And what broadcasts! I think the long boring bits are the most significant. They tell us what they find important. A slow sweep of a camera around a vast conical chamber ringed with concentric stepped circular bars gappily lined with bat people hanging upside down and now and again making a lot of noise and flapping — it has to be a council, a parliament. I know Grey Universal says it’s a lecture theatre, but that’s just him. What his interpretation has going for it, I admit, is all the other stuff: the quaint rockets that go fast and explode; the peculiar multiwinged box-kite aircraft not much bigger than our microlights and obviously, painfully heavier; the strange balloons and dirigibles.
It could be, I suppose, some enormous system of public lectures on aviation and rocketry.
Except that you see the same sort of thing in two different languages, from the two separate parts of the divided continent. (Nothing from the big continent in the other hemisphere.)
And what you see, through the trudges’ eyes, in and above the cities: the bomb-catapults and giant crossbows wheeled through the streets on carriages drawn by straining teams of trudges, or huge coughing steam engines; the new flying machines very occasionally, the dirigibles floating overhead much more often than they did on our first surveillance, and the coordinated flights of great masses of bat people, swooping and wheeling in unison.
I know I’ve sometimes been controversial, but never for the sake of it. I’m no contrarian. What I see there is what most people see there; what I see in front of my eyes.
What I see is two powers preparing for war.
But that isn’t the worst. The worst, the most sinister development, is what’s happening to the trudges.
Reports from all over, of course — check the newslines — but here are two from me.
First one: I was in one of those dull virtualities I complained about the other night. The trudge was working at the back of a shop where they sell fresh meat. A huge carcass of one of the grazing animals had been tipped from some kind of truck into a stone-flagged yard, where two of the bat people cut it up with knives that look too small for the job. Their skill was impressive — they slide the blades into the joints and slice through the ligaments, and suddenly a whole limb falls off; or they slit the belly and all the guts spill out — but, as you will by now appreciate, it was a bit disgusting to watch. Anyway, the trudge whose POV I was getting and another were lugging the chunks to the front of the shop, where they threw them down on a big marble-slab counter. Back and forth, back and forth. And “my” trudge leans over to the other and says: “Get knife.”
The other trudge looks back and grunts. My trudge looks away and goes on with the work. But every so often, the POV focuses on the two bat people’s bloody blades. I’m just beginning to wonder whether I’m about to see something exciting when two more bat people drop out of the sky. They land in the yard. Both are wearing smart belts. One of them has a chest harness on which is mounted a box. Cables go from the box to his ears. He tweaks some kind of knob on it and looks straight at me — as I can’t help feeling — and walks straight up to one of the aliens working on the carcass.
I hear something like this: “You [chirp growl] boss?”
“[Twitter] to you?”
Then a lot of stuff that doesn’t translate.
The new arrival hands the blade guy a bundle of pieces of paper. I recognise it as the stuff they use as money. They walk over to “my” trudge and point to the front of the shop. “Out.”
So the trudge shuffles out, past the counter, past a small queue of bat people, out into the street and into the back of a motor vehicle. Then the virtually crashes. No input. I replayed it, taking more care to look, freezing images now and then, and I noticed something interesting about the interior of the van. It contained a big box of metallic-looking mesh, with a door that stood open as the trudge was hustled in.
It might just be a coincidence, but that box would work as a Faraday cage. It would block all radio transmissions.
Shaken, I did some prowling around, and found a scene where I’m looking out of a wooden barred box. There are other trudges in the box. They look strange and out of proportion, and I realise all of a sudden that they’re juveniles.
A hand reaches in, there’s a second or two of going head over heels, and then an open metal cage and then nothing.
Check the newslines. It’s happening all over the place. Check the virtualities. They’re dropping like a stone in a gravity well.
Our inputs are being cut off one by one. The trudges infected by our nanotech are being rounded up. Beings to whom we have given language and self-awareness.
We can’t let this happen.
Grant is not so pleased. He’s just gone off to work in the tank, after having been told — along with everybody else — that salvage work is over for the duration. Instead, every available hand has been mobilised to coordinate a fleet of those big spidery crab-like machines in tearing up the carbonaceous chondrites and working the buckyfibre-spinarets to make twenty thousand kilometres of rope. Not to mention breaking stuff up for reaction mass.
14 366:04:14 07:10
Damn. Just checked my incoming. I’m on the reserve-tank work roster too. Well, at least they didn’t send one of these all-hands calls to my head. Fourteen-hour days for the next week. And in one gravity at that, as we boost across the system on main drive. No news as to the intervention plans as yet, but I think it’s a safe guess we’re going into geosynchronous orbit. Talk to you after the war, I guess.
14 366:04:14 06:08
We’re going in!
This is the first time in my life that I have felt proud that Constantine is my half-father.
20 — Second Contact
The camp had changed. New launch-ramps had been built, a long balloon-cable ascended from the middle of the square, new sheds and barracks had been thrown up. Fresh craters and wreckage littered the test ranges. Flattened and tarred strips of what looked like roadway had the tiny crosses of airframes clustered at their near ends. An enormous parabolic structure of wood and wire mounted on an arrangement of iron-wheeled carriages on a circular rail turned hither and yon, like a hand-cupped ear to heaven. The greatest difference, Darvin reflected, was that he was looking down at all this from the cabin of the descending airship. The location was no longer a secret.
Along with the secrecy had gone the complacency. Not much room for that with an extra moon in the sky. Darvin glanced upward and sideways at the thought of it. He couldn’t see it in the bright daylight sky, but he knew it was there. Unlike the natural moons, and for that matter the invisible third, artificial moon, this new satellite did not rise or set. Its orbital period was one day, to the minute. Through even a good amateur telescope its conical structure was unmistakeable. Darvin wondered where the other cone from the gigantic world-ship had gone. The obvious presumption was that it was being held in reserve. Bahron, when he’d telephoned to summon Darvin to the camp, had made the point that if the aliens were holding back half their forces, this meant they thought there was a chance they might lose the other half. Darvin didn’t find this notion convincing, but he hoped Bahron was spreading it around. It might help morale.
The airship drifted, nudged by its rotors, to the perimeter mooring-mast. The engines feathered down. The door slid open. Eight-and-four passengers — the rest had all been close-mouthed scientists, leafing through pages of small-print formulae — made their way to the exit and dived out.
As he glided groundward Darvin spotted Nollam walking across the central square. He banked, flapped, sideslipped, and alighted beside Nollam in a puff of dust.
“Show-off,” said Nollam.
“Watch your lip, techie.”
“Less of that,” said Nollam, straightening so much he almost leaned back. “I’ve been awarded a degree, I have. Master Scholar.”