Alex nodded. “In a few hours, a day at most, I’ll have the resources to counter anything they try. Wipe them off every frequency. They won’t be able to shake a tree branch, let alone a continent.”
He tried not to listen to the tinny voice in the background — a BBC World Service reporter telling of widespread damage in the American Midwest. That was only a taste of what the desperate foe promised if any moves were made against them without a full parole. And so the cautious militias had withdrawn to wait.
No one knew how earnest June Morgan’s secretive masters were about the threat. How serious had the Helvetians been with their cobalt bombs? Or Kennedy and Khrushchev, back in 1962? Men caught in the momentum of events sometimes think the unthinkable.
The resonator watch officer called. “They’re pulsing again…”
Everyone turned. All three enemy probes once more glowed with induced gravitational energy. “What are they up to now? I thought they’d agreed to wait.”
Narrow pencils of yellow speared downward toward the purple dot — Beta’s flickering mirror.
“Could it be another demonstration?”
The comm operator interrupted. “They’ve come on-line again, all channels. They claim it isn’t them at all!”
Alex turned. “What d’you mean, ’it isn’t them’?”
“It isn’t them!” The woman pressed her headphones.
“They swear their resonators all just went off by themselves!”
Teresa asked, “Alex, is that possible? What are they trying to pull?”
But he only watched, transfixed, as the three beams passed through several roiling cells of superconducting electricity, struck Beta, and… disappeared.
“Ikeda! Clambers!” Alex shouted. “Scan parallel frequencies.” He reached for his subvocal. “They may be trying to sneak up on a side band!”
It seemed unlikely. There were only a few mode-combinations which coupled strongly with surface rock, especially the topmost crust. And he felt sure those were all covered. Still—
“There is something, Alex,” one of the techs yelled across the room. “Take a look at fifty-two gigahertz, on a one point six meter amplitude p-wave—”
“Got it!” he shouted back. Fresh dotted lines showed what had been invisible — thin trails of gazer radiation shining from Beta’s glittering maw.
“But those beams are headed—” He didn’t have to finish. Everyone stared in shock as the concentrated rays flew straight back to their points of origin, striking direct hits on all three enemy resonators.
“They shot themselves!” someone cried in amazement. Alex scanned but found no signs of damage. No earth tremors. The foe’s resonators still shone on-line, as dangerous as ever. This was weird.
“Effects!” he demanded. But the question stayed unanswered — why would the enemy have fired beams at themselves? Beams which apparently did nothing?
“Do they say anything?”
Comm ops scanned. “Nothing. They’ve gone dead.”
This is too strange, Alex thought. Something bizarre was going on.
“Alex!” Teresa cried out.
Jesus, she’s strong! He winced at her sudden grip on his shoulder. Turning around, he saw her blinking, shaking her head. “It’s happening again. I’m sure of it, Alex. Can’t you feel it?”
He remembered their long passage together in New Zealand, down twisty avenues of Hadean darkness, relying on her fey sensitivity to find a way back to the world of light.
That memory left no room for doubt. “Battle stations!” he cried as he reset the instruments, searching.
There! On yet another side band — Beta seemed to throb angrily. “Load all capacitors! Give me a counterpulse at—”
He was interrupted as somebody screamed. Only a dozen meters away, a man went goggle eyed, tore at his hair — and blew up.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t an explosion. The poor fellow stretched, still screaming, till he shredded like gooey taffy. In sound there was little more than a wet pop, but the colors … a rainbow of brilliant liquid shades spilled forth as the skin peeled back, gobbets of flesh flying in all directions.
An aura of shimmering lambency seemed to hang midair even as the ruin of meat fell to the floor. That man-sized apparition hovered for a moment and then began moving rapidly in a horizontal spiral.
Men and women yelled in dismay, scrambling to avoid it. But the terrible focus accelerated, striking two cooks who chose that unlucky moment to leave the kitchen carrying lunch. Their tureens flew as arms and heads ripped from their bodies, spraying those nearby with scalding soup and crimson blood. They never knew what hit them before the disturbance swept on, catching victim after victim.
“Everybody out!” Alex cried redundantly amid a panicky rush for the exits. He paused only to grab his plaque and Teresa’s hand before joining the stampede. Halfway to the open doors, however, she braked and suddenly wrapped her arms around him. “Wha — ?” He cried, struggling. But she held on, fiercely immobile as something horrible and barely visible brushed by them, passing through space they would have occupied.
“Now!” she cried when it swept on. Alex needed no urging.
Outside he saw no order to the evacuation. The Tangoparu crew were excellent and brave. They had faced dangers more powerful than any warriors had since time began. But courage is a useless abstraction when the mind recoils to a primitive state. Men and women ran pell-mell, scattering across the windblown hillsides, some running straight for the seaside cliffs. In one blinking instant, Alex saw a technician touched glancewise by something no more visible than a pocket of air. She whirled, screaming as some tide seemed to suck her into a roughly man-shaped refraction. Her horror ended in a shuddering gasp, and she crumpled to the ground hemorrhaging from purpled, blistering skin.
“This way!” Teresa shouted, dragging Alex’s arm. They fled westward, though Alex had no idea why.
Several more times Teresa suddenly veered right or left. On each occasion Alex obeyed at once, following her zigs and zags like they were commandments from God. Close brushes with death grew too numerous to count, and he stopped wondering how Teresa knew which way to dodge. Sometimes he noted a close passage only by the sudden shiver down his back or by a threatening rise in his gorge. Then, before he could respond to the horror, it passed and they were off again.
There wasn’t time to react to the sight of friends and colleagues being horribly murdered in broad daylight, under azure Pacific skies… no effort to waste on anything but flight. Numbly, he felt the crunchy unevenness of grassy slopes suddenly give way to the harder pounding of shoes on concrete. There “were blurry images of parked jets and zeppelins. Was she going to try to grab one of those… ?
But no. Teresa yanked him past the waiting aircraft and toward another object — black on the bottom, white on top, and streaked with dross. Up a set of rusted, rickety stairs they clambered, to fall at last inside a dank, dusty chamber.
The space shuttle, he realized dimly as he fell to the deck, wheezing. So Teresa hadn’t any plan after all. Blind instinct must have driven her as much as the others. Only in her case the compulsion had been to seek out “her” spacecraft — a totem of safety and her own sense of control.
“Come on, Alex.” Sudden, sharp pain lanced his shoulder as she kicked him. “Move it!” she shouted. “The thing could pass through here any minute!”
That was true enough. So why hadn’t they stayed outside, where her acute senses might be helpful, rather than hiding in this useless coffin?
He let her drag him to his feet, though, and stumbled after her through the fetid airlock, tripping over the high sill. She virtually threw him the last few meters into the shuttle’s dim, cavernous cargo bay, where he stumbled to his knees under the glitter of two small spotlights. The beams converged in a pool of brilliance where he met his own dumbfounded reflection, as if staring into a magic pool.