anyway: anything but laser-based comm and nav is going to be static-soup.”