But lying on the ground next to the suit was what appeared to be a cut-down 25mm Bushmaster from a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. He couldn’t imagine precise covergent evolution of the Bushmaster. Among other things, it had some real design drawbacks.
Ergo, it had to be a human. Furthermore, it had to be a human from a time sometime near the present. It was probably from the present.
And it was right in the middle of one of the hottest patches of radiation in the world.
The vehicle lurched into motion and he, carefully, climbed up onto the turret and held onto the commander’s machine-gun mount as it slowly negotiated the rubble on the hillside.
The mecha had gotten to its feet and was now lurching in the general direction of town. It didn’t walk very well; every step seemed to be dragged out of some recesses of energy. And the steps were not graceful at all, foot by foot lurches, arms held at the sides. It had left the Bushmaster on the ground and now plodded its weary way up the hill, one slow step at a time.
It didn’t seem to notice the engineering vehicle until they were about fifty meters away. Then it stopped and raised its right arm, waving it back and forth slowly, very much like the droid in Star Wars but slower and with much less enthusiasm. But Slade waved back and motioned for the mecha to stay where it was.
When the engineering vehicle stopped it was within a meter of the mecha. Slade called for a Geiger counter and went forward, waving the wand over the suit. Sure enough, it was hot enough to fry eggs.
“Stay in that,” he yelled. He could see a human face peering at him through the armored glass.
He climbed back up onto the turret and ordered them to pick the mecha up with the manipulator arm.
The manipulator arm was a relatively recent addition to the engineering vehicle. It was designed to pick up mines and “Improvised Explosive Devices.” It should, however, be able to lift the mecha. If it was even working; the arm was complicated and broke down on a regular basis.
The one on this vehicle was working, though, and it lurched out of its protective cover and jerked creakily towards the suit. The operator, probably the vehicle commander, clearly didn’t have much experience using it. But it managed to clamp onto the chest of the suit, lifting it up by hooking under the shoulder.
“Let’s get out of the rad zone,” Slade yelled down into the vehicle.
He watched carefully to ensure that the suit was not damaged by the movement. But the driver or the vehicle commander had already thought of that and the vehicle backed up the hill, the suit held well off the ground to avoid obstacles, and slowly bumped to the top and over the other side.
The burst of radiation that had come from the gate had, fortunately, been blocked by the hill. Otherwise the vast majority of the defenders would have died of radiation poisoning. But the back side of the hill was clean and there was a decontamination station set up at the base of it. The driver pivoted the vehicle and carried the mecha down to it, where the suit was lowered to the ground in the middle of the road where the decontamination station had been set up.
“What the fuck is that?” one of the decontamination team yelled through his mask. He was wearing a rubber environmental suit that was half covered in suds and had a scrub brush in his hand. The Humvee that he had been working on was sitting in the road.
“Mecha-suit,” the major said from his place of approximate safety on the top of the vehicle. “One of ours. There’s somebody inside. How do you want to handle it?”
As he asked that the suit rolled to the side then got up on its knees, slowly. The decontamination team backed up and one of the MPs from the contaminated Humvee drew his sidearm.
“Put it away,” Slade said. “I told you, he’s one of ours.”
“We don’t have anything like that, sir,” the MP yelled.
“That you know of,” Slade replied.
The front of the suit opened outwards and a man wearing a black, skintight, coverall stepped out and walked quickly away from the suit, rubbing one shoulder and stretching.
He turned around and waved at Slade as soon as he was well away from the suit. “Thanks for the ride. This is Staunton, right?”
“Right,” Slade said.
“I need a secure line to the Pentagon,” the man said. “Right after I get whatever they give you for radiation poisoning. Oh, and I could really use a beer.”
“We have a report from Chief Miller on the events at the Eustis gate,” the secretary of defense said. “We had assumed that you were killed in the explosion.”
“No, I was caught in the gate failure,” Bill replied. “At that point I experienced some rather unusual communications. I’ll make up a report on it as soon as I can with the strong caveat that I’m not sure whether it was real or a sensory-deprivation-induced hallucination. But I think I know what’s going on and I’ve got a pretty good idea how we can get some control over the gates.”
“Good,” the national security advisor said. “How?”
“The anomaly in Orlando is a boson generator,” Bill said, taking a sip of Miller Light. “I mean, that’s pretty obvious but I know, now, how it’s working. Bosons require high levels of energy to occur. The anomaly is an opening to a realm outside the normal concept of ‘universe.’ That is, it’s not opening to another universe, it’s completely open to utter unreality. The reason that we’re opening gates to other planets is that linked bosons create stable wormholes through that intermediate unreality. The reason that they’re on other planetary surfaces is that they are inactive bosons left over from previous generation. I think that if we looked hard at all the sites we’d find evidence of previous civilizations. Furthermore, the bosons are resonate on a specific frequency. They only link to bosons on that same frequency. I think that’s why the Titcher can only get through certain bosons.”
“Can I ask you a question off the subject?” the President said. “More of a point of order. It’s not normally the case that one of my subordinates sits in a secure communications facility sipping on a beer during a report.”
“Doctor’s orders,” Bill said, taking another sip. “Honest to God, Mr. President. I know that you don’t care for it, and why, but I’m balancing health and need. The only thing you can do for radiation sickness is get as much of the radiation out of your body as you can as fast as you can. The most efficient way to move it out is water transfer, drink a lot and go to the bathroom a lot. Beer is even better than water at both. As soon as I’m off the horn with you guys and get a few things moving, I’m going to sit down with a couple of cases and drink them as fast as I can. In the meantime, I’m staying on the sober side. Just.”
“Oh,” the President said. “In that case, I hope I never get exposed to radiation.”
“Your theory that sufficient energy will destabilize the wormholes seems to be correct, by the way,” the secretary of defense said, changing the subject. “The Titcher gates, as well as the Mreee gate, have all shut down and generated a blast of hard radiation. I’m not sure why in the case of the Mreee gate.”
“Oh,” Bill said, taking another sip. “That’s because the Mreee are bad guys.”
“What?” the national security advisor snapped.
“The Mreee are working with the Titcher,” Weaver replied. “They use the same resonance bosons as the Titcher and when I went into the Titcher gate room my environmental system had been breached. I smelled the same smell there that I did at the Mreee gate. I’m pretty sure that just about everything the Mreee told us was a lie, at least about their trying to hold off the Titcher. The gate room, all that concrete, was probably inside a Titcher organism. Not on an island. The island lie was to explain the smell. They’re not trying to hold off the Titcher; they already lost.”