N’Gana was keeping himself going by sheer force of will. He was a dead man and he knew it, but he was not going to die of a heart attack just before the final blow.
Littlefeet was confused. “What do you mean, `sing the legends’? I shall be in heaven with the others.”
“I have been thinking about that,” the mentat told him. “And I have been dwelling on a people who, reduced to nothing, nonetheless retain all that is good in humanity. Duty, honor, courage… These are rare things that get obscured or forgotten by modern life. And love as well. I cannot really know that emotion, but the observable qualities make it a central part of all the rest that is good and perhaps holy in people.”
It paused, as if listening for something in the silence, then continued.
“There is a great deal of additional activity up there. I am getting surges of power radiated into the old power grid at levels that are almost off the scale. They know something. I had hoped to give the others another few hours, but I do not think we can wait.”
“Then this is it?” Littlefeet asked, nervously steeling himself.
“Yes, this is it. I do not think you have much of a chance to survive this close in, but you have twenty minutes if nothing else happens. Go! Use it!”
He stood there a moment, uncomprehending.
“Go, I said! You may barely make it out! Stay low and in the culvert! Do not look at the demon palace until after you hear us shoot! The shot may blind you. But, as soon as they shoot, run like the very devil!”
“But—but you said I may—”
“If you don’t start now, you will die here! Go! I give you a chance, however slim, at surviving! By the time you get into that culvert it won’t matter what they pick up! Move!”
Littlefeet started to say something to the two who remained, but N’Gana just smiled and pointed to the catwalks.
Hamille raised its bizarre head and croaked, “Get the fuck out of here, you asshole!”
Littlefeet started running.
They had been on Hector long enough now that Juanita Krill was beginning to worry that they might run short on some supplies before anything happened below. The temporal shift was always in the minds of those who planned this expedition; new air generators, water reprocessors and traps, and fresh food should be coming in by small automated shuttle on a regular basis now, but the timing to pick up the modules and get them to Hector was dicey.
Van der Voort and Takamura didn’t care. They were in a kind of heaven in the place, with a whole new area of physics suddenly open to them, a whole new kind of mathematical approach to problems involving genhole communications. There were years of work here done by large teams of brilliant people and state-of-the-art artificial intelligence agents as well, work virtually forgotten in the slow lethargic collapse of The Confederacy. Years more of work would be needed to figure it all out, to document and test each and every revolutionary idea, but the potential here was mind-blowing. Nobody, but nobody, had been able to lick the temporal shifts of the genhole, but this came very close.
Equally stunning had been the recordings of the initial tests of the weapon based on the effects from Priam’s Lens. Asteroids shattered, a small moon literally sliced in two… Incredible power, power that had terrified those who had built it. What purpose, they’d asked, to kill the Titans if at the same time you destroyed Helena and all upon it as well? There was hope, they argued. There was no other way. There had to be another way. It had gone on and on until the great white spacecraft of the Titans appeared in-system and the power was sucked dry and there was no way left to get down to the surface and get the codes and transmit them back up.
It must have haunted George Sotoropolis most of all. He had been the main roadblock, and he had been here, unlike the other two, to see the ships come in, to understand that he could have hit the ships before they devastated his beloved Helena if he’d just let them have his part of the code.
It was such a simple problem to solve, at least on a theoretical basis. The data stated that the bursts had to be incredibly short. No more than three bursts on a target, no more than thirty nanoseconds per burst, and you kept the damage localized, focused. And the best part was, you only had to hit the target, not necessarily dead center or in a vital area.
The computer models said it would work. They had spent several days running programs through the Control Center command and control computers and they had a ninety-seven percent certainty.
Only nobody’d had the opportunity to find out for sure. By the time they’d determined it, they had already been essentially overrun.
They also knew that Helena’s installations and Titan ships and bases had to be first. They had to take them out and quickly. They had to do it right the first time, and they had to do it without any serious damage to the planet or the moon they were on would no longer be held in a planetary grip.
They had the initial targets picked and locked in using the genhole gates scattered around the system. As soon as any of the gates activated, it would be pinpointed by the Titans, but they would be harder to reach than they seemed, spitting an unknown but deadly stream.
They had the targets all mapped out, and the order. All they needed was the go codes. If it all worked, if they were still alive, still viable when it was over, and if at least one master genhole gate were still intact, then they could turn their attention to other conquered worlds. Not all, of course—there hadn’t been time. But there were a lot of targets out there. Targets that, the early data suggested, against all plausibility, could be automatically hit by commands that would somehow arrive very quickly indeed.
Van der Voort had been working on how that could be so, since it defied established physics. The key, he was certain, was in the properties of whatever that string or stream or whatever it was that the holes captured and transmitted. It had to be something unlike anything they had ever seen before, something that, somehow, took its time from both ends of a wormhole simultaneously without breaking up.
Those earlier scientists had tried to determine the nature of this strange phenomenon coming from the small lens and its trapped and looped singularity. The strings were not true strings; they simply resembled them in the way they registered on instruments and the way they seemed to move. They had no measurable mass, but if they were energy, they did not register as such on any known measuring device. But they were as destructive as hell.
Quite rapidly, van der Voort had come to a conclusion that a number of long-dead project scientists had also considered, but put aside for the more immediate engineering problems.
“Not strings,” he told Takamura. “Not matter at all, or energy, either.”
Takamura frowned. “Not matter and not energy? No mass, no energy transfer, yet destructive. What can you mean?”
“I think they’re cracks,” he told her. “Cracks in the very fabric of space-time emanating from the collapse of the boltzmon. Because it is caught hi a loop, the cracks heal as quickly as the thing cycles, and the forces in our own universe aid this to maintain integrity.”
Takamura saw it at once. “And since the genholes create holes in our own space-time fabric, it is a natural attractor and conductor of the cracks. They don’t heal inside! They’re maintained! Inside, the crack expands instantly but is held inside the field! Yes! Oh, my! That’s why it shattered planets, and could possibly destabilize stars! Nothing could withstand it until it healed over. Whatever it struck, even if it were a hair-thin sliver, would fall instantly out of space-time itself. Oh, my! I can see now why they were so afraid to use it!”