Space Eater (27 page)

Still couldn’t see anything through the blur of tears, but pieces of me I hadn’t realized were missing kept drifting up from the dark and locking into place. Standard interrogation trick number two...

“Now if you’re feeling a little better we can finish this quite quickly.”

Standard interrogation trick number two. “You’re the nice guy,” I said. “She was the nasty one. You save me from her and so I trust you all the way.”

“Kind of you to put it like that,” he said with more of an edge to his voice. “Now I’m afraid our time is short in view of events outside, so perhaps—“

And the confident, convincing reference to 1.9 centimeters—wasn’t that something I’d let slip in the first questioning? “Not playing. I’m not playing that game. Let me off this thing, give me a feed and then I’ll think about getting chatty, Mr. Nice Guy. Sir.”

“You’re making matters very difficult for all of us,” he said sadly, still with the remains of friendliness.

“I’m afraid I must go now...” Footsteps, and did I imagine the low voice at the door? “All right, Parsons, he’s all yours again. Give him hell for me.”

Hell got to me before she did, with another present from Rossa’s trick nervous system. (_Blank. Empty blank_.)

...Each time it was getting harder and harder to climb back up into the light and start thinking again.

Rossa was still holding out, then. Rossa must be getting level five, and the thought of taking it firsthand was too terrible to face. A tiny seed started sprouting in me about then, next to the question about whether security really mattered anymore: it was unfair. I was getting double rations of nerve-scramble, more than even that bastard woman Parsons was handing out to me. If I cracked, I had something pretty damn near an excuse...

And I was so tired, so very very very tired.

“Level five,” I heard the woman Parsons saying somewhere far off.

“Don’t,” I heard my own voice saying, far away in something like the same direction. Standard interrogation trick three, come back hard and fast when the sucker’s been having it easy awhile with the nice/nasty routine. A few empty minutes for the pain to sink in and for all my clever little nerves to tune themselves up, ready to feel the next blast with topnotch efficiency—tiny radiotelescopes collecting every scrap of pain there was in the air. ”
Don’t,”
I said again before it happened.

In the long run it doesn’t help to know the tricks. You only think too much about what’s coming.

“Tell me about the FTL drive, Lieutenant Jacklin.” Parsons’ voice was all bright, matter-of-fact, and almost friendly. She could have been any smart woman secretary in Admin. She waited patiently.

“It’s not really an FTL drive,” I said hoarsely. “It’s a trick. See, there’s this small MT gateway that’s limited to 1.9 centimeters, that’s how wide the aperture is...”

Once you’ve started, it’s hard to stop. “Confession is good for the soul.” The questioner comes to be like your own father or mother—or priest, if you went Keeb’s way. You want to sweep out all your secrets, all the lumber that’s been lying around locked cupboards inside your skull. Parsons popped in a question, once in a while—

“Why the charade of an FTL ship in the first place?”

“Supposed to impress you, I think, make you listen to what we had to say if we had FTL and suchlike.”

“That’s plausible. However, I note that General Lowenstein’s scientific think tank deduced your craft was an orbiting factory from Earth, fitted with FTL drive. From all accounts it
is
an orbiting factory, or at least a machine shop. Why?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know at all.” After a touch of level two (I’d say) to jog my memory, she decided that perhaps I didn’t.

“Why does it have an oversized airlock, when a small personnel lock would do?”

“Don’t know again. We thought about that all a good deal—never got anywhere.”

“Would you agree that it’s possible the FTL charade also had the purpose of making possible that orbiting-factory explanation of your flying machine shop—which might in fact have some purpose hidden even from you?”

“Anything’s possible. It’s your idea, not mine.”

“Lieutenant Jacklin, you are becoming perky. Up to level three again, please—“

It poured out faster and faster. All our doubts, all our fears, all the things Rossa and I had tossed back and forth between us. The Force. Tunnel. Ngabe, Birch, Wui. The tanks: seemed they didn’t have anything like them on Pallas—long on physics and short on biology. The 1.9-centimeter gate, Kraz and DEVOURER. The last item caught Parsons’s imagination and she tickled me up to level four and blackout before deciding maybe I didn’t know what was lurking behind that particular door. Onward ...

When you’re spilling everything right down to the bottom of the brainpan, you can hold a couple of items back if you’re clever. I was still just clever enough to sit on Rossa’s special comm talent—I could kid myself into feeling that much better about cracking if only I could hold back on what wasn’t my secret. I hadn’t felt anything for so long from Rossa that I guessed she’d broken too, or that they’d given up on her. Another thing I didn’t let out, and that was half because Parsons didn’t choose to probe about it, was the shambles Earth was really in while we pretended to represent a united world government etc.

Sheer self-preservation: I told myself it would help Rossa too if Lowenstein’s mob thought we had a whole world behind us, a world that might just one day look after its own and beat the shit out of anyone who hadn’t treated us nicely. Not that I thought too hard about that or about anything at the time. The logical reasons came later.

When she decided she’d got a clear picture of how we really came from Earth to Pallas, Parsons let out a quiet whistle that I almost failed to hear. “Jesus,” she said after a while, “I don’t believe there’s anything we could do to you that hasn’t been outdone—in advance—by your own people.”

It wasn’t a question and so I didn’t say anything. Under the numb, dead feeling left over from a touch too many of level four, the ache that had got built into me on the way was still gnawing on my bones.

Twenty-Five

“No,” Rossa said, “I simply passed out after a rather long while. Didn’t I tell you that long pain makes me dreadfully sleepy? And for some reason they simply let me sleep.”

I’d slept fourteen hours straight off, when they’d helped me back here, so that was fair enough. But
she
hadn’t cracked. Half of me wanted to give her a medal and the rest hated her for it. “What happened then?”

“Oh ... they came and asked for confirmation of this elaborate story, or most of a story, and it was obviously on a different order from the naive ‘we know all’ tricks they were playing earlier. So I didn’t worry about holding back: I filled in the gaps for them and they were perfectly happy. You know, Ken, I don’t believe that any of this information will do them the least good.”

I nodded slowly. That was the first excuse I’d been going to use for having broken apart, and now Rossa had pulled it out for me I wanted to argue and say it wasn’t much of an excuse. Nothing’s an excuse for breaking. I sat in my chair, still numb, and Rossa came to perch on the arm. She bent over, put her arms around me as if she were trying to cheer me up a bit, and her mouth came close to my ear.

The tiniest of whispers: “I know you kept silence when it came to my talent ... you did, didn’t you?” I nodded. “Thank you very much for that, Ken. That is important to me. Now listen—you mustn’t feel you’ve failed merely because I didn’t happen to make any revelations before you. Do remember that I’m
trained
to suffer stimulation like this, or something not terribly different. You’re not—you have other talents altogether. And there must have been extra pressure on you because you were sensitized and receiving...”

Trouble was that I’d thought of those excuses, too. They sounded pretty good in the lonely spaces of my skull, and I might have talked my way into believing them if
I’d
been talking to
Rossa
... but this way around they didn’t convince. I couldn’t say anything out loud, now, without shifting position and maneuvering my mouth next to Rossa’s ear. I just shook my head, unhappy.

“Speaking of being sensitized,” Rossa said as if she’d just thought of it, “I wonder how long darling Birch carried on trying to decode that set of signals before begging for the cutoff serum. Remember, he must have picked up everything they fed into me...”

“Closer,” I said grumpily, a safe enough thing for the bugs. More self-pity.

Rossa wriggled closer, but she’d spotted what I meant all right. “Oh come on, Ken, you know better than that. The signal’s independent of distance and the inverse-square law—they’ve run the most tremendous programs of tests.”

I pushed at her, not hard, and she let go of me. “Thanks a lot, Rossa,” I said out loud. “Nice of you to try cheering me up. Now ... just leave me alone awhile. I need a breathing space to handle what’s happened. In the Force, you know, you win or you’re dead...”

“Liberty or death,” she said sourly.

“Yeah, that kind of thing; what I mean is I can’t cope with losing just this way—I need some time to get to live with the thing...” After a short while I noticed my mouth was still hanging open as I sat there. I shut it and stayed there with my brains churning like cold, sour porridge. The secret now was to hold on tight to the last of my excuses, the one I didn’t really much like, the one about how the Force couldn’t expect me to put out loyalty at the old 100 percent rate when they’d messed me up so thoroughly in the Corvus transit. Brain porridge pouring through that little knothole. But then I didn’t like that point of view too much because I supposed I was still the Force’s man; there’d never been anything else for me; I owed them any number of lives they’d given me in the tanks. Or if you wanted to turn it the other way around, I owed them any number of deaths...

Rossa had been looking at me as if wondering what to do about this nasty mess on the floor. She said,

“While you sit there wallowing, you might consider the
minor
fact that you’re not all alone in your sufferings. I’m used to pain, I said—but that session was precisely the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Kindly figure that into your personal
weltschmerz
.” There was a new snap in her voice.

“I surrender,” I told her after a little. “Suppose I was looking for good reasons not to think about ... well, what the hell happens next?”

“More ‘house arrest’ in our roomy and palatial embassy. They must realize we can’t play any part in their war now—the really enormous question is one of which side’s nerves can last longer...”

She was wrong, as it turned out within a couple of hours.

“I see you’re wide awake,” Keeb’s voice said from the door—he was still full of helpful information, that man. “The general would like another word with you, if that’s all right.”

It rather had to be all right. Rossa did murmur something about a previous engagement; Keeb said “ha, ha,” without any special emotion and held open the door for us. He seemed even edgier than he’d been when Colophon peaked.

“Sorry about that, um, formality,” Lowenstein said when for the last time we’d been put in chairs facing his big desk. Keeb stood stiffly on our left, the general’s right. “Afraid one or two of our interviewers were a little overenthusiastic ... No hard feelings, I trust?”

“In point of fact, yes,” Rossa said.

“Quite understandable at present, of course. When this war’s all over I expect we’ll be having a drink and laughing about all this, though, eh?”

I almost nodded. It was already less easy to remember how shatteringly cruel the treatment had been.

War’s like that. “You know everything we know, now,” I said to Lowenstein. “Don’t tell me there’s something
else
?”

He thumped an even thicker wad of orange-barred UTS papers, with a smile that made his mustache hunch up like a wooly caterpillar. “Interview report,” he said. “Very interested in weapons potential of an MT device you mentioned.” He waited.

Rossa said, “You
have
the most appallingly huge of all MT weapons—unless you want to deal in novas or wreck the universe the way our people fear? There is no defense against nullbombs—and we don’t know the least detail of how to construct any other AP machine. I believe you’re talking nonsense.”

“Not at all. Think in terms of precision weapons, you see—this nullbomb is about as precise as an earthquake. Now Jacklin mentioned something called a sunbeam—very pretty name indeed. How about that as an answer to our problems?”

Oh God. Beta Corvi radiation blasting through a 1.9-centimeter aperture. Powerful stuff. But strategically, surely it just wouldn’t work, because—

“That’s no use to you, General,” I said. “You’ve already got fifty times more precision weapons than you need, all those brain missiles. Precision’s no good when the rebel nullbombs are hidden in jungle, or mountains, or whatever they’ve got over there.”

Rossa went back to the line she’d been taking before. “We do
not
know how to build such a weapon, in any case.”

Lowenstein leaned back with an even bigger smile, rubbing his chin like someone polishing a doorknob.

“Answers to both those points, of course. Corman, my dear girl, building one will take no time at all once our MT people have dissected that, what d’you call it, minigate business aboard your tin can up there.”

“It’s booby-trapped,” I said quickly.

“Report states pretty clearly you’ve an override on most of the traps—spilled a little more than you thought, didn’t you? Come back to that in a minute. Precision, now, obviously you haven’t thought this through. (No, Keeb, you be quiet.) Can you even state the problem, either of you?”

“In your rather distasteful terms,” Rossa said slowly, “I assume the problem is to kill off those poor people who are trying to blackmail your side into peace terms with an unknown number of nullbombs.”

“Not good enough, not good enough. Could do that with a saturation nullbomb attack, couldn’t we?